The Prisoners of Hartling/Chapter 11

RTHUR hoped that he might meet Eleanor at the breakfast-table again the next morning, but although he put in an appearance before Miss Kenyon and Hubert had finished, and waited until after his aunt had come down, he saw nothing of Eleanor. He consoled himself with the reflection that she was probably busy with some preparation for her grandfather's visit to town.

He was awake now to the effect that the visit was having on the household. They were all uneasy, even Miss Kenyon, all as it seemed to him, unnecessarily nervous about their future. He inferred something of this attitude from the preoccupation of the three members of the family he met at the breakfast-table; and later, his inference was fully confirmed.

They were momentarily shaken out of the belief into which they habitually lulled themselves, the belief that eventually they must all be decently provided for. The security of Hartling itself was threatened. Who knew what the old man might do in some fit of eccentricity? He might devise the estate to be used as a convalescent home or as a country house for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he chose. No one had the power to stop him or dispute his testament afterwards. For all legal purposes he was sane enough.

Joe Kenyon, Turner, and Hubert were all in the library at ten o'clock, but it was certainly not their interest in the morning papers that kept them there. Yet, although they were manifestly unable to keep their attention on what they were reading, they appeared disinclined to talk.

Arthur was not less fidgety than the other three. He could not decide whether it would be better to wait for Eleanor after the old man had gone, or to go and find her. She might have a certain amount of work still to do that morning, and if so, might prefer to remain undisturbed until she had done it. On the other hand, she might expect him to come and fetch her.

"What time is Mr Kenyon going?" he asked at last, addressing his question vaguely to the company at large.

Neither Turner nor Hubert took any notice, but after a slight hesitation Joe Kenyon pulled out his watch, stared at it absent-mindedly, and then said, "Oh, I don't know! About half-past ten or eleven probably. He generally does."

Arthur put down his paper and walked over to the window. From there he could see the car already drawn up at the front door, but the attitude of Scurr, comfortably reclining in the driver's seat, seemed to imply that he was well accustomed to waiting. Waiting was an art in which one acquired proficiency at Hartling. Those who could not acquire it, like Ken Turner, had no place there. Eleanor was the single exception to all rules. She worked. … So did Miss Kenyon, for that matter. She ran the house amazingly well. But she waited, just as much as the others. She had been disturbed by the "rumblings of the earthquake"—was doubtful of her security. Eleanor did not care. She would be glad to go.

The front door opened soon after eleven o'clock, and Arthur saw the head of the house come out with Eleanor in attendance.

"He's just going," Arthur announced to the other occupants of the library, and they dropped their papers at once and came over to the window.

The old man was just getting into the car. He needed no help. Eleanor stood by with a despatch case, which she gave to him after he was seated, but she did not offer to assist him in any other way. He was quite capable of looking after himself. He stepped into the car like a man of sixty. Then Scurr closed the door, and touched his cap, and in another minute they were slipping down the drive. None of the family had gone to the door to see him off. Not once, since he had been at Hartling, had Arthur seen any sign of filial affection displayed by the family. The old man patronised them with his gentle smile, but apparently he never looked for any return other than obedience and respect. He did not expect gratitude.

Joe Kenyon stretched himself in a prodigious yawn as the car vanished over the bridge. "Reminds me of the day poor old Jim went," he said.

Little Turner had begun to pace the width of the room under the windows. He had his hands on his hips, slowly smoothing them as he walked. He looked even neater and sleeker than usual this morning, but he was manifestly agitated. That odd, mechanical rubbing of his hands up and down his hips was the action of a man unconsciously seeking some relief.

"Well, it didn't so far as we know, make any difference to us, then," he commented, in reply to his brother-in-law's remark.

"So far as we know," Joe Kenyon repeated, awkwardly settling himself down in the window-seat.

"All U.P. with Ken, of course," Turner went on. "I hope to God he'll make some sort of a do of it in South Africa. He might—one never knows. I wish I could have done more to help him."

"Absolutely impossible to do anything," Joe Kenyon said, looking out of the window. "Fact was he didn't really want Ken. Got a strong streak of Jim in him. I've noticed it before. He'll do all right, I expect. Jim would have, in time. He had bad luck, that was all. Damned sorry for you and Catherine all the same."

"Wish to God I could go with him," Turner said. His brother-in-law thrust out his under-lip and shook his head. "Too soft for that kind of life," he murmured, still staring out of the window.

