Mrs. Maule soon finished her more than usually frugal evening meal. She got up and left the table, and as she did so Lingard sprang to the door.

He seemed to delight in rendering her the smallest personal service.

Before leaving the room, she turned round and addressed Wantele: "Don't hurry," she said softly. "We won't go into the drawing-room to-night.

I've got to write some notes. Quite a batch of letters came this afternoon. There were just one or two people I should have liked to have asked next week--" she looked at him pleadingly, reproachfully....

Wantele stared at her coldly. "Of course you can ask one or two people,"

he said, and, with a slight smile, "Don't make yourself out more of a martyr than you must, Athena!"

Hew Lingard, standing aside, his hand still on the handle of the door, felt an overmastering impulse to go back to the table and strike d.i.c.k Wantele's sneering face across the mouth. How awful to think, to see, that such a woman as Athena Maule, so kind, so gentle, so generous, so--so lovely and so defenceless, was subject to this young man's insolence.

But he could do nothing--nothing; and Jane, amazing thought, was actually fond of Wantele!

He shut the door behind his hostess and walked slowly back to the table.

There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Wantele broke it by speaking of Jane. It was the first time her name had pa.s.sed his lips in Lingard's presence.

"Since Miss Oglander lost her brother in the strange and terrible way you know," he said, "she has shrunk very much from seeing people, I mean from mixing in ordinary society. That is one reason why she has always enjoyed her visits here. The state of my cousin, Richard Maule's, health compels us to lead a very quiet life." He forced himself to go on: "Mrs. Maule, as you know, is a good deal away. She naturally does not care for the extreme dulness, the solitariness, of the life----"

Lingard muttered a word of a.s.sent, but he made no other comment on the other man's words. He took them to mean that d.i.c.k Wantele felt rather ashamed of himself, as indeed he ought to do. Was it not pitifully clear that Mrs. Maule, poor beautiful Athena, had no part or place in her husband's house? All invalids tend to become self-absorbed and selfish; but he judged Wantele hardly for encouraging, nay for fostering, Mr.

Maule's egoistic unkindness to his wife.

Both men were glad when the time came for them to part. d.i.c.k, as always, went off to Richard, and Lingard, after a few unquiet moments in the smoking-room, made his way slowly to Athena's boudoir, the charming, restful room which, alone of the many rooms in the big quiet house, seemed to be in a real sense her territory, and where he and she had spent so many delightful hours together.

But to-night he was met there with something very like a rebuff.

Athena had been standing thinking, doing nothing, but when she heard Lingard's now familiar steps in the corridor she moved swiftly to her writing-table, and bent over it.

As he came in she lifted her head: "I really must finish these notes,"

she said deprecatingly. "You see, I had hoped to soften, if not Richard's, then d.i.c.k's heart! Well, I failed, as I generally do fail with him. And I feel"--her voice quivered--"very much as poor Cinderella must have felt when the clock was about to strike twelve."

As he stood, irresolute, before her, she added, "Take a book and sit down. I'll be as quick as I can." She got up with a swift movement and put a box of cigarettes and matches close to his hand.

It was such a little thing, and yet, in the emotional state in which he was now, Lingard felt touched, inexpressibly touched. How extraordinarily kind and thoughtful she was! No wonder Jane was so fond of her.

Mrs. Maule went back to her writing-table, intensely conscious that Lingard's ardent, melancholy gaze was fixed on her. Now and again, perhaps three or four times, she looked up for a moment and smiled, her glance full of confident friendliness. But she did not speak, and thus was spent one of the shortest and most poignant half-hours of Lingard's life.

At last there came harsh, unwelcome interruption in the person of d.i.c.k Wantele. For a moment he stood between them, his back to Lingard, facing Athena.

"I've only come to tell you," he exclaimed, rather breathlessly, "that Richard agrees that there are two or three more people we ought to ask.

I suggested the Dight-Suttons."

"I've just written, this moment, to say we can't have them," said Athena slowly.

d.i.c.k shrugged his shoulders with what seemed to the man watching him an unmannerly gesture of irritation. "I'm sorry," he said curtly. "I had no idea that you would be writing to them to-night, or indeed to anyone to-night. Surely to-morrow morning will be time enough. However, there are one or two other people----"

Lingard got up. "I think I'll go out of doors for a bit," he said abruptly. "I haven't walked enough to-day." It was horrible to him to stand by and see Mrs. Maule insulted in her own house, in her own room.

He felt afraid that if he stayed there he would lose control of himself and say something he would regret having said to d.i.c.k Wantele.

And Athena, moving to one side, saw his lowering face, and she felt a thrill of possessive pride. What a man Lingard seemed by the side of d.i.c.k Wantele! How well he must look in uniform. She wondered, jealously, if Jane had ever seen him in uniform....

