Chapter 6. Modus Vivendi

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_ CHAPTER VI. MODUS VIVENDI

After the first few days of his arrival at Shotover time had threatened to hang heavily on Mortimer's mottled hands. After the second day afield he recognised that his shooting career was practically over; he had become too bulky during the last year to endure the physical exertion; his habits, too, had at length made traitors of his eyes; a half hour's snipe-shooting in the sun, and the veins in his neck swelled ominously. Panting, eyes inflamed, fat arms wobbly, he had scored miss after miss, and laboured onward, sullenly persistent to the end. But it was the end. That cup day finished him; he recognised that he was done for. And, following the Law of Pleasure, which finishes us before we are finished with it, he did not experience any particular sense of deprivation in the prospect. Only the wholesome dread caging. But Mortimer, not yet done with self-indulgence in more convenient forms, cast about him within his new limits for occupation between those hours consecrated to the rites of the table and the card-room.

He drove four, but found that it numbed his arms, and that the sea air made him sleepy. Motor-cars agreed with him only when driving with a pretty woman. Forced through ennui to fish off the rocks, he soon tired of the sea-perch and rock-cod and the malodours of periwinkle and clam.

Then he frankly took to Major Belwether's sunny side of the gun-room, with illustrated papers and apples and decanter. But Major Belwether, always as careful of his digestion as of his financial secrets, blandly dodged the pressing invitations to rum and confidence, until Mortimer sulkily took up his headquarters in the reading-room, on the chance of his wife's moving elsewhere. Which she did, unobtrusively carrying Captain Voucher with her in a sudden zeal for billiard practice on rainy mornings now too frequent along the coast.

Mortimer possessed that mysterious talent, so common among the financially insolvent, for living lavishly on an invisible income. But, plan as he would, he had never been able to increase that income through confidential gossip with men like Quarrier or Belwether, or even Ferrall. What information his pretty wife might have extracted he did not know; her income had never visibly increased above the vanishing point, although, like himself, she denied herself nothing. One short, lively interview with her had been enough to drive all partnership ideas out of his head. If he wanted to learn anything financially advantageous to himself he must do it without her aid; and as he was perpetually in hopes of the friendly hint that never came, he still moused about when opportunity offered; and this also helped to kill time.

Besides, he was always studying women. Years before, Grace Ferrall had snapped her slim fingers in his face; and here, at Shotover, the field was limited. Mrs. Vendenning had left; Agatha Caithness was still a pale and reticent puzzle; Rena, Katharyn, and Eileen tormented him; Marion Page, coolly au fait, yawned in his face. There remained Sylvia, who, knowing nothing about his species, met him half-way with the sweet and sensitive deference due a somewhat battered and infirm gentleman of forty-eight--until a sleek aside from Major Belwether spoiled everything, as usual, for her, leaving her painfully conscious and perplexed between doubt and disgust.

Meanwhile, the wealthy master of Black Fells, Beverly Plank, had found encouragement enough at Shotover to venture on tentative informality. There was no doubt that ultimately he must be counted on in New York; but nobody except him was impatiently cordial for the event; and so, at the little house party, he slipped and slid from every attempt at closer quarters, until, rolling smoothly enough, he landed without much discomfort somewhere between Mr. and Mrs. Leroy Mortimer. And it was not a question as to "which would be good to him," observed Major Belwether, with his misleading and benevolent mirth; "it was, which would be goodest quickest!"

And Mrs. Mortimer, abandoning Captain Voucher by the same token, displayed certain warning notices perfectly comprehensive to her husband. And at first he was inclined to recognise defeat.

But the general insuccess which had so faithfully attended him recently had aroused the long-dormant desire for a general review of the situation with his wife--perhaps even the furtive hope of some conjugal arrangement tending toward an exchange of views concerning possible alliance.

The evening previous, to his intense disgust, host, hostess, and guests had retired early, in view of the point-shooting at dawn. For not only was there to be no point-shooting for him, but he had risen from the card-table heavily hit; and besides, for the first time his apples and port had disagreed with him.

As he had not risen until mid-day he was not sleepy. Books were an aversion equalled only by distaste for his own company. Irritated, bored, he had perforce sulkily entered the elevator and passed to his room, where there was nothing on earth for him to do except to thumb over last week's sporting periodicals and smoke himself stupid.

But it required more than that to ensnare the goddess of slumber. He walked about the room, haunted of slow thoughts; he stood at the rain-smeared pane, fat fingers resting on the glass. The richly flavoured cigar grew distasteful; and if he could not smoke, what, in pity's name, was he to do?