Turner chose to overlook that remark. "It's this cursed lack of ready money that beats you every time," he grumbled, as he paced up and down. "No getting round that anyway. We couldn't raise five hundred pounds between us to save our eternal souls."

Hubert, leaning against the end of the massive oak table that stood in the centre of the room, solemnly nodded his head. "Not three hundred," he said judicially.

Turner looked at him for an instant, but made no reply.

"Nothing whatever to be done," he went on. "We know that by this time. No need for him to show his fangs again to teach us that."

"Glad to have the opportunity all the same," Joe Kenyon put in.

Arthur, despite his immense preoccupation with the thought of Eleanor, could not help listening. They had never hitherto spoken as frankly as this before him. "Do you mean," he put in, "that he is sort of intimidating you by going up to town?" He did not realise until he had spoken that by saying "you" instead of "us" he had implied the separateness of his own interest in the affair.

Turner stopped his walk and the nervous movement of his hands and stared at Arthur with a look that was not quite free from suspicion. "What else?" he jerked out, frowned impatiently, and then resumed his pacing, but this time with more deliberation.

Joe Kenyon, huddled into an ungainly heap in the window seat, was more honest or less discreet. "We're all in the same boat, my boy," he said, a remark that might have been addressed either to his brother-in-law or his nephew, and continued: "Of course it's done to intimidate us. We've seen that trick played too often to doubt it. Any excuse'll do. It hasn't been one of the family since Jim went, so this is a very special occasion; but even if it's only been one of the servants going to leave, he has never missed the chance of underlining the fact that he can alter his will whenever he feels like it."

Turner had come to rest in front of Arthur while this explanation was being made, and now prodded him gently in the chest with an elegant forefinger. "All the same, my lad," he said on a note of warning, "you'd better keep quiet about what you know or think you know. We've been a trifle upset this morning; it isn't altogether pleasant for a father to see his son turned adrift without a penny in his pocket, but getting excited won't make matters better for any of us."

"Well, as a matter of fact," Arthur began, and stopped abruptly. He had been on the verge of telling them that they need have no more doubts about him, since this was almost certainly his last day at Hartling, but as he began to speak a doubt of his prudence in making that announcement overtook him. Once they knew he was going, they would again look upon him as an outsider and cease to have the least regard for him. Turner or Miss Kenyon—he trusted the others—might use him as a pawn in their own interests and anticipate him in conveying the news to old Kenyon—an eventuality that he wished to avoid, for despite all the evidence that was being presented to him, he still believed that they did the old man less than justice, and it was his disappointment rather than his anger that Arthur feared at the coming interview.

"As a matter of fact?" Turner repeated, with raised eyebrows, after a decent pause.

"Well, I've no personal interest to serve, have I?" Arthur said. "I made it quite clear to you, I hope, that I have no—no expectations, and shouldn't accept any legacy if it were left to me."

"You wouldn't accept anything, not even a thousand pounds, for instance?" Turner asked.

"Not a red cent," Arthur returned with decision. He could say that now, he reflected, with perfect safety.

"Then why stay?" Turner said.

Arthur blushed vividly, the blush of a naturally honest man caught in an equivocation, but Turner misread its origin.

"No need to be embarrassed," he went on. "We guessed it would be like that, and the old man seems favourable. But doesn't it strike you as probable that if the affair comes off you may change your mind about those possible expectations? I'm not talking without something to go on, my boy. I've been through precisely the same experience myself." He sighed and looked out of the window as he concluded. "And a damned dirty mess I've made of it."

Arthur's blush had been restimulated by Turner's misconception as to its cause, and still burnt his face as he replied, "There's no earthly chance of that, if you mean … what I presume you do. And in any case, I'm not going to stay. I've made up my mind about that. I shall be leaving here, for good, fairly soon."

Joe Kenyon looked up hopefully. "Wise man," he commented, and Hubert nodded a melancholy agreement.

"Fairly soon?" Turner rolled the words over with a rather impish enjoyment. "Ah, well! we can re-discuss the precise intention of 'fairly soon' in a month's time."

Ever since Mr Kenyon had gone Arthur had been fretting intermittently over the problem of whether he should take the initiative or leave it to Eleanor, and this indirect talk of her was increasing his impatience. It was nearly a quarter to twelve now, and the morning was slipping away. He had hoped that she might either come to look for him or send him a message but every minute that possibility grew less probable. Yet he did not care to leave the library at this point in the conversation. It would look as if he were trying to shirk the issue.

"I certainly shan't be here a month," he said, addressing little Turner; "almost certainly not another week."

