or less acclimated; he no longer desired to sleep several times a day,
he could now assimilate guavas without disaster, and walk about without
acquiring headaches or deluging himself in perspiration. For another he
was enchanted with his work and with Shiela Cardross, and with the
entire Cardross family.

The month had been a busy one for him. When he was not in the saddle
with Neville Cardross the work in the new office and draughting-room
required his close attention. Already affairs were moving briskly; he
had leased a cottage for his office work; draughtsmen had arrived and
were fully occupied, half a dozen contractors appeared on the spot, also
a forester and assistants, and a surveyor and staff. And the energetic
Mr. Cardross, also, was enjoying every minute of his life.

Hamil's plan for the great main park with its terraces, miles of shell
and marl drives, its lakes, bridges, arbours, pools, shelters, canals,
fully satisfied Cardross. Hamil's engineers were still occupied with the
drainage problem, but a happy solution was now in sight. Woodcutters had
already begun work on the great central forest avenue stretching
straight away for four miles between green jungles topped by giant oaks,
magnolias, and palmettos; lesser drives and chair trails were being
planned, blazed, and traced out; sample coquina concrete blocks had been
delivered, and a rickety narrow-gauge railroad was now being installed
with spidery branches reaching out through the monotonous flat woods and
creeping around the boundaries where a nine-foot game-proof fence of
woven buffalo wire was being erected on cypress posts by hundreds of
negroes. Around this went a telephone and telegraph wire connected with
the house and the gamekeeper's lodges.

Beyond the vast park lay an unbroken wilderness. This had already been
surveyed and there remained nothing to do except to pierce it with a
wide main trail and erect a few patrol camps of palmetto logs within
convenient reach of the duck-haunted lagoons.

And now toward the end of the month, as contractor after contractor
arrived with gangs of negroes and were swallowed up in the distant
woodlands, the interest in the Cardross household became acute. From
the front entrance of the house guests and family could see the great
avenue which was being cleared through the forest--could see the vista
growing hour by hour as the huge trees swayed, bent, and came crashing
earthward. Far away the noise of the felling sounded, softened by
distance; snowy jets of steam puffed up above the trees, the panting of
a toy locomotive came on the breeze, the mean, crescendo whine of a
saw-mill.

"It's the only way to do things," said Cardross again and again; "make
up your mind quickly that you want to do them, then do them quickly. I
have no patience with a man who'll dawdle about a bit of property for
years and finally start to improve it with a pot of geraniums after he's
too old to enjoy anything except gruel. When I plant a tree I don't
plant a sapling; I get a machine and four horses and a dozen men and I
put in a full-grown tree so that I can sit under it next day if I wish
to and not spend thirty years waiting for it to grow. Isn't that the way
to do things, Hamil?"

Hamil said yes. It was certainly the way to accomplish things--the
modern millionaire's way; but the majority of people had to do a little
waiting before they could enjoy their vine and fig-tree.

Cardross sat down beside his wife, who was reading in a hammock chair,
and gazed at the new vista through a pair of field-glasses.

"Gad, Hamil!" he said with considerable feeling, "I hate to see a noble
tree go down; it's like murder to me. But it's the only thing to do,
isn't it? The French understand the value of magnificent distances. What
a glorious vista that will make, four miles straight away walled in by
deathless green, and the blue lagoon sparkling at the end of the
perspective! I love it, I tell you. I love it!"

"It will be very fine," said Hamil. His voice sounded a trifle tired. He
had ridden many miles since sunrise. There was marl on his
riding-breeches.

Cardross continued to examine the work in progress through his
binoculars. Presently he said:

"You've been overdoing it, haven't you, Hamil? My wife says so."

"Overdoing it?" repeated the young man, not understanding. "Overdoing
what?"

"I mean you've a touch of malaria; you've been working a little too
hard."

"He has indeed," drawled Mrs. Cardross, laying aside her novel; and,
placidly ignoring Hamil's protests: "Neville, you drag him about through
those dreadful swamps before he is acclimated, and you keep him up half
the night talking plans and making sketches. He is too young to work
like that."

Hamil turned red; but it was impossible to resent or mistake the kindly
solicitude of this very large and leisurely lady whose steadily
increasing motherly interest in him had at times tried his dignity in
that very lively family.

That he was already a successful young man with a metropolitan
reputation made little or no impression upon her. He was young, alone,
and she liked him better and better every day until that liking arrived
at the point where his physical welfare began to preoccupy her. So she
sent maids to his room with nourishing broths at odd and unexpected
moments, and she presented him with so many boxes of quinine that their
disposal became a problem until Shiela took them off his hands and
replaced them in her mother's medicine chest, whence, in due time, they
returned again as gifts to Hamil.

"Dear Mrs. Cardross," he said, taking a vacant chair beside her hammock,
"I really am perfectly well and perfectly acclimated, and I enjoy every
moment of the day whether here as your guest or in the saddle with your
husband or in the office over the plans--"

"But you are always at work!" she drawled; "we never see you."

"But that's why I am here," he insisted, smiling.

"Neville," she interrupted calmly; "no boy of his age ought to kill
himself. Listen to me; when Neville and I were married we had very
little, and he began by laying his plans to work every moment. But we
had an understanding," she added blandly; "I explained that I did not
intend to grow old with a wreck of a man. Now you may see the result of
our understanding," nodding toward her amazingly youthful husband.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" observed Cardross, still looking through his
field-glasses. "There's a baby-show next week and I'll enter if you
like, my dear."

Mrs. Cardross smiled and took Hamil's hand flat between her fair, pudgy
palms.

"We want you here," she said kindly, "_not_ because it is a matter of
convenience, but because we like you. Be a little more amiable, Mr.
Hamil; you never give us a moment during the day or after dinner. You
haven't been to a dance yet; you never go to the beach, you never motor
or sail or golf. Don't you like my children?"

"Like them! I adore them," he said, laughing, "but how can--"

"I'm going to take him camping," observed Cardross, interrupting. "I
want some duck-shooting; don't you, Hamil?"

"Of course I do, but--"

"Then we start this week for the woods--"

"I won't let you," interposed his wife; "you'll talk that boy to death
with your plans and surveys!"

"No, I'll promise to talk shooting every moment, and do a little of it,
too. What do you say, Hamil? Gray will go with us. Are you game?"

"I'd love to, but I promised Malcourt that--"

"Oh, nonsense! Louis can wait for you to go North and lay out Mr.
Portlaw's park. I've the first call on you; I've got you for the winter
here--"

"But Portlaw says--"

"Oh, bother Mr. Portlaw! We'll take him along, too, if he can tear
himself away from the Beach Club long enough to try less dangerous
game."

Since Malcourt's arrival he and Portlaw had joyously waded into whatever
gaiety offered, neck-deep; Portlaw had attached himself to the Club with
all the deliberation of a born gourmet and a hopeless gambler; Malcourt
roamed society and its suburbs, drifting from set to set and from
coterie to coterie, always an opportunist, catholic in his tastes,
tolerant of anything where pretty women were inclined to be amiable. And
they often were so inclined.

For his own curiosity he even asked to be presented to the redoubtable
Mrs. Van Dieman, and he returned at intervals to that austere
conservatory of current gossip and colonial tradition partly because it
was policy, socially, partly because, curiously enough, the somewhat
transparent charms of Virginia Suydam, whom he usually met there,
interested him--enough to make him remember a provocative glance from
her slow eyes--very slow, deeply lidded eyes, washed with the tint of
the sea when it is less blue than green. And the curious side of it was
that Malcourt and Virginia had met before, and he had completely
forgotten. It was difficult to tell whether she had.

He usually remembered women who looked at him like that, tucking them
away in his mental list to be investigated later. He had quite a little
list in his mental archives of women, wedded and otherwise, who
interested him agreeably or otherwise. Neither Mrs. Carrick nor Cecile
was on that list. Shiela Cardross was--and had been for two years.

Hamil, sitting on the terrace beside Mrs. Cardross, became very busy
with his note-book as soon as that languid lady resumed her book.

"If you're going to import wild boar from Germany," he said to Cardross,
"you'll have to fence in some ten miles square--a hundred square
miles!--or they'll take to the Everglades."

"I'm going to," returned that gentleman calmly. "I wish you'd ask
McKenna to figure it out. I'll supply the cypress of course."

Hamil leaned forward, a little thrilled with the colossal scheme. He
never could become quite accustomed to the vast scale on which Cardross
undertook things.

"That will make a corking preserve," he said. "What do you suppose is in
there now?"

"Some bears and deer, a few lynx, perhaps one or two panthers. The boar
will hold their own--if they can stand the summer--and I'm sure they
can. The alligators, no doubt, will get some of their young when they
breed. I shall start with a hundred couple when you're ready for them.
What are you going to do this afternoon?"

"Office work," replied Hamil, rising and looking at his marl-stained
puttees and spurs. Then he straightened up and smiled at Mrs. Cardross,
who was gently shaking her head, saying:

"The young people are at the bathing-beach; I wish you'd take a chair
and go down there--to please me, Mr. Hamil."

"Come, Hamil," added Cardross airily, "take a few days off--on yourself.
You've one thing yet to learn: it's only the unsuccessful who are too
busy to play."

"But what I'm doing is play," remonstrated the young man
good-humouredly. "Well--I'll go to the beach, then." He looked at the
steam-jets above the forest, fumbled with his note-book, caught the eye
of Mrs. Cardross, put away the book, and took his leave laughingly.

"We go duck-shooting to-morrow," called out Cardross after him.

Hamil halted in the doorway to protest, but the elder man waved him
away; and he went to his room to change riding-clothes for flannels and
sponge the reek of horse and leather from his person.

The beach was all ablaze with the brilliant colours of sunshades, hats,
and bathing-skirts. Hamil lost no time in getting into his
swimming-suit; and, as he emerged, tall, cleanly built, his compact
figure deeply tanned where exposed, Portlaw, waddling briskly toward the
ocean, greeted him with the traditional: "Come on! it's fine!" and
informed him furthermore that "everybody" was there.

CHAPTER VIII

MANOEUVERING

Everybody seemed to be there, either splashing about in the Atlantic or
playing ball on the beach or congregated along the sands observant of
the jolly, riotous scene sparkling under the magnificence of a cloudless
sky.

Hamil nodded to a few people as he sauntered toward the surf; he stopped
and spoke to his aunt and Colonel Vetchen, who informed him that
Virginia and Cuyp were somewhere together chastely embracing the ocean;
he nodded to old Classon who was toddling along the wet sands in a
costume which revealed considerable stomach; he saw Malcourt, knee-deep,
hovering around Shiela, yet missing nothing of what went on around him,
particularly wherever the swing of a bathing-skirt caught his quick,
handsome eyes.

Then Cecile stretched out an inviting hand to him from the water and he
caught it, and together they hurled themselves head first into the surf,
swimming side by side out to the raft.

"It's nice to see you again," said the girl. "Are you going to be
agreeable now and go about with us? There's a luncheon at two--your fair
friend Virginia Suydam has asked us, much to our surprise--but after
that I'm quite free if you've anything to propose."

She looked up at him, pink and fresh as a wet rose, balanced there on
the edge of the rocking raft.

"Anything to propose?" he repeated; "I don't know; there's scarcely
anything I wouldn't propose to you. So you're going to Virginia's
luncheon?"

"_I_ am; Shiela won't." She frowned. "It's just as it was two years ago
when Louis Malcourt tagged after her every second. It's stupid, but we
can't count on them any more."

"Does--does Malcourt--"

"Tag after Shiela? Haven't you seen it? You've been too busy to notice.
I wish you wouldn't work every minute. There was the jolliest sort of a
dance at the O'Haras' last night--while you were fast asleep. I know you
were because old Jonas told mother you had fallen asleep in your chair
with your head among a pile of blue-prints. On my way to the dance I
wanted to go in and tie one of Shiela's cunning little lace morning caps
under your chin, but Jessie wouldn't go with me. They're perfectly sweet
and madly fashionable--these little Louis XVI caps. I'll show you one
some day."

For a few moments the girl rattled on capriciously, swinging her
stockinged legs in the smooth green swells that rose above her knees
along the raft's edge; and he sat silent beside her, half-listening,
half-preoccupied, his eyes instinctively searching the water's edge
beyond.

"I--hadn't noticed that Louis Malcourt was so devoted to your sister,"
he said.

Cecile looked up quickly, but detected only amiable indifference in the
young fellow's face.

"They're-always together; _elle s'affiche à la fin_!" she said
impatiently. "Shiela was only eighteen before; she's twenty now, and
old enough to know whether she wants to marry a man like that or not."

Hamil glanced around at her incredulously. "Marry Malcourt?"

But Cecile went on headlong in the wake of her own ideas.

"He's a sort of a relative; we've always known him. He and Gray used to
go camping in Maine and he often spent months in our house. But for two
years now, he's been comparatively busy--he's Mr. Portlaw's manager, you
know, and we've seen nothing of him--which was quite agreeable to me."

Hamil rose, unquiet. "I thought _you_ were rather impressed by Shiela,"
continued the girl. "I really did think so, Mr. Hamil."

"Your sister predicted that I'd lose my heart and senses to _you_" said
Hamil, laughing and reseating himself beside her.

"Have you?"

"Of course I have. Who could help it?"

The girl considered him smilingly.

"You're the nicest of men," she said. "If you hadn't been so busy I'm
certain we'd have had a desperate affair. But--as it is--and it makes me
perfectly furious--I have only the most ridiculously commonplace and
comfortable affection for you--the sort which prompts mother to send you
quinine and talcum powder--"

Balanced there side by side they fell to laughing.

"Sentiment? Yes," she said; "but oh! it's the kind that offers
witch-hazel and hot-water bottles to the best beloved! Mr. Hamil, why
can't we flirt comfortably like sensibly frivolous people!"

"I wish we could, Cecile."

"I wish so, too, Garret. No, that's too formal--Garry! There, that ends
our chances!"

"You're the jolliest family I ever knew," he said. "You can scarcely
understand how pleasant it has been for me to camp on the edges of your
fireside and feel the home-warmth a little--now and then--"

"Why do you remain so aloof then?"

