When the men came in after dinner that evening Mrs. Darling sat alone in a huge red satin causeuse; one of those queer, hard, tufted royal things that fashion pitched in among the wigs and powder of one past period.

She wore a gown of gray gauze with bands of beaded and jeweled fringe at corsage and knees. Few women can wear gray. Nina could, and did.

The other women were grouped near, talking, but not with her. They had not shunted her; but she had gone apart and sat so. It was her way when the time for the reappearance of the men drew near. Nobody misconstrued. They all understood.

"And yet, how she does make a party go, you know!" whispered her hostess to the duchess. "She's really quite wonderful at it."

"I like her," confessed the duchess. "She's such nice lines about her waist, too, hasn't she?"

"Y-yes," faltered Lady Bellingdown, "she's quite a picture. I do wish Nibbetts wouldn't pitch into her so. It's very nasty of him."

"But Caryll will never believe what he says," the duchess offered comfortingly. "Men never do."

As she spoke the doors slid apart and the six men straggled in in procession, scattering slowly like a flock of settling birds. Each married man tried to avoid his wife and rather missed the mark.

Caryll Carleigh walked to where Mrs. Darling sat, circled her and took the other end of the red tufted thing that was made for two. She just smiled.

All the rest began to talk at once. The air warmed with: "They made it a point to drive through once a year and preserve the right of way – " "He said: 'Don't hurry!' but she took it and the branch caught her and carried her off – " "Oh, no, it wasn't that winter; it was when I was in Malta – " and so on, and so on.

Sir Caryll lifted his eyes and lowered his voice. "Do you know, I was sure my heart was dead. I was certain of it. But now I begin to doubt."

She smiled still, staring straight before her.

"Do look at me," he pleaded. "Your eyes are so wonderful. Like an elixir. They give me back all that I have lost. Do look at me."

"Do you know," she asked, complying with his request, "that I'm considered a very bad woman?"

"I don't believe it."

"Oh, but I am. You ask Lord Kneedrock. He'll tell you. He has a hash about a reincarnated tiger that he tells every one. He calls my hands claws."

She looked down at her hands then and Caryll's gaze followed hers. They were wonderful hands, every finger a psychic index.

"Some day I'll let you hold one for a little," she said, moving them slightly. "You can judge for yourself what they're like then."

He was conscious of the most curious of thrills. It coursed through him from head to toes. It stimulated him, wonderfully. It redoubled his courage.

"Adieu, ordinary rules!" his heart cried. "To the front and fire!" And his voice said: "Has Kneedrock ever held them?"

"Oh, yes. Ever so many have. I'm making a study of holding hands. Some men keep boring into your palm with their thumb, and some like to grind all your knuckle-bones together, crosswise. They never seem to think how the woman may feel."

"I fancy, under such circumstances, if I were you, I should say something," said Sir Caryll, laughing.

She looked at him, seriously. "What, for instance?"

"'Oh, you hurt! Let go!'"

"I'll try to remember," she said, without a smile. "You think that is better than just bearing it?"

"Yes. Unless you like it."

"Oh, I never like it. I grew weary of it long ago. Men are all so dreadfully alike. Unless you are going to be different, I – Are you going to be different?"

"I'm heart-broken," said Carleigh, not quite seriously. "Perhaps that constitutes a difference."

"I know exactly how it feels to be heart-broken." She nodded wisely. "You feel that it will kill you; but it doesn't. The third day one takes pudding, as usual."

"Tell me," he pleaded suddenly, "did you love your husband?"

"Oh, no," she answered with emphasis. "What a stupid question!"

"What went on before he died?"

She laughed. "Lots," was her laconic answer.

"Were you very lonely?"

"No. I had compensation."

He felt a violent throb through all his veins.

"A lover?" he asked boldly.

Instantly her eyes came to his. "You really do think bad of me, then?" Her tone was reproachful. "You think that when I said people considered me a very bad woman they meant baddest bad, and that they considered right?"

"No," he corrected. "I didn't stop to think. What I said just jumped into my head. I'm curious about you – that's all."

