Esme pa.s.sed him the water-bottle and roused herself with an effort and joined in the general talk. The meal seemed interminable. The children were excited and noisy; they dawdled over their food. Their mother urged them to be quicker, and their father defeated her authority by insisting that the slower they ate the better for their digestions.

Husband and wife had a wordy argument on this point. The children ceased eating to listen, on perceiving which their father vented his annoyance on them and sent them away from the table.

"That's your fault," he said to his wife. "You are always nagging at the kids. We never get a meal in peace."

Esme listened and wondered. What was wrong with this household? These two were quite fond of each other, and fond of the children; yet they were seldom in agreement on any subject. She wondered whether all married people got on one another's nerves. Marriage was a difficult problem. It occurred to Esme that the solution of the difficulty might be reached by it generous use of tact. Without her volition her reflections found verbal expression.

"Tact!" she observed aloud to the astonishment of her hearers. "That's the secret of happiness--immense tact. Jim, I think you are the most tactless person in the world."

Book 2--CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

During the first few days after her return to her sister's home time hung dismally for Esme. It would have been better had she gone back to work immediately; but there was a full week to term time, and during that week she found nothing sufficiently interesting to distract her thoughts from the desolating fact that she missed something out of her life. Her world was like a world without sunshine, flat and colourless, a place of neutral tints and drab impressions. She hated the house, she hated going out; most of all, she hated the people who visited her sister and gossiped over tea of every trivial matter in the common daily round. Those afternoon gatherings gave her mental indigestion. Yet at one time these things had seemed pleasant and natural. The inference was that there was something wrong with herself.

Her sister laid a hand on her secret very soon after her return. She had gone into Esme's room and taken up a book, which lay on the little table beside her bed, and opened it casually.

"Who is Paul Hallam?" she asked, reading the name inside the cover.

Esme swung round from the dressing-table, saw the book in her sister's hand, and coloured warmly.

"A man who was staying at the Zuurberg."

"And he gave you this book?"

"Yes--to read in the train."

The two sisters looked at one another. Rose waited for further information, but it was not forthcoming. She laid the book down, and Esme resumed brushing her hair. It was pretty hair, soft and wavy. The older woman watched operations for a moment or so, then she went forward, took the brush from the girl's hand, and brushed it for her.

"Tell me about him," she urged.

"There is nothing to tell," Esme replied. "He was nice to me while I was there; that is all."

The finality of the phrase struck on her own ears desolately. That was all. Her romance had begun and ended with her holiday.

Rose made no comment. The sc.r.a.ppy information had illumined things for her surprisingly. She felt suddenly very tender towards her sister.

She put the hair back from her face and kissed her gently.

"You are just sweet. You look such a child with your hair like that,"

she said.

But she made no further mention of Paul Hallam. There were a dozen questions she would have liked to ask, but she forbore. It was not fair to attempt to force the girl's confidence; her very reluctance to speak of this acquaintance proved that there was more in it than she allowed, perhaps more than she yet realised.

There followed days of restlessness and alternating moods more fitful than any barometer. Sinclair called, and made himself so agreeable to Rose and the children, and was so markedly attentive to Esme that Rose found herself wishing that this quite eligible and agreeable young man was the object of her sister's interest, as he unmistakably desired to be.

Esme was pleased to see him again; but her manner towards him showed no particular partiality. It was certainly not George Sinclair, Rose decided, who was responsible for the change in the girl.

Sinclair called frequently after that first visit, and speedily became on very friendly terms with the family. He found a staunch ally in Rose, who, considering the other affair too remote to be serious, saw in Sinclair an eventual safety-valve for her sister's repressed emotions.

Repressed emotion was undesirable; it hid like a morbid germ in the brain cells and worked with insidious effect upon the mind. In Esme it betrayed itself in unexpected bursts of irritability, as her discontent with things grew. Mainly this was the result of reaction, and was but a phase in the cure of which Sinclair aided unconsciously. His visits made a break in the general monotony.