"I don't mean to. But my heart is in this business of your father's--the
more deeply in because of his kindness--and your mother's--and for all
your sakes. You know I can scarcely realise it--I've been with you only
a month, and yet you've done so much for me--received me so simply, so
cordially--that the friendship seems to be of years instead of hours."

"That is the trouble," sighed Cecile; "you and I never had a chance to
be frivolous; I'm no more self-conscious with you than I am with Gray.
Tell me, why was Virginia Suydam so horrid to us at first?"

Hamil reddened. "You mustn't ask me to criticise my own kin," he said.

"No," she said, "you couldn't do that.... And Miss Suydam has been more
civil recently. It's a mean, low, and suspicious thing to say, but I
suppose it's because--but I don't think I'll say it after all."

"It's nicer not to," said Hamil. They both knew perfectly well that
Virginia's advances were anything but disinterested. For, alas! even the
men of her own entourage were now gravitating toward the Cardross
family; Van Tassel Cuyp was continually wrinkling his nose and fixing
his dead-blue eyes in that direction; little Colonel Vetchen circled
busily round and round that centre of attraction, even Courtlandt
Classon evinced an inclination to toddle that way. Besides Louis
Malcourt had arrived; and Virginia had never quite forgotten Malcourt
who had made one at a house party in the Adirondacks some years since,
although even when he again encountered her, Malcourt had retained no
memory of the slim, pallid girl who had for a week been his fellow-guest
at Portlaw's huge camp on Luckless Lake.

"Virginia Suydam is rather an isolated girl," said Hamil thoughtfully.
"She lives alone; and it is not very gay for a woman alone in the world;
not the happiest sort of life.... Virginia has always been very friendly
to me--always. I hope you will find her amusing."

"I'm going to her luncheon," said Cecile calmly. "It's quite too absurd
for her to feel any more doubt about us socially than we feel about her.
That is why I am going. Shall we swim?"

He rose; she clasped his offered hand and sprang to her feet, ready for
the water again. But at that instant Malcourt's dark, handsome head
appeared on the crest of a surge close by, and the next moment that
young gentleman scrambled aboard the raft, breathing heavily.

"Hello, Cecile!" he gasped; "Hello, Hamil! Shiela thought it must be
you, but I was sceptical. Whew! That isn't much of a swim; I must be out
of condition--"

"Late hours, cards, and highballs," observed Cecile scornfully. "You're
horridly smooth and fat, Louis."

Malcourt turned to Hamil.

"Glad to see you've emerged from your shell at last. The rumour is that
you're working too hard."

"There's no similar rumour concerning you," observed Cecile, who had
never made any pretence of liking Malcourt. "Please swim out to sea, if
you've nothing more interesting to tell us. I've just managed to decoy
Mr. Hamil here and I'd like to converse with him in peace."

Malcourt, arms folded, balanced himself easily on the raft's pitching
edge and glanced at her with that amiably bored expression
characteristic of him when rebuffed by a woman. On such occasions his
eyes resembled the half-closed orbs of a teased but patient cat; and
Cecile had once told him so.

"There's a pretty rumour afloat concerning your last night's performance
at the Beach Club," said the girl disdainfully. "A boy like you, making
himself conspicuous by his gambling!"

Malcourt winced, but as the girl had apparently heard nothing to his
discredit except about his gambling, he ventured an intelligent sidelong
glance at Hamil.

The latter looked at him inquiringly; Malcourt laughed.

"You haven't been to the Beach Club yet, have you, Hamil? I'll get you a
card if you like."

Cecile, furious, turned her back and went head first into the sea.

"Come on," said Hamil briefly, and followed her. Malcourt took to the
water leisurely, going out of his way to jeer at and splash Portlaw, who
was labouring like a grampus inshore; then he circled within observation
distance of several pretty girls, displayed his qualities as a swimmer
for their benefit, and finally struck out shoreward.

When he emerged from the surf he looked about for Shiela. She was
already half-way to the beach, walking with Cecile and Hamil toward the
pavilion; and, starting across the shallows to overtake her, he
suddenly came face to face with Virginia Suydam.

She was moving hip-deep out through the seething tide, slim, graceful, a
slight flush tinting the usual delicate pallor of her cheeks. Gussie
Vetchen bobbed nimbly about in the vicinity, very busy trying to look at
everybody and keep his balance at the same time. Miss Palliser was
talking to Cuyp.

As Malcourt waded past, he and Miss Suydam exchanged a pleasantly formal
greeting; and, for the second time, something in her casual gaze--the
steadiness of her pretty green-tinted eyes, perhaps--perhaps their
singular colour--interested him.

"You did not ask _me_ to your luncheon," he said gaily, as he passed her
through the foam.

"No, only petticoats, Mr. Malcourt. I am sorry that your--fiancée isn't
coming."

He halted, perfectly aware of the deliberate and insolent indiscretion
of her reply. Every line of her supple figure accented the listless,
disdainful intention. As he remained motionless she turned, bent
gracefully and laid her palms flat on the surface of the water, then
looked idly over her shoulder at him.

He waded back close to her, she watching him advance without apparent
interest--but watching him nevertheless.

"Have you heard that anybody and myself are supposed to be engaged?" he
asked.

"No," she replied coolly; "have you?"

A dark flush mantled his face and he choked.

For a moment they stood so; her brows were raised a trifle.

"Well?" she asked at last. "Have I made you _very_ angry, Mr. Malcourt?"
She waded out a step or two toward the surf, facing it. The rollers
breaking just beyond made her foothold precarious; twice she nearly lost
her balance; the third time he caught her hand to steady her and held it
as they faced the surges, swaying together.

She did not look again at him. They stood for a while unsteadily, her
hand in his grasp.

"Why on earth did you say such a thing to me?" he asked.

"I don't--know," she said simply; "I really don't, Mr. Malcourt."

And it was true; for their slight acquaintance warranted neither
badinage nor effrontery; and she did not understand the sudden impulse
toward provocation, unless it might be her contempt for Shiela Cardross.
And that was the doing of Mrs. Van Dieman.

"I'm sorry," she said, looking up at him, and after a moment, down at
their clasped hands. "Are we going to swim out, Mr. Malcourt?--or shall
we continue to pose as newly married for the benefit of the East Coast?"

"We'll sit in the sands," he said. "We'll probably find a lot of things
to say to each other." But he dropped her fingers--gently.

"Unless you care to join your--care to join Miss Cardross."

Even while she spoke she remained calmly amazed at the commonness of her
own speech, the astonishing surface streak of unsuspected vulgarity
which she was naïvely exhibiting to this man.

Vetchen came noisily splashing up to join them, but he found neither of
them very attentive to him as they walked slowly to the beach and up to
the dry, hot sand.

Virginia curled up in the sand; Malcourt extended himself full length at
her feet, clasped fingers supporting his head, smooth, sun-browned legs
crossed behind him; and he looked like a handsome and rather sulky boy
lying there, kicking up his heels insouciantly or stretching luxuriously
in the sun.

Vetchen, who had followed, began an interminable story on the usual
theme of his daughter, Mrs. Tom O'Hara, illustrating her beauty, her
importance, and the incidental importance of himself; and it was with
profound surprise and deep offence that he discovered that neither
Malcourt nor Miss Suydam were listening. Indeed, in brief undertones,
they had been carrying on a guarded conversation of their own all the
while; and presently little Vetchen took his leave with a hauteur quite
lost on those who had so unconsciously affronted him.

"Of course it is very civil of you to say you remember me," Virginia was
saying, "but I am perfectly aware you do not."

Malcourt insisted that he recalled their meeting at Portlaw's Adirondack
camp on Luckless Lake two years before, cudgelling his brains at the
same time to recollect seeing Virginia there and striving to remember
some corroborative incident. But all he could really recall was a young
and unhappily married woman to whom he had made violent love--and it was
even an effort for him to remember her name.

"How desperately you try!" observed Virginia, leisurely constructing a
little rampart of sand between them. "Listen to me, Mr. Malcourt"--she
raised her eyes, and again the hint of provocation in them preoccupied
him--"I remembered you, and I have sometimes hoped we might meet again.
Is that amends for the very bad taste I displayed in speaking of your
engagement before it has been announced?"

"I am not engaged--to be married," he said deliberately.

She looked at him steadily, and he sustained the strain of the gaze in
his own untroubled fashion.

"You are not engaged?"

"No."

She straightened up, resting her weight on one bare arm, then leisurely
laid her length on the burning sands and, face framed between her
fingers, considered him in silence.

In her attitude, in her very conversation with this man there was, for
her, a certain sense of abandonment; a mental renouncing of all that had
hitherto characterised her in her relations with an always formal world;
as though that were necessary to meet him on his own level.

Never before had she encountered the temptation, the opportunity, or the
person where the impulse to discard convention, conviction, training,
had so irresistibly presented itself. Nor could she understand it now;
yet she was aware, instinctively, that she was on the verge of the
temptation and the opportunity; that there existed a subtle something in
this man, in herself, that tempted to conventional relaxation. In all
her repressed, regulated, and self-suppressed career, all that had ever
been in her of latent daring, of feminine audacity, of caprice, of
perverse provocation, stirred in her now, quickening with the slightest
acceleration of her pulses.

Apparently a man of her own caste, yet she had never been so obscurely
stirred by a man of her own caste--had never instinctively divined in
other men the streak which this man, from the first interchange of
words, had brought out in her.

Aware of his attraction, hazily convinced that she had no confidence in
him, the curious temptation persisted and grew; and she felt very young
and very guilty like a small child consenting to parley with another
child whose society has been forbidden. And it seemed to her that
somehow she had already demeaned herself by the tentative toward a
common understanding with an intellect and principles of a grade
inferior to her own.

"That was a very pretty woman you were so devoted to in the
Adirondacks," she said.

He recalled the incident with a pleasant frankness which left her
unconvinced.

Suddenly it came over her that she had had enough of him--more than was
good for her, and she sat up straight, primly retying her neckerchief.

"To-morrow?" he was saying, too civilly; but on her way to the pavilion
she could not remember what she had replied, or how she had rid herself
of him.

Inside the pavilion she saw Hamil and Shiela Cardross, already dressed,
watching the lively occupants of the swimming-pool; and she exchanged a
handshake with the former and a formal nod with the latter.

"Garret, your aunt is worrying because somebody told her that there are
snakes in the district where you are at work. Come in some evening and
reassure her." And to Shiela: "So sorry you cannot come to my luncheon,
Miss Cardross.--You _are_ Miss Cardross, aren't you? I've been told
otherwise."

Hamil looked up, pale and astounded; but Shiela answered, undisturbed:

"My sister Cecile is the younger; yes, I am Miss Cardross."

And Hamil realised there had been two ways of interpreting Virginia's
question, and he reddened, suddenly appalled at his own knowledge and at
his hasty and gross conclusions.

If Shiela noticed the quick changes in his face she did not appear to,
nor the curious glance that Virginia cast at him.

"_So_ sorry," said Miss Suydam again, "for if you are going to be so
much engaged to-day you will no doubt also miss the tea for that pretty
Mrs. Ascott."

"No," said Shiela, "I wouldn't think of missing that." And carelessly to
Hamil: "As you and I have nothing on hand to-day, I'll take you over to
meet Mrs. Ascott if you like."

Which was a notice to Virginia that Miss Cardross had declined her
luncheon from deliberate disinclination.

Hamil, vaguely conscious that all was not as agreeable as the surface of
things indicated, said cordially that he'd be very glad to go anywhere
with Shiela to meet anybody, adding to Virginia that he'd heard of Mrs.
Ascott but could not remember when or where.

"Probably you've heard of her often enough from Louis Malcourt," said
Virginia. "He and I were just recalling his frenzied devotion to her in
the Adirondacks; that," she added smilingly to Shiela, "was before Mrs.
Ascott got her divorce from her miserable little French count and
resumed her own name. She was the most engaging creature when Mr.
Malcourt and I met her two years ago."

Shiela, who had been listening with head partly averted and grave eyes
following the antics of the divers in the pool, turned slowly and
encountered Virginia's smile with a straight, cold gaze of utter
distrust.

Nothing was said for a moment; then Virginia spoke smilingly again to
Hamil concerning his aunt's uneasiness, turned toward Shiela, exchanged
formal adieux with her, and walked on toward her dressing-room and
shower. Hamil and Miss Cardross turned the other way.

When Shiela was seated in her double wheel-chair with Hamil beside her,
she looked up through her veil unsmiling into his serious face.

"Did you notice anything particularly impertinent in Miss Suydam's
question?" she asked quietly.

"What question?"

"When she asked me whether I was Miss Cardross."

The slow colour again burned his bronzed skin. He made no reply, nor did
she await any after a silent consideration of his troubled face.

"Where did you hear about me?" she asked.

She had partly turned in her seat, resting both gloved hands on the
crook of her folded sunshade, and leaning a little toward him.

"Don't ask me," he said; "whatever I heard I heard unwillingly--"

"You _have_ heard?"

He did not answer.

The remainder of the journey was passed in silence. On the road they met
Mrs. Cardross and Jessie Carrick driving to a luncheon; later, Gray
passed in his motor with his father.

"I have an idea that you and I are to lunch alone," said Hamil as they
reached the house; and so it turned out, for Malcourt was going off
with Portlaw somewhere and Cecile was dressing for Virginia's luncheon.

"Did you care to go with me to the Ascott-O'Hara function?" asked
Shiela, pausing on the terrace. Her voice was listless, her face devoid
of animation.

"I don't care where I go if I may go with you," he said, with a new
accent of intention in his voice which did not escape her.

She went slowly up the stairs untying her long veil as she mounted.
Cecile in a bewildering hat and gown emerged upon the terrace before
Shiela reappeared, and found Hamil perched upon the coquina balustrade,
poring over a pocketful of blue-prints; and she said very sweetly:
"Good-bye, my elder brother. Will you promise to take the best of care
of our little sister Shiela while I'm away?"

