"It'll be only a little dinner," she explained as they seated themselves. "You weren't expected. But Porter always has something hidden away for an emergency. Don't you, Porter?"

He was getting accustomed to these asides addressed to Porter. He began to perceive that Porter had other uses besides gliding round the table in a cap and ap.r.o.n. She was a conversational stop-gap when situations grew awkward, as they frequently must between an ensnared bachelor and an unchaperoned widow.

And she was eligible; he had to own it as they sat down to their first meal together. Tea hadn't counted as a meal; you can serve tea to anybody. But dinner for two, in an oak-paneled room, when the spring dusk is falling is different. The table was lit by four naked candles.

Looped back from the windows hung the marigold-tinted curtains, revealing in triangular patches the courtyard, with its mock village-green and its quaintly timbered houses. It looked very real in the half-light. An electric street-lamp stood out sharply against the fading sky, placid and contemplative as an unclouded moon. Several houses away a woman was singing. Sometimes her voice sank so that he lost the air; but once, when it rose, he caught the words, "Crushing out life, than waving me farewell." He knew what she was singing then and followed the air in his imagination. The atmosphere of the room was vibrant with romance; all that was lacking was his impulse to be romantic.

Maisie was chattering gayly and forestalling his wants. He reserved a small portion of his mind for her conversation--sufficient to enable him to reply "Yes" or "No" when the occasion seemed to demand it. It was clear to him that it made her happy to have a man so entirely at her mercy. She meant immensely well by him. Behind her mist of words she seemed to be saying, "Isn't it nice to be just we two together?"

But he was thinking of the other three soldiermen who had played the game of being "just we two together" before him. The singing voice, drifting through the courtyard, put into words the question of his thought, "Where are you now? Where are you now?" Yes, where were they?

He felt pity and distaste for Maisie in equal proportions. Those men had each in turn caressed her, dipped their hands in the largesse of her pale gold hair, seen their souls' reflection in the cornflower innocence of her eyes, drunk forgetfulness from the poppy-petals of her mouth and gone away to die, believing she was wholly theirs. How little of her was theirs now! She was almost virginal--as though she had never been touched by their pa.s.sion. And yet there seemed to be one of them whose memory had outstayed the rest, for she had said, "You know, my man's out there." Was she merely a light, predatory woman or---- Or very loving and lonely?

She was speaking more seriously now. "We mustn't tell her. It's natural to be sorry for him now that he's dead." He picked up the thread and guessed that she was referring to Lord Dawn.

"We must tell her," he said.

"But we mustn't," she urged. "For years he tried to make her wretched.

There were rumors of other women. She's found peace at last. It wouldn't help him to let her know that he had died loving her out there. He's beyond any help of ours. They all are." He surmised who the _they_ were: the three soldiermen who had sat there before him. In pleading for silence for others, she was pleading for silence for herself. Again she was defending herself against his thoughts. "All of the dead had their chance. Lord Dawn had; there were so many years in which he might have told her. To tell her now would be to rob----"

She broke off as the maid reentered with the coffee. Her tone changed instantly to one of convention. "Not here, Porter. We'll have it in the drawing-room."

As he followed her out across the hall, he glanced at his watch. It was past eight o'clock. He could lose no more time. He must plunge boldly into the subject of his mission and bring his visit promptly to an end.

He dreaded the temptation of that feminine room, with its coziness and security and quiet. It made him too much alone with her; she was not a woman that it was wise to be alone with too long.

The moment the maid had left them and the door had closed, he became confirmed in the sanity of this decision. Everything in the room appealed to him to procrastinate. The curtains before the French windows were closely drawn. The hearth had been swept in their absence; the fire glowed more companionably than ever. About the table, where the coffee waited, a solitary lamp shed a golden blur. It was heavily shaded with yellow silk, so that most of its light escaped their faces and fell downwards.

She had seated herself on the couch. When she had filled both cups, she glanced up at him smilingly, patting the vacant place beside her as a sign that he should occupy it. He was standing before the fire, looking immensely tall in the semi-darkness. He could see her plainly where she sat beneath the lamp; but of him she could see nothing but his outline, for his eyes were lost in shadow. When he seemed not to have noticed her sign, "Come," she said coaxingly. "You don't spare yourself at all. You make yourself tired by so much standing."

"Mrs. Lockwood----" She started as he called her that. Twice already she had been Maisie to him. "Mrs. Lockwood, as you reminded me before dinner, it was about you that I came here to talk. Let's get it over. I haven't any idea how far things have gone. I should like to believe that nine-tenths of what's said is nothing more than gossip. But why can't you let him alone? He may mean nothing or a tremendous lot to you--but why can't you?"

CHAPTER THE FIFTH

THE AIR OF CONQUEST

I

She sat very silently, the way he had seen men sit when they were wounded. She had been expecting the blow and trying to postpone it; now that it had fallen her only feeling was one of peace because the expecting was ended. Her face remained turned towards him, as it had been while he had been talking. As though a mask had dropped, the real, very tired, very young, very lonely Maisie watched him. The wistfulness of her beauty surprised and touched him. Several times her lips moved in an attempt to say something. Then, at last, "What right have you to ask?"

"I should like to claim the right of friendship."

