It was a quite idiotic performance. I set it down to the snares of Spring--to her insidious, delightful snares of scent and sound and colour that--for the moment, at least--had trapped these young people into loving life infinitely.

But I wonder who is responsible for that tatter of rhyme and melody that had come to them from nowhere in particular? Mr. Woods, as he sat up at the conclusion of the singing vigorously to applaud, would have shared his last possession, his ultimate crust, with that unknown benefactor of mankind. Indeed, though, the heart of Mr. Woods just now was full of loving kindness and capable of any freakish magnanimity.

For--will it be believed?--Mr. Woods, who four years ago had thrown over a fortune and exiled himself from his native land, rather than propose marriage to Margaret Hugonin, had no sooner come again into her presence and looked once into her perfectly fathomless eyes than he could no more have left her of his own accord than a moth can turn his back to a lighted candle. He had fancied himself entirely cured of that boy-and-girl nonsense; his broken heart, after the first few months, had not interfered in the least with a naturally healthy appet.i.te; and, behold, here was the old malady raging again in his veins and with renewed fervour.

And all because the girl had a pretty face! I think you will agree with me that in the conversation I have recorded Margaret had not displayed any great wisdom or learning or tenderness or wit, nor, in fine, any of the qualities a man might naturally look for in a helpmate. Yet at the precise moment he handed his baggage-check to the groom, Mr. Woods had made up his mind to marry her. In an instant he had fallen head over ears in love; or to whittle accuracy to a point, he had discovered that he had never fallen out of love; and if you had offered him an empress or fetched Helen of Troy from the grave for his delectation he would have laughed you to scorn.

In his defense, I can only plead that Margaret was an unusually beautiful woman. It is all very well to flourish a death's-head at the feast, and bid my lady go paint herself an inch thick, for to this favour she must come; and it is quite true that the reddest lips in the universe may give vent to slander and lies, and the brightest eyes be set in the dullest head, and the most roseate of complexions be purchased at the corner drug-store; but, say what you will, a pretty woman is a pretty woman, and while she continue so no amount of common-sense or experience will prevent a man, on provocation, from alluring, coaxing, even entreating her to make a fool of him. We like it. And I think they like it, too.

So Mr. Woods lost his heart on a fine spring morning and was unreasonably elated over the fact.

And Margaret? Margaret was content.

V

They talked for a matter of a half-hour in the fashion aforetime recorded--not very wise nor witty talk, if you will, but very pleasant to make. There were many pauses. There was much laughter over nothing in particular. There were any number of sentences ambitiously begun that ended nowhere. Altogether, it was just the sort of talk for a man and a maid.

Yet some twenty minutes later, Mr. Woods, preparing for luncheon in the privacy of his chamber, gave a sudden exclamation. Then he sat down and rumpled his hair thoroughly.

"Good Lord!" he groaned; "I'd forgotten all about that d.a.m.ned money!

Oh, you a.s.s!--you abject a.s.s! Why, she's one of the richest women in America, and you're only a fifth-rate painter with a paltry thousand or so a year! _You_ marry her!--why, I dare say she's refused a hundred better men than you! She'd think you were mad! Why, she'd think you were after her money! She--oh, she'd only think you a precious cheeky a.s.s, she would, and she'd be quite right. You _are_ an a.s.s, Billy Woods! You ought to be locked up in some nice quiet stable, where your heehawing wouldn't disturb people. You need a keeper, you do!"

He sat for some ten minutes, aghast. Afterward he rose and threw back his shoulders and drew a deep breath.

"No, we aren't an a.s.s," he addressed his reflection in the mirror, as he carefully knotted his tie. "We're only a poor chuckle-headed moth who's been looking at a star too long. It's a bright star, Billy, but it isn't for you. So we're going to be sensible now. We're going to get a telegram to-morrow that will call us away from Selwoode. We aren't coming back any more, either. We're simply going to continue painting fifth-rate pictures, and hoping that some day she'll find the right man and be very, very happy."

Nevertheless, he decided that a blue tie would look better, and was very particular in arranging it.

At the same moment Margaret stood before her mirror and tidied her hair for luncheon and a.s.sured her image in the gla.s.s that she was a weak-minded fool. She pointed out to herself the undeniable fact that Billy, having formerly refused to marry her--oh, ignominy!--seemed pleasant-spoken enough, now that she had become an heiress. His refusal to accept part of her fortune was a very flimsy device; it simply meant he hoped to get all of it. Oh, he did, did he!

Margaret powdered her nose viciously.