"The very best," he said, sliding feet foremost to the terrace.
"Heavens, Cecile, you certainly are bewitching in those clothes!"

"It is what they were built for, brother," she said serenely. "Good-bye;
we won't shake hands on account of my gloves.... Do be nice to Shiela.
She isn't very gay these days--I don't know why. I believe she has
rather missed you."

Hamil tucked her into her chair, the darky pedalled off; then the young
man returned to the terrace where presently a table for two was brought
and luncheon announced as Shiela Cardross appeared.

Hamil displayed the healthy and undiscriminating appetite of a man who
is too busy mentally and physically to notice what he eats and drinks;
Shiela touched nothing except fruit. She lighted his cigarette for him
before the coffee, and took one herself, turning it thoughtfully over
and over between her delicately shaped fingers; but at a glance of
inquiry from him:

"No, I don't," she said; "it burns my tongue. Besides I may some day
require it as a novelty to distract me--so I'll wait."

She rose a moment later, and stood, distrait, looking out across the
sunlit world. He at her elbow, head bent, idly watched the smoke curling
upward from his cigarette.

Presently, as though moved by a common impulse, they turned together,
slowly traversed the terrace and the long pergola all crimson and white
with bougainvillia and jasmine, and entered the jungle road beyond the
courts where carved seats of coquina glimmered at intervals along the
avenue of oaks and palmettos and where stone-edged pools reflected the
golden green dusk of the semi-tropical foliage above.

On the edge of one of these basins the girl seated herself; without her
hat and gloves and in a gown which exposed throat and neck she always
looked younger and more slender to him, the delicate modelling of the
neck and its whiteness was accentuated by the silky growth of the brown
hair which close to the nape and brow was softly blond like a child's.

The frail, amber-tinted little dragon-flies of the South came hovering
over the lotus bloom that edged the basin; long, narrow-shaped
butterflies whose velvet-black wings were barred with brilliant stripes
of canary yellow fluttered across the forest aisle; now and then a giant
papilio sailed high under the arched foliage on tiger-striped wings of
chrome and black, or a superb butterfly in pearl white and malachite
green came flitting about the sparkle-berry bloom.

The girl nodded toward it. "That is a scarce butterfly here," she said.
"Gray would be excited. I wish we had his net here."

"It is the _Victorina_, isn't it?" he asked, watching the handsome,
nervous-winged creature which did not seem inclined to settle on the
white flowers.

"Yes, the _Victorina steneles_. Are you interested?"

"The generation I grew up with collected," he said. "I remember my
cabinet, and some of the names. But I never saw any fellows of this sort
in the North."

"Your memory is good?"

"Yes," he said, "for what I care about"--he looked up at her--"for those
I care about my memory is good, I never forget kindness--nor confidence
given--nor a fault forgiven."

She bent forward, elbows on knees, chin propped on both linked hands.

"Do you understand now," she said, "why I could not afford the
informality of our first meeting? What you have heard about me explains
why I can scarcely afford to discard convention, does it not, Mr.
Hamil?"

She went on, her white fingers now framing her face and softly indenting
the flushed skin:

"I don't know who has talked to you, or what you have heard; but I knew
by your expression--there at the swimming-pool--that you had heard
enough to embarrass you and--and hurt me very, very keenly."

"Calypso!" he broke out impulsively; but she shook her head. "Let _me_
tell you if it must be told, Mr. Hamil.... Father and mother are
dreadfully sensitive; I have only known about it for two years; two
years ago they told me--had to tell me.... Well--it still seems hazy and
incredible.... I was educated in a French convent--if you know what that
means. All my life I have been guarded--sheltered from knowledge of
evil; I am still unprepared to comprehend--... And I am still very
ignorant; I know that.... So you see how it was with me; a girl awakened
to such self-knowledge cannot grasp it entirely--cannot wholly convince
herself except at moments--at night. Sometimes--when a crisis
threatens--and one has lain awake long in the dark--"

She gathered her knees in her arms and stared at the patch of sunlight
that lay across the hem of her gown, leaving her feet shod in gold.

"I don't know how much difference it really makes to the world. I
suppose I shall learn--if people are to discuss me. How much difference
does it make, Mr. Hamil?"

"It makes none to me--"

"The world extends beyond your pleasant comradeship," she said. "How
does the world regard a woman of no origin--whose very name is a
charity--"

"Shiela!"

"W-what?" she said, trying to smile; and then slowly laid her head in
her hands, covering her face.

She had given way, very silently, for as he bent close to her he felt
the tearful aroma of her uneven breath--the feverish flush on cheek and
hand, the almost imperceptible tremor of her slender body--rather close
to him now.

When she had regained her composure, and her voice was under command,
she straightened up, face averted.

"You are quite perfect, Mr. Hamil; you have not hurt me with one
misguided and well-intended word. That is exactly as it should be
between us--must always be."

"Of course," he said slowly.

She nodded, still looking away from him. "Let us each enjoy our own
griefs unmolested. You have yours?"

"No, Shiela, I haven't any griefs."

"Come to me when you have; I shall not humiliate you with words to shame
your intelligence and my own. If you suffer you suffer; but it is well
to be near a friend--not _too_ near, Mr. Hamil."

"Not too near," he repeated.

"No; that is unendurable. The counter-irritant to grief is sanity, not
emotion. When a woman is a little frightened the presence of the
unafraid is what steadies her."

She looked over her shoulder into the water, reached down, broke off a
blossom of wild hyacinth, and, turning, drew it through the button-hole
of his coat.

"You certainly are very sweet to me," she said quietly. And, laughing a
little: "The entire family adores you with pills--and I've now decorated
you with the lovely curse of our Southern rivers. But--there are no such
things as weeds; a weed is only a miracle in the wrong place....
Well--shall we walk and moralise or remain here and make cat-cradle
conversation?... You are looking at me very solemnly."

"I was thinking--"

"What?"

"That, perhaps, I never before knew a girl as well as I know you."

"Not even Miss Suydam?"

"Lord, no! I never dreamed of knowing her--I mean her real self. You
understand, she and I have always taken each other for granted--never
with any genuine intimacy."

"Oh! And--this--ours--is genuine intimacy?"

"Is it not?"

For a moment her teeth worried the bright velvet of her lip, then
meeting his gaze:

"I mean to be--honest--with you," she said with a tremor in her voice;
but her regard wavered under his. "I mean to be," she repeated so low he
scarcely heard her. Then with a sudden animation a little strained:
"When this winter has become a memory let it be a happy one for you and
me. And by the same token you and I had better think about dressing. You
don't mind, do you, if I take you to meet Mrs. Ascott?--she was Countess
de Caldelis; it's taken her years to secure her divorce."

Hamil remembered the little dough-faced, shrimp-limbed count when he
first came over with the object of permitting somebody to support him
indefinitely so that later, in France, he could in turn support his
mistresses in the style to which they earnestly desired to become
accustomed.

And now the American girl who had been a countess was back, a little
wiser, a little harder, and more cynical, with some of the bloom rubbed
off, yet much of her superficial beauty remaining.

"Alida Ascott," murmured Shiela. "Jessie was a bridesmaid. Poor little
girl!--I'm glad she's free. There were no children," she said, looking
up at Hamil; "in that case a decent girl is justified! Don't you think
so?"

"Yes, I do," he said, smiling; "I'm not one of those who believe that
such separations threaten us with social disintegration."

"Nor I. Almost every normal woman desires to live decently. She has a
right to. All young girls are ignorant. If they begin with a dreadful
but innocent mistake does the safety of society require of them the
horror of lifelong degradation? Then the safety of such a society is not
worth the sacrifice. That is my opinion."

"That settles a long-vexed problem," he said, laughing at her
earnestness.

But she looked at him, unsmiling, while he spoke, hands clasped in her
lap, the fingers twisting and tightening till the rose-tinted nails
whitened.

Men have only a vague idea of women's ignorance; how naturally they are
inclined to respond to a man; how the dominating egotism of a man and
his confident professions and his demands confuse them; how deeply his
appeals for his own happiness stir them to pity.... They have heard of
love--and they do not know. If they ever dream of it it is not what they
have imagined when a man suddenly comes crashing through the barriers of
friendship and stuns them with an incoherent recital of his own desires.
And yet, in spite of the shock, it is with them instinctive to be kind.
No woman can endure an appeal unmoved; except for them there would be no
beggars; their charity is not a creed: it is the essence of them, the
beginning of all things for them--and the end.

The bantering smile had died out in Hamil's face; he sat very still,
interested, disturbed, and then wondering when his eyes caught the
restless manoeuvres of the little hands, constantly in motion,
interlacing, eloquent of the tension of self-suppression.

He thought: "It is a cowardly thing for an egotist with an egotist's
early and lively knowledge of the world and of himself to come
clamouring to a girl for charity. It _is_ true that almost any man can
make a young girl think she loves him if he is selfish enough to do it.
Is her ignorance a fault? All her training deprecates any acquisition of
worldly knowledge: it is not for her: her value is in her ignorance.
Then when she naturally makes some revolting mistake and attempts to
escape to decency and freedom once more there is a hue and a cry from
good folk and clergy. Divorce? It is a good thing--as the last resort.
And a woman need feel no responsibility for the sort of society that
would deprive a woman of the last refuge she has!"

He raised his eyes, curiously, in time to intercept hers.

"So--you did not know me after all, it seems," she said with a faint
smile. "You never suspected in me a _Vierge Rouge_, militant, champion
of her downtrodden sex, haranguing whomsoever would pay her the fee of
his attention. Did you?"

And as he made no reply: "Your inference is that I have had some unhappy
love affair--some perilously close escape from--unhappy matrimony." She
shrugged. "As though a girl could plead only a cause which concerned
herself.... Tell me what you are thinking?"

She had risen, and he stood up before her, fascinated.

"Tell me!" she insisted; "I shall not let you go until you do!"

"I was thinking about you."

"Please don't!... Are you doing it yet?" closely confronting him, hands
behind her.

"Yes, I am," he said, unable to keep his eyes from her, all her beauty
and youth and freshness troubling him, closing in upon him like subtle
fragrance in the golden forest dusk.

"Are you still thinking about me?"

"Yes."

The rare sweet laughter edged her lips, for an instant; then something
in his eyes checked her. Colour and laughter died out, leaving a pale
confused smile; and the straight gaze wavered, grew less direct, yet
lost not a shade of his expression which also had changed.

Neither spoke; and after a moment they turned away, walking not very
near together toward the house.

The sunshine and the open somehow brought relief and the delicate
constraint between them relaxed as they sauntered slowly into the house
where Shiela presently went away to dress for the Ascott function, and
Hamil sat down on the veranda for a while, then retired to undertake the
embellishment of his own person.

CHAPTER IX

THE INVASION

They went together in a double chair, spinning noiselessly over the
shell road which wound through oleander and hibiscus hedges. Great
orange and sulphur-tinted butterflies kept pace with them as they
travelled swiftly southward; the long, slim shadows of palms gridironed
the sunny road, for the sun was in the west, and already a bird here and
there had ventured on a note or two as prelude to the evening song, and
over the ocean wild ducks were rising in clouds, swinging and drifting
and settling again as though in short rehearsal for their sunset flight.

"Your hostess is Mrs. Tom O'Hara," said the girl; "when you have enough
of it look at me and I'll understand. And if you try to hide in a corner
with some soulful girl I'll look at you--if it bores me too much. So
don't sit still with an infatuated smile, as Cecile does, when she sees
that I wish to make my adieux."

"I'm so likely to," he said, "when escape means that I'll have you to
myself again."

There was a trifle more significance in the unconsidered speech than he
had intended. The girl looked absently straight in front of her; he sat
motionless, uncomfortable at his own words, but too wise to attempt to
modify them by more words.

Other chairs passed them now along the road--there were nods of
recognition, gay salutes, an intimate word or two as the light-wheeled
vehicles flashed past; and in a moment more the tall coquina gate posts
and iron grille of Mrs. Tom O'Hara's villa, Tsana Lahni, glimmered under
an avenue of superb royal palms.

The avenue was crowded with the slender-wheeled basket-bodied chairs gay
with the plumage of pretty women; the scene on the lawns beyond was
charming where an orange and white pavilion was pitched against the
intense green of the foliage, and the pelouse was all dotted and
streaked with vivid colours of sunshades and gowns.

"Ulysses among the sirens," she whispered as they made their way toward
their hostess, exchanging recognition with people everywhere in the
throngs. "Here they are--all of them--and there's Miss Suydam,--too
unconscious of us. How hath the House of Hamil fallen!--"

"If you talk that way I won't leave you for one second while we're
here!" he said under his breath.

"Nonsense; it only hurts me, not my pride. And half a cup of unforbidden
tea will drown the memory of that insolence--"

She bent forward with smiling composure to shake hands with Mrs. Tom
O'Hara, a tall, olive-tinted, black-haired beauty; presented Hamil to
his hostess, and left him planted, to exchange impulsive amenities with
little Mrs. Ascott.

Mrs. Tom O'Hara, a delicate living Gainsborough in black and white, was
probably the handsomest woman in the South. She dressed with that
perfection of simplicity which only a few can afford; she wore only a
single jewel at a time, but the gem was always matchless.

Warm-hearted, generous, and restless, she loved the character of Lady
Bountiful; and, naïvely convinced of her own unassailable supremacy,
played very picturesquely the rôle of graciousness and patronage to the
tenants of her great estates and of her social and intellectual world
alike. Hence, although she went where many of her less fashionable
guests might not have been asked to go, she herself paid self-confident
homage to intellect as she understood it, and in her own house her
entourage was as mixed as her notions of a "salon" permitted.

