Chapter II: The Florentine (2)

“The second-rate at second-hand? Dear lady, what else am I to do in the time? I put it to you! I didn’t ask to give this lecture, did I? The whole thing is abhorrent to me.”

“I have a little book,” suggested Miss Barrington doubtfully. “An Oxford Extension book. It’s called ‘The Florentine and His Age.’ It’s about two hundred pages. Would that be any use?”

“The very thing,” cried Hubert in relief. “Will you lend it to me, Miss Barrington?”

“I lent it to Kell, one of the housemaids, who is going to the lecture. She told me she knew nothing about Dante. Kell! Have you finished that book I lent you?”

Kell was on her knees lighting the fire. She now rose to her feet and approached them. She was a pretty girl with a round freckled face, apricot-coloured hair and tawny eyes. Her neck was as white as milk. She surveyed Miss Barrington with sedate respect.

“I beg your pardon, ma’am?”

“Have you finished that book on Dante?”

“Not quite, ma’am.”

“Will you bring it here? Mr. Ervine wants to look at it.”

If this demand surprised Kell she did not show it. She departed and Miss Barrington explained:

“You see, Mr. Ervine, all the Lyndon servants belong to the Reading Union. Lady Clewer likes it.”

This was a new aspect of Agatha, and Hubert gaped. But she laughed and set him right:

“Not me. John’s stepmother. She is down here so much that she supervises parish work and all that sort of thing. She really likes it and it’s a great relief to me, for I would hate it.”

“Of course,” said Miss Barrington, “all the maids cannot go to all the meetings. They take it in turns. This time it happened to be Kell who is going, so I lent her the book. She is a very intelligent girl.”

“She is the friend of James’s youth that he was looking for yesterday,” added Agatha. “I’d like to know what she thinks of Dante.”

Kell returned with the book, which she had neatly wrapped in a cover of brown paper. The fire was lighted and Hubert was left to himself.

The hall was full of Marian superintending the disposition of some flowers in pots. She was rather annoyed with a gardener, and was so occupied in scolding him that Agatha was able to carry on a significant conversation almost at her elbow.

“Lois! Will you tie my veil for me?”

Lois, who had been reading the _Tatler_ with a very disconsolate expression, came sulkily to her side and helped to dispose of the masses of gray tulle which were to protect her head in the landaulette.

“I can’t think, Agatha, what you want to wear a veil in a closed car for.”

Agatha’s voice grew softer.

“Poor Mr. Ervine is in the library. I’m afraid he’s rather stuck in his lecture. He might like help—books and things. I wish you would look in some time this morning and see if he has all he wants.”

Lois bloomed once more. She had begun to think that he must have gone for a walk.

“Oh, all right. I certainly will if you want me to.”

On these occasions one remembered with pleasure that Agatha was really the mistress of Lyndon.

Hubert listened to the departing landaulette with a hopeless heart. He had not written a word. He sat with his head buried in his hands while the rain beat a tattoo upon the window pane. Presently Lois put her head timidly round the door.

“How are you getting on?”

“Not at all.”

“Oh, dear! I am sorry!” She came nearer. “Have you got all the books you want?”

“Far too many. That’s the trouble.”

He pointed to the pile of library books on the table and waved the little atrocity in his hand.

“If Miss Barrington hadn’t taken it upon herself to prime my audience with this little handbook, I could have copied out a chunk of it and given it as my lecture. But the third housemaid has heard it all already. She’d spot it if I tried.”

“Would it be any easier if you dictated to me?”

Hubert thought that it would. He might manage to sparkle a little for her; her admiration for everything he said was rather stimulating. She seized a pad and a pen, expectantly. After a moment’s creative abstraction he began:

“The advent of a great poet. . . .”

He caught the eye of Voltaire.

“Come away,” it said. “You and your great poets!”

Hubert coughed and tried again in another vein.

