"Oh, but it's quite, quite dark. However will you manage?"

"We'll pick our way back well enough," he a.s.sured her. "The distance to the road is nothing, and from here on it runs straight to the abbey."

The d.u.c.h.ess followed him slowly to the door, and there she asked abruptly: "Is Westboro' to be down all winter? I didn't know it. I thought he was out of England or I should not have come here at all."

"Oh," Bulstrode answered, "he's too restless to be long anywhere. I expect he'll pack up and be off before we know it. He's away just now at any rate, and I'm kicking my heels up there quite alone. I'm not to return--ever?" he ventured. "You may so fully trust me that--" and he saw that she hesitated and pursued, "I shall ride up to the little gate again, and if it is unlatched...."

"Oh, don't count on it," she advised him, "don't--it's against all my plans."

Somebody in the shape of a lad had unfastened the mare, and preceded Bulstrode on foot with a lantern, by whose flicker, with much delicate caution and pretended shyness, Banshee picked her way to the road, through the woods which Bulstrode an hour before had fancied led into a deserted garden.

"You see," he put it to her delicacy to understand, "it's scarcely, in a way, fair to him--I feel it so at least. It gives me the sensation of knowing more than he does in his own house about that which presumably should be Westboro's secret."

"You mean to say,"--the d.u.c.h.ess pinned him down, "that you'll give me away because of one of those peculiar crises of honor that makes a person betray a trust in order to salve his conscience?"

Bulstrode had come again faithfully, making the pilgrimage to the forest road, and he was not surprised that it should have finally turned out so that one day the gate yielded to his touch, and he found the d.u.c.h.ess if not waiting for him, distinctly there. During their delightful little talks--and they had been so--not once had the name of Bulstrode's host been mentioned; and if the lady had a curiosity concerning her lord and once master, she did not display it to the visitor.

"I mean to say," Bulstrode replied in answer to her challenge which was fiery, "that I really don't want to play false to Westboro', more false than I shall in the course of events be forced to be. Of course, your secret--I need not say so--is entirely safe. But the Duke comes back in a day or two, and rather than face him with this silence which you have imposed upon me I am going back to London before he returns."

The sewing she had chosen to finger--a d.u.c.h.ess, and an American one at that, is not expected to do more--lay at her feet. By her side was a basket of considerable proportions, and it was full to the brim with linen: the very fine white stuff overflowed from the basket like snow.

The d.u.c.h.ess of Westboro's handiwork had already caught the eye of her guest. And now, as her long hands and her long finger, tipped by its golden thimble, handled her sewing, Bulstrode watched her interestedly and found great loveliness in her bending face.

"I didn't think any of you knew how to sew," he mused aloud.

"Any of us!" she smiled. "Do you, by that, mean American d.u.c.h.esses?

Or do you mean women who have left their husbands? Or in just what cla.s.s do you think of me, regarding your last remark?"

She folded up her work and dropped her thimble in the nest of snow.

Bulstrode acknowledged that his conclusion, whatever it had been, was wrong.

"When I married," the d.u.c.h.ess said, "I was the best four-in-hand whip for a woman in my set. I don't think I am a keen needlewoman, really, and I know then I didn't recognize a needle by sight. When my little boys were born I sent to Paris for everything they wore, and I can remember that I didn't even know for what the little clothes were intended, many of them, when they came home in my first son's layette.

I have learned to sew since I came here to The Dials. I've been three months here, now, and I really must have proved a clever pupil, for I a.s.sure you that they tell me I have made some pretty things." As she spoke she held up the seam she ran, and Bulstrode, who himself confessed to not knowing a needle by sight, was forced to peer over the seam and endeavor to find her tiny st.i.tches. He exclaimed:

"Three months! You must have been terribly dull!"

"No."

"You are known," he said, "throughout the countryside--not that I've been making inquiries, but in spite of myself I have heard--as a stranger, presumably a Frenchwoman, a widow who will probably buy The Dials."

"Oh, I shall never buy the place," she a.s.sured him, and then abruptly: "Had you been free to speak of me, what would you have told Westboro'?"

He waited a second, then answered her lightly, but with a feeling which she did not mistake: "I should have asked him to come and see you run up that seam."

"He would not have come."

Remembering very clearly how determined Westboro's decision had been, he did not affirm to the lady his belief that Westboro' would in reality have flown to her.

At the door, later, she bade him good-bye and appeared to gather her courage together, and, with a lapse into a simplicity so entire that she seemed only Frances Denby and to possess no more of t.i.tle or distinction than any lovely woman, she said to him:

"Mr. Bulstrode, please don't leave the castle."

