The Children By Edith Wharton

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The Children

Edith Wharton

Published: 1928

Categorie(s): Fiction

Source: http://gutenberg.net.au About Wharton:

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer.

Also available on Feedbooks Wharton:

- The Age of Innocence (1920)

- Ethan Frome (1911)

- The House of Mirth (1905)

- Summer (1917)

- Twilight Sleep (1927)

- The Custom of the Country (1913)

- The Touchstone (1900)

- The Valley of Decision (1902)

- Sanctuary (1903)

- The Reef (1912)

Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70.

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Part 1

Chapter 1

As the big liner hung over the tugs swarming about her in the bay of Algiers, Martin Boyne looked down from the promenade deck on the troop of first-class passengers struggling up the gangway, their faces all unconsciously lifted to his inspection.

"Not a soul I shall want to speak to—as usual!"

Some men's luck in travelling was inconceivable. They had only to get into a train or on board a boat to run across an old friend; or, what was more exciting, make a new one. They were always finding themselves in the same compartment, or in the same cabin, with some wandering celebrity, with the owner of a famous house, of a noted collection, or of an odd and amusing personality—the latter case being, of course, the rarest as it was the most rewarding.

There was, for instance, Martin Boyne's own Great-Uncle Edward. Uncle Edward's travel-adventures were famed in the family. At home in America, amid the solemn upholstery of his Boston house, Uncle Edward was the model of complacent dulness; yet whenever he got on board a steamer, or into a train (or a diligence, in his distant youth), he was singled out by fate as the hero of some delightful encounter. It would be Rachel during her ill-starred tour of the States; Ruskin on the lake of Geneva; the Dean of Canterbury as Uncle Edward, with all the appropriate emotions, was gazing on the tomb of the Black Prince; or the Duke of Devonshire of his day, as Uncle Edward put a courteous (but probably pointless) question to the housekeeper showing him over Chatsworth. And instantly he would receive a proscenium box from Rachel for her legendary first night in Boston, or be entreated by Ruskin to join him for a month in Venice; or the Dean would invite him to stay at the Deanery, the Duke at Chatsworth; and the net result of these experiences would be that Uncle Edward, if questioned, would reply with his sweet frosty smile: "Yes, Rachel had talent but no beauty"; or: "No one could be more simple and friendly than the Duke"; or: "Ruskin really had all the appearances of a gentleman." Such were the impressions produced on Uncle Edward by his unparalleled success in the great social scenes through which, for a period of over sixty years, he moved with benignant blindness.

Far different was the case of his great-nephew. No tremor of thought or emotion would, in similar situations, have escaped Martin Boyne: he would have burst all the grapes against his palate. But though he was given to travel, and though he had travelled much, and his profession as a civil engineer had taken him to interesting and out-of-the-way parts of the world, and though he was always on the alert for agreeable encounters, it was never at such times that they came to him. He would have loved adventure, but adventure worthy of the name perpetually eluded him; and when it has eluded a man till he is over forty it is not likely to seek him out later.

"I believe it's something about the shape of my nose," he had said to himself that very morning as he shaved in his spacious cabin on the upper deck of the big Mediterranean cruising-steamer.

The nose in question was undoubtedly not adventurous in shape; it did not thrust itself far forward into other people's affairs; and the eyes above, wide apart, deep-set, and narrowed for closer observation, were of a guarded twilight gray which gave the nose no encouragement whatever.

"Nobody worth bothering about—as usual," he grumbled. For the day was so lovely, the harbour of Algiers so glittering with light and heat, his own mood so full of holiday enterprise—it was his first vacation after a good many months on a hard exhausting job—that he could hardly believe he really looked to the rest of the world as he had seen himself that morning: a critical cautious man of forty-six, whom nobody could possibly associate with the romantic or the unexpected.

"Usual luck; best I can hope for is to keep my cabin to myself for the rest of the cruise," he pondered philosophically, hugging himself at the prospect of another fortnight of sea-solitude before—well, before the fateful uncertainty of what awaited him just beyond the voyage…

"And I haven't even seen her for five years!" he reflected, with that feeling of hollowness about the belt which prolonged apprehension gives.

Passengers were still climbing the ship's side, and he leaned and looked again, this time with contracted eyes and a slight widening of his cautious nostrils. His attention had been drawn to a young woman—a slip of a girl, rather—with a round flushed baby on her shoulder, a baby much too heavy for her slender frame, but on whose sleepy countenance her own was bent with a gaze of solicitude which wrung a murmur of admiration from Boyne.

"Jove—if a fellow was younger!"

Men of forty-six do not gasp as frequently at the sight of a charming face as they did at twenty; but when the sight strikes them it hits harder. Boyne had not been looking for pretty faces but for interesting ones, and it rather disturbed him to be put off his quest by anything so out of his present way as excessive youth and a rather pathetic grace.

"Lord—the child's ever so much too heavy for her. Must have been married out of the nursery: damned cad, not to—"

The young face mounting toward him continued to bend over the baby, the girl's frail shoulders to droop increasingly under their burden, as the congestion ahead of her forced the young lady to maintain her slanting position halfway up the liner's flank.

A nurse in correct bonnet and veil touched her shoulder, as if offering to relieve her; but she only tightened her arm about the child. Whereupon the nurse, bending, lifted in her own arms a carrot-headed little girl of four or five in a gaudy gipsy-like frock.

"What—another? Why, it's barbarous; it ought to be against the law! The poor little thing—"

Here Boyne's attention was distracted by the passage of a deck-steward asking where he wished his chair placed. He turned to attend to this matter, and saw, on the chair next to his, a tag bearing the name: "Mrs. Cliffe Wheater."

Cliffe Wheater—Cliffe Wheater! What an absurd name … and somehow he remembered to have smiled over it in the same way years before… But, good Lord, of course! How long he must have lived out of the world, on his engineering jobs, first in the Argentine, then in Australia, and since the war in Egypt—how out of step he must have become with the old social dance of New York, not to situate Cliffe Wheater at once as the big red-faced Chicagoan who was at Harvard with him, and who had since become one of the showiest of New York millionaires. Cliffe Wheater, of course—the kind of fellow who was spoken of, respectfully, as having "interests" everywhere: Boyne recalled having run across Wheater "interests" even in the Argentine. But the man himself, at any rate since his marriage, was reputed to be mainly interested in Ritz Hotels and powerful motorcars. Hadn't he a steam-yacht too? He had a wife, at any rate—it was all coming back to Boyne: he had married, it must be sixteen or seventeen years ago, that good-looking Mervin girl, of New York—Joyce Mervin—whom Boyne himself had danced and flirted with through a remote winter not long after Harvard. Joyce Mervin: she had written to him to announce her engagement, had enclosed a little snap-shot of herself with "Goodbye, Martin," scrawled across it. Had she rather fancied Boyne—Boyne wondered? He had been too poor to try to find out… And now he and she were going to be deck-neighbours for a fortnight on the magic seas between Algiers and Venice! He remembered the face he had contemplated that morning in his shaving-glass, and thought: "Very likely she hasn't changed a bit; smart women last so wonderfully; but she won't know me." The idea was half depressing and half reassuring. After all, it would enable him to take his observations—and to have his deck-chair moved, should the result be disappointing.

The ship had shaken her insect-like flock of tugs and sailing-boats off her quivering flanks; and now the great blue level spread before her as she headed away toward the morning. Boyne got a book, pulled his hat over his nose, and stretched out in his deck-chair, awaiting Mrs. Wheater…

"This will do—yes, I think this will do," said a fluty immature voice, a girl's voice, at his elbow. Boyne tilted his head back, and saw, a few steps off, the slim girl who had carried the heavy baby up the gangway.

The girl paused, glanced along the line of seats in his direction, nodded to a deck-steward, and disappeared into the doorway of a "luxe" suite farther forward. In the moment of her pause Boyne caught a small pale face with anxiously wrinkled brows above brown eyes of tragic width, and round red lips which, at the least provocation, might bubble with healthy laughter. It did not occur to him now to ask if the face were pretty or not—there were too many things going on in it for that.

As she entered her cabin he heard her say, in her firm quick voice, to some one within: "Nanny, has Chip had his Benger? Who's got the cabin with Terry?"

"What a mother!" Boyne thought, still wondering if it were not much too soon for that maternal frown to have shadowed her young forehead.

"Beg pardon, sir—there's a new passenger booked for your cabin." The steward was passing with a couple of good-looking suit-cases and a bundle of rugs.

"Oh, damn—well, it had to happen!" Boyne, with a groan, stood up and followed the steward. "Who is it, do you know?"

"Couldn't say, sir. Wheater—Wheater's the name."

Well, at last a coincidence! Mrs. Cliffe Wheater's chair was next to his own, and his old Harvard class-mate was to share his cabin with him. Boyne, if not wholly pleased, was at least faintly excited and interested by this unexpected combination of circumstances.

He turned, and saw a little boy standing in the door of the cabin, mustering him with a dispassionate eye.

"All right—this will do," said the boy quietly. He spoke in a slightly high-pitched voice, neither querulous nor effeminate, but simply thin and a little tired, like his slender person. Boyne guessed him to be about eleven years old, and too tall and reasonable for his age—another evidence of the physical frailty betrayed by his voice. He was neatly dressed in English school-boy clothes, but he did not look English, he looked cosmopolitan: as if he had been sharpened and worn down by contact with too many different civilizations—or perhaps merely with too many different hotels.

He continued to examine Boyne, critically but amicably; then he remarked: "I'm in here, you know."

"You are? I thought it was to be your father!"

"Oh, did you? That's funny. Do you know my father?"

"I used to. In fact, I think we were at Harvard together."

Young master Wheater looked but faintly interested. "Would you mind telling me your name?" he asked, as if acquitting himself of a recognized social duty.

"My name's Boyne: Martin Boyne. But it's so long since your father and I met that he wouldn't have been likely to speak of me."

Mr. Wheater's son reflected. "Well, I shouldn't have been likely to be there if he did. We're not so awfully much with father," he added, with a seeming desire for accuracy.

A little girl of his own age and size, but whose pale fairness had a warmer glow, had advanced a step or two into the cabin, and now slipped an arm through his.

"I've been hunting for you everywhere," she said. "Judith sent me."

"Well, here's where I am: with this gentleman."

The little girl lifted her deeply fringed lids and bent on Boyne the full gaze of two large and accomplished gray eyes. Then she pursed up her poppy-red lips and looked at her brother. "For a whole fortnight—Terry, can you bear it?"

The boy flushed and pulled away his arm. "Shut up, you ass!" he admonished her.

"Do let me ask Judith to tip the steward—"

He swung about on her angrily. "Will you shut up when I tell you to? This gentleman's a friend of father's."

"Oh—" the little girl murmured; and then added, after another fringed flash at Boyne: "He doesn't look it."

"Blanca—will you please get out of here?"

She wavered, her bright lips trembled, and she turned in confusion and ran down the deck. "She doesn't know anything—she's only my twin," said Terry Wheater apologetically.

He completed his scrutiny of the cabin, looked a little wistfully at Boyne, and then turned and sauntered away after the delinquent.

Boyne returned to the deck and his book; but though the latter interested him, it did not prevent his keeping watch, out of the tail of his eye, on the empty chair which bore Mrs. Wheater's name. His curiosity to see her had grown immensely since his encounter with her son and daughter—in the latter of whom he discovered, as the past grew clearer to him, a likeness to her mother at once close and remote. Joyce Mervin—yes, she had had those same poppy-red lips in a face of translucent pallor, and that slow skilful way of manœuvring her big eyes; but her daughter seemed made of a finer frailer stuff, as if a good deal of Mrs. Wheater's substance had been left out of her, and a drop of some rarer essence added. "Perhaps it's because the child is only half a person—there was always too much of her mother," Boyne thought, remembering Joyce Mervin as being rather aimlessly abundant. "In such cases, it's probably enough to be a twin," he decided.

But how puzzling it all was! Terry was much less like Cliffe Wheater than his twin was like their mother. There too—even more so in the boy's case—quality seemed to have replaced quantity. Boyne felt, he hardly knew why, that something obvious and almost vulgar might lurk under Blanca's fastidiousness; but her brother could never be anything but distinguished. What a pity such a charming lad should look so ill!

Suddenly, from the forward suite, the young lady with the baby emerged. She had her sleepy cherub by the hand and was guiding him with motherly care along the deck. She sank into the chair next to Boyne's, pulled the baby up on her knee, and signalled to a steward to draw a rug over her feet. Then she leaned back with a sigh of satisfaction.

"This is something like, eh, Chip?" she said, in her gay fluty voice.

Chip laughed a genial well-fed laugh and fingered the brim of her hat appreciatively. It was evident that the two had the very highest opinion of each other.