"Of friendship!" She frowned slightly, peering from beneath the lamp in an effort to make out his features. Then her eyes cleared and she smiled. "If you don't mean it, please don't say it. You see, it would hurt afterwards. And--and I should like to have you for my friend."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_Mrs. Lockwood, why can't you let Adair alone?_"]

He came over from the fireplace and seated himself beside her. "We've been almost enemies--just a little afraid of each other. Isn't that so?

It's ever so much more comfortable now; we'll be able to talk more easily. Tell me honestly, what do you see in Adair?"

"See in him!"

She commenced sipping her coffee. She looked extraordinarily like Terry used to do years ago, when she was a little la.s.s and had been naughty, and had come reluctantly to ask pardon. He thought that if he went on talking he might make it easier for her.

"You'll wonder why I, who never knew you until to-day, should have taken upon myself to broach this subject."

"I don't wonder," she headed him off. "I know. Terry's my friend. Her father was determined to send somebody, so she worked things in order that you might be sent. She thought that you would be the kindest person."

"She thought that!" Tabs was a little taken back by her a.s.sertion; it seemed to pledge him to kindness before he had learnt whether kindness was required or deserved. It made him in a sense her partisan, when he ought to have been impartial.

"I think I can be trusted to be kind," he said; "but you must remember that I've got to be kind all round. I must be kind to Adair's wife and to his children. If this goes much further it will spell tragedy for them."

She shrugged her shoulders and laughed without mirth. "Adair's wife should have remembered to be kind to herself. If a woman can't keep her husband, she never deserved to have won him. And Adair--he's the easiest man to keep in the world; far too easy to be exciting. If she doesn't lose him to me, she'll lose him to some one else, unless----"

And then she surprised him, "But she won't lose him to me, for I don't want him."

Tabs sighed with relief and lit himself a cigarette. "Then that's settled. If you don't want him, the trouble's ended, and I think Sir Tobias and all of us owe you an apology."

Again she laughed. This time some of her old mischief had come back.

"You go too fast, Lord Taborley. I shouldn't advise any of you to apologize to me yet. It's true that I don't want him for keeps, but----"

Tabs guessed the way the ground lay and went back to the question with which he had started. "What on earth do you see in him? That's what I can't make out."

She kept him waiting for his answer. While he waited, like sunshine struggling through cloud, amused happiness fought its way into her expression. When she turned, she met his gaze with complete candor. She was again a woman of the world. "What do I see in him? Not much--only a makeshift, a second best. Only a man who needs me for the moment because he's lost his direction. You remember our conversation of this afternoon about having to feel that you were needed. He gives me that feeling, so I'm grateful. That's why I have to have him."

"Are you so lonely as to stoop--well, to steal to get it?"

He was sorry he had asked it. She bit her lip in an effort to keep back the tears and to force herself to go on brightly smiling. "Yes, as lonely as all that," she nodded; "so lonely that it's almost a joke."

"No joke." He was at a loss what to say. "But you have friends. You go everywhere. You----"

"Friends!" she interrupted, laughing with the high-pitched note of breaking nerves. "What are friends? People to whom you say, 'How d'you do?' here and 'How d'you do?' there, every one of whom can do without you. I want some one who can't do without me for a second---- No joke, you said. But it is almost a joke to be young, and eager, and good-looking, and to know how to dress, and to be so willing to love, and to live in the world just once, and to hear the world go by you laughing, and to desire so much," she paused for breath, "and to want to give so much that no one is willing to accept. If one didn't laugh over it, it would be more than one could stand. If one didn't treat it as a joke----"

He caught her hands. "Steady, Mrs. Lockwood. Stop laughing at once.

There's nothing to laugh about. You're nearly over the edge."

She stared at him with wide eyes, filled with panic, while little ripples of laughter kept escaping from her, which she did her best to suppress.

"Now, listen to me," he continued quietly: "You're not exceptional.

You've been expressing something that there's not a man or woman that hasn't felt. I feel it when I realize that I may lose Terry; so does Braithwaite. Lord Dawn felt it when he couldn't drag his wife down to him and couldn't climb up to her. And his wife must have felt it too, when she sat always by herself. Phyllis feels it when she sees that, for the moment, you have more attraction for her husband than she has. And Adair feels it as well, when he risks his good name for a little desperate comfort and is willing to clothe you, for whom he professes to care, with all the appearance of dishonor. You're no exception; it's the feeling that you are exceptional that makes you unscrupulous in your self-pity. Get that into your head, that you're not exceptional. Half the world's with you in the same box; but it smiles and doesn't own it.

Have you got that?"

She nodded and tried to withdraw her hands; but he held them fast.

"And now as regards this desire to be wanted; that's perfectly right and natural. There's n.o.body who doesn't share it. And I understand what you say about mere friendship. It's unsatisfying and impermanent. It's like a meal s.n.a.t.c.hed at a restaurant; none of the dishes or napkins or tables or chairs belong to you. They've been used by other people before you and they'll be used by other people the moment your bill is settled.

What you want and what every one wants, is something more than friendship--a human relation with one person who is so much yours that your intimacies are a secret from all the world."

"Some one with whom I can be little," she whispered, "and foolish and off my guard."