(There should have been a line for that at once on the jamb just below the lintel.)

The nursery revealed itself as a large airy white and green apartment entirely free from old furniture and done rather in the style of an aesthetically designed hospital, with a tremendously humorous decorative frieze of c.o.c.ks and puppies and very bright-coloured prints on the walls. The dwarfish furniture was specially designed in green-stained wood and the floor was of cork carpet diversified by white furry rugs.

The hospital quality was enhanced by the uniformed and disciplined appearance of the middle-aged and reliable head nurse and her subdued but intelligent subordinate.

Three st.u.r.dy little girls, with a year step between each of them, stood up to receive Lady Beach-Mandarin"s invasion; an indeterminate baby sprawled regardless of its dignity on a rug. "Aah!" cried Lady Beach-Mandarin, advancing in open order. "Come and be hugged, you dears!

Come and be hugged!" Before she knelt down and enveloped their shrinking little persons Mr. Brumley was able to observe that they were pretty little things, but not the beautiful children he could have imagined from Lady Harman. Peeping through their infantile delicacy, hints all too manifest of Sir Isaac"s characteristically pointed nose gave Mr.

Brumley a peculiar--a eugenic, qualm.

He glanced at Lady Harman and she was standing over the ecstasies of her tremendous visitor, polite, attentive--with an entirely unemotional speculation in her eyes. Miss Sawbridge, stirred by the great waves of violent philoprogenitive enthusiasm that circled out from Lady Beach-Mandarin, had caught up the baby and was hugging it and addressing it in terms of humorous rapture, and the nurse and her a.s.sistant were keeping respectful but wary eyes upon the handling of their four charges. Miss Sharsper was taking in the children"s characteristics with a quick expertness. Mrs. Sawbridge stood a little in the background and caught Mr. Brumley"s eye and proffered a smile of sympathetic tolerance.

Mr. Brumley was moved by a ridiculous impulse, which he just succeeded in suppressing, to say to Mrs. Sawbridge, "Yes, I admit it looks very well. But the essential point, you know, is that it isn"t so...."

That it wasn"t so, indeed, entirely dominated his impression of that nursery. There was Lady Beach-Mandarin winning Lady Harman"s heart by every rule of the game, rejoicing effusively in those crowning triumphs of a woman"s being, there was Miss Sawbridge vociferous in support and Mrs. Sawbridge almost offering to join hands in rapturous benediction, and there was Lady Harman wearing her laurels, not indeed with indifference but with a curious detachment. One might imagine her genuinely anxious to understand why Lady Beach-Mandarin was in such a stupendous ebullition. One might have supposed her a mere cold-hearted intellectual if it wasn"t that something in her warm beauty absolutely forbade any such interpretation. There came to Mr. Brumley again a thought that had occurred to him first when Sir Isaac and Lady Harman had come together to Black Strand, which was that life had happened to this woman before she was ready for it, that her mind some years after her body was now coming to womanhood, was teeming with curiosity about all she had hitherto accepted, about Sir Isaac, about her children and all her circ.u.mstances....

There was a recapitulation of the invitations, a renewed offering of outlooks and vistas and Agatha Alimony. "You"ll not forget," insisted Lady Beach-Mandarin. "You"ll not afterwards throw us over."

"No," said Lady Harman, with that soft determination of hers. "I"ll certainly come."

"I"m so sorry, so very sorry, not to have seen Sir Isaac," Lady Beach-Mandarin insisted.

The raid had accomplished its every object and was drifting doorward.

For a moment Lady Beach-Mandarin desisted from Lady Harman and threw her whole being into an eddying effort to submerge the already subjugated Mrs. Sawbridge. Miss Sawbridge was behind up the oak staircase explaining Sir Isaac"s interest in furniture-buying to Miss Sharsper.

Mr. Brumley had his one moment with Lady Harman.

"I gather," he said, and abandoned that sentence.

"I hope," he said, "that you will have my little house down there. I like to think of _you_--walking in my garden."

