The invitation was given during the eleven o'clock break. Clare would occasionally join the school in Big Hall, and share its milk and biscuits. Often enough to make it any day's delightful possibility, not often enough for it to be other than an event. She would sit on the platform steps, watching the gay promenaders below, informal, approachable, tossing the ball to the daring few, hedged about, in turn, by the tentative many. Sometimes she would stroll about the hall with a girl on either side, or one only. She had a curious little trick of catching the girl she spoke with by the elbow, and pushing her gently along as she talked, bending over (she was very tall) and enveloping.

Everybody knew the "Gendarme Stunt" as Cynthia Griffiths irreverently termed it, and no one would have dreamed of approaching or interrupting such a _tete-a-tete_.

Nevertheless, Miss Hartill had not exchanged three sentences with Louise Denny on the morning of Olivia Pring's arrival, before every girl in Big Hall knew of it, and twice the number of eyes were following them, with an elaborately accidental gaze, in their progress.

Possibly Clare was a little touched by Louise's delight at the invitation. At any rate she managed, in spite of her headache, to be a very charming companion. She confessed to the headache, and asked Louise for advice. And Louise, deeply concerned, could think of nothing but a recipe she had found in Clare's own Culpeper, in which rhubarb and powdered dormice figured largely. She suggested it in a doubtful little voice. The school would have given a good deal to know what made Miss Hartill laugh so.

Miss Hartill told Louise all about her visitor, whom, she declared, she depended on Louise to entertain, and added a couple of comical tales of their mutual schooldays. Unfortunately Clare's _novelli_ owed their charm more to her inventive touches and graphic manner than to the actual underlying fact. Louise was left with the impression of an Olivia Pring who had been Friar Tuck to Clare's Robin Hood. She appreciated the honour of being asked to meet her to a degree that would have tickled Clare, had she guessed it.

"Miss Olivia Pring!" Louise meditated all day over Miss Olivia Pring.

Evidently Miss Hartill's best friend.... She hoped Miss Olivia Pring would like her.... How dreadful it would be if she didn't ... for what might she not say of her to Miss Hartill? Louise must be careful, oh, so careful, of her manners and her speech.... It was rather hard luck that she would not have Miss Hartill to herself.... It would be dreadfully uncomfortable--talking before a stranger.... Except for the delightfulness of being asked by Miss Hartill, she could have wished that Miss Hartill had not asked her. Rather an ordeal for a thirteen-year-old--supper with Miss Hartill and Miss Olivia Pring.

Now shyness, like any other painful sensation, is inexplicable to such as have not experienced it, is at once forgotten by such as outgrow it, but to those at its mercy, to sheer suffering, paralysing, stultifying, a spiritual Torture of the Pear.

Clare Hartill should have understood; she had her own furtive childhood for reference; but Clare Hartill had a headache, and she was very tired of Olivia Pring. Olivia was so placid, so shapeless, so ridiculous, in her pink flannel blouse, and the reckless gla.s.ses, that were ever on the point of toppling over the precipice of her abbreviated nose into the abyss of her half-open mouth. It certainly did not occur to Clare that Louise could feel the slightest discomfort on account of Olivia Pring.

But Louise was blind to the flannel blouse, and the foolish face, and the unmanageable gla.s.ses. She was wearing gla.s.ses of her own, rose-coloured affairs, through which Miss Pring appeared, not only as a "grown-up" and a stranger, but as the intimate of Deity in Undress.

Miss Pring did nothing to dispel the illusion--she had conscientiously flattened the high spirits out of too many little girls to be interested in a new specimen. She addressed herself chiefly to Clare--recalling incessantly, and enlarging upon, trifling incidents of their mutual past, which every fresh sentence of the badgered hostess contrived to recall to her elastic memory. Louise, always sensitive, her shyness growing with every word, could but take each unexplained allusion as a personal snub, and feeling herself entirely superfluous, began to imagine that Miss Hartill was already regretting the invitation.

Panic-struck she tried to remedy matters by effacing herself as completely as possible. It was wonderful what a small and insignificant person Louise could sometimes look, and did look that evening in one of Clare's big arm-chairs. Her prim little whisper and deprecatory smile might have struck Clare as pathetic if Clare had not been so very tired of the affectionate reminiscences of Olivia Pring. As it was, she was annoyed. She had asked Louise of the bright eyes and quick stammer and extravagant imagery, to supper with her--the panther-cub, not the leveret. She had talked of Louise too--had looked forward to putting the child through its paces, if only for the benefit of Olivia Pring. She had even surmised that Louise would take Olivia's measure, and at a nod from Clare would be delicately, deliciously impertinent. Indeed, she had thought her capable of it. But it was only a schoolgirl after all--a silly tongue-tied schoolgirl--that she had for an instant compared with Alwynne: Alwynne, monstrously absent, a match for ten Olivias.