_She_ saw through him! His honest bearing she very plainly perceived to be the result of consummate hypocrisy. In his laughter her keen ear detected a hollow ring; and his courteous manner she found, at bottom, mere servility. And finally she demonstrated--to her own satisfaction, at least--that his charm of manner was of exactly the, same sort that had been possessed by many other eminently distinguished criminals.

How did she do this? My dear sir, you had best inquire of your mother or your sister or your wife, or any other lady that your fancy dictates. They know. I am sure I don't.

And after it all--

"Oh, dear, dear!" said Margaret; "I _do_ wish he didn't have such nice eyes!"

VI

On the way to luncheon Mr. Woods came upon Adele Haggage and Hugh Van Orden, both of whom he knew, very much engrossed in one another, in a nook under the stairway. To Billy it seemed just now quite proper that every one should be in love; wasn't it--after all--the most pleasant condition in the world? So he greeted them with a semi-paternal smile that caused Adele to flush a little.

For she was--let us say, interested--in Mr. Van Orden. That was tolerably well known. In fact, Margaret--prompted by Mrs. Haggage, it must be confessed--had invited him to Selwoode for the especial purpose of entertaining Miss Adele Haggage; for he was a good match, and Mrs. Haggage, as an experienced chaperon, knew the value of country houses. Very unexpectedly, however, the boy had developed a disconcerting tendency to fall in love with Margaret, who snubbed him promptly and unmercifully. He had accordingly fallen back on Adele, and Mrs. Haggage had regained both her trust in Providence and her temper.

In the breakfast-room, where luncheon was laid out, the Colonel greeted Mr. Woods with the enthusiasm a sailor shipwrecked on a desert island might conceivably display toward the boat-crew come to rescue him. The Colonel liked Billy; and furthermore, the poor Colonel's position at Selwoode just now was not utterly unlike that of the suppositious mariner; were I minded to venture into metaphor, I should picture him as clinging desperately to the rock of an old fogeyism and surrounded by weltering seas of advanced thought. Colonel Hugonin himself was not advanced in his ideas. Also, he had forceful opinions as to the ultimate destination of those who were.

Then Billy was presented to the men of the party--Mr. Felix Kennaston and Mr. Petheridge Jukesbury. Mrs. Haggage he knew slightly; and Kathleen Saumarez he had known very well indeed, some six years previously, before she had ever heard of Miguel Saumarez, and when Billy was still an undergraduate. She was a widow now, and not well-to-do; and Mr. Woods's first thought on seeing her was that a man was a fool to write verses, and that she looked like just the sort of woman to preserve them.

His second was that he had verged on imbecility when he fancied he admired that slender, dark-haired type. A woman's hair ought to be an enormous coronal of sunlight; a woman ought to have very large, candid eyes of a colour between that of sapphires and that of the spring heavens, only infinitely more beautiful than either; and all petticoated persons differing from this description were manifestly quite unworthy of any serious consideration.

So his eyes turned to Margaret, who had no eyes for him. She had forgotten his existence, with an utterness that verged on ostentation; and if it had been any one else Billy would have surmised she was in a temper. But that angel in a temper!--nonsense! And, oh, what eyes she had! and what lashes! and what hair!--and altogether, how adorable she was, and what a wonder the admiring G.o.ds hadn't s.n.a.t.c.hed her up to Olympus long ago!

Thus far Mr. Woods.

But if Miss Hugonin was somewhat taciturn, her counsellors in divers schemes for benefiting the universe were in opulent vein. Billy heard them silently.

"I have spent the entire morning by the lake," Mr. Kennaston informed the party at large, "in company with a mocking-bird who was practising a new aria. It was a wonderful place; the trees were lisping verses to themselves, and the sky overhead was like a robin's egg in colour, and a faint wind was making tucks and ruches and pleats all over the water, quite as if the breezes had set up in business as mantua-makers. I fancy they thought they were working on a great sheet of blue silk, for it was very like that. And every once in a while a fish would leap and leave a splurge of bubble and foam behind that you would have sworn was an inserted lace medallion."

Mr. Kennaston, as you are doubtless aware, is the author of "The King's Quest" and other volumes of verse. He is a full-bodied young man, with hair of no particular shade; and if his green eyes are a little aged, his manner is very youthful. His voice in speaking is wonderfully pleasing, and he has a habit of c.o.c.king his head on one side, in a bird-like fashion.

"Indeed," Mr. Petheridge Jukesbury observed, "it is very true that G.o.d made the country and man made the town. A little more wine, please."

Mr. Jukesbury is a prominent worker in the cause of philanthropy and temperance. He is ponderous and bland; and for the rest, he is president of the Society for the Suppression of Nicotine and the Nude, vice-president of the Anti-Inebriation League, secretary of the Incorporated Brotherhood of Benevolence, and the bearer of divers similar honours.

