She did not look at him, but continued speaking fluently, warmly, incisively.

"Ever since I met you, I have felt what all of us women long to feel, the ridiculous inferiority of the bulk of modern men suddenly relieved by an object which we are willing to serve and obey. Your cures, if you have ever effected any in me, were just that,--not your regimens or your analyses,--but your words, your glance, the touch of your hand, your presence. Everybody knows you have a bewildering presence. I need not add to the idle compliments you must receive on all hands. But surely I have recognised the greatness beneath the outward glamour. And it has cast a spell over me. I admit it. I am fettered to it, riveted to it. We women suffer to-day because we have no such men as you to look up to.

Oh, to have met for once something great, something precious, in a world where these things are so rare!"

He glanced up at her. He could not help observing her spruce footgear smothered in the dust of the road, her straight proud back, her fine profile outlined against the bright colours of the chintz, and her blue-veined hands. And he felt an uncontrollable impulse to tell her how deeply he admired her.

"You are no fool," she pursued; "you must have known that I loved you.

Therefore I'm only confirming what you already know. But, believe me, Lord Henry, I am something more than one of your interesting cases."

He protested.

"Yes, I know; you always say women cannot understand men, because to comprehend is to comprise, and the smaller cannot comprise the greater----"

He smiled approvingly.

"You see how accurately I can quote you. That is possibly true. I do not claim to be able to understand you. But surely you will grant me that a woman may have a deep and very real knowledge of being in the presence of something exceptionally great, without precisely understanding it?"

Lord Henry rose. He was blinking rapidly and tugging with more than usual force at his mesh of hair.

"Am I impossible?" she asked hoarsely. "Is the disparity of our ages such that, hitherto, the thought of our being more than friends has been unthinkable to you?"

He went to her side by the window. Words were forming on his lips, but they would make no sentence. She saw his lips moving and noticed his distress.

"Is it not a sign of our deep sympathy that you are the only man in all England in whose presence I forget my ghastly age, my half century and more expended on futilities?"

He took her hand.

"Oh, Edith Delarayne, you wonderful creature!" he exclaimed; "that is the tragedy. You put your finger on the tragedy. If only you could be twenty again, what a wife you would make for me!"

She gave a little sob and fell into his arms. "Oh, my boy, my dear boy!"

she cried, and kissed his hand almost with the avidity of hunger, as it clasped hers on his shoulder.

She released herself slowly and lightly dabbed her eyes.

"When are you going away?" he demanded gravely.

"The day after to-morrow," she replied.

"Write to me as usual," he said.

She caught his hand and grasped it firmly. "Oh, Lord Henry, be the same to me!" she pleaded.

He laughed the plea to scorn. "Of course I'll always be the same to you.

What do you think?"

She saw that he meant it and moved lightly towards the door. "I must be going," she said, putting away her handkerchief, and trying to control an awkward catch in her breath which was reminiscent of her weeping.

He urged her to stay for lunch; he offered to have her fetched by the Sanatorium car; he begged to be allowed to accompany her back to Ashbury; but she stalwartly refused; and in a moment he and St. Maur were watching her, sprightly as a girl, tripping back along the dusty road to the station.

"My boy, my dear boy," he muttered to St. Maur, "that is what she felt, that is what she said. The unconscious voice in her knew the desired relationship and expressed the wish, although the conscious mind thought only of 'husband.'"

CHAPTER IX

"So inexhaustibly rich is the sun that even when it goes down it pours its gold into the very depths of the sea; and then even the poorest boatman rows with golden oars."

Thus spoke the greatest poet of the nineteenth century, and thus all generations of men have felt.

The warm rich colour, as of ripeness, that it gives to the youngest cheek, the tawny tinge as of jungle fauna with which it vitalises every dead-white urban hand, and the enchanting glamour it lends to the plainest head and face,--these are a few of the works of the sun that are surely a proof of its demoniacal glory. Halos, it is true, it fashions as well, and beyond reckoning; but the white teeth that flash from the tanned mask are scarcely those of a saint. Or has a saint actually been known who really had white teeth of his own?

August in England, between the moist wood-clad hills and the blinding glitter of the sea; August in a beautiful country homestead, with its flowering garden, its cool carpet of lawn stretching to a black line of thick hedgerow which seems to be the last barrier between earth and ocean,--what a season it is, and what a setting for the greatest game of youth, the game of catch as catch can, with a cheerless winter for the losers!

The world is at her old best, and all her children are exalted and exhilarated by the knowledge that they are at their best also. Even the trippers are perpetually in Sabbath clothes, as a sign that they are infected with the prevalent feeling of festivity.

Sabbath clothes without the Sabbath gloom, beauty without piety, freedom with open shops, sunshine without duty,--these to the masses are some of the chief joys of the summer sun in England.

In this enumeration of a few of the leading features of a sunny August in England, however, we should not forget to mention what will appear to some the least desirable of them all. The fact that this particular feature is omitted by the most successful English poets of the Victorian School, as by other sentimentalists, would not excuse us in failing to give it at least a passing reference here; for Victorian, alas! does not by any means signify Alexandrian in regard to the periods of English poetry; and even if it be a sin to mention this aspect of a sunny August, we prefer to sin rather than to resemble a Victorian poet.

The quality referred to, then, is a certain result of the eternally pagan influence of the sun. For, say what you will, the sun is pagan. It says "Yea" to life. In its glorious rays it is ridiculously easy to forget the alleged beauties of another world. Under its scorching heat the snaky sinuousness of a basking cat seems more seductive than the image of a winged angel, and amid the gold it lavishes, nothing looks more loathsome, more repulsive, than the pale cheek of pious ill-health.