Involuntarily his distended eyes wandered to his wife's locked and bolted door; then he thought of Beverly Plank, and his own failure to fasten himself upon that anxiously over-cordial individual with his houses and his villas and his yachts and his investments!

He stepped to the switch and extinguished the lights in his room. Under the door, along the sill, a glimmer came from his wife's bed-chamber. He listened; the maid was still there; so he sat down in the darkness to wait; and by-and-by he heard the outer bedroom door close, and the subdued rustle of the departing maid.

Then, turning on his lights, he moved ponderously and jauntily to his wife's door and knocked discreetly.

Leila Mortimer came to the door and opened it; her hair was coiled for the night, her pretty figure outlined under a cascade of clinging lace.

"What is the matter?" she asked quietly.

"Are you point-shooting to-morrow?"

"I wanted to chat with you."

"I'm sorry. I'm driving to Wenniston, after breakfast, with Beverly Plank, and I need sleep."

"I want to talk to you," he repeated doggedly.

She regarded him for a moment in silence, then, with an assenting gesture, turned away into her room; and he followed, heavily apprehensive but resolved.

She had seated herself among a pile of cushions, one knee crossed over the other, her slim white foot half concealed by the silken toe of her slipper. And as he pulled a chair forward for himself, her pretty black eyes, which slanted a little, took his measure and divined trouble.

"Leila," he said, "why can't we have--"

"A cigarette?" she interrupted, indicating her dainty case on the table.

He took one, savagely aware of defiance somewhere. She lighted her own from a candle and settled back, studying the sequence of blue smoke-rings jetting upward to the ceiling.

"About this man Plank," he began, louder than he had intended through sheer self-mistrust; and his wife made a quick, disdainful sign of caution, which subdued his voice instantly. "Why can't we take him up--together, Leila?" he ended lamely, furious at his own uneasiness in a matter which might concern him vitally.

"I see no necessity of your taking him up," observed his wife serenely. "I can do what may be useful to him in town."

"So can I. There are clubs where he ought to be seen--"

"I can manage such matters much better."

"You can't manage everything," he insisted sullenly. "There are chances of various sorts--"

"Investments?" asked Mrs. Mortimer, with bright malice.

"See here, Leila, you have your own way too much. I say little; I make damned few observations; but I could, if I cared to. ... It becomes you to be civil at least. I want to talk over this Plank matter with you; I want you to listen, too."

A shade of faint disgust passed over her face. "I am listening," she said.

"Well, then, I can see several ways in which the man can be of use to me. ... I discovered him before you did, anyway. And what I want to do is to have a frank, honourable--"

"A--what?"

"--An honourable understanding with you, I said," he repeated, reddening.

"Oh!" She snapped her cigarette into the grate. "Oh! I see. And what then?"

"What then?"

"Yes; what then?"

"Why, you and I can arrange to stand behind him this winter in town, can't we?"

"And then?"

"Then--damn it!--the beggar can show his gratitude, can't he?"

"How?" she asked listlessly.

"By making good. How else?" he retorted savagely. "He can't welch because there's little to climb for beyond us; and even if he climbs, he can't ignore us. I can do as many things for him in my way as you can in yours. What is the use of being a pig, Leila? Anything he does for me isn't going to cancel his obligations to you."

"I know him better than you do," she observed, bending her head and pleating the lace on her knee. "There is Dutch blood in him."

"Not good Hollander, but common Dutch," sneered Mortimer. "And you mean he'll squeeze a dollar till the eagle screams-don't you?"

She sat silent, pleating her lace with steady fingers.

"Well, that's all right, too," laughed Mortimer easily; "let the Audubon Society worry over the eagle. It's a perfectly plain business proposition; we can do for him in a couple of winters what he can't do for himself in ten. Figure it out for yourself, Leila," he said, waving a mottled fat hand at her.

"I--have," she said under her breath.

"Then, is it settled?

"Settled--how?"

"That we form ourselves into a benevolent society of two in behalf of Plank?"

"I--I don't want to, Roy," she said slowly.

"Why not?"

She did not say why not, seated there nervously pleating the fragile stuff clinging to her knee.

"Why not?" he repeated menacingly. Her unexpectedly quiescent attitude had emboldened him to a bullying tone--something he had not lately ventured on.

She raised her eyes to his: "I--rather like him," she said quietly.