"I shall love that garden," she said. "But I shall feel unworthy."

"There are a hundred little things I want to tell you--about it."

Then all the others seemed to come into focus again, and with a quick mutual understanding--Mr. Brumley was certain of its mutuality--they said no more to one another. He was entirely satisfied he had said enough. He had conveyed just everything that was needed to excuse and explain and justify his presence in that company.... Upon a big table in the hall he noticed that a silk hat and an umbrella had appeared since their arrival. He glanced at Miss Sharsper but she was keenly occupied with the table legs. He began to breathe freely again when the partings were over and he could get back into the automobile. "Toot," said the horn and he made a last grave salutation to the slender white figure on the steps. The great butler stood at the side of the entrance and a step or so below her, with the air of a man who has completed a difficult task. A small attentive valet hovered out of the shadows behind.

--5

(A fragment of the conversation in Lady Beach-Mandarin"s returning automobile may be recorded in a parenthesis here.

"But did you see Sir Isaac?" she cried, abruptly.

"Sir Isaac?" defended the startled Mr. Brumley. "Where?"

"He was dodging about in the garden all the time."

"Dodging about the garden!... I saw a sort of gardener----"

"I"m sure I saw Him," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "Positive. He hid away in the mushroom shed. The one you found locked."

"But my _dear_ Lady Beach-Mandarin!" protested Mr. Brumley with the air of one who listens to preposterous suggestions. "What can make you think----?"

"Oh I _know_ I saw him," said Lady Beach-Mandarin. "I know. He seemed all over the place. Like a Boy Scout. Didn"t you see him too, Susan?"

Miss Sharsper was roused from deep preoccupation. "What, dear?" she asked.

"See Sir Isaac?"

"Sir Isaac?"

"Dodging about the garden when we went through it."

The novelist reflected. "I didn"t notice," she said. "I was busy observing things.")

--6

Lady Beach-Mandarin"s car pa.s.sed through the open gates and was swallowed up in the dusty stream of traffic down Putney Hill; the great butler withdrew, the little manservant vanished, Mrs. Sawbridge and her elder daughter had hovered and now receded from the back of the hall; Lady Harman remained standing thoughtfully in the large Bulwer-Lyttonesque doorway of her house. Her face expressed a vague expectation. She waited to be addressed from behind.

Then she became aware of the figure of her husband standing before her.

He had come out of the laurels in front. His pale face was livid with anger, his hair dishevelled, there was garden mould and greenness upon his knees and upon his extended hands.

She was startled out of her quiet defensiveness. "Why, Isaac!" she cried. "Where have you been?"

It enraged him further to be asked so obviously unnecessary a question.

He forgot his knightly chivalry.

"What the Devil do you mean," he cried, "by chasing me all round the garden?"

"Chasing you? All round the garden?"

"You heard me breaking my shins on that infernal flower-pot you put for me, and out you shot with all your pack of old women and chased me round the garden. What do you mean by it?"

"I didn"t think you were in the garden."

"Any Fool could have told I was in the garden. Any Fool might have known I was in the garden. If I wasn"t in the garden, then where the Devil was I? Eh? Where else could I be? Of course I was in the garden, and what you wanted was to hunt me down and make a fool of me. And look at me!

Look, I say! Look at my hands!"

Lady Harman regarded the lord of her being and hesitated before she answered. She knew what she had to say would enrage him, but she had come to a point in their relationship when a husband"s good temper is no longer a supreme consideration. "You"ve had plenty of time to wash them," she said.

"Yes," he shouted. "And instead I kept "em to show you. I stayed out here to see the last of that crew for fear I might run against "em in the house. Of all the infernal old women----"

His lips were providentially deprived of speech. He conveyed his inability to express his estimate of Lady Beach-Mandarin by a gesture of despair.

"If--if anyone calls and I am at home I have to receive them," said Lady Harman, after a moment"s deliberation.

"Receiving them"s one thing. Making a Fool of yourself----"

His voice was rising.