“‘The man who has seen Hell!’ That is what they called him, those thirteenth-century citizens of whatever it was (leave a blank space, we can look it up in a minute), as they watched that sinister figure shouldering its way through their crowded market-places. ‘The man who has seen Hell!’ Not, mark you, the man who has seen Heaven, although the Divine Comedy includes a book called the ‘Paradiso.’ Why is this? Why is it that in both contemporary and subsequent opinion the ‘Inferno’ is incomparably the greatest book of the three? For us in these latter days it has, of course, lost something of its piquancy. We have forgotten what a _Chronique Scandaleuse_ it was. But if a man of genius were to arise in our midst to-day and versify, say the eternal tortures of Manning and Gladstone, were he to limn for us a picture of Parnell and Mrs. O’Shea, a second Paolo and Francesca, blown upon the gales of Hell, we might recapture the old thrill. . . .”

He paused to draw breath and Lois diffidently protested: “I don’t know if this is quite what Mother wants. It’s for poor people, you know. I don’t think she wants anything amusing.”

“Oh, all right. Tear it up.”

“You don’t mind my saying so, do you?”

“Oh, no. Indeed not. I’m most anxious to please your mother. You can have no idea how anxious.”

Lois flushed and fidgeted with the ring at the end of her pencil. Hubert began again:

“_Lasciate ogni speranza_. . . .”

“They won’t understand Italian. You must translate it.”

“Abandon hope all ye who enter here,” said the lecturer peevishly, adding, a moment later, “no, don’t put it. I don’t think I will begin that way. I was going to say that this was the artist’s comment on the condition of the mind prior to creation. But I forget why.”

“Really nobody very clever is coming,” she assured him. “It’s a much simpler affair than you think. Why can’t you just say where he was born, and all that; and then say what he wrote. That is the sort of thing Mother wants.”

“Dante,” dictated Hubert. . . . “No . . . put Dante Alighieri . . . was born in . . . in . . . I say . . . was he born in Florence, or did he go there after he was born? Would you mind looking it up in that little book?”

Lois studied “The Florentine and His Age.”

“It doesn’t put,” she said at last.

“Oh, Lord! What’s a book like that for if it doesn’t give you the facts?”

“That’s the gong for lunch.”

Hubert jumped up with alacrity.

“Shall we go on after lunch?” he said. “I may feel brighter after food.”

“Of course we will,” said the obliging Lois, “if you feel it’s any use to you.”

Marian’s face was greatly troubled when she joined them at lunch.

“This rain is terrible,” she complained. “It’s so awkward, Mr. Ervine. They’ve just sent in to say that the big station car is out of order and can’t possibly be put right before Monday. It’s most tiresome. Because, of course, we all meant to drive to your lecture in it. The Village Room is quite two miles off, across the park, and if this rain goes on it will be much too wet to walk.”

“It’s extraordinary how these things are always happening,” said Lois. “We have four cars, and yet I do believe that we are more often held up for want of transport than many people who have only a motor bicycle and a side-car.”

“Well, you see, John and Thomas have the limousine, and Agatha the landaulette. There is the little two-seater, of course, which will take you down to the village, Mr. Ervine. But I’m very much afraid that the rest of us will be deprived of hearing your lecture unless it clears up. I’m so sorry! But it’s really too wet to walk. I catch cold so easily, and so do the girls.”

“Perhaps, as it’s such a bad day, I might postpone it,” suggested Hubert hopefully.

“Oh, no! Please don’t do that! All the folk from the village will be there, Mr. Ervine. And they would be so disappointed; some of them have to walk several miles. Poor things! Their lives are so dull and it is such a treat for them! No, don’t put it off. Only it’s so disappointing for us. But perhaps you will read it to us later.”

“Oh, no! I couldn’t inflict it on anybody twice.”

“James will go, of course. Won’t you, James? He doesn’t mind the rain a scrap. And Miss Barrington. You mustn’t think that everyone from Lyndon is deserting you. And then Agatha will be dropping in on her way home.”

