So his hours were spent in close communion with such men as Sir Meeston Harborough and the Marquis of Lordburgh; Sir Joseph Caistor and a few others who headed the party. Breakfasts and luncheons were his battle-fields. But week-ends for dilettante golf at Dorby Towers, which frequently developed into visits to the great yards at Dorby itself, were no mean factors in the success of his efforts.

It was from a luncheon in Downing Street that he emerged one afternoon on foot into the great official thoroughfare of Whitehall. It had been a very small but very successful function from his point of view. It had followed upon a week-end at Dorby Towers, at which the President of the Board of Admiralty, Sir Reginald Steele, had given his final verdict upon the new constructions in process at the Dorby yards. It had been more than favorable. It had very nearly approached enthusiasm.

And in its expression Sir Reginald had swept away the final doubts of both the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary.

Even now, as he swung into Whitehall with long vigorous strides, the Prime Minister's words were still ringing in his ears.

"You have our approval and support, my boy," he had said in his quick, nervous way. "Go ahead, and when the time comes do not hesitate to look to us. We shall do everything we can to support your efforts; that is,"

he added, with a whimsical, twinkling smile, "subject, of course, to the permission of a certain section of the ha'penny press."

There was still a suggestion of summer in the autumn air, but the sky had lost its brilliancy, and the inevitable grey of smoke was beginning to settle upon the city. For Ruxton, however, it might have been spring. The vigor of his gait, his delighted feelings, certainly belonged to the birth rather than the old age of the summer. He saw nothing of that which moved and pa.s.sed about him. His busy thoughts were alive only with those enthralling concerns which were his. Nothing seemed able to stir him out of his abstraction until a street arab selling papers, who had recognized him, with the humorous effrontery of his cla.s.s raised a newspaper poster for his inspection, and almost thrust it under his nose.

"'Ere y'are, governor. Better 'ave one. Kaiser Bill an' old Tirps sc.r.a.ppin' it out in the Baltic."

There was no avoiding it. The boy's persistence would not be denied.

Ruxton glanced at the contents bill, and a startled look crept into his eyes.

"HEAVY FIRING IN THE BALTIC MYSTERY UNSOLVED"

Ruxton purchased a paper and pa.s.sed on. But his eager eyes scanned the stop press paragraph as he went. It was a report from Copenhagen. It stated that heavy gunfire had been heard off the German coast, and fishermen stated that a German squadron had been seen twenty miles from land engaged in what appeared to be a heavy bombardment of some object in the water. It was also stated that seaplanes had been seen to be dropping bombs on the same object. Another report, from a German source, stated that a portion of the fleet had been engaged in long-range target practice. This was denied in a still further account from the captain of one of the Baltic ferries, who declared that no target had been visible to those on his vessel, which had suddenly found itself in the danger zone, with sh.e.l.ls dropping in the water within a radius of a quarter of a mile.

A still later account hinted that the whole thing was an attempt to sink a foreign submarine discovered in the act of espionage.

It was this final paragraph which held Ruxton's attention and permanently altered the whole trend of his thoughts. The affairs discussed at the recent luncheon had been abruptly thrust out of his mind. His final triumph over prejudice and official conservatism seemed to have lost its meaning for the moment. The whole centre of his interest had been completely transferred. He was gazing out across the sea, a grey, dark, troubled autumn sea. A fierce and awe-inspiring picture filled his focus. A squadron of battleships; the hawk-like swooping of great seaplanes; a small, almost indistinct object bobbing amongst the waves. He remembered his escape from Borga. Something of such a scene had been acted there, only in that case the battleships had been absent, and in their place had been guns trained, with every spot on the narrow water carefully measured out. Was this such an adventure as his? He could not tell. But----

At that moment he hailed a pa.s.sing taxi, and, giving the man an address in Kensington, he jumped in.

He folded up his paper and thrust it into a side pocket, and, with the sudden change of environment, his thoughts underwent a third development.

Somewhere in the west, there, he knew that a woman was waiting impatiently for his news. He had 'phoned her of his coming, and hinted at his success. Her reply had set every pulse in his body hammering out a reciprocal emotion.

"Of course you have succeeded," she had replied. "The rapidity with which you have done so only the more surely points my original conviction. You cannot fail. I shall be in Kensington until a late hour."

