Haven of the Heart

HAVEN OF THE HEART Averil Ives

Jocelyn Cherril had everything in the world to make for happiness, except what her heart most desired ---the love of Lucien Fitzgerald. Perhaps because of the pain he constantly endured, Lucien seemed beyond the realms of normal human emotion, at least until beautiful, accomplished Wanda Hayward arrived in Ireland. It looked as though the lovely Wanda, who had been so much a part of Lucien's past life, were going to become part of his future too, thought Jocelyn as, with a breaking heart, she watched Wanda whisk Lucien off to London. But things are not always what they seem, as Jocelyn eventually found to her joyous bewilderment.

CHAPTER ONE WHEN Jocelyn received the news that old Mrs. Fitzgerald had remembered her so generously in her will—with such amazing generosity, in fact!—she could not believe it. She made Mr. Dashwood, the solicitor, smile a little when she sat in his office and confronted him on the far side of his old-fashioned desk, and explained to him that so for as she knew Mrs. Fitzgerald could have had no reason at all for remembering her. "My mother, who married rather late in life, acted as her companion for years," she explained, "and I believe there was rather a close bond between them. When my mother left to get married, Mrs. Fitzgerald insisted on making a small settlement on her, and when I was a child I was allowed to. visit her once, and stayed with her at Fairhaven. But apart from that one visit she never saw me again, and there was no reason at all why she should remember me in her will." "But, nevertheless, she did remember you—to the tune of some thirty-odd thousand pounds, and the house at Fairhaven!" Mr. Dashwood could not resist smiling this time with more amusement as he regarded the concerned face in front of him. For one thing, it was a face he would never have found the smallest objection to studying at any time—a fair, typically English face, despite the fact that the girl's mother had had nothing but Irish blood in her veins, lighted by blue eyes that made him think of bluebells lying in colorful patches in the woods; and framed in a cloud of lightbrown hair that looked as if it had been powdered with gold-dust. She wore a dainty little hat, and a neat suit, and her gloves and her shoes and her handbag were all very correct and unobtrusive. Another reason why he smiled, with that little glint of humor under his heavy eyebrows, was because it struck him as definitely singular

that anyone should attempt to probe the reasons why a fortune had been left to them. Most people would have been thankful and nothing more. But this girl was not like that. "You may find the house a bit of a liability," he informed her. "It's large, and a bit unwieldy, and full, of course, of old-fashioned furniture—some of it probably very valuable. You may think it a good plan to sell the whole lot as it stands, if we can secure you a good enough offer." But for the first time Jocelyn adopted a positive attitude towards her new possessions. "I don't think so," she said, giving the brown-gold head a shake. "If my memories of the house have not been affected by the lapse of time since I was there it is a lovely old house, and I know Mrs. Fitzgerald herself adored it." As she spoke she had a mental picture of the house, surrounded by emerald lawns, bowered in trees, with green hills rising behind it, and green slopes running before it down to the curling edges of the seas that seeped quietly on to Fairhaven sands. But there was a worried thought at the back of her mind, and she clasped both her slim hands together and leaned a little towards Mr. Dashwood; "but I'm almost certain Mrs. Fitzgerald had close relatives of her own to whom she could have left her property—why didn't she do so?" she added. Mr. Dashwood spread his plump hands in a gesture. "My dear Miss Cherril, don't hold me responsible for the whims of an elderly lady!" he begged rather whimsically: "Or for any lady, if it comes to that! Mrs. Fitzgerald certainly had nephews—three of them, as a matter of fact, and so far as I am aware they are all living in Fairhaven. But their existence has nothing whatever to do with you or I."

"You mean—she didn't leave them anything at all?" "Nothing"—with a faint shrug of his shoulders— "so far as I am aware." "Is it possible she mode a settlement on one or other of them before she died?" "I don't think so—in fact, I'm quite certain she did nothing of the kind. You see," he explained, with an almost fatherly glance this time, "I handled all her affairs, and have done so far years, and I would know whether any generous action of that sort had taken place. But this firm has certainly not drawn up any Deed of Settlement in favor of the Fitzgerald brothers. For one thing"—with an infinitesimal pause—"they were the least little bit of a thorn in their aunt's side." "You mean, they—they weren't all she would have liked them to be?" "Well"—he looked down at some papers on his desk, and straightened them—"Lucien Fitzgerald, her eldest nephew, is in no need of financial assistance from anyone, but the two younger lads are a couple of spendthrifts who, if they had expectations from her, have been doomed to disappointment. But I wouldn't let their disappointment worry you." But Jocelyn's feathery-light brows were drawn together in a faintly anxious frown, and the blue eyes were not altogether convinced. "Blood is thicker than water," she voiced it as her opinion, "and if they had been my nephews I would have had to do something about them. And I shall feel dreadful if, when I get out there, I find that— without intending to do so in the very least!—I've been the means of upsetting some of their future plans! Perhaps altering their plans altogether!"

Mr. Dashwood continued to smile complacently, but there was just a faint edge of reproof to his voice as he observed: "My dear young lady, if you'll forgive me for saying so, I do feel that you're rather casting doubts on the mental acumen of my late client, and the qualities which probably made her a very worthwhile relative to possess at certain periods in all three of those young men's lives! And the fact that she left them nothing is really no concern of yours, but that she has become your benefactress is something for which you can feel really grateful, and which must always endear her memory to you." Jocelyn felt as if she had been guilty of rank ingratitude by championing the cause of the nephews, but he went on with great briskness: "And now, how soon do you propose to go over to Ireland?" Once more his elderly eyes were beaming at her, and his wide smile was all encouragement. "I can advance you any money you may require at any time, you know. And if you'd like me to make reservations for you ...? I expect you'd prefer to fly rather than risk a bad sea crossing, and if you take my advice you'll spend at least one night in Dublin — it's always worth seeing. . . When she finally left his office Jocelyn felt as if she were living and moving in a dream, and nothing was any longer completely normal. She was a young woman who had just been bequeathed a disturbingly large sum of money, and a beautiful house—and in addition to both of these things she was going to Ireland for the second time in her life. But at the back of her mind that worry persisted. What of the three nephews . . .?

CHAPTER TWO WHEN she arrived in Ireland it was raining, the skies weeping softly as they so often do weep in the Emerald Isle. Despite the rain she would have liked to have spent more than one night in Dublin, but she was anxious—almost consumingly anxious—to see again the house which had been left to her in Fair- haven, memories of which had lingered like a pleasing echo in her mind from the time that she was twelve. Fairhaven was no more than a cluster of houses, only two of which were large, set down beside the sea on a remote tip of the south-west coast. Inland there were mountains which looked like purple mist when the sun shone on them, and when the sun was not shining they seemed to interpose a barrier between Fairhaven and the rest of the world that was like a grim, grey wall. But within the barrier there were rolling hills that were so bright and green that the incredible depth and perfection of their color was almost a challenge to the eye, and where the waves broke upon the shore the shining strip of sand was palest wedding-ring gold. In summer the cottages that comprised Fairhaven village were smothered in torrents of climbing white roses, and bees hummed continually in gardens where the giant hollyhocks provided shade for drowsy hens, and even an occasional somnolent pig. A tiny stream twisted and fought its way down from the hills and formed a silver river which flowed beneath the village street, and children fished beside the river and sometimes sailed a home-made boat On the gentle slopes where Himself and his fine house were located a fine forest of tall trees soared into the sky, and at the base of those trees in springtime primroses painted golden splashes, and bluebells lay crouched in sheets of mauve. But on the afternoon when Jocelyn was set down at what was really no more than a wayside halt— although the local inhabitants

dignified it by use of the word "station"—the rain was coming down in a silvery-grey sheet, and on her brief journey from the train to the corrugated-iron roofed structure which served the purpose of a booking-hall and a cloakroom as well, she was very nearly completely drenched. Her mackintosh was over her arm, for she had not stopped to put it on before leaving her compartment, and the rain was trickling down the neck < of her suit. Her absurd little hat— rather like a blown leaf sitting on the back of her head and her soft brown curls—looked ridiculous and inadequate with moisture forming rivers which ran from her hair down her cheeks and sparkled like diamond-drops on her chin. Jocelyn surrendered her ticket to the only porter on duty, and enquired of him whether she could get a taxi to take her to Fairhaven House. The porter rubbed his chin and looked at her thoughtfully— obviously mentally puzzling out the connection between her and a house that had been empty for months—and then pronounced it as his opinion, in a very strong brogue, that she would get no wheeled conveyance of any sort until the "Ixpriss", as he called it, came through in a couple of hours' time, when there might be one or two taxis to be had. Although, on the other hand, there might not! "Oh, but -" Jocelyn was beginning, in consternation, when a very large, and very luxurious, long black car slid to a standstill at the foot of the station steps, and, instantly abandoning her, the porter went hastening rheumatically down the steps and addressed the liveried chauffeur through a sliding glass panel which the latter slid back a bare few inches—taking care not to admit any ^of the driving rain. On the back seat of the car a man without a hat, but with the high collar of a thick tweed coat up about his ears, and a plaid rug over his knees, seemed to be lying back very comfortably. His sleek dark head rested languidly against the pearl-grey upholstery behind him, and one rather long-fingered and very slender hand lay across the

back of a fine black Aberdeen terrier, with bristling whiskers, who shared the seat with him. Jocelyn, her solitary suit-case reposing at her feet, stood on the steps feeling both self-conscious and unhappy as the rain continued to bounce off her, and the porter collected a number of parcels from some mysterious inner compartment of the corrugated-iron roofed structure and handed them over to the chauffeur, who stowed them away in the boot of the car. After which the representative of Irish railways thrust his head inside the car and indulged in a few noticeable gestures which, Jocelyn realized, could have meant that he was drawing attention to herself and her plight. And when he suddenly lifted a gnarled finger and beckoned her she was not so much surprised as tremendously relieved, especially when he said: "Tis Himself that will be having the goodness of heart to give you a lift as far as Fairhaven House. Hell be passing the gates, and hell drop you off there, and the walk up the drive'll not be wetting you any more than you are at this minute," eyeing with disfavor her bedraggled appearance, and in particular the frivolous little hat which, so far as he could see, served no useful purpose whatsoever. "Oh—oh, thank you!" Jocelyn exclaimed, and fumbled in her purse for a reward which took him temporarily aback, and then actually caused him to salute her with two fingers to his cap as he closed the car door upon her. There was a glass partition between the owner of the vehicle and the uniformed man who drove him, and the atmosphere in that confined .but beautifully appointed space was warm and snug on such a day, especially after the exposed draughtiness of the station steps. But Jocelyn was so afraid lest her dripping garments should do damage to the elegance of the well-sprung back seat—which would have accommodated another besides herself and the man with the plaid rug over his knees, who had scooped the Aberdeen up into the crook of

his arm—that she didn't dare do more than perch rather uncomfortably on the extreme edge, so that the quietest masculine voice she had ever heard in her life observed with rather an amused note in it: "There's plenty of room, you know, and no reason at all why you shouldn't make yourself comfortable! There's even a spare rug if you don't mind reaching for it!" There was—folded neatly on the drop-down seat in front of her. But Jocelyn, feeling faintly surprised because he made no attempt to alter his position in the very slightest in the corner where his long- limbed body seemed to be stretched out very much at his ease, drew his attention to the drops that were still running off her on to the pearlcolored floor- covering, and flushed in a way that most people would have found infinitely attractive as she declared that she was not in the least cold. "Aren't you? But you do look most uncomfortably wet!" The amused note persisted in his voice, but otherwise it was rather sleepy. "Not at all a good day on which to arrive in Eire for the first time and receive those all-important first impressions! You're really rather unfortunate, Miss Cherril." She looked up at him quickly, in amazement, as he uttered her name. His eyes were grey, like wood smoke, under the blackest and thickest of eyelashes, and there was a gleam of lazy humor which seemed to dance in them. "How—how do you know who I am?" she asked, her eyes betraying her astonishment. "My dear Miss Cherril, you're going to Fairhaven House, and Fairhaven House, once the property of my aunt, has recently become the property of a young Englishwomen by the name of Miss Jocelyn