“But will Miss Barrington walk?” asked Hubert doubtfully. “Let me walk with you, Clewer, and Miss Barrington can go in the two-seater.”

“Oh, but that’s quite unnecessary,” protested Miss Barrington, casting a nervous glance at her employer. “I don’t mind the rain. I like a little turn in the fresh air.”

“Yes, she likes it,” asserted Marian, but was interrupted by a very tactless explosion of sneezing on the part of her secretary.

She waited in heavy patience until Miss Barrington had done.

“I say! You have got a cold!” observed Gerald.

“Oh, no! Not at all. It’s nearly gone now.”

“Do go in the car and let me walk!” urged Hubert.

“I think fresh air does a cold good,” observed Marian judicially. “I always go out for a cold myself. And I have a few notes to be left in the village. I think Miss Barrington had better walk. Mr. Blair, will you care to go? Lady Clewer would have room for you in the landaulette on the way home, I’m sure, so there would only be the walk one way.”

“Yes, I’d like to come,” agreed Gerald.

“There, you see, Mr. Ervine! Three people are going from Lyndon in spite of the rain. You mustn’t think we have all deserted you.”

“Dolly Kell is going, so it’s four really,” observed James.

“Hush, James!” remarked his stepmother mechanically.

A silence fell upon the lunchers while they devoured roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. Hubert eyed Gerald.

“You’d really better not come, Blair,” he said. “You’ll be bored stiff, you know.”

“But I want to come. I know nothing at all about Dante. I’ll hold an umbrella over Miss Barrington.”

Hubert sighed and wished the affair well over. But he could not quarrel with an occasion which was to secure him an afternoon alone with Lois. When they emerged from the library at tea-time the lecture was written and neatly fastened together with a paper clip.

4

“Sooner you than me,” said Clara, the scullery maid, as she peered out into the rain. “It’s a good thing your boots is thick.”

“I’m glad to get a chance of a walk,” said Dolly Kell. “I’m not afraid of a bit of rain.”

“This isn’t a bit of rain; it’s a flood. It’s terrible. There won’t be many there, I shouldn’t think. I wouldn’t go, not if I was you, Dolly.”

“Oh, I got to. Old Lady Clewer would see if I wasn’t there. She’s so sharp. Everyone from the house is going.”

“Yes. I seen Mr. James waiting by the yard gate.” Clara popped her head out of the scullery window for a moment. “He’s there still. I wonder who he’s waiting for, don’t you?”

“Not knowing, can’t say.” Dolly was not deceived by Clara’s innocent curiosity. “I’ve got something better to wonder at. I’d get on with my vegetables if I was you.”

She buttoned up the last button of her mackintosh and moved down the passage.

“Oh! Ain’t you going out through the yard?”

“Never you mind what way I’m going out.”

A little side door at the end of the old schoolroom passage led into the shrubbery. Through this Dolly slipped, holding her skirts well away from the splashings of soaked bushes. As she picked her way into the avenue she was glad of the prudence which had prompted her to spend her last quarter’s wages on new boots and an umbrella instead of a summer costume. The drive was deep in puddles and the rain pattered everywhere. It fell in great splashes from the trees and dimpled the flowing gutters.

She thought with compunction of poor Mr. James waiting in the downpour by the yard gate. Her evasion seemed to be a little heartless. It would have been kinder, after all, to have gone out by the yard. But then she must have rebuffed his offers of escort under the inquisitive eye of Clara, who would have seen it all from the scullery window. She had not the courage.

This affair of Mr. James was very worrying to Dolly. It was worse than any of the “social puzzles” in _Home Words_. She did not know how she ought to act. They had been, of course, playmates and equals, but that was a long time ago. On her return to Lyndon as third housemaid she knew that things ought to be very different. He was a young gentleman now, and it was her business to remind him of the fact should he show signs of forgetting it.