"Does the old man know that?" Turner asked.

"Not yet," Arthur said. "But I'm going to tell him at once. To-morrow morning at latest."

Turner was reflectively twisting the ends of his neat moustache.

"Oh, well! my boy," he remarked, "we'll wait to settle that point of when you'll go until after you've seen him. He may have a card or two to play that you haven't guessed at so far. Eh, Joe?"

Joe Kenyon pursed his mouth. His expression was not hopeful.

"I've quite made up my mind," Arthur said, with what he hoped was an effect of complete finality. He had settled his problem now. He would go and find Eleanor. All the day, his last day, might be lost if he waited for her. She might be angry with him, but he would risk that. He could not endure this suspense any longer. He could hear the hall clock striking twelve.

Little Turner with a knowing, half-whimsical look of doubt on his face, still stood in front of him.

"Well, it's no good arguing that, is it?" Arthur continued irritably. "You'll know for certain to-morrow."

Turner turned away with a shrug of his neat shoulders. "Wonderful house for to-morrows, this," he said. "Always has been."

Arthur, inspired to pretend that he considered himself insulted, walked out of the room. By that little piece of chicane he escaped from all his dilemmas at a stroke. He had been horribly afraid that if he attempted some excuse to get away, Hubert might offer to accompany him. The suggestion of golf had hung in the air as a way of passing the afternoon, and some sort of untruthful evasion would have been necessary to avoid it.

He went first to the drawing-room on the off-chance that Eleanor might have come as far as that in search of him, but no one was there except his aunt and Mrs Turner; the latter, sitting with her hands in her lap staring fixedly out of the window. She had obviously been crying. His aunt did not look up from her fancy-work as he passed through with an air of having accidentally intruded upon a private ceremony. Poor old Mrs Turner; it had not occurred to him that she would be so upset by her son's departure for South Africa. He was, as a matter of fact, lucky to have broken away; but to the Kenyons, no doubt, the evils of the outer world appeared altogether monstrous compared with the securities of Hartling.

He had no hesitation now as to where he should seek Eleanor. Unless she had gone out without him—a ghastly alternative that he refused to believe—she must be upstairs somewhere in old Mr Kenyon's private suite. But when he knocked at the door of the little room whose chief use appeared to be that of a lobby, no one answered. He had never before entered the suite unannounced, and he opened the door and went in with a faint sense of trepidation. The room was empty and the door to the next room closed, but this time he entered without knocking.

He was now in the apartment in which he had always been received when he paid his morning visit, and farther than this he had never penetrated. Obviously, however, there were other rooms beyond. He remembered that he had seen Eleanor go through that way sometimes when he had been engaged with the old man, and as he stood hesitating he thought he heard very remotely the clicking of a typewriter. He went over to the farther door and knocked, and was answered faintly from within. He discovered then that there were double doors, four feet apart, between him and the next room. When he had opened the second he found himself in what appeared to be a perfectly appointed office.

The walls were nearly hidden by white-lettered deed-boxes, pedestals of standard letter-files, a tremendous nest of card-index drawers, and a book-case containing four or five hundreds works of reference: law-books, encyclopædias, directories, gazetteers, registers and official reports. Flush with the face of the wall that divided this office from the room through which he had just passed was the door of what was, no doubt, an enormous safe. The centre of the room was occupied by an extensive solid oak table, at which, seated with her back to him, Eleanor was engaged with a typewriter.

She did not turn round as he came in, and said, without stopping her work or looking up, "Shut both doors behind you, and sit down over there. I shan't be very long."

So she was expecting him, was his thought as he followed her instructions, and she was not presumably altogether displeased with him for coming. He sat down on the seat of one of those oriel windows that were the most pleasing feature of Hartling's south elevation. He did not, however, turn his attention to the panorama of the gardens that stretched out below him, nor to the glimpses of the rolling Sussex country visible as an effect of blue mysterious freedoms beyond the wardenship of that stiff, enclosing wall. He had no eyes, no thought for anything but Eleanor.

From here, he could watch her earnest, intent profile, bent a little forward over the typewriter. She looked, he thought a trifle flushed, and something in her intense concentration on her work gave her the air of being faintly embarrassed, an air that was not less marked when she whirled the letter off the roller and having glanced at it said in a formal voice, "This is our office, the heart of the house. Don't you think it looks very orderly and business-like?"

He agreed without enthusiasm. His mind was still obsessed with the idea that they were again going out together to the hill that had the view of the South Downs. He felt no inclination just then to discuss the business affairs of old Kenyon.