She yawned, shrugged her shoulders, and suggested, in fine ironic fit, a game of "Old Maid." Olivia was extremely pleased. She so much preferred Old Maid--or Beggar-my-Neighbour, perhaps?--to Bridge. She did not approve of Bridge. In her position it did not do. Clare would remember that she had always said....

Clare fetched the cards.

Louise! Louise! You have done yourself no good to-night. Shy? Nonsense!

What is there to be shy about? A few words from Miss Hartill--a prompting or two--a leading question--could have broken the ice of your shyness for you, eh? And Miss Hartill knows it, as well as you, if not better. That shall not avail you. Who are you, to set Miss Hartill's conscience itching? Miss Hartill has a headache. Pull up your chair, and deal your cards, and stop Miss Hartill yawning, if you can. Believe me, it's your only chance of escape.

Louise was a clumsy dealer. Her careful setting out of cards irritated Clare to s.n.a.t.c.hing point. Olive triumphed in every game. On principle, Clare disliked losing, even at Beggar-my-Neighbour. And they played Beggar-my-Neighbour till ten o'clock.

Louise grew more cheerful as the evening progressed, ventured a few sentences now and then. Clare was dangerously suave with both her guests; but Louise, taking all in good faith, hoped after all, that she had not appeared as stupid as she felt. It had been dreadful at first, she reflected, as she put on coat and hat. But it had gone better afterwards.... She didn't believe Miss Hartill was cross with her....

That had been a silly idea of her own.... Miss Hartill was just as usual.

She made her farewells. Clare came out into the hall and ushered her forth.

"Good-bye!" Louise smiled up at her. "It was so kind of you to have me.

I have so much enjoyed myself." Then, the formula off her tongue: "Miss Hartill, I do hope your head's better?"

"Thank you!" said Clare inscrutably. "Good-night!" Then, as the maid went down the stairs: "Louise!"

"Yes, Miss Hartill?"

Clare was smiling brilliantly.

"Don't come again, Louise, until you can be more amusing. At any rate, natural. Good-night!"

She shut the door.

CHAPTER XVII

Louise spent her Easter holidays among her lesson books. Miss Hartill and Miss Durand were in Italy, all responsibilities put aside for four blessed weeks, but for Louise there could be no relaxation. The examinations were to take place a few days before the summer term began, and their imminence overshadowed her. Useless for Miss Durand to extract a promise to rest, to be lazy, to forget all about lessons. Louise promised readily and broke her promise half-an-hour after she had waved the train out of the station. Impossible to keep away from one's History and Latin and Mathematics with examinations three weeks ahead. Miss Durand might preach; her overtaxed brain cry pax; her cramped body ache for exercise; but Louise knew herself forced to ignore all protests. She would rest when the examinations were over. Till then--revision, repet.i.tion--repet.i.tion, revision--with as little time as might be grudged to eating and sleeping and duty walks with Mrs. Denny.

There was no time to lose. The nights swallowed up the days all too swiftly.

Yet, waking one morning with a start to realise that the day of days had dawned at last, she found it incredible. The morning was exactly like other mornings, with the sun streaming blindingly in upon her, because she had forgotten, as usual, to drawn her blind at night, her head already aching a little, hot and heavy from uneasy sleep. All night long her brain had been alert, restless, beyond control. All night long it had tugged and fretted, like a leashed dog, at the surface slumber that tethered it. She felt confused, burdened with a half-consciousness of vivid, forgotten dreams.

She dressed abstractedly, lesson books propped against her looking-gla.s.s, and wedged between soap-dish and pitcher. For the hundredth time she conned the technicalities of her work, and making no slips, grew more cheerful for it had been the letter, not the spirit, that had troubled her--little matters of rules and exceptions, of dates and derivations, that would surely trip her up. But she was feeling sure of herself at last, and thrilling as she was with nervous excitement, could yet be glad that the great day had dawned, and ready to laugh at all her previous despondencies. Things were turning out better than she had expected. There was bracing comfort in beginning with her own subject--Miss Hartill's own subject. She could have no fears for herself in the Literature examination. French in the afternoon, that was less pleasant. But she would manage--must, literally. "Miss Hartill expects----" She laughed. She supposed the sailors felt just the same about Nelson as she did about Miss Hartill. She wondered if Lady Hamilton had minded his only having one eye and one arm? Suppose Miss Hartill had only one eye and one arm? Oh! If anything happened to Miss Hartill...! She shivered at the idea and instantly witnessed, with all imaginable detail, the wreck of the train as it entered Utterbridge station, and she herself rescuing Miss Hartill, armless and blind, from the blazing carriage. She had her on the sofa, five years later, in the prettiest of invalid gowns, contentedly reliant on her former pupil. And Louise, blissfully happy, was her hands and feet and eyes, her nurse, her servant, her--(hastily Louise deprived her alike of income and friends) her bread-winner and companion. Here her French Grammar, slithering over the soap to the floor, woke her from that delicious reverie.

