He has read over with pain and distaste the brief words in which he chronicled that first chance meeting with Nancy Dampier. What excitement, what adventures, and yes, what bitter sorrow had that chance meeting under the porte cochere of the Hotel Saint Ange brought in its train! If only he and Daisy had started out an hour earlier on that June morning just two years ago how much they would have been spared.

As for the fortune left to him, Senator Burton is now inclined to think that it has brought him less than no good. It has only provided Gerald with an excuse, which to an American father is no excuse, for neglecting his profession. Further, it has enabled the young man to spend money in a prodigal fashion over what even he now acknowledges to have been a hopeless quest, though even at the present moment detectives in every capital in Europe are watching for a clue which may afford some notion as to the whereabouts of John Dampier.

John Dampier? Grim, relentless spectre who pursues them unceasingly, and from whose menacing, shadowy presence they are never free--from whom, so the Senator has now despairingly come to believe, they never, never will be free....

He had stopped his diary abruptly on the evening of that now far-off day when his eyes had been so rudely opened to his son's state of mind and heart. But though he has no written record to guide him the Senator finds it only too easy, on this beautiful June morning, to go back, in dreary retrospective, over these two long years.

Gerald had not found it possible to keep his rash vow; there had come a day when he had had to go back to America--indeed, he has been home three times. But those brief visits of his son to his own country brought the father no comfort, for each time Gerald left behind him in Europe not only his heart, but everything else that matters to a man--his interests, his longings, his hopes.

Small wonder that in time Senator Burton and Daisy had also fallen into the way of spending nearly the whole of the Senator's spare time in Europe, and with Nancy Dampier.

Nancy? The mind of the watcher by the window turns to her too, as he visions the slender, graceful figure now pacing slowly by his son's side.

Is it unreasonable that, gradually withdrawing herself from her old friends, those friends who did not believe that Dampier had left her save of his own free will, Nancy should cling closer and closer to her new friends? No, not at all unreasonable, but, from the Senator's point of view, very unfortunate. Daisy and Nancy are now like sisters, and to the Senator himself she shows the loving deference, the affection of a daughter, but with regard to the all-important point of her relations to Gerald, none of them know the truth--indeed, it may be doubted if she knows it herself.

But the situation gets more difficult, more strained every month, every week, almost every day. Senator Burton feels that the time has come when something must be done to end it--one way or the other--and the day before yesterday he sought out Mr. Stephens, now one of his closest friends and advisers, in order that they might confer together on the matter. As he stands there looking down at the two figures walking across the dewy gra.s.s, he remembers with a sense of boding fear the conversation with Nancy's lawyer.

"There's nothing to be done, my poor friend, nothing at all! Our English marriage laws are perfectly clear, and though this is a very, very hard case, I for my part have no wish to see them altered."

And the Senator had answered with heat, "I cannot follow you there at all!

The law which ties a living woman to a man who may be dead, nay, probably is dead, is a monstrous law."

And Mr. Stephens had answered very quietly, "What if John Dampier be alive?"

"And is this all I can tell my poor son?"

And then it was that Mr. Stephens, looking at him doubtfully, had answered, "Well no, for there is a way out. It is not a good way--I doubt if it is a right way--but still it is a way. It is open to poor little Nancy to go to America, to become naturalized there, and then to divorce her husband, in one of your States, for desertion. The divorce so obtained would be no divorce in England, but many Englishmen and Englishwomen have taken that course as a last resort--" He had waited a moment, and then added, "I doubt, however, very, very much if Nancy would consent to do such a thing, even if she reciprocates--which is by no means sure--your son's--er--feeling for her."

"Feeling?" Senator Burton's voice had broken, and then he had cried out fiercely, "Why use such an ambiguous word, when we both know that Gerald is killing himself for love of her--and giving up the finest career ever opened to a man? If Mrs. Dampier does not reciprocate what you choose to call his 'feeling' for bet, then she is the coldest and most ungrateful of women!"

"I don't think she is either the one or the other," had observed Mr.

Stephens mildly; and he had added under his breath, "It would be the better for her if she were--Believe me the only way to force her to consider the expedient I have suggested--" he had hesitated as if rather ashamed of what he was about to say, "would be for Gerald to tell her the search for Mr.

Dampier must now end--and that the time has come when he must go back to America--and work."

Small wonder that Senator Burton found it hard to sleep last night, small wonder he has risen so early. He knows that his son is going to speak to Nancy, to tell her what Mr. Stephens has suggested she should do, and he suspects that now, at this very moment, the decisive conversation may be taking place.

II

Though unconscious that anxious, yearning eyes are following them, both Nancy Dampier and Gerald Burton feel an instinctive desire to get away from the house, and as far as may be from possible eavesdroppers. They walk across the stretch of lawn which separates the moat from the gardens in a constrained silence, she following rather than guiding her companion.

But as if this charming old-world plesaunce were quite familiar to him, Gerald goes straight on, down a gra.s.s path ending in what appears to be a high impenetrable wall of yew, and Nancy, surprised, then sees that a narrow, shaft-like way leads straight through the green leafy depths.

"Why, Gerald?" she says a little nervously--they have long ago abandoned any more formal mode of address, though between them there stands ever the spectre of poor John Dampier, as present to one of the two, and he the man, as if the menacing shadow were in very truth a tangible presence. "Why, Gerald, where does this lead? Have you ever been here before?"

