“Let us take a short turn,” said Max, and his arms came around her. As they circled slowly down the length of the room she stared at his black shoulder a few inches from her eyes. His stranger’s face was just above her in the bright light; his strange black-stitched glove holding her mittened hand. His arms steadied her as they neared the conservatory.
“Let us go out,” she heard him say, and her footsteps were guided across the moulding, her arm retained in his. Meg Wedderburn was playing and met her with her sentimental smile. In the gloom at her side, just beyond the shaded candle, stood Ted ready to turn the music, his disengaged hand holding the bole of a tall palm. He dropped his hands and turned as they passed him, almost colliding with Miriam. “Next dance with me,” he whispered neatly. “Will you show me your coffin?” asked Max as they reached the garden steps.
“It’s quite down at the end beyond the kitchen garden.”
“There are raspberry canes all along here, on both sides—trailing all over the place; the gardener puts up stakes and things but they manage to trail all over the place.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Some of them are that pale yellow kind, the colour of champagne. You can just see how they trail. Isn’t it funny how dark they are, and yet the colour’s there all the time, isn’t it? They are lovely in the day, lovely leaves and great big fruit, and in between are little squatty gooseberry bushes, all kinds, yellow and egg-shaped like plums, and little bright green round ones and every kind of the ordinary red kind. Do you know the little bright green ones, quite bright green when they’re ripe, like bright green Chartreuse?”
“No. The green Chartreuse of course I know. But green ripe gooseberries I have not seen.”
“I expect you only know the unripe green ones they make April fool of.”
“April fool?”
“I mean gooseberry fool. Do you know why men are like green gooseberries?”
“No. Why are they? Tell me.”
“Perhaps you would not like it. We are passing the apple trees now; quarendens and stibbards.”
“Tell me. I shall like what you say.”
“Well, it’s because women can make fools of them whenever they like.”
Max laughed; a deep gurgling laugh that echoed back from the wall in front of them.
“We are nearly at the end of the garden.”
“I think you would not make a man a fool. No?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never thought about it.”
“You have not thought much about men.”
“I don’t know.”
“But they, they have thought about you.”
“Oh, I’m sure I don’t know.”
“You do not care, perhaps?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. Here’s the coffin. I’m afraid it’s not very comfortable. It’s so low.”
“What is it?”
“It’s an overturned seedling box. There’s grass all round. I wonder whether it’s damp,” said Miriam suddenly invaded by a general uncertainty.
“Oh, we will sit down, it will not be damp. Your future brother-in-law has not scrubbed also the ivy on the wall,” he pursued as they sat down on the broad low seat, “it will spoil your blouse.”
Miriam leaned uncomfortably against the intervening arm.
“Isn’t it a perfectly lovely night?” she said.
“I feel that you would not make of a man a fool. …”
“Why not?”
“I feel that there is no poison in you.”
“What do you mean?” People … poisonous … What a horrible idea.
“Just what I say.”
“I know in a way. I think I know what you mean.”
“I feel that there is no poison in you. I have not felt that before with a woman.”
“Aren’t women awful?” Miriam made a little movement of sympathy towards the strange definiteness at her side.
“I have thought so. But you are not as the women one meets. You have a soul serene and innocent. With you it should be well with a man.”
“I don’t know,” responded Miriam. “Is he telling me I am a fool?” she thought. “It’s true, but no one has the courage to tell me.”
“It is most strange. I talk to you here as I will. It is simple and fatal”; the supporting arm became a gentle encirclement and Miriam’s heart beat softly in her ears. “I go tomorrow to Paris to the branch of my father’s business that is managed there by my brother. And I go then to New York to establish a branch there. I shall be away then, perhaps a year. Shall I find you here?”
A quick crunching on the gravel pathway just in front of them made them both hold their breath to listen. Someone was standing on the grass near Max’s side of the coffin. A match spat and flared and Miriam’s heart was shaken by Ted’s new, eager, frightened voice. “Aren’t you ever going to dance with me again?”
She had seen the whiteness of his face and his cold, delicate, upright figure. In spirit she had leapt to her feet and faltered his name. All the world she knew had fallen into newness. This was certainty. Ted would never leave her. But it was Max who was standing up and saying richly in the blackness left by the burnt-out match, “All in good time, Burton. Miss Miriam is engaged to me for this dance.” Her faint “of course, Ted,” was drowned in the words which her partner sang after the footsteps retreating rapidly along the gravel path: “We’re just coming!”
“I suppose they’ve begun the next dance,” she said, rising decisively and brushing at her velvet skirt with trembling hands.
“Our dance. Let us go and dance our dance.”
They walked a little apart steadily along up through the kitchen garden, their unmatched footsteps sounding loudly upon the gravel between remarks made by Max. Miriam heard them and heard the voice of Max. But she neither listened nor responded.
She began to talk and laugh at random as they neared the lawn lit by the glaring uncurtained windows.
Consulting his scrutinising face as they danced easily in the as yet half-empty room, he humming the waltz which swung with their movement, she found