Chapter 2

It was none of Boyne's business to tell his new neighbour that the chair she had chosen was Mrs. Cliffe Wheater's; the less so as she might (he decided on closer inspection) turn out to be a governess or other dependent of that lady's. But no (after another look); she was too young for the part, even if she had looked or acted it—and she didn't. Her tone in addressing her invisible companions was that of command, not subservience: they were the nurses and governesses, not she. Probably she had taken Mrs. Wheater's chair because it was one of the few empty ones left, and was well aware that she might presently be asked to evacuate it. That was just what Boyne would have liked to spare her; he didn't see Joyce Wheater—the Joyce he had known—yielding her seat without a battle.

"I beg your pardon; but in case somebody should claim this chair, I might find another for you before the whole front row is taken up."

The phrase sounded long and clumsy, but it was out before he had time to polish it. He had to hear her voice again, and also to get her to turn her eyes his way. She did so now, with perfect composure. Evidently she was not surprised at his addressing her, but only at the fact he imparted.

"Isn't this my chair?" She reached for the label and examined it. "Yes; I thought it was."

"Oh, I'm sorry—"

"That's all right. They are filling up, aren't they?"

Her brown eyes, under deep lashes like Blanca's, rested on him in polite acknowledgment of his good will; but he was too bewildered to see anything but a starry blur.

Mrs. Cliffe Wheater, then—this child? Well, after all, why not? His Mrs. Cliffe Wheater she obviously could not be; but in these days of transient partnerships there was no reason for expecting it. The Wheaters he knew must have been married nearly twenty years ago; and Cliffe Wheater, in the interval, had made money enough to treat himself to half-a-dozen divorces and remarriages, with all the attendant outlay. "No more to him than doing over a new house—good deal less than running a steam-yacht," Boyne half enviously reflected.

Yes; his neighbour was obviously a later—was the latest—Mrs. Wheater; probably two or three removes from poor Joyce. Though why he should think of her as poor Joyce, when in all probability she had moved off across the matrimonial chess-board at the same rate of progression as her first husband… Well, at any rate, if this was a new Mrs. Cliffe Wheater, Boyne might insinuate himself into her field of vision as an old friend of her husband's; a sufficient plea, he argued, between passengers on a pleasure-cruise. Only, remembering Terry's cool reception of his father's name, he hesitated. These modern matrimonial tangles were full of peril to the absentee…

The question was answered by the appearance of Blanca, who came dancing toward them like a butterfly waltzing over a bed of thyme.

As she approached, the young lady at Boyne's side said severely: "Child! Why haven't you got on your coat? Go and ask Scopy for it at once. The wind is cold."

Blanca leaned against her with a caressing gesture.

"All right." But instead of moving she slanted her gaze again toward Boyne. "He says he used to know father," she imparted.

The young lady turned her head also, and Boyne felt the mysterious weight of her eyes upon his face. "How funny!" was her simple comment. It seemed to strike all the group with equal wonder that Martin Boyne should be on speaking terms with its chief. "Not smart enough, I suppose; no Bond Street suit-cases," he grumbled to himself, remembering the freight of costly pigskin which had followed his neighbour up the gangway.

The latter's attention had already turned from him. "Blanca! I tell you to go and put on your coat. And see that Terry has his… Don't lean on me like that, child. Can't you see that Chip's asleep?"

She spoke a little wearily, almost irritably, Boyne thought; but as she bent over the child her little profile softened, melting into something puerile and appealing. "Hush!" she signalled; and Blanca, obedient, tiptoed off.

Boyne, at this, invoking Uncle Edward, patron saint of the adventurous, risked a playful comment. "You've got them wonderfully well in hand."

She smiled. "Oh, they're very good children; all except … Zinnie—!" she screamed; and Boyne, following her horrified glance, saw a stark naked little figure with a shock of orange-coloured hair and a string of amber beads capering toward them to the wonder and delight of the double row of spectators in the deck-chairs.

In a flash the young lady was on her feet, and Boyne was pressing a soap-scented bundle to his breast. "Hold Chip!" she commanded. "Oh, that little red devil!" She sped down the deck and catching up the orange-headed child gave her a violent shaking. "You'll be catching cold next, you wretch," she admonished her, as if this were the head and front of the child's offending; and having pushed the culprit into the arms of a pursuing nurse she regained her seat.

"How nicely you've held him! He's still asleep." She received back the hot baby, all relaxed and slumber-scented, and the eyes she turned on Boyne were now full of a friendly intimacy—and much younger, he thought, than Blanca's. "Did you ever mind a baby before?" she asked.

"Yes; but not such a good one—nor so heavy."

She shone with pride. "Isn't he an armful? He's nearly two pounds heavier than most children of two. When Beechy was his age she weighed only … "

"Beechy?" Boyne interrupted. "I thought you called her Zinnie."

"Zinnie? Oh, but she's not the same as Beechy." She laughed with something of a child's amusement at the ignorance of the grown up. "Beechy's a step—but you haven't seen the other steps," she reminded herself. "I wonder where on earth they are?"

"The steps?" he echoed, in deeper bewilderment.

"Bun and Beechy. They only half belong to us, and so does Zinnie. They're all three step-children. But we're just as devoted to them as if they were altogether ours; except when Bun is naughty. Bun is my only naughty child!—oh, do hold Chip again!" she exclaimed, and once more Boyne became the repository of that heap of rosy slumber.

"There's Bun now—and I never trust him when he's by himself! I can't," she wailed, as a sturdy little brown boy in a scarlet jumper came crawling down the deck on all fours, emitting strange animal barks and crowings. "He's going to do his menagerie-tricks. Oh, dear—And he can't, with the ship rolling like this. His mother was a lion-tamer. But he'll hurt himself, I know he will—oh, Scopy! Yes; do take him… "

A gaunt narrow-chested lady with a face hewn into lines of kindly resolution, and a faded straw hat cocked sideways on her blown gray hair, had appeared in Bun's wake and set him on his feet as firmly as the rolling deck permitted. His face, dusky with wrath, squared itself for a howl; but at that moment a very small brown girl, with immense agate-coloured eyes and a thicket of dark curls, dashed out of a state-room, and hurried to him with outstretched arms. Instantly the offender's wrath turned to weeping, and the two little creatures fell dramatically on each other's bosoms, while the governess, unmoved by this display of feeling, steered them sternly back to their quarters.

The young lady at Boyne's side leaned back with a laugh. "Isn't Scopy funny? She can't bear it when Bun falls on Beechy's neck like that. She calls it 'so foreign and unmanly.' And of course they are foreign … they're Italian … but I'm too thankful that Beechy has such an influence over Bun. If it weren't for her we should have our hands full with him." She hugged the sleep-drunk Chip to her bosom.

"You must have your hands rather full as it is—I mean even without Bun?" Boyne ventured, consumed by the desire to see farther into this nursery tangle, and follow its various threads back to the young creature at his side. "Travelling with them all like this—and without Wheater to help you out," he pushed on.

At this she shrugged a little. "Oh, he's not much at helping out; he loathes to travel with us," she said, slightingly yet not unkindly. Boyne was beginning to think that her detached view of human weaknesses was perhaps the most striking thing about her.

"But Terry helps—most wonderfully," she added, a smile of maternal tenderness lighting her small changeful face, in which so many things were always happening that Boyne had not yet had time to decide if it were pretty or just curiously loveable.

"My cabin-mate," Boyne smiled. "Yes; a big boy like that must be a comfort." He dared not say "a big son like that," for he could not believe that the girl at his side could be the mother of a tall lad of Terry's age. Yet she had distinctly not classed him among the "steps"! In his perplexity he ventured: "A chap of that age is always so proud of his mother."

She seemed to think that this needed consideration. "Well, I don't know that Terry's proud of Joyce, exactly—but he admires her, of course; we all do. She's so awfully handsome. I don't believe even Blanca is going to come up to her."

Joyce! Boyne caught at the familiar name as at a lifebelt. Evidently his old friend Joyce Mervin was still situated somewhere within the Wheater labyrinth. But where? And who was this young thing who gave her her Christian name so easily? Everything that seemed at first to enlighten him ended only by deepening his perplexity.

"Do you know that Joyce, as you call her, used to be a great friend of mine years ago?" There could be no harm, at least, in risking that.

"Oh, was she? How jolly! She says she looked exactly like Blanca then. Did she? Of course she's a little thick now—but not nearly as much so as she imagines. She does so fret about it. It's her great unhappiness."

Boyne laughed. "You mean she hasn't any worse ones?"

"Oh, no. Not now. They've been on a new honeymoon since Chip … haven't they, old Chippo?"

"They… ?" On a new honeymoon? Since Chip? Then the sleeping cherub was not the property of the girl at his side, but of Joyce Mervin … Joyce Wheater … Joyce Somebody … Oh, how he longed to ask: "Joyce who?"

This last step forward seemed really to have landed him in the heart of the labyrinth; the difficulty now was to find his way out again.

But the young lady's confidences seemed to invite his own. Or was it just that she had the new easy way with people? Very likely. Still, an old fogey out of the wilderness might be excused for taking it as something more—a sign of sympathy, almost an invitation to meet her fresh allusions with fresh questions.

"Yes; we were friends—really great friends for a winter … "

("That's long, for Joyce," said his neighbour parenthetically.)

"… such good friends that I should like to tell you my name: Martin Boyne—and to ask what your—"

"Oh—oh!!!" She shrilled it out so precipitately that it cut his last word in two. At first he could not guess the cause of this new disturbance; but in a moment he discovered the young Bun walking with bare feet and a cat-like agility along the backs of the outer row of deck-chairs, while their occupants ducked out of his way and laughed their approval of his skill.

"She was also a tight-rope dancer—his mother was," the girl flung back, leaping in Bun's direction. Having caught and cuffed him, and cuffed him again in answer to his furious squeals, she dragged him away to the firm dishevelled lady who had previously dealt with him. When she returned to her seat, pale and a little breathless, she looked as if her domestic cares sometimes weighed on her too heavily. She dropped down by Boyne with a sigh. "If ever you marry," she enjoined him ("And how does she know I never have?" he wondered), "don't you have any children—that's all I say! Do you wonder mother and father don't care to travel with the lot of us?"

Chapter 3

The luncheon-signal crashed in on this interrogation, and Boyne was left alone to make what he could of it. At the first sound of the gong his neighbour was on her feet, hardly heeding his suggestion that, if she had not already chosen her seat, they might meet at a table for two in the restaurant.

"Thanks a lot; but of course I lunch with my children." And he remembered with regret that their ocean-palace had a separate dining-room for youthful passengers.

"Dash it—I should have liked a few minutes' quiet talk with her."

Instead, he drifted back to his usual place at a table of waifs and strays like himself: an earnest lady in spectacles who was "preparing" Sicily; an elderly man who announced every morning: "I always say the bacon on these big liners is better than anything I can get at home"; and a pale clergyman whose parishioners had sent him on a holiday tour, and whose only definite idea was to refuse to visit catacombs. "I do so want to lead a pagan life just for once," he confided to Boyne, with an ascetic smile which showed, between racking coughs, his worn teeth and anæmic gums.

Luncheon over, Boyne hurried back to his corner, hoping to find the seat at his side already occupied; but it was empty, and empty it remained as the long blue day curved down imperceptibly toward evening.

"Father and mother don't care to travel with the lot of us," the girl had said.

"Father and mother"? That, as far as Boyne could make out, could mean only the Cliffe Wheaters, his old original Cliffe Wheaters, in their before-the-letter state, as it were. In that case the thin eager girl at his side would be their daughter, their eldest daughter, born probably soon after a marriage which, some thirteen or fourteen years later, had produced the sturdy and abundant Chip.

"Very unmodern, all that." It gave Boyne a more encouraging view of the conjugal state than he had lately held, and made him look forward with a lighter mind to meeting the lady who awaited him in the Dolomites—the lady he had not seen for five years. It must certainly be pleasant to be the parent of a large reliable baby like Chip…

But no sooner did he imagine that he had solved the puzzle of the Cliffe Wheaters than the image of the enigmatic trio, Zinnie, Bun and Beechy, disarranged his neat equation. The "steps"—who on earth were the "steps," and how and where did they fit into the family group which seemed, with Judith (hadn't they called her that?) at one end, and Chip at the other, to form its own unbroken circle? Miss Wheater, he remembered, had tossed him a few details about the two brown children, Bun and Beechy. "They're foreigners… Italians… " But if so, they belonged neither to Cliffe Wheater nor to his wife; certainly not to his wife, since Judith had added, in speaking of Bun: "His mother was a lion-tamer … " not as if using the term metaphorically, but as stating a plain social fact.

