It was all in vain, however. The bullet could be traced to no one of the party of men who had gone forth with their guns in the gloom of that summer night.
Off and on Juliet had spoken her mind very freely to Ida about what she called her “conventual life.”
“Come home for a time,” she had written to her, “and let us just for a week or two make believe to be young and lighthearted girls once more.”
And again and again in blunt, sisterly fashion she had attacked Ida’s resolution to hold no communication whatever with Clive.
“Even supposing,” she had written, “that you have ruined one man’s life—a fact I by no means admit—I don’t see that that is a reason why you should ruin another man’s. Use your common sense, my dear—There’ll have to be some plain speaking between you and me sooner or later.”
Juliet’s remonstrances, however, had been all in vain. Ida had held to her purpose, and it was not until death had released her from her obligations to Sefton’s desolate mother, that Juliet found her opportunity for “plain speaking.”
She had seized it so soon as Ida had entered the house.
“You’ll please to sit down in white to dinner tonight, not in that ugly black dress,” she had said, minutely criticising her sister’s toilette.
And when Ida had yielded compliance, and had gone back to her room to don the white gown, she had found waiting for her a half-wreath of wine-red roses, which Juliet herself had twined, and which she insisted that her sister should wear as a throatlet.
So soon as dinner had come to an end, she had, as she phrased it—when telling the story to Goody afterwards—“hunted” Ida out of the drawing-room into the shadowy garden, as the more appropriate place in which to begin her plain speaking.
In most characteristic fashion it was begun. For a few minutes the two had wandered in silence down a by-walk, where beds of heavily-scented carnations were “giving back to the earth in fragrance all that they had taken out of it in nourishment”; and where tall marguerites were shining like so many stars from out their mist-like foliage. Then Juliet suddenly announced, with a heavy sigh, that she felt herself to be “a blot upon the face of creation.”
Ida started.
“A blot!” she exclaimed.
“Yes. I feel to speak poetically—as if I were a flower without its scent; or a star without its light. Or—to speak prosaically—as if I were a cow without its horns; a gnat without its sting; a table without its legs; a dish with nothing upon it!”
“All that!” cried Ida. “What a conglomeration of experiences!”
“I haven’t half done yet. Or a pen without nibs; a pencil without lead; a pin without a head; a needle without an eye; a—”
“Oh, sum it up in a word, and be done with it, Juliet!”
“Well, then, in a word, ‘my occupation’s gone!’ During the two years you have been away, and things have been so slow, I have improved the occasion to the best of my abilities. I have tamed Peggy utterly, and have reduced father to a state of abject submission; and now the raison d’être of my own existence has come to an end.”
“I should get another raison d’être, and go on living, if I were you. What about Arthur Glynde?” said Ida, archly. “Is he as utterly tamed and subjugated as father and Peggy?”
Juliet stooped and gathered a long fern-frond, which she waved in front of Ida and herself to keep off the dancing twilight gnats.
“It doesn’t in the least matter to me what Arthur Glynde is or is not,” she answered, sentimentally. “When we next meet we shall require an introduction to each other.”
“Juliet!”
“I mean it. We shall have passed entirely out of each other’s recollection. I’ve told him that I never wish to see him again until—”
“Oh, Juliet,” interrupted Ida, in great agitation, “don’t say that! You can’t mean it. Pray, pray, my darling, don’t trifle with your happiness—with his!”
She spoke vehemently. The days when she herself might have talked in the same wilful fashion had long since gone by. She had learnt at what a cost wilfulness might be gratified, and she trembled lest Juliet might buy her experience in a similar manner.
“You won’t let me finish what I was going to say,” said Juliet, pathetically. “I told him I didn’t wish to see him again until the day I fixed my wedding-day.”
Ida drew a long breath of relief.
“That will be soon, dear, won’t it? Aunt Sefton’s death need not prevent a quiet, a very quiet wedding.”
Juliet shook her head.
“When Arthur and I meet again he will be thinking of going into a churchyard, not into a church to be married. He’ll be bald, with a high, shiny head, and grey whiskers, and he’ll think a great deal more of his cook than he does of his tailor. And I shall be stout, and wear glasses, and a cap, and a great grey chignon. And I shall be ‘given up to works of charity’—going out ‘slumming’ in the East End of London; be perpetually writing to the newspapers for money to give the babies in Bethnal Green a day of fresh air; or else—”
“Oh, have mercy, Juliet! Why and wherefore is all this to come about?”
“The why and wherefore can be put into a nutshell,” answered Juliet, with great solemnity of manner. “I told Arthur—and he knows I mean it—that I would never—never fix my wedding-day till you fixed yours. Now do you understand why Arthur and I will need an introduction to each other when next we meet?”
“Oh, Juliet, you pain me!” cried Ida. And then, for a few minutes, there fell a silence between the sisters.
As they walked thus side by side in the gloaming, it was easy to note the difference that two years