Cherril. You're so obviously English that it would be impossible to make a mistake about your identity,' he assured her, his long hands gently caressing the dog's well-kept coat while he did so. "Oh!" Jocelyn exclaimed, and felt that the exclamation was inadequate. "And realising who you were the instant I caught sight of you, I felt sorry that you should have chosen to arrive on such a day." She could not be certain whether the smile he directed towards her had any real commiseration in it or not, but certainly it revealed hard, and very perfect, teeth, which flashed whitely in his thin, dark face. "At this time of year" —it was late spring—"we could have welcomed you with something quite spectacular in the way of weather, if only the Fates had been kind—something blue, and green, and golden, and full of promise, which would no doubt have struck you as an excellent omen. As it is, I hope you won't allow our weeping skies to depress you, or make you wish that my late, good aunt had lived anywhere other than where she did live!" "Of—of course not," Jocelyn answered, maintaining her balance with difficulty on the extreme edge of the seat while they moved with amazing smoothness over the rough road which she had observed from the train, and which twisted and wound like a serpent, while the curtain of rain drove at them. And then, rather foolishly, she added: "Then, you must be—you must be Mrs. Fitzgerald's nephew?" "One of them," he replied, the faint smile in his eyes baffling her. "She possessed three." "Meaning that there are still three of you?" "Exactly." The curve of his lips—such beautifully cut lips, and he was certainly the most languidly elegant man, who was probably somewhere in his middle thirties, she had ever seen in her life—took

.on a kind of open, ironical mockery, as he inclined his sleek head a little towards her. "I am Lucien, Miss Cherril—older by a good many years than either of my two brothers, Blaize and Arthur—commonly known as Artie. You will almost certainly meet them before very long, if you intend to settle down over here for any length of time." "Which is what I very much hope to do," Jocelyn found herself confessing to him, with a sudden little burst of impulsiveness. "You see," she explained, more shyly, "this is not quite my first visit to Ireland. 1 was over here when I was twelve, and it was then that I first met Mrs. Fitzgerald." "I see," he murmured. The straight gaze of his eyes disconcerted her, for he seemed to find studying her a curiously rewarding pastime, in spite of the fact that she was by no means at her best just then, and she was very much aware of it herself. She put up a hand and whipped off the little straw hat which had found such small favor with the porter, and shook out her wet curls, and looked at him apologetically. "I explained to Mr. Dashwood that I couldn't think why your aunt remembered me so generously in her will," she said quickly, knowing that some explanation of the situation would have to be offered to him at some time or other, and the present moment seemed as good as any other was likely to be. "There was really no reason why she should have remembered me at all." "Wasn't there?" But this time his smile didn't merely confuse her; it was so full of a dry, quizzical humor that it made her lower her own eyes rather hastily, and once again that attractive soft flush rose up over her cheeks and stained them like the pink petals of a peony. "I wonder in which part of the world I was wandering when you were twelve. Miss Cherril?" he murmured, watching her lazily, and at the same time preventing the Aberdeen from hurling himself on to her lap, thereby upsetting her balance altogether. "I'm quite certain we

didn't meet, otherwise I would have remembered—even if you were only twelve!" Jocelyn peeped at him in the midst of an acute kind of embarrassment which she could not quite understand, but she also was quite certain that they had never met before. For he was the sort of man one would not forget altogether, even if his image grew dim. And ten years previously—when he would have been still in his early twenties, and without those few silvery threads that lightened his dark hair above the temples—he must have been quite staggeringly handsome. Handsome enough to impress even a child of twelve! They had flashed between a pair of wrought-iron gates and seemed to be proceeding up a drive, and Jocelyn looked quickly about her as the realisation smote her that this must be Fairhaven House. But the car had not slowed, and the tunnel-like trees shut them in on either hand, and she could glimpse or remember nothing at all until all at once the trees opened out, and there was the broad carriage sweep she had never forgotten, and the dignified grey shape of the house itself. Not really a large house, but compact and comfortably Victorian, with flower-beds underneath the windows, and several steps leading up to an impressive front door. On the top of the steps, as the car came to rest, the figure of the late Mrs. Fitzgerald's housekeeper appeared, and Jocelyn looked up at her rather wonderingly, recognising the gaunt shape in the old-fashioned stiff black alpaca, but unable to believe that it was herself, in the guise of the new mistress, that the woman was there to welcome. '1 did think of asking you to come and have tea with my mother," Lucien Fitzgerald said, still studying Jocelyn's face with that air of repressed amusement, "as it's such a brute of a day, and it struck me that you might feel rather lonely arriving here with nothing but a collection of old memories. And then I realised that Hannah would be waiting for you, and so she is."

"Thank you. It was kind of you to think of anything of the kind," Jocelyn answered, and then waited for him to make some sort of a move, such as bending forward to open the door for her, if he did not himself intend to alight—even for a few moments, just for the sake of mere politeness—or even to sit suddenly upright and offer her his hand in farewell. But he did neither, although he certainly held out his hand to her, and as she put hers into it Hannah came hastening down the steps and anticipated the chauffeur by giving a wrench to the rear door, swinging it so uncomfortably wide that it admitted a fierce gust of rain and wind. "I'm not going to say good-bye," Lucien said, "because we shall almost certainly meet again, and probably quite soon. So we'll make it au revoir, shall we?" Hannah leaned anxiously into the car, and addressed herself to its owner. "And how are you today, Mr. Lucien, sir? 'Tis good to see you about, but the weather is fit for neither man nor beast." He gave her a smile which quite transformed his face, or so Jocelyn thought. It was extraordinarily gentle, and there was an amazing quality of sweetness about it. "Oh, I'm perfectly all right, Hannah," he assured her. "And—praise be!—whatever the weather, I never have actually to face up to it, because all I have to do is to sit in a car while Hudson gets wet opening and shutting the door, and doing various little commissions for me." He smiled at Jocelyn—not quite the same smile as that with which he had rewarded the housekeeper's enquiry—and then, in response to a wave of his hand, Hudson, the chauffeur, who had extracted Jocelyn's suit-case from the boot of the car and carried it into the house, slid

into his seat behind the wheel and the long, gleaming black vehicle sped away silently back down the drive, beneath the dripping trees. And watching its departure Jocelyn thought—and was almost horrorstricken by the thought!—that from the moment she had first made the acquaintance of Lucien Fitzgerald to the moment she had bade him 'au revoir', she had never once seen him move anything other than his hand or his head. The rest of him had been utterly immobile in the car.

CHAPTER THREE HANNAH, when she got her inside out of the rain, studied her intently for several seconds, holding her by the arms and looking info her face. "You don't need me to tell you, Miss Jocelyn," she said, "that you've grown! And you've grown the way Mrs. Fitzgerald said you'd grow— into a handsome enough colleen! But it's easy to feel at a glance that the half of you is English!" Jocelyn laughed. "You've scarcely altered at all, Hannah," she told her, and it was no more than the truth. The Hannah who had baked her gingerbread cakes, and insisted on her drinking endless glasses of milk because she was so thin—far too thin for Hannah to approve— when she was twelve, and the Hannah who now confronted her and held her tightly, welcomingly, by the arms, might differ from one another in the same fashion as a fresh photograph and a faded one would almost certainly differ from one another, but that was all. Even to the thin hair, greying for years, drawn back tightly into a bun at her nape, and the bunch of keys jingling at her waist, she was just the same old Hannah. "And you don't really feel any resentment because I—because Mrs. Fitzgerald—remembered me--?" Jocelyn asked, feeling suddenly anxious lest that feeling was somewhere in Hannah's heart. The old housekeeper shook her head quite decidedly. "Why should I? Your mother was a good friend to Mrs. Fitzgerald, and if there are others who might have benefited -" She broke off, and Jocelyn interposed quickly:

"Hannah! Those three nephews of Mrs. Fitzgerald's. ... I feel rather dreadful about them! They were left nothing at all!" "I know," Hannah said, and compressed her lips together rather tightly, "but I wouldn't let that worry you." "But, after all—they're blood relations, and— and -" "Sometimes blood relations cause a lot of complications," Hannah expressed it as her opinion, "and personally I'm often glad that I don't possess any relations at all. There won't be anyone to quarrel about what I leave when I die!" "But—surely," Jocelyn insisted, "if Mrs. Fitzgerald had any fondness for them—or even if she hadn't, the fact that they seem to live almost on her doorstep, and that I'm a complete outsider - Well, what do you imagine they'll think about me? What will the whole neighborhood think about me? I'll have to do something to make things more even -" "If you've any sense, Miss Jocelyn, you'll do nothing at all but take my advice," Hannah interrupted, "and, believe me, it'll be good advice!" She paused weightily. "Mr. Lucien Fitzgerald, whom you've just met, is in need of nothing at all you now possess—he's enough of his own to buv up this house, and several others Eke it, if he wanted to. Ac for Mr. Blcrize -" "Tell me, Hannah," Jocelyn said quickly, because she had to know, "is Mr. Lucien an invalid? I mean, is he—is he a permanent invalid . . .? You—you asked how he was, and I noticed that he—he doesn't seem capable of making much movement -?" "He isn't," the housekeeper answered, rather tersely. "He's paralysed all down one side, and I don't think there's anything anyone can do about it, although quite a few doctors—from London, and all over the

place—have tried. He met with an accident several years ago. Nowadays he depends on Hudson to do everything for him, and Hudson is as devoted to him as a mother with only one child." "How many years ago did he meet with this accident?" Jocelyn asked, and was not quite sure why she wanted to know this. "Nearly ten," Hannah told her at once, and Jocelyn thought, with a fresh kind of little shock: "When I was twelve! . . ." "As for Mr. Blaize," the housekeeper continued, returning to a subject that she had no intention of being separated from until she had had a chance to do it justice, "I'm going to warn you about him before ever you meet him! He's a charmer—a bird on a bough could never resist him, and as a general rule women don't want to resist him. And he knows it! And that makes him extra dangerous. Old Mrs. Fitzgerald adored him, but she was often ashamed to own him as her nephew." "That sounds a little bit incomprehensible to me," Jocelyn admitted, looking perplexed. "And in any case I still can't understand why she cut him out of her will." "Maybe you will when you get to know him," Hannah answered, more sourly. "And what about Arthur?" Jocelyn asked. "Oh, Artie's just a weakling." "And Mrs. Fitzgerald—their mother?" "Wait until you meet her," Hannah replied to this, more cagily. "And that you're bound to do before very long. Mount Clodagh, where the

family have lived for generations, is the big house of the district, and a lot of entertaining is done there. Mrs. Fitzgerald—young Mrs. Fitzgerald, as we used to call her—has a weakness for it, and anyone who comes to settle in Fairhaven, as you have done, sooner or later finds that they've been put upon her visiting- list." "I see," Jocelyn murmured, and thought with a vague feeling of apprehension that if anyone had cause to dislike and mistrust her it was Mrs. Fitzgerald, the mother of Lucien, Blaize and Arthur, all three of whom had been overlooked and ignored in their late aunt's will on account of herself. But, later that evening, when the rain stopped and a watery sun shed its light over Fairhaven, and her whole new world looked very fresh and fair viewed from the windows of the house that was now hers, a feeling of wonderment because this .amazing thing had happened and she was mistress of the house, with enough money to maintain it if she wished, drove every other thought and back-thought from her mind. Hannah served her a meal in the dining-room, a room that had always overawed her when she was twelve because of the magnificent display of silver on the sideboard. Today the thick carpet that had been so carefully preserved throughout the years, and the heavy velour hangings, struck her as slightly overpowering, as did fee collection of valuable china and the knick-knacks in the drawingroom, and the festoons of austere portraits that frowned upon her when she ascended the stairs in the hall. But outside the heavily-draped windows there were lilac trees that tapped against the panes of glass, and a blaze of lavender-colored plumbago that formed a kind of shrubbery leading to the kitchengarden. There was a tulip-tree in the centre of an emerald lawn that melted in misty woodland, and wallflowers that were going on blooming banked up in masses against the grey walls of the house.