The invitation had been irresistible to a man of Ruxton's temperament.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed at it with an almost boyish impulse, determined to lose no moment of communion with this wonderful creature whose attractions had so overwhelmed the youth that was in him. He knew that whatever the future might hold for him there could be nothing comparable with the wonderful stirring which the bare thought of her created in him.

As he drove along her image was before his smiling dark eyes. The grey glory of her deeply fringed eyes had a power to thrill him as nothing else in life could. Her beautiful, oval face, so full of a power to express every emotion, suggested to him the mirror-like surface of a sunlit lake reflecting the wonders of a perfect life. The radiance of her smile alone seemed to him worth living for.

The heart of the man had been unloosed from the bondage of early restraint. Now it was a-riot, claiming in its freedom an excess of interest for its years of deprivation. He had no power nor desire to check it. It was as though a new life had opened out before eyes which had all too long confronted the sober grey of mere existence, a life which had been hidden behind a dark curtain raised at last only to dazzle and amaze.

Mrs. Jenkins, a hard-faced lady with a sniff, who had undoubtedly seen "worse" days, had performed her duty as only a superior British char-lady-turned-cook-housekeeper could have possibly performed it. She had regarded Ruxton Farlow on the door-step of Vita's flat for a few speculative moments. Then she sniffed.

"Name of Farlow, ain't it? She's in."

Then, shuffling down the pa.s.sage, she thrust her head through the doorway of the sitting-room and sniffed again.

"It's 'im, miss," she announced, and beat a strategical retreat to the back regions of the flat, with the virtuous conviction that she had performed her duty in a manner which might well have been an example to a superior parlor-maid, or even a well-trained footman.

There seemed to be no necessity for greeting between Vita and Ruxton Farlow. For the man it was as if Vita had become a part of his life, as though she were always with him, ready to support him at every turn, ready to lead him on towards those great ideals which were his.

Just now the commonplaces of social intercourse had no meaning for Vita. She drew an armchair from its inevitable place beside the cold fireplace, and faced it towards the window, flinging the meagre cushion aside, so useless to a man's comfort.

"Take that chair," she said, with a warm smile of welcome. "You may smoke, too; I'd like you to. And there is refreshment on the table beside you." Then she seated herself upon a low chair in the vicinity.

"Now tell me," she added, as Ruxton flung himself into the doubtful armchair with a contented sigh.

"Tell you?" he returned, with a smile in his dark eyes.

Then for some moments he was silent, contemplating the perfect oval of her face, the ma.s.ses of her red-gold hair; the wonderful grace of the exquisitely clad body. But under his gaze her warm grey eyes were hidden. She felt the ardor of the man's regard, nor did it leave her unmoved.

"There ought to be a lot to tell you--there is a lot," he said presently, in a half-abstracted manner. "And yet----"

"Begin at the beginning," she helped him, and his eyes were caught in the upward glance of the wonderful grey, so eager, so clear, and yet so full of simple purpose.

"The beginning?" Ruxton smiled. "It makes it the harder." He shook his head. "No man can tell a woman the beginning. There is no beginning. It just comes along without his knowing it, and, in a moment, he is caught in mid-tide and borne along."

Vita's eyes were gazing up into the strong face in some doubt. She was demanding the story of his success. Something she beheld in the man's dark eyes made her lower her own, and she found herself powerless to urge him further. An absurdly chaotic feeling had suddenly taken possession of her, and amidst that chaos was a great and wonderful dread that had nothing fearful or terrifying in it. Yet the dread was there, a dread which urged her to flee from his presence, and hide herself somewhere, whither he could not follow. But opposed to such feeling was a fascination which held her waiting, waiting upon his words.

Her att.i.tude conveyed something of the emotions his words had inspired, but Ruxton was incapable of interpreting them. He was absorbed in the triumph of his own feelings. His success in affairs of that day had intoxicated him. And their outcome was a wild desire to go further and crown them with the achievement of the pa.s.sion of love which had set fire to his soul. He yearned for the love of this woman, and such was the impetuous tide let loose that there, and now, he must stake his whole future happiness on one single throw. Caution had no place when his pa.s.sionate heart was stirred. Caution, and all its concomitants, were for the business of life. In the emotional side of him they had no place, they could never have place.

