She gazed yearningly at the chandelier.
“I wish mother would take me to Algiers next winter,” she murmured, absently. “It would do her rheumatism so much good.”
I went away frankly uneasy. These novelists, I felt, ought to be more careful. They put ideas into girls’ heads and made them dissatisfied. I determined to look William up and give him a kindly word of advice. It was no business of mine, you may say, but they were so ideally suited to one another that it seemed a tragedy that anything should come between them. And Jane was in a strange mood. At any moment, I felt, she might take a good, square look at William and wonder what she could ever have seen in him. I hurried to the boy’s cottage.
“William,” I said, “as one who dandled you on his knee when you were a baby, I wish to ask you a personal question. Answer me this, and make it snappy. Do you love Jane Packard?”
A look of surprise came into his face, followed by one of intense thought. He was silent for a space.
“Who, me?” he said at length.
“Yes, you.”
“Jane Packard?”
“Yes, Jane Packard.”
“Do I love Jane Packard?” said William, assembling the material and arranging it neatly in his mind.
He pondered for perhaps five minutes.
“Why, of course I do,” he said.
“Splendid!”
“Devotedly, dash it!”
“Capital!”
“You might say madly.”
I tapped him on his barrel-like chest.
“Then my advice to you, William Bates, is to tell her so.”
“Now that’s rather a brainy scheme,” said William, looking at me admiringly. “I see exactly what you’re driving at. You mean it would kind of settle things, and all that?”
“Precisely.”
“Well, I’ve got to go away for a couple of days tomorrow—it’s the Invitation Tournament at Squashy Hollow—but I’ll be back on Wednesday. Suppose I take her out on the links on Wednesday and propose?”
“A very good idea.”
“At the sixth hole, say?”
“At the sixth hole would do excellently.”
“Or the seventh?”
“The sixth would be better. The ground slopes from the tee, and you would be hidden from view by the dogleg turn.”
“Something in that.”
“My own suggestion would be that you somehow contrive to lead her into that large bunker to the left of the seventh fairway.”
“Why?”
“I have reason to believe that Jane would respond more readily to your wooing were it conducted in some vast sandy waste. And there is another thing,” I proceeded, earnestly, “which I must impress upon you. See that there is nothing tame or tepid about your behaviour when you propose. You must show zip and romance. In fact, I strongly recommend you, before you even say a word to her, to seize her and clasp her in your arms and let your hot breath sear her face.”
“Who, me?” said William.
“Believe me, it is what will appeal to her most.”
“But, I say! Hot breath, I mean! Dash it all, you know, what?”
“I assure you it is indispensable.”
“Seize her?” said William, blankly.
“Precisely.”
“Clasp her in my arms?”
“Just so.”
William plunged into silent thought once more.
“Well, you know, I suppose,” he said at length. “You’ve had experience, I take it. Still—Oh, all right, I’ll have a stab at it.”
“There spoke the true William Bates!” I said. “Go to it, lad, and Heaven speed your wooing!”
In all human schemes—and it is this that so often brings failure to the subtlest strategists—there is always the chance of the Unknown Factor popping up, that unforeseen X for which we have made no allowance and which throws our whole plan of campaign out of gear. I had not anticipated anything of the kind coming along to mar the arrangements on the present occasion; but when I reached the first tee on the Wednesday afternoon to give William Bates that last word of encouragement which means so much, I saw that I had been too sanguine. William had not yet arrived, but Jane was there, and with her a tall, slim, dark-haired, sickeningly romantic-looking youth in faultlessly-fitting serge. A stranger to me. He was talking to her in a musical undertone, and she seemed to be hanging on his words. Her beautiful eyes were fixed on his face, and her lips slightly parted. So absorbed was she that it was not until I spoke that she became aware of my presence.
“William not arrived yet?”
She turned with a start.
“William? Hasn’t he? Oh! No, not yet. I don’t suppose he will be long. I want to introduce you to Mr. Spelvin. He has come to stay with the Wyndhams for a few weeks. He is going to walk round with us.”
Naturally this information came as a shock to me, but I masked my feelings and greeted the young man with a well-assumed cordiality.
“Mr. George Spelvin, the actor?” I asked, shaking hands.
“My cousin,” he said. “My name is Rodney Spelvin. I do not share George’s histrionic ambitions. If I have any claim to—may I say renown?—it is as a maker of harmonies.”
“A composer, eh?”
“Verbal harmonies,” explained Mr. Spelvin. “I am, in my humble fashion, a poet.”
“He writes the most beautiful poetry,” said Jane, warmly. “He has just been reciting some of it to me.”
“Oh, that little thing?” said Mr. Spelvin, deprecatingly. “A mere morceau. One of my juvenilia.”
“It was too beautiful for words,” persisted Jane.
“Ah, you,” said Mr. Spelvin, “have the soul to appreciate it. I could wish that there were more like you, Miss Packard. We singers have much to put up with in a crass and materialistic world. Only last week a man, a coarse editor, asked me what my sonnet, ‘Wine of Desire,’ meant.” He laughed indulgently. “I gave him answer,