And behind the house there were the gentle green elopes that, farther inland, became misty mountains, and all the front windows of the house looked out towards the sea. Before she went to bed, Jocelyn stood in the open window of the drawing-room and felt the cool saltness of it on her face, and the scent of the wallflowers did something to her rather tensed-up nerves and soothed them. A bat flew past her ears in the dusk, and disappeared under the eaves of the house, and in some tall trees not very far away an owl hooted solemnly. Jocelyn shivered in a kind of unusual ectasy, because all this was hers, and it was so beautiful, and calm, and peaceful. After living in a two-roomed flat in London, and spending her days in a rather cramped little office where nothing ever happened, and Life had just seemed to flow past her, all this that had so recently happened to her was almost more than she could bear, or take in, at the moment. . And then she caught sight of some lights twinkling on the hill facing her, and she asked herself, could they be the lights of Mount Clodagh? And, remembering Mount Clodagh, she remembered Lucien Fitzgerald, and all at once her feeling of elation passed. Ten years, she though, during which she had grown up and earned her living, and ended by inheriting a house—ten years he had been as she had seen him today, a man who moved only his head and his hands, and was dependent on a servant for all the things a normal man would be dependent on no other human being for. A man whose thin face gave away little of the suffering he must have endured, but whose dark hair prematurely sprinkled with frost spoke volumes. Her sense of elation passed altogether, and when the owl hooted again in the clump of tall trees she shivered a little and went indoors.

CHAPTER FOUR THE next morning she had hardly finished her breakfast when a visitor was announced. She was in the morning-room—which she had already decided was the most comfortable of the three main reception-rooms, and with its deep, chintz-covered chairs, cases of books, and even a grand piano with a lovely rosewood case filling one corner, would make her a most attractive sitting-room—when a rakish-looking bright red sports-car came sweeping up the drive. It came to rest at the foot of the flight of steps before the front door, and while a girl with a pointed, freckled face, enormous dark eyes, and curly dark hair remained in her seat beside the wheel, the man behind the wheel got out and ascended to the front door. Hannah, when she opened the door to him, gave him a look which in no wise caused him to look abashed. On the contrary, he smiled charmingly, regarding her with quite a loving light in his own eyes while he assured her that she was looking younger than ever, and then asked to see Miss Jocelyn Cherril. "I'm not even sure that Miss Cheml's finished breakfast,"' Hannah answered grudgingly. She was perfectly well aware that Jocelyn was at that moment arranging flowers in the morning-room, but she saw no reason why she should tell this young man so. She would even, if she could, have refused him admittance altogether, but she did not dare do that. And he read her thoughts with ease, and he was smiling with genuine amusement as he stepped past her into the hall. "In that case she can offer me a cup of coffee," he said, "and it'll be a very pleasant way to get acquainted!"

Hannah said no more, but led the way to the momma-room. She turned with much ceremony on the stout oak door, and when Jocelyn called permission to enter, flung it wide. "Mr. Blaize Fitzgerald to see you, miss!" she announced, looked once more in what she intended to be a freezing—or was it a warning?— fashion at Blaize, and then withdrew to the domestic side of the house. It was a radiant morning—one of those perfect Irish mornings in the late spring when, after a great deal of rain, the skies are suddenly absolutely clear v and the sun shines with dazzling brilliance. The prospect outside the morning-room window was a prospect to lift up anyone's heart, and for the first time that year Jocelyn had donned a really summery cotton frock that had little knots of blue flowers scattered all over a white ground, and with which she wore a white belt and sandals. Her hair shone as if it had been newly powdered with gold-dust in the sunlight that flooded the room, and when she lifted her eyes from some tall trails of lupins that she was trying to persuade to stand upright in a wedge- wood blue vase they seemed to have borrowed the color of the vase, and to be as clear and unclouded as the morning. "Symphony in blue!" Blaize observed, after studying her for a moment, while he remained very still in the doorway. And then he went forward with an outstretched hand and smiled at her in a slightly one-sided fashion. "Welcome to Old Oirland, Miss Cherril," he greeted her, "although we don't call it that nowadays! We're not nearly as poetic as we once were. We say, simply 'Welcome to Fairhaven, and if this is your first visit to Eire, we hope that it's all you expected to find?—even yesterday, when you must have wondered where we got all the moisture from'!" 'Well, it was rather wet, wasn't it?" Jocelyn replied, unable to resist returning his smile which for some reason she found irresistibly

infectious. "And it isn't my first visit to Eire, so I don't have to give an account of my impressions this time, do I?" "Not if they're the right sort of impressions.' He put a hand inside a pocket of his tweed hacking jacket and produced a rather limp grey suede glove which he held out to her, accompanying the action with a little bow. "My brother Lucien's compliments, Miss Cherril, and you left this behind in his car!" "Oh!" Jocelyn stared at the glove in astonishment, and then that ridiculous light blush over which she had so little control in moments such as this swept into her face, and instantly made it much more than attractive. "But you really shouldn't have bothered to return it to me, Mr. Fitzgerald—at any rate, not so soon. Why, I hadn't even realised that I'd lost it." "Hadn't you?" The smile he gave her this time made her wonder why it was that, when he first appeared in the doorway, and before Hannah had time to announce him, she would have been prepared to swear that it was Lucien who had suddenly recovered the complete use of his limbs, and had decided to pay her a visit. But now she could see clearly that they were not really alike at all— apart from the fact that Blaize was obviously much younger—and although they both had black hair and lean dark faces, and the whitest of teeth when they smiled, the eyes of the debonair Blaize, into which she now found herself gazing as if compelled, were sloe-black like an Indian's, with the oddest little circle of golden lights surrounding the pupils themselves that provided them with the strangest sort of attraction. And whereas Lucien's beautifully cut mouth smiled with a tinge of real humor, and only the subtlest hint of derisiveness sometimes, the rather twisted lips of Blaize, when they curved back over those faultless teeth, had something tantalising, and provocative, as well as

rather brilliantly humorous, locked up in them that, taken together with the effect of his eyes, could, Jocelyn realized, have had a disastrous effect on some people, particularly if they were really impressionable. "Hadn't you?" he repeated. "But please don't think for one moment that it was any trouble at all to me to return you your glove, and as a matter of fact it provided me with an excellent opportunity to make your acquaintance very soon after your arrival here—much sooner than I might otherwise have thought up an excuse to do!" Jocelyn looked faintly amused. "And did you have to make my acquaintance so soon after my arrival?" "Oh, yes, of course! A rich young woman in the district—a new rich young woman, whom rumor already has it is completely unattached, and full of the charms of the English! I couldn't possibly allow such a plum to go elsewhere, when by paying it marked attention from the very beginning I might carry it off myself!" "Well!" Jocelyn exclaimed, and for a moment she was so astonished by the bland impudence of this statement that her eyes opened to their fullest extent, and looked like twin blue lakes fringed with curly dark eyelashes that glinted golden at the tips. And then as he grinned at her in his one-sided fashion she laughed. "Well, really!" "Yes, really," he agreed, seating himself on the arm of one of the chintz-covered chairs and producing a cigarette-case and offering it to her. The case, like his well-tailored clothes, looked expensive, and she noticed that the finely-shaped hand that held it out to her was superbly well-cared-for and provided her with the impression that it had never done such a thing as even a light day's work in its life. His dark, disturbing eyes were mocking her a little. "It's every man for

himself when such a thing as an heiress appears on his immediate horizon!" Jocelyn looked away from him, and her face grew suddenly rather grave. "Is it too early in the morning to offer you some coffee, Mr. Fitzgerald?" she enquired with great formality. "I'm sorry I haven't anything in the house at the moment that might appeal to you more, but if you'd like the coffee I'll ring for Hannah -" "Don't bother," he replied, touching the bell himself before she could get to it, "I'll have old Hannah here in half a jiffy, and some coffee will go down excellently while you and I have a little talk. By the way -" "Yes?" as she started, rather nervously, to rearrange her flowers, and interposed an enormous spear of larkspur between him and herself. "The name is Blaize, and I think we might cut out the 'Mr. Fitzgerald', don't you?" Jocelyn looked at him over the flowers in a way that made him smile a little. "Since we've only just met -" she was beginning, when Hannah came bustling in and received the order for the coffee, and as soon as she had withdrawn again he got up and started to wander about the room, picking up ornaments and examining them with apparent interest, and studying the books and pictures. "Nice little place you've come in for here," he remarked, when she had poured him out his coffee and handed it to him, and he took it still with that mocking, provoking smile in his eyes. "My late, lamented aunt always did herself rather well, and I always knew she

fancied herself as a collector. You'll probably discover that there's a lot of real value in this house, and although it's admittedly oldfashioned, and wants some large-scale alterations carried out on it, when you've brought the place up-to-date, you'll probably be able to live here very comfortably." "I imagine I could live here very comfortably as it is," Jocelyn told him quietly. He studied her for a few moments with one eyebrow raised, as if she provided him with an intriguing study, and then went over to the lovely rosewood grand piano and sat down at it and struck a few rich, rippling chords. Jocelyn had only to hear those chords to recognise the fact that, when he wanted to do so, he could play with infinite skill. "Before I forget," he said, interrupting himself in the middle of a snatch of Chopin, "my mother would like very much to call upon you in the next few days, but she's going to be hectically busy, and therefore I am entrusted by her with a message for you." He looked up at her sideways, handsome mouth curving upwards a little at the corners, dark eyes all but caressing her.. "We're giving a garden-party in a few days' time—on Thursday, as a matter of fact. Nothing really tedious—only the sort of thing we do once or twice a year, when the weather can be expected to behave reasonably, and the local people who like to see the grounds at their best can turn out in summerly attire. Is it too short notice to ask you to be one of the guests?" There was a sudden, slight noise at the open french window, and Jocelyn looked up to be surprised by the sight of a slim, and obviously angry young woman standing in the opening. Her indignant eyes were sending forth sparks as they gazed at Blaize, seated at the piano; but to Jocelyn the most striking thing about her was that the rest of her face was quite white with the emotion that so

plainly had her in its grip. And even her mouth looked pale, and quivered uncontrollably. She stamped a small foot as she stood there, in the window. "Blaize!" she exclaimed, "Really, Blaize, how could you -?"

