Savage I was sitting in my house, late, lone: Dreary, weary with the long day's work:
Head of me, heart of me, stupid as a stone:
Tongue-tied now, now blaspheming like a Turk;
When, in a moment just a knock, call, cry,
Half a pang and all a rapture, there again were we!—
"What, and is it really you again?" quoth I.
"I again, what else did you expect?" quoth She.
The Householder.
The gas was not carried up to the attics of No. 22 Canning Street. Late-comers had to stumble in the dark up the last flight of stairs, and bark their shins over the brooms and pails which Beatrice invariably left standing about on the landing. One evening in April Lettice was sitting at work, brow buried in her hands, tensely courting the Muse, when she was startled by a sudden tremendous clatter. The door burst open and Denis fell into the room, in company with a mop and a banister brush.
 
"Dear, dear!" said Lettice with her usual inadequacy.
 
"I wish you'd not keep an ironmonger's shop on your landing," said Denis, annoyed, and rubbing his knee.
 
"You, you—you are so violent!" Lettice protested in her pianissimo drawl. She went outside for a moment. "There, I've put them all away in the cupboard, so you won't have to break your poor nose when you go home," she consoled him. "Now, how nice it is to see you again! And what have you been doing with yourself all this long time?"
 
"Selling four monoplanes to the War Office," said Denis, with the simple satisfaction of bygone days. "What do you think of that?"
 
"No! have you really?"
 
"A man I used to know in the Sappers came over to[Pg 211] Dent-de-lion and fixed up the order last Saturday. It's been in the air for some time, but of course I couldn't say anything till it was settled. Wandesforde's awful pleased. It's no end of a leg-up for us."
 
"Four all at once!" cooed his sympathetic hostess.
 
"Yes, the Government's rather keen on the Air Service these days. There's a lot goin' on we don't hear anything about—a lot; and they don't mean to be caught napping."
 
"Did your friend tell you that?" asked Lettice, interested, as always, in politics.
 
Denis nodded. "He did. And more. He was askin' me, among other things, what percentage of our civilian flyers would volunteer in case of a war."
 
"Oh! What did you say?"
 
"I said all, of course—every man jack of 'em who wasn't needed as an instructor at home."
 
"You'd go yourself?"
 
"Rather so! What do you take me for? I should join up with the R.F.C. at once. Oh, it's coming, and they know it's coming; that's been obvious ever since Agadir. The only question is, when. I hope I shan't smash myself first. I'd be sorry to be out of the fun."
 
He lapsed into silence, leaning back in the big chair which Lettice kept on purpose for him, his long legs extended half across the hearth. How many months was it since he had last filled that place? Lettice had not so much as seen him since the Olympia day; but neither by word nor look did she remind him of the gap. She was an adept at taking things for granted. It was enough to see him sitting there, the same old Denis, talking in the same old way. And yet, not quite the same. Even in his silence there was a new quality. He had matured; he had lived through the wreck of an ideal, and built up his faith again, steady and sure, upon a rock.
 
Lettice put away her papers with delicate neatness, and sat down in a low chair with her needlework—not a green dragon this time, but a pair of combinations, which she darned serenely under the masculine eye. Denis had a nice[Pg 212] mind, he would never see. Now if it had been a certain other person—Lettice made a graceful figure, soft brown hair and hazel eyes, long throat and little head, slight drooping shoulders and slim waist, set off by the soft gray-blue silk of her dress. She was fond of that peculiarly soft and feminine fabric known to dressmakers as crêpe de Chine. She could not spend much on her clothes, but she chose and wore them with that French fineness and perfection of detail which she, in common with her sisters, had learned from their foreign upbringing.
 
"Well, I didn't come here to talk about German invasions," said Denis, rousing himself. "The fact is, I'm rather badly worried about Gardiner, Lettice. I didn't like that last piece of news at all. Did you?"
 
"You've not heard anything fresh?" asked Lettice quickly, her work dropping in her lap.
 
"Not a syllable; and can't till June. That's the worst of it; it's such a deadly long time. I'd half thought of running down there and lookin' up little Scott—he's quite a decent little chap, and he'd know. But I suppose it wouldn't do."
 
"I suppose not," agreed Lettice, who was, as has been said, a dandy in affairs of honor. She made her funny little pause to collect words before she got rid of her next speech. "I suppose if it had gone any further we should have heard by now."
 
"Heard?"
 
"The prison people would have let us know."
 
"Let us know what?"
 
"Why, if he'd been ill, or gone off his head, or anything of that sort."
 
"You think there's a danger of his going off his head?"
 
"Well, that's what you're talking about, isn't it?"
 
"No," said Denis, "I'd not got so far as that." He regarded her thoughtfully. "I wish you'd tell me how it strikes you, Lettice. I can't see my way at all."
 
"There's nothing to tell," said Lettice, a trifle restless at being asked to explain the obvious. "He must have[Pg 213] been off his balance to hit a warder, mustn't he? And when that begins, with anybody like him, you never know where it will stop. He isn't any too steady."
 
(Certainly there was no one like Lettice for pulling things off pedestals. Hitting a warder—it didn't sound nearly so bad as assaulting an officer!)
 