"Then, by God! he'll pay for that!" he burst out, mask off, every inflamed feature shockingly congested.

"Roy! You dare not--"

"I tell you I--"

"You dare not!"

The palpitating silence lengthened; slowly the blood left the swollen veins. Heavy pendulous lip hanging, he stared at her from distended eyes, realising that he had forgotten himself. She was right. He dared not. And she held the whip-hand as usual.

For every suspicion he could entertain, she had evidence of a certainty to match it; for every chance that he might have to prove anything, she had twenty proven facts. And he knew it. Why they had, during all these years, made any outward pretence of conjugal unity they alone knew. The modus vivendi suited them better than divorce: that was apparent, or had been until recently. Recently Leila Mortimer had changed--become subdued and softened to a degree that had perplexed her husband. Her attitude toward him lacked a little of the bitterness and contempt she usually reserved for him in private; she had become more prudent, almost cautious at times.

"I'll tell you one thing," he said with a sudden snarl: "You'd better be careful there is no gossip about you and Plank."

She reddened under the insult.

"Now we'll see," he continued venomously, "how far you can go alone."

"Do you suppose," she asked calmly, "that I am afraid of a divorce court?"

The question so frankly astonished him that he sat agape, unable to reply. For years he had very naturally supposed her to be afraid of it--afraid of not being qualified to obtain it. Indeed, he had taken that for granted as the very corner-stone of their mutual toleration. Had he been an ass to do so? A vague alarm took possession of him; for, with that understanding, he had not been at all careful of his own behaviour, neither had he been at any particular pains to conceal his doings from her. His alarm increased. What had he against her, after all, except ancient suspicions, now so confused and indefinite that memory itself outlawed the case, if it ever really existed. What had she against him? Facts--unless she was more stupid than any of her sex he had ever encountered. And now, this defiance, this increasing prudence, this subtle change in her, began to make him anxious for the permanency of the small income she had allowed him during all these years--doled out to him, as he believed, though her dormant fear of him.

"What are you talking about?" he said harshly.

"I believe I mentioned divorce."

"Well, cut it out! D'ye see? Cut it, I say. You'd stand as much chance before a referee as a snowball in hell."

"There's no telling," she said coolly, "until one tries."

He glared at her, then burst into a laugh. "Rot!" he said thickly. "Talk sense, Leila! And keep this hard-headed Dutchman for yourself, if you feel that way about it. I don't want to butt in. I only thought--for old times' sake--perhaps you'd--"

"Good night," she managed to say, her disgust almost strangling her.

And he went, furtively, heavy-footed, perplexed, inwardly cursing his blunder in stirring up a sleeping lioness whom he had so long mistaken for a dozing cat.

For hours he sat in his room, or paced the four walls, doubtful, chagrined, furious by turns. Once he drew out a memorandum-book and stood under a lighted sconce, studying the figures. His losses at Shotover staggered him, but he had looked to his wife heretofore in such emergencies.

Certainly the time had come for him to do something. But what?--if his wife was going to strike such attitudes in the very face of decency? Certainly a husband in these days was without honour in his own household.

His uneasiness had produced a raging thirst. He punched an electric button with his fleshy thumb, and prowled around, waiting. Nobody came; he punched again, and looked at his watch. It astonished him to find the hour was three o'clock in the morning. That discovery, however, only appeared to increase his thirst. He opened the hall door, prepared to descend into the depths of the house and raid a sideboard; and as he thrust his heavy head out into the lighted corridor his eyes fell upon two figures standing at the open door of a bedroom. One was Siward; that was plain. Who was the girl he had kissed? One of the maids? Somebody's wife? Who?

Every dull pulse began to hammer in Mortimer's head. In his excitement he stepped half-way into the corridor, then skipped nimbly back, closing his door without a sound.

"Sylvia Landis, by all that's holy!" he breathed to himself, and sat down rather suddenly on the edge of the bed.

After a while he rose and crept to the door, opened it, glued his eyes to the crack, in time to catch a glimpse of Siward entering his own corridor alone.

And that night, Mortimer, lying awake in bed, busy with schemes, became conscious of a definite idea. It took shape and matured so suddenly that it actually shocked his moral sense. Then it scared him.

"But--but that is blackmail!" he whispered aloud. "A man can't do that sort of thing. What the devil ever put it into my head? ... And there are men I know--women, too--scoundrelly blackguards, who'd use that information somehow; and make it pay, too. The scoundrels!"