As for Zinnie, the little red devil, she remained wholly unaccounted for, and there was nothing in her clever impudent face, with its turned-up nose and freckled skin under the shock of orange hair, to suggest any blood-relationship to the small Italians. Zinnie appeared to be sharply and completely American—as American as Beechy and Bun were Italian, and much more so than the three elder Wheaters, who were all so rubbed down by cosmopolitan contacts. The "steps," in fact, had the definiteness of what the botanists call species, whereas Judith, Blanca and Terry were like exquisite garden hybrids. The harder Boyne stared into the problem the more obscure it became.

Even the least eventful sea-voyages lend themselves to favourable propinquities, and in the course of the afternoon the gray-haired lady whom the young Wheaters addressed as "Scopy" reappeared on deck, this time alone, and seemingly in quest of a seat. Boyne instantly pointed out the one next to his, and the lady, saying with an austere smile: "I believe ours are on the other side, but I can take this while Judith's resting," settled herself at his side in an attitude of angular precision.

As she did so she gave him a look of shy benevolence, and added: "I understand from Judith that you're a friend of her people."

Boyne eagerly acquiesced, and she went on to say what a comfort it was, when they were on one of these long treks with the children, to come across anybody who was a friend of their parents, and could be appealed to in an emergency. "Not that there's any particular reason at present; but it's a good deal of a responsibility for Judith to transport the whole party from Biskra to Venice, and we're always rather troubled about Terry. Even after four months at Biskra he hasn't picked up as we'd hoped… Always a little temperature in the evenings… " She sighed, and turned away her sturdy weather-beaten face, which looked like a cliff on whose top a hermit had built a precarious refuge—her hat.

"You're anxious about Terry? He does look a little drawn." Boyne hoped that if he adopted an easy old-friend tone she might be lured on from one confidence to another.

"Anxious? I don't like the word; and Judith wouldn't admit it. But we always have our eye on him, the dear boy—and our minds." She sighed again, and he saw that she had averted her head because her eyes were filling.

"It is, as you say, a tremendous responsibility for any one as young as Miss Wheater." He hesitated, and then added: "I can very nearly guess her age, for I used to see a good deal of both her parents before they were married."

It was a consolation to his self-esteem that the lady called "Scopy" took this with less flippancy than her young charges. It seemed distinctly interesting to her, and even reassuring, that Boyne should have been a friend of the Cliffe Wheaters at any stage in their career. "I only wish you'd gone on seeing them since," she said, with another of her sighs.

"Oh, our paths have been pretty widely divided; so much so that at first I didn't know whether … not till I saw Chip… "

"Ah, poor little Chipstone: he's our hope, our consolation." She looked down, and a faint brick-red blush crossed her face like sunset on granite. "You see, Terry being so delicate—as twins often are—Mr. Wheater was always anxious for another boy."

"Well, Chip looks like a pretty solid foundation to build one's hopes on."

She smiled a little bleakly, and murmured: "He's never given us a minute's trouble."

All this was deeply interesting to her hearer, but it left the three "steps" still unaccounted for; the "steps" of whom Judith had said that they were as much beloved as if they had been "altogether ours."

"Not a minute's trouble—I wish I could say as much of the others," his neighbour went on, yielding, as he had hoped she would, to the rare chance of airing her grievances.

"The others? You mean—"

"Yes: those foreign children, with their scenes and their screams and their play-acting, I shall never get used to them—never!"

"But Zinnie: Zinnie's surely not foreign?" Boyne lured her on.

"Foreign to our ways, certainly; really more so than the two others, who, on the father's side… " She lowered her voice, and cast a prudent eye about her, before adding: "You've heard of Zinnia Lacrosse, the film star, I suppose?"

Boyne racked his mind, which was meagrely peopled with film stars, and finally thought he had. "Didn't she marry some racing man the other day—Lord Somebody?"

"I don't know what her last enormity has been. One of them was marrying Mr. Wheater—and having Zinnie… "

Marrying Wheater—Zinnia Lacrosse had married Cliffe Wheater? But then—but then—who on earth was Chipstone's mother? Boyne felt like crying out: "Don't pile up any more puzzles! Give me time—give me time!" but his neighbour was now so far launched in the way of avowal that she went on, hardly heeding him more than if his face had been the narrow grating through which she was pouring her woes: "It's inconceivable, but it's so. Mr. Wheater married Zinnia Lacrosse. And Zinnie is their child. The truth is, he wasn't altogether to blame; I've always stood up for Mr. Wheater. What with his feeling so low after Mrs. Wheater left him, and his wanting another boy so dreadfully … with all those millions to inherit… "

But Boyne held up a drowning hand. Mrs. Wheater had left Wheater? But when—but how—but why? He implored the merciless narrator to tell him one thing at a time—only one; all these sudden appearances of new people and new children were so perplexing to a man who'd lived for years and years in the wilderness…

"The wilderness? The real wilderness is the world we live in; packing up our tents every few weeks for another move… And the marriages just like tents—folded up and thrown away when you've done with them." But she saw, at least, that to gain his sympathy she must have his understanding, and after another cautious glance up and down the deck she settled down to elucidate the mystery and fill in the gaps. Of course, she began, Judith having told her that he—Mr. Boyne was the name? Thanks. Hers was Miss Scope, Horatia Scope (she knew the children called her "Horror Scope" behind her back, but she didn't mind)—well, Judith having told her that Mr. Boyne was a friend of her parents, Miss Scope had inferred that he had kept up with the successive episodes of the couple's agitated history; but now that she saw he didn't know, she would try to make it clear to him—if one could use the word in speaking of such a muddled business. It took a great deal of explaining—as he would see—but if any one could enlighten him she could, for she'd come to the Wheaters' as Judith's governess before Blanca and Terry were born: before the first, no, the second serious quarrel, she added, as if saying: "Before the Hittite invasion."

Quarrels, it seemed, there had been many since; she had lost count, she confessed; but the bad, the fatal, one had happened when Mrs. Wheater had met her Prince, the wicked Buondelmonte who was the father of Bun and Beechy: Beatrice and Astorre Buondelmonte, as the children were really named.

Here Boyne, submerged, had to hold up his hand again. But if Zinnie was Wheater's child, he interrupted, were Bun and Beechy Mrs. Wheater's? And whose, in the name of pity, was Chipstone? Well… Miss Scope said she understood his wonder, his perplexity; it did him credit, she declared, to be too high-minded to take in the whole painful truth at a glance. No; Bun and Beechy, thank heaven, were not Mrs. Wheater's children; they were the offspring of the unscrupulous Prince Buondelmonte and a vile woman—a circus performer, she believed—whom he had married and deserted before poor Mrs. Wheater became infatuated with him. ("Infatuated" was a horrid word, she knew; but Mrs. Wheater used it herself in speaking of that unhappy time.)

Well—Mrs. Wheater, in her madness, had insisted on leaving her husband in order to marry Prince Buondelmonte. Mr. Wheater, though she had behaved so badly, was very chivalrous about it, and "put himself in the wrong" (Boyne rejoiced at the phrase) so that his wife might divorce him; but he insisted on his right to keep Terry with him, and on an annual visit of four months from Judith and Blanca; and as there was a big fight over the alimony Mrs. Wheater had to give in about the children—and that was when Judith's heart-break began. Even as a little thing, Miss Scope explained, Judith couldn't bear it when her parents quarrelled. She had had to get used to that, alas; but what she couldn't get used to was, after the divorce and the two remarriages, being separated from Terry, and bundled up every year with Blanca, and sent from pillar to post, first to one Palace Hotel and then to another, wherever one parent or the other happened to be… It was that, Miss Scope thought, which had given the grown-up look to her eyes…

Luckily Mrs. Wheater's delusion didn't last long; the Prince hadn't let it. Before they'd been married a year he'd taken care to show her what he was. Poor Judith, who was alone with her mother during the last dreadful months, knew something of that. But Miss Scope realised that she mustn't digress, but just stick to the outline of her story till it became a little clearer to Mr. Boyne…

Well—when Mrs. Wheater's eyes were opened, and the final separation from the Prince took place, she (Mrs. Wheater) was so sorry for Beatrice and Astorre—there was really nobody kinder than Mrs. Wheater—that she kept the poor little things with her, and had gone on keeping them ever since. Their father had of course been only too thankful to have them taken off his hands—and their miserable mother too. Here Miss Scope paused for breath, and hoped that Mr. Boyne was beginning to grasp—

"Yes; beginning; but—Chipstone?" he patiently insisted.

"Oh, Chip; dear Chip's a Wheater all right! The very image of his father, don't you think? But I see that I haven't yet given you all the threads; there are so many… Where was I? Oh, about Mrs. Wheater's separation. You know there's no divorce in Italy, and she thought she was tied to the Prince for life. But luckily her lawyers found out that he had been legally married—in some Italian consulate at the other end of the world—to the mother of Bun and Beechy; and as the woman was still alive, the Prince's marriage with Mrs. Wheater had been bigamous, and was immediately annulled, and she became Mrs. Wheater again—"

"And then?"

"Then she was dreadfully miserable about it all, and Mr. Wheater was miserable too, because in the meanwhile he'd found out about the horror he'd married, and was already suing for a divorce. And Judith, who was thirteen by that time, and as wise and grown up as she is now, begged and entreated her father and mother to meet and talk things over, and see if they couldn't come together again, so that the children would never have to be separated, and sent backward and forward like bundles—"

"She did that? That child?"

"Judith's never been a child—there was no time. So she got Mr. and Mrs. Wheater together, and they were both sore and unhappy over their blunders, and realised what a mess they'd made—and finally they decided to try again, and they were remarried about three years ago; and then Chip was born, and of course that has made everything all right again—for the present."

"The present?" Boyne gasped; and the governess smoothed back her blown hair, and turned the worn integrity of her face on his.

"If I respect the truth, how can I say more than 'the present'? But really I put it that way only for fear … for fear of the Fates overhearing me… Everything's going as smoothly as can be; and we should all be perfectly happy if it weren't for poor Terry, whose health never seems to be what it should… Mr. and Mrs. Wheater adore Chip, and are very fond of the other children; and Judith is almost sure it will last this time."

Miss Scope broke off, and looked away again from Boyne. Her "almost" wrung his heart, and he wanted to put his hand out, and clasp the large gray cotton glove clenched on her knee. But instead he only said: "If anything can make it last, you and Judith will"; and the governess answered: "Oh, it's all Judith. And she has all the children behind her. They say they refuse to be separated again. Even the little ones say so. They're much more attached to each other than you'd think, to hear them bickering and wrangling. And they all worship Judith. Even the two foreigners do."

Chapter 4

The children, at first, had been unanimously and immovably opposed to going to Monreale.

Long before the steamer headed for Palermo the question was debated by them with a searching thoroughness. Judith, who had never been to Sicily, had consulted Boyne as to the most profitable way of employing the one day allotted to them, and after inclining to Segesta, Boyne, on finding that everybody, including Chip, was to be of the party, suggested Monreale as more accessible.

"And awfully beautiful too?" Judith was looking at him with hungry ignorant eyes.

"One of the most beautiful things in the world. The mosaics alone… "

She clasped ecstatic hands. "We must go there! I've seen so little—"

"Why, I thought you'd travelled from one end of Europe to the other."

"That doesn't show you anything but sleeping-cars and Palace Hotels, does it? Mother and father never even have a guide-book; they just ask the hall-porter where to go. And then something always seems to prevent their going. You must show me everything, everything."

"Well, we'll begin with Monreale."

But the children took a different view. Miss Scope, unluckily, had found an old Baedeker on the steamer, and refreshing her mind with hazy reminiscences gleaned from former pupils, had rediscovered the name of a wonderful ducal garden containing ever so many acres of orange-trees always full of flowers and fruit. Her old pupils had gone there, she recalled, and been allowed by the gardeners to pick up from the ground as many oranges as they could carry away.

At this the children, a close self-governing body, instantly voted as one man for the Giardino Aumale. Boyne had already observed that, in spite of Judith's strong influence, there were moments when she became helpless against their serried opposition, and in the present case argument and persuasion entirely failed. At length Terry, evidently wishing, as the man of the party, to set the example of reasonableness, remarked that Judith, who had all the bother of looking after them, ought to go wherever she chose. Bun hereupon squared his mouth for a howl, and Blanca observed tartly that by always pretending to give up you generally got what you wanted. "Well, you'd better try then," Terry retorted severely, and the blood rose under his sister's delicate skin as if he had struck her.

"Terry! What a beast you are! I didn't mean—"

Meanwhile Beechy, melting into tears at the sight of Bun's distress, was hugging his tumbled head against her breast with murmurs of: "Zitto, zitto, carissimo! Cuor mio!" and glaring angrily at Judith and Terry.