"I'm not going to tell you my story," she declared. "You ask Kneedrock. He'll tell you that I shot my husband to marry another man, and that the other man begged to be excused. Kneedrock's very entertaining when he begins to be confidential about me."

"How can you joke about such things?"

"I joke about everything. It's my way of getting on."

"But such an awful tale!"

"Oh, dreadful!" she said, easily.

He felt a bit uncertain and his laugh showed it. "The other man was an idiot," he told her.

"Quite so," she assented.

There was a movement among the others. They were going to have bridge. All had risen and their backs were turned. Quickly he laid his hand upon hers. Then:

"Oh, how you interest me!" he exclaimed, below his breath. "You've had a bad time, too. I know it. I feel it. You'll tell me, and I'll tell you, and there'll be something in the world I'll care about again. You see, I thought – I really was sure – that all the caring about things had been killed in me forever."

Her hand was quiet beneath the throbbing of his own. He had a singular hand for a man – one of those rare hands that pale and flush, that shiver and burn.

It burned now, but hers had no responding heat or throb. If his quivered with a passionate call for some response, the response came not. He had to recognize that no sleeping ardor stirred to the call of his caress.

But her eyelids drooped lower and lower until her lashes lay close against her cheeks, and then as he looked – and longed – he saw suddenly with an ecstatic thrill of surprise and delight that tears shone among them.

"You feel – something?" he murmured breathlessly. "What?"

"I feel for you," she answered. "You are so young. How old are you? Do you mind telling me?"

Certainly he had not expected that answer. "I am twenty-six," he said. "But why?"

"Twenty-six!" Her eyes were still closed. "I am thirty," she said softly. "That is why."

He felt quite bewildered; in a maze as to her meaning. "I know you've had a bad time, too," he said again. "You'll tell me all about it, won't you? Don't join the bridge crowd. They'll be playing there for hours, and we can sit here and have ourselves to ourselves. Do! Do! I want to know such a lot, and you'll tell me all."

She drew her hand gently away. "Will I?" she whispered. "Will I, truly?"

He seized her hand a second time, "Yes – yes, you will. You're going to be so kind – so good – to me. You're going to let me have your trouble to think of instead of mine. I'm so tired of the ceaseless agony of mine. I didn't do anything, you know. 'Fore God, I didn't do anything. It was all a plot, and now they've ruined her life and mine. Perhaps it was a plot with you, too."

"No," she breathed. "With me it was a plan."

"Never mind the difference," he protested. "They say, you know, that I was in love with the mother. I wasn't. Really, I wasn't. But they told her and the engagement was broken. It was all the most horrible thing imaginable. You'll hear it on all sides.

"Of course no one would believe that story about you, but every one believes the one about me. They haven't ruined you, but they have ruined me. And then people think that Scotland should have helped me." He paused, quite pale, his voice shaking.

His hand had closed harder and harder on hers, and now he drew it nearer. When he had pressed it between both of his own for a long minute, he felt a painful point within his palm, and, freeing her, he looked. On her third finger sparkled a diamond cross.

It was a great, awkward thing to be attached to a ring, although lovely enough in itself. The cross had marked his flesh. He turned her hand and saw that the ring was shaped and carven like a crown – a crown with points.

"The cross and the crown?" he questioned then. "Your own design?"

"His mother's," she said, still with closed eyes. "If I had been his wife it would have been mine. But as I can never be his wife he gave it to me to wear – because I loved him."

"The man who backed out?" Carleigh asked.

"The same man," she made answer.

"Stupid idiot!"

"With all my heart."

With which she opened her eyes and rose abruptly.

"You are very young," she said in the most casual of tones. "Oh, dear, but you are so very young. When you've gone further on in life you'll know that very few of those that really love can ever marry. I almost think that it is the first sign of a great love to be separated. And a good thing too. It leaves one one's dreams."

The tone startled him, but the matter of her speech suited. She moved toward the fire. Kneedrock stood there, facing the chimney-piece.

"What are you doing?" she asked him, gaily. "Have you stopped playing?"

