IT was too dark to distinguish details as the big car flew-along, but Jean found herself yielding instinctively to the still, mysterious charm of the country-side at even.
A slender young moon drifted like a curled petal in the dusky blue of the calm sky, its pale light faintly outlining the tops of the trees and the dim, gracious curves of distant hills, and touching the mist that filled the valleys to a nebulous, pearly glimmer, so that to Jean’s eager eyes the foot of the hills seemed laved by some phantom sea of faery.
She felt no inclination to talk. The smooth rhythm of the pulsing car, the chill sweetness of the evening air against her face, the shadowy, half-revealed landscape all combined to lull her into a mood of tranquil appreciation, aloof and restful after the fatigue of her journey and the shock of her unexpected meeting with the Englishman from Montavan. She knew that later she would have to take up the thread of things again, adjust her mind to the day’s surprising developments, but just for the moment she was content to let everything else slide and simply enjoy this first exquisite revelation of twilit Devon.
For a long time they drove in silence, Tormarin seeming no more disposed to talk than she herself.
Presently, however, he slowed the car down and, half-turning in his seat, addressed her abruptly.
“This is somewhat in the nature of an anti-climax,” he remarked, the comment quite evidently springing from the thoughts which had been absorbing him.
He spoke curtly, as though he resented the march of events.
Jean felt herself jolted suddenly out of the placid reverie into which she had fallen.
“Yes. It is odd we should meet again so soon,” she assented hurriedly.
“The silence has been broken—after all! You may be sure, Miss Peterson, it was by no will of mine.”
Jean smiled under cover of the darkness.
“You’re not very complimentary,” she returned. “I’m sorry our meeting seems to afford you so little satisfaction.” There was a ripple of laughter in her tones.
“It’s not that.” As he spoke, he slackened speed until the car was barely moving. “You know it’s not that,” he continued, his voice tense. “But, all the same, I’m going to ask you to—forget Montavan.”
Jean’s heart gave a violent throb, and the laughter went suddenly out of her voice as she repeated blankly:
“To forget Montavan?”
“Please. I said—and did—a few mad things that day we spent together. It was to be an uncounted day, you know, and—oh, well, the air of the Alps is heady! I want you to forgive me—and to blot out all remembrance of it.”
He seemed to speak with some effort, yet each word was uttered deliberately, searing its way into her consciousness like red-hot iron.
The curt, difficultly spoken sentences could only signify one thing—that he had meant nothing, not even good, honest comradeship, that day at Montavan. He had merely been amusing himself with a girl whom he never expected to meet again, and now that circumstances had so unexpectedly brought them together he was clearly anxious that she should be under no misapprehension in the matter.
Jean’s pride writhed beneath the insult of it. It was as though he feared she might make some claim upon his regard and had hastened to warn her, almost in so many words, not to set a fictitious value upon anything that had occurred between them. The glamour was indeed torn from her stolen day on the mountains! The whole memory of it, above all the memory of that pulsing moment of farewell, would henceforth he soiled and vulgarised—converted into a rather sordid little episode which she would gladly have blotted out from amongst the concrete happenings of life.
The feminine instinct against self-betrayal whipped her into quick speech.
“I’ve no wish to forget that you practically saved my life,” she said. “I shall always”—lightly—“feel very much obliged for that.”
“You exaggerate my share in the matter,” he replied carelessly. “You would have extricated yourself from your difficulties without my assistance, I have no doubt. Or, more truly”—with a short laugh—“you would never have got into them.”
He said no more, but let out the car and they shot forward into the gathering dusk. Presently they approached a pair of massive iron gates admitting to the manor drive, and as these were opened in response to a shrill hoot from Tormarin’s horn the car swung round into an avenue of elms, the bare boughs, interlacing overhead, making a black network against the moonlit sky.
Still in silence they approached the house, its dim grey bulk, looming indeterminately through the evening mist, studded here and there with a glowing shield of orange from come unshaded window, and almost before Tormarin had pulled up the car, the front door flew open and a wide riband of light streamed out from the hall behind.
Jean was conscious of two or three figures grouped in the open doorway, dark against the welcoming blaze of light, then one of them detached itself from the group and hastened forward with outstretched hands.
“Here you are at last!”
For an instant Jean hesitated, doubtful as to whether the speaker could be Lady Anne. The voice which addressed her was so amazingly young—clear and full of vitality like the voice of a girl. Then the light flickered on to hair as white as if it had been powdered, and she realized that this surprisingly young voice must belong to her hostess.