CHAPTER FIVE BLAIZE looked up from the ivory of the piano keys and met the huge-greenish-hazel eyes of the girl with a reproving shake of his head. "My dear Sheila," he rebuked her, in the smoothest of tones, "don't you know it's an offence to break into other people's houses without first receiving their permission—or, better still, their invitation—to do so? And it's appallingly rude, and very childish, to stamp your foot! What's wrong?" "What's wrong?" She gaped at him, rather foolishly, for a moment, as if she found it difficult to assemble her words—or perhaps to control her indignation. "I've been sitting in the car for ages, and then I hear you playing the piano! You'd forgotten all about me!" "Impossible, my sweet Sheila,' he returned, a little drily. And then he looked up at Jocelyn. "Let me introduce Miss Sheila Lambert, Miss Cherril— actually a much nearer neighbour of yours than we are at Mount Clodagh. When she isn't in a naughty temper she's really quite nice, so you'll have to forgive her this little exhibition this morning." He beckoned to Sheila to come inside, but her expression grew so mutinous that Jocelyn was faintly shocked by it, and when she seconded the invitation to join them in the morning-room and have some coffee, Miss Lambert's bleak shake of the head was as good as a cold, blunt refusal. Under ordinary circumstances Jocelyn would have decided that she was an amazingly attractive girl, for she had a complexion like clear, pale honey, and those great eyes of hers had certainly been set in with a sooty finger. But not even her youth— and she was obviously not more than eighteen, even if she had reached that age, with a figure that was as yet undeveloped, while her manners were those of an

enraged schoolgirl—could excuse her inability to control an uncertain temper which destroyed much of the freshness, and the charm, of her looks. And when she declined' even to shake hands with Jocelyn, and looked at her with sullen hostility, the latter felt more than faintly shocked, and looked her surprise. "Blaize and I started off to go to Welltown to do some shopping," she said, "and then he decided to call here. I didn't want him to do so because this is early-closing day, and now the shops will all be shut. She looked at Blaize with a whole world of frustration in her eyes, and dug two beautiful little white teeth into her lower lip. "It's too bad, Blaize!" "Never mind, Infant." He closed the piano and stood up, smiling at her in an inscrutable fashion which, even if it was intended to do so, had none of the noticeable effects of oil when it is poured on troubled waters. "Get back into the car, and I'll join you in a few moments, and if you're a good girl I'll take you somewhere especially nice this afternoon." "You know very well that I'm not free this afternoon," Sheila muttered, but her ungraciousness did not prevent him from giving her ear a little tweak, and then administering a light pat to her cheek. "Tomorrow, then." "Tomorrow Mother's going to Dublin, and I'll have to stay at home." "Well, well! . . He could obviously think of nothing further that might placate her, and he turned back to Jocelyn, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his hands in a little gesture that was slightly French. "You see how it is, Miss Cherril! With certain members of your sex the more you endeavor to please them the less progress you

make! There must be a good deal of truth in that old saying about 'a woman, a dog, and a walnut tree, the more you beat 'em the better they be! "I should hardly think so," Jocelyn replied, and for a moment— perhaps because of his wilful determination to make light of the girl's disappointment—she felt a faint feeling of sympathy for the young, hurt creature who was standing in front of her, and whose stormy eyes seemed to be roving over her in a restless, resentful fashion and taking in all the perfection of her gay little frock with the blue flowers scattered over it, which was actually quite an inexpensive frock and had not been bought since her recent acquisition of wealth. But by comparison with the appearance Sheila presented, in her worn, corduroy slacks and faded, too tight jumper, Jocelyn was an exquisitely feminine and beautifully turned-out young woman. And the thought passed through the latter's mind that if the girl wished to be seen about with such a plainly very fastidious and impeccably dressed young man like Blaize Fitzgerald, why didn't she do something about her unprepossessing attire? "Then may I take it that you will come to my mother's garden party on Thursday?" Blaize asked, before he shooed Sheila out on to the lawn as if she was a slightly troublesome puppy, and followed her himself. He subjected Jocelyn to one of his rather warm, persuasive looks. "I'll come and collect you myself if you will, and I promise you it won't be too dull." But Jocelyn hesitated. She was anxious to postpone her meeting with his mother for as long as she possibly could, and in addition she was quite sure Sheila was hoping ardently that she would refuse. "I don't really know," she said. "I've only just arrived here, and -"

"Lucien particularly requested me to tell you that he hoped you would come," Blaize informed her, and he removed a snippet of lilac from the bush overhanging their heads and inserted it into the buttonhole in the lapel of his coat."Oh!" Jocelyn exclaimed in surprise. And then all at once she had a mental picture of Lucien lying back in that languid attitude in a corner of his big car, and saw him smiling at her when he said goodbye on that day which was only yesterday when they met for the first time. She had liked Lucien, even if there had been something about her which had seemed to amuse him a little. Blaize gave her a sudden, brilliant, penetrating smile. "I'll call for you about eleven, shall I?" he suggested. "The actual bun-fight won't be starting until about three in the afternoon, but we would like you to lunch with us, and I can show you the grounds before they get thoroughly messed up by the enthusiasts who will be pouring over them later." So Jocelyn found that the only thing she could do was to murmur that she would be very pleased to accept the invitation, and when they had gone and Hannah came in to collect the tray of used coffee cups she told her about the garden party. "H'm!" Hannah exclaimed. "Master Blaize is a fast worker, but you'll have to be up to him, Miss Jocelyn. You see,' she explained earnestly, anxiously, "it isn't only you—it's what you've just come into that makes you, well -" "Desirable?" Jocelyn suggested rather drily. Hannah looked a little perplexed.

"You're pretty enough, so you are," she admitted; "and that's a thing there can be no denying. But looks don't mean much to a man who has been used to having all he wanted all his life, and has one day got to fend for himself. Neither of the two younger Fitzgerald boys got a penny when their father died, but Lucien inherited everything. And although it's hardly likely that Lucien will ever marry and have any children to leave what he has to, he could tie it up in such a way that -Well, it's common knowledge that he doesn't altogether approve of his brothers' goings on, and you never know what he might do. . . . And, in any case, he might live for years. . . ." "Yes," Jocelyn agreed, and then she wrinkled her brows. "What did you mean by 'goings on', Hannah?" "Well, there's horses, for one thing,' Hannah said, arranging the fragile porcelain cups on the tray, and taking care that the shining silver sugar bowl and cream jug should not be scratched by coming into contact with anything menacing to them, "and the money that goes on horses! And then there's always the girls hanging around— and not always such young girls, either! ..." with a meaning look. "I see," Jocelyn murmured. "But no scandals, I hope?" Hannah remained silent. Jocelyn thought of Blaize going round her room and picking up her books and china and examining them with such obvious interest, and she recalled his observations about the house and its possibilities. And then she shook her head mentally. No; whatever else he was, Blaize was not as obvious as all that. He was not nearly so near the surface. . .

For the next few days she was allowed to settle down in her new home without being disturbed by any more callers save the local doctor's wife, a friendly woman who wanted to engage her sympathy in some scheme she had on hand for getting ailing children from the towns to the seaside. Jocelyn donated generously. And then the parish priest, an elderly Father O'Donnell, called and took tea with her one afternoon, and enchanted her with his stories of Ireland and its glorious, mystical past, insisting that it was the true cradle of Christianity, and whatever the many vicissitudes it had passed through in the length of its history it would one day bound like a cork to the surface, and be in the forefront of the world again. Jocelyn found his visit most enjoyable, for he was leisurely, cultured, amusing and entertaining, and before he left he wanted to know whether she had any plans for her immediate future, and whether she found the house a bit lonely. "It's rather large for one small colleen like yourself," he told her, smiling down at her while he held her hand before taking his departure. "Maybe a bit oppressive?" "I have thought of doing something with it," Jocelyn confessed. "Turning it into something—a convalescent home for children, or something of the sort. There are so many rooms. . ." "The saints forefend!" Father O'Donnell exclaimed. "Old Mrs. Fitzgerald would never forgive you, and she'd almost certainly come back and haunt you if you did anything of the kind! This house was her love, and she couldn't bear any major changes being made to it That was one reason why she declined to leave it to either of her two younger nephews, because she thought they might turn it into hard cash." "Oh—really?" Jocelyn looked suddenly enlightened.

"No, it's a husband you'll have to be after adding to your establishment, Miss Cherril," the rubicund priest informed her, looking at her with twinkling eyes. "And then you can fill the place with as many children as you like, and your benefactress will be only too delighted, wherever she is at this moment—and I've no doubt it's a very pleasant place!" Jocelyn could not resist returning his happy smile. "Husbands don't grow on every gooseberry-bush, you know, Father," she told him, "and I've got to find one first." "Ach, and that should be easy!" And then he added, more seriously: "But if you're thinking of going on living here I do think you should find someone else to live here with you, Miss Cherril. A lady of your acquaintance who would give you some companionship, and who could provide adequate chaperonage for you." Jocelyn looked amused, and he wagged a plump forefinger at her. "Oh, but I'm not being funny, and I'm not being old-fashioned, either! You do want someone— someone besides Hannah, who would defend you against the most intrepid burglar who ever smashed a window. You want someone to talk to, and— perhaps advise you sometimes." He smiled at her again and patted her hand. "Think about it, my dear." "I will," Jocelyn promised, and when he had gone she did think about it a good deal—perhaps because she was rather more lonely in such a big and faintly austere house than she had ever imagined she could be—and the following afternoon she sent a telegram to London, to an old friend of her mother's who was living in the Bayswater district on a very tiny income, offering to pay all her expenses if she would come over to Fairhaven as soon as possible. And the friend replied immediately that she was as good as on her way, and Jocelyn felt

relieved and suddenly keenly anxious to see her, for Caroline Yorke was one of those sound, blunt, hale-fellow-well-met types, with an abounding sense of humor, who would almost certainly fit in very well in such a community as Fairhaven, and would provide all the necessary background of bolstering and confidence that Jocelyn felt she needed just then. But before she arrived the day of the garden-party at Mount Clodagh dawned, and Jocelyn felt waves of uneasiness well over her at the thought of being brought face to face with Mrs. Fitzgerald, and finding out just how much she resented having her sons passed over in favor of a complete outsider to the family.

CHAPTER SIX MRS. Fitzgerald, however, was so completely unlike the picture that Jocelyn's imagination had conjured up that it took the latter some time to get over her surprise on meeting her. When Lucien said, "I thought of asking you to come and have tea with my mother," she had pictured a grey-haired faintly austere elderly lady who would greet her with reservations, but being essentially well-bred, allow little of what she was really feeling to show in her face. But Oonagh Fitzgerald did not look as if she was the mother of three sons —certainly not one who was already in his thirties—and although her hair was silvery (treated to a delicate blue rinse) it was arranged in very youthful-looking curls beneath the brim of a large picture-hat when Jocelyn first saw her crossing one of the exquisitely tended lawns at Mount Clodagh. Her dress, which had a Parisian line about it, made her figure look almost young-girlish also, and she had very large blue eyes that were quite unlike the eyes of either of her two sons whom Jocelyn had so far met, set in a perfectly-featured smooth mask of a face that was certainly wellbred, and revealed nothing of what she was thinking or feeling, save that the eyes held that suggestion of secret amusement that Jocelyn had noticed in Lucien's. "My dear," she said, as she looked keenly at Jocelyn, "the picture Lucien painted of you was correct in every detail! You do look far too young to be living all alone in such a gloomy old house era Fairhaven! Doesn't it strike you as rather too closely resembling an overcrowded museum?" "No—I can't say that it does," Jocelyn answered with perfect truth, feeling for some reason an instantly aroused resentment because her so recently acquired property was receiving adverse criticism.

"You really mean that?" The amusement in the blue eyes might have confounded her temporarily, but for the fact that her little rush of indignation prevented her from even noticing it. "I should have thought that you would have found the place quite terrifying when you stayed there as a child." Blaize, who was standing beside Jocelyn, and looking supremely elegant in a beautifully-cut dark blue blazer and faultless grey flannel trousers, met his mother's eyes and put his hand under Jocelyn's elbow. '?Come and have a look at the house before the crowd gets here, and then we'll all have a drink before lunch," he said. Mrs. Fitzgerald called after him, smiling a little waggishly: "And don't forget, Blaize, there will be other people who will expect a certain amount of attention from you before the day is over, but you needn't be too punctilious under the circumstances, and Artie will have to do his duty as well." She went on her way across the lawn, gracious, very sure of herself as a hostess, very much the finished product in her flowered frock and shady hat, smiling her rather brittle smile; and standing for a moment and looking after her, with Blaize still retaining possession of her arm, Jocelyn did not know whether to feel relieved now that the meeting with her was over, or mystified by the inscrutable quality of that smile. At lunch she met several other local people who had been invited to share a cold repast before the garden-party began in earnest, and she was also introduced to Artie for the first time. He surprised her by being very blond, and quite unlike either of his brothers, rather boyish, and the possessor of his mother's large blue eyes.