"They don't want me just now," he said.

Carleigh felt annoyed; but he followed close after her.

"We were talking of such interesting things," she went on, still addressing the viscount's back.

"I dare say. What for instance?" he asked, without turning.

"I've told Sir Caryll that you will tell him all of my story," she pursued, ignoring the question. "You will – won't you?"

"The whole of it?"

"Yes."

"I hope that it will interest him more than it does me."

"If it bores you to repeat it, you needn't," said Nina, gently. "But it is rather dramatic, you know. I mean that night, and all that happened."

"Poor Darling!" muttered Kneedrock.

Carleigh felt most uncomfortable.

"Nibbetts was there, you know," she explained tranquilly. "He was always a friend of the family."

"We're first cousins," said the viscount shortly.

"And once – once, in India – he fought for my good name," she continued, easily.

"The good name of the family," the cousin corrected – unnecessarily it seemed to Sir Caryll.

"It came to the same thing," she added.

Carleigh wished that the other man would go back to the game and thus end this bewilderingly frank conversation. And the next instant he did, and they two were alone again.

"You have had a hard time," he said, quickly. "I fancy I ought to know all about the story, Mrs. Darling, but I don't. I haven't any connections in the army. We are all diplomatic people. It's very stupid in us, I suppose."

"Not quite that," she returned. "I've sometimes thought that we are stupid to go in for the army so strongly. But it is all an affair of blood and bigness, I imagine."

He laughed. "Blood and bigness," he repeated. "How cleverly you put it! And with us it is – "

"Brains and littleness," she cut in.

Then he laughed again, outright. So outright that those at the tables heard, threw up their heads, listened, and then bowed their heads again, masking significant smiles.

"There is no one like Nina," Lady Bellingdown commented under her breath.

"Oh, he is saved, if you mean that," Sir George declared lightly.

"I told you so," reminded the duke, proudly. "I said: 'Nina will wake him up.' She always wakes everybody up. She says what you wouldn't think she'd say, and it wakes one up most uncommonly."

And they went forward with their game. For that matter so did Mrs. Darling and Carleigh.

"Are you stopping here for long?" he asked.

"For as long as I can stand it."

"You mean – "

She clasped her hands behind her head and gazed intently into the very soul of the embers. "I mean that I soon choke and stifle in the close air of man. I am happier alone."

Freshly startled, he stared afresh. "It's always bad, then?" he asked sympathetically. "You don't get over it?"

"It's always bad." She paused a second or more, and then turned toward him, her eyes narrowed in that characteristic style which Kneedrock had described so harshly.

"But it is glorious, all the same," she cried with an odd little soft rapture. "You haven't come to that yet. You've not gone on to where one fights for the mere joy of loving love, in life, as one fights for breath in a suffocating pit. Why shouldn't I love to love? I love to do it. I love it all. I'd double the stakes at every loss, if I could. Do you follow me?"

"N-no," stammered Sir Caryll, a trifle stunned by the sudden shock of a boomerang idea. "N-no – I – er – I – "

"But you will to-morrow," she declared, nodding at him. "You will to-morrow. I'll go first and you'll follow."

"Oh, if you mean that – "

"I never give up," she asserted. "I never will – "

"Does it look hopeless?" he broke in, laughing.

"I will tell you that to-morrow."

"When to-morrow?"

"We'll get off an hour before luncheon. I'll be down here waiting for you at a quarter to twelve precisely."

"You'll find me waiting," said Carleigh, smiling.

CHAPTER XII
The Joy of Interest

The next morning the sun soared radiant. Carleigh, handed his stick by his valet, was conscious, too, of a personal soaring radiance: a condition so unusual and unexpected that it metaphorically struck him in the face.

"Oh, no," he reminded his lovelornity with emphasis, "it cannot possibly be!" Yet he knew joy to be all over him.

Not even the fourteen rare old engravings of early Christian martyrs and their martyrdom, with which the corridor was cheerfully embellished, could dampen his bubbling gaiety.

