Brenda sat a little forward, with her gloved hand resting on the window, which had been lowered by the guard. They were seated on the landward side of the train, and as she looked out her eyes rested on the rising hills to the north with a vague, unseeing gaze.
A slight movement made by Mrs. Huston caused her at length to look across, and the two sisters sat for a second searching each other’s eyes for the old heartwhole frankness which never seems to survive the death of childhood and the birth of separate interests in life.
“Theo,” said the elder woman significantly at last, “is brave and cool and cunning, Brenda.”
The girl made an effort, but the old childish confidence was dead. From Theo Trist, the disciple of stoicism, she had perhaps learnt something of a creed which, if a mistaken one, renders its followers of great value in the world, for they never intrude their own private feelings upon public attention. That effort was the last. It was a beginning in itself—the first stone of a wall destined to rise between the two sisters, built by the gray hands of Time.
“But,” suggested Brenda, “Theo is in Bulgaria.”
Mrs. Huston smiled with all the conscious power of a woman who, without being actually vain, knows the market value and the moral weight of her beauty.
“Suppose I telegraphed to him that I wanted him to come to me at once.”
Brenda fixed her eyes upon her sister’s face. For a second her dainty lip quivered.
“You must not do that,” she said, in such a tone of invincible opposition that her sister changed colour, and looked somewhat hastily in another direction.
“I suppose,” murmured the elder woman after a short silence, “that it is quite impossible to find out when he may return?”
“Quite impossible. This ‘Eastern Question,’ as it is called, is so complicated that I have given up trying to follow it—besides, I do not see what Theo has to do with the matter. We must act alone, Alice.”
“But women are so helpless.”
Brenda smiled in a slightly ironical way.
“Why should they be?” she asked practically. “I am not afraid of Captain Huston. He is a gentleman, at all events.”
“He was!” put in his wife bitterly.
“And I suppose there is something left of his former self?”
“Not very much, my dear. At least, that phase of his present condition has been religiously hidden from my affectionate gaze.”
Brenda drew her gloves pensively up her slim wrists, smoothing out the wrinkles in the black kid. There was in her demeanour an air of capable attention, something between that accorded by a general to his aide-de-camp on the field of battle, and the keen watchfulness of a physician while his patient speaks.
“Theo,” she said conversationally, “would be a great comfort to us. He is so steadfast and so entirely reliable. But we must do without him. We will manage somehow.”
“I am horribly afraid, Brenda. It has just come to me; I have never felt it before. You seem to take it so seriously, and … and I expected to find Theo at home.”
“Theo is one of the energetic men with brains who have their own affairs to attend to,” said Brenda, in her cheery way. “We are not his affairs; besides, as I mentioned before, he is in Bulgaria—in his element, in the midst of confusion, insurrection, war.”
“But,” repeated Mrs. Huston, with aggravating unconsciousness of the obvious vanity of her words, “suppose I telegraphed for him?”
Brenda laughed, and shook her head.
“I have a melancholy presentiment that if you telegraphed for him he would not come. There is a vulgar but weighty proverb about making one’s own bed, which he might recommend to our notice.”
“Then Theo must have changed!”
Brenda raised her round blue eyes, and glanced sideways out of the window. She was playing idly with the strap of the sash, tapping the back of her hand with it.
“Theo,” she observed indifferently, “is the incarnation of steadfastness. He has not changed in any perceptible way. But he is, before all else, a war-correspondent. I cannot imagine that anyone should possess the power of dragging him away from the seat of war.”
Mrs. Huston smiled vaguely for her own satisfaction. Her imagination was apparently capable of greater things. It was rather to be deplored that, when she smiled, the expression of her beautiful face was what might (by a true friend behind her back) be called a trifle vacuous.
“He wrote,” continued the younger sister, “a very good article the other day, which came just within the limits of my understanding. It was upon the dangers of alliance; and he showed that an ally who, in any one way, might at some time prove disadvantageous, is better avoided from the very first. It was apropos of the Turkish-Christian subjects welcoming a Russian invasion. It seems to me, Alice, that our position is rather within the reach of that argument.”
“Being a soldier’s wife, I do not know much about military matters; but it seems to me that a retreat should be safely covered at all costs.”
“Not at all costs,” said Brenda significantly. Her colour had changed, and there was a wave of pink slowly mounting over her throat.
Mrs. Huston smiled serenely, and shrugged her shoulders.
“I do not see,” she expostulated frankly, “what harm there can be in calling in the aid of an old friend.”
“I would rather work alone!” was Brenda’s soft reply.
And in those two casual remarks there lay hidden from the gaze of blinder mortals the story of two lives.
III
Alice Returns
In her pleasant room on the second-floor of Suffolk Mansions, Mrs. Wylie awaited the arrival of the two sisters.
From without there came a suggestion of bustling life in the continuous hum of wheel-traffic and an occasional cry, not unmelodious, from enterprising news-vendors. Within, everything spoke of peaceful, pleasant comfort. There was a large table in the centre of the room literally covered with periodical and permanent literature—a pleasant table to sit by, for there