She was gracious to Hamil on account of his aunt, his profession, and
himself. Also her instinct was to be nice to everybody. As hostess she
had but a moment to accord him, but during that moment she contrived to
speak reassuringly of the Suydam genealogy, the art of landscape
architecture, and impart a little special knowledge from her
inexhaustible reserve, informing him that the name of her villa, Tsa-na
Lah-ni, was Seminole, and meant "Yellow Butterfly." And then she passed
him sweetly along into a crush of bright-eyed young things who attempted
to pour tea into him and be agreeable in various artless ways; and
presently he found himself in a back-water where fashion and intellect
were conscientiously doing their best to mix. But the mixture was a thin
solution--thinner than Swizzles and Caravan, and the experience of the
very young girl beside him who talked herself out in thirty seconds from
pure nervousness and remained eternally grateful to him for giving her a
kindly opportunity to escape to cover among the feather-brained and
frivolous.

Then, close to him, a girl spoke of the "purple perfume of petunias,"
and a man used the phrases, "body politic," and "the gaiety of
nations."

So he knew he was among the elect, redundant, and truly precious. A
chinless young man turned to him and said:

"There is nobody to-day who writes as Bernard Haw writes."

"Does anybody want to?" asked Hamil pleasantly.

"You mean that this is an age of trumpery romance?" demanded a heavy
gentleman in dull disdain. "William Dean has erased all romance from
modern life with one smear of his honest thumb!"

"The honest thumb that persistently and patiently rubs the scales from
sapphire and golden wings in order to be certain that the vination of
the Ornithoptera is still underneath, is not the digit of inspiration,"
suggested Hamil.

The disciple turned a dull brick-colour; but he betrayed neither his
master nor himself.

"What, in God's name," he asked heavily, "is an ornithoptera?"

A very thin author, who had been listening and twisting himself into a
number of shapes, thrust his neck forward into the arena and considered
Hamil with the pale grimace of challenge.

"Henry Haynes?" he inquired--"your appreciation in one phrase, Mr.
Hamil."

"In a Henry Haynes phrase?" asked Hamil good-humouredly.

"The same old calumny?" said the thin author, writhing almost off his
chair.

"I'm afraid so; and the remedy a daily dose of verbifuge--until he gets
back to the suffocated fount of inspiration. I am very sorry if I seem
to differ from everybody, but everybody seems to differ from me, so I
can't help it."

A Swami, unctuous and fat, and furious at the lack of feminine
attention, said something suavely outrageous about modern women. He was
immediately surrounded by several mature examples who adored to be
safely smitten by the gelatinous and esoteric.

A little flabby, featureless, but very fashionable portrait painter
muttered to Hamil: "Orient and Occident! the molluskular and the
muscular. Mr. Hamil, do you realise _what_ the Occident is?"

"Geographically?" inquired Hamil wearily.

"No, symbolically. It is that!" explained the painter, doubling his
meagre biceps and punching at the infinite, with a flattened thumb.
"That," he repeated, "is America. Do you comprehend?"

The wan young girl who had spoken of the purple perfume of petunias said
that _she_ understood. It may be that she did; she reviewed literature
for the _Tribune_.

Harried and restless, Hamil looked for Shiela and saw Portlaw, very hot
and uncomfortable in his best raiment, shooting his cuffs and looking
dully about for some avenue of escape; and Hamil, exasperated with
purple perfumes and thumbs, meanly snared him and left him to confront a
rather ample and demonstrative young girl who believed that all human
thought was precious--even sinful thought--of which she knew as much as
a newly hatched caterpillar. However, Portlaw was able to enlighten her
if he cared to.

Again and again Hamil, wandering in circles, looked across the
wilderness of women's hats at Shiela Cardross, but a dozen men
surrounded her, and among them he noticed the graceful figure of
Malcourt directly in front of her, blocking any signal he might have
given.

Somebody was saying something about Mrs. Ascott. He recollected that he
hadn't met her; so he found somebody to present him.

"And _you_ are the man?" exclaimed Mrs. Ascott softly, considering him
with her head on one side. "Shiela Cardross wrote to me in New York
about you, but I've wanted to inspect you for my own information."

"Are you doing it now?" he asked, amused.

"It's done! Do you imagine you are complex? I've heard various tales
about you from three sources, to-day; from an old friend, Louis
Malcourt--from another, Virginia Suydam--and steadily during the last
month--including to-day--from Shiela Cardross. But I couldn't find a
true verdict until the accused appeared personally before me. Tell me,
Mr. Hamil, do you plead guilty to being as amiable as the somewhat
contradictory evidence indicates?"

"Parole me in custody of this court and let me convince your Honor,"
said Hamil, looking into the captivatingly cool and humourous face
upturned to his.

Mrs. Ascott was small, and finely moulded; something of the miniature
grande dame in porcelain. The poise of her head, the lifted chin, every
detail in the polished and delicately tinted surface reflected cool
experience of the world and of men. Yet the eyes were young, and there
was no hardness in them, and the mouth seemed curiously unfashioned for
worldly badinage--a very wistful, full-lipped mouth that must have been
disciplined in some sad school to lose its cheerfulness in repose.

"I am wondering," she said, "why Mr. Portlaw does not come and talk to
me. We are neighbors in the country, you know; I live at Pride's Fall. I
don't think it's particularly civil of him to avoid me."

"I can't imagine anybody, including Portlaw, avoiding you," he said.

"We were such good friends--I don't know--he behaved very badly to me
last autumn."

They chatted together for a moment or two in the same inconsequential
vein, then, other people being presented, she nodded an amiable
dismissal; and, as he stepped aside, held out her hand.

"There are a lot of things I'd like to ask you some day; one is about a
park for me at Pride's Fall--oh, the tiniest sort of a park, only it
should be quite formal in all its miniature details. Will you let Shiela
bring you for a little conference? _Soon_?"

He promised and took his leave, elated at the chances of a new
commission, hunting through the constantly arriving and departing
throngs for Shiela. And presently he encountered his aunt.

"You certainly do neglect me," she said with her engaging and care-free
laugh. "Where have you been for a week?"

"In the flat-woods. And, by the way, don't worry about any snakes.
Virginia said you were anxious."

"Nonsense," said his aunt, amused, "Virginia is trying to plague you! I
said nothing about snakes to her."

"Didn't you say there were snakes in my district?"

"No. I _did_ say there were _girls_ in your district, but it didn't
worry me."

His face was so serious that the smile died out on her own.

"Why, Garret," she said, "surely you are not offended, are you?"

"Not with you--Virginia has apparently taken her cue from that
unspeakable Mrs. Van Dieman, and is acting like the deuce toward Shiela
Cardross. Couldn't you find an opportunity to discourage that sort of
behaviour? It's astonishingly underbred."

His aunt's eyelids flickered as she regarded him.

"Come to see me to-night and explain a little more fully what Virginia
has done, dear. Colonel Vetchen is hunting for me and I'm going to let
him find me now. Why don't you come back with us if you are not looking
for anybody in particular."

"I'm looking for Shiela Cardross," he said.

"Oh, she's over there on the terrace holding her fascinating court--with
Louis Malcourt at her heels as usual."

"I didn't know that Malcourt was usually at her heels," he said almost
irritably. It was the second time he had heard that comment, and he
found it unaccountably distasteful.

His aunt looked up, smiling.

"Can't we dine together, Garry?"

"Yes."

"Thank you, dear"--faintly ironical. "So now if you'll go I'll reveal
myself to Gussie Vetchen. Stand aside, my condescending friend."

He said, smiling: "You're the prettiest revelation here. I'll be at the
hotel at eight."

And with that they parted just as the happy little Vetchen, catching
sight of them, came bustling up with all the fuss and demonstration of a
long-lost terrier.

A few minutes later Hamil found Shiela Cardross surrounded by her
inevitable entourage--a jolly, animated circle hemming her in with
Malcourt at her left and Van Tassel Cuyp on her right; and he halted on
the circle's edge to look and listen, glancing askance at Malcourt with
a curiosity unaccustomed.

That young man with his well-made graceful figure, his dark hair and
vivid tints, had never particularly impressed Hamil. He had accepted him
at his face value, lacking the interest to appraise him; and the
acquaintance had always been as casual and agreeable as mutual
good-humour permitted. But now Malcourt, as a type, attracted his
attention; and for a moment he contrasted this rather florid example
with the specimens of young men around him. Then he looked at Shiela
Cardross. Her delicately noble head was bent a trifle as she listened
with the others to Malcourt's fluent humour; and it remained so, though
at moments she lifted her eyes in that straight, questioning gaze which
left the brows level.

And now she was replying to Malcourt; and Hamil watched her and listened
to her with newer interest, noting the poise, the subtle reserve under
the gayest provocation of badinage--the melody of her rare laughter,
the unaffected sweetness of her voice, and its satisfying
sincerity--satisfying as the clear regard from her lifted eyes.

Small wonder men were attracted; Hamil could understand what drew
them--the instinctive recognition of a fibre finer and a metal purer
than was often found under the surface of such loveliness.

And now, as he watched her, the merriment broke out again around her,
and she laughed, lifting her face to his in all its youthfully
bewildering beauty, and saw him standing near her for the first time.

Without apparent reason a dull colour rose to his face; and, as though
answering fire with fire, her fainter signal in response tinted lip and
cheek.

It was scarcely the signal agreed upon for their departure; and for a
moment longer, amid the laughing tumult, she sat looking at him as
though confused. Malcourt bent forward saying something to her, but she
rose while he was speaking, as though she had not heard him; and Hamil
walked through the circle to where she stood. A number of very young men
looked around at him with hostile eyes; Malcourt's brows lifted a
trifle; then he shot an ironical glance at Shiela and, as the circle
about her disintegrated, sauntered up, bland, debonair, to accept his
congé.

His bow, a shade exaggerated, and the narrowed mockery of his eyes
escaped her; and even what he said made no impression as she stood,
brightly inattentive, looking across the little throng at Hamil. And
Malcourt's smile became flickering and uncertain when she left the
terrace with Hamil, moving very slowly side by side across the lawn.

"Such lots of pretty women," commented Shiela. "Have you been passably
amused?"

"Passably," he replied in a slightly sullen tone.

"Oh, only passably? I rather hoped that unawakened heart of yours might
be aroused to-day."

"It has been."

"_Not_ Mrs. Ascott!" she exclaimed, halting.

"Not Mrs. Ascott."

"Mrs. Tom O'Hara! Is it? Every man promptly goes to smash when Mrs. Tom
looks sideways."

"O Lord!" he said with a shrug.

"That is not nice of you, Mr. Hamil. If it is not with her you have
fallen in love there is a more civil way of denying it."

"Did you take what I said seriously?" he asked--"about falling in love?"

"Were you not serious?"

"I could be if you were," he said in a tone which slightly startled
her. She looked up at him questioningly; he said:

"I've had a stupid time without you. The little I've seen of you has
spoiled other women for me. And I've just found it out. Do you mind my
saying so?"

"Are you not a little over-emphatic in your loyalty to me? I like it,
but not at the expense of others, please."

They moved on together, slowly and in step. His head was bent, face
sullen and uncomfortably flushed. Again she felt the curiously
unaccountable glow in her own cheeks responding in pink fire once more;
and annoyed and confused she halted and looked up at him with that frank
confidence characteristic of her.

"Something has gone wrong," she said. "Tell me."

"I will. I'm telling myself now." She laughed, stole a glance at him,
then her face fell.

"I certainly don't know what you mean, and I'm not very sure that you
know."

She was right; he did not yet know. Strange, swift pulses were beating
in temple and throat; strange tumults and confusion were threatening his
common sense, paralyzing will-power. A slow, resistless intoxication had
enveloped him, through which instinctively persisted one warning ray of
reason. In the light of that single ray he strove to think clearly. They
walked to the pavilion together, he silent, sombre-eyed, taking a
mechanical leave of his hostess, fulfilling conventions while scarcely
aware of the routine or of the people around him; she composed, sweet,
conventionally faultless--and a trifle pale as they turned away together
across the lawn.

When they took their places side by side in the chair she was saying
something perfunctory concerning the fête and Mrs. Ascott. And as he
offered no comment: "Don't you think her very charming and sincere....
Are you listening to me, Mr. Hamil?"

"Yes," he said. "Everybody was very jolly. Yes, indeed."

"And--the girl who adores the purple perfume of petunias?" she asked
mischievously. "I think that same purple perfume has made you drowsy, my
uncivil friend."

He turned. "Oh, you heard _that_?"

"Yes; I thought it best to keep a sisterly eye on you."

He forced a smile.

"You were very much amused, I suppose--to see me sitting
bras-dessus-bras-dessous with the high-browed and precious."

"Not amused; no. I was worried; you appeared to be so hopelessly
captivated by her of the purple perfumery. Still, knowing you to be a
man normally innocent of sentiment, I hoped for Mrs. Ascott and the
best."

"Did I once tell you that there was no sentiment in me, Calypso? I
believe I did."

"You certainly did, brother," she replied with cheerful satisfaction.

"Well, I--"

"--And," she interrupted calmly, "I believed you. I am particularly
happy now in believing you." A pause--and she glanced at him. "In fact,
speaking seriously, it is the nicest thing about you--the most
attractive to me, I think." She looked sideways at him, "Because, there
is no more sentiment in me than there is in you.... Which is, of course,
very agreeable--to us both."

He said nothing more; the chair sped on homeward. Above them the sky was
salmon-colour; patches of late sunlight burned red on the tree trunks;
over the lagoon against the slowly kindling west clouds of wild-fowl
whirled, swung, and spread out into endless lengthening streaks like
drifting bands of smoke.

From time to time the girl cast a furtive glance toward him; but he was
looking straight ahead with a darkly set face; and an ache, dull,
scarcely perceptible, grew in her heart as they flew on along the
glimmering road.

"Of what are you thinking, brother?" she asked persuasively.

"Of something I am going to do; as soon as I reach home; I mean _your_
home."

"I wish it were yours, too," she said, smiling frankly; "you are such a
safe, sound, satisfactory substitute for another brother." ... And as he
made no response: "What is this thing which you are going to do when you
reach home?"

"I am going to ask your mother a question."

Unquiet she turned toward him, but his face was doggedly set forward as
the chair circled through the gates and swept up to the terrace.