One cannot, indeed, take much interest in hangings and burnings and other tortures when one is going to have an hour alone in the open with a pretty woman who says things that – as the duke put it – you wouldn't think she would.

In the hall below he found the great black staghound – sole symbol of her mourning – waiting in majestic solitude beside a chair that bore a slender switch of a cane and a rough gray Burberry.

Mrs. Darling, herself, was not there; but the hound, the cane, and the coat – the morning being cold – showed that she had not forgotten her appointment.

Carleigh strolled over to the fire and lighted a cigarette. He felt so delightedly content. Presently his hostess swept quickly in from another room and nodded at him with the good cheer that no one had of late dared exhibit before him.

"You're going out with Nina," she said, evidently well-posted. "We're all driving to lunch with the men in the open. Can't you and she find your way there, too?"

"We'll try, but don't wait for us," he answered, really blithely.

Then it abruptly rushed over him how much he had been eased of his pain in these few hours, and he went up and kissed Lady Bellingdown's cheek impulsively, with: "Oh, Aunt Kitty! When will you have a spare minute for me, alone? I've such a lot to tell you."

In his way he was as uncontrolled as Nina, and quite as given to bursting forth in unwary speech.

"Tell it all to her, dear boy," she advised, looking up into his flushed brightness. "She's such a sweet, sympathetic woman. And she'll help you. She helps every man. She has wonderful ways with her."

"You recommend her as a confidante?"

"Yes, indeed."

"But why, aunt? Why?"

"Oh, she has a way with her that brings men out of themselves. I don't know just what it is, because I'm a woman, and she never has it with women. But I know that she has it. She was always like that. And then she grew more so after her marriage. There was a while when no one knew just what the end would be, but she pulled through quite straight."

"There was a story?"

"When a woman is magnetic, my dear Caryll, there is always a story."

"Who will tell it me?"

"She will, if you ask her, I fancy."

He smiled again. "I am so interested. If you knew the relief – the rest – the absolute joy of feeling an interest in something again!"

"I know, dear boy. It's been bad. But Nina will help you. She helps every one. Ah, here she is now!"

And she was; tall and withy as a willow-wand; more wondrous, it seemed to Caryll, by daylight than nightlight, because more clearly seen.

"Good-morning! Good-morning!" she cried, a hand to each. "What a glorious day! The bang-bang of the guns woke lazy me; but I thanked Heaven that I was a woman and went to sleep again directly."

Lady Bellingdown laughed, and kissing her hand to both, vanished quickly through a curtained archway opposite.

Then Mrs. Darling all at once altered. First she glanced at Carleigh, and then at the floor. "Have you been waiting long?" she queried.

"Hours," he declared, gloating over her confusion. He picked up the coat and offered her the cane. With a quick, fleeting smile, she took both; and then they were off; the funereal Tara at their heels.

Across the Italian garden they went, and then across the Dutch garden, and the French garden to the genuine English park. When their feet clapped gaily on the smooth, sodden mosaic of leaves, he turned to her, exclaiming:

"Life has become suddenly full again for me. I am really happy. And yet this time yesterday I was a misanthrope – a blighted creature. Think of that! It is your witchcraft."

But she shook her head.

"No," she contradicted firmly. "Not my doing at all. Manlike you wish to attribute all good and evil to some cause. But as a matter of fact you were already cured. I am but the 'top-stones of the corner.'"

"No, no, not at all," he denied gravely. "I was blighted, I – "

"Then you are blighted still," she declared. "What has happened is that you are just enough intoxicated to forget for a little. I've benumbed you. That's all."

"I beg to differ."

"Differ to beggary, if you will. Nevertheless, I know. I know I am right."

"I am divinely happy. I – " he began again. But she went on unheeding:

"We shall flirt, you and I, and we shall go pretty far. But we shall not fall in love and we shall not marry, because of two very excellent reasons."

"And they are?"

"A man and a woman."

"What woman? What man?"

She tossed her head in a way that might have signified anything.

"You mean that we love others – you and I?" he hazarded.

She laughed distractingly.

"Perhaps you love," he pursued. "But I am heart-free."