"Well, I want to go where there's zoranges to eat," said Zinnie, in her sharp metallic American voice, with which she might almost have peeled the fruit. "—'r if I don't, I want something a lot better'nstead, n' I mean to have it!"

Boyne laughed, and Judith murmured despairingly: "We'd better go to their orange-garden."

"Look here," Terry interposed, "the little ones are mad to hear the end of that story of the old old times, about the two children who'd never seen a motor. They're all so fed up with airships and machinery and X rays and wireless; and you know you promised to go on with that story some day. Why couldn't we go to the place you want to see, and you'll promise and swear to finish the story there, and to have chocolates for tea?"

"Oh—and oranges; I'll supply the oranges," Boyne interposed. "There's a jolly garden next to the cloister, and I'll persuade the guardian to let us in, and we'll have a picnic tea there."

"An'masses of zoranges?" Zinnie stipulated, with a calculating air, while Beechy surreptitiously dried Bun's tears on her crumpled pinafore, and Bun, heartlessly forsaking her to turn handsprings on the deck, shrieked out: "Noranges! Noranges! NORANGES!"

"Oh, very well; I knew—" Blanca murmured, shooting her gray glance toward Boyne; and Judith, lifting up Chip, triumphantly declared: "He says he wants to go to Monreale."

"That settles it, of course," said Blanca, with resigned eyelids.

A wordy wrangle having arisen between Zinnie, Beechy and Bun as to whether the fruit for which they clamoured should be called zoranges or noranges, Judith and Miss Scope took advantage of the diversion to settle the details of the expedition with Boyne, and the next morning, when the steamer lay to off Palermo, the little party, equipped and eager, headed the line of passengers for the tug.

Boyne, stretched out at length on a stone bench in the sun, lay listening with half-closed eyes to Judith's eager plaintive voice. He had bribed the custodian to let them pass out of the cloister into the lavender-scented cathedral garden drowsing on its warm terrace above the orange-orchards. Far off across the plain the mountains descended in faint sapphire gradations to the denser sapphire of the sea, along which the domed and towered city gleamed uncertainly. And here, close by, sat Judith Wheater in the sun, the children heaped at her knee, and Scopy and Nanny, at a discreet distance, knitting, and nursing the tea-basket. Judith's voice went on: "But when Polycarp and Lullaby drove home in the victoria with the white horse to their mamma's palace they found that the zebra door-mat had got up and was eating all the flowers in the drawing-room vases, and the big yellow birds on the wall-paper were all flying about, and making the most dreadful mess scattering seeds about the rooms. But the most wonderful thing was that the cuckoo from the nursery clock was gone too, so that the nurses couldn't tell what time it was, and when the children ought to be put to bed and to get up again… "

"Oh, how perfectly lovely," chanted Bun, and Beechy chorused: "Lovelly, lovelly… "

"Not at all," said Judith severely. "It was the worst thing that had happened to them yet, for the cook didn't know what time it was either, and nobody in the house could tell her, so there was no breakfast ready; and the cook just went off for a ride on the zebra, because she had no carriage of her own, and she said there was nothing else to do."

"Why didn't they tell their father'n'mother?" Zinnie queried in a practical tone.

"Because they'd got new ones, who didn't know about the cuckoo either, I guess," said Bun with authority.

"Then why didn't the children go with their old fathers an' mothers?" Zinnie inserted.

"Because their old mother's friend, Sally Money, wasn't big enough … big enough … big enough … for her to take them all with her… " Bun broke off, visibly puzzled as to what was likely to follow.

"Big enough to take them all on her back and carry them away with her. But I daresay the new father and mother would have been all right," Judith pursued, "if only the children had been patient and known how to treat them; only just at first they didn't; and besides, at the time I am telling you about, they happened to be away travelling—"

"Then why didn't the children telephone to them to come back?"

"Because there weren't any telephones in those days."

"No telephones? Does it say so in the hist'ry books?" snapped Zinnie, sceptical.

"Course it does, you silly. Why, when Scopy was little," Terry reminded them, "she lived in a house where there wasn't any telephone."

Beechy, ever tender-hearted, immediately prepared to cry at the thought of Scopy's privation; but Scopy interpolated severely: "Now, Beatrice, don't be foreign—" and the story-teller went on: "So there was no way whatever for them to get any breakfast, and—"

"Oh, I know, I know! They starved to death, poverini!" Beechy lamented, promptly transferring her grief to another object, and flinging her little brown arms heavenward in an agony of participation.

"Not just yet. For they met on the edge of the wood—"

("What wood? There wasn't any wood before," said Zinnie sharply.)

"No, but there was one now; for all the trees and flowers from the wall-papers had come off the wall, and gone out into the garden to grow, so that the big yellow birds should have a wood to build their nests in, and the zebras should—"

"Zebras! There was only one zebra." This, sardonically, from a grown-up looking, indifferent Blanca.

"Stupid! He'd been married already and had a lot of perfectly lovely norphans and three dear little steps like us, and Mrs. Zebra she had a big family too, no, she had two big families," Zinnie announced, enumerating the successive groups on her small dimpled fingers.

"Oh, how lovely for the zebra! Then all the little zebras stayed together always afterward—f'rever and ever. Say they did—oh, Judith, say it!" Beechy clamoured.

"Of course they did. (Zinnie, you mustn't call Blanca stupid.) But all this time Polycarp and Lullaby were starving, because the clock had stopped and the cook had gone out on the zebra… "

"And they were starving—slowly starving to death … " Zinnie gloated.

"Yes; but on the edge of the wood whom did they meet but a great big tall gentleman with a mot—no, I mean a pony-carriage… "

"What's a pony?"

"A little horse about as big as Bun—"

("Oh, oh—I'm a pony!" shouted Bun, kicking and neighing.)

"And the pony-carriage was full—absolutely brim full of—what do you think?" Judith concluded, her question drowned in a general cry of "Oranges! No, noranges—zoranges!!!" from the leaping scrambling group before whom, at the dramatic moment, Boyne had obligingly uncorded his golden bales, while Miss Scope and Nanny murmured: "Now, children, children—now—"

"And this is our chance," said Boyne, "to make a dash for the cathedral."

He slipped his hand through Judith's arm, and drew her across the cloister and into the great echoing basilica. At first, after their long session on the sun-drenched terrace, the place seemed veiled in an impenetrable twilight. But gradually the tremendous walls and spandrils began to glow with their own supernatural radiance, the solid sunlight of gold and umber and flame-coloured mosaics, against which figures of saints, prophets, kings and sages stood out in pale solemn hues. Boyne led the girl toward one of the shafts of the nave, and they sat down on its projecting base.

"Now from here you can see—"

But he presently perceived that she could see nothing. Her little profile was studiously addressed to the direction in which he pointed, and her head thrown back so that her lips were parted, and her long lashes drew an upward curve against her pale skin; but nothing was happening in the face which was usually the theatre of such varied emotions.

She sat thus for a long time, and he did not move or speak again. Finally she turned to him, and said in a shy voice (it was the first time he had noticed any shyness in her): "I suppose I'm much more ignorant than you could possibly have imagined."

"You mean that you don't particularly care for all this?"

She lowered her voice to answer: "I believe all those big people up there frighten me a little." And she added: "I'm glad I didn't bring Chip."

"Child!" He let his hand fall on hers with a faint laugh. What a child she became as soon as she was away from the other children!

"But I do want to admire it, you know," she went on earnestly, "because you do, and Scopy says you know such a lot about everything."

"It's not a question of knowing—" he began; and then broke off. For wasn't it, after all, exactly that? How many thousand threads of association, strung with stored images of the eye and brain, memories of books, of pictures, of great names and deeds, ran between him and those superhuman images, tracing a way from his world to theirs? Yes; it had been stupid of him to expect that a child of fifteen or sixteen, brought up in complete ignorance of the past, and with no more comprehension than a savage of the subtle and allusive symbolism of art, should feel anything in Monreale but the oppression of its awful unreality. And yet he was disappointed, for he was already busy at the masculine task of endowing the woman of the moment with every quality which made life interesting to himself.

"Woman—but she's not a woman! She's a child." His thinking of her as anything else was the crowning absurdity of the whole business. Obscurely irritated with himself and her, he stood up, turning his back impatiently on the golden abyss of the apse. "Come along; it's chilly here after our sun-bath. Gardens are best, after all."

In the doorway she paused a moment and sent her gaze a little wistfully down the mighty perspective they were leaving. "Some day, I know, I shall want to come back here," she said.

"Oh, well, we'll come back together," he replied perfunctorily.

But outside in the sunlight, with the children leaping about her, and guiding her with joyful cries toward the outspread tea-things, she was instantly woman again—gay, competent, composed, and wholly mistress of the situation…

Yes; decidedly, the more Boyne saw of her the more she perplexed him, the more difficult he found it to situate her in time and space. He did not even know how old she was—somewhere between fifteen and seventeen, he conjectured—nor had he as yet made up his mind if she were pretty. In the cathedral, just now, he had thought her almost plain, with the dull droop of her mouth, her pale complexion which looked dead when unlit by gaiety, her thick brown hair, just thick and just brown, without the magic which makes some women's hair as alive as their lips, and her small impersonal nose, a nose neither perfectly drawn like Blanca's nor impudently droll like Zinnie's. The act of thus cataloguing her seemed to reduce her to a bundle of negatives; yet here in the sunshine, her hat thrown off her rumpled hair, and all the children scrambling over her, her mouth became a flame, her eyes fountains of laughter, her thin frail body a quiver of light—he didn't know how else to put it. Whatever she was, she was only intermittently; as if her body were the mere vehicle of her moods, the projection of successive fears, hopes, ardours, with hardly any material identity of its own. Strange, he mused, that such an imponderable and elusive creature should be the offspring of the two solid facts he recalled the Cliffe Wheaters as being. For a reminder of Joyce Mervin as he had known her, tall, vigorous and substantial, one must turn to Blanca, not Judith. If Blanca had not had to spare a part of herself for the making of Terry she would have been the reproduction of her mother. But Judith was like a thought, a vision, an aspiration—all attributes to which Mrs. Cliffe Wheater could never have laid claim. And Boyne, when the tired and sleepy party were piled once more into the motor, had not yet decided what Judith looked like, and still less if he really thought her pretty.

He fell asleep that night composing a letter to the lady in the Dolomites. "… what you would think. A strange little creature who changes every hour, hardly seems to have any personality of her own except when she's mothering her flock. Then she's extraordinary: playmate, mother and governess all in one; and the best of each in its way. As for her very self, when she's not with them, you grope for her identity and find an instrument the wind plays on, a looking-glass that reflects the clouds, a queer little sensitive plate, very little and very sensitive—" and with a last flash of caution, just as sleep overcame him, he added: "Unluckily not in the least pretty."

Chapter 5

"I'm so much interested in your picturesque description of the little-girl-mother (sounds almost as nauseating as 'child-wife,' doesn't it?) who is conducting that heterogeneous family across Europe, while the parents are jazzing at Venice. What an instance of modern manners; no, not manners—there are none left—but customs! I'm sure if I saw the little creature I should fall in love with her—as you are obviously doing. Luckily you'll be parting soon, or I should expect to see you arrive here with the girl-bride of the movies and a tribe of six (or is it seven?) adopted children. Don't imagine, though, that in that case I should accept the post of governess." And then, p.s: "Of course she's awfully pretty, or you wouldn't have taken so much pains to say that she's not."

One of Rose Sellars's jolly letters: clever, understanding and humorous. Why did Boyne feel a sudden flatness in it? Something just a trifle mincing, self-conscious—prepared? Yes; if Mrs. Sellars excelled in one special art it was undoubtedly that of preparation. She led up to things—the simplest things—with the skill of a clever rider putting a horse at a five-barred gate. All her life had been a series of adaptations, arrangements, shifting of lights, lowering of veils, pulling about of screens and curtains. No one could arrange a room half so well; and she had arranged herself and her life just as skilfully. The material she had had to deal with was poor enough; in every way unworthy of her; but, as her clever hands could twist a scarf into a divan-cover, and ruffle a bit of paper into a lamp-shade, so she had managed, out of mediocre means, a mediocre husband, an ugly New York house, and a dull New York set, to make something distinguished, personal, almost exciting—so that, in her little world, people were accustomed to say "Rose Sellars" as a synonym for cleverness and originality.