He sprang out; and as he aided her to descend she felt his hand
trembling under hers. A blind thrill of premonition halted her; then she
bit her lip, turned, and mounted the steps with him. At the door he
stood aside for her to pass; but again she paused and turned to Hamil,
irresolute, confused, not even daring to analyse what sheer instinct was
clamouring; what intuition was reading even now in his face, what her
ears divined in his unsteady voice uttering some commonplace to thank
her for the day spent with him.

"What is it that you are going to say to my mother?" she asked again.

And at the same instant she knew from his eyes--gazing into them in
dread and dismay.

"Don't!" she said breathlessly; "I cannot let--" The mounting wave of
colour swept her: "Don't go to her!--don't ask such a--a thing. I am--"

She faltered, looking up at him with terrified eyes, and laid one hand
on his arm.

The frightened wordless appeal stunned him as they stood there,
confronting one another. Suddenly hope came surging up within her; her
hand fell from his arm; she lifted her eyes in flushed silence--only to
find hopeless confirmation of all she dreaded in his set and colourless
face.

"Mr. Hamil," she said tremulously, "I never dreamed--"

"No, you didn't. I did. It is all right, Shiela."

"Oh--I--I never, never dreamed of it!"--shocked and pitifully
incredulous still.

"I know you didn't. Don't worry." His voice was very gentle, but he was
not looking at her.

"Is it my--fault, Mr. Hamil?"

"Your fault?" he repeated, surprised. "What have _you_ done?"

"I--don't know."

He stood gazing absently out into the flaming west; and, speaking as
though unaware: "From the first--I realise it now--even from the first
moment when you sprang into my life out of the fog and the sea--Shiela!
Shiela!--I--"

"Don't!" she whispered, "don't say it." She swayed back against the
wall; her hand covered her eyes an instant--and dropped helpless,
hopeless.

They faced each other.

"Believe that I am--sorry," she whispered. "Will you believe it? I did
not know; I did not dream of it."

His face changed as though something within him was being darkly
aroused.

"After all," he said, "no man ever lived who could kill hope."

"There is no hope to kill--"

"No chance, Shiela?"

"There has never been any chance--" She was trembling; he took both her
hands. They were ice cold.

He straightened up, squaring his shoulders. "This won't do," he said.
"I'm not going to distress you--frighten you again." The smile he forced
was certainly a credit to him.

"Shiela, you'd love me if you could, wouldn't you?"

"Y-yes," with a shiver.

"Then it's all right and you mustn't worry.... Can't we get back to the
old footing again?"

"N-no; it's gone."

"Then we'll find even firmer ground."

"Yes--firmer ground, Mr. Hamil."

He released her chilled hands, swung around, and took a thoughtful step
or two.

"Firmer, safer ground," he repeated. "Once you said to me, 'Let us each
enjoy our own griefs unmolested.'" He laughed. "Didn't you say
that--years ago?"

"Yes."

"And I replied--years ago--that I had no griefs to enjoy. Didn't I?
Well, then, if this is grief, Shiela, I wouldn't exchange it for another
man's happiness. So, if you please, I'll follow your advice and enjoy
it in my own fashion.... Shiela, you don't smile very often, but I wish
you would now."

But the ghost of a smile left her pallor unchanged. She moved toward the
stairs, wearily, stopped and turned.

"It cannot end this way," she said; "I want you to know how--to know--to
know that I--am--sensible of w-what honour you have done me. Wait! I--I
can't let you think that I--do not--care, Mr. Hamil. Believe that I
do!--oh, deeply. And forgive me--" She stretched out one hand. He took
it, holding it between both of his for a moment, lightly.

"Is all clear between us, Calypso dear?"

"It will be--when I have courage to tell you."

"Then all's well with the world--if it's still under-foot--or somewhere
in the vicinity. I'll find it again; you'll be good enough to point it
out to me, Shiela.... I've an engagement to improve a few square miles
of it.... That's what I need--plenty of work--don't I, Shiela?"

The clear mellow horn of a motor sounded from the twilit lawn; the
others were arriving. He dropped her hand; she gathered her filmy skirts
and swiftly mounted the great stairs, leaving him to greet her father
and Gray on the terrace.

"Hello, Hamil!" called out Cardross, senior, from the lawn, "are you
game for a crack at the ducks to-morrow? My men report Ruffle Lake full
of coots and blue-bills, and there'll be bigger duck in the West
Lagoons."

"I'm going too," said Gray, "also Shiela if she wants to--and four
guides and that Seminole, Little Tiger."

Hamil glanced restlessly at the forest where his work lay. And he needed
it now. But he said pleasantly, "I'll go if you say so."

"Of course I say so," exclaimed Cardross heartily. "Gray, does Louis
Malcourt still wish to go?"

"He spoke of it last week."

"Well, if he hasn't changed his rather volatile mind telephone for
Adams, We'll require a guide apiece. And he can have that buckskin
horse; and tell him to pick out his own gun." And to Hamil, cordially:
"Shiela and Louis and Gray will probably wander about together and you
and I will do the real shooting. But Shiela is a shot--if she chooses.
Gray would rather capture a scarce jungle butterfly. Hello, here's Louis
now! Are you glad we're going at last?"

"Very," replied Hamil as Malcourt strolled up and airily signified his
intention of making one of the party. But as soon as he learned that
they might remain away three days or more he laughingly demurred.

The four men lingered for a few minutes in the hall discussing guns,
dogs, and guides; then Hamil mounted the stairs, and Malcourt went with
him, talking all the while in that easy, fluent, amusing manner which,
if he chose, could be as agreeably graceful as every attitude and
movement of his lithe body. His voice, too, had that engagingly
caressing quality characteristic of him when in good-humour; he really
had little to say to Hamil, but being on such excellent terms with
himself he said a great deal about nothing in particular; and as he
persistently lingered by Hamil's door the latter invited him in.

There Malcourt lit a cigarette, seated lazily astride a chair, arms
folded across the back, aimlessly humourous in recounting his adventures
at the Ascott function, while Hamil stood with his back to the
darkening window, twisting his unlighted cigarette into minute shreds
and waiting for him to go.

"Rather jolly to meet Miss Suydam again," observed Malcourt. "We were
great friends at Portlaw's camp together two years ago. I believe that
you and Miss Suydam are cousins after a fashion."

"After a fashion, I believe."

"She's tremendously attractive, Hamil."

"What? Oh, yes, very."

"Evidently no sentiment lost between you," laughed the other.

"No, of course not; no sentiment."

Malcourt said carelessly: "I'm riding with Miss Suydam to-morrow. That's
one reason I'm not going on this duck-hunt."

Hamil nodded.

"Another reason," he continued, intent on the glowing end of his
cigarette, "is that I'm rather fortunate at the Club just now--and I
don't care to disturb any run of luck that seems inclined to drift my
way. Would you give your luck the double cross?"

"I suppose not," said Hamil vaguely--"if I ever had any."

"That's the way I feel. And it's all kinds of luck that's chasing me.
_All_ kinds, Hamil. One kind, for example, wears hair that matches my
cuff-links. Odd, isn't it?" he added, examining the golden links with a
smile.

Hamil nodded inattentively.

"I am about seven thousand dollars ahead on the other sort of luck,"
observed Malcourt. "If it holds to-night I'll inaugurate a killing that
will astonish the brothers B. yonder. By the way, now that you have
your club ticket why don't you use it?--one way or another."

"Perhaps," replied Hamil listlessly.

A few minutes later Malcourt, becoming bored, genially took his leave;
and Hamil turned on an electric jet and began to undo his collar and
tie.

He was in no hurry; at times he suspended operations to pace aimlessly
to and fro; and after a while, half undressed, he dropped into an
arm-chair, clinched hands supporting his temples.

Presently he said aloud to himself: "It's absolutely impossible. It
can't happen this way. How can it?"

His heavy pulse answered the question; a tense strain, irksome as an
ache, dragged steadily at something within him which resisted; dulling
reason and thought.

For a long time he sat there inert, listening for the sound of her voice
which echoed at moments through the stunned silence within him. And at
last he stumbled to his feet like a stricken man on the firing line,
stupefied that the thing had happened to _him_; and stood unsteadily,
looking around. Then he went heavily about his dressing.

Later, when he was ready to leave his room, he heard Malcourt walking
through the corridor outside--a leisurely and lightly stepping Malcourt,
whistling a lively air. And, when Malcourt had passed came Cecile
rustling from the western corridor, gay, quick-stepping, her enchanting
laughter passing through the corridor like a fresh breeze as she joined
Mrs. Carrick on the stairs. Then silence; and he opened his door. And
Shiela Cardross, passing noiselessly, turned at the sound.

His face must have been easy to read for her own promptly lost its
colour, and with an involuntary recoil she stepped back against the
wall, staring at him in pallid silence.

"What is the matter?" he asked, scarcely recognising his own voice. And
striving to shake off the unreality of it all with a laugh: "You look
like some pretty ghost from dreamland--with your white gown and arms and
face. Shall we descend into the waking world together?"

They stood for a moment motionless, looking straight at one another;
then the smile died out on his face, but he still strove to speak
lightly, using effort, like a man with a dream dark upon him: "I am
waiting for your pretty ghostship."

Her lips moved in reply; no sound came from them.

"Are you afraid of me?" he said.

"Yes."

"Of _me_, Shiela?"

"Of us both. You don't know--you don't know!"

"Know what, Shiela?"

"What I am--what I have done. And I've got to tell you." Her mouth
quivered suddenly, and she faced him fighting for self-control. "I've
got to tell you. Things cannot be left in this way between us. I thought
they could, but they can't."

He crossed the corridor, slowly; she straightened up at his approach,
white, rigid, breathless.

"What is it that has frightened you?" he said.

"What you--said--to me."

"That I love you?"

"Yes; that."

"Why should it frighten you?"

"Must I tell you?"

"If it will help you."

"I am past help. But it will end you're caring for me. And from making
me--care--for you. I must do it; this cannot go on--"

"Shiela!"

She faced him, white as death, looking at him blindly.

"I am trying to think of you--because you love me--"

Fright chilled her blood, killing pulse and colour. "I am trying to be
kind--because I care for you--and we must end this before it ends us....
Listen to my miserable, pitiful, little secret, Mr. Hamil. I--I have--I
am not--free."

"Not _free_!"

"I was married two years ago--when I was eighteen years old. Three
people in the world know it: you, I, and--the man I married."

"Married!" he repeated, stupefied.

She looked at him steadily a moment.

"I think your love has been done to death, Mr. Hamil. My own danger was
greater than you knew; but it was for your sake--because you loved me.
Good night."

Stunned, he saw her pass him and descend the stairs, stood for a space
alone, then scarce knowing what he did he went down into the great
living-room to take his leave of the family gathered there before dinner
had been announced. They all seemed to be there; he was indifferently
conscious of hearing his own words like a man who listens to an
unfamiliar voice in a distant room.

The rapid soundless night ride to the hotel seemed unreal; the lights in
the café, the noise and movement, the pretty face of his aunt with the
pink reflection from the candle shades on her cheeks--all seemed as
unconvincing as himself and this thing that he could not grasp--could
not understand--could not realise had befallen him--and her.

If Miss Palliser was sensible of any change in him or his voice or
manner she did not betray it. Wayward came over to speak to them,
limping very slightly, tall, straight, ruddy, the gray silvering his
temples and edging his moustache.

And after a while Hamil found himself sitting silent, a partly burnt
cigar between his fingers, watching Wayward and his youthful aunt in
half-intimate, half-formal badinage, elbow to elbow on the cloth. For
they had known one another a long time, and through many phases of Fate
and Destiny.

"That little Cardross girl is playing the devil with the callow
hereabout," Wayward said; "Malcourt, house-broken, runs to heel with the
rest. And when I see her I feel like joining the pack. Only--I was never
broken, you know--"

"She is a real beauty," said Miss Palliser warmly; "I don't see why you
don't enlist, James."

"I may at that. Garry, are you also involved?"

Hamil said, "Yes--yes, of course," and smiled meaninglessly at Wayward.

For a fraction of a second his aunt hesitated, then said: "Garry is
naturally among the devoted--when he's not dog-tired from a day in the
cypress-swamps. Have you been out to see the work, James? Oh, you should
go; everybody goes; it's one of the things to do here. And I'm very
proud when I hear people say, 'There's that brilliant young fellow,
Hamil,' or, in a tone which expresses profound respect, 'Hamil designed
it, you know'; and I smile and think, 'That's my boy Garry!' James, it
is a very comfortable sensation for an old lady to experience." And she
looked at Wayward out of her lovely golden eyes, sweet as a maid of
twenty.

Wayward smiled, then absently bent his gaze on his wine-glass, lying
back in his chair. Through his spectacles his eyes seemed very intent on
the frail crystal stem of his glass.

"What are you going to do for the rest of the winter?" she asked,
watching him.

"What I am doing," he replied with smiling bitterness. "The _Ariani_ is
yonder when I can't stand the shore.... What else is there for me to
do--until I snuff out!"

"Build that house you were going to build--when we were rather younger,
Jim."

"I did; and it fell," he said quietly; but, as though she had not heard.
"--Build that house," she repeated, "and line it with books--the kind of
books that were written and read before the machine-made sort supplanted
them. One picture to a room--do you remember, Jim?--or two if you find
it better; the kind men painted before Rembrandt died.... Do you
remember your plan?--the plans you drew for me to look at in our front
parlour--when New York houses had parlours? You were twenty and I
fourteen.... Garry, yonder, was not.... And the rugs, you
recollect?--one or two in a room, Shiraz, Ispahan--nothing as obvious as
Sehna and Saraband--nothing but Moresque and pure Persian--and one
agedly perfect gem of Asia Minor, and one Tekke, so old and flawless
that only the pigeon-blood fire remained under the violet bloom.... Do
you remember?"

Wayward's shoulders straightened with a jerk. For twenty years he had
not remembered these things; and she had not only remembered but was now
reciting the strange, quaint, resurrected words in their forgotten
sequence; the words he had uttered as he--or what he had once been--sat
in the old-time parlour in the mellow half light of faded brocades and
rosewood, repeating to a child the programme of his future. Lofty aim
and high ideal, the cultivated endeavour of good citizenship, loyalty to
aspiration, courage, self-respect, and the noble living of life; they
had also spoken of these things together--there in the golden gloom of
the old-time parlour when she was fourteen and he master of his fate and
twenty.

