He heard her whisper hesitatingly, “But Jervis must get something to do very soon now, Mr. Rushworth, or I don’t know what we shall do. We’re so horribly hard up,” and her mouth, that most revealing feature, quivered.
His strong face—the face he believed to be so shrewd, and which was shrewd where “business” was concerned—became filled with warm sympathy.
“That can’t be allowed to go on!” he exclaimed a little awkwardly.
During their last moonlit walk and talk in the dark, scented garden of the house where they had first met, Ivy Lexton had told him the pathetic story of her life. How, when she and Jervis Lexton had first married, they had been quite well off, but that a dishonest lawyer had somehow muddled away all “poor Jervis’s money.”
She had further confessed that now they were really “up against it,” hard-driven as they had never been before.
“An idle man,” she had said, speaking in that tremulous, husky voice which nearly always touched a listener’s heartstrings, “can’t help spending money. I would give anything to get my husband a job!”
Miles Rushworth remembered, now, that pathetic cry from the heart, and he felt much ashamed that he had not attended to the matter ere this. But he had not forgotten this dear little woman, and, had they not met tonight, she would have heard from him within a day or two.
All at once, by what was a real accident, his fingers touched her bare arm. They lay on her soft flesh for the fraction of a minute, and it was as if she could feel the thrill which ran through him.
She did not move, she scarcely breathed. Neither could have said how long it was before those hard, cool fingers slid down and grasped her soft hand. He crushed her hand in his strong grasp, then let it go.
“I suppose you would like Mr. Lexton to start work this autumn?” he said at last. “There isn’t much doing during August and September.”
His voice sounded strangely caressing and possessive, even to himself. But he felt sure that Ivy, a “nice” woman, had no suspicion of how much he had been moved by that casual, unexpected touch.
Miles Rushworth told himself that he must mind his step, for this seductive little creature, God help him, was another man’s wife, and he “wasn’t that sort.” Neither, he would have staked his life on it, was she.
And yet? Was it he?—sensible, prudent, nay, where women were concerned, overcautious—Miles Rushworth, or some tricksy, bold entity outside himself which uttered the words: “By the way, what are you doing next month? If you’re doing nothing in particular, I do wish you’d both join my yachting party. Lady Dale and her daughter are coming, together with two or three others.”
A look of real, almost childlike, joy and pleasure flashed into Ivy Lexton’s face and, once more, the man sitting so closely by her side felt shaken to the depths. Tenderness was now added to the feeling of passionate attraction of which he was already half uncomfortably, half exultantly, aware. How young she looked, how innocent—now, at this moment, like a happy little girl.
“D’you really mean that?” she cried. “I’ve always longed to go yachting! But I’ve never even been in a yacht. Jervis is awfully fond of the sea, too; he was at Cowes when the war broke out!”
“Then that settles it,” exclaimed Rushworth delightedly. “We join the Dark Lady at Southampton on August the 5th! By the way, perhaps I ought to tell you that we’re not going on any specially wonderful trip. We’re only going to cruise about the coast of France. I’m afraid Lady Dale and her daughter will have to leave us fairly soon—they’ve promised to stay with some people near Dieppe.”
“It will be heavenly—heavenly!”
Ivy whispered those five words almost in his ear, for she was exceedingly anxious that Roger Gretorex should hear nothing of this delightful plan. She had promised the young man she would spend a week, during August, alone with him and his mother in the Sussex manor house which was still his own, though all the land up to the park gates had been sold.
As she gave a quick surreptitious glance at the host who was her dangerously jealous lover—even jealous, grotesque thought, of her husband, entirely unsuspicious Jervis—a feeling of sharp irritation again swept over Ivy Lexton.
She told herself angrily that, though Roger Gretorex might belong by birth to grand people (to her surprise he made no effort to keep up with them), he had never been taught to behave as a young man should always behave in pleasant company. Even now, he still had what Ivy called “his thundercloud face,” and he was scarcely paying any attention to the girl sitting by him.
Ivy, not for the first time, realised that she had been a fool indeed to allow herself to become attracted to a man who was so little of her own sort. And yet Gretorex had been such a wonderful wooer! And his ardour had moved and excited her all the more because, at times, he had been as if overwhelmed with what had seemed to her an absurd kind of remorse at the knowledge that the woman he loved was another man’s wife.
Dismissing the distasteful thought of Gretorex from her mind, she turned to Rushworth.
“Don’t say anything to my husband about this delightful plan,” she murmured. “I shall have to bring him round to the idea. You see, he’s so awfully eager to start work at once.”
The lights were now being turned off one by one, so Ivy smiled across at Lady Dale, and rose from the chair which touched that on which Rushworth was still sitting as if lost in a dream.
As, a few moments later, they all stood together outside in the cool night air—all, that is, but Roger Gretorex who, after having uttered a curt good night, had gone