The dining room at Mount Clodagh was a particularly handsome room, richly panelled, and furnished in a manner that was entirely in keeping. Jocelyn found herself looking around it in admiration and a certain amount of awe, for she had never been invited to partake of a meal in such a splendid room in her life, and she knew enough about antiquity to realize that this was quite genuine. The whole house was a lovely period piece in a perfect setting, and the size of it astonished her in an age when such houses were not normally frequently occupied as family houses, especially in Ireland, where so many lovely relics of more spacious days have been allowed to crumble into ruins. But here there was no sign of decay, and no evidence of neglect of any sort or kind. The furniture was a careful combination of the old and the new, the mellow background of expensive carpets and hangings obviously modern. There was nothing at all that jarred, and nothing that spoke of too much wealth and yet everything breathed wealth. Everything was in such perfect taste that its existence could only have been achieved because some member of the family possessed an unlimited bankroll, and, Jocelyn was aware that that member was not Mrs. Fitzgerald, whose husband had entrusted her future to the generosity of her eldest son. So, therefore, everything belonged to Lucien— but Lucien was not present at the luncheon table. The grounds that surrounded Mount Clodagh like the skirts of an elegant female surrounding a shapely form were made up of lavishly maintained flower-beds, lawns, shrubberies, kitchen-gardens, and even a silver sheet of water whereon a tiny island floated, and where, on occasions such as this, guests were permitted to make use of punts and canoes if they wished. Jocelyn allowed Blaize to row her out to the tiny island where, once they had landed, they sat for half an hour with their arms wrapped about their drawn-up knees, watching the

magical effect of the sunlight in the mirror-like sheet of water, and the graceful movements of the reeds on its brink as they were stirred by the lightest of breezes. Beyond the water stretched the green lawns and the marquee where tea and refreshments were being served, and beyond them rose the gray crenellated walls of the house itself. Behind the house rose the plantation of fine trees that provided it with such a magnificent backcloth. Jocelyn, hatless, in a linen dress that was the faint pink of a hedgerose, felt as if the beauty of the lake and all that lay beyond it possessed some ingredient that hurt a little—some element of pathos that touched her. It belonged to a man who could not possibly enjoy it in the fullest sense of the word, and the thought made her feel suddenly very sober. "A penny for them?" Blaize enquired, lying stretched out at her feet in a kind of voluptuous ease that drew attention to the sheer physical perfection of his build, his black hair gleaming like a wing of satin in the sunshine. He peered upwards into her clouded blue eyes, his strong brown hands supporting his head, and endeavoured to read her thoughts for himself. "They were rather sombre, weren't they?" Jocelyn admitted that they were. "I was thinking," she said, "how sad it is that your brother can get so little enjoyment out of all that -" she waved a hand to indicate it. Blaize continued to stare up into her pensive face rather hard for several seconds, and then he turned his head languidly and looked away across the lake. "Yes," he agreed. "Poor old Lucien!"

"Can nothing be done for him?" "No, nothing—I'm afraid!" "But, no doubt, people have tried to do something for him?" "Oh, yes, he's had the very best of expert opinions." He rolled over on to his elbows and supported himself on them, still staring across the lake. "It was a riding accident, you know, when I was not much older than you were when you first came here." For an instant his eyes flickered up at her, and he smiled at her broodingly. "Why was it I never met you when you were twelve, young woman?" Jocelyn felt a little impatient because of what sounded to her an irrelevance. "Because you were no doubt away at school at the time, and in case meeting with me when I was twelve would at that stage of your existence have afforded you little pleasure," she told him rather crisply, and certainly very shrewdly. "But I should have remembered it!" "Would you?" Her blue eyes surveyed him thoughtfully, with the merest hint of contempt in them. "I doubt it." "I don't!" How black his eyes were, she thought, as once again she felt herself compelled to gaze into them, and how curiously lifeless they could appear at times—not so much a brilliant blackness as a sort of mystic, fluid blackness that could have the strange effect of a wall of darkness rising up in front of her and drawing forth something of herself to meet it! And then she gave herself a little mental shake. How ridiculous to think such a thing! And just now his eyes were smiling, faintly.

"Well?" he said. "What were you thinking about me just then? And what has that old arch-enemy of mine, Hannah, had to say to you about me that causes you to have unpleasant back-thoughts whenever you allow your gaze to rest on me in that contemplative fashion?" Jocelyn felt annoyed with herself because she had allowed her gaze to rest on him in a contemplative fashion, and she denied hastily: "I wasn't thinking of you at all. I was thinking of Mount Clodagh— and what a fortunate family you are to have such a perfect place to live in! Although I'm desperately sorry for your brother." "You needn't be," he said, and she noticed a sudden harsh curl of his lip. "Lucien will be the last, as you phrased it, to be fortunate enough to live in a place like this! If anything happens to him— and I suppose we should hope that it won't happen to him for some considerable while!—this place will be sold, and the money distributed amongst the poor and needy! That's one of Lucien's pet schemes—he's a bit of a socialist in his way, you know." Jocelyn decided that he was joking, and she observed: "Of course, that would be wonderful, if it was practical—but not while your mother, and yourself and your brother are alive." "Believe me, we don't count all that much—at least, Artie and I don't! It's my mother who likes living here, and as Lucien adores my mother she's safe so long as she lives, but Artie and I will probably have to subsist by the sweat of our brows when Lucien is no longer with us." "You mean you'll have to work?" "We'll have to try working," grinning at her rather strangely sideways.

"Wouldn't it be a good idea to be learning to do something of that nature now?" "You mean, make up our minds where our talents lie?" The grin grew broader. "Well, as a matter of fact, we have tried one or two things— or, at least, I have! I was a motor-car salesman for three months, and I tried fruit-farming in Rhodesia for six—but I might have conserved my energies and foregone these little experiments, for they led nowhere, and the fruit-farming experiment cost Lucien quite a packet." He hauled himself to his feet. "No; we'll hope Lucien continues to resist the temptation to take an overdose of the many and various kinds of pills he has to swallow, and that his strength holds out for a long while yet, even if it isn't much of a life for him." Jocelyn was quite shocked by the blunt, cool way in which he said this, but at the same time she didn't neglect to notice that his shapely brown hands were suddenly clenched down at his sides, and an expression of restrained violence came and went in his face, and he seemed to gnaw savagely at his lower lip. He kicked a small fragment of moss-covered stone that was in his path into the lake, and they both listened to the splash. "Does — does Lucien suffer much?" Jocelyn asked, after a long moment of absolute silence, in a very quiet voice. "Quite enough — more than enough!" He turned to her and stretched forth his hands and lifted her, in one swift, easy movement, to her feet. "Now come along and see the horses," he suggested. "And, by the way, do you ride?" "I used to ride, but I haven't done so for years now." "Then in that case you still can ride, and well fix you up with a mount. I'll come along and collect you before breakfast tomorrow morning, and well let you have a canter."

He seemed restless all at once, anxious to leave the quiet lakeside behind them, and she returned with him to the densely-thronged lawns where so many colorful frocks discovered extra brilliance in the sunshine, and the tea-tent was doing an enormous business. When at last he had to leave her to her own devices for a while, in order to carry out his mother's instructions and pay a certain amount of attention to some other of their guests, she wandered alone around the house, loving its aloof dignity on such a day as this, when the sky was without sign of a cloud, and the shadows of the giant cypress trees cut like inky pools across the smooth floor of the terrace. Away in the distance, beyond the rhododendrons and the azalea bushes that were just now at their best, and filling the air with sweetness — especially the azaleas — she could glimpse the sea, so blue that it made the eyes ache, curling inwards to that smooth strip of incredibly golden sand that was Fairhaven beach. And the green slopes folding endlessly one into the other until cut off in cliffs at, the sea's edge were such a harsh, bright emerald that they seemed to join in the attack upon a slightly bewildered vision. Jocelyn felt as if the glare were almost too much, and she was glad to take advantage of an open window behind her and step into the comparative coolness and dim twilight of a room where the color scheme was like a sudden, inviting cavern, sage- green like the sea when the sun no longer shines upon it, with a carpet that felt like a thick bed of moss under her tired feet. There were heavy velvet hangings before the windows, some exquisite etchings on the plain walls, a long narrow couch drawn up close to the terrace window, with a camel-hair rug folded neatly on the foot of it, and a little table beside it supporting books and papers and a silver cigarette-box, as well as a bowl of deep purple violets like a deep rich cushion. Jocelyn paused to bend over the violets and sniff them ecstatically, and then all at once she stiffened and became almost rigid.

A sound had reached her from an inner room, the door of which stood partly open. The sound was a voice calling, in a low but insistent and anguished manner: "Hudson! Hudson, are you there . . . ? Hudson! . . ." Jocelyn felt a kind of icy cold chill strike through to her heart, for she knew the voice, and she recognized the urgency that lay behind it.

CHAPTER SEVEN WHEN she pushed open the door of the inner room Jocelyn was prepared for a spectacle that would afford her no pleasure, and she was prepared even to be considerably shocked. But she was not prepared for the extent of the shock that awaited her when she found herself on the fringe of a vast room furnished with almost monastic simplicity as a bedroom, and on a similar narrow couch to the one that occupied such a prominent position under the wide windows of the room she had left, she saw that a man was lying, his face absolutely grey, with little rivers of perspiration running down it. He was fully dressed, and there was no rug over his knees, so that he seemed to her to be immensely tall, the effect heightened by the fact that his head was flat on his pillows, while he was reaching out with one fumbling hand for the electric bell-push that had so far yielded no results. Jocelyn covered the space between them in a few feather-light strides that made absolutely no sound, and then knelt down urgently beside the couch, forgetting in the extent of her compassion that he might wonder how she came to be there, and merely asking him in almost the same breath what was wrong and what she could do to help. For an instant the smoke-grey eyes she remembered, under their thickly fringed lids, widened at sight of her, and then he gasped out an instruction in a voice that was no longer easily recognizable: "On the dressing-table! — if — if you don't mind! . . . The — the tablets in the small white box! . . . A glass of water... He could say no more, his face contorting in agony, and Jocelyn wasted no time in reaching the dressing-table — although her hand shook as she poured the water from the carafe into the glass — and then carried the tablets back to his side, and following another

difficult instruction counted two out into her palm. She made as if to slip an arm beneath his head to lift him, but Lucien waved her away with an expression of so much horror that it left her feeling more than a little sick inside, and she watched him swallow The tablets with difficulty, like a thirsty man in the desert forcing the muscles of his throat to obey him, and then lie very still, as if every ounce of strength in his body had deserted him. But gradually, as she crouched there beside him, watching — while her breath remained as if suspended in her throat, and her heart hammered heavily in anxiety — those heavy eyelids that had fluttered down wearily over his eyes lifted, and a little of the greyness seemed to steal away from his face to give place to the first look of normality she had seen in it since she entered his room. She removed her own crisp linen handkerchief from her" handbag and wiped away the perspiration in which it was still bathed, however, and suddenly she saw that he was smiling at her — very, very faintly smiling at her, but smiling at her nevertheless. "Thank you," he whispered. "I don't know how you come to be here, but — I'm glad you were here!" "You're better now?" Her own voice was so shaky that she scarcely recognized it. "Much better, thanks." "Is there anything else I can do for you? Another drink -?" She held the glass to his lips, but he turned his head away very slightly, and she returned it to the little table beside the couch. "Would you like me to get Hudson for you? Although I don't somehow feel I ought to leave you yet -" "That's all right," he assured her. "I shall be quite all right now I've had the tablets — for some time, at least. And Hudson can't be far

away. I think something must be wrong with my electric bell— probably fused, or something. But you mustn't let me keep you in here out of the sunshine. Miss Cherril." She was looking rather white herself, and her blue eyes — not light and sparkling like Oonagh Fitzgerald's, but deep and dark and tender, like violets hidden in a secret wood — were still faintly distended from shock. Her mouth quivered slightly, uncontrollably, as a result of the same shock. 'It was the heat of the sun that drove me into your room," she told him. "But I'd no idea, of course, that it was yours." Lucien gazed up at her with a look of concern over-spreading his face. "I'm afraid I've upset you, Miss Cherril," he said, and now that his voice was growing stronger it was also full of self-condemnation. "It was a pity you had to see me like that — on one of my worst days! I know I must be rather a frightening spectacle, if I look anything like I feel! But it was hard lines on you, coming upon me without any warning -" "Nonsense!" she interrupted him, almost fiercely. "I'm only too thankful I did come upon you!" She wanted to ask him what would have happened to him — how long he could have held out in the condition he was in when she first saw him on the couch, if assistance had not arrived — but naturally die found it quite impossible to pose such a question. Instead she added, the words tumbling over one another, and her lips trembling more than ever while she uttered them: "And I don't think it at all right that you should be left alone like this, dependent on someone hearing you ring a bell . . . ! Suppose you couldn't manage to ring the bell . ..? And, in any case, it failed to ring . . . !"