But there came into his life a brilliant woman who stayed a year and
left his name a mockery: Malcourt's only sister, now Lady Tressilvain,
doubtfully conspicuous with her loutish British husband, among those
continentals where titles serve rather to obscure than enlighten
inquiry.

The wretched affair dragged its full offensive length through the
international press; leaving him with his divorce signed and a future
endurable only when his senses had been sufficiently drugged. In sober
intervals he now had neuritis and a limp to distract his mind; also his
former brother-in-law with professions of esteem and respect and a
tendency to borrow. And drunk or sober he had the _Ariani_. But the
house that Youth had built in the tinted obscurity of an old New York
parlour--no, he didn't have that; and even memory of it were wellnigh
gone had not Constance Palliser spoken from the shadows of the past.

He lifted his glass unsteadily and replaced it. Then slowly he raised
his head and looked full at Constance Palliser.

"It's too late," he said; "but I wish I had known that you remembered."

"Would you have built it, Jim?"

He looked at her again, then shook his head: "For whom am I to build,
Constance?"

She leaned forward, glancing at the unconscious Hamil, then dropped her
voice: "Build it for the Boy that Was, Jim."

"A headstone would be fitter--and less expensive."

"I am not asking you to build in memory of the dead. The Boy who Was is
only asleep. If you could let him wake, suddenly, in that house--"

A clear flush of surprise stained his skin to the hair. It had been many
years since a woman had hinted at any belief in him.

"Don't you know that I couldn't endure the four walls of a house,
Constance?"

"You have not tried this house."

"Men--such men as I--cannot go back to the House of Youth."

"Try, Jim."

His hand was shaking as he lifted it to adjust his spectacles; and
impulsively she laid her hand on his twitching arm:

"Jim, build it!--and see what happens."

"I cannot."

"Build it. You will not be alone and sad in it if you remember the boy
and the child in the parlour. They--they will be good company--if you
wish."

He rested his elbows on the table, head bent between his sea-burned
hands.

"If I could only, only do something," she whispered. "The boy has merely
been asleep, Jim. I have always known it. But it has taken many years
for me to bring myself to this moment."

"Do you think a man can come back through such wreckage and mire--do you
think he wants to come back? What do you know about it?--with your white
skin and bright hair--and that child's mouth of yours--What do you know
about it?"

"Once you were the oracle, Jim. May I not have my turn?"

"Yes--but what in God's name do you care?"

"Will you build?"

He looked at her dumbly, hopelessly; then his arm twitched and he
relieved the wrist from the weight of his head, sitting upright, his
eyes still bent on her.

"Because--in that old parlour--the child expected it of the boy," she
said. "And expects it yet."

Hamil, who, chair pushed back, had been listlessly watching the
orchestra, roused himself and turned to his aunt and Wayward.

"You want to go, Garry?" said Constance calmly. "I'll walk a little with
James before I compose my aged bones to slumber.... Good night, dear.
Will you come again soon?"

He said he would and took his leave of them in the long corridor,
traversing it without noticing which direction he took until, awaking
from abstraction, he found himself at the head of a flight of steps and
saw the portico of the railroad station below him and the signal lamps,
green and red and white, burning between the glistening rails.

Without much caring where he went, but not desiring to retrace his steps
over half a mile or so of carpet, he went out into the open air and
along the picket fence toward the lake front.

As he came to the track crossing he glanced across at the Beach Club
where lights sparkled discreetly amid a tropical thicket and flowers
lay in pale carpets under the stars.

Portlaw had sent him a member's card; he took it out now and scanned it
with faint curiosity. His name was written on the round-cornered brown
card signed by a "vice-president" and a "secretary," under the engraved
notice: "To be shown when requested."

But when he ascended the winding walk among the palms and orange
blossoms, this "suicide's tag," as Malcourt called it, was not demanded
of him at the door.

The restaurant seemed to be gay and rather noisy, the women vivacious,
sometimes beautiful, and often respectable. A reek of cigarette smoke,
wine, and orange blossoms hung about the corridors; the tiny glittering
rotunda with its gaming-tables in a circle was thronged.

He watched them lose and win and lose again. Under the soft tumult of
voices the cool tones of the house attachés sounded monotonously, the
ball rattled, the wheels spun. But curiosity had already died out within
him; gain, loss, chance, Fate--and the tense white concentration of the
man beside him no longer interested him; nor did a sweet-faced young
girl in the corridor who looked a second too long at him; nor the
handsome over-flushed youth who was with her and who cried out in loud
recognition: "Gad, Hamil; why didn't you tell me you were coming?
There's somebody here who wants to meet you, but Portlaw's got
her--somewhere. You'll take supper with us anyway! We'll find you a fair
impenitent."

Hamil stared at him coolly. He was on no such terms with Malcourt, drunk
or sober. But everybody was Malcourt's friend just then, and he went on
recklessly:

"You've got to stay; hasn't he, Dolly?--Oh, I forgot--Miss Wilming, Mr.
Hamil, who's doing the new park, you know. All kinds of genius buzzes in
his head--roulette wheels buzz in mine. Hamil, you remember Miss Wilming
in the 'Motor Girl.' She was one of the acetylenes. Come on; we'll all
light up later. Make him come, Dolly."

Hamil turned to speak to her. She seemed to be, at a casual glance, the
sort of young girl who usually has a mother somewhere within ear-shot.
Upon inspection, however, her bright hair was a little too perfectly
rippled, and her mouth a trifle fuller and redder than a normal
circulation might account for. But there remained in the eyes something
as yet unquenched. And looking at her, he felt a sense of impatience and
regret that the delicate youth of her should be wasted in the flare and
shadow of the lesser world--burning to a spectre here on the crumbling
edge of things--here with Malcourt leering at her through the disordered
brilliancy of that false dawn which heralds only night.

They spoke together, smilingly formal. He had quietly turned his back on
Malcourt.

She hoped he would remain and join them; and her as yet unspoiled voice
clashed with her tinted lips and hair.

He was sorry--politely so--thanking her with the natural and unconscious
gentleness so agreeable to all women. And as in his manner there was not
the slightest hint of that half-amused, half-cynical freedom
characteristic of the worldly wise whom she was now accustoming herself
to meet, she looked up at him with a faint flush of appreciation.

Malcourt all the while was pulling Hamil by the elbow and talking on at
random almost boisterously, checking himself at intervals to exchange
familiar greetings with new-comers passing the crowded corridor. His
face was puffy and red; so were his lips; and there seemed to be a shiny
quality to hair and skin prophetic of future coarsening toward a type,
individuals of which swarmed like sleek flies around the gaming-tables
beyond.

As Hamil glanced from the young girl to Malcourt, who was still noisily
importuning him, a sudden contempt for the man arose within him. So
unreasoningly abrupt was the sensation of absolute distrust and dislike
that it cut his leave-taking to a curt word of refusal, and he turned on
his heel.

"What's the matter with you? Aren't you coming with us?" asked Malcourt,
reddening.

"No," said Hamil. "Good-bye, Miss Wilming. Thank you for asking me."

She held out her hand, uncertainly; he took it with a manner so gentle
and considerate that she ventured, hesitatingly, something about seeing
him again. To which he replied, pleasantly conventional, and started
toward the door.

"See here, Hamil," said Malcourt sharply, "is there any reason for your
sudden and deliberate rudeness to me?"

"Is there any reason for your sudden and deliberate familiarity with
me?" retorted Hamil in a low voice. "You're drunk!"

Malcourt's visage crimsoned: "O hell!" he said, "if your morals are as
lofty as your mincing manners--"

Hamil stared him into silence, hesitated, then passed in front of him
and out of the door.

Vicious with irritation, Malcourt laid his hand on the girl's arm: "Take
it from me, Dolly, that's the sort of citizen who'll sneak around to
call on your sort Saturday evenings."

She flushed painfully, but said nothing. "As for me," added Malcourt, "I
don't think I've quite finished with this nice young man."

But Dolly Wilming stood silent, head bent, slender fingers worrying her
lips, which seemed inclined to quiver.

CHAPTER X

TERRA INCOGNITA

The camp-wagon and led horses left before daylight with two of the
Cracker guides, Bulow and Carter; but it was an hour after sunrise when
Cardross, senior, Gray, Shiela, Hamil, and the head guide, Eudo Stent,
rode out of the _patio_ into the dewy beauty of a February morning.

The lagoon was pink; so was the white town on its western shore; in the
east, ocean and sky were one vast rosy-rayed glory. Few birds sang.

Through the intense stillness of early morning the little cavalcade made
a startling clatter on the shell highway; but the rattle of hoofs was
soon deadened in the sand of a broad country road curving south through
dune and hammock along the lake shore.

Dew still dropped in great splashes from pine and palm; dew powdered the
sparkle-berry bushes and lay like a tiny lake of quicksilver in the
hollow of every broad palmetto frond; and all around them earth and
grass and shrub exhaled the scented freshness of a dew-washed world.

On the still surface of the lake, tinted with palest rose and primrose,
the wild ducks floated, darkly silhouetted against the water or, hoping
for crumbs, paddled shoreward, inquiringly peering up at the riders with
little eyes of brightest gold.

"Blue-bills," said Cardross to Hamil; "nobody shoots them on the lake;
they're as tame as barnyard waterfowl. Yet, the instant these same ducks
leave this lagoon where they know they're protected they become as wild
and wary and as difficult to get a shot at as any other wild-fowl."

Shiela, riding ahead with Gray, tossed bits of bread into the water; and
the little blue-bill ducks came swimming in scores, keeping up with the
horses so fearlessly and persistently that the girl turned in her saddle
and looked back at her father in delight.

"I'm certainly as gifted as the Pied Piper, dad! If they follow me to
Ruffle Lake I won't permit a shot to be fired."

While she spoke she kept her eyes on her father. Except for a brief good
morning at breakfast she had neither looked at nor spoken to Hamil,
making no noticeable effort to avoid him, but succeeded in doing it
nevertheless.

Like her father and brother and Hamil she was mounted on an unornamental
but wiry Tallahassee horse; and she rode cross-saddle, wearing knee-coat
and kilts of kahkee and brown leather puttees strapped from under the
kneecap to the ankle. Like the others, too, she carried a small shotgun
in a saddle boot, and in the web loops across her breast glimmered the
metal rims of a dozen cartridges. A brilliant handkerchief knotted
loosely around her bare white throat, and a broad Panama turned up in
front and resolutely pulled down behind to defy sunstroke, completed a
most bewilderingly charming picture, which moved even her father to
admiring comment.

"Only," he added, "look before you step over a log when you're afoot.
The fangs of a big diamond-back are three-quarters of an inch long, my
dear, and they'll go through leather as a needle goes through cambric."

"Thanks, dad--and here endeth the usual lesson."

Cardross said to Hamil: "One scarcely knows what to think about the
snakes here. The records of the entire Union show few deaths in a year,
and yet there's no scarcity of rattlers, copperheads, and moccasins in
this Republic of ours. I know a man, an ornithologist, who for twelve
years has wandered about the Florida woods and never saw a rattler. And
yet, the other night a Northern man, a cottager, lighted his cigar after
dinner and stepped off his veranda on to a rattler."

"Was he bitten?"

"Yes. He died in two hours." Cardross shrugged and gathered up his
bridle. "Personally I have no fear; leggings won't help much; besides, a
good-sized snake can strike one's hand as it swings; but our cracker
guides go everywhere in thin cotton trousers and the Seminoles are
barelegged. One hears often enough of escapes, yet very rarely of
anybody being bitten. One of my grove guards was struck by a moccasin
last winter. He was an awfully sick nigger for a while, but he got over
it."

"That's cheerful," said Hamil, laughing.

"Oh, you might as well know. There are plenty of wiseacres who'll tell
you that nobody's in danger at these East Coast resorts, and the hotel
people will swear solemnly there isn't a serpent in the State; but there
are, Hamil, and plenty of them. I've seen rattlers strike without
rattling; and moccasins are ugly brutes that won't get out of the way
for you and that give no warning when they strike; and all quail hunters
in the flat-woods know how their pointers and setters are killed, and
every farmer knows that the best watchmen he can have is a flock of
guinea-fowl or turkeys or a few hogs loose. The _fact_ is that deadly
snakes are not rare in many localities; the _wonder_ is that scarcely a
death is reported in a year. How many niggers die, I don't know; but I
know enough, when I'm in the woods or fields, to look every time before
I put my foot upon the ground."

"How can you see in the jungle?"

"You've _got_ to see. Besides, rattlers are on the edge of thickets, not
inside. They've got to have an open space to strike the small furry
creatures which they live on. Moccasins affect mud--_look_ there!"

Both horses shyed; in front Shiela's mount was behaving badly, but even
while she was mastering him she tried at the same time to extract her
shotgun from the leather boot. Stent rode up and drew it out for her;
Hamil saw her break and load, swing in the saddle, and gaze straight
into an evil-looking bog all set with ancient cypress knees and the
undulating snaky roots of palmettos.

"A perfectly enormous one, dad!" she called back.

"Wait!" said Cardross; "I want Hamil to see." And to Hamil: "Ride
forward; you ought to know what the ugly brutes look like!"

As he drew bridle at Shiela's left the girl, still intent, pointed in
silence; but he looked in vain for the snake, mistaking every palmetto
root for a serpent, until she leaned forward and told him to sight along
her extended arm. Then he saw a dull gray fold without any glitter to
it, draped motionless over a palmetto root, and so like the root that he
could scarcely believe it anything else.

"That?"

"Yes. It's as thick as a man's arm."

"Is it a moccasin?"

"It is; a cotton-mouth."

The guide drawled: "Ah reckon he's asleep, Miss Cahdhoss. Ah'll make him
rare up 'f yew say so."

"Make him rear up," suggested Gray. "And stand clear, Hamil, because
Shiela must shoot quick if he slides for the water."