And then one day a letter came for Esme. Rose took it in. It was directed in the same small untidy handwriting which she remembered vividly seeing on the front page of the book in Esme's room. She had looked for that book often since but she had never seen it again. Now, with the letter in her hand, her thoughts went back to that little scene in the bedroom, and her brows knitted themselves in a frown. Paul Hallam had broken the silence and written to the girl. She carried the letter up to Esme's room and laid it on the table beside her bed.

"Poor George!" she reflected. "This puts him out of the picture anyway."

Then she went downstairs and left it to the girl to make her own discovery on her return.

The first thing which Esme's eyes rested on when she ran up to her room on getting back from the college where she gave music lessons was the letter lying on her table. She stood for a full minute looking down at it with pleased, amazed eyes and a deepening colour in her cheeks; then she reached forth shyly and took it up.

"I wonder how he learned my address?" was the thought in her mind.

She had not seen him copy it from the label on her suit-case. He had taken that precaution when the luggage was being placed in the cart.

She seated herself on the side of the bed and opened her letter and read it.

"Dear little Friend," it began characteristically,--

"I wonder whether it will surprise you that I should write to you? I write to ask you a favour. I want you out of the kindness of your heart to send me a line sometimes. You can in this matter help me considerably. I knew before you left that I should miss you, but I did not realise how great that miss would be until after you were gone.

Never in all my life have I known what it was to feel intolerably lonely until now. It is not fair to me if, after giving me your friendship, you withdraw it again altogether.

"I am fighting the devil within me, and just at present I can't say who will win. But you can help me, if you will. Once you told me it was a shame to make waste of my life. You were right, and I knew it, though at the time I resented your candour. Since you left I have thought often of your words. I miss you. And I want to talk to you. I have never before ached to talk with any one. And yet I don't want to see you for the present. If ever we meet you will know I have won. I shan't attempt to see you otherwise.

"Please send me a line occasionally. You don't know what it will mean to me. I am wondering as I write what you are doing, and whether you continue the early morning habit? The sunrises are not marvellous any longer. Every morning I go in search of the old beauty, but it is not there. I wonder whether I shall ever find it again.

"Paul Hallam."

Esme read this letter through with deepening interest and a growing softness in her eyes; there were tears in her eyes; they splashed on to the paper and blurred the signature, tears of relief, of deep thankfulness that at last the man had come to see the pity of wasting his days.

She felt no fear for him any longer. Not a doubt of him troubled her mind. That he would ultimately win through was a.s.sured by the sincerity of his desire to win. It did not seem to her possible that he could fail in what he undertook to accomplish. His devil stood no chance when his better self took up arms against him. He would win. a.s.suredly he would win. And then...

The bell sounded for lunch. She folded the letter and put it inside her blouse. Then she bathed her eyes to hide the traces of emotion and went downstairs.

Her sister scrutinised her attentively, but could read nothing in her face to help her to any conclusion. She longed to ask questions, but restrained her curiosity in the hope that Esme would confide in her when a propitious moment offered. She made opportunities somewhat too obviously, but Esme did not take advantage of them. She did not speak of her letter.

The letters came regularly after that, once a week; and Rose's unsatisfied curiosity grew enormously. There was something unnatural in the girl's reticence. She began to entertain doubts of Paul Hallam. It entered her mind to seek information from Sinclair, but loyalty to her sister restrained her from doing that. Esme, she supposed, answered these weekly epistles; but she never saw her write letters; whatever she wrote she posted herself.

"Who's Esme's correspondent?" Jim asked on one occasion when the weekly letter attracted his notice. "These letters are always coming to the house."

"I don't know," his wife answered. "And you'd better not ask her."

"D'you mean she never tells you?" he asked, amazed.

"She doesn't tell me anything. But I believe they come from a man she met at the Zuurberg."

"That place seems to be a kind of matrimonial agency," Jim grinned. "I thought Sinclair was coming into the family. You see if you can't find out something about this fellow. Sinclair's all right, and he means business. Pity if this is going to queer his pitch."

"It's Esme's affair," Rose replied, experiencing a distinct disinclination to follow his counsel. "When there is anything for me to know I expect she will tell me."

"I never knew before that you were so blooming discreet," he rejoined; and turned, red in the face but unabashed, to confront his sister-in-law, who entered by the open door and met them in the tiny hall. He gave her the letter.