"This is the mainspring of the whole machine," Eleanor went on, looking at the range of deed boxes in front of her; "and I don't think there is the least fear of the machine breaking down. We are very methodical and very safe. We never gamble. We don't pretend to be far-sighted or ingenious, we're just plodders, adding a few thousands to our capital every year. Do you know that there are securities in this room worth well over half a million? I can't give you exact figures because there are one or two secrets into which the private secretary is not admitted. But I do know that even after we've paid the enormous sums demanded from us in taxes, our income considerably exceeds our disbursements." She looked round at him as she added, "Aren't you dazzled? Don't you feel exalted by being in the presence of all this wealth?"

He was puzzled, uncertain of her mood. Her speech had had a strong flavour of irony, but there was no trace of it in her manner. "Oh! confound the beastly money," he said, "I came up to see if we were going for another walk."

"Not to-day," she said. "I have far too much to do. Perhaps this letter I've just written will explain why."

She held it out towards him, and he jumped up and took it from her and then read it, leaning against the edge of the table.

It was addressed to Mrs Payne, and after a few opening phrases, continued: "I want to come and stay with you for a week or two if you could possibly manage to have me. I can't tell you why till I see you, but I should like to come on Friday, the day after to-morrow. I know it is dreadfully short notice. …"

He broke off there and looked at her in bewilderment. His mind had leapt back to their talk on the hill. Was she doing this, he wondered, in order that he might stay on?

"But I don't in the least understand why you have written this," he said frowning. "Why are you going? Do you mean that you're leaving here for good?"

She nodded gravely.

"But why?" he persisted. "I thought that we agreed …"

"Don't you want me to go?" she asked.

"No. I don't," he said emphatically.

"Would you stay on if I went?" she returned.

"No, I wouldn't. Nothing on earth should induce me to," he declared vehemently, still regarding her departure as an alternative to his own.

"Then what's your objection?" she said.

His eyes were suddenly opened then to a new prospect. He would not lose sight of her if they both left Hartling. He hated the thought of her working in a London office, but she would be within his reach there. He could, in a sense, look after her. They could meet quite often—if she were willing.

"You mean," he said, "that we might both go?"

"I know of no reason why your going should affect me one way or the other." Her tone was cold, even a trifle disdainful.

He was slightly taken aback. "No, no, of course not. It has nothing to do with me," he agreed. "But what has made you change your mind? Or don't you want to tell me that?"

She got up from her chair and walked over to the window. "There's one thing I want you to tell me first," she said. "Will my going have the least effect on your own plans?"

He considered that for a moment before he replied with perfect sincerity. "Absolutely none. Whatever happens, I'm going back to Somers to-morrow afternoon."

She had turned her back on him and was looking out over the prospect that had so recently failed to interest him.

"It isn't altogether that," she said over her shoulder, making a gesture with her hand that may have indicated the distant weald of Sussex. "I shouldn't go if it were only that I wanted to be free and independent."

She paused so long after this statement that he was emboldened to prompt her by saying, "You seem to have made up your mind so suddenly."

"The truth is that I can't stand it any longer," she said in a low voice. "I simply can't stand it."

He waited patiently this time for her to continue. He saw that she had something to say which she found difficult to put into words. The pose of her upright figure suggested a certain tensity of motion and when after another silent interval she turned and faced him, her hands were clenched.

"And I'm haunted by the fear that I may be wrong after all," she said, looking at him as if for help. "And you are the last person in the world, I suppose, who can tell me whether I am wrong or not."

"I don't quite understand yet. Is it about him—Mr Kenyon?" he asked.

She did not deign to answer his question directly. "You're supposed to know something about psychology, aren't you?" she went on. "Well, is it possible for a man to lose all decent, human feeling even for his own family?"

"Lord, yes," Arthur replied. "Speaking generally, of course, misers, for instance. Some of them seem to lose all human feeling."

"He isn't the least a miser," she put in. "He's often extraordinarily generous outside his own family."

"I only instanced that as a well-known type," he said. "But drink or drugs will do the same thing."

"Yes, but in all those cases there is always a definite vice of some sort," she complained. "Something that you can take hold of, understand more or less, as a cause for it all. But he hasn't any vices, unless you can call it a vice to be deliberately cruel to your own children and grandchildren without any apparent reason."

"But is he actually cruel?" Arthur remonstrated. "Doesn't he perhaps really mean it all for their own good. He may be deluded—he almost said as much to me—into thinking that they are weaker and less capable than they actually are; but that would be a natural delusion enough in a man of his age."