Yes; she had had the art to do that, and to do it quietly, unobtrusively, by a touch here, a hint there, without ever reaching out beyond her domestic and social frame-work. Her originality, in the present day, lay in this consistency and continuity. It was what had drawn Boyne to her in the days of his big wanderings, when, returning from an arduous engineering job in Rumania or Brazil or Australia, he would find, in his ever-shifting New York, the one fixed pole of Mrs. Sellars's front door, always the same front door at the same number of the same street, with the same Whistler etchings and Sargent water-colours on the drawing-room walls, and the same quiet welcome to the same fireside.

In his homeless years that sense of her stability had appealed to him peculiarly: the way, each time he returned, she had simply added a little more to herself, like a rose unfurling another petal. A rose in full sun would have burst into quicker bloom; it was part of Mrs. Sellars's case that she had always, as Heine put it, been like a canary in a window facing north. Not due north, however, but a few points north by west; so that she caught, not the sun's first glow, but its rich decline. He could never think of her as having been really young, immaturely young, like this girl about whom they were exchanging humorous letters, and who, in certain other ways, had a precocity of experience so far beyond Mrs. Sellars's. But the question of a woman's age was almost always beside the point. When a man loved a woman she was always the age he wanted her to be; when he had ceased to, she was either too old for witchery or too young for technique. "And five years is too long a time," he summed it up again, with a faint return of the apprehension he always felt when he thought of his next meeting with Mrs. Sellars.

Five years was too long; and these five, in particular, had transformed the situation, and perhaps its heroine. It was a new Rose Sellars whom he was to meet. When they had parted she was still a wife—resigned, exemplary, and faithful in spite of his pleadings; now she was a widow. The word was full of disturbing implications, and Boyne had already begun to wonder how much of her attraction had been due to the fact that she was unattainable. It was all very well to say that he "wasn't that kind of man"—the kind to tire of a woman as soon as she could be had. That was all just words; in matters of sex and sentiment, as he knew, a man was a different kind of man in every case that presented itself. Only by going to the Dolomites to see her could he really discover what it was that he had found so haunting in Rose Sellars. So he was going.

"Mr. Boyne—could we have a quiet talk, do you think?"

Boyne, driven from the deck by the heat and glare, and the activities of the other passengers, was lying on his bed, book in hand, in a state of after-luncheon apathy. His small visitor leaned in the doorway, slender and gray-clad: Terry Wheater, with the faint pinkness on his cheek-bones, the brilliance in his long-lashed eyes, that made his honest boy's face at times so painfully beautiful.

"Why, of course, old man. Come in. You'll be better off here than on deck till it gets cooler."

Terry tossed aside his cap and dropped into the chair at Boyne's bedside. They had shared a cabin for nearly a fortnight, and reached the state of intimacy induced by such nearness when it does not result in hate; but Boyne had had very few chances to talk with the boy. Terry was always asleep when the older man turned in, and Boyne himself was up and out long before Terry, kept in bed by the vigilant Miss Scope, had begun his leisurely toilet. Boyne, by now, had formed a fairly clear idea of the characteristics of the various young Wheaters, but Terry was perhaps the one with whom he had spent the least time; and the boy's rather solemn tone, and grown-up phraseology, made him lay aside his book with a touch of curiosity.

"What can I do for you, Terry?"

"Persuade them that I ought to have a tutor."

"Them?"

"I mean the Wheaters—father and mother," Terry corrected himself. The children, Boyne knew, frequently referred to their parents by their surname. The habit of doing so, Miss Scope had explained, rose from the fact that, in the case of most of the playmates of their wandering life, the names "father" and "mother" had to be applied, successively or simultaneously, to so many different persons; indeed one surprising little girl with black curls and large pearl earrings, whom they had met the year before at Biarritz, had the habit of handing to each new playmate a typed table of her parents' various marriages and her own successive adoptions. "So they all do it now; that is, speak of their different sets of parents by their names. And my children have picked up the habit from the others, though in their own case, luckily, it's no longer necessary, now that their papa and mamma have come together again."

"I mean father and mother," Terry repeated. "Make them understand that I must be educated. There's no time to lose. And you could." His eyes were fixed feverishly—alas, too feverishly—on Boyne's, and his face had the air of precocious anxiety which sometimes made Judith look so uncannily mature.

"My dear chap—of course I'll do anything I can for you. But I don't believe I shall be seeing your people this time. I'm going to jump into the train the minute we get to Venice."

The boy's face fell. "You are? I'm sorry. And Judy will be awfully sold."

"That's very good of her—and of you. But you see—"

"Oh, I can see that a solid fortnight of the lot of us is a good deal for anybody," Terry acquiesced. "All the same, Judy and I did hope you'd stay in Venice for a day or two. We thought, you see, there were a good many things you could do for us."

Boyne continued to consider him thoughtfully. "I should be very glad if I could. But I'm afraid you overrate my influence. I haven't seen your parents for years. They'd hardly remember me."

"That's just it: you'd be a novelty," said Terry astutely.

"Well—if that's an inducement… Anyhow, you may be sure I'll do what I can … if I find I can alter my plans… "

"Oh, if you could! You see I've really never had anybody to speak for me. Scopy cuts no ice with them, and of course they think Judy's too young to know about education—specially as she's never had any herself. She can't even spell, you know. She writes stomach with a k. And they've let me go on like this, just with nurses and nursery-governesses (that's really all Scopy is), as if I wasn't any older than Bun, when I'm at an age when most fellows are leaving their preparatory schools." The boy's face coloured with the passion of his appeal, and the flush remained in two sharp patches on his cheeks.

"Of course," he went on, "Judy says I'm not fair to them—that I don't remember what a lot they've had to spend for me on doctors and climate, and all that. And they did send me to school once, and I had to be taken away because of my beastly temperature… I know all that. But it was a sell, when I left school, just to come back again to Scopy and Nanny, and nobody a fellow could put a question to, or get a tip from about what other fellows are learning. Last summer, at St. Moritz, I met a boy not much older than I am who was rather delicate too, and he'd just got a new father who was a great reader, and who had helped him no end, and got a tutor for him; and he'd started Cæsar, and was getting up his Greek verbs—with a temperature every evening too. And I said to Judy: 'Now, look at that.' And she said, yes, it would be splendid for me to have a tutor. And for two weeks the other fellow's father let me work a little with him. But then we had to go away—one of our troubles," Terry interrupted himself, "is that we're so everlastingly going away. But I suppose it's always so with children—isn't it?—with all the different parents they're divided up among, and all the parents living in different places, and fighting so about when the children are to go to which, and the lawyers always changing things just as you think they're arranged… Of course a chap must expect to be moving about when he's young. But Scopy says that later parents settle down." He added this on a note of interrogation, and Boyne, feeling that an answer was expected, declared with conviction: "Oh, but they do—by Jove, they do!"

Inwardly he was recalling the warm cocoon of habit in which his own nursery and school years had been enveloped, giving time for a screen of familiar scenes and faces to form itself about him before he was thrust upon the world. What had struck Boyne first about the little tribe generically known as the Wheaters was that they were so exposed, so bared to the blast—as if they had missed some stage of hidden growth for which Palace Hotels and Riviera Expresses afforded no sufficient shelter. He found his gaze unable to bear the too-eager questioning of the boy's, and understood why Miss Scope looked away when she talked of Terry.

"Settle down? Rather! People naturally tend to as they get older. Aren't your own parents proving it already? Haven't you all got together again, so to speak?" Boyne winced at his own exaggerated tone of optimism. It was a delicate matter, in such cases, to catch exactly the right note.

"Yes," Terry assented. "You'd think so. But I know children who've thought so too, and been jolly well sold. The trouble is you can never be sure when parents will really begin to feel old. Especially with all these new ways the doctors have of making them young again. But anyhow," he went on more hopefully, "if you would put in a word I'm sure it would count a lot. And Judy is sure it would too."

"Then of course I will. I'll stop over a day or two, and do all I can," Boyne assured him, casting plans and dates to the winds.

He was not certain that the appeal had not anticipated a secret yearning of his own; a yearning not so much to postpone his arrival at Cortina (to that he would not confess) as to defer the parting from his new friends, and especially from Judith. The Monreale picnic had been successfully repeated in several other scenes of classic association, and during the gay and clamorous expeditions ashore, and the long blue days on deck, he had been gradually penetrated by the warm animal life which proceeds from a troop of happy healthy children. Everything about the little Wheaters and their "steps" excited his interest and sympathy, and not least the frailness of the tie uniting them, and their determination that it should not be broken. There was something tragic, to Boyne, in the mere fact of this determination—it implied a range of experience and a power of forethought so far beyond a child's natural imagining. To the ordinary child, Boyne's memories told him, separation means something too vague to fret about beforehand, and too pleasantly tempered, when it comes, by the excitement of novelty, and the joy of release from routine, to be anything but a jolly adventure. Boyne could not recall that he had ever minded being sent from home (to the seashore, to a summer camp, or to an aunt's, when a new baby was expected) as long as he was allowed to take his mechanical toys with him. Any place that had a floor on which you could build cranes and bridges and railways was all right: if there was a beach with sand that could be trenched and tunnelled, and water that could be dammed, then it was heaven, even if the porridge wasn't as good as it was at home, and there was no mother to read stories aloud after supper.

He could only conjecture that what he called change would have seemed permanence to the little Wheaters, and that what change signified to them was something as radical and soul-destroying as it would have been to Boyne to see his mechanical toys smashed, or his white mice left to die of hunger. That it should imply a lasting separation from the warm cluster of people, pets and things called home, would have been no more thinkable to the infant Boyne than permanence was to the infant Wheaters.

Judith had explained that almost all their little friends (usually acquaintances made in the world of Palace Hotels) were in the same case as themselves. As Terry had put it, when you were young you couldn't expect not to move about; and when Judith proceeded to give Boyne some of the reasons which had leagued her little tribe against the recurrence of such moves he had the sick feeling with which a powerless looker-on sees the torture of an animal. The case of poor Doll Westway, for instance, who was barely a year older than Judith, and whom they had played with for a summer at Deauville; and now—!

Well, it was all a damned rotten business—that was what it was. And Judith's resolve that her children should never again be exposed to these hazards thrilled Boyne like the gesture of a Joan of Arc. As the character of each became more definite to him, as he measured the distance between Blanca's cool self-absorption, tempered only by a nervous craving for her twin brother's approval, and the prodigal self-abandonment of Beechy, as he compared the detached and downright Zinnie to the sinuous and selfish Bun, and watched the interplay of all these youthful characters, he marvelled that the bond of Judith Wheater's love for them should be stronger than the sum of such heredities. But so it was. He had seen how they could hang together against their sister when some childish whim united them, and now he could imagine what an impenetrable front they would present under her leadership. Of course the Cliffe Wheaters would stay together if their children were determined that they should; and of course they would give Terry a tutor if he wanted one. How was it possible for any one to look at Terry and not give him what he wanted, Boyne wondered? At any rate, he, Boyne, meant to accompany the party to Venice and see the meeting. Incidentally, he was beginning to be curious about seeing the Wheaters themselves.

Chapter 6

There was no doubt about the Wheaters' welcome. When Boyne entered the big hall of their hotel on the Grand Canal he instantly recognized Cliffe Wheater in the florid figure which seemed to fill the half-empty resonant place with its own exuberance. Cliffe Wheater had been just like that at Harvard. The only difference was that he and his cigar had both grown bigger. And he seemed to have as little difficulty in identifying Boyne.

"Hullo!" he shouted, so that the hall rocked with his greeting, and the extremely slim young lady in a Quaker gray frock and endless pearls to whom he was talking turned her head toward the newcomer with a little pout of disdain. The pout lingered as her eyes rested on Boyne, but he perceived that it was not personally addressed to him. She had a smooth egg-shaped face as sweetly vacuous as that of the wooden bust on which Boyne's grandmother's caps used to be done up, with carmine lips of the same glossy texture, and blue-gray eyes with long lashes that curved backward (like the bust's) as though they were painted on her lids; and Boyne had the impression that her extreme repose of manner was due to the fear of disturbing this facial harmony.

"Why, Martin dear!" she presently breathed in a low level voice, putting out a hand heavy with rings; and Boyne understood that he was in the presence of the once-redundant Joyce Wheater, and that in her new fashion she was as glad to see him as ever.

"I've grown so old that you didn't recognise me; but I should have known you anywhere!" she reproached him in the same smooth silvery voice.

"Old—you?" he found himself stammering; but the insipidities she evidently awaited were interrupted by her husband.