She had grown up in the creed that Mr. James was “put upon.” Her aunt, Mrs. Job Kell, had never liked the second Lady Clewer and her interfering ways. The dislike was mutual, for Marian had been quick to divine the element of contempt which lay behind the old housekeeper’s civility. She had pensioned her off at the first opportunity, feeling that old retainers are sometimes better at a distance.

Their hottest battles had been fought over James. Mrs. Kell, who had mothered him from birth, was enraged by Marian’s unfavourable comments on his person and intelligence.

“Soft-headed,” she would say to Dolly. “She’s soft-headed herself. You mark my words, if anything ails that boy it’s too much brains, not too little. Didn’t I rear him from a babby? I ought to know. He was always as sharp as they’re made. A regular old-fashioned child if ever there was one; ever so knowing. You remember him yourself. The funny little dear!”

Dolly remembered a sturdy, ugly child some months older than herself. A lonely, secretive boy he had been, but excellent company when he had got over his shyness. They had played endless, mysterious games in the gardens at Lyndon. They had kept house in the old brick potting shed, cooking elaborate meals in Dolly’s little saucepans and rearing a large family of dolls. With these, James, as a father, was allowed very little say though he sometimes took the stick to them when they got beyond petticoat government. The household reflected Clewer luxuries and the artless simplicity of the four-room cottage. Dolly, having despatched the children to school, would scrub out the “liberry” and announce:

“Now I’ll have a good cup of tea and a lay down.”

These memories made her feel very kindly toward him. She was a good-natured girl, in spite of her sharp tongue, and hated giving real pain. She soon perceived that she was wounding him deeply; he would stare at her, when she snubbed him, with a startled grief in his eyes. As she grew to know the household better, and saw the scorn and derision in which he was held, she became very sorry for him and longed to unbend to his wistful advances. But this would have been to carry on with a gentleman of the house, a lapse unpardonable. Of course, he was quite different from any other gentleman she had ever met; he always had been. She had once said as much to her aunt, whereupon Mrs. Kell had become very mysterious and refused to discuss the subject. She said she didn’t know but what it mightn’t be accounted for.

The road across the park led through an iron gate into the wet village street. The postman, one of Dolly’s admirers, was clearing the box at the corner.

“Hullo, Dolly!” he greeted her cheerfully. “Rain-water’s good for the complexion, so they say.”

She passed him with her round chin in the air.

“You’ll catch plenty of it in your mouth that way, if you’re thirsty,” he called after her.

She stalked on, her head held so high that she failed to perceive the approach of the grocer’s young man and almost collided with him. The postman guffawed rudely in the distance, but young Mr. Hopkins, nothing daunted, fell into step beside her.

“Good afternoon, Miss Kell,” he ventured. “It’s a wet day.”

“It is,” she agreed.

“You going a walk?”

“No.”

“Well, it’s a wet day for a walk, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps you’ll be going a walk after chapel, Sunday?”

“I may and I mayn’t. What of it?”

“I was wondering,” he said diffidently, “if you’ve not fixed up with any other chap, that is . . .”

“Oh, I haven’t fixed up with anybody, thanks. And I’m not going to. I’d sooner walk by myself.”

“Really now . . .”

“I would. Till I can find a man that can talk sense, thank you, Mr. Hopkins. I haven’t seen one yet.”

“If you’d only let me come along I wouldn’t talk at all. Would that please you?”

“It wouldn’t. I said a man that could talk sense, not anybody dumb!”

He looked a little dashed, but toiled by her side until they reached the Village Institute. Dolly turned in at the gate.

“You going in there?” he said, gaping.

“Oh, no, of course not,” snapped Dolly. “I’m only going to climb trees in the garden.”

“You’re very clever, aren’t you?”

He was beginning to get riled.

“Well, what do you want to ask such a silly question for? Was I going in. Couldn’t you see I was?”

“What’s taking you in, anyway?”

“Haven’t you eyes? It’s wrote large enough.”

