"I think he's lovely," said Muriel.

"Do you?" Mrs. Newberry was bovine even in her playful moods. "He does really run about like a boy, doesn't he?"

"Well," said Muriel, "I wouldn't say _just_ like a boy."

"He seems quite young--he actually seems very young indeed," mused Ethel.

"Seems?" said Preston. "He is."

His positive tone startled Mrs. Newberry into indiscretion.

"He is fif----" she began, then, catching her husband's eye, she corrected herself: "He must be nearly----"

"He is forty," said Newberry, scowling.

"Oh, Uncle Preston," protested Muriel, "Mr. Holt said----"

"George Holt is a fool," said Newberry, "and always was."

"Your uncle is quite right, Muriel," said Ethel. "Mr. Holt does gossip.

Besides, he is not the sort of person a young girl should quote."

"You quote him, Aunt Ethel--often."

"Your aunt," said Preston, "is not a young girl. Mr. Stainton is younger than Holt, I dare say, for he has evidently taken good care of himself, and Holt never takes care of anything, least of all his health."

The air of importance that her uncle and aunt seemed to attach to so trivial a matter as a few years more or less in the age of any man past thirty puzzled Muriel, and she betrayed her bewilderment.

"I don't see how it much matters," she said, "whether he's forty or fifty."

"It doesn't matter in the least," said Newberry. "But you had better make the most of him while you can."

"I don't see why," said Muriel.

"Because he is popular," Preston explained. "There are several women--women and _girls_--anxious to marry him, and one or other of them is sure to succeed."

Muriel winced. She did not relish the thought of losing her new friend, and she wondered why, if he were really sought after in marriage, he had so much time to devote to her and her aunt and uncle, and why he spoke so little of women to her.

Stainton, indeed, held his tongue about his intentions for just the length of time that, as he had previously concluded, a man must hold his tongue in such matters. If, in the meantime, Muriel heard from both of the Newberrys more interesting stories of his career in the West, and was impressed thereby, if she got from the same reliable source equally romantic accounts of his wealth and was, as the best of us could not in like circ.u.mstances help being, a little impressed by these as well, she was, nevertheless, honestly unprepared for his final declaration. She regarded Stainton as a storybook hero, the more so since his conversation never approached the sentimental, and she delighted in his company for the "good time"--it was thus that she described it--which he was "showing her."

In brief, she was at last ready to fall in love with Stainton. Stainton was in love.

VI

A MAID PERPLEXED

So far as Stainton was privileged to know, the end of this first act in their comedy came about in much the manner designed by him. He moved quietly, as he moved in all the details of his life; he had the gift of precision, and when he arrived at what Sarcey called the _scene a faire_, though he was perhaps more in love, as that term is generally understood, than most lovers, he arrived not at all breathless, and found nothing to complain of in what awaited him.

Mrs. Newberry had ostentatiously deserted him and Muriel in the white-and-gold Newberry drawing-room splendid with spindle-legged mahogany and appropriately uncomfortable. It was evening, an evening that Stainton had taken care should be unoccupied by any disturbing theatre party or other frivolous forerunner to a declaration.

That Ethel and her husband had tacitly agreed to this arrangement, Stainton did not notice as significant. Mrs. Newberry, after the spasm of chaperonage that followed his first unwatched motor drive with Muriel, had tactfully begun to withdraw from the role of duenna, and the suitor had consoled himself in the ocular demonstration of the proverb that two are company and three none. Hitherto he had enjoyed his privilege like the temperate man that he was, which is to say that he enjoyed it without abusing it. He belonged by birth to that cla.s.s of society which, though strong enough in the so-called natural affections, seems to think it indecent to display emotion in public, and he was unwilling, for both his own sake and that of the girl he loved, to hurry an affair that might lose much by speed and gain much by circ.u.mspection.

Now, however, the time came to test the virtues of his plan of campaign, and Stainton was glad that the combination of the time and the place and the loved one was not marred by any extraneous interference.

The wooer was at his best. The clothes that are designed for those short hours of the twenty-four when one is at rest without being asleep, became him; they gave full value to his erect figure, his shapely hips, and his robust shoulders; and, since he was about to win or lose that which he now most prized in life, and since he had always felt sure that the only courage he lacked was physical, his strong face looked far younger than its years and his iron-grey eyes shone not with fear, but with excitement.