Eleanor threw out her hands with a gesture of confutation. "And you!" she exclaimed. "Does he believe that you aren't capable of looking after your own interests too?"

"Why me?" Arthur objected.

"Because he has been trying to get you. Oh! manifestly trying to—to add you to his collection," she exclaimed passionately. "It was that that opened my eyes. Until you came, I had hardly a doubt of him. I didn't like the life we lead here. It bored me. I believe I've always hated money—it must have been born in me, if that's possible. But I believed more or less what you do now, that he—looked after them, that his only fault, if anything, was that he looked after them too much.

"And then there was the suggestion of your coming here for a week-end visit. That was something rather exceptional. We'd had old Mr Beddington not long before—it was he who told my grandfather about you—and I remember wondering whether he was beginning to pine for more company or something. And I—I was rather interested in what I heard of you; we talked a little about you once or twice, and one day, after you had accepted the invitation, he threw out a kind of hint that he'd like to keep you here. That bothered me somehow. I'd made some sort of picture of you in my mind, and I—it's difficult to explain exactly—but I didn't like the idea of your—getting like the others. Some silly, romantic school-girl notion or other. I don't know quite why."

She paused and turned back to the window. Her colour had risen again, and Arthur believed that she was embarrassed by her thought of him as the hero of her old dream. How bitterly disappointed she must have been when she had found that her imagined hero had been a mere idler, like the others, willing to slack about and play games, in the hope of a place in the old man's will! Good God, what a poor thing she must have thought him! He looked down and began aimlessly to smooth the carpet with his foot. He felt utterly humiliated and miserable. Without a word of reproach she had exposed the weakness and unworthiness of him; and he could only acknowledge that she was right.

He did not look up at once when she turned back to him and went on. "It was the first time that I had seen the thing happening, if you know what I mean. I could follow all the stages of it. I saw how he let you enjoy the easiness of the life here before he made any sort of offer, and then just dangled it in front of you and tried to make it look as if you would be doing him a favour. Well, that was true enough in a way—you were. But the horrible thing, to me, was that he never paid you any salary. That really opened my eyes more than anything. He believed that you had given up your work at Peckham; that what would mostly likely tempt you away from here was the idea of going to Canada, and he wanted to make that impossible. I know that was it. I'm perfectly certain of it. And on the top of it there came that affair about Hubert's engagement and this fuss over Ken. That finished it for me. Ken isn't really bad. Most young men in his place would have got into debt, and I don't believe that he was the least angry about that. Of course the money to put the debts straight was nothing at all to him. He wouldn't have thought twice about that, but he has just turned Ken out without the least thought for poor Aunt Catherine, who is simply heartbroken about it. I believe Uncle Charles is really more upset, too, than he cares to admit."

"I know. I was talking to him this morning," Arthur put in.

"Well, will you tell me why he does these things if he is not an inhuman, heartless brute?" Eleanor concluded.

Arthur could find no answer to that.

"But you still believe in him?" she asked.

"It's so—so incredible," he said.

"Oh! and this morning!" Eleanor broke out, with a passion of resentment in her voice. "All this petty, silly, detestable business of his going up to town to alter his will. Why? I don't believe for a moment that he ever left Ken anything. He never liked him. Ken was too independent to please him. No; I believe that he has gone to see Mr Fleet to-day, just to make them feel his power over them. He was glad of the opportunity. …"

"That's exactly what they were saying downstairs just now," Arthur admitted. "That he was glad of the opportunity to shake them up a bit. But I suppose I'm prejudiced; I'm so new to it all; only it doesn't seem to me, somehow, as if he were that kind of a man."

"He has been nice to you, of course," Eleanor commented. "He would be, just yet. And you've only seen one side of him. But doesn't it strike you that this is a queer household? I don't remember any other; but I've read novels, and if they're anything like life, it must be very unusual for a man to live with his family and never receive any sign of affection from them. Doesn't it seem to you as if he were their master rather than their father?"

"Yes. I was thinking something of the kind this morning," Arthur agreed. "But I wondered if there weren't faults on both sides in a way."

Eleanor looked at him doubtfully. "I don't know; it's beyond me," she said. "But now you know why I'm going, don't you? It isn't as if I could help any of them by staying. No one has the least influence with him, not the very least. It may have looked as if you had helped Hubert about that engagement. You did in one way, but it was all because he was trying to get a tighter hold of you. Oh, well!" she sighed, and half turned away from him, before adding unexpectedly, "I'm glad you're going."