She pointed to a bill on the paling executed in Miss Barrington’s best poster writing. It said:

CLEWER VILLAGE INSTITUTE

June Session, 1914.
On Friday next, at 6 p.m.
Mr. HUBERT ERVINE will lecture on:
“DANTE, THE GREAT ITALIAN POET.”
Free to all. Come early.

“Dant the Eyetalian Poit!” read Mr. Hopkins. “Who’s he when he’s at home?”

“Well, you are a Mr. Ignorance and no mistake. You didn’t ought to say Dant. Dunty! That’s the proper way to say it.”

Thus Dolly, who had heard all about Dunty from Miss Barrington.

“Well, but what d’you want to bother your head about him for? That’s what I want to know.”

“Curiosity killed the cat. Good-bye, Mr. Hopkins.”

Too much incensed to answer, he strode on and left her.

The Clewer Village Institute was a dreary place. A lending library of an instructive nature, carefully chosen by Marian, lined the walls. All the books were uniformly clad in drab holland covers. The baize table near the stove was littered with old newspapers of a strictly Tory nature and some pamphlets issued by the Primrose League. Two Union Jacks, draped between the windows, testified to the patriotism of the village of Lyndon.

As Dolly shook out her mackintosh she wondered anxiously how long James would wait in the rain. She trusted that he would soon give her up. It was so very wet and he had not got on his Burberry. She wished she could have made him put it on without sacrificing any of her hard-won aloofness. The room was empty, but this did not surprise her, for she knew she was early. With the patience of a well-disciplined nature she settled herself to tranquil inactivity on a bench at the very back of the room. Divested of her mackintosh she was revealed, supple and sturdy, in a navy coat and skirt of indifferent fit. Her best black hat, abob with cherries, hid the apricot meshes of her hair.

She was flushed with the routing of Mr. Hopkins, though the suppression of followers was an art in which she was much practised. She had many, but she detested them all and was determined never to marry. Her young intelligence had been dreadfully haunted by the shadow of that maniac stepfather who had made life so frightful for her mother. It was a memory which still terrified her and distorted her ideas; the risks of marriage, its possible disasters, seemed to her insurmountable. Nor was it likely that she would meet a man who could inspire her to face these difficulties; strength and weakness alike antagonized her, since the one stirred her to revolt against possible domination and the other roused her ridicule. An affectionate, intuitive creature, built for womanly ends, she was likely to remain single.

The rain drummed on the roof and the large clock over the door ticked loudly. She began to grow nervous, wishing that somebody else would turn up. Suddenly she had a perfectly horrible apprehension. Suppose that she were all the audience! It might well be. She would never have come herself, on such a nasty evening, if she had not been obliged. But it would be awkward if she were the only one. Of course there would be the party from “the house.” But Dolly knew that it was for herself and her likes that this lecture was given. It was meant to elevate her. She did not mind being elevated along with other proletarians, but she barred the notion of enduring it quite by herself. If nobody from the village put in an appearance she would have to sit marooned on the benches designed for the commonalty. A semicircle of her betters, installed in armchairs behind the lecturer’s back, would confront her for at least an hour. Every time she looked up she would face a battery of aristocratic eyes. She was a brave girl, but she quailed at the idea. She would have withdrawn had she dared; but, with old Lady Clewer coming, flight was impossible. Old Lady Clewer saw everything, except perhaps the way Miss Cynthia was carrying on with that Sir Thomas. But then Miss Cynthia was very deep.

She strained her ears to catch the approach of the station car which would bring the family. It was surely time they arrived. The clatter of boots and a great scraping in the porch relieved her. She was, it seemed, to have at least one companion.

But her heart sank again when James appeared.

“Hullo, Dolly!” he exclaimed. “I thought you couldn’t be coming. I waited by the back gate for you.”

Dolly grew pink.

“I went out by the shrubberies, sir,” she observed.

“Well, why didn’t you tell me?” he persisted. “I wanted to walk with you.”

“I’m sure I’m very sorry, sir.”

“But why didn’t you? Are you angry about anything? What is the matter with you? Why are you so different? Because if you are angry I wish you’d tell me why,” he complained.