The men backed their nervously snorting horses, giving her room; Stent
dismounted, picked up a pig-nut, and threw it accurately. Instantly the
fat mud-coloured fold slipped over the root and a head appeared rising
straight out of the coils up into the air--a flat and rather small head
on a horribly swollen body, stump-tailed, disgusting. The head was
looking at them, stretched high, fully a third of the creature in the
air. Then, soundlessly, the wide-slitted mouth opened; and Hamil saw its
silky white lining.

"Moccasins stand their ground," said the girl, raising her gun. The shot
crashed out; the snake collapsed. For fully a minute they watched; not a
fold even quivered.

"Struck by lightning," said Gray; "the buzzards will get him." And he
drew a folding butterfly net from his saddle boot, affixed ring and
gauze bag, and cantered forward briskly in the wake of a great velvety
black butterfly which was sailing under the live-oaks above his head.

His father, wishing to talk to Eudo Stent, rode ahead with the guide,
leaving Shiela and Hamil to follow.

The latter reined in and waited while the girl leisurely returned the
fowling-piece to its holster. Then, together, they walked their horses
forward, wading the "branch" which flowed clear as a trout stream out
of the swamp on their right.

"It looks drinkable," he said.

"It is, for Crackers; but there's fever in it for you, Mr. Hamil....
Look at Gray! He's missed his butterfly. But it's a rather common
one--the black form of the tiger swallow-tail. Just see those
zebra-striped butterflies darting like lightning over the palmetto
scrub! Gray and I could never catch them until one day we found a ragged
one that couldn't fly and we placed it on a leaf; and every time one of
those butterflies came our way it paused in its flight for a second and
hovered over the ragged one. And that's how Gray and I caught the swift
Ajax butterflies for his collection!... I've helped him considerably, if
you please; I brought him the mysterious Echo moth from Ormond, and a
wonderful little hornet moth from Jupiter Inlet."

She was rattling on almost feverishly, never looking at him, restless in
her saddle, shifting bridle, adjusting stirrups, gun-case, knotting and
reknotting her neckerchief, all with that desperate attempt at composure
which betrays the courage that summons it.

"Shiela, dear!"

"What!" she said, startled into flushed surprise.

"Look at me."

She turned in her saddle, the colour deepening and waning on her white
skin from neck to temples; and sustained his gaze to the limit of
endurance. Then again in her ears sounded the soft crash of her senses;
he swung wide in his stirrups, looking recklessly into her eyes. A
delicate sense of intoxication stilled all speech between them for a
moment. Then, head bowed, eyes fixed on her bridle hand, the other hand,
ungloved, lying hotly unresponsive in his, she rode slowly forward at
his side. Face to face with all the mad unasked questions of destiny and
fate and chance still before her--all the cold problems of truth and
honour still to be discussed with that stirring, painful pulse in her
heart which she had known as conscience--silently, head bent, she rode
into the west with the man she must send away.

Far to the north-east, above a sentinel pine which marks the outskirts
of the flat-woods, streaks like smoke drifted in the sky--the wild-fowl
leaving the lagoons. On the Lantana Road they drew bridle at a sign from
her; then she wheeled her horse and sat silent in her saddle, staring
into the western wilderness.

The character of the country had changed while they had been advancing
along this white sandy road edged with jungle; for now west and south
the Florida wilderness stretched away, the strange "Flat-woods,"
deceptively open, almost park-like in their monotony where, as far as
the eye could see, glade after glade, edged by the stately vivid green
pines, opened invitingly into other glades through endlessly charming
perspective. At every step one was prepared to come upon some handsome
mansion centring this park--some bridge spanning the shallow crystal
streams that ran out of jasmine thickets--some fine driveway curving
through the open woods. But this was the wilderness, uninhabited,
unplotted. No dwelling stood within its vistas; no road led out or in;
no bridge curved over the silently moving waters. West and south-west
into the unknown must he go who follows the lure of those peaceful,
sunny glades where there are no hills, no valleys, nothing save trees
and trees and trees again, and shallow streams with jungle edging them,
and lonely lakes set with cypress, and sunny clearings, never made by
human hands, where last year's grass, shoulder-high, silvers under the
white sun of the South.

Half a hundred miles westward lay the great inland lake; south-west, the
Everglades. The Hillsboro trail ran south-west between the upper and
lower chain of lakes, over Little Fish Crossing, along the old
Government trail, and over the Loxahatchi. Westward no trail lay save
those blind signs of the Seminoles across the wastes of open timber and
endless stretches of lagoon and saw-grass which is called the
Everglades.

On the edge of the road where Hamil sat his horse was an old pump--the
last indication of civilisation. He dismounted and tried it, filling his
cup with clear sparkling water, neither hot nor cold, and walking
through the sand offered it to Shiela Cardross.

"Osceola's font," she nodded, returning from her abstraction; "thank
you, I am thirsty." And she drained the cup at her leisure, pausing at
moments to look into the west as though the wilderness had already laid
its spell upon her.

Then she looked down at Hamil beside her, handing him the cup.

"_In-nah-cahpoor?_" she asked softly; and as he looked up puzzled and
smiling: "I asked you, in Seminole, what is the price I have to pay for
your cup of water?"

"A little love," he said quietly--"a very little, Shiela."

"I see!--like this water, neither warm nor cold: _nac-ey-tai?_--what do
you call it?--oh, yes, sisterly affection." She looked down at him with
a forced smile. "_Uncah_" she said, "which in Seminole means 'yes' to
your demand.... You don't mind if I relapse into the lake dialect
occasionally--do you?--especially when I'm afraid to say it in English."
And, gaining confidence, she smiled at him, the faintest hint of
tenderness in her eyes. "Neither warm nor cold--_Haiee-Kasapi_!--like
this Indian well, Mr. Hamil; but, like it, very faithful--even when in
the arid days to come you turn to drink from sweeter springs."

"Shiela!"

"Oh, no--no!" she breathed, releasing her hands; "you interrupt me; I
was thinking _ist-ahmah-mahhen_--which way we must go. Listen; we leave
the road yonder where Gray's green butterfly net is bobbing above the
dead grass: _in-e-gitskah?_--can't you see it? And there are dad and
Stent riding in line with that outpost pine--_ho-paiee_! Mount, my
cavalier. And"--in a lower voice--"perhaps you also may hear that voice
in the wilderness which cried once to the unwise."

As they rode girth-high through the grass the first enchanting glade
opened before them, flanked by palmettos and pines. Gray was galloping
about in the woods among swarms of yellow and brown butterflies,
swishing his net like a polo mallet, and drawing bridle every now and
then to examine some specimen and drop it into the cyanide jar which
bulged from his pocket.

"I got a lot of those dog's-head fellows!" he called out to Shiela as
she came past with Hamil. "You remember that the white ants got at my
other specimens before I could mount them."

"I remember," said Shiela; "don't ride too hard in the sun, dear." But
Gray saw something ahead and shook out his bridle, and soon left them in
the rear once more, riding through endless glades of green where there
was no sound except the creak of leather and the continuous popping of
those small pods on the seeds of which quail feed.

"I thought there were no end of gorgeous flowers in the semi-tropics,"
he said, "but there's almost nothing here except green."

She laughed. "The concentration of bloom in Northern hothouses deceives
people. The semi-tropics and the tropics are almost monotonously green
except where cultivated gardens exist. There are no masses of flowers
anywhere; even the great brilliant blossoms make no show because they
are widely scattered. You notice them when you happen to come across
them in the woods, they are so brilliant and so rare."

"Are there no fruits--those delectable fruits one reads about?"

"There are bitter wild oranges, sour guavas, eatable beach-grapes and
papaws. If you're fond of wild cassava and can prepare it so it won't
poison you, you can make an eatable paste. If you like oily cabbage, the
top of any palmetto will furnish it. But, my poor friend, there's little
here to tempt one's appetite or satisfy one's aesthetic hunger for
flowers. Our Northern meadows are far more gorgeous from June to
October; and our wild fruits are far more delicious than what one finds
growing wild in the tropics."

"But bananas, cocoa-nuts, oranges--"

"All cultivated!"

"Persimmons, mulberries--"

"All cultivated when eatable. Everything palatable in this country is
cultivated."

He laughed dejectedly, then, again insistent: "But there _are_ plenty of
wild flowering trees!--magnolia, poinciana, china-berry--"

"All set out by mere man," she smiled--"except the magnolias and
dog-wood. No, Mr. Hamil, the riotous tropical bloom one reads about is
confined to people's gardens. When you come upon jasmine or an orchid in
the woods you notice the colour at once in the green monotony. But think
how many acres of blue and white and gold one passes in the North with
scarcely a glance! The South is beautiful too, in its way; but it is not
that way. Yet I care for it even more, perhaps, than I do for the
North--"

The calm, even tenor of the speech between them was reassuring her,
although it was solving no problems which, deep in her breast, she knew
lay latent, ready to quicken at any instant.

All that awaited to be solved; all that threatened between her and her
heart and conscience, now lay within her, quiescent for the moment. And
it was from moment to moment now that she was living, blindly evading,
resolutely putting off what must come after that relentless
self-examination which was still before her.

The transport wagon was now in sight ahead; and Bulow, one of the
guides, had released a brace of setters, casting them out among the open
pines.

Away raced the belled dogs, jingling into the saw-scrub; and Shiela
nodded to him to prepare for a shot as she drew her own gun from its
boot and loaded, eyes still following the distant dogs.

To and fro raced the setters, tails low, noses up, wheeling, checking,
quartering, cutting up acres and acres--a stirring sight!--and more
stirring still when the blue-ticked dog, catching the body-scent, slowed
down, flag whipping madly, and began to crawl into the wind.

"You and Shiela!" called out Cardross as they trotted up, guns resting
on their thighs. "Gray and I'll pick up the singles."

The girl sprang to the ground, gun poised; Hamil followed her, and they
walked across the sandy open where scarcely a tuft of dead grass
bristled. It seemed impossible that any living creature bigger than an
ant could conceal itself on that bare, arid sand stretch, but the ticked
dog was standing rigid, nose pointing almost between his forefeet, and
the red dog was backing him, tail like a ramrod, right forefoot doubled,
jaws a-slaver.

The girl glanced sideways at Hamil mischievously.

"What are we shooting for, Mr. Hamil?"

"Anything you wish," he said, "but it's yours anyway--all I can give. I
suppose I'm going to miss."

"No; you mustn't. If you're out of practice remember to let them get
well away. And I won't shoot a match with you this time. Shall I flush?"

"I'll put them up. Are you ready?"

"Quite, thank you."

He stepped up beside the ticked dog, halted, took one more step
beyond--whir-r-r! and the startled air was filled with wings; and crack!
crack! crack-crack! spoke the smokeless powder.

Two quail stopped in mid-air and pitched downward.

"O Lord!" said Hamil, "they're not my birds. Shiela, how _could_ you do
such a thing under my very nose and in sight of your relatives and three
unfeeling guides!"

"You poor boy'" she said, watching the bevy as he picked up the curious,
dark, little Florida quail and displayed them. Then, having marked, she
quietly signalled the dogs forward.

"I'm not going," he said; "I've performed sufficiently."

She was not quite sure how much of disappointment lay under his
pretence, and rather shyly she suggested that he redeem himself. Gray
and his father were walking toward one dog who was now standing; two
quail flushed and both fell.

"Come," she said, laying her hand lightly on his arm; "Ticky is pointing
and I _will_ have you redeem yourself."

So they went forward, shoulder to shoulder; and three birds jumped and
two fell.

"Bravo!" she exclaimed radiantly; "I knew my cavalier after all!"

"You held your fire," he said accusingly.

"Ye-s."

"Why?"

"Because--if you--" She raised her eyes half serious, half mockingly:
"Do you think I care for--anything--at your expense?"

A thrill passed through him. "Do you think I mind if you are the better
of us, you generous girl?"

"I am not a better shot; I really am not.... Look at these birds--both
cocks. Are they not funny--these quaint little black quail of the
semi-tropics? We'll need all we can get, too. But now that you are your
resistless self again I shall cease to dread the alternative of
starvation or a resort to alligator tail."

So with a gay exchange of badinage they took their turns when the dogs
rounded up singles; and sometimes he missed shamefully, and sometimes he
performed with credit, but she never amended his misses nor did more
than match his successes, and he thought that in all his life he had
never witnessed more faultless field courtesy than this young girl
instinctively displayed. Nothing in the world could have touched him
more keenly or convinced him more thoroughly. For it is on the firing
line that character shows; a person is what he is in the field--even
though he sometimes neglects to live up to it in less vital moments.

Generous and quick in her applause, sensitive under his failures, cool
in difficulties, yielding instantly the slightest advantage to him,
holding her fire when singles rose or where there could be the slightest
doubt--that was his shooting companion under the white noon sun that
day. He noticed, too, her sweetness with the dogs, her quick
encouragement when work was well done, her brief rebuke when the red
dog, galloping recklessly down wind, jumped a ground-rattler and came
within a hair's breadth of being bitten.

"The little devil!" said Hamil, looking down at the twisting reptile
which he had killed with a palmetto stem. "Why, Shiela, he has no
rattles at all."

"No, only a button. Dig a hole and bury the head. Fangs are always fangs
whether their owner is dead or alive."

So Hamil scooped out a trench with his hunting-knife and they buried the
little ground-rattler while both dogs looked on, growling.

Cardross and Gray had remounted; Bulow cast out a brace of pointers for
them, and they were already far away. Presently the distant crack of
their guns announced that fresh bevies had been found beyond the branch.

The guide, Carter, rode out, bringing Shiela and Hamil their horses and
relieving the latter's pockets of a dozen birds; announcing a halt for
luncheon at the same time in a voice softly neglectful of _I's_ and
_R's_, and musical with aspirates.

As they followed him slowly toward the wagon which stood half a mile
away under a group of noble pines, Hamil began in a low voice:

"I've got to say this, Shiela: I never saw more perfect sportsmanship
than yours; and, if only for that, I love you with all my heart."

"What a boyish thing to say!" But she coloured deliciously.