She picked it up, and applied herself for a while to its dazing infinitives. But teeth-brushing is a rhythmic process: her thoughts wandered again perforce. She had got to be first.... Miss Hartill would be so pleased.... It would be heavenly to please Miss Hartill again as she used to do.... Nothing had been the same since Cynthia came.... She flushed to the eyes at the recollection of her last unlucky visit----"You needn't come again unless you can be more amusing. You might at least be natural...." Yet Miss Hartill had been so kind at the last ... had waved to her from the train....

The postman's knock startled her, disturbed her meditations anew.

Letters! Was it possible? Would Miss Hartill have remembered? Have sent her, perhaps, a postcard? Stranger things had been. She had for weeks envisaged the possibility. She finished her dressing and tore downstairs.

The maid was hovering over the breakfast-table.

"Are there any letters, Baxter? Are there any letters?" But she had already caught sight of a foreign postcard on her plate, a postcard with an unfamiliar stamp. She scurried round the table, her heart thumping.

But the big, adventurous handwriting was hatefully familiar. The postcard was from Miss Durand.

She waited a moment, her lips parted vacantly, as was her fashion when controlling emotion; waited till the maid had gone.

Then she crumpled and tore the thin cardboard in her hand and flung it at last on the floor, in a pa.s.sion of disappointment.

"She might have written!" cried Louise. "Oh, she might have written! It wouldn't have hurt her--a postcard."

Presently a thought struck her. She groped under the table for the torn sc.r.a.ps of paper and spread them in her lap, piecing them eagerly, laboriously. Miss Hartill might have written on Miss Durand's postcard.

She had the oblong fitted together at last and read the scrawl with impatient eagerness. Miss Durand was just sending her a line to wish her all imaginable luck. She and Miss Hartill were having a glorious time.

They were sitting at that moment where she had made a cross on the picture postcard. She wished Louise could be with them to see the wonderful view over the valley and with good wishes from them both, was her Alwynne Durand....

Louise's eyes softened--"from them both." That was something! Miss Hartill had sent her a message. She sighed as she wrapped the sc.r.a.ps carefully in her handkerchief. Life was queer.... Here was Miss Durand, so kind, so friendly always--yet her kindness brought no pleasure....

And Miss Hartill, who could open heaven with a word--was not half so kind as Miss Durand. Louise marvelled that Miss Hartill could be so miserly. She was sure that if she, Louise, could make people utterly happy by kind looks and kind words, stray messages and occasional postcards, that she would be only too glad to be allowed to do it. To possess the power of giving happiness.... And with no more trouble to yourself than the writing of a postcard! Queer that Miss Hartill did not realise what her mere existence meant to people.... She couldn't realise it, of course ... that was it.... She thought so little about herself.... It was her own beautiful selflessness that made her seem, occasionally, hard--unkind even.... She didn't realise what she meant to people.... If she had, she would have written.... Of course she would have written ... just a word ... on Daffy's postcard....

Louise sighed again. One didn't ask much.... But it seemed the more humble one grew--the less one asked--the more unlikely people were to throw one even that little.... At any rate there was the examination to tackle.... If she did well--! She lost herself again in speculations as to the form Miss Hartill's approval might take.

The family trooped in to breakfast as the brisk maid dumped a steaming dishful of liver and bacon upon the table.

Louise occupied her place and began to spread her bread-and-b.u.t.ter, avoiding her father's eye. But, as she foresaw, she was not permitted to escape.

Mr. Denny pounced upon the b.u.t.ter-dish.

"Not with bacon," he remarked, with reproachful satisfaction, and removed it.

Louise said nothing. She was careful not to look at her parent, for she knew that her expression was not permissible. His harmless tyrannies irritated her as invariably as her tricks of personality grated upon him. She thought him smug and petty, and despised him for his submissive att.i.tude to her step-mother. His noisy interferences with her personal habits she thought intolerable, though she had learned to endure them stolidly. But most of all, she hated to see his fat, pudgy hands touching her food. She was accustomed to cut bread for the family. No one guessed why she had arrogated to herself that duty.

And he, good man, would look at his daughter occasionally, and wonder why she was so unlike his satisfactory sons and their capable mother: would be vaguely annoyed by her silences, and by a certain expression that reminded him uncomfortably of his first "fine-lady" wife; would have an emotion of disquieted responsibility; would hesitate: would end by presenting his daughter with a five-shilling-piece, or be delivered from a dawning sense of responsibility by crumbs on the carpet, the muddy boots of a son and heir, or, as in the present instance, an unjustifiable predilection for b.u.t.ter.