After all there was no great need to be shy of him, for she had known him all her life. Now that they were alone together she had much better speak plainly to him.

“I’m not angry. It’s only this. Now we are grown up it’s quite different to being little. We can’t be friends like we used to be. Our stations in life is so different.”

“I don’t mind about our stations in life.”

“Ah, but I do. A girl like me can’t be friends with a gentleman without people thinking things.”

“They always do,” he argued. “It’s no use to worry about what people think. I never do. I used to. But when I saw that they’d really rather think wrong than right I gave it up.”

“Yes. You can. But I can’t. I got my living to earn.”

He digested this and grew grave.

“It’s very hard, that is,” he said at last.

“It can’t be helped,” quoth Dolly. “We didn’t make the world. If we had, it would have been different, I daresay.”

“It would,” agreed James feelingly.

Dolly remembered with dismay that she had not called him “sir” for at least two minutes. This was always happening to her. Also she was inclined to relapse, insensibly, from the refined grammar and diction with which she usually addressed her employers. It seemed more natural, somehow, to converse with him in the rough-and-ready speech of her own caste.

“This sort of thing is maddening,” he declared. “I like you better than any one I know. I always have. I don’t suppose I shall ever find any one I like better. It isn’t only the people here . . . I used to think that it would be different if I got away and went to Paris. But it wasn’t. Paris was all right for working in. I learnt a lot. But I felt just as out of it there as here. I never knew what to say to them. And they all laughed at me, like they do here. Even the ones who liked my work did.”

“Well, you know, sir, you act a bit queer sometimes.”

“I can’t help it. Do you see anything very serious the matter with me, Dolly?”

“I don’t see there’s much wrong with you, I don’t. And Auntie doesn’t neither.”

“But you are the only ones. And isn’t it hard?”

“Everyone has their troubles,” interrupted Dolly.

“I know. But why? I don’t want my station in life. Who gave it to me, anyway?”

“Almighty God,” she told him austerely.

“Well, I suppose so,” he assented.

She was overjoyed to hear at least two people in the porch, but wished that he would move from his pleading posture at her side. The newcomers turned out to be Mr. Blair and Jimmy Pyewacket, the boy who weeded the garden. She was distressed to think that Mr. Blair was a visitor at the house, but consoled herself with the reflection that he was a born gentleman and wouldn’t get thinking things, even if James’s attitude did look a little odd. This was a great compliment to Mr. Blair, for Dolly’s standards were cruelly high, and very few of the Lyndon guests were allowed by her to be born gentlemen.

James, with the air of a man of the world, immediately effected an introduction.

“Miss Kell, Mr. Blair. But you ought to know her, for she brings your shaving water in the morning, doesn’t she?”

His triumphant glance told Dolly that he believed himself to have done exactly the right thing upon this occasion. Let her retract her statement that he acted a bit queer!

Mr. Blair was looking a little puzzled and she set them right.

“Not me, sir. Mr. Peters waits on gentlemen staying in the house.”

“That explains it,” said Mr. Blair. “I thought you must have changed very much since this morning. Are we all the audience?”

Dolly looked round for Jimmy Pyewacket and saw him edging away toward the door. She made a dash at him and detained him.

“Now then, young Jimmy! You don’t! Do stay, there’s a little love! I don’t want to have to sit on these benches all by myself.”

“These gents’ll sit with you,” said Jimmy, poised for flight.

“No they won’t. They have to sit on the platform with the family.”

“Shall we?” exclaimed the gents, and Mr. Blair added: “We won’t. We’d much rather sit on the benches. What’s the point of sitting behind the lecturer’s back?”

“There won’t be any family,” observed James. “We are all that’s coming. So we can sit where we like, I should think.”

“Nobody coming!” cried Dolly. “Not Lady Clewer nor Miss Lois?”

“Not they. It’s raining and their car is out of order.”

Dolly cursed her fate. If she had only known this she would have absconded herself.