"You don't care whether I love you--that way, do you?" he asked
hopefully.

"N-no."

"Then--I can wait."

She turned toward him, confused.

"Wait?" she repeated.

"Yes--wait; all my life, if it must be."

"There is nothing to wait for. Don't say such things to me. I--it's
difficult enough for me now--to think what to do--You will not speak to
me again that way, will you? Because, if you do, I must send you
away.... And that will be--hard."

"Once," he said, "you spoke about men--how they come crashing through
the barriers of friendship. Am I like that?"

She hesitated, looked at him.

"There were no barriers."

"No barriers!"

"None--to keep you out. I should have seen to it; I should have been
prepared; but you came so naturally into my friendship--inside the
barriers--that I opened my eyes and found you there--and remembered, too
late, alas--"

"Too late?"

"Too late to shut you out. And you frightened me last night; I tried to
tell you--for your own sake; I was terrified, and I told you what I have
never before told a living soul--that dreadful, hopeless, nightmare
thing--to drive you out of my--my regard--and me from yours."

His face whitened a little under its tan, but the flat jaw muscles
tightened doggedly.

"I don't understand--yet," he said. "And when you tell me--for you will
tell me sooner or later--it will not change me."

"It _must_!"

He shook his head.

She said in desperation: "You cannot care for me too much because you
know that I am--not free."

"Cannot?" He laughed mirthlessly. "I _am_ caring for you--loving
you--every second more and more."

"That is dishonourable," she faltered.

"Why?"

"You _know_!"

"Yes. But if it does not change me how can I help it?"

"You can help making me care for _you_!"

His heart was racing now; every vein ran fiery riot.

"Is there a chance of _that_, Shiela?"

She did not answer, but the tragedy in her slowly lifted eyes appalled
him. Then a rushing confusion of happiness and pain almost stupefied
him.

"You must not be afraid," he managed to say while the pulse hammered in
his throat, and the tumult of his senses deadened his voice to a
whisper.

"I am afraid."

They were near the wagon now; both dismounted under the pines while
Bulow came forward to picket their horses. On their way together among
the trees she looked up at him almost piteously: "You must go if you
talk to me again like this. I could not endure very much of it."

"I don't know what I am going to do," he said in the same curiously
deadened voice. "You must tell me more."

"I cannot. I am--uncertain of myself. I can't think clearly when
we--when you speak to me--this way. Couldn't you go North before
I--before my unhappiness becomes too real--too hard?--couldn't you go
before it is too late--and leave me my peace of mind, my common sense!"

He looked around at her. "Yes," he said, "I will go if there is no
decent chance for us; and if it is not too late."

"I have my common senses still left. It is not too late."

There was a silence. "I will go," he said very quietly.

"W-when?"

"The day we return."

"Can you leave your work?"

"Yes. Halloran knows."

"And--you _will_ go?"

"Yes, if you wish it."

Another silence. Then she shook her head, not looking at him.

"There is no use in going--now."

"Why?"

"Because--because I do not wish it." Her eyes fell lower; she drew a
long, unsteady breath. "And because it is too late," she said. "You
should have gone before I ever knew you--if I was to be spared my peace
of mind."

Gray came galloping back through the woods, followed by his father and
Eudo Stent. They were rather excited, having found signs of turkey along
the mud of a distant branch; and, as they all gathered around a cold
luncheon spread beside the wagon, a lively discussion began concerning
the relative chances of "roosting" and "yelping."

Hamil talked as in a dream, scarcely conscious that he was speaking and
laughing a great deal. A heavenly sort of intoxication possessed him; a
paradise of divine unrealities seemed to surround him--Shiela, the
clustering pines, the strange white sunlight, the depthless splendour of
the unshadowed blue above.

He heard vaguely the voices of the others, Cardross, senior, rallying
Gray on his shooting, Gray replying in kind, the soft Southern voices of
the guides at their own repast by the picket line, the stir and whisk
and crunch of horses nuzzling their feed.

Specks moved in the dome of heaven--buzzards. Below, through the woods,
myriads of robins were flying about, migrants from the North.

Gray displayed his butterflies; nothing uncommon, except a black and
green one seldom found north of Miami--but they all bent over the lovely
fragile creatures, admiring the silver-spangled Dione butterflies, the
great velvety black Turnus; and Shiela, with the point of a dry pine
needle, traced for Hamil the grotesque dog's head on the fore wings of
those lemon-tinted butterflies which haunt the Florida flat-woods.

"He'd never win at a bench-show," observed her father, lighting his
pipe--an out-of-door luxury he clung to. "Shiela, you little minx, what
makes you look so unusually pretty? Probably that wild-west rig of
yours. Hamil, I hope you gave her a few points on grassing a bird. She's
altogether too conceited. Do you know, once, while we were picking up
singles, a razor-back boar charged us--or more probably the dogs, which
were standing, poor devils. And upon my word I was so rattled that I did
the worst thing possible--I tried to kick the dogs loose. Of course they
went all to pieces, and I don't know how it might have fared with us if
my little daughter had not calmly bowled over that boar at three paces
from my shin-bones!"

"Dad exaggerates," observed the girl with heightened colour, then
ventured a glance at Hamil which set his heart galloping; and her own
responded to the tender pride and admiration in his eyes.

There was more discussion concerning "roosting" versus "yelping" with
dire designs upon the huge wild turkey-cock whose tracks Gray had
discovered in the mud along the branch where their camp was to be
pitched.

Seven hens and youthful gobblers accompanied this patriarch according to
Eudo Stent's calculations, and Bulow thought that the Seminole might
know the location of the roost; probably deep in some uninviting swamp.

But there was plenty of time to decide what to do when they reached
camp; and half an hour later they started, wagon and all, wheels bumping
over the exposed tree roots which infinitely bored the well-behaved
dogs, squatting forward, heads in a row, every nose twitching at the
subtle forest odours that only a dog could detect.

Once they emitted short and quickly stifled yelps as a 'possum climbed
leisurely into a small tree and turned to inspect the strange procession
which was invading his wilderness. And Shiela and Hamil, riding behind
the wagon, laughed like children.

Once they passed under a heronry--a rather odoriferous patch of dead
cypress and pines, where the enormous nests bulged in the stark
tree-tops; and once, as they rode out into a particularly park-like and
velvety glade, five deer looked up, and then deliberately started to
trot across.

"We need that venison!" exclaimed Gray, motioning for his gun which was
in the wagon. Shiela spurred forward, launching her mount into a gallop;
Hamil's horse followed on a dead run, he tugging madly at the buck-shot
shell in his web belt; and away they tore to head the deer. In vain! for
the agile herd bounded past far out of shell-range and went crashing on
through the jungle of the branch; and Shiela reined in and turned her
flushed face to Hamil with a laugh of sheer delight.

"Glorious sight, wasn't it?" said Hamil. "I'm rather glad they got clear
of us."

"So am I. There was no chance, but I always try."

"So shall I," he said--"whether there is a chance or not."

She looked up quickly, reading his meaning. Then she bent over the gun
that she was breaking, extracted the shells, looped them, and returned
the weapon to its holster.

Behind them her father and brother jeered at them for their failure,
Gray being particularly offensive in ascribing their fiasco to bad
riding and buck-fever.

A little later Shiela's horse almost unseated her, leaping aside and
into the jungle as an enormous black snake coiled close in front.

"Don't shoot!" she cried out to Hamil, mastering her horse and forcing
him past the big, handsome, harmless reptile; "nobody shoots black
snakes or buzzards here. Slip your gun back quickly or Gray will
torment you."

However, Gray had seen, and kept up a running fire of sarcastic comment
which made Hamil laugh and Shiela indignant.

And so they rode along through the rich afternoon sunshine, now under
the clustered pines, now across glades where wild doves sprang up into
clattering flight displaying the four white feathers, or pretty little
ground doves ran fearlessly between the horses' legs.

Here and there a crimson cardinal, crest lifted, sat singing deliciously
on some green bough; now and then a summer tanager dropped like a live
coal into the deeper jungle. Great shiny blue, crestless jays flitted
over the scrub; shy black and white and chestnut chewinks flirted into
sight and out again among the heaps of dead brush; red-bellied
woodpeckers, sticking to the tree trunks, turned their heads calmly;
gray lizards, big, ugly red-headed lizards, swift slender lizards with
blue tails raced across the dry leaves or up tree trunks, making even
more fuss and clatter than the noisy cinnamon-tinted thrashers in the
underbrush.

Every step into the unknown was a new happiness; there was no silence
there for those who could hear, no solitude for those who could see. And
he was riding into it with a young companion who saw and heard and loved
and understood it all. Nothing escaped her; no frail air plant trailing
from the high water oaks, no school of tiny bass in the shallows where
their horses splashed through, no gopher burrow, no foot imprint of the
little wild things which haunt the water's edge in forests.

Her eyes missed nothing; her dainty close-set ears heard all--the short,
dry note of a chewink, the sweet, wholesome song of the cardinal, the
thrilling cries of native jays and woodpeckers, the heavenly outpoured
melody of the Florida wren, perched on some tiptop stem, throat swelling
under the long, delicate, upturned bill.

Void of self-consciousness, sweetly candid in her wisdom, sharing her
lore with him as naturally as she listened to his, small wonder that to
him the wilderness was paradise, and she with her soft full voice, a
native guide. For all around them lay an enchanted world as young as
they--the world is never older than the young!--and they "had eyes and
they saw; ears had they and they heard"--but not the dead echoes of that
warning voice, alas! calling through the ancient wilderness of fable.

CHAPTER XI

PATHFINDERS

Considerably impressed by her knowledge he was careful not to embarrass
her by saying so too seriously.

"For a frivolous and fashionable girl who dances cotillions, drives
four, plays polo, and reviews her serious adorers by regiments, you're
rather perplexing," he said. "Of course you don't suppose that I really
believe all you say about these beasts and birds and butterflies."

"What has disturbed your credulity?" she laughed.

"Well, that rabbit which crossed ahead, for one thing. You promptly
called it a marsh rabbit!"

"_Lepus palustris_" she nodded, delighted.

"By all means," he retorted, pretending offensive scepticism, "but why a
_marsh_ rabbit?"

"Because, monsieur, its tail was brown, not white. Didn't you notice
that?"

"Oh, it's all very well for you to talk that way, but I've another
grievance. All these holes in the sand you call gopher burrows
sometimes, sometimes salamander holes. And I saw a thing like a rat run
into one of them and a thing like a turtle run into another and I think
I've got you now--"

Her delightful laughter made the forest silence musical.

"You poor boy! No wonder your faith is strained. The Crackers call the
gopher a salamander, and they also call the land turtle a gopher. Their
burrows are alike and usually in the same neighbourhood."

"Well, what I want to know is where you had time to learn all this?" he
persisted.

"From my tame Seminole, if you please."

"Your Seminole!"

"Yes, indeed, my dear, barelegged, be-turbaned Seminole, Little Tiger. I
am now twenty, Mr. Hamil; for ten years every winter he has been with us
on our expeditions. A week before we start Eudo Stent goes to the
north-west edge of the Everglades, and makes smoke talk until he gets a
brief answer somewhere on the horizon. And always, when we arrive in
camp, a Seminole fire is burning under a kettle and before it sits my
Little Tiger wearing a new turban and blinking through the smoke haze
like a tree-lynx lost in thought."

"Do you mean that this aboriginal admirer of yours has already come out
of the Everglades to meet you at your camp?"

"Surely he is there, waiting at this moment," she said. "I'd as soon
doubt the stars in their courses as the Seminole, Coacochee. And you
will see very soon, now, because we are within a mile of camp."

"Within a mile!" he scoffed. "How do you know? For the last two hours
these woods and glades have all looked precisely alike to me. There's no
trail, no blaze, no hills, no valleys, no change in vegetation, not the
slightest sign that I can discover to warrant any conclusion concerning
our whereabouts!"

She threw back her head and laughed deliciously.

"My pale-face brother," she said, "do you see that shell mound?"

"Is that hump of rubbish a shell mound?" he demanded scornfully.

"It certainly is; did you expect a pyramid? Well, then, that is the
first sign, and it means that we are very near camp.... And can you not
smell cedar smoke?"

"Not a whiff!" he said indignantly.

"Can't you even _see_ it?"

"Where in Heaven's name, Shiela?"

Her arm slanted upward across his saddle: "That pine belt is _too_ blue;
do you notice it now? That is smoke, my obstinate friend."

"It's more probably swamp mist; I think you're only a pretty
counterfeit!" he said, laughing as he caught the volatile aroma of
burning cedar. But he wouldn't admit that she knew where she was, even
when she triumphantly pointed out the bleached skull of an alligator
nailed to an ungainly black-jack. So they rode on, knee to knee, he
teasing her about her pretended woodcraft, she bantering him; but in his
lively skirmishes and her disdainful retorts there was always now an
undertone which they both already had begun to detect and listen for:
the unconscious note of tenderness sounding at moments through the
fresh, quick laughter and gayest badinage.

But under all her gaiety, at moments, too, the dull alarm sounded in her
breast; vague warning lest her heart be drifting into deeper currents
where perils lay uncharted and unknown.

With every intimate and silent throb of warning she shivered,
responsive, masking her growing uncertainty with words. And all the
while, deep in her unfolding soul, she was afraid, afraid. Not of this
man; not of herself as she had been yesterday. She was afraid of the
unknown in her, yet unrevealed, quickening with instincts the parentage
of which she knew nothing. What might be these instincts of inheritance,
how ominous their power, their trend, she did not know; from whom
inherited she could never, never know. Would engrafted and acquired
instincts aid her; would training control this unknown heritage from a
father and a mother whose very existences must always remain without
concrete meaning to her?

Since that dreadful day two years ago when a word spoken inadvertently,
perhaps maliciously, by Mrs. Van Dieman, made it necessary that she be
told the truth; since the dazed horror of that revelation when, beside
herself with grief and shame, she had turned blindly to herself for
help; and, childish impulse answering, had hurled her into folly
unutterable, she had, far in the unlighted crypt of her young soul,