In short it urges man and woman to a wanton enjoyment of life and their fellows; it recalls to them their relationship to the beasts of the field and the birds in the trees; it fills them with a careless thirst and hunger for the chief pastimes of these animals,--feeding, drinking, and procreation; and the more "exalted" practices of self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, and the mortification of the flesh, are easily forgotten in such a mood.

Nothing goes wrong, nothing can go wrong, while the sun blazes and the flowers are beautiful. So thinks everybody who has survived Puritanism unscathed, so thought the majority of Brineweald's visitors that year, so thought Mrs. Delarayne and her party of eager young swains and still more eager virgins. Wantonness was in the air,--wantonness and beauty; and when these two imps of passion come together August is at its zenith.

Mrs. Delarayne had been down at Brineweald a little under a week; Vanessa Vollenberg and the young Fearwells had already been of the party four whole days; Sir Joseph with Denis Malster and Guy Tyrrell, Mr. and Mrs. Gerald Tribe and Miss Mallowcoid had arrived at Brineweald Park twenty-four hours after the Delarayne household had been completed, and now everybody was busy settling down to the novelty of life, effacing the traces of strangeness wherever they appeared, and measuring each other's skill and power at pastimes not necessarily confined to swimming, golf, and tennis.

Leonetta had been congratulated on her friend Vanessa. Mrs. Delarayne who had expected an over-dressed, heavy young lady, with Shylock countenance and shaggy negroid coiffure, had been not a little surprised when she saw alight on the Brineweald down platform a girl who, though distinctly Semitic in features, had all the refinement, good taste, and sobriety of a Gentile and a lady. It was a relief, to say the least, and when, in addition, she found her intelligent and a lively companion, she was devoutly thankful.

Nothing beneath that fierce August sun escaped the keen comprehending eye of Vanessa Vollenberg. The mother and the two daughters with whom she found her present lot cast, gave her food enough for meditation and secret comment; but while their acumen and penetration were hardly inferior to her own, she felt an adult among people not completely grown up. It was as if they still retained more of the ingenuousness of primitive womanhood than she, and thus she "circumnavigated" them, while they, all too self-centred, had barely discovered in which hemisphere her shores were to be found. In this way the seniority of her race was probably revealed.

Beautiful in her own Oriental style, voluptuous and graceful, with small well-made hands, and shapely limbs, she might have proved a formidable rival to Leonetta; or was it perhaps precisely her Jewish blood,--which seemed in Leonetta's eyes to preclude rivalry,--that had first endeared this attractive young Jewess to her wilful Gentile friend?

Girls have strange reasons for "falling in love" with each other at school. It is not impossible that the inconceivability of eventual rivalry should be one of these.

Mrs. Delarayne's house, "The Fastness," was one of a round dozen large houses that stood along the crest of Brineweald Hill, overlooking the little seaside town of Stonechurch. It took a little over fifteen minutes to walk down from Brineweald to the beach at Stonechurch, and perhaps a little over twenty minutes to walk back up the steep hill. Sir Joseph's place, Brineweald Park, lay inland on the far side of the village of Brineweald, about a mile from "The Fastness," but the distance was soon covered by the young people, even when they could not dispose of one of Sir Joseph's cars; and the two households were therefore practically always mingled.

Bathing, tennis, golf, picnicking, croquet,--these helped to fill the time while the sun was high; and when the cool of the evening came, the quiet paths and groves of Brineweald Park, or the bowers of Mrs.

Delarayne's garden, were an agreeable refuge for bodies pleasantly fatigued and faintly langorous.

Mrs. Delarayne who was not uncommonly in a condition of faint languor was content, during these terrible six weeks of her life, to play the part of spectator. Silently, but with a good proportion of the available interest, she contemplated the younger members of the party, and whether she happened to be on her _chaise-longue_ overlooking her own lawn, or on the terrace of Brineweald Park, her deep concern about the performances of her juniors never abated. The fact that a good deal of this determined attention was calculated to ward off the less attractive alternative of Sir Joseph's untiring advances, was suspected least of all by the generous squire of Brineweald himself; but it was noticeable too, that she would often sit for long spells neither observing the pranks of her young people nor listening to Sir Joseph's dulcet tones, and then it was that her daughters would suspect that age was after all beginning to tell, even in the case of their valiant parent. At such times she was, of course, simply dreaming day dreams of the life she could have had if, as "he" had said, she had been twenty now; and the beatific expression that would come into her face was scarcely one of reconciliation to senility.

To say that Vanessa Vollenberg and Agatha Fearwell were perfectly happy on this holiday, would be a little wide of the mark. Indeed their condition fell very much more short of perfect happiness than they could possibly have anticipated.

Truth to tell, Leonetta was too indisputably mistress of the stage. The infinite resource with which she contrived always to draw the limelight in her direction, the unremitting regularity with which she turned every circumstance into a "curtain" for her own apotheosis, while it fired the proud Cleopatra to ever fresh efforts at successful competition,--efforts which were proving tremendously exhausting,--left Vanessa and Agatha in a state not unlike a suspension of hostilities. They simply waited. Of all the men, Denis Malster was certainly the only one that a girl could have been expected to make a struggle for, and since he appeared to be entirely hypnotised by Leonetta, the remaining two, one of whom, in Agatha's case, was a brother, seemed to invite only a Platonic relationship of games and sports.

It is true that Guy Tyrrell felt he could have gone to any lengths with the fascinating, voluptuous Jewess; but he had the inevitable defects of his "clean-mindedness," and knew as little how to engage the interest of a thoroughly matriculated girl as to rouse enthusiasm for botany in a cat.