“Indeed you are wrong, Jack,” said his mother, with a sigh. “I have had many an anxious hour about you. But I’m not going to be doleful now I have you at home again, and for a long time, I hope.”
“Yes, for a long time,” echoed Jack. “I am sick of travelling.”
There was a weariness in his tone that sounded as if he meant what he said.
“And now tell me your adventures.”
The word hurt him like the sharp edge of a knife.
“I have had none. No one has adventures nowadays,” he said. “I had a fortnight on an American friend’s yacht in the Mediterranean, and we had some rather dirty weather, but nothing to hurt. That’s my nearest approach to an adventure. I had a month at Monte Carlo, shot a good many pigeons, and missed nearly as many as I shot; played a little, with varying luck, but am not ruined; came off on the whole a winner, though to no substantial amount, perhaps enough to buy a pair of solitaires for Maud’s pretty little ears”—pinching the ear that was nearest him, as the girl sat on a low chair at his side. “No, I have had no adventures. I have only been in familiar places. Let me see, from where did I write last?”
“From Bologna, ages ago; a shabby little letter,” answered Maud.
“Ah, I spent a few days in Bologna after I left Florence. I am rather fond of Bologna.”
“And after that? Where did you go after Bologna? It must be nearly two months since you were there.”
“Oh, I went to Padua and—and Verona,” he answered carelessly, “and then back to Genoa, and then I dawdled along the Riviera, stopping a night or two here and there, to Marseilles; and here I am. That is my history—and I am ready for another cup of tea.”
Maud filled his cup, and offered him dainty biscuits and tempting cakes, and hung about him fondly, touching the thick hair which made such a waving line across the broad forehead.
“Why, how tremendously sunburnt you are!” she exclaimed. “You look as if you had just come off a sea voyage.”
“Do I? Well, I have basked in the sun that shines upon the Mediterranean; and a March sun on the Riviera is a blazer.”
“And you were at Bologna and Padua, and did not go to your beloved Venice?” said his mother. “I thought you were so fond of Venice?”
“Yes, I delight in the place, but I wanted to go back to the Riviera, where I should be more secure of sunshine and balmy air.”
“And you left Italy without revisiting Venice?” exclaimed Maud, who had often listened to his raptures about the City by the Sea.
There was no more to be said. For the first time in his life he had deliberately lied, and to his mother and sister, of all people—to those who in all the world most trusted and believed in him. He hated himself for what he had done; and yet he meant to maintain that false assertion doggedly. He had not been to Venice. Let no casual acquaintance come forward to allege that he had been seen there. In the very teeth of assertion he would declare that in this springtime of 1886 he had not been in Venice. He rejoiced in the thought that he had told his name to no one at Danieli’s, and that he had entered the hotel as a stranger, having stopped at one of the hotels on the Grand Canal on his previous visits. He told himself that no one could convict him of having been in the fatal city last Shrove Tuesday—no one who knew him as Jack Vansittart.
“And now that you’ve had the history of my travels—”
“A sorry history, forsooth!” cried Maud. “You men have no capacity for description. When Lucy Calder came home from her Italian honeymoon she talked to me for hours about the places and things she had seen there.”
“Pretty prattler! Would you like me to recite a few pages of Murray or Joanne? All travelling is alike nowadays, Maud, and pleasure and comfort are only a question of good railway service and well-found hotels. We have done with romance and adventure. Life is pretty much the same all over Europe. And now tell me what you have been doing; there is more interest in a girl’s life in her first season than in all the cities of Europe.”
“Well, Jack, to begin with, I was presented at the February Drawing-Room. I went out with mother a goodish bit last November, don’t you know, but I was not actually out. That only began after the Drawing-Room.”
“And had you a pretty frock, and did the Royalties look kindly at you when you made your curtsy?”
“The Royalties might all have been waxwork, from Her Majesty downwards, for anything I knew to the contrary,” said Maud. “I saw no faces—only a cloud of feathers, and a splendour of jewels, and velvet, and satin, all vague and troubled, like the figures in a dream—but I got through the business somehow, and mother said I made no mistakes.”
“And the frock?”
“Oh, the frock was just as pretty as a frock can be. It was mother’s taste. She talked out every detail with Mdlle. Marie. She was not content to hear that Lady Lucille Plantagenet had worn this sort of thing, or Lady Gwendoline Tudor that sort of thing. She insisted on having just the frock she thought would suit me, Maud Vansittart. The train and petticoat were white satin—the satin you see in old pictures, satin in which there are masses of deep, steel-grey shadow and floods of white, silvery light—and then there was a cloud of aerophane arranged as only Marie can arrange a drapery, and in the cloud there were clusters of lilies of the valley and fluffy ostrich tips. The papers—the lady-papers mostly—went into raptures about my frock.”
“And did the lady-papers say nothing of the wearer?”
“Oh, some of them were so