'That will soon be put right," he reassured her gently. He put out a hand and took one of hers, that was mal-treating her handkerchief by crushing it up into a tight, hard ball, and held it closely and comfortingly — so closely and comfortingly that she marvelled at the strength that had flowed back into his veins following the taking of those two simple-looking tablets. And as she continued to kneel there beside his couch he thought there was something of the ministering angel about her, with that protective look in her eyes, and with the delicate wild-rose color of her dress matching the unbelievable soft bloom of her complexion. "I should hope so!" "And Hudson would never miss hearing it if it did ring. Today it's true he might have been tempted away from his post because of all the excitement out there on the lawns -" "But your mother's garden-party is nothing to do with him! You are his job -!" "Am I?" The faint smile in his eyes was soft and very gently amused, because she sounded so surprisingly fierce, and she looked so exquisitely feminine. Jocelyn bit her lip to prevent herself giving voice to indignant observations on the reason why a garden-party was allowed to go on at all when this was one of his bad days, but the sudden twinkle in his eyes, together with the way the eyes themselves, under those amazing eyelashes that added so much to their depth and lustre, were gazing up at her, covered her all at once in confusion, and she looked hastily away. At the same time she carefully freed her hand. "As garden-parties go, I hope this one is going .well?" he said, and she stood up hastily as the door behind them opened, and Hudson and her hostess burst into the room together.

Hudson looked across at her keenly, and then hastened to the side of his master. Mrs. Fitzgerald, moving with more slowness and therefore greater dignity over the thick carpet, looked directly at Jocelyn also, and one of her beautifully shaped and skilfully darkened eyebrows rose in a questioning arch. "One of the maids reported that she heard a bell tinkle, and then suddenly fizzle out," she said. "Has anything happened to justify your finding your way to this part of the house. Miss Cherril?" she asked, her voice very cool and her eyes very light and cool, also, Jocelyn was about to reply, when Lucien — who had winced a little at the interruption, and was now looking very white and tired and exhausted — answered for her. "Miss Cherril arrived in time to give me my tablets, and I'm tremendously grateful to her," he said. "But for her appearance on the scene — driven in by the heat that was a little too much for her outside — I'm not at all sure that I could have lasted out as long as this." Jocelyn was never afterwards quite sure whether he was speaking lightly, or whether he was merely stating what he knew to be the truth; but from the way he was lying watching her, with a slight, warm smile on his lips, she knew that so far, as his gratitude to her was concerned he was certainly not exaggerating that. Hudson, a plain little man, a Londoner, of Cockney extraction, looked as if he would willingly burst into tears as he bent with a mother's solitude over Lucien. "That dratted bell!" he exclaimed. "I suspected the other day that it wasn't working properly, and I meant to overhaul it—" He looked across at Jocelyn, the mistiness in his eyes dissolving as she smiled at him encouragingly, recognizing the genuineness of his distress, and the amount of self-condemnation he was prepared to indulge in. "You

gave him the right tablets. Miss -? The white ones -? It was lucky you weren't far away -" His hands shook as he adjusted the pillows behind his master's head. Mrs. Fitzgerald walked to the side of her son and gazed down at him, and by contrast with the manservant her complete calmness and composure were no doubt highly commendable. She stooped a little to rest the fingers of one very white hand with a butterfly's touch on a thick wave of his black hair for a moment, and then she straightened and turned away. "I think it will be best if we leave Lucien alone now," she said. "He's always better left undisturbed when he's had one of these bad attacks." She slipped a hand lightly, but in quite a determined manner inside Jocelyn's arm, and guided her over towards the door, adding that she was sure Blaize was somewhere about, and that she would hand her over to him to take care of it. But before they reached the door Jocelyn looked back at Lucien, and he could tell by her eyes that she was still anxious about him, and that she was anxious for reassurance that he was really better. He called after her, in a surprisingly strong voice, causing her faint astonishment: "Come and see me again. Miss Cherril — get Blaize to bring you! And, thank you — thank you a thousand times!" When they were outside on the terrace the sudden brilliance of the sunshine, the gay splendor of the flowers, the frocks, and even the striped sides of the tea-tent, confused her a little. She caught sight of the girl called Sheila Lambert, looking really attractive in a frock of scarlet-checked gingham, with a wide scarlet belt, hanging on to Blaize's arm, and somewhat to Jocelyn's astonishment she no longer

looked sullen, and she even smiled in a brittle, condescending manner at Jocelyn. "Blaize tells me you're coming riding with us tomorrow morning," she said. "Am I?" To Jocelyn nothing was quite real, and certainly not of tremendous importance after her experience in that quiet, monastic bedroom where Lucien was at present lying, with that white, exhausted look in his face, while Hudson fussed round him belatedly. "I didn't know you were coming, too." "Oh, yes." Sheila's large eyes were quite openly taking in the details of her frock, and the various accessories that went with it. "And if you don't happen to possess any riding things of your own I can lend you some. At least, I can lend you a pair of jodhpurs. We're much of a size," eyeing the slender form, confronting her critically. "Thank you," Jocelyn murmured mechanically, and was aware that Mrs. Fitzgerald was talking in an aside to her son, and was no doubt passing on to him information concerning what had just taken place in Lucien's room. Jocelyn saw Blaize's strongly-marked eyebrows meet in a sudden, noticeable frown, and then he turned away abruptly and left them all three on the terrace and went into the house. When he returned, after about a quarter-of-an- hour, that odd expression of restrained violence was back in his face, and it made his brow look black, as thunder, and his eyes were sombre and brooding. He looked towards Jocelyn, who had been presented in his absence to a few more of the other guests, and was looking pale and exhausted while she attempted to enter into light conversation with people who had been curious to get to know her, and asked her

whether she would like him to take her over to the tea-tent for refreshments. "If you don't mind," Jocelyn answered, in rather a flat voice, "I'd much rather go home." Blaize's eyes softened all at once, and he touched her arm in sudden sympathy. "You saw poor old Lucien while he was having one of his bad turns, didn't you? I've no doubt it shook you quite a bit." "It did," Jocelyn confessed simply. His hand closed more firmly about her arm, and he led her over towards the tea-tent, piloting her determinedly through the opening, so that her insistence that she did not require any tea was merely borne away with all the other voices around them, and insisted on having refreshments brought to her also, and talked loudly in a voice which she endeavored to make sound very grown-up, and a little blase and sophisticated — although she herself was so obviously unsophisticated — the sound jarred a little upon Jocelyn just then, she felt decidedly more like herself after the excellent cup of tea she drank. And then Blaize got rid of Sheila by the simple expedient of telling her that she was wanted by some member of her family who was also attending the garden-party, and placed Jocelyn in his red sports-car and drove her back to Fairhaven House, where after her harrowing experience of the afternoon the atmosphere of solid Victorian calm was infinitely to her liking. The following morning he called for her with a little beauty of a chestnut mare on which he placed her, in the jodhpurs she had

borrowed from Sheila, and a sleeveless white silk blouse, and they set off down the drive. The morning had a silken quality about it which might later dissolve into rain; but at the moment the sky was like a pale back-cloth, the sun reaching them as if it was being released through a curtain of gauze, and the sea beside which' they presently rode had an oily swell as it slapped softly on to the unblemished sand. Sheila did not attach herself to them until they were down on the sands, and then she came haring along on a rangy grey which looked as if it was several sizes too large for her, although her horsemanship was quite obviously above reproach. She was in the mood to show off, too — particularly when she noted that Jocelyn was not altogether certain of herself in her own saddle, and that Blaize was keeping close to her side because he realized that there was an element of nervousness in the way she rode. Sheila looked a little disdainful, with curling lips and windblown hair, as she sat astride her ungainly grey, and on this occasion at least she fitted into the picture far better than Jocelyn did. For one thing, her bright jumper and gaudy neckerchief and worn jodhpurs made the most of her somewhat immature proportions, and when she grew tired of aimlessly trotting beside that sleepy, pearl-gray sea, with the cliffs shutting them in on the one hand and the misty horizon a line of promise on the other, and whisked away from them suddenly, Blaize's eyes followed her with such unmistakable admiration in their depths that Jocelyn was actually a little surprised. "She might have been born in the saddle, that one," he observed, crinkling his eyes against the harsh glare of the light, and watching until the gay blob of color on the colorless mount was practically out of sight. "She's never taken a tumble, either, which is remarkable."

"Yes; I suppose so," Jocelyn agreed. Her own performance, she knew, left much to be desired, but she had never been able to overcome altogether a slight, instinctive fear of horses, which she would not have cared to admit to. Blaize looked down at her, the admiration in his eyes for Sheila giving place to a more provocative admiration for the slim form at his side. "But we'll have you doing splendidly, too, before very long," he told her. "You're not doing so badly as it is. Do you feel you could risk a bit of a gallop?" "Oh, no!" Jocelyn put out a hand quickly as if to clutch at him, and he laughed softly and brought his mount even closer to hers, and looked at her in, a way that brought a wild blush spreading all over her face and neck. "Do you know," he murmured, with a slight, pleasant Irish burr invading his tones, "you're so attractive when you turn pink like that that 'tis difficult for me to stop looking at you! Sure, and I want to go on looking!" Jocelyn forced herself to study the unexpected white spot between her chestnut's ears. "Have you ever kissed the Blarney stone?" she enquired lightly. "What do you think?" he asked, and quoted: . . whoever kisses Oh, he never misses To grow eloquent; 'Tis he may clamber To a lady's chamber,

Or become a member Of Parliament . . . "So what do you think?" he repeated. Jocelyn was amused by the rhyme, and she looked at him sideways, under her brown-gold eyelashes. "I don't know about becoming a member of Parliament/' she said; "but the rest could add up to the same thing. I'd say that you have." "And neither eloquence nor a clamber to a lady's chamber are beyond me?" "Certainly not eloquence." She wished that when he studied her with those disturbing black eyes of his the little golden lights in them would not all at once start dancing rather madly; and when he put his hand suddenly on her horse's neck and uttered a few soft words to prove his eloquence she was not prepared for the almost instantaneous response the little mare made to him. "Come on!" he cried, and gaily, challengingly, he was away, and to her considerable consternation her own mount gathered up its hind legs beneath her and literally sprang forward over the straight width of golden sand and tore after him in the same direction as that taken by Sheila Lambert. Only, quite unlike Sheila Lambert, Jocelyn had so little control over her means of locomotion that she forgot all she had ever learned about checking the speed of a horse she bestrode and grew temporarily panic-stricken, hanging forward over the animal's neck and allowing the reins to slip from her fingers and literally encircling the glossy neck with her arms.

When, ahead of her, Blaize suddenly checked his own speed and she drew level with him again, her cheeks were pink with anger this time, and her eyes accused him with so much indignation in them that he dismounted hurriedly and went round to the other side of the little mare's head to quiet her. He put the reins back into Jocelyn's unwilling fingers and grinned up at her repentantly, engagingly — but with a look of laughter quirking up the corners of his mouth at the same time that increased her annoyance. "I'm sorry, alannah!" His voice sounded almost humble, and caressing as well. "But I thought you would enjoy that, once you forgot to be afraid. And you weren't really afraid, were you?" Jocelyn swallowed her resentment, and her feeling that she could never quite trust him again — certainly not when out riding with him — and endeavored to answer without a shake in her voice. "You took me too much by surprise, and I certainly didn't enjoy it!" "Didn't you?" "And in any case, you knew I wasn't very sure of myself -" "But you forgive me just the same?" There was a coaxing note in the warm, Irish voice that should have melted a heart of stone, but Jocelyn was still biting her lip and looking disturbed when he climbed back into his own saddle and leant across to squeeze her gloved hands. "Yes; of course you do! And after you've been out like this with me half-a-dozen times you won't have any fear at all!" "I don't know that I'm coming out with you again," Jocelyn told him, thinking that he took too much for granted, but that his eyes had a magical softness when they looked at her like that.

