He broke off rather lamely, with an appealing glance at Mrs. St. Vincent. She stood very straight, and her eyes met his steadily.
"It was a kind plan," she said. "A very unusual one, and one that does you credit. I am - most grateful. But - of course, you understand that we cannot stay?"
"I expected that," he said. "Your pride won't let you accept what you'd probably style 'charity.'"
"Isn't that what it is?" she asked steadily.
"No,'" he answered. "Because I ask something in exchange."
"Something?"
"Everything." His voice rang out, the voice of one accustomed to dominate.
"When I was twenty-three," he went on, "I married the girl I loved. She died a year later. Since then I have been very lonely. I have wished very much I could find a certain lady - the lady of my dreams ... "
"Am I that?" she asked, very low. "I am so old - so faded." He laughed.
"Old? You are younger than either of your children. Now I am old, if you like." But her laugh rang out in turn, a soft ripple of amusement.
"You? You are a boy still. A boy who loves to dress up!"
She held out her hands and he caught them in his.
Philomel Cottage
"Good-bye, darling."
"Good-bye, sweetheart."
Alix Martin stood leaning over the small rustic gate, watching the retreating figure of her husband, as he walked down the road in the direction of the village.
Presently he turned a bend and was lost to sight, but Alix still stayed in the same position, absentmindedly smoothing a lock of the rich brown hair which had blown across her face, her eyes far-away and dreamy.
Alix Martin was not beautiful, nor even, strictly speaking, pretty. But her face, the face of a woman no longer in her first youth, was irradiated and softened until her former colleagues of the old office days would hardly have recognized her. Miss Alix King had been a trim business-like young woman, efficient, slightly brusque in manner, obviously capable and matter-of-fact.
Alix had graduated in a hard school. For fifteen years, from the age of eighteen until she was thirty-three, she had kept herself (and for seven years of the time, an invalid mother) by her work as a shorthand-typist. It was the struggle for existence which had hardened the soft lines of her girlish face. True, there had been romance - of a kind - Dick Windyford, a fellow-clerk. Very much of a woman at heart, Alix had always known without seeming to know that he cared. Outwardly they had been friends, nothing more. Out of his slender salary, Dick had been hard put to it to provide for the schooling of a younger brother. For the moment, he could not think of marriage.
And then suddenly deliverance from daily toil had come to the girl in the most unexpected manner. A distant cousin had died leaving her money to Alix - a few thousand pounds, enough to bring in a couple of hundred a year. To Alix, it was freedom, life, independence. Now she and Dick need wait no longer. Nevertheless, when Alix envisaged the future, it was with the half acknowledged certainty that she would one day be Dick's wife. They cared for one another, so she would have put it, but they were both sensible people. Plenty of time, no need to do anything rash. So the years had gone on. But Dick reacted unexpectedly. He had never directly spoken of his love to Alix, now he seemed less inclined to do so than ever. He avoided her, became morose and gloomy. Alix was quick to realize the truth. She had become a woman of means. Delicacy and pride stood in the way of Dick's asking her to be his wife.
She liked him none the worse for it and was indeed deliberating as to whether herself might not take the first step when for the second time the unexpected descended upon her.
She met Gerald Martin at a friend's house. He fell violently in love with her and within a week they were engaged. Alix, who had always considered herself "not the falling-in-love kind," was swept clean off her feet.
Unwittingly she had found the way to arouse her former lover. Dick Windyford had come to her stammering with rage and anger.
"The man's a perfect stranger to you! You know nothing about him!"
"I know that I love him."
"How can you know - in a week?"
"It doesn't take everyone eleven years to find out that they're in love with a girl," cried Alix angrily. His face went white.
"I've cared for you ever since I met you. I thought that you cared also." Alix was truthful.
"I thought so, too," she admitted, "But that was because I didn't know what love was." Then Dick had burst out again. Prayers, entreaties, even threats. Threats against the man who had supplanted him It was amazing to Alix to see the volcano that existed beneath the reserved exterior of the man she thought she knew so well.
Her thoughts had gone back to that interview now, on this sunny morning, as she leaned on the gate of the cottage. She had been married a month, and she was idyllically happy. Yet, in the momentary absence of the husband who was everything to her, a tinge of anxiety invaded her perfect happiness, and the cause of that anxiety was Dick Windyford.
Three times since her marriage she had dreamed the same dream. The environment differed, but the main facts were always the same. She saw her husband lying dead and Dick Windyford standing over him, and she knew clearly and distinctly that his was the hand which had dealt the fatal blow. But horrible though that was, there was something more horrible still - horrible that was, on awakening, for in the dream it seemed perfectly natural and inevitable. She, Alix Martin, was glad that her husband was dead - she stretched out grateful hands to the murderer, sometimes she thanked him. The dream always ended the same way, with herself clasped in Dick Windyford's arms.
She had said nothing of this dream to her husband, but secretly it had perturbed her more than she liked to admit. Was it a warning - a warning against Dick Windyford?
Alix was roused from her thoughts by the sharp ringing of the telephone bell from within the house. She entered the cottage, and picked up the receiver. Suddenly she swayed, and put out a hand against the wall.
"Who did you say was speaking?"
"Why, Alix, what's the matter with your voice? I wouldn't have known it. It's Dick."
"Oh!" said Alix. "Oh! Where - are you?"
"At the Traveller抯 Arms - that's the right name, isn't it? Or don't you even know of the existence of your village pub? I'm on my holiday - doing a bit of fishing here. Any objection to my looking you two good people up this evening after dinner?"
"No," said Alix sharply. "You mustn't come."
There was a pause, and Dick's voice, with a subtle alteration in it, spoke again.
"I beg your pardon," he said formally. "Of course I won't bother you - " Alix broke in hastily. Of course he must think her behaviour too extraordinary. It was extraordinary. Her nerves must be all to pieces.