He squirmed down among the bedclothes with a sudden shiver; but the night had turned warm.

"Scoundrels!" he said, with milder emphasis. "Blackmailers! Contemptible pups!"

He fell asleep an hour later, muttering something incoherent about scoundrels and blackmail.

And meanwhile, in the darkened house, from all round came the noise of knocking on doors, sounds of people stirring--a low voice here and there, lights breaking out from transoms, the thud of rubber-shod heels, the rattle of cartridges from the echoing gun-room. For the guests at Shotover were awaking, lest the wet sky, whitening behind the east, ring with the whimpering wedges of wild-fowl rushing seaward over empty blinds.

The unusual stillness of the house in the late morning sunshine was pleasant to Miss Landis. She had risen very late, unconscious of the stir and movement before dawn; and it was only when a maid told her, as she came from her bath, that she remembered the projected point-shooting, and concluded, with an odd, happy sense of relief, that she was almost alone in the house.

A little later, glancing from her bedroom window for a fulfilment of the promise of the sun which a glimpse of blue sky heralded, she saw Leila Mortimer settling herself in the forward seat of a Mercedes, and Beverly Plank climbing in beside her; and she watched Plank steer the big machine across the wet lawn, while the machinist swung himself into the tonneau; and away they rolled, faster, faster, rushing out into the misty hinterland, where the long streak of distant forest already began to brighten, edged with the first rays of watery sunshine.

So she had the big house to herself--every bit of it and with it freedom from obligation, from comment, from demand or exaction; freedom from restraint; liberty to roam about, to read, to dream, to idle, to remember! Ah, that was what she needed--a quiet interval in this hurrying youth of hers to catch her breath once more, and stand still, and look back a day or two and remember.

So, to breakfast all alone was delicious; to stroll, unhurried, to the sideboard and leisurely choose among the fresh cool fruits; to loiter over cream-jug and cereal; to saunter out into the freshness of the world and breathe it, and feel the sun warming cheek and throat, and the little breezes from a sunlit sea stirring the bright strands of her hair.

In the increasing brilliancy of the sunshine she stretched out her hands, warming them daintily as she might twist them before the fire on the hearth. And here, at the fragrant hearth of the world, she stood, sweet and fresh as the morning itself, untroubled gaze intensely blue with the tint of the purple sea, sensitive lips scarcely parting in the dreaming smile that made her eyes more wonderful.

As the warmth grew on land and water, penetrating her body, a faintly delicious glow responded in her heart,--nothing at first wistful in the serene sense of well-being, stretching her rounded arms skyward in the unaccustomed luxury of a liberty which had become the naively unconscious licence of a child. The poise of sheer health stretched her to tiptoe; then the graceful tension relaxed, and her smooth fingers uncurled, tightened, and fell limp as her arms fell and her superb young figure straightened, confronting the sea.

Out over the rain-wet, odorous grass she picked her way, skirts swung high above the delicate contour of ankle and limb, following a little descending path she knew full of rocky angles, swept by pendant sprays of blackberry, and then down under the jutting rock, south through thickets of wild cherry along the crags, until, before her the way opened downward again where a tiny crescent beach glimmered white hot in the sun.

From his bedroom window Mortimer peeped forth, following her progress with a leer.

As she descended, noticing the rifts of bronzing seaweed piled along the tide mark, her foot dislodged a tiny triangle of rock, which rolled clattering and ringing below; and as she sprang lightly to the sand, a man, lying full length and motionless as the heaped seaweed, raised himself on one arm, turning his sun-dazzled eyes on her.

The dull shock of surprise halted her as Siward rose to his feet, still dazed, the sand running from his brown shooting-clothes over his tightly strapped puttees.

"Have you the faintest idea that I supposed you were here?" she asked briefly. Then, frank in her disappointment, she looked up at the cliffs overhead, where her line of retreat lay.

"Why did you not go with the others?" she added, unsmiling.

"I--don't know. I will, if you wish." He had coloured slowly, the frank disappointment in her face penetrating his surprise; and now he turned around, instinctively, also looking for the path of retreat.

"Wait," she said, aware of her own crude attitude and confused by it; "wait a moment, Mr. Siward. I don't mean to drive you away."

"It's self-exile," he said quietly; "quite voluntary, I assure you."

"Mr. Siward!"