“You mustn’t go, you know,” went on Mr. Blair, attacking Jimmy in his turn. “Think of the wretched lecturer! Four are better than three.”

“It’s so cold,” objected Jimmy, shivering at the damp odour of the place. “The stove ought to of been lighted.”

“It’s laid,” said James, inspecting it. “Shall I light it?”

“Will you stay if we do?” pleaded Mr. Blair of Jimmy, who nodded graciously.

“I don’t see why we shouldn’t,” Dolly encouraged them.

So they lit the stove and the four students of Dante gathered round the crackling sticks. Dolly could not digest the idea that no one else was coming from the house.

“But isn’t Miss Barrington coming?” she asked. “She always does.”

“He,” James indicated Mr. Blair, “wouldn’t let her. She has a very sneezy cold. And when we were all in the hall after tea he told her to go to bed. You should have heard him, Dolly! It was like Mamma and God and a magistrate all at once. She went rather quickly!”

“My most effective professional manner,” murmured Mr. Blair. “She wasn’t fit to be up at all.”

There was a great snorting and tooting outside as a little car bustled up to the gate. The lecturer, nervously grasping a roll of MS., sidled into the room. He glanced around, prepared for the beefy stare of innumerable rustics, all the simple village folk who would be so disappointed if he did not brighten their lives. He beheld empty benches. The group round the stove rose to receive him in sympathetic solemnity.

“I’m afraid most of your audience has been frightened by the weather,” observed Gerald Blair.

Jimmy Pyewacket said hopefully:

“The rain’s stopping. P’raps some more will come.”

Hubert clutched at this.

“Yes, they might,” he said. “Shall we wait a bit in case they do?”

There was a pause and Dolly said encouragingly:

“Just as you like, sir.”

So they all sat down again and the warming stove drew clouds of steam from their wet boots. A few minutes of uneasy silence passed. At last Hubert thought fit to ask Dolly if she liked poetry.

“Some poetry I like,” she said. “There was one piece I read. I saw it in the pictures first and it was beautiful. So I read the book. ‘Evangeline’ it was called. All about the olden times.”

“Ah—Longfellow!”

“That’s right.”

“You like his works, then?”

“Yes, sir. I think it’s beautiful.”

“And what,” asked Hubert, “do you think of Dante?”

Dolly was nonplussed and said she didn’t know much about him.

“But you read that little book . . . er . . . ‘The Florentine and His Age’?”

“Pat and his Ape!” muttered James, with such concentration of scorn that Dolly stifled a giggle.

“I read a bit of it, sir,” she replied.

“And what did you make of it?”

“It was a very nice book, I’m sure,” she said politely.

She had no wish to hear more of Dante. What she had read in “The Florentine and His Age” had been quite enough. The fellow was, apparently, a foreigner, an idolatrous Roman Catholic, a blasphemer, and a bad husband. A shiftless creature, moreover, incapable of supporting himself, and very rude about the steep stairs of the kind gentleman who patronized him. His picture in the frontispiece had not been pretty. And his poem, all about Hell, revolted her. Her stepfather, whose mania had a religious turn in it, had talked a good deal about Hell, with all the gusto of a cruel and perverted imagination. She thought the Florentine must have been a little like him.

A few minutes elapsed and nobody could think of anything further to say. At length another car was heard to arrive. Agatha, sumptuous in furs and veils, slipped noiselessly through the door as though desirous not to disturb a lecture which she imagined to be in full swing. She also looked at the empty benches with a surprised air and then at the people round the stove. Taking them in she became mirthful.

“Now, Mr. Ervine,” she commanded, when she had heard the facts. “Tell the truth! You’d much rather not read that lecture at all, wouldn’t you?”

“Much rather,” said Hubert earnestly.

“Well?” she looked round her with a question in her eyes. “What about it? Shall we let him off?”

Everyone fidgeted. At length someone mentioned the dowager.

“We won’t tell,” laughed the mistress of Lyndon. “Burn it, and we’ll all vow it was the best lecture we ever heard.”

