“You recognise no responsibilities?” he demanded.
“I am beginning to ask myself whether I need,” she replied. “I have committed no sin in marrying. My husband is a very generous man, and I would rather tell him about you all than continue this concealment. I am afraid mine is not a household that any one would be proud of, but at least Andrew would remember that they were my people, and I know that he would be kind. I do not understand why they all persist in remaining unknown to him.”
“They are right,” the young man declared.
“The time will come,” she warned him calmly, “when I shall exercise my own judgment.”
“Then, if you do,” he rejoined, “you will regret it all your life. I can promise you that.”
“What brought you to Glenlitten?” she asked abruptly.
“No wish to see my charming sister, I can assure you,” he answered. “Those two men had been rather decent to me in town. They play bridge very badly, and they asked me down for a couple of nights. In any case, my visit did no harm.”
She shivered a little.
“I wish to dance no more,” she said. “I am worried.”
The music had stopped, but her partner stood in the middle of the floor and clapped.
“We cannot finish like this,” he told her, as the music started again. “When I tell them that you are in town they will all want to see you. They need help, and you must give them help.”
“Am I not helping them all the time?” she asked wearily. “I have done no sin in marrying. I wish to be happy. Why may I not be happy? Why do you all close in around me with evil faces? Why do you forbid me to tell my husband of the existence of any one of you? I do not understand it.”
The dance had changed into a waltz. They swayed lightly round the lower part of the room, loitering with the music. The young man waited until they had reached the most remote corner again.
“You are all sensitiveness and scruples, Félice,” he complained. “The world is made for life and for living. Why should you think of yourself only? Why should we others not live? Why should you not help us to live?”
“Do I not try?” she demanded.
“Try? But with what? It is to you the great good fortune has been given. Now, listen once more. You know where we live—Number ten, Milden Square. Between four and six in the afternoon is the time we are there and awake. Between four and six we shall await you, to-morrow, or the next day. . . . Your husband will pay me for the dance? There is no money in the house.”
Her head scarcely reached his shoulder, but she glanced at him as a woman who looks at something crawling upon the ground.
“My husband will do all that is usual,” she assured him.
As the music died away, they returned to their table. Andrew rose to his feet and held her chair.
“Very much obliged to you,” he said pleasantly to her late partner. “I am sure my wife enjoyed the dance very much.”
He touched the other’s hand lightly, leaving some notes in his palm. The young man bowed.
“It is a great pleasure to dance with Madame,” he said. “Perhaps again?”
“Not to-night,” Félice decided. “Another time perhaps. The room is a little crowded.”
He departed with a formal bow. Andrew filled his wife’s glass with champagne.
“Dear,” he said, “there is no one in the world who dances like you. These professional lads and lassies aren’t in it. There were two of them from the Adelphi dancing close to you most of the time. The woman dances a pas seul there, but you made them look clumsy. You looked—well, just like a fleck of foam on the top of a wave. I’m not much of a chap at comparisons, you know, but it was wonderful to sit here and watch you.”
Her hand stole into his.
“Andrew,” she whispered, “where did you learn in your dull Anglo-Saxon bringing-up to say such sweet things and to say them so often? It makes one so happy. I do think that I dance well, but I love to be told. I do think sometimes that I must be quite nice to watch, but how wonderful to be told so by any one you care for. Do we stay much longer?”
There was a faint tremor in her question, a light almost of adoration in her glowing eyes. He struck the table with the palm of his hand.
“Waiter, the bill,” he ordered.
Later, they smoked a cigarette together in the little boudoir leading out of her bedroom.
“You do not regret those partridges so very much?” she asked wistfully.
“My dear,” he assured her, “you have changed life for me completely. Shooting, hunting, fishing? they don’t count. It is just being with you that makes me happy. You can take me round the world in a tourist steamer or you can take me to New York and lodge me in a sky-scraper hotel. I don’t care. I have just mentioned those two things,” he explained, leaning over and splashing a little more soda water into his glass, “because I have always looked upon them as being the worst that could happen to any one, but in plain words, wherever we are together, and you remain as sweet as you always are, that is the place for me.”
She left her chair and sat upon his knee.
“I think,” she told him, “I am glad that we came to London for a little time. I love Glenlitten. It is too wonderful a home that you have given me, dear Andrew, but just for a week—it is so good to be away from that room. Husband!”
“Darling!”
“I am afraid of that long-faced friend of yours. I am afraid of him. You will not let him hurt me? You will not let them come and ask questions which I cannot answer. I do not wish to keep on having to think of those few terrible moments—having them always recalled to me.”
Tighter and tighter his arms clasped her.
“Sweetheart,” he promised, “no one shall ever bully you, I promise you that.”
“You trust me—altogether?” she whispered. “You know my great, great secret?”
“I shall know it better if you tell it to me,” he answered.
Then she whispered it—and soon afterwards fell asleep.
Long after he had carried her to bed and laid her between the cool, sweet sheets, he sat by himself, thinking. There must be some explanation of Richard Cotton’s cynical and disconcerting theories. If only he could stumble upon it without distress to her, close the whole business up, and yet do justice to the accused man. To him, the thing seemed almost pathetically simple. A burglar climbed in through the window. That was a fact which no one denied. He was probably seen on the ladder by this fellow De Besset who had naturally enough rushed in to warn Félice. The burglar had shot him and gone off with the jewels. Now he was to be hanged. Why not? And then came Dick Cotton with his damned suspicions, his enquiries, his doubts,—Cotton who had dared to stir up the great fear in Félice’s heart lest, owing to her brief period of unconsciousness, the man should die who had done no harm. But if the burglar was not the guilty man, who was— He sat and smoked and frowned. At last he arrived at a determination. Cotton was, after all, notwithstanding the difference in their years, one of his oldest friends. Why should there be this mystery between them? Why should the whole truth not be told now instead of later on? To-morrow he would put this before him and drag out whatever was at the back of his mind.
CHAPTER X
“I’m going to be a trifle brutal,” the