While he leaned against a corner of the white mantelpiece above the glowing fireplace, so much as it was possible for his upright figure to lean, he was thinking that Muriel, opposite him, was more beautiful than he had ever yet seen her--thinking, but without terror, how dreadful it would be should he lose her and how wonderful should he win. Young enough for her in that kindly light he almost looked and was sure he was; worthy of her, though he felt more worthy than most, he was certain that no man could be. He saw her as he had seen her that first night at the opera, but more desirable.

Seated in the farther corner of a long, low couch drawn close to the chimney-place and at right-angles to it, three or four rose-red pillows piled behind the suggestion of bare shoulders only just escaping from her gown of grey ninon draped over delicate pink, Muriel's slim body fronted the dancing fire and warmed in the light that played from the flames. Her blue-black hair waved about her white temples and the narrow lines of her brows; her lips, the lower slightly indrawn, were like young red roses after the last shower of Spring.

He felt again, as he had felt when he saw her in the Newberrys' box, that she was lovely not only with the hesitant possibilities of girlhood at pause before the door of maturity, but because she gleamed with the gleam of an approaching summer night scented and starred. He noted how the yellow rays from a high candelabrum standing near the couch cast what might be an aureole about her head and set it in relief against the distant, drawn curtains, the curtains of ivory plush, which shut the heaven of this drawing-room from the earth of everywhere else. In his every early adventure among the dreams of love, this lonely man of the desert, reacting on his environment, had been less annoyed by the demands of a body that clamoured in vain than by the dictates of a soul that insisted upon the perfection of beauty among beautiful surroundings beautifully encountered. Now he was to put into action forces that would either realise or break those dreams, and, knowing that, he imprinted on his memory this picture of her and always after remembered it: her white hands clasped about the great bunch of violets he had brought to her, the glory of her wayward hair, the curve of her throat, her dark eyes with their curving lashes, her parted lips.

She had again been asking him of his life in the mining-camps of Alaska and the West and about his solitary journeys prospecting for the gold that it had often seemed was never to be found, and Stainton, wishing not to capitalise his achievements and unable to understand why a girl should interest herself in what was simply a business history, had again evaded her.

"But you must have suffered a good deal," she said.

"Oh, yes," he said; "that is part of the price of Life."

"You did it all," she asked, "to win a fortune?"

"No," he answered, his glance as steady upon hers as it had been that night at the opera. "I did it all to win Life. That has always been what I wanted; that has always been what I never had: Life. I wanted--I scarcely know how to say it: the full, sharp, clean joys of being. You understand?"

"I think I understand," she said.

"I wanted them. I saw that no man could have them in these days, living as we live, unless he was economically independent and morally straight.

I made up my mind to win economic independence and to keep morally straight at any sacrifice."

She drew her fingers a little tighter about the tinfoil wrapping of the violets. Over the purple tops of the flowers, as she raised them toward her face, her intent, innocent face returned his steady scrutiny.

"And you've won?" she asked.

He wished to cross to her, to come to the couch and lean over its back, and, with his lips close to her cheek, whisper his answer. But he would not do that; he had decided that to do that at this point would be to bring about for his benefit an unfair propinquity. Instead, he moved only a step from the mantelpiece and stood upright, his arms folded.

Only a step, but to the girl he seemed somehow to draw much closer. The atmosphere of the room was somehow strained to tension. She saw that his eyes, although they did not waver, softened, and, to fill a pause of which she began to be afraid, she heard herself repeating:

"And you've won?"

"That," said Stainton, "is for you to say--Muriel."

It was the first time he had called her by her given name. Her eyes fell. She lowered the violets and, looking only at them, raised a hand to finger them. The hand shook.

"For me?" she asked.

If there is one thing in which men are more alike than another, it is the manner of their asking women to marry them. Generally it adds to many pretences the cruelty of suspense. Stainton was not unusual.

"I have won my fight--yes," he said. "I have got the means. Can I gain the end? It's you who must tell me that."