"I may be mad, I may be dreaming," he cried, suddenly springing to his feet and confronting the woman he loved with eyes grown darker with the sudden intensity of his feelings. "I may be mad to risk forever losing a companionship which has become so great a part of my life, so vital to my whole existence. I may be dreaming to believe, or hope, that my longings can ever reach fulfillment. But I cannot help it. It is not in me to act otherwise. The soul-mate of a man either belongs to him, or is denied to him, as the great controlling forces ordain. For thirty-five years I have walked through life alone. I have seen no woman whose companionship I desired, or could desire, during all that time. Never once in all that time have the soul-fires in me been stirred. Never once have I longed for the warm heart of a woman to beat in unison with mine. Then came a night--a mentally black and dreary night--when the work seemed desolate, and existence a condition almost intolerable in the future. The darkest thoughts of my life pa.s.sed through my hot brain that night; darker even than the thoughts during the darkest days of the great war. That moment was the one that preceded dawn--my dawn.

"Ah, Vita," he went on, with deeper, more vibrant meaning. "That dawn came like the miracle of every other dawn. But, unlike the dawn which heralds mere sunrise, it heralded an eternity of beautiful dreams untouched by the bitternesses and contentions of the human day. It came with a voice out of the moonlit darkness. The voice of a woman, who, within a s.p.a.ce of time almost negligible, had changed the despairing blackness of night to a--wonderful dawn."

Ruxton turned from her and began to pace the narrow length of the room.

It was an unstudied expression of the fierce fire which had leapt up in his pa.s.sionate, Slavonic heart. Vita's eyes followed his movements, fascinated yet unseeing in the tumult which he had roused within her.

For her his words, his sudden outburst, had reduced to concrete form all that gamut of feeling which had been hers from the moment of their first encounter. All unacknowledged, the latent power of this man's personality had absorbed her every feeling. He was the one out of all the world. His handsome head, his superb body, so strong, so perfectly poised, but above all that wonderful idealism which saw so clearly through the fog of sordid influences which clogged all real progress.

Almost breathless she waited while he went on.

He paused in his walk and abruptly flung out his arms.

"I can see her now, a figure of perfect beauty, regal, splendid in the silvery moonlight. The light playing upon her marbled features, finding reflection in eyes wide with sincerity, truth and pa.s.sion. Vita, Vita, I can never tell you all that picture inspired in me. Suddenly I knew what life meant. Up till then I had merely existed. Life had had no meaning for me but the necessity of working out that simple duty of effort which belongs to us all. With your coming everything changed.

Life became at once that superb thing of which the dreamer speaks.

Where before only the black shadows of a drear depression had been, at once life became flooded with a golden light. It was beautiful, beautiful."

The woman's wondering gaze was now frankly held by the pa.s.sionate eyes regarding her. She had no power to withdraw it, she had no desire to withdraw it. Her cheeks were flushed. Her lips were parted, revealing the pearly whiteness of her teeth framed in their ruby setting, so full, so ripe.

"But this is madness," she breathed without conviction. It was the burden of her feelings seeking expression. She leant forward in her chair, her hands so tightly clasped that the blood was pressed back from her delicate finger-tips, and the simple rings dug hard into the tender flesh.

"Madness? Madness?" Ruxton drew nearer. He laughed as he echoed the word. It was the inconsequent laugh which is merely an audible expression and possesses no meaning. "If it is madness let me be mad.

Madness? Then I never want sanity again. Love is madness, Vita, a madness that is ordained, and without it love can never be love. The man who can pause to reason does not know love. He can never love.

Leave reason and sanity for the cold affairs of life. Love can know no check from such a course. That is how I love you, Vita. I want you--you. I want you always with me, near me. I want you so that our life together is all one. You must be part of me. You must be me. You speak of the beginning. There is no beginning, just as there can be no end. Love is all, everything. Vita--Vita----"

He had bent down from his great height. He had seized the woman's tightly clasped hands. He had raised them with gentle force, and, as though caught by the magnetism of all the love he had endeavored to express, she rose to her feet, and permitted him to hold her prisoner before him.

But now with his final appeal the tension seemed to relax. She stood there for a moment, silent. Then she sighed faintly. It was as though she had awakened from some beautiful dream. The flush on her oval cheeks lessened, and the light in her eyes changed unmistakably. The man seemed to become suddenly aware of the change, and a note of apprehension sounded in his voice as he repeated his appeal.

"Vita--Vita," he cried, with a pa.s.sion of yearning in the words.