"You despised me for wanting to stay, didn't you?" he said.

"I was sorry," she admitted.

"More than that, you despised me," he insisted. "You were right, too, absolutely right. I really only saw it properly when you said just now that you were interested in me, in a way, before I came. And then, of course, you were bitterly disappointed. I can see all that now."

She was looking out of the window again, and the fact that he could not see her face gave him courage. He came a little nearer to her, as he went on, "I haven't any excuse to offer. None at all. I was a silly, weak fool, and I should have gone on being a fool if it hadn't been for you. But now I have come to my senses, and I'm going back to work, and it would help me frightfully—if when I'm in Peckham—if you're ever up in town—if I could see you now and again. You've only seen me here and I've been a different person since I've been here. Would it be possible for me to see you ever, after you go to stay with those people?"

She was kneeling up on the window seat now, leaning her forehead against the glass, and she did not move her position as she said, in the tone of one who quietly weighs a proposition, "Oh, yes. Why not?"

"It would help me tremendously," he submitted.

She was silent for a few seconds before she suddenly said in a light conversational tone, "It was all bosh, of course, what you said just now."

"What was?" he asked in surprise.

"All that about your being a weak fool and my despising you for it," she said, still with her forehead pressed against the glass of the window.

"Do you mean that you didn't despise me?" he asked eagerly, and then as an afterthought, "But in that case why were you so fearfully down on me?"

"I didn't want you to waste your life here," she murmured, "I know it wasn't any business of mine, but I simply couldn't stand the thought of your becoming one of—them."

He could not mistake the implication of those last two sentences. She had confessed to an interest in his welfare that deeply stirred and aroused him. Something of his humility began to fall from him, his recent passion of self-condemnation assuaged by her belief in the promise of his life. And with that reaction all those phases of his admiration which had for so long been secretly merging into love, were suddenly tinged by an ecstasy of gratitude. She appeared infinitely more to him at the moment than either friend or possible lover. She was the supreme miracle of creation embodied in that graceful form, outlined against the window. The benefactor, the giver, the maker of himself. By her simple expression of belief in him, she had given him a soul. He wanted to kneel before her in adoration. …

Intrigued and a little embarrassed by his prolonged silence, she slipped off the window seat and turned to him with the beginning of a conversational commonplace that was checked by the adoring intensity of his gaze.

"It must be nearly …" she had begun, and then stopped and put her hands to her face to hide the flood of colour that leapt to her cheeks.

And still he could not speak. All the love and poetry that surged within him could find no expression in his modern phrase. At the mere thought of any gesture, movement, or word, he was frozen by his self-consciousness; all too aware of himself as a product of his own time, of the little conventional self that he had always presented as a representative of the authentic Arthur Woodroffe.

And yet he knew that this was his moment, that if he let it slip he might never again find an opportunity to say what he knew, now, was within him, and so he grasped at an opening, however conventional, in order to anticipate some slipping back into the everyday manner, on her part or his own, that might release the fatuities of the manikin.

"There is something I must say to you," he broke out. "Please don't interrupt me. It's—oh! necessary. I …" He found that he could not lose himself, standing there in stark inaction with her before him, and began to pace up and down the room, keeping his eyes on the ground.

"To begin with, I must thank you," he went on, trying not to think of himself in any future relation to her. "I want to go on thanking you. I can't possibly tell you what you've done for me. Everything, all life, is different now that I've got just the hope that you believe in me. It has given me a hope—of myself. If you can believe in me, nothing can ever be the same again. Oh! I wish I could tell you all that it has done for me, just knowing you. But I can't. I can't say it, but I can live it, and you know that I will. I'm sure you know that. I can feel it. If …"

He paused and looked up. She was sitting in the window-seat, her head bent and her hands in her lap. And with that he forgot his self-consciousness, plunged across the room, and went down on his knees before her.

"Eleanor," he said. "Do you know how I worship you?"

She did not answer him in words, but it seemed as if by a series of infinitely delicate movements they came slowly together, until her hands, with his own clasping them, were on his breast and they were looking into each other's eyes. There was no need then for them to say that they had loved from their first meeting, but now that the pressure of that first overpowering urgency had weakened, words came more easily.

It was not, however, until some time later that he found one essential explanation.

"But the first time that I really knew how much I loved you," he said, "was when I saw you in imagination, as a solemn little chit of seven standing by the elephant's pad in the hall. You seemed so precious then."