"Know him? I should say so! Not an ounce more flesh on him than there used to be, after all these years: how d'yer do it, I wonder? Great old times we used to have in the groves of John Harvard, eh, Martin, my boy? 'Member that Cambridge girl you used to read poetry to? Poetry! She was a looker, too! 'Come into the garden, Maud'… Garden they used to call it in those days! And now I hear you're a pal of my son's… Well, no, I don't mean Chipstone—" he smiled largely—"but poor old Terry… Hullo, why here's the caravan! Joyce, I say—you've told them they're to be parked out at the Pension Grimani? All but Chip, that is. Can't part with Chipstone, can we? Here they all come, Judy in the lead as usual. Hullo, Judy girl! Chippo, old man, how goes it? Give us your fist, my son." He caught his last-born out of Judith's arms, and the others had to wait, a little crestfallen, yet obviously unsurprised, till the proud father had filled his eyes with the beauty of his last achievement. "Catch on to him, will you, Joyce? Look at old man Chippo! Must have put on another five pounds since our last meeting—I swear he has … you just feel this calf of his! Hard as a tennis ball, it is… Does you no end of credit, Judy. Here, pass him on to the room next to your mother's… Wish you'd develop that kind of calf, Terry boy… "

"Look at my calfs, too! I can show them upside down!" shouted Bun, bursting in with a handspring upon these endearments; while Blanca, wide-eyed and silent, fastened her absorbed gaze on the golden thatch of her mother's intricately rippled head, and Joyce clasped the children, one after another, to her pearls.

Give Terry a tutor? Boy's own idea, was it? Good old chap—always poking around with books. Wheater would have thought that Terry knew enough to be his own tutor by this time… Funny, wasn't it, for a son of his? Cut out to be a Doctor of Divinity; or President of a University, maybe! Talk of heredity—for him and Joyce to have turned out such a phenomenon! Hoped Chipstone wouldn't turn into a Doctor of Divinity too. But of course they'd give Terry a tutor—wouldn't they, Joyce? The boy was dead right; he couldn't be loafing about any longer with the women… Did Boyne happen to know of a tutor, by any chance? Wheater'd never before had anything of the sort to bother about. Right up on schools, of course—always meant to send Terry to Groton; but his rotten temperature had knocked that out, so now…

The three were sitting after dinner on the balcony of the Wheaters' apartment, watching the Grand Canal, gondola-laden, lamp-flecked, furrowed with darting motor-boats, drift beneath them in rich coils and glassy volutes. There was nothing doing in Venice, Wheater had explained, so early in the season; it was as dead as the grave. Just a handy place to meet the children in, and look them over before they were packed off to the Engadine or Leysin. And besides, the Wheaters had come there to pick up their new steam-yacht; the "Fancy Girl," a real beauty. They were going on a short cruise in her before they left for Cowes, and Venice was a handy place to try her out. By-and-by, if Boyne liked, he and Joyce and Wheater might drift out to the Piazza, and take an ice at Florian's, and a turn on the Canal—not very exciting, but the best Wheater could suggest in the circumstances. But Boyne said: why not stay where they were? And Joyce, with a shrug that just sufficiently displaced the jet strap attaching her dress to her white shoulder, remarked that Cliffe never could stay where he was, but that nobody objected to his painting Venice red if he wanted to…

"Where'd I get the paint, at this time of year? Nobody here but guys with guide-books, and old maids being photo'd feeding the pigeons… Hotels cram full of 'em… Well, look here; about that tutor? You haven't come across anybody on your travels that would do, Martin? University chap, and that sort of thing?"

Martin didn't believe he had; but Mrs. Wheater, lifting a white arm to flick her cigarette into the Canal, said: "I know a tutor."

"Hell—you do?" her husband laughed incredulously. "'Nother cigar, old chap? These Coronas ain't bad—specially made for me." He loosed the golden sheathings from a cigar and held his lighter to it.

"I know a tutor," Mrs. Wheater repeated. "Exactly the right person, if only we can persuade him to take the job."

"Well—I'll be blowed! Where'd you excavate him?"

She was silent for a moment; then she said: "I've been going to the galleries with him. It's the first time I've ever seen Venice. Fanny Tradeschi got him out from England to tutor her boys, and then she was bored here, and rushed back to Paris, and left him stranded. His name is Ormerod—Gerald Ormerod. It would be the greatest privilege for Terry if he could be persuaded… "

"Oh, I guess I can persuade him all right. I don't believe Fanny remembered to settle with him before she left."

"No, she didn't; but he's awfully proud. You'd better not take that tone with him, Cliffe."

"What; the tone of asking him what his screw is?"

"Shouting like that at the top of your lungs—as if everybody less rich than yourself was deaf," said his wife, with a slight steel edge in her silver voice.

"Hullo! That the size of it? Well, fix it up with him any old way you like. I'm off for a round of the town… Not coming along, Martin? Well, so long… Can't for the life of me see why you've stuck yourself down at that frowsy pension with the children; I'm sure I could have bullied the manager here into giving you a room… Have it your own way, though. And you and Joyce can map out a tour for to-morrow: only no galleries for me, thank you! Look here—d'ye think I'd disturb Chipstone Wheater Esqre if I was just to poke my head in and take a look at him on my way out? Listen—my shoes don't creak the least bit… Oh, hang it, I don't care, I'm going to, anyway… "

Of the Joyce Mervin of Boyne's youth, the young Joyce Wheater of her early married days, nothing, apparently, was left in the slim figure leaning over the balcony at Boyne's elbow. Then she had been large, firm and rosy, with a core of artless sensibility; now she seemed to have gone through some process of dematerialization (no doubt there were specialists for this too) which had left a translucent and imponderable body about a hard little kernel of spirit.

"It's impossible to make Cliffe feel nuances," she murmured to her cigarette after Wheater had gone; then, turning to Boyne: "But now we can have a good talk—just like old times, can't we?" She settled down in her armchair, and exchanged her measured syllables for a sort of steely volubility which rattled about Boyne's head like a hail of confetti. She was awfully glad to see him, really she was, she declared; he did believe her when she said that, didn't he? He'd always been such a perfect friend, in the silly old days when she herself was just a stupid baby, years younger in experience than Judy was now… What did Martin think of Judy, by the way? Did he appreciate what a miracle the child was? Positively, she was older and wiser than any of them; and the only human being who had any influence whatever with Cliffe…

Oh, well: Cliffe … yes… It was awfully dear and sweet of Martin to say that he was glad she and Cliffe had come together again, and she was glad too, and she was ever so proud of Chip, and she did recognize poor Cliffe's qualities, she always had, even when things were at their worst … but, there, it was no use pretending with Martin, it never had been; and there was no denying that Cliffe had got into dreadfully bad hands when she left him … utterly demoralized and cowed by that beastly Lacrosse woman … and the money pouring out like water… Yes, she, Joyce, had seen it was her duty to take him back; and so she had. Because she still believed in the sanctity of marriage, in spite of everything. She hoped Martin did too? For if you didn't, what was there left to hold society together? But all the same, if one came to feel that by living with a man, even if he was one's husband, one was denying one's Ideal: that was awful too, wasn't it? Didn't Martin think it was awful?

Yes, Martin supposed it was; but he rather thought a bunch of jolly children were a pretty good substitute for any old Ideal he'd ever met. Mrs. Wheater laughed, with somewhat more of the old resonance, and said she thought so too, and that was what Judy had argued—no, Martin would never know how wonderful Judy had been during the ghastly days when Buondelmonte was dragging her, Joyce, through the mire, literally through the mire! "Why, there were things I couldn't tell even you, Martin—"

Martin felt his gorge rise. "Things I hope that Judy wasn't told, then?"

Mrs. Wheater's shoulder again slipped its light trammels in a careless shrug. "Bless you, you don't have to tell the modern child things! They seem to be born knowing them. Haven't you found that out, you dear old Rip van Winkle? Why, Judy's like a mother to me, I assure you."

"She's got a pretty big family to mother, hasn't she?" Boyne rejoined, and Mrs. Wheater sighed contentedly: "Oh, but she loves it, you know! It's her hobby. Why, she tried to be a mother to Zinnia Lacrosse… Fancy a child of Judy's age attempting to keep a movie star straight! She used to give good advice to Buondelmonte… But that nightmare's over now, and we're all together again, and there's only Terry, poor darling, to worry about. I do worry about him, you know, Martin. And isn't it sweet of him to want to be properly educated? For Cliffe, of course, education has always just been college sports and racing-motors. That's one reason why I've missed so much … but I am determined that Terry shall have all the opportunities I haven't had. This tutor I was speaking about, Gerald Ormerod—I wonder if you'd see him for me to-morrow, Martin? It's no use asking Cliffe—he'd just shout and brag, and spoil the whole thing. Gerald—I've got to calling him Gerald because Fanny Tradeschi always did—he comes of very good people, you see, and he's almost too sensitive … too much of an idealist… I can't tell you what it's been to me, these last weeks, to see Venice through the eyes of some one who really cares for beauty… You'll have a talk with him about Terry, Martin dear? I'm sure Cliffe would give any salary you advise—and it would be the saving of our poor Terry to be with some one really sensitive and cultivated … and Bun, too … he might put some sort of reason into Bun, who's beginning to get quite out of hand with Scopy… And, Martin, don't forget: you can fix the salary as high as you like."

Chapter 7

Two days later Boyne sat taking his morning coffee with Judith Wheater at a rickety iron table in the mouldy garden of the Pension Grimani. He had bribed a maid to carry out their breakfast, so that they might escape the stuffiness of the low-ceilinged dining-room, full of yesterday's dinner smells, of subdued groups of old maids and giggling bands of school-girls, and of the too-pervasive clatter of the corner table about which Scopy and Nanny had gathered their flock. It was Boyne's last day in Venice, and he wanted a clear hour of it with Judith. Presently the family would surge up like a spring tide, every one of them—from Mr. and Mrs. Wheater, with the "Fancy Girl" lying idle off San Giorgio, and a string of unemployed motors at Fusina, to Beechy and Zinnie squabbling over their new necklaces from the Merceria, and Miss Scope with a fresh set of problems for the summer—all wanting Boyne's advice or sympathy or consolation, or at least his passive presence at their debates. All this was rather trying, and the eager proximity of the little Wheaters made privacy impossible. Yet Boyne was more than ever glad that he had resisted the persuasions of their parents, and carried his luggage to the Pension Grimani instead of to the Palace Hotel. The mere existence of Palace Hotels was an open wound to him. Not that he was indifferent to the material advantages they offered. Nobody appreciated hot baths and white tiles, electric bed-lamps and prompt service, more than he whose lot was usually cast in places so remote from them. He loved Palace Hotels; but he loathed the mere thought of the people who frequented them.

Judy, he discovered, was of the same mind. Boyne had felt a little resentful of the fact that only the Wheaters' youngest-born was to share the luxury of their hotel; it seemed rather beastly to banish the others to frowsy lodgings around the corner. At the moment he had avoided Judy's eye, fearing to catch in it the reflection of his thought: most of Judy's feelings were beginning to reverberate in him. But now, in the leisure of their first talk since landing, he learned that no such feeling had marred the meeting of the little Wheaters with their parents.

Blanca, Judith owned, probably had minded a little, just at first. Silly Blanca—she was always rather jealous of the fuss that Joyce and father made about Chip. Besides, she loved smartness, and picking up new ideas about clothes from the chic women in hotel restaurants; and she liked to be seen about with Joyce, who was so smart herself, and to have other smart ladies say: "Is this your dear little girl? We should have known her anywhere from the likeness."

But it was precisely because of Blanca that Judith most disliked going to "Palaces." "Ever since she got engaged to the lift-boy at Biarritz… "

"Engaged?" Boyne gasped. "But, Judy … but Blanca's barely eleven… "

"Oh, I was engaged myself at Blanca's age—to a page at a skating-rink." Judith's small face, as she made the admission, had the wistful air of middle-age looking back on the sweet follies of youth. "But that was different. He was a very nice little Swiss boy; and I only gave him one of my hair-ribbons, and he gave me one of his livery buttons; and when he went home for his holiday he sent me dried edelweiss, and forget-me-nots pasted on cards. But these modern children are different. Blanca's boy wanted a ring with a real stone in it; and he was a horrid big thing with a fat nose that wriggled. Terry and I could hardly bear it. And when Scopy found out about it she made an awful row, and threatened to write to mother … so altogether we're better off here. In fact I wrote to father that we'd better put up at a place like this, where the children can rush about and make a noise, and nobody bothers. I think it's rather jolly here, don't you, Martin?"

She had called him Martin, as a matter of course, since the second day out from Algiers; and he could never hear his name in her fresh young trill without a stir of pleasure.

