The sisters had met on the steamboat landing a few moments previously. A rattling drive through the town had followed, and now they were able to speak together alone for the first time. There had been no display of emotion. The beautiful lips had met lightly, the well-gloved fingers had clasped each other with no nervous hysterical fervour, and now it would seem that they had parted but a week ago. Emotion is tabooed in the school through which these two had passed—the school of nineteenth-century society—and, indeed, we appear to get along remarkably well without it.
“My dear,” Mrs. Huston was saying, “he will be home by the next boat if he can raise the money. We cannot count on more than a week’s start.”
“And,” inquired Brenda, “can he raise the money?”
“Oh yes! If he can get as far as the steamboat office without spending it.”
Brenda looked at her sister in a curious way.
“Spending it on what … Alice?”
“On—drink!”
Mrs. Huston was not the woman to conceal any of her own grievances from quixotically unselfish motives.
Brenda thought for some moments before replying.
“Then,” she said at length, with some determination, “we must make sure of our start, if, that is, you are still determined to leave him.”
Mrs. Huston was looking down at her sister’s neat black dress, about which there was a subtle air of refined luxury, which seems natural to some women, and part of their being.
“Yes, yes, I suppose we must. By the way, dear, you are in mourning … for whom?”
“For Admiral Wylie,” replied Brenda patiently.
“But it is two months—is it not?—since his death, and he was no relation. I think it is unnecessary. Black is so melancholy, though it suits your figure.”
“I am living with Mrs. Wylie,” Brenda explained with unconscious irony. “Are you still determined that you cannot live with your husband, Alice?”
“My dear, he is a brute! I am not an impulsive person, but I think that if he should catch me again, it is very probable that I should do something desperate—kill myself, or something of that sort.”
“I do not think,” observed Brenda serenely, “that you would ever kill yourself.”
The beautiful woman laughed in an easy, lightsome way, which was one of her many social gifts. It was such a pleasantly infectious laugh, so utterly lighthearted, and so ready in its vocation of filling up awkward pauses.
“No, perhaps not. But in the meantime, what is to become of me? Will Mrs. Wylie take me in for a day or two, or shall we seek lodgings? I have some money, enough to last a month or so; but I must have two new dresses.”
“Mrs. Wylie has kindly said that you can stay as long as you like. But, Alice, it would never do to stay in London. You must get away to some small place on the seacoast, or somewhere where you will not be utterly bored, and keep in hiding until he comes home, and I can find out what he intends to do.”
“My dear, I shall be utterly bored anywhere except in London. But Brenda, tell me … you have got into a habit of talking exactly like Theo Trist!”
Brenda met her sister’s eyes with a bright smile.
“How funny!” she exclaimed. “I have not noticed it.”
“No, of course; you—would not notice it. When will he be home?”
The girl stopped and looked critically at an advertisement suspended on the wall near at hand. It was a huge representation of a coloured gentleman upon his native shore, making merry over a complicated pair of braces. She had never seen the work of art before, and for some unknown reason in the months—ay, and in the years that followed—her dislike for it was almost nauseating in its intensity.
“I don’t know,” she replied indifferently.
“We,” continued Mrs. Huston, following out her own train of thought, “are so helpless. We want a man to stand by us. Of course papa is of no use. I suppose he is spouting somewhere about the country. He generally is.”
“No,” replied Brenda, with a wonderful tolerance. “We cannot count on him. He is in Ireland. I had a postcard from him the other day. He said that I was not to be surprised or shocked to hear that he was in prison. He is trying to get himself arrested. It is, he says, all part of the campaign.”
Again Mrs. Huston’s pretty laughter made things pleasant and sociable.
“I wonder what that means,” she exclaimed, smoothing a wrinkle out of the front of her jacket for the benefit of a military-looking man, with a cigar in his mouth, who stared offensively as he passed.
Brenda shrugged her shoulders slightly, and said nothing. She did not appear to attach a very great importance to her father’s political movements, in which culpable neglect she was abetted by the whole of England.
“What we require,” continued Mrs. Huston, “is an energetic man with brains.”
“I am afraid that energetic men with brains have in most cases their own affairs to look after. It is only the idle ones with tongues who have time to devote to other people’s business.”
“The ‘brute,’ my dear, is clever; we must remember that. And he is terribly obstinate. There is a sort of stubborn bloodhoundism about him which makes me shiver when I think that he is even now after me, in all probability.”
“We must be cool and cunning, and brave to fight against him,” said Brenda practically.
At this moment the guard came forward, and held the door of their compartment invitingly open. They got in, and found themselves alone. They were barely seated, opposite to each other, when the train