"Oh, I couldn't sit opposite my friend at dinner, I couldn't meet his eyes now, my dear child."

The d.u.c.h.ess touched his arm. "It's sweet of you to call me so. You are really as young as I am, and certainly I feel an age beyond you.

Please stay."

The pleasure which his visits had been to her had brought something of an animation and interest to her cold face. Dressed in a dark and simple gown, her fur stole about her neck, she had this afternoon followed him out of the house into the garden and walked slowly along by his side towards the gate.

"Of all the people in the world one would choose you, I think, to be the friend of..." She caught herself up. "I mean to say, can't you forget those stupid little ideas of honor and friendship and all that?"

She put it beautifully. "I, of course, will give up seeing you," she renounced, "but it will be a world of comfort just to feel that you are there."

As he did not at once succ.u.mb to her blandishments, she asked point blank:

"Promise me to stop on."

"I at least won't go without letting you know of it."

"Without my permission?"

"I won't say that."

"But I'm sure that you mean it," she nodded happily, "and you're _such_ a help."

She was so affectionate as she bade him good-bye, that only at the little road did he begin to wonder just what help he was. Was he aiding her to detective poor Westboro'? Was he adding an air of protection to some feminine treachery?

"Oh, no," he decided; "she's incapable of any thing of the sort. But I must clear out;" and he decided that at once, so soon as Westboro'

should be at home, he would take himself to ground still more neutral than The Dials had proved to be. But Westboro' showed no intention of coming immediately home. Instead, with a droll egoism, as if the fact that he had made poor Bulstrode a party to his unhappiness gave him thereafter a right to the other's time even in absence, he laid a firm hold on Jimmy. Westboro' finally put pen to paper, and the sc.r.a.ppy letter touched the deserted visitor; it proved to have been written at a _bureau de poste_ in Paris:

"Don't, for G.o.d's sake, go off, old man. Keep up your end." (His end!) "Stop on at Westboro'--Use the place as if it were all put up for your amus.e.m.e.nt. Just live there so I may feel it's alive. Let me find a human being at home when I turn up. I'll wire in a day or so."

"So he is in Paris, then." Bulstrode had supposed so, and did not doubt that the Duke had gone there to find news of his wife, possibly as well to see Madame de Ba.s.sevigne.

Poor fellow, if he were searching for the d.u.c.h.ess! Well, Bulstrode would keep up his end, he had nothing else for the time being to do but to mind other people's business. He put it so to himself. Indeed he could not but believe it was fortunate for more than one person that something could keep him from minding his own.

An undefined discretion kept him from going to the Moated Grange, as to himself he styled the retreat the d.u.c.h.ess had made of The Dials. And, in spite of the absolute freedom now given him to prowl about amongst the books, in spite of his "evenings out" as he called them, Jimmy found the time at Westboro' to drag lamentably. His own affairs, which he so faithlessly denied, came to him in batches of letters whose questions could not be solved by return mail. He became over his own thoughts restless, and he sent a telegram to his host: "Better have a look at things here yourself. Can't possibly stop on longer than...."

And he set a day.

"If Westboro', poor devil, has to look forward to a life of this unaccompanied grandeur," he pitied him. The lines and files of soft-footed, impersonal servants, the perfect stilted attention, the silence, and the inhumanness of a man's lonely life, became intolerable to Jimmy Bulstrode. Even though Frances, d.u.c.h.ess of Westboro', had truly said that the castle was a delightful home, Bulstrode began to wonder what that word comprised or meant: certainly nothing like his occupation of another man's house or like any life that is lived alone.

At the end of the week that the American spent at Westboro' he had condensed the castle, as he said to himself, as far as possible, to the proportions of a Harlem flat, and he lived in it. In the almost small breakfast room whose windows gave on the terrace, and where all the December sun that was visible came to find him, he took his meals; each of them but dinner, which was determinedly and imperially served by five men in one of the dining-rooms, and at which function, as he expressed it, he shut his eyes and just ate blindly through. He lived out of doors all day, took his tea in his dressing-room, and read and smoked until the august dinner hour called him down to dress and dine alone. For a week he lived "without sight of a human being," so he said, for the domestics were only machines. And, towards the end of the week, he would have gone to see any one: an enemy would have been too easy, and the only person within range was, of course, the d.u.c.h.ess of Westboro'.

Westboro' had made a confidant of Bulstrode, and the woman had not.

Bulstrode liked it in her. To be sure, the cases were quite different: there was no reason why the man deserted and bruised in his pride and in his heart, should not have talked to his old friend. Westboro'

accused himself of weakness.

"I've blabbed like a woman," he acknowledged ruefully.