He said he thought the Pension Grimani awfully jolly, and was glad it suited the rest of them as well as it did him. Then she asked if it was all right about Terry's tutor, and what he thought of the young man. The answer to this was more difficult. Boyne was not sure what he thought. He had had an interview with Mr. Ormerod on the previous day; an interview somewhat halting and embarrassed on his own part, perfectly firm and self-possessed on the tutor's. Mr. Ormerod was a good-looking young Englishman with the University stamp upon him. He had very fair hair, somewhat long and rumpled, lazy ironic gray eyes, and a discontented mouth. He looked clever, moody and uncertain; but he was cultivated and intelligent, and it seemed certain that Terry would learn more, and be more usefully occupied, in his care than in Miss Scope's. Boyne's embarrassment proceeded not only from the sense of his unfitness to choose a tutor for anybody, but from the absurdity of having to do so with the pupil's parents on the spot. Mr. Ormerod, however, seemed neither surprised nor disturbed. He had seen Terry, and was sure he was an awfully good little chap; his only hesitation was as to the salary. Boyne, who had fixed it to the best of his judgment, saw at once that, though it exceeded the usual terms, it was below Mr. Ormerod's mark. The young man explained that the Princess Tradeschi had let him down rather badly, and that it was a beastly nuisance, but he really couldn't give in about his screw. Boyne remembered Mrs. Wheater's parting injunction, and to get over the difficulty suggested throwing in Bun. "There's the little Buondelmonte boy—a sort of step-son; he's rather a handful for the governess, and perhaps you would take him on for part of the time. In that case—"

This closed the transaction to Mr. Ormerod's advantage, and enabled Boyne to report to the Wheaters that their eldest son's education would begin the next day. And now he had to answer Judith's question.

"He strikes me as clever; but I don't know how hard he'll make Terry work."

"Oh, Terry will make him work. And as long as Joyce wants it I'm glad it's settled. If she hadn't, father might have kicked at the price. Not that he isn't awfully generous to us; but he can't see why people should want to be educated when they don't have to. What does it ever lead to, he says." She wrinkled her young brows pensively. "I don't know; do you? I can't explain. But if Terry wants it I'm sure it's right. You've read a lot yourself, haven't you? I don't suppose I shall ever care much about reading … but what's the use of bothering, when I should never have a minute's time, no matter how much I cared to do it?"

He reminded her that she might have time later, and added that, now that her parents were in an educational mood, he wondered she didn't take advantage of it to get herself sent to a good school, if only to be able to keep up with Terry. At this she smiled a little wistfully; it was the same shy doubtful smile with which she had looked about her in the cathedral at Monreale, trying to puzzle out what he saw in it. But her frown of responsibility returned. "Go to school? Me? But when, I'd like to know? There'll always be some of the children left to look after. Why, I shall be too old for school before Chip is anywhere near Terry's age. And besides, I never mean to leave the children—never!" She brought the word out with the shrill emphasis he had already heard in her voice when her flock had to be protected or reproved. "We've all sworn that," she added. "We took an awful oath one day at Biskra that we'd never be separated again, no matter what happened. Even Chip had to hold up his fist and say: 'I swear.' We did it on Scopy's 'Cyclopædia of Nursery Remedies.' And if things went wrong again, and I was off at one of your schools, who'd see to it that the oath was kept?"

"But now that all the children are safely with your own people, couldn't you let the oath take care of itself, and think a little of what's best for you?"

She raised her eyes with a puzzled stare which made them seem as young as Zinnie's. "You'd like me to go to school?"

He returned the look with one of equal gravity. "Most awfully."

Her colour rose a little. "Then I should like to."

"Well, then—"

She shook her head and her flush faded. "I don't suppose you'll ever understand—you or anybody. How could I leave the children now? I've got to get them off to Switzerland in another fortnight; this is no place for Terry. And suppose Mr. Ormerod decides he won't come with us—"

"Won't come with you? But it's precisely what he's been engaged to do!"

She gave an impatient shrug like her mother's, and turned on Boyne a little face sharp with interrogation. "Well, then, suppose it was mother who didn't want him to?"

"Your mother? Why, child, it was she who found him. She knows all about him; she—"

"She jolly well likes doing Venice with him," Judy completed his sentence with a hideous promptness. It was Boyne's turn to redden. He averted his eyes from her with one of Miss Scope's abrupt twists, and pushed his chair back as if to get up. Judy leant across the table and touched his sleeve timidly.

"I've said something you don't like, Martin?"

"You've said something exceedingly silly. Something I should hate to hear if you were grown up. But at your age it's merely silly, and doesn't matter."

She was on her feet in a flash, quivering with anger. "My age? My age? What do you know about my age? I'm as old as your grandmother. I'm as old as the hills. I suppose you think I oughtn't to say things like that about mother—but what am I to do, when they're true, and there's no one but you that I can say them to?"

He never quite knew, when she took that tone, if he was most moved or offended by it. There were moments when she frightened him; when he would have given the world to believe either that she was five years older than she said, or else that she did not know the meaning of the words she used. At such moments it was always the vision of Rose Sellars which took possession of him, and he found himself breathlessly explaining this strange child to her, and feeling that what was so clear to him would become incomprehensible as soon as he tried to make it clear to others, and especially to Mrs. Sellars. "There's nothing to be done about it," he thought despairingly. Aloud he remarked, in an impatient tone: "You're very foolish not to go to school."

She made no reply, but simply said, with a return of her wistful look: "Perhaps if you were going to stay here you'd lend me some books."

"But I'm not going to stay here; I'm off to-morrow morning," he answered angrily, keeping his head turned away with an irritated sense that if he should meet her eyes he would see tears in them.

Her own anger had dropped—he knew it without looking at her, and he had the sense that she was standing near him, very small and pale. "Martin, if you'd only stay! There are so many things left undecided… Father and mother can't make up their minds where to go next, and it's always when they've got nothing particular to do that they quarrel. They can't get anybody to go on the yacht with them—not till Cowes. And if they have to chuck the cruise father wants to go to Paris, and mother wants to go motoring in the hill-towns of Italy (where are they, do you know?) And if they get wrangling again what in the world is to become of us children?"

He turned back then, and put his hand on her arm. There was an old bench, as shaky as the table, under a sort of ragged sounding-board of oleanders. "Sit down, my dear." He sat beside her, smiling a little, lighting a cigarette to prove his ease and impartiality. "You're taking all this much too hard, you know. You've too much on your shoulders, and you're over-tired: that's all. I've been with your father and mother for two days now, and I see no signs of anything going wrong. The only trouble with them is that they're too rich. That makes them fretful: it's like teething. Every time your father hears he's made another million it's like cutting a new tooth. They hurt to bite on when one has so many. But he'll find people soon to go off for a cruise with him, and then he'll have to decide about your summer. Your people must see that this place is not bracing enough for Terry; and they'll want him to settle down somewhere in the mountains, and get to work as soon as possible."

The tone of his voice seemed to quiet her, though he suspected that at first she was too agitated to follow what he said. "But what sort of people?" she brought out at length, disconsolately.

"What sort of people?"

"To go on the yacht. That's another thing. When mother is away from father, and I'm with her, it's easier in some ways—except that then I fret about the other children. When Joyce and father are together they do all sorts of crazy things, just to be in opposition to each other. Take up with horrid people, I mean, people who drink and have rows. And then they get squabbling again, as they did when Buondelmonte sent father the bill for his Rolls-Royce… "

"Buondelmonte?"

"Yes; but Joyce said we were never to talk about that—she forbade us all."

"She was quite right."

"Yes; only it's true. And they do get into all sorts of rows and muddles about the people they pick up—"

At this moment Boyne, hearing a shuffle on the gravel, looked around and saw the maid approaching with a card. The maid glanced doubtfully at the two, and finally handed the card to Boyne, as the person most likely to represent law and order in the effervescent party to which he seemed to belong. It was a very large and stiff piece of paste-board, bearing the name: Marchioness of Wrench, and underneath, in a sprawling untaught hand: "To see my daughter Zinnie Wheater," the "my" being scratched out and "her" substituted for it. Boyne, after staring at this document perplexedly, passed it on to Judith, who sprang up with an astonished exclamation.

"Why, it must be Zinnia Lacrosse! Why, she's married again! It's true, then, what Blanca saw in the papers… " She looked inquiringly at Boyne. "Do you suppose she's really here?"

"Of course I'm here!" cried a sharp gay voice from the doorway; and through the unkempt shrubbery an apparition sparkling with youth and paint and jewels swept toward them on a wave of perfume.

"Hullo, Judy—why, it's you!" But the newcomer was not looking at Judith. She stood still and scrutinised Boyne with great eyes set like jewels in a raying-out of enamelled lashes. She had a perfectly oval face, a small exquisitely curved mouth, and an air of innocent corruption which gave Boyne a slightly squeamish feeling as she turned and flung her arms about Judy.

"Well, old Judy, I'm glad to see you again… Who's your friend?" she added, darting a glance at Boyne through slanting lids. All her gestures had something smooth and automatic, and a little larger than life.

"He's Mr. Boyne. He's father's friend too. This is Zinnia Lacrosse, Martin."

"No, it isn't, either! It's the Marchioness of Wrench. Only I'm just called Lady Wrench, except on visiting-cards, and when they put me in the newspapers, or I talk to the servants. And of course you'll call me Zinnia just the same, Judy. How d'ye do, Mr. Boyne?" murmured the star, with an accession of elegance and a languidly extended hand. But she had already mustered Boyne, and was looking over his shoulder as she addressed him. "What I'm after is Zinnie, you know," she smiled. "Wrenny's waiting in the gondola—Wrenny's my husband—and I've promised to take her out and show her to him."

She cast an ingratiating glance at Judith, but the latter, quietly facing her, seemed to Boyne to have grown suddenly tall and authoritative, as she did when she had to cope with a nursery mutiny.

"Now, Zinnia," she began, in the shrill voice which always gave Boyne a sense of uneasiness, "you know perfectly well—"

"Know what?"

"You know what the agreement is; and you know Scopy and I aren't going to listen to anything—"

"Fudge, child! What d'you suppose I'd want to break the agreement for? Not that I care such an awful lot for Cliffe's old alimony, you know. It don't hardly keep me in silk stockings. If I wanted to carry Zinnie off, that wouldn't stop me half a second. But I only want to show Wrenny that I can have a baby if I choose. Men are so funny about such things; he doesn't believe I've ever had one. And of course I can see he's got to have an heir. Look here, Judy, ain't I always dealt with you white? Let me see her right away, won't you? I've got a lovely present for her here, and one for you too—a real beauty… Can't you understand a mother's feelings?"

Judy still kept her adamantine erectness. Her lips, colourless and pressed together, barely parted to reply to the film star, whose last advance she appeared not to have noticed.

"Of course you can see Zinnie. You needn't get excited about that. Only you'll see her here, with me and Mr. Boyne. All your husband has got to do is to get out of the gondola and come into the house."

"If you'd been brought up like a lady you'd call him Lord Wrench, Judy."

Judith burst out laughing. "Mercy! Then you'd better call me Miss Wheater. But if you want to see Zinnie you haven't got any time to lose, because father's going to send for the children in a minute or two, and take them all off on the yacht."

"Oh, Judy—but he can't prevent my seeing Zinnie!"

"Nobody wants to prevent you, if you'll do what I say."

The Marchioness of Wrench pondered this ultimatum for a moment, staring down at her highly polished oval nails. Then she said sullenly: "I'll try; but I don't believe he'll get out of the gondola. He's dead lazy. And we wanted to take Zinnie for a row." Judith made no reply, and finally Lady Wrench moved back toward the vestibule door with a reluctant step.

"I'll go and fetch Zinnie," Judith announced to Boyne, advancing to the house by another path; but as she did so a small figure, bedizened and glass-beaded, hurled itself across the garden and into her arms.

"Judy! That was Zinnia, wasn't it? I saw her from my window! Nanny said it wasn't, but I knew it was. She hasn't gone away without seeing her own little Zinnie, has she? I'll never forgive you if she has. Did she bring a present for me? She always does. Blanca's crazy to come down and see her clothes, but Scopy won't let her. She's locked her up."

Judith gave one of her contemptuous shrugs. "Oh, Scopy needn't have done that. It won't hurt Blanca to see your mother. There, stop pinching me, Zinnie, and don't worry. Your mother's coming back. She's only gone to get her husband to introduce him to you."

"Her new husband? What's his name? Nobody ever told me she had a new husband. 'Cos they always say: 'You're too little to understand.' Zif I wasn't Zinnia's own little daughter! Judy, hasn't she got a present for me, don't you think? If it's nothing but choc'lates, course I'll divvy with the others; but if it's jewelry I needn't, need I?" Zinnie's ruddy curls spiralled upward and her face flamed with cupidity and eagerness. With a flash of her dimpled fists she snatched the new Merceria beads from her neck and thrust them into the pocket of her frock. "There's no use her seeing I've had presents already—you don't mind, Martin, do you?" she queried over her shoulder, addressing Boyne, who had given her the necklace that morning. He burst out laughing; but Judith, before he could intervene, caught hold of the delinquent and gave her a wrathful shake. "You nasty false ungrateful little viper you—"

"Oo-oo-oo," wailed Zinnie, hunching up her shoulders in a burst of sobs.