And for the first time since they met the night before, the young man smiles. "I thought I'd like to see an English sunrise, Nancy, so I've been up a long time. I found a rose garden through here, and I thought it would be a quiet place for our talk."

It is strangely dark and still under the dense evergreen arch of the slanting way carved through the yew hedge; Nancy can only grope her way along. Turning round, Gerald holds out his strong hands, and taking hers in what seems so cool, so impersonal a grasp, he draws her after him. And Nancy flushes in the half darkness; it is the first time that she and Gerald Burton have ever been alone together as they are alone now, and that though they have met so very, very often in the last two years.

Nancy is at once glad and sorry when he suddenly loosens his grasp of her hands. The shadowed way terminates in a narrow wrought-iron gate; and beyond the gate is the rose garden of Barwell Moat, a tangle of exquisite colouring, jealously guarded and hidden away from those to whom the more familiar beauties of the place are free.

It is one of the oldest of English roseries, planned by some Elizabethan dame who loved solitude rather than the sun. And if the roses bloom a little less freely in this quiet, still enclosure than they would do in greater light and wilder air, this gives the rosery, in these hot June days, a touch of austere and more fragile beauty than that to be seen beyond its enlacing yews.

A hundred years after the Elizabethan lady had designed the rosery of Barwell Moat a Jacobean dame had added to her rose garden a fountain--one brought maybe from Italy or France, for the fat stone Cupids now shaking slender jets of water from their rose-leaved cornucopias are full of a roguish, Southern grace.

When they have pa.s.sed through into this fragrant, enchanted looking retreat, Nancy cries out in real delight: "What an exquisite and lovely place! How strange that Daisy and I never found it!"

And then, as Gerald remains silent, she looks, for the first time this morning, straight up into his face, and her heart is filled with a sudden overwhelming sensation of suspense--and yes, fear, for there is the strangest expression on the young man's countenance, indeed it is full of deep, of violent emotion--emotion his companion finds contagious.

She tells herself that at last he has brought news. That if he did not tell her so last night it was because he wished her to have one more night of peace--of late poor Nancy's nights have become very peaceful.

John Dampier? There was a time--it now seems long, long ago--when Nancy would have given not only her life but her very soul to have known that her husband was safe, that he would come back to her. But now? Alas! Alas! Now she realises with an agonised feeling of horror, of self-loathing, that she no longer wishes to hear Gerald Burton say that he has kept his word--that he has found Dampier.

She prays G.o.d that nothing of what she is feeling shows in her face; and Gerald is far too moved, far too doubtful as to what he is to say to her, and as to the answer she will make to him, to see that she looks in any way different from what she always does look in his eyes--the most beautiful as well as the most loved and worshipped of human creatures.

"Tell me!" she gasps. "Tell me, Gerald? What is it you want to say to me?

Don't keep me in suspense--" and then, as he is still dumb, she adds with a cry, "Have you come to tell me that at last you have found Jack?"

And he pulls himself together with a mighty effort. Nancy's words have rudely dispelled the hopes with which his heart has been filled ever since his father came to his room last night and told him what Mr. Stephens had suggested as a possible way out of the present, intolerable situation.

"No," he says sombrely, "no, Nancy, I have brought you no good news, and I am beginning to fear I never shall."

And he does not see even now that the long quivering sigh which escapes from her pale lips is a sigh of unutterable--if of pained and shamed--relief.

But what is this he is now saying, in a voice which is so unsteady, so oddly unlike his own?

"I think--G.o.d forgive me for thinking so if I am wrong--that I have always been right, Nancy, that your husband is dead--that he was killed two years ago, the night he disappeared--"

She bends her head. Yes, she too believes that, though there was a time when she fought, with desperate strength, against the belief.

He goes on breathlessly, hoa.r.s.ely, aware that he is making what Mr.

Stephens would call a bad job of it all: "I am now beginning to doubt whether we shall ever discover the truth as to what did happen. His body may still lie concealed somewhere in the Hotel Saint Ange, and if that is so, there's but small chance indeed that we shall ever, ever learn the truth."

And again she bends her head.

"I fear the time is come, Nancy, when the search must be given up."

He utters the fateful words very quietly, very gently, but even so she feels a pang of startled fear. Does that mean--yes, of course it must mean, that Gerald is going away, back to America?

A feeling of dreadful desolation fills her heart. "Yes," she says in a low tone, "I think you are right. I think the search should be given up."

She would like to utter words of thanks, the conventional words of grat.i.tude she has uttered innumerable times in the last two years--but now they stick in her throat.

Tears smart into her eyes, stifled sobs burst from her lips.

And Gerald again misunderstands--misunderstands her tears, the sobs which tear and shake her slender body. But he is only too familiar with the feeling which now grips him--the feeling that he must rush forward and take her in his arms. It has never gripped him quite as strongly as it does now; and so he steps abruptly back, and puts more of the stone rim of the fountain between himself and that forlorn little figure.

"Nancy?" he cries. "I was a brute to say that. Of course I will go on! Of course we won't give up hope! It's natural that I should sometimes become disheartened."

He is telling himself resolutely that never, never will he propose to her the plan his father revealed to him last night. How little either his father or Mr. Stephens had understood the relation between himself and Nancy if they supposed that he, of all men, could make to her such a suggestion.