"Oh, yes, you will! -" he assured her, and then Sheila came cantering up to them, looking both bored and questioning, and with the healthy color of exercise in her own cheeks. "What happened -?" she asked, looking curiously at Jocelyn. "You two haven't been having a row, have you?" "Nothing so violent as a row," Blaize answered her, smiling in a silken fashion at both girls. And then he turned his horse's head in the direction whence they had come. "And now we'll take Miss Cherril home," he said. They cantered sedately back along the sands, Sheila shooting curious glances at both of them every now and again, and because the faint cloud on Jocelyn's face did not lift she was more friendly to her than when they started out. But Blaize wore an inscrutable expression which provoked her, and when they had dropped Jocelyn at Fairhaven House and were riding through the village towards their own respective homes she said suddenly, without mentioning any names : "You think she's pretty, don't you?" "Miss Cherril?" He sounded thoughtful, and reflective. "I think she's extremely attractive!" Sheila ground her small white teeth together, and her green eyes flashed dangerously. "You've made up your mind to marry her, haven't you?" "Could be," Blaize answered, and turned his head to grin at her annoyingly before digging his heel into the sleek side of his mount and cantering off and leaving her.

CHAPTER EIGHT BUT although Jocelyn was genuinely annoyed with Blaize, she was glad, two days later, to accept his offer to drive her to the little wayside halt where she herself had been decanted from the train when she first arrived in Fairhaven, to give a lift to Miss Caroline Yorke when she, too, descended from the train, after her journey from England, Caroline — or Aunt Caro, as Jocelyn had always called her, although there was no blood relationship — was short, sturdy, shrewd and business-like, in unfashionable tweeds that were nevertheless good, and with a healthy complexion and bright eyes that took in more at a single glance than most people took in following a prolonged acquaintance. She had a stout valise in one hand, and a very plump dachshund under her other arm, and she handed over the latter to Jocelyn with explanations and apologies. "Couldn't leave Penelope behind, because she would have fretted for one thing, and for another there was no one to leave her with. But she'll be no trouble, and if you haven't got a dog of your own as yet she'll be company in a lonely country house that's no doubt falling to bits." "It isn't," Jocelyn assured her. 'It's in magnificent trim." "Well then, you're fortunate, and that's very unusual in Ireland. I've stayed over her before, and I've often dreaded a gale lest the whole lot blew down on top of me." She looked at Blaize surveying her from behind the wheel of his brilliant red sports- car with a faint twinkle in his eyes, and from the moment the two of them shook hands it was borne in on Jocelyn they were going to like one another. They calmly took the measure of each other and decided that, whatever the deficiencies in the other's make-up, there was enough to justify a decided spirit of approval.

Not only did Blaize stay to tea when they got back to Fairhaven House, but it looked as if he would be quite prepared to accept an invitation to remain to dinner also. But Jocelyn did not ask him. She was not quite sure why, unless it was that she wanted to be left alone with Aunt Caro, and when he had taken his departure with obvious reluctance Aunt Caro observed: "That young man has got something! ... I don't know quite what it is, but he has got something, apart from being almost ridiculously goodlooking! Did you ever look into a pair of eyes like that before in your life? — I know I never did!" Jocelyn admitted that his eyes were a little disconcerting sometimes. Aunt Caro studied her shrewdly. "Is he the local heart-breaker Number One? Because I should imagine he is, and in any case you ought to beware of him. You're not unattractive, and you've just acquired a beautifully fat bankbalance." "Meaning that he's unscrupulous as well as good- looking?" "Not necessarily, my dear, but I imagine he's got his head screwed on very sensibly — or I'd be surprised if he hasn't. It's always a very useful thing to have one's head screwed on sensibly." She stuck a cigarette into a long amber holder, and then lay back and luxuriated in the comfort of the big, solidly-furnished lounge. "What's his background like?" Jocelyn told her, and she also told her a little about Lucien, and the very little she knew about Artie, and their mother. Aunt Caro lay and puffed contentedly at her cigarette while she listened, and then expressed an opinion:

"It's a pity about the eldest son, but it's also a great pity things were left like that — with all the power of life and death in the hands of an invalid! And an invalid who won't get any better, or so you say?" Jocelyn felt she wanted to refute such a statement rather hastily, for some reason which she could not understand, but she did not of course do so, apparently it was irrefutable. "And whatever the potentialities of a weak character they will not be improved by frustration, or by the need to do something perhaps contrary to natural instincts to make an insecure future look a trifle more secure. Or that's my own personal opinion." Jocelyn could not agree with her, and she said so. "Whatever provision Lucien has made for Blaize, it is a wise one, I'm sure — because Lucien could never be unfair." Why did she know that, she wondered, even as she made the assertion which, considering she knew little or nothing of Lucien, was somewhat of a shot in the dark? But she did know — she was quite certain of it. "Lucien is quite unlike Blaize, and certainly unlike Artie, and I should imagine he has very few indeed of the qualities his mother possesses. You have only to meet him to recognize that immediately. He looks a bit like Blaize, and he must once have had a magnificent physique, but apart from that there is no shadow of likeness between them." "Ha!" Aunt Caro murmured, studying her through the positive fog of cigarette-smoke she was creating. "He sounds like someone the gods love, and for that reason I hope he won't die young — unless, of course, he should prefer it that way!" She noticed that Jocelyn's cheek actually blanched a little, and she said nothing further, except to observe that she hoped the opportunity would be hers to meet the various members of the Fitzgerald family before long, because they sounded to her quite fascinating. Blaize she

had already decided was intriguing enough as an individual, but collectively they must offer quite an interesting study.

The opportunity to meet the Fitzgerald family gathered together beneath their own roof was hers before many days had passed, for Mrs. Fitzgerald telephoned and asked Jocelyn to tea, and extended an invitation to Aunt Caro also. Mrs. Fitzgerald was full of polite apologies because she had not yet discovered an opportunity to call upon Jocelyn, but, as she explained, she had many calls upon her time, and she hoped to be forgiven for having delayed her visit to Fairhaven House. Her invitation to tea appealed to Jocelyn, because she hoped very much that she would see Lucien, and that he would be looking very much better than when she saw him last. As a matter of fact he was looking so much better that she was conscious of surprised pleasure when she found that he was awaiting their arrival in a wheel-chair on the terrace at Mount Clodagh, and that her appearance on the terrace appeared to gratify him sufficiently to make his grey eyes seem almost to light up a little as he smiled at her. She and Caroline Yorke had walked through the woods and up the steep hillside to Mount Clodagh, and as the day was warm — unusually warm considering it was still rather early in the year — Jocelyn's natural pink color was a little heightened, although she looked deliciously cool in her summery dress. Aunt Caro was puffing a little, for the walk up the drive had been rather longer than she had anticipated, and when Lucien quietly instructed Artie to place one of the deep, comfortable wicker chairs in a patch of shade beside his own chair — while Jocelyn was accommodated with another in rather closer proximity to his mother — she sank into it gratefully, and decided that this was a splendid opportunity to get to know Lucien.

Jocelyn was seeing the entire family together for the first time also, and she decided that there could be no question as to who was the dominating spirit amongst them. In spite of his wheel-chair, and in spite of the fact that his mother was wearing a Paris frock, and that her hair style was most becoming, and she presided over a tea-table with an air that would not have ill-become an exceptionally dainty Grand Duchess, Lucien, with his carefully knotted tie, his hair that looked blue-black in the sunshine, his thin, grave, thoughtful face and lustrous eyes, was undoubtedly master in his own house, and all three of the others deferred to him to a certain, quite noticeable extent. Blaize, although he looked his admiration at Jocelyn, and waited on her most assiduously when his mother pressed him to do so, was definitely a little subdued, and the handsome, boyish, golden-haired Artie was almost humble in his elder brother's presence. The looks they directed towards the wheel-chair were always full of a certain amount of affection, however, and it became clear to Jocelyn that however much they might secretly resent his lordship over them, and the security of his position as head of the household and holder of the purse-strings, that resentment was not permitted to affect the regard which it was plain each of the two sound young men felt for the victim of a most unfortunate accident. Blaize was most watchful where Lucien was concerned, and his wants were anticipated almost eagerly by him. He even appeared to feel slightly annoyed when, and if, Artie, who was sometimes a little closer to him than he was himself, noticed that Lucien's cushions were a little uncomfortable, and paused to adjust them; or if he carried a plateful of tempting sandwiches over to Lucien, or carried his cup to the tea-table for replenishment. On these occasions Jocelyn . observed that Blaize's thickly marked eyebrows met in a very noticeable ridge in the middle, and his night-dark eyes positively glowered at Artie, who was the possessor of the mildest, sunniest and least demanding disposition of all three of Mrs. Fitzgerald's sons.

But if Blaize was quick to resent Artie gravitating over to Lucien's little island of deliciously cool shadow, cast by the giant cypress tree, which he shared with Aunt Caro, Lucien was not slow to acknowledge any little attention he received from Blaize, either with one of his long, quiet, appreciative looks, or a few low words for Blaize's ear alone. He seemed to understand the alert sensitivity of the brother who was nearest to him in age, and his tendency to grow quickly ruffled when something did not altogether please him, and to make allowances for him in a way that Jocelyn thought very human. And she also thought that she had been very right when she said to Aunt Caro that whatever Lucien did, or said, or however he behaved, it would always be with the most exacting fairness. Only when, in the midst of conversation that was quite general, Blaize suggested to Jocelyn that, if she proposed to remain at Fairhaven House she ought to buy herself a car, and that he could teach her to drive, did Lucien surprise her by looking suddenly sharply disapproving, and speaking almost rebukingly to Blaize. "If Miss Cherril decides that she would like a car, then it is up to her to buy one," he said. "But I don't recommend you for the job of teaching her to drive it." His mother elevated her delicate eyebrows a little. "Why not, Lucien?" she enquired. "Blaize is quite an excellent driver." "And, surprisingly enough, I've an absolutely clean licence," Blaize announced, grinning a little as he looked towards Jocelyn. "But, all the same, I don't think you're the type to instruct a young woman to drive her first car/'

Lucien insisted, with such a blunt, determined note in his voice that even Aunt Caro looked faintly surprised. But, remembering Blaize's methods of teaching her to gain control of a horse, and the temporary panic into which she had been flung down on the shore only a few mornings before, Jocelyn, gazing thoughtfully first at one brother and then at the other, suddenly ceased to be surprised. "Dear me!" Blaize exclaimed, a comical twist to his lips, although there was a slightly wry note in his voice, as his eyes continued to dwell on Jocelyn. "It looks to me as if Lucien is valuing your life more highly for you than you might be inclined to value it yourself, Miss Cherril, and you ought to feel highly honored. It isn't often that he takes such an active interest in the affairs of other people— particularly newcomers to Fairhaven—and if you want to show your appreciation you'll just have to listen to his advice." "Oh, as to that," Jocelyn said quickly—annoyed because the lightest of blushes had sprung to her cheeks, and Lucien was watching her keenly—"I don't think I'll have a car at all—at least, not one that IH have to drive myself—not yet, anyway. . . . I've a feeling I mightn't make a remarkably good driver, and if I want a car badly I can always hire one." "Or ride a push-bike," Artie put in a little drily. "I'm reduced to that myself since I smashed up my old 'bus—vintage in any case!—and Lucien's declined absolutely to buy me another one," looking with a reproachful gaze in the direction of Lucien. But Lucien was obviously not easily moved by reproachful looks, and Artie's very plainly did nothing to upset him. Mrs. Fitzgerald refilled Aunt Caro's flowery porcelain cup for the third time, and then decided that it might be a wise thing to introduce different topic of conversation.