With jubilant thankfulness Hubert thrust his lecture into the stove. He sent a benediction with it, however, for it had secured him an afternoon with his love. Agatha sat down in one of the most comfortable of the armchairs and stretched a silken ankle toward the blazing manuscript.

“We must wait here for a bit,” she said, “to give him time to deliver his lecture. What shall we do? I wish we could roast chestnuts.”

“I got peanuts,” volunteered Jimmy, producing a dirty paper bag.

“What are peanuts?” asked Lady Clewer, peering. “Can one roast them? Are they nice?”

Jimmy said that they were very nice and was commanded to superintend the roasting. Agatha looked round the room.

“This is fun,” she said. “It’s the first time I’ve enjoyed myself in this place. What shall we play at? Consequences? No!” She glanced at Hubert. “It’s a risky game. Too risky. Shall we tell ghost stories?”

“Ah! Ghost stories!” said Hubert at once. “That reminds me of something I heard in Morocco. . . .”

If ghost stories were to be told, he had better demonstrate how it should be done. He had a horror of the amateur narrator. As a matter of fact he was really rather good at it and enthralled them for half an hour with one startling anecdote after another. Jimmy’s eyes opened wider and wider and he edged closer to Dolly’s protecting skirts. And she, as the rainy dusk drew in, thought nervously of the lonely walk through the park. It would be very difficult to refuse James’s company.

At last Agatha decided that enough time had elapsed and they might return in safety. Jimmy scooted off into the twilight as though all the demons of Morocco were at his heels. The others paused uncertainly in the porch until Agatha declared that nobody must walk home in this rain. The little two-seater was nowhere in sight, but she insisted that they could all pack somehow into the landaulette. Hubert was put in front with the chauffeur and the four others climbed in behind. The roof was too low for any one to stand in comfort and the only way for them all to get in was for the men to sit with the ladies perched on their knees. Dolly would have preferred Mr. Blair’s knees, but she was given to James. She vaguely understood why Mr. Ervine had been put in front; he would not have supported this intimacy at all well. As it was, she felt that the barriers raised against James were sensibly weakened by this enforced proximity. The car, turning into the drive, swayed them all backward and forward so that she nearly fell off his knee. He put an arm about her to keep her steady. She looked at his hand as it lay in her lap. It was a broad, muscular hand, not over clean, and stained with paint; a working hand, like her own. Behind her shoulder, through the thin cloth of her coat, she could feel the strong beating of his heart. Consciously she checked an impulse of tenderness and comprehension. She tried to sit on his knee in a distant and respectful manner. Lady Clewer might think it very forward in her to allow him to put his arm round her waist. She glanced nervously at the others.

She need not have disturbed herself. Lady Clewer was secure in the arm of her cousin. She also was staring pensively at the hand of the man who held her. Dolly was struck for the first time by her employer’s youthfulness; not more than twenty-one, so they said. You’d never think it, she had such a stately way with her. But it wasn’t really very stately for a married lady to sit in the lap of a strange gentleman, cousin or no cousin. And she was looking as if she enjoyed it too.

Arrived at Lyndon, Dolly ran round to the back door and upstairs to change her dress. Later in the evening she was sent with a tray of invalid delicacies to Miss Barrington, whose cold was very much worse. In the sick room she encountered the dowager, who was determined that her secretary should be competently nursed.

“Well, Kell,” said she, “and how did you enjoy the lecture?”

“Very much indeed, thank you, my lady,” replied Dolly mindful of instruction.

“And was Mr. Ervine very interesting?”

“Oh, very, my lady. We all got so scared.”

“Scared?” said Marian. “Scared?”

Dolly recollected herself and became very much confused.

“The Idferdo!” croaked Miss Barrington from the bed. “D’you bead that the descriptiod of the dabbed alarbed you, Kell?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Dolly, when she had identified the “dabbed.”

Being a truthful girl she blushed as she said it.