"I am never really happy in the country," Mrs. Saumarez dissented; "it reminds me so constantly of our rural drama. I am always afraid the quartette may come on and sing something."

Kathleen Eppes Saumarez, as I hope you do not need to be told, is the well-known lecturer before women's clubs, and the author of many sympathetic stories of Nature and animal life of the kind that have had such a vogue of late. There was always an indefinable air of pathos about her; as Hunston Wyke put it, one felt, somehow, that her mother had been of a domineering disposition, and that she took after her father.

"Ah, dear lady," Mr. Kennaston cried, playfully, "you, like many of us, have become an alien to Nature in your quest of a mere Earthly Paradox. Epigrams are all very well, but I fancy there is more happiness to be derived from a single impulse from a vernal wood than from a whole problem-play of smart sayings. So few of us are natural," Mr. Kennaston complained, with a dulcet sigh; "we are too sophisticated. Our very speech lacks the tang of outdoor life.

Why should we not love Nature--the great mother, who is, I grant you, the necessity of various useful inventions, in her angry moods, but who, in her kindly moments--" He paused, with a wry face. "I beg your pardon," said he, "but I believe I've caught rheumatism lying by that confounded pond."

Mrs. Saumarez rallied the poet, with a pale smile. "That comes of communing with Nature," she reminded him; "and it serves you rightly, for natural communications corrupt good epigrams. I prefer Nature with wide margins and uncut leaves," she spoke, in her best platform manner. "Art should be an expurgated edition of Nature, with all the unpleasant parts left out. And I am sure," Mrs. Saumarez added, handsomely, and clinching her argument, "that Mr. Kennaston gives us much better sunsets in his poems than I have ever seen in the west."

He acknowledged this with a bow.

"Not sherry--claret, if you please," said Mr. Jukesbury. "Art should be an expurgated edition of Nature," he repeated, with a suave chuckle. "Do you know, I consider that admirably put, Mrs.

Saumarez--admirably, upon my word. Ah, if our latter-day writers would only take that saying to heart! We do not need to be told of the vice and corruption prevalent, I am sorry to say, among the very best people; what we really need is continually to be reminded of the fact that pure hearts and homes and happy faces are to be found to-day alike in the palatial residences of the wealthy and in the humbler homes of those less abundantly favoured by Fortune, and yet dwelling together in harmony and Christian resignation and--er--comparatively moderate circ.u.mstances."

"Surely," Mrs. Saumarez protested, "art has nothing to do with morality. Art is a process. You see a thing in a certain way; you make your reader see it in the same way--or try to. If you succeed, the result is art. If you fail, it may be the book of the year."

"Enduring immortality and--ah--the patronage of the reading public,"

Mr. Jukesbury placidly insisted, "will be awarded, in the end, only to those who dwell upon the true, the beautiful, and the--er --respectable. Art must cheer; it must be optimistic and edifying and--ah--suitable for young persons; it must have an uplift, a leaven of righteousness, a--er--a sort of moral baking-powder. It must utterly eschew the--ah--unpleasant and repugnant details of life.

It is, if I may so express myself, not at home in the menage a trois or--er--the representation of the nude. Yes, another gla.s.s of claret, if you please."

"I quite agree with you," said Mrs. Haggage, in her deep voice. Sarah Ellen Haggage is, of course, the well-known author of "Child-Labour in the South," and "The Down-Trodden Afro-American," and other notable contributions to literature. She is, also, the "Madame President" both of the Society for the Betterment of Civic Government and Sewerage, and of the Ladies' League for the Edification of the Impecunious.

"And I am glad to see," Mrs. Haggage presently went on, "that the literature of the day is so largely beginning to chronicle the sayings and doings of the labouring cla.s.ses. The virtues of the humble must be admitted in spite of their dissolute and unhygienic tendencies. Yes,"

Mrs. Haggage added, meditatively, "our literature is undoubtedly acquiring a more elevated tone; at last we are shaking off the scintillant and unwholesome influence of the French."

"Ah, the French!" sighed Mr. Kennaston; "a people who think depravity the soul of wit! Their art is mere artfulness. They care nothing for Nature."

"No," Mrs. Haggage a.s.sented; "they prefer nastiness. _All_ French books are immoral. I ran across one the other day that was simply hideously indecent--unfit for a modest woman to read. And I can a.s.sure you that none of its author's other books are any better. I purchased the entire set at once and read them carefully, in order to make sure that I was perfectly justified in warning my working-girls' cla.s.ses against them. I wish to misjudge no man--not even a member of a nation notoriously devoted to absinthe and illicit relations."