And, as he looked up coolly, "Have you nothing more friendly to say to me? Is your friendship for me so limited that my first caprice oversteps the bounds? Must I always be in dread of wounding you when I give you the privilege of knowing me better than anybody ever knew me--of seeing me as I am, with all my faults, my failings, my impulses, my real self? ... I don't know why the pleasure of being alone to-day should have meant exclusion for you, too. It was the unwelcome shock of seeing anybody--a selfish enjoyment of myself--that surprised me into rudeness. That is all. ... Can you not understand?"

"I think so. I meant no criticism--"

"Wait, Mr. Siward!" as he moved slowly toward the path. "You force me to say other things, which you have no right to hear. ... After last night"--the vivid tint grew in her face--"after such a night, is it not--natural--for a girl to creep off somewhere by herself and try to think a little?"

He had turned full on her; the answering colour crept to his forehead.

"Is that why?" he asked slowly.

"Is it not a reason?"

"It was my reason--for being here."

She bit her bright lip. This trend to the conversation was ominous, and she had meant to do her drifting alone in still sun-dreams, fearing no witness, no testimony, no judgment save her own self in court with herself.

"I--I suppose you cannot go--now," she reflected innocently.

"Indeed I can, and must."

"And leave me here to dig in the sand with my heels? Merci!"

"Do you mean--"

"I certainly do, Mr. Siward. I don't want to dream, now; I don't care to reflect. I did, but here you come blundering into my private world and upset my calculations and change my intentions! It's a shame, especially as you've been lying here doing what I wished to do for goodness knows how long!"

"I'm going," he said, looking at her curiously.

"Then you are very selfish, Mr. Siward."

"We will call it that," he said with an odd laugh.

"Very well." She seated herself on the sand and calmly shook out her skirts.

"About what time would you like to be called?" he asked smilingly.

"Thank you, I shall do no sun-dreaming."

"Please. It is good for you."

"No, it isn't good at all. And I am grateful to you for waking me," she retorted with a sudden gay malice that subdued him. And she, delicate nose in the air, laughingly watching him, went on with her punishment: "You see what you've done, don't you?--saved me from an entire morning wasted in sentimental reverie over what might have been. Now you can appreciate it, can't you?--your wisdom in appearing in the flesh to save a silly girl the effort of evoking you in the spirit! Ah, Mr. Siward, I am vastly obliged to you! Pray sit here beside me in the flesh, for fear that in your absence I might commit the folly that tempted me here."

His low running laughter accompanying her voice had stimulated her to a gay audacity, which for the instant extinguished in her the little fear of him she had been barely conscious of.

"Do you know," he said, "that you also aroused me from my sun-dreams?"

"Did I? And can't you resume them?"

"You save me the necessity."

"Oh, that is a second-hand compliment," she said disdainfully--"a weak plagiarism on what I conveyed very wittily. You were probably really asleep, and dreaming of bird-murder."

He waited for her to finish, then, amused eyes searching, he roamed about until high on a little drifted sand dune he found a place for himself; and while she watched him indignantly, he curled up in the sunshine, and, dropping his head on the hot sand, calmly closed his eyes.

"Upon--my word!" she breathed aloud.

He unclosed his eyes. "Now you may dream; you can't avoid it," he observed lazily, and closed his eyes; and neither taunts nor jeers nor questions, nor fragments of shells flung with intent to hit, stirred him from his immobility.

She tired of the attempt presently, and sat silent, elbows on her thighs, hands propping her chin. Thoughts, vague as the fitful breeze, arose, lingered, and, like the breeze, faded, dissolved into calm, through which, cadenced by the far beat of the ebb tide, her heart echoed, beating the steady intervals of time.

She had not meant to dream, but as she sat there, the fine-spun golden threads flying from the whirling loom of dreams floated about her, settling over her, entangling her in unseen meshes, so that she stirred, groping amid the netted brightness, drawn onward along dim paths and through corridors of thought where, always beyond, vague splendours seemed to beckon.

Now lost, now restless, conscious of the perils of the shining path she followed, the rhythm of an ocean soothing her to false security, she dreamed on awake, unconscious of the tinted sea and sky which stained her eyes to hues ineffable. A long while afterward a small cloud floated across the sun; and, in the sudden shadow on the world, doubt sounded its tiny voice, and her ears listened, and the enchantment faded and died away.

Turning, she looked across the sand at the man lying there; her eyes considered him--how long she did not know, she did not heed--until, stirring, he looked up; and she paled a trifle and closed her eyes, stunned by the sudden clamour of pulse and heart.

When he rose and walked over, she looked up gravely, pouring the last handful of white sand through her stretched fingers.