"Well, I've known Gardiner five and twenty years, and I'd never have called him unsteady. Hard as nails, more like."
 
"So he is that too."
 
"Now what on earth do you mean?"
 
"Well, of course he'd be hard so long as he hadn't anything to face he really minded, wouldn't he? And till this he didn't, did he? It's what you said yourself—he's always been lucky. But if you get him off his guard he's rather unusually sensitive. Look at the way he feels pain!"
 
"I never saw him feel pain. In my company he's always been brutally robust."
 
"Well, but can't you tell he would, by the set of his lips?"
 
"No," said Denis, "I can't. I've not your imagination."
 
To this Lettice made no reply, unless one might count the slight derisive lift of her chin. She never would take up the personal question. She would never, if she could help it, say: "I thought." She was sometimes driven to say, "I did," but even then she kept to the bald facts, uncolored by her personality. Denis, shifting in his chair to a more convenient angle, continued to regard her with attention, in which now mingled some amusement.
 
"Oh ah," he said, "you were there when he damaged his hand, weren't you? I'd forgotten. How long was it you stayed on at Rochehaut after I left?"
 
"About six weeks."
 
"And you were actin' as his secretary all that time?"
 
"Part of it."
 
"Of course that accounts."
 
"Accounts what for?" asked Lettice unwisely, with her little air of distraction.
 
[Pg 214]
 
"For the sympathetic insight you display," said Denis, now openly smiling. Lettice had chaffed him all her life; it was a new thing for him to turn the tables. "He swears it was you sent him back, and I believe him now. You've eased my mind quite a lot. He won't go under. He may knock out a warder or so, but he'll come through all right in the end—with such backin'!"
 
"Rubbish," said Lettice with acerb decision. She folded her work, got up, lighted a small paraffin lamp and carried it outside. Denis watched her hang it on the wall above the stairs.
 
"Is that a gentle hint to me to be off?" he asked, still smiling, as she re?ntered. "Because if so I'm not takin' any. I'll go when my time comes, but there's ten minutes yet."
 
"It's not for you at all, it's for Dot O'Connor."
 
"For Dot O'Connor!"
 
"She always tumbles over the brooms worse than you did," Lettice explained, "so I give her a light on the stairs when I'm expecting her to supper. I'd have given you one, too, if I'd known you were coming."
 
She had banished Denis's smile. He shifted in his chair once more, but this time away from her. "Dot O'Connor!" he repeated for the third time, in that altered voice. "Do you mean Mrs. Trent?"
 
"She doesn't like being called that now."
 
"Do you see much of her?"
 
"So so," said Lettice. She had mentioned Dorothea, not to get away from Denis's chaff—that would have been too cruel—but of set purpose, because there was something she had to say before he went. "Will you stay and have supper with us? I think there'll be enough to go round, if you aren't too hungry."
 
"No, Lettice."
 
"I don't see why you shouldn't."
 
"Don't you?"
 
His tone was not encouraging, but it made not a pin's difference to Lettice; her difficulties came always from within,[Pg 215] not from without, and once she had made up her mind to speak all the king's horses and all the king's men would not have stopped her. She did not imagine that she could move Denis, but there were certain things he ought to know, and which, in justice to Dorothea, she meant to set before him. They would not move him now, but he would not forget them; and in time to come they might sink in and soften his judgment.
 
"I don't see why you shouldn't forgive her," she pronounced.
 
"I'd rather not discuss it."
 
"Very well, don't you say anything, but will you listen?" Denis moved restlessly in his chair. "You're too hard on her," said Lettice, hitting straight and hard. "You will treat her as a woman, when she's only a child. And you don't realize what marrying a—a beast like that does to a girl. It bruises her innocence. It's like tearing open the eyes of a blind kitten. You can't expect her to see right and wrong like other people." So far beyond herself had Lettice been carried by that potent loosener of tongues, a sense of injustice! She went on with the same resolute candor: "Besides, there's another thing. She loves you. And she can love; you won't meet what she has to give twice in a lifetime. I know"—Lettice spoke with an effort; it was as near to an avowal as she could go, and the fact that she thought her cause worth such a sacrifice added tenfold to the weight of her words—"I know she's often made me ashamed of my stockishness. Are you prepared to throw all that away?"
 
She had finished, and she stopped. Denis sat silent, staring into the fire and pulling absently at his forelock, a trick he had when deep in thought. The soft sounds of Lettice's business did not break the stillness of the room. The alarm clock which Denis had given her to get up by in the morning (Lettice had long been mortally afraid of the alarm, and she still handled it as gingerly as if she expected it to explode) ticked on through the stillness. It struck seven; Denis glanced at his watch, and got up.
 
[Pg 216]
 
"I must go," he said confusedly. "I—I'd no idea it was so late."
 
He took his hat and stick, and Lettice thought he was really going then and there, without another word; but he thought better of it, and from the landing came back and stood in the doorway, visibly struggling with himself. "You—you mustn't think I mind what you said, Lettice," he got out. "I'd always listen to you. But I can't do this—I can't—"
 
Lettice looked him in the face. "She would have something to forgive you now," she said deliberately.
 
"No, she would not," said Denis with equal deliberation; and he met her eyes, fair and square. "............