"Do you--ah--care for him?"

"No."

"Then why--"

She shook her head.

"Quite right," said Malcourt, rising; "you're in the wrong planet, too.

And the sooner you realise it the sooner we'll meet again. Good-bye."

She turned horribly pale, stammering something about his coming with her, resisting a little as he drew her out, down the stairs, and aided her to enter the depot-wagon. There he kissed her; and she caught him around the neck, holding him convulsively.

"Nonsense," he whispered. "I've talked it all over with father; he and I'll talk it over some day with you. Then you'll understand." And backing away he called to the coachman: "Drive on!" ignoring his brother-in-law, who sat huddled in a corner, gla.s.sy eyes focused on him.

Portlaw almost capered with surprise and relief when at breakfast he learned that the Tressilvains had departed.

"Oh, everything is coming everybody's way," said Malcourt gaily--"like the last chapter of a bally novel--the old-fashioned kind, Billy, where Nemesis gets busy with a gun and kind Providence hitches 'em up in ever-after blocks of two. It takes a rotten novelist to use a gun on his villains! It's never done in decent literature--never done anywhere except in real life."

He swallowed his coffee and, lighting a cigarette, tipped back his chair, balancing himself with one hand on the table.

"The use of the gun," he said lazily, "is obsolete in the modern novel; the theme now is, how to be pa.s.sionate though pure. Personally, being neither one nor the other, I remain uninterested in the modern novel."

"Real life," said Portlaw, spearing a fish-ball, "is d.a.m.n monotonous.

The only gun-play is in the morning papers."

"Sure," nodded Malcourt, "and there's too many shooting items in 'em every day to make gun-play available for a novel.... Once, when I thought I could write--just after I left college--they took me aboard a morning newspaper on the strength of a chance I had to discover a missing woman.

"She was in hiding; her name had been horribly spattered in a divorce, and the poor thing was in hiding--had changed her name, crept off to a little town in Delaware.

"Our enlightened press was hunting for her; to find her was termed a 'scoop,' I believe.... Well--boys pull legs off gra.s.shoppers and do other d.a.m.nable things without thinking.... I found _her_.... So as I knocked at her door--in the mean little farmhouse down there in Delaware--she opened it, smiling--she was quite pretty--and blew her brains out in my very face."

"Wh-what!" bawled Portlaw, dropping knife and fork.

"I--I want to see that girl again--some time," said Malcourt thoughtfully. "I would like to tell her that I didn't mean it--case of boy and gra.s.shopper, you know.... Well, as you say, gun-play has no place in real novels. There wouldn't be room, anyway, with all the literature and ill.u.s.trations and purpose and purple preciousness; as anachronismatically superfluous as sleigh-bells in h.e.l.l."

Portlaw resumed his egg; Malcourt considered him ironically.

"Sporty Porty, are you going to wed the Pretty Lady of Pride's Hall at Pride's Fall some blooming day in June?"

"None of your infernal business!"

"Quite so. I only wanted to see how the novel was coming out before somebody takes the book away from me."

"You talk like a pint of shoe-strings," growled Portlaw; "you'd better find out whose horse has been denting the lawn all over and tearing off several yards of sod."

"I know already," said Malcourt.

"Well, who had the nerve to--"

"None of your bally business, dear friend. Are you riding over to Pride's to-day?"

"Yes, I am."

"I think I'll go, too."

"You're not expected."

"That's the charm of it, old fellow. I didn't expect to go; they don't expect me; they don't want me; I want to go! All the elements of a delightful surprise, do you notice?"

Portlaw said, irritably: "They asked Mrs. Malcourt and me. Nothing was said about you."

"Something will be said if I go," observed Malcourt cheerfully.

Portlaw was exasperated. "There's a girl there you behaved badly to.

You'd better stay away."

Malcourt looked innocently surprised.

"Now, who could that be! I have, it is true, at times, misbehaved, but I can't ever remember behaving badly--"

Portlaw, too mad to speak, strode wrathfully away toward the stables.

Malcourt was interested to see that he could stride now without waddling.

"Marvellous, marvellous!--the power of love!" he mused sentimentally; "Porty is no longer rotund--only majestically portly. See where he hastens lightly to his Alida!

"Shepherd fair and maidens all-- Too-ri-looral!

Too-ri-looral!"

And, very gracefully, he sketched a step or two in contra-dance to his own shadow on the gra.s.s.

"Shepherd fair and maidens all-- Truly rural, Too-ri-looral, Man prefers his maidens plural; One is none, he wants them all!

Too-ri-looral!

Too-ri-looral--"

And he sauntered off humming gaily, making playful pa.s.ses at the trees with his riding-crop as he pa.s.sed.

Later he aided his wife to mount and stood looking after her as she rode away, Portlaw pounding along heavily beside her.

"All alone with the daisies," he said, looking around him when they had disappeared.

Toward noon he ordered a horse, ate his luncheon in leisurely solitude, read yesterday's papers while he smoked, then went out, mounted, and took the road to Pride's Fall, letting his horse choose his own pace.

Moving along through the pretty forest road, he glanced casually right and left as he advanced, tapping his riding-boots in rhythm to the air he was humming in a careless undertone--something about a shepherd and the plural tastes of man.

His mood was inspired by that odd merriment which came from sheer perversity. When the depths and shallows of his contradictory character were disturbed a ripple of what pa.s.sed for mirth covered all the surface; if there was any profundity to the man the ripple obscured it.

No eye had ever penetrated the secrecy of what lay below; none ever would. Perhaps there was nothing there.