She walked on in silence.

"I don't ask the name of the man, for that's your affair. But no woman lives who can stand in the way of my bolting with you or marrying you if I choose."

"You are very positive," she said at length. "What if I am the woman and you are the man?"

For a second or two he stared blankly. "Oh," he said, crestfallen. "I see. Thanks!"

"Don't let us discuss such serious subjects as ourselves," she proposed. "Look at the sky and the swans – but be careful not to slip – and recollect that forgetfulness was the nectar upon which the gods subsisted."

"Quite so. There!" He squared his shoulders, but he looked at neither the sky nor the swans. He looked directly at her.

"I suppose I have just proposed to you and been refused; but, after all, what does it matter? Already I have forgotten the trifling episode. I've drunk of the gods' nectar. It saves one's reason occasionally. Because I have been able to forget, I have been able to live."

"You deserve the cross for heroism," she said. "I think you are wonderful."

He colored becomingly. "Spare my modesty," he pleaded. Then: "Look here! Now that we're quite alone, tell me your story."

"Tell me yours first."

"Oh, mine's so very hideous. But I don't mind telling you. My fiancée's mother, who had been out of the country for years, came back to find her little girl grown up, so she – well, she managed to break it all off – "

His voice slipped a note, and, turning, she saw that his face was working.

"I can't tell you more," he said, with a choke. "I'm not as brave as I thought. I can't help remembering. You'll find plenty to tell you that I loved the mother. She wasn't very old, you know."

"Why didn't you marry her?"

At her question he stopped short in the path.

"What's the matter?" she asked, turning.

"Why, I never thought of that way out," he answered, going white and red alternately.

"What a funny man you are!" cried Nina, startled. "Perhaps you will marry the mother yet. How old is she?"

"About thirty-seven."

"And rich?"

"Oh, yes. She's an American." As if riches and Americans were synonymous.

"Better marry her."

"I like you better just at present," returned Carleigh.

"Thanks, awfully. But I've told you what woman will stand in the way of your serious views about me. Besides, I'd never dare risk such a man as you. Everything will right itself, some day."

"Nothing can be right ever."

"Never?"

"Never."

"Ah, you've not told me all the story then?"

"Of course not. I never shall. I never can."

For a few steps they walked on in silence.

"Do tell me your – your story," he faltered. "Tell me what you can – what you'd like to."

"My story? My stories, you mean. I'm all stories." And she laughed her merry laugh.

"But the story?"

"Oh, the story!" She paused for the space of a heart-beat, and her eyes were serious. "Even that began with my birth," she continued. "It's rather long, you see, to tell on a short walk. It's a war story. I was born to battle; and not being a man, and medieval, was appointed to eternal combat with myself."

"With victory for the prize," he suggested.

She thought for a second; then dropped her head. "I don't know. No one can tell. Perhaps – perhaps not."

"But you can tell me some of it – me," he insisted.

"But it's so hopeless," she said wearily. "And you're really too young to know what I mean when I talk. Then, too, it's such a horrid story. Just as yours is, you know.

"Mixed love and straight-out killing haven't been respectable since the time when Catherine de' Medici shoved every pleasant way of getting on under a cloud. How I do wish I had lived when you could kill a man by shaking hands! If that were possible now, I know what I'd do to lots of men."

"What?" asked Carleigh, quickly.

"I'd never shake hands any more. I'd kiss them all instead. It would be so humane and blameless – and nice."

He felt all the blood in him bound out of his heart to meet her whimsy.

"You darling!" he cried ecstatically. "What could be nicer? A fig for your tragedies. We'll just flirt – and – and – "

He seized her and was drawing her into a close embrace. His face was scarlet, his pupils distended.

"The guns are just there on the hill," she said, ever so calmly. "Better wait!"

Carleigh released her with reluctance, but his expanded pupils were still devouring her.

"I am a new man," he whispered passionately. "Darling, oh, darling! I'm so glad I came."

Neither of them saw the tall form of Lord Kneedrock, who, at a little distance stood watching them, a bitterly satirical smile upon his lips.