“Young ruffian!”
“Oh, Adeline!”
“Look at her!”
“Take her from the grave!”
“Oh, naughty — naughty!”
“Ha, ha, ha!”
The laughter from Renny. Piers said sternly:
“I don’t see how you can laugh at her. It’s beastly disrespectful toward Gran.”
“Gran would laugh too, if she were here. She’d say — ‘A pickaback, eh? I like the youngsters about me.’”
“Renny,” said Meg, “I command you to take your child away from there. If you are willing to let her behave so, Piers and I, at least, don’t want to see such an example set our children.”
“I should think not,” agreed Piers.
“Adeline,” said Renny, “come to Daddy.”
Adeline jumped from her imaginary mount, her round, bare thighs flashing. She now stood astride a small mound marked by a headstone bearing the words — ‘Gwynneth, Died April 13th, 1898, aged five months.’ Piers exclaimed angrily:
“Now she is on my little sister’s grave! I won’t have it!” He grasped Adeline by the arm and lifted her roughly over the railing. She smiled up at him daringly.
“You talk,” said Renny, with equal heat, “as though Gwynneth were your sister only. What do you mean by it?”
“Well, she was only your half-sister.”
Renny was cut. “Do I cast it into your teeth that you are only my half-brother? I care as much for Gwynneth’s memory as you do. As a matter of fact, you never even saw her.”
“Yes,” agreed Meg, with one of her inexplicable veerings in fraternal discussion. “Gwynneth might never have a flower laid on her grave if she had to depend on you, Piers. It is I, her half-sister, who bring them.” And she looked down complacently at three narcissi and a spray of pussy willow.
Piers did not know what to say. He stared sulkily at his boots.
Maurice examined his wristwatch.
“Our P.G.s will be starving, Meg.”
She gave an exclamation of consternation.
The very mention of the paying guests was distasteful to Renny. He said sarcastically:
“I suppose you dish up for them and Maurice ambles round with the trays.”
“You seem to think it is all right,” declared Meg, “for Mrs. Lebraux to run a tea shop.”
“Yes,” said Piers, “he goes to the length of breaking his bones to help her in the work.”
“Oh, to think of it! And you allow Wakefield to keep a filling station!”
Renny retorted in exasperation — “Don’t worry! Mrs. Lebraux is going to live with her brother and Wake is entering a monastery.”
Before Meg could answer this she was led away by Maurice who took the welfare of his guests deeply to heart. Patience ran after them. Renny and his child crowded into the car with Piers, Pheasant, and their boys.
A tremor might well be supposed to have quivered through the dense earth that lay on old Adeline’s coffin as the group departed, and her spirit have exclaimed — “What’s the to-do? I will not be kept out of things!”
Alayne was waiting for them in the sitting room. She had often felt it rather an ordeal that these relatives should always take Sunday dinner at Jalna. Today she welcomed them.
She had a flat, strange, unreal feeling. The thought of making conversation took from her what strength she had. She would let the others do the talking. The Whiteoaks had one never-failing subject of absorbing interest — horses and the breeding and training of horses. For all his keenness in farming, Piers could not make it pay. He and Renny were breeding more horses, polo ponies and children’s saddle ponies. Curiously little Maurice had not inherited his parents’ love of horses. He loved the sounds and scents of the fields and woods, but he desired no stirrups between him and the earth. An erratic swift-moving creature beneath him filled him with nervous apprehension. Even Pheasant did not realize the depth of this emotion though she shielded him from rough experiences as much as was in her power. Mooey lived a double life, feigning a keenness unnatural to him in the activities of the stables, disappearing when he had the chance into the great depths of the woods or hiding in his attic room to pore over the old books which the Miss Laceys had left stored there.
Alayne liked Mooey and she felt a compassionate understanding of him, but it was little Nook who was her favourite. He was the sort of child she would have liked for her own. He was sensitive, shy, aloof, slow to give his affection but staunch in the giving of it. Between him and Alayne there was a curious understanding. He ran to her now and clasped one of her hands in both of his. She sat down and took him on her lap. She and Pheasant were in the sitting room while their two husbands, Adeline between them, had gone to the stables before dinner. Mooey hesitated in the hall, uncertain whether or not he should follow his father.
Pheasant glanced shrewdly at Alayne. She saw the heaviness of her eyes, the lines about her mouth. Something was wrong, she thought, something beyond an ordinary quarrel. Alayne looked ill. Her skin had a sallow tinge. “Men can make you suffer,” she said out loud before she could stop herself, and then added, breathlessly — “Oh, Alayne, I should not have said that!”
Alayne sifted Nook’s fine hair between her fingers. “It doesn’t matter. I expect I do look awful. I couldn’t sleep last night.”
Pheasant burst out — “As long as you love each other, I don’t believe in lying awake suffering in your mind! I say it’s better to make friends at any cost — dignity or high ideals or — anything! And I know you have lots of both.”
Alayne’s lips twisted in a little smile. She answered composedly, not being able to enter into intimate depths of marital discussion.
“We are naturally worried about Wakefield.”
Pheasant was unconvinced. She could not believe that Wake’s decision to enter a monastery could make Alayne look like that. She said:
“Nothing that young man could do would surprise me. I pity him when Renny and Piers get after him. But I didn’t expect you to mind so much.”
Alayne answered irritably — “I don’t mind. It is the sort of thing one must settle in oneself. But it is upsetting to Renny and very hard on Pauline.”
“Not half so hard, I think, as marriage with him would be! But Mrs. Lebraux will be terribly disappointed. It must be hard, when you think you have your daughter settled in life, to find that it’s all off. Not having a daughter, I shall never have to go through that.”
The mention of Clara Lebraux’s name quivered through Alayne’s nerves like the striking of a gong. She got up abruptly and carried Nook to the open window. “Let us see,” she said, “if we can find any buds on the lilac.”
Alayne retreating as usual! thought Pheasant. And she began resignedly to talk about the children: baby Philip’s new tooth and how good Adeline had been in church. Alayne remained at the window till she saw Renny and Piers coming toward the house.
She remembered how the first time she had seen Renny it had been from a window, drooping in his saddle with that accustomed air, unconscious of being watched. At that first moment the shape of him had been imprinted in the most sensitive recess of her mind and never again could be effaced. Now he was walking toward her after ten years and how little changed outwardly! Yet she felt as though she saw him for the