"Did you dream?" he asked lightly.

"Yes."

"Did you dream true?"

"Nothing of my dream can happen," she said. "You know that, ... don't you?"

"I know that we love ... and that we dare not ignore it."

She suffered his arm about her, his eyes looking deeply into hers--a close, sweet caress, a union of lips, and her dimmed eyes' response.

"Stephen," she faltered, "how can you make it so hard for me? How can you force me to this shame!"

"Shame?" he repeated vaguely.

"Yes--this treachery to myself--when I cannot hope to be more to you--when I dare not love you too much!"

"You must dare, Sylvia!"

"No, no, no! I know myself, I tell you. I cannot give up what is offered--for you!--dearly, dearly as I do love you!" She turned and caught his hands in hers, flushed, trembling, unstrung. "I cannot--I simply cannot! How can you love me and listen to such wickedness? How can you still care for such a girl as I am--worse than mercenary, because I have a heart--or had, until you took it! Keep it; it is the only part of me not all ignoble."

"I will keep it--in trust," he said, "until you give yourself with it."

But she only shook her head wearily, withdrawing her hands from his, and for a time they sat silent, eyes apart.

Then--"There is another reason," she said wistfully.

He looked up at her, hesitated, and--"My habits?" he asked simply.

"Yes."

"I have them in check."

"Are you--certain?"

"I think I may be--now."

"Yet," she said timidly, "you lost one fight--since you knew me."

The dull red mantling his face wrung her heart. She turned impulsively and laid both hands on his shoulders. "That chance I would take, with all its uncertainty, all the dread inheritance you have come into. I love you enough for that; and if it turned out that--that you could not stem the tide, even with me to face it with you; and if the pity of it, the grief of it, killed me, I would take that chance--if you loved me through it all. ... But there is something else. Hush; let me have my say while I find the words--something else you do not understand. ... Turn your face a little; please don't look at me. This is what you do not know--that, in three generations, every woman of my race has--gone wrong. ... Every one! and I am beginning--with such a marriage! ... deliberately, selfishly, shamelessly, perfectly conscious of the frivolous, erratic blood in me, aware of the race record behind me.

"Once, when I knew nothing--before I--I met you--I believed such a marriage would not only permit me mental tranquillity, but safely anchor me in the harbour of convention, leaving me free to become what I am fashioned to become--autocrat and arbiter in my own world. And now! and now! I don't know--truly I don't know what I may become. Your love forces my hand. I am displaying all the shallowness, falseness, pettiness, all the mean, and cruel and callous character which must be truly my real self. ... Only I shall not marry you! You are not to run the risk of what I might prove to be when I remember in bitterness all I have renounced. If I married you I should remember, unreconciled, what you cost me. Better for you and for me that I marry him, and let him bear with me when I remember that he cost me you!"

She bent over, almost double, closing her eyes with small clenched hands; and he saw the ring shimmering in the sunshine, and her hair, heavily, densely gold, and the white nape of her neck, and the tiny close-set ears, and the curved softness of cheek and chin; every smooth, childlike contour and mould--rounded arms, slim, flowing lines of body and limb--all valued at many millions by her as her own appraiser.

Suddenly, deep within him, something seemed to fail, die out--perhaps a tiny newly lighted flame of unaccustomed purity, the dawning flicker of aspiration to better things. Whatever it was, material, spiritual, was gone now, and where it had glimmered for a night, the old accustomed twilit doubt crept in--the same dull acquiescence--the same uncertainty of self, the familiar lack of will, of incentive, the congenial tendency to drift; and with it came weariness--perhaps reaction from the recent skirmishes with that master-vice.

"I suppose," he said in a dull voice, "you are right."

"No, I am wrong--wrong!" she said, lifting her lovely face and heavy eyes. "But I have chosen my path. ... And you will forget."

"I hope so," he said simply.

"If you hope so, you will."

He nodded, unconvinced, watching a flock of sand-pipers whirling into the cove like a gray snow-squall and fearlessly settling on the beach.

After a while, with a long breath: "Then it is settled," she concluded.

If she expected corroboration from him she received none; and perhaps she was not awaiting it. She sat very still, her eyes lost in thought.

And Mortimer, peeping down at them over the thicket above, yawned impatiently and glanced about him for the most convenient avenue of self-effacement when the time arrived. _

Read next: Chapter 7. Persuasion

Read previous: Chapter 5. A Winning Loser

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