"Yes--do go out. And take the key--you know--the key of the Garden Room off the mantelpiece. But you must get a coat. It's cold to-night."

He shook hands with them both, and went out. d.i.c.k only stayed a very few moments,--long enough, however, to be told very plainly the names of the people whom Athena wished to be invited. He went off to Richard with her message.

Mrs. Maule began moving about the boudoir aimlessly. It was tiresome of Lingard to stay out so long. She was used to another type of man,--one more civilised, who would have understood in a moment what her quick glance at him had tried to convey. That sort of man would have hung about in the Garden Room till d.i.c.k Wantele had left her, and then he would have come back at once.

But the great soldier--and the fact, it must be admitted, was part of his attraction for Athena Maule--was not in the least like that.

Lingard knew nothing of flirtation, as the word was understood in Mrs.

Maule's circle. She supposed him, rightly, to be a man with but little knowledge of the world in which the pursuit of the tenderer emotions is carried to a fine art; she judged him, erroneously, to be a man strangely lacking in certain primitive instincts. But that made the state of bondage to which she had already reduced him the greater triumph.

To a thinking mind there is something sombre, disturbing, in the thought that the attraction of a man to a woman, whatever be the quality of that attraction, manifests itself in much the same way.

Athena knew the signs. To-night every omen pointed one way. She put the thought--the slightly insistent memory--of Jane away from her. Jane should have known how to guard what had perhaps never been really hers.

She set her door ajar. It would be very annoying if General Lingard were to come in and, as she knew he had done some nights ago, creep up silently through the house....

At last there came the sounds of footfalls across the flags of the Garden Room. Athena began to experience that curious sensation which goes by the name of a beating heart. In other words, she felt strung up to a high pitch of emotion.

Bayworth Kaye had given her some delicious moments, but she had never felt with him what she felt now. For the first time Athena--skilful huntress of men--had found a quarry worthy of pursuit. Was it possible that to-night her quarry would elude her? Was it conceivable that Lingard would push his scruples, his sense of absurd delicacy, as far as that?

Athena had not yet learnt to reckon with Hew Lingard's conscience,--the conscience, perhaps it would be more true to say the honour, he had already deliberately thrust aside to-night, during those few unquiet moments in the smoking-room.

She remained, however, absolutely still.

Lingard advanced a few steps nearer to the partly open door. He was evidently hesitating, and Athena felt she could bear the suspense no longer.

"Is anyone there?" she called out in a low voice. "Is it Hew?" She only called him by that name when they were alone together.

He opened the door and came in.

"You must be cold," she said tremulously. "Do come nearer the fire."

Lingard came towards her. No, he was not cold. He had been walking, covering miles in the hour he had spent trying to tire, to deaden, himself out. It had been a terrible time of self-communion, self-reproach, self-abas.e.m.e.nt.

The state he found himself in to-night recalled with piteous vividness that episode of his stormy youth which had led to his long break with the Paches.

It was horrible that he should couple, even in thought, Athena Maule and that--that creature, over whom he had wasted, squandered, such treasures of adoring love. Rosie had been one of those young ladies who, to use a technical term, "walk on"; and because she was extraordinarily pretty, she was always placed in the front row of the foolish musical comedy of which he could still recall, not only every tune, but almost every word, so often had he been to the theatre after that first meeting.

At the end of ten days,--he had known Athena Maule ten days, what a strange coincidence!--at the end of ten days he had asked Rosie to marry him. She had shilly-shallied for a while, and then, to his rapturous surprise, she had said "Yes." How angry, how scandalised, how shocked his relations had been!

Tommy Pache--in those days old Mr. Pache had been "Tommy" to his relations--had hurried up to London and said all the usual things that one does say to a young fool on such an occasion, but even he had been struck by the girl's beauty, though of course Tommy had been careful not to let this out to the others when he had got back to them.

How it all came back to him to-night! Lingard remembered the letters he had received, the letters he had written. It had gone on for some weeks--he couldn't quite remember how long now,--that time of anger, of impatience, of longing, of rapture. And then, within a very few days of that fixed for the quiet wedding which was to take place in a city church,--he had always avoided that part of London ever since,--Rosie had become the wife of another man, of a young idiot with a vacuous face and an enormous fortune, of whom he had not even troubled to be jealous, although his presence in the flat Rosie shared with another girl had often made him impatient.

Now Lingard felt desperately tired--tired in body, tired in spirit. But he was glad--glad that he had disregarded the promptings of his conscience, of his honour. It was delicious to be here indoors, with this kind, this enchanting, this angelically beautiful woman close, very close, to him.