“I was so sorry I could not meet you at the station myself,” continued Lady Anne, leading the way into the house. “But a tiresome visitor turned up—one of those people who never know when it’s time to go—and I simply couldn’t get away without forcibly ejecting her.”
In the fuller light of the hall, Jean discerned in Lady Anne’s appearance something of that same quality of inherent youth apparent in her voice. The keen, humorous grey eyes beneath their black, arched brows were alertly vivacious, and the quite white hair served to enhance, rather than otherwise, the rose-leaf texture of her skin. Many a much younger woman had envied Lady Anne her complexion; it was so obviously genuine, owing nothing at all to art.
“And now”—Jean felt herself pulled gently into the tight—“let me have a good look at you. Oh, yes!”—Lady Anne laughed amusedly—“You’re Glyn Peterson’s daughter right enough—you have just his chin with that delicious little cleft in it. But your eyes and hair are Jacqueline’s.” She leaned forward a little and kissed Jean warmly. “My dear, you’re very welcome at Staple. There is nothing I could have wished more than to have you here—except that you could have prevailed upon Glyn to bring you himself.”
“When you have quite finished going into the ancestral details of Miss Peterson’s features, madonna, perhaps you will present me.”
Lady Anne laughed good-humouredly.
“Oh, this is my pushful younger son, Jean. (I’m certainly going to call you Jean without asking whether I may!) You’ve already made acquaintance with Blaise. This is Nick.”
Nick Brennan was as unlike his half-brother as he could possibly be—tall, and fair, and blue-eyed, with a perfectly charming smile and an air of not having a care in the world. Jean concluded he must resemble closely the dead Claude Brennan, since, except for a certain family similarity in cut of feature, he bore little resemblance to his mother.
“Blaise has had an hour’s start of me in getting into your good graces, Miss Peterson,” he said, shaking hands. “I consider it very unfair, but of course I had to be content—as usual—with the younger son’s portion.”
Jean liked him at once. His merry, lazy blue eyes smiled friendship at her, and she felt sure they should get on together. She could not imagine Nick “glooming” about the world, as one of the women at the hotel had declared his half-brother did.
It occurred to her that it would simplify matters if both he and Lady Anne were made aware at once of her former meeting with Blaise, so she took the opportunity offered by Nick’s speech.
“He’s had more than that,” she said gaily. “Mr. Tor-marin and I had already met before—at Montavan.”
“At Montavan?” Lady Anne gave vent to an ejaculation of amused impatience. “If we had only known! Blaise could have accompanied you back and saved you all the bothersome details of the journey. But we had no idea where he was. He went off in his usual way”—smiling a shade ruefully—“merely condescending to inform his yearning family that he was going abroad for a few weeks.” Then, as Tormarin, having surrendered the car to a chauffeur, joined the group in the hall, she turned to him and continued with a faint note of expostulation in her voice: “You never told us you had already met Miss Peterson, Blaise.”
“I didn’t know it myself till I found her marooned on the platform at Coombe Eavie,” he returned. His eyes, meeting Jean’s, flickered with brief amusement as he added nonchalantly: “I did not catch Miss Peterson’s name when we met at Montavan.”
“No, we were not formally introduced,” supplemented Jean. “But Mr. Tormarin was obliging enough to pull me out of an eight-foot deep snowdrift up in the mountains, so we allowed that to count instead.”
“What luck!” exclaimed Nick with fervour.
“Yes, it was rather,” agreed Jean. “To be smothered in a snowdrift isn’t exactly the form of extinction I should choose.”
“Oh, I meant luck for Blaise,” explained Nick. “Opportunities of playing knight-errant are few and far between nowadays”—regretfully.
They all laughed, and then Lady Anne carried Jean off upstairs.
Here she found that a charming bedroom, with a sitting-room connecting, had been allotted her—“so that you’ll have a den of your own to take refuge in when you’re tired of us,” as Lady Anne explained.
Jean felt touched by the kindly thought. It takes the understanding hostess to admit frankly that a guest may sometimes crave for the solitude of her own company—and to see that she can get it.
The rooms which were to constitute Jean’s personal domain were delightfully decorated, old-world tapestries and some beautiful old prints striking just the right note in conjunction with the waxen-smooth mahogany of Chippendale. From the bedroom, where a maid was already busying herself unstrapping the traveller’s manifold boxes, there opened off a white-tiled bathroom frankly and hygienically modern, and here Jean was soon splashing joyfully. By the time she had finished her bath and dressed for dinner she felt as though the fatigue of the journey had slipped from her like an outworn garme............