"Have you thought about when you're going to take me in a ship, Daddy?"

Bran had climbed on his knee.

"Yes; I 've been thinking about that, my son."

Haidee said abruptly:

"Did n't you say we would take one of those tramp steamers that go from Ma.r.s.eilles, and touch at all sorts of ports?"

"That was the idea." Westenra held up a cigar to Val, and she nodded permission to smoke. "Why?"

"Well, as Rupert is going to Morocco next week I thought we might as well take the same ship." Haidee sounded rather breathless.

"Ah!" remarked Westenra thoughtfully and lay back in his chair, his face between the knees of Bran, who had climbed up into his favourite position.

Rupert murmured something about that being "an idea _bien gentille_" and hunted nervously for a cigarette.

"In that case," announced Val quietly, "we shall all be sailing from Ma.r.s.eilles at much the same time."

"All?" Every eye was immediately focused upon her.

"You----?"

"But you 're not coming--" Haidee broke off confusedly.

"No; but I am leaving France."

"Leaving France?" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Rupert.

"Yes, leaving France, and all cities, to go back to the life I lived as a child and which has been pulling and calling me ever since."

"What, that life in a waggon?" Haidee had heard of it so often it was strange she should become so excited about it now.

"Yes; a waggon that starts every late afternoon, and treks throughout the night; and brings you to a fresh place every morning." Her face suddenly lost the veil of shadows that had hung over it so long. s.p.a.ce, and joy and distance, and a fierce wistfulness came into her gaze. "One goes on and on to places one has never seen before, sometimes to places _no one_ has ever seen before--that is best, that is wonderful----"

Strangely the veil that had pa.s.sed from her face seemed to fall upon the faces of her listeners. Not one among them but looked curiously disturbed.

"I shall see the wildebeeste grazing on the horizon once more--and hear the guinea-fowl in the bush crying 'come back! come back!"

Westenra stared at her. Was this the woman who had run his nursing home!

"Everything in nature, if you leave it alone, will come back--to the ways of its early life."

"If you leave it alone?" Westenra spoke almost involuntarily. She laughed.

"Am not I going to be left alone?"

There was a silence. Every one sat staring at her.

"Who but I would care for such a foolish life!" she said more sombrely.

"But wouldn't I?" burst out Rupert. "It is what I have always longed for. To _coucher a la belle etoile_! _Zut, alors_! I will come too.

It is understood."

Val laughed.

"You would soon be bored. One must be a wanderfoot by birth and instinct."

But he repudiated the saying, and there was no boredom in his eye nor in the eyes of any. An odd uneasiness possessed them all. Haidee looked paler and was biting her lip. Bran had descended from his father's shoulders and advancing on Val stood looking at her, a startling reflection of her fierce wistfulness in his own eyes. But he still kept a hand on his father's knee.

It was Marietta who broke up the seance by coming out to announce in an autocratic manner that dinner would be ready in ten minutes. No one had realised that it was so late. Westenra did not accept the invitation to stay and dine as he was, but having secured its extension to the evening sprang on his bicycle and rode for his hotel to the endangerment of several lives on the _route Nationale_.

It hardly seemed an hour before he was back again, very big and handsome in conventional dress, among the tranquil trees of the garden. The place was silvered and transformed by the light of the moon, which, at the full, hung like a great luminous pearl on the radiant breast of heaven.

The windows of the Villa were all set wide, and in the drawing-room Haidee's fingers were weaving fairy tales at the piano with such magic that they seemed real voices and hands that called and tugged at Val and Rupert under the trees. The boy stirred restlessly in his chair, gripping its sides. Since dinner Val had been sitting there, very silent, while Haidee played.

When he heard the bell tinkle on the garden gate far below, and knew that some one, probably Westenra, was entering, he said suddenly:

"I forgot to tell you that the other night when I walked home with the doctor I happened to mention to him ... that ... well, that I was with you at the funeral of Mr. Valdana."

"Ah!" Val sighed strangely and sat up straight in her chair. It was too late for anything more to be said. Westenra was upon them. And since Rupert, vacating his chair, was already on his way to the drawing-room, it was quite simple and natural that Westenra should sit down beside her. They talked, a little disjointedly about the beauty of the night, how well Haidee played, what a charming fellow Rupert was.

Then he said suddenly:

"And you are really going back to that wild wandering life of yours, Val?"

It was the first time he had called her Val in all these years. She trembled a little, answering sadly:

"Like water, I must return to my own level."

"Then you should live on the mountain tops."

She trembled again and her heart ached a little more poignantly. Why should he mock her?

"You think you will be happy?" His voice was not mocking, only very gentle.

"Oh! happy?" she echoed. "Who is happy? But--

'Give me the long white road, and the grey path of the sea, And the wind's will, and the birds' will, and the heartache still in me,'

and I will reproach no one."

"Reproaching has never been a pastime of yours, I think--and you may be glad of it, Val, for reproaches, like curses, have a way of coming home to roost. My conscience is no better than an aviary----"

Her involuntary laugh lightened the strain a little, but Westenra was a thorough man, and did not mean to leave it at that. Sombrely he finished.

"I beg your forgiveness, Val, for every reproach I have ever made you in your capacity as wife, mother--or lover. They were undeserved, every one!"

Why should his voice have grown hoa.r.s.e at the last, and her heart come climbing up into her throat as if to suffocate her? It was some moments before she could half-whisper, half-mutter a response.

"You are too generous; I deserved everything you ever said--but after long thinking I see--that--we cannot all win out as wives and mothers.