"There—now, Wrenny, you just look at that. I wish I had my lawyers here! That's the way those Wheater people treat my child—" Lady Wrench stood in the garden door and pointed with a denunciatory arm toward her weeping infant. Over her shoulder appeared the fair hair and puzzled eyes of a very tall young man with a sickly cast of countenance, a wide tremulous mouth and a bald forehead. "Oh, Lord, my dear," he said.

Chapter 8

Lady Wrench had snatched up her daughter and stood, in an approved film attitude, pressing Zinnie's damp cheek against her own, while the child's orange-coloured curls mixed with the red gold of hers. "What's that nasty beast been doing to momma's darling?" she demanded, glaring over Zinnie's head at Judith. "Whipping you for wanting to see your own mother, I suppose? You just tell momma what it was and she'll… "

But Zinnie's face had cleared, and she was obviously far too much absorbed in her mother's appearance to heed the unimportant questions which were being put to her. She slid her fat fingers through the pearls flowing in cataracts down Lady Wrench's bosom. "Oh, Zinnia, are they real? Blanca says they can't be—she knows they can't, 'cos they're twice as big as Joyce's."

"Blanca? Why, is Blanca here? Where is she?"

"Scopy's got her locked up, so's she can't come down and stare at you, but she found Martin's op'ra glasses in his room'n she's looking at you through them'n she says they're so pow'ful she can count the pearls, and can't she come down, please, Zinnia, 'cos she wants to see f'you've got the same Callot model's Joyce's jess ordered, 'cos it'll make Joyce wild'n she'll want to get another one instead as quick as she can. Please, Zinnia!"

Lady Wrench's brow had cleared as quickly as her daughter's. She burst out laughing and pressed her lips to Zinnie's cheek. "There, Wrenny, what d'you think of that, I'd like to know? Isn't she my really truly little girl?"

Lord Wrench had shambled slowly forward in her wake. He stood, lax-jointed, irresolute, in his light loose flannels, a faded Homburg hat tilted back from his perplexed brow, gazing down on the group from the immense height to which his long limbs and endless neck uplifted him.

"Yes, I'll take my oath she's that," he replied, in a voice which seemed to come from somewhere even higher than his hat; and he gave a cackle that rose and overreached his voice, and went tinkling away to the housetops.

His wife's laugh joined and outsoared his, and she dropped down on the bench, still hugging Zinnie. "Judy thought we wanted to steal her, Wrenny—think of that! Oh, I forgot you didn't know each other—Lord Wrench, Judy Wheater. And this is Mr. Boyne, a friend of Cliffe's—aren't you a friend of Cliffe's, Mr. Boyne? My present husband, the Marqu—no; that's wrong, I know—just my husband. But where's Blanca, Judy? Do let her come down, and Terry too; that's a darling! After all, I'm their step-mother, ain't I? Or I was, anyhow… Is Blanca as much of a beauty as ever, Mr. Boyne? If that girl had more pep I wouldn't wonder but what I could do something with her on the screen. Judy, now, would never be any good to us—would she, Wrenny? Too much of a lady, I always used to tell her… "

"Shut up: here she is," Lord Wrench interpolated. As he spoke Judith reappeared with her younger sister. Blanca's eyes were stretched to their widest at the sight of her former step-mother, though her erect spine and measured tread betrayed nothing of her eagerness to appraise Lady Wrench's dress and jewels. Behind them walked Miss Scope, helmeted as if for a fray, her hands mailed in gray cotton, and clutching her umbrella like a spear.

"Well, Blanca! How are you? How you've grown! And what a looker you're going to be! Only you're so fearfully grand—always was, wasn't she, Judy? You're a lady yourself, but you ain't such a lady. Well, Blanca, shake hands, and let me introduce you to my new husband. Wrenny, this is Blanca, who used to come and stay, with Terry and Judy, when Cliffe and me were married. Where's Terry, Blanca? Why didn't he come down too? I'd love to see him."

"Terry's with his tutor at present," said Blanca distantly, though her eyes never for a second detached themselves from Lady Wrench's luminous presence.

"But he said he wouldn't have come down even if he hadn't of been," chimed in Zinnie, peering up maliciously into her mother's face. "He says he isn't 'quisitive like Blanca, and he can't be bothered every time somebody comes round to see the steps."

Lord Wrench, at this, joined Boyne in a fresh burst of laughter, but his bride looked distinctly displeased. "Well, I see Terry's tutor hasn't taught him manners anyhow," she snapped, while Miss Scope admonished her youngest charge: "Inquisitive, Zinnie; you're really old enough to begin to speak correctly."

"No, I'm not, 'less Bun and Beechy do too," Zinnie retorted.

"Beatrice and Astorre are foreigners," Miss Scope rejoined severely.

"Well, so are you, you old flamingo! You're not a real true Merrican like us!"

"Zinnie," cried Blanca, intervening in her brother's behalf in her grandest manner, "Terry never said any such thing"; but Zinnie, secure in her mother's embrace, laughed scorn at her rebukers, until Judith remarked: "I'm very sorry, but children who are rude are not to be taken on the yacht today. Father particularly told me to tell you so. Zinnie, if you don't apologise at once to Miss Scope I'm afraid you'll have to stay behind alone with Nanny."

"No, she won't, either, my Zinnie pet won't! She'll go out in the gond'la with her own momma and her new father," Lady Wrench triumphantly declared. But Zinnie's expressive countenance had undergone a sudden change. She detached herself from the maternal embrace, and sliding to the ground slipped across to Miss Scope and endearingly caught her by a gray cotton hand. "Scopy, I'm not a really naughty Zinnie, say I'm not—'cos I don't want to go out in a bally old gond'la, I want to go'n father's steam-yacht, I do!"

Fresh squeals of approval from Lord Wrench greeted this hasty retractation. "Jove—she's jolly well right, the kid is! No doubt about her being yours, Zinnia," he declared; whereat the lady rejoined, with an effort at lightness: "Zif I couldn't have a yacht of my own any day I like that'd steam all round that old hulk of Cliffe's! And I will too—you'll see," she added, sweeping a circular glance about the company.

"Righto. Come along now, and we'll pick one out," her husband suggested with amiable irony.

"Well, maybe I will," she menaced, rising to her feet with the air of throwing back an ermine train. But Blanca had advanced and was lifting shy eyes to hers. "Your dress is so perfectly lovely, Zinnia; I think it's the prettiest one I ever saw you in. Isn't it from that Russian place mother's always talking about, where it's so hard to get them to take new customers?"

The star cast a mollified smile upon her. "You bright child, you! Well, yes; it is. But even if your mother could persuade them to take her on she wouldn't be able to get this model, because the Grand Duke Anastase designed it expressly for me, and I've got a signed paper saying it's the only one of the kind they'll ever make. See the way it's cut across the shoulders?"

Blanca contemplated this detail with ecstatic appreciation, and Lady Wrench, gathering up her sable scarf, glanced victoriously about her. "I guess anybody that wants to can buy a steam-yacht; but you can count on one hand with two fingers missing the women that Anastase'll take the trouble to design a dress for."

"Oh, I say, come on, old girl," her husband protested, shifting his weight wearily from one long leg to another; and Lady Wrench turned to follow him.

"Well, goodbye, Zinnie child. Next time I'll call for you on my two thousand ton oil-burner. Oh, look here—seen my bag, Wrenny? I believe I brought some caramels for the child—" She turned back, and began to fumble in a bejewelled bag, while the two little girls' faces fell at the mention of caramels. But presently a gold chain strung with small but lustrous pearls emerged from a tangle of cigarettes and bank-notes. "Here, Zinnie, you put that on, and ask Blanca to look at the pearls under the microscope, and then tell you if they're false, like your momma's."

Blanca paled at the allusion. "Oh, Zinnia, I never said yours were false! Is that what that little brute told you? I only said, I couldn't be sure they weren't, at that distance—"

Lady Wrench laughed imperturbably. "Well, I should think you'd have been sure they were, being so accustomed to your mother's. But movie queens don't have to wear fake pearls, my pet, 'cos if the real ones get stolen they can always replace 'em. You tell that to Mrs. Cliffe Wheater number three. And you needn't look so scared—I bear no malice." She drew a small packet from the bag. "See, here's a ring I brought you: I guess that'll bear testing too," she added, flinging the little box into Blanca's hand.

Blanca, white with excitement, snapped open the lid, which revealed to her swift appraising eye a little ruby set in brilliants. She drew it forth with a rapturous "Oh, Zinnia," and slipped it onto her hand, hastily thrusting the box into a fold of her jumper.

"When I give presents I don't go to the ten-cent store for them," remarked Lady Wrench, with a farewell wave of her hand. "So long, everybody! Shouldn't wonder if we met again soon by the sad sea waves. Wrenny and I are honeymooning out at the Lido, and maybe you'll all be over for the bathing. It's getting to be as gay as it is in August. All the smart people are snapping up the bathing tents. The Duke of Mendip's got the one next to ours. He's Wrenny's best friend, you know. By-bye, Judy. Mr. Boyne, hope you'll dine with us some night at the Lido Palace to meet the Duke. Ask for the Marchioness of Wrench—you'll remember?"

She vanished in a dazzle of pearls and laughter, leaving Blanca and Zinnie in absorbed contemplation of their trinkets till Miss Scope marshalled them into the house to prepare for the arrival of the "Fancy Girl" 's launch.

After the children were gone, Judy lingered for a moment in the garden with Boyne. Her features, so tense and grown-up looking during the film star's visit, had melted into the small round face of a pouting child.

"Well—that's over," Boyne said, flinging away his cigarette as though the gesture symbolised the act of casting out the Wrenches.

"Yes," she assented, in a tone of indifference. "Zinnia doesn't really matter, you know," she added, as if noticing his surprise. "She screams a lot; but she doesn't mean anything by it."

"Well, I should think you'd be glad she didn't, for whatever she meant would be insufferable."

Judith raised her eyebrows with a faint smile. "We're more used to fusses than you are. When there are seven children, and a lot of parents, there's always somebody fighting about something. But Zinnia's nothing like as bad as she looks." She paused a moment, and then, irrepressibly, as if to rid her heart of an intolerable weight: "But Blanca got away with my present. Did you see that? I knew she would! That's what she came down for—to wangle it out of Zinnia. Pretending she thought that old Callot model was one of Anastase's! There's nothing mean enough for Blanca!" Her eyes had filled with large childish tears, and one of them rolled down her cheek before she had time to throw back her head and add proudly: "Not that I care a straw, of course. I'm too grown up to mind about such rubbish. But I know Blanca must have noticed my 'nitials on the box. Didn't you see how quick she was about hiding it?"

Part 2

Chapter 1

The next day, during the journey through the hot Veneto and up into the mountains, the Wheater children and their problems were still so present to Boyne that he was hardly conscious of where he was going, or why.

His last hours with his friends had ended on a note of happiness and security. The new yacht, filled and animated by that troop of irrepressible children, whom it took all Miss Scope's energy and ubiquity to keep from falling overboard or clambering to the mast-head, seemed suddenly to have acquired a reason for existing. Cliffe Wheater, in his speckless yachting cap and blue serge, moved about among his family like a beneficent giant, and Mrs. Wheater, looking younger than ever in her white yachting skirt and jersey, with her golden thatch tossed by the breeze, fell into the prettiest maternal poses as her own progeny and the "steps" scrambled over her in the course of a rough-and-tumble game organised by Boyne and the young tutor.

The excursion had not begun auspiciously. Before the start from the pension, Bun and Beechy, imprisoned above stairs during Lady Wrench's irruption, had managed to inflict condign punishment on Zinnie for not having them fetched down with Blanca, and thus making them miss an exciting visit and probable presents. Terry's indifference to the whole affair produced no effect on the irascible Italians; and as Zinnie, when roused, was a fighter, and now had a gold necklace with real pearls to defend, all Judith's influence, and some cuffing into the bargain, were needed to reduce the trio to order; after which Boyne had to plead that they should not be deprived of their holiday. But once on the deck of the "Fancy Girl" all disagreements were forgotten. It was a day of wind and sparkle, with a lagoon full of racing waves which made the yacht appear to be actually moving; and after Beechy had drenched her new frock with tears of joy at being reunited to Chipstone, and Blanca and Zinnie had shown Lady Wrench's presents to every one, from the captain to the youngest cook-boy, harmony once more reigned among the little Wheaters.