"By the way," she said, looking at Jocelyn, "has Blaize told you about our dance on the twenty- fourth? We always have a midsummer dance, and this year we're expecting someone rather special home from abroad, so it will also be in the nature of a celebration." She did not say who the "someone rather special" was, and went on: "We hope very much that you'll be there—you and your friend. Miss Yorke, if she'll accept an invitation? It's nothing very grand, but all the young people of the district look forward to it, and another young person will make things that much the merrier." Jocelyn was not quite certain whether she herself was the other "young person", or whether the someone rather special who was coming home from abroad was also young. But Blaize ejaculated "I'll say they will!" and went across and sat down cross- legged on the floor of the terrace in front of Jocelyn's chair, and looked up at her with his old gay audacity. "And while we're on the subject," Blaize added, "it might be as well to book the Supper Dance here and now, because even if I'm not permitted to teach you to drive I can ensure for myself a pleasant evening, and take you nicely under my wing—a reward to which I'm surely entitled since, although it was Lucien who discovered you first, I did bring you back your glove, and lost very Utile time over doing so!" "And Lucien doesn't dance in any case," Lucien put in so quietly that everyone turned to look at him, Jocelyn with her heart starting to hammer in a most extraordinary fashion, while her eyes revealed much more than she realized. When the time came for them to leave Blaize said he would drive them home, and while he went to fetch the car—Lucien's car, since Lucien insisted that the red sports-car was unsuitable to contain Miss Yorke as well—Mrs. Fitzgerald took Aunt Caro on a brief inspection of the grounds, and Artie vanished for some purpose of his own, so

that Jocelyn was left alone with Lucien for the first time that afternoon. He looked at her with a smile in his eyes when she went and sat beside him in the chair Aunt Caro had vacated, and in a voice that sounded almost apologetic he said: "I don't quite know why I said that about not being able to dance myself, but it's something I ought to be used to by now. And, in any case, you're young, and you want to dance. You must dance as often as you can." "Why?" Jocelyn enquired, a little quizzically. 'It's just possible I'm not terribly keen." "Of course you're keen! Anyone who looks like you—who's as alive, and as natural, and as charming as you -What else do you think you were made for?" "Lots of things," Jocelyn told him, gently, "with dancing probably the least of them!" Lucien smiled again, but it was rather a weary smile this time. That slightly alarming look of exhaustion was creeping back into his face, and his smoke-grey eyes looked heavy and the least little bit hopeless, or so Jocelyn thought. She noticed that his beautiful longfingered hand, resting on the arm of his chair, was gripping it tightly. "You're—you're all right?" Jocelyn asked, her heart giving a quick little leap of anxiety. "Quite all right." He forced himself to smile at her reassuringly. "I expect an afternoon like this is—is a bit trying for you?" she suggested.

"On the contrary, this has been one of the pleasantest afternoons I can remember!" Jocelyn said nothing. He lay back quietly in his chair, staring under sombre brows across the emerald green of the lawn confronting them, while in a bush not far away a blackbird started to carol as if the sun was already setting, and there was so much blitheness in the bird's note that to Jocelyn it acquired instead a touch of anguish, and she knew that the anguish was reflected in the heart of the man beside her. She said quietly, as the car came creeping quietly round the angle of the house from the coachman's quarters that had. recently been converted into a garage large enough to accommodate several cars: "I'd better go now. And here's Hudson coming to take you indoors, anyway." Hudson greeted her most respectfully. "We're better today, miss—much better!" he said. And then he peered into his master's face. "But I think you've had just about enough, haven't you, sir?" "Just about," Lucien admitted, and held out his hand to Jocelyn. She put hers into it and felt his fingers close round hers with the strength that always surprised her. "Au revoir, Miss Cherril," he said, with a softened inflection in his voice. "It's been very nice seeing you again." When they got back to Fairhaven House Aunt Caro said to Jocelyn: "Of course you were right about Lucien! He and Blaize are actually poles apart! But I like Blaize just the same."

"Do you?" But Jocelyn felt strangely weary as she removed her hat from her slightly damp curls—far the afternoon had been really very hot—and dropped into the lap of a settee in the lounge. Aunt Caro surveyed her gently. "And you like Lucien, don't you?" she said. "And Lucien is quite devoted to Blaize. . . . Ah, weUl" She sighed suddenly. "It's an odd world! . ."'

CHAPTER NINE JOCELYN found that with the arrival of Aunt Caro at Fairhaven House she was able to settle down much more easily, and she quickly became more accustomed to the idea that she was a young woman of substance, and that her future, from the financial point of view, was entirely secure. Aunt Caro was the right type to advise her, and she did so in a sternly practical fashion. She discouraged the idea with which Jocelyn toyed—in spite of Father O'Donnell's already expressed advice—that Fairhaven should be turned into some sort of a convalescent home, or children's home, simply because it was so large and admittedly quite ideal for such a purpose, and Jocelyn did not feel quite happy about the idea of living there in a kind of dignified state on an income which now made such a thing possible. "One of these days," Aunt Caro said, "you'll marry, and then you'll be glad you've got a house of your own to begin your married life in. No need for you ever to be dependent on a husband, or to have to wait for someone to provide you with a home. You've already got one, and unless I'm much mistaken your biggest problem will be keeping the men at bay, and sorting the wheat from the chaff. And that's where you really will have to be careful!" Jocelyn looked thoughtful. "Perhaps I'd better make up my mind and stay single," she said. "Don't talk rubbish, my dear!" Aunt Caro exclaimed. "Have you ever looked at yourself in a glass?" "Frequently," Jocelyn told her, smiling at her gently.

"Then in that case you don't need me to tell you that whatever you may make up your mind to do, someone is bound to come along and upset the idea for you one day! As well talk about keeping a goldfish on the carpet, instead of in a glass bowl, or letting a canary fly loose in the garden. In both cases the result would be the same, and any attempt on your part to grow into an old maid like myself would be just as neatly frustrated." "But I don't know that I want to be married for my money—or because I've already got the means of starting a home!" Jocelyn remarked, with a frown between her delicate, slightly fly-away eyebrows. "Surely I'd be better off as an old maid?" "No, you wouldn't, darling," Aunt Caro assured her, "because for one thing there isn't such a thing as an old maid nowadays—we're women who've a preference for running in single harness, and haven't been passed over by anyone—or so we like to pretend to ourselves! And for another, it's far too lonely a way of leading one's life to be recommended by an old woman like me to a young girl of twentytwo like you, and the someone I spoke about just now, when he comes along, will be strong enough to make up your mind as well as his own, so I shouldn't worry Jocelyn wasn't worrying, because in her heart she knew that marriage for her would only be possible under certain circumstances, and if those circumstances never became concrete then, whatever Aunt Caro said, she would not marry. But in spite of the fact that she was gradually becoming accustomed to the idea of herself as mistress of Fairhaven House, there were moments when she awoke sometimes in the mornings when a feeling of almost complete unbelief would well over her. She would lie looking about her handsomely equipped bedchamber—in no sense of the word was it a pretty or a feminine room, but it was full of massive furniture that had received so much attention from Hannah during the course of many years that the high sheen on it rendered the ornate mirrors on the walls a little unnecessary—and think that it could not

be true that beyond the white-painted door and the flower-patterned walls there were other rooms and endless, thickly-carpeted corridors that belonged to her also. Quantities of china, and glass, and silver that would be just as well packed up and stored somewhere for safety, for not only did they make Hannah and her staff of one daily girl far too much work, but the knowledge that they were in daily and quite unnecessary use worried Jocelyn, who recognized that amongst the accumulation were a number of collector's treasures. It was Aunt Caro, however, who recommended clearing the main rooms of a lot of the bric-a-brac and ornamentation that rendered them a little oppressive, and between them they chose fresh flowerpatterned chintzes to replace the austere velvet hangings which made a constant and unwearying war-against-moth one of the more onerous parts of Hannah's duties. And fresh covers were also made for the arm-chairs and settees, which lightened the rooms enormously, and as they were always filled with flowers they began to look really attractive in a way Mrs. Fitzgerald, their late owner, might not have appreciated at all, although Jocelyn hoped she would forgive her the alterations which were not really on a very large scale. She also went on a shopping expedition to Dublin with Aunt Caro, and bought herself several additions to her wardrobe which were quite necessary, and which gave her a great deal of pleasure in acquiring because she had never really had anything expensive to wear before, and Aunt Caro encouraged her to be the least little bit extravagant. For the dance on the twenty-fourth, for instance— which was still a couple of weeks away—she bought herself a white net dress which Aunt Caro declared could not have suited anyone as well as it did her, and Jocelyn accepted the flattery without really believing it.

There were rhinestones on the bodice that flashed a deep amethyst in a brilliant light, and as one of her few items of jewellery was a necklet of stones that were also amethyst, these completed the scheme and looked exceptionally attractive on her pretty white throat. They had only just returned from Dublin when Blaize drove up to know whether she was going riding with him the following morning. Since the day, when she had accepted his offer of a mount, and had gone for a before-breakfast canter with him, Jocelyn had lost a little of her confidence in Blaize, and he knew it, and he looked at her with a faint, derisive smile on his lips, and an enigmatic sparkle in his eyes, when he saw her surrounded by wrapping paper and a dressbox cascading tissue and a little of the filmy white net of the eveningfrock which she and Aunt Caro had just been examining in the comfort of their pleasantly transformed lounge. "Spending money?" Blaize enquired, in a lazy voice. "There's nothing, that gives one so much satisfaction, is there?" He touched the edge of the net with the tip of one very long and very brown finger. "Is this something to take our united breaths away?" Jocelyn denied any intention on her part to make any attempt to take anyone's breath away, and Blaize suddenly smiled at her almost caressingly. "Whatever your intentions, my child, the disaster will happen just the same, and you'll have us all at your feet before very long!" He gave a quick, appraising glance round the lounge, and his eyes expressed approval. "Excellent!" he declared. "You've made a thorough job of it! I never could stand all that old-fashioned junk my late aunt surrounded herself with, although I've no doubt the antique shops would love it, and your idea of bearable surroundings harmonizes almost exactly with my own."

He gave Aunt Caro one of his subtly brilliant smiles, and she returned it with just a hint of scepticism in her own smile. Then he put his hand under Jocelyn's arm and told her that if she could spare him half an hour he wanted to take her and introduce her to some people in the village, and as it was a lovely evening, and she could think of no excuse that would be likely to put him off, Jocelyn went with him. The red car stopped outside a house just the other side of the village, and it was a house that at first sight seemed to Jocelyn to be badly in need of a considerable amount of repair. It was large, and rambling, with slates missing from the roof, and a tumble-down front porch that was smothered in torrents of climbing roses, and the front garden was a mass of weeds, but it was also a blaze of early summer flowers. There was a line of washing in the back garden which could be seen from the road, and hens clucked busily somewhere behind the house. Blaize descended from the car and went up the garden path and shouted into the dimly lit space beyond the open front door, and almost instantly a stout, elderly woman appeared, wiping her hands on what appeared to be a tea-towel. She pushed back a wisp of greying hair from a pleasant, rubicund face, and at sight of Blaize she neither looked welcoming nor displeased to see him. "Oh, it's you!" she said. Blaize beckoned to Jocelyn to leave the car and join him in the front porch, and when she had done so he made the necessary introduction between herself and Mrs. Molly Lambert, Sheila Lambert's mother. Mrs. Lambert looked a little uncomfortable at first at the sight of Jocelyn, in the crisp linen suit she had worn for her visit to Dublin. But when Jocelyn smiled at her—noting the harassed lines in the other woman's face, and the work-worn condition of her hands, although her voice was soft and educated, with just a hint of a

brogue, and she had obviously been extremely good-looking at one time —the uncomfortable feeling left her, and she smiled back and gripped Jocelyn's hand warmly. "Of course I've been curious to meet you. Miss Cherril," she said, "we all have! Old Mrs. Fitzgerald was shrewd enough to allow no one to benefit as a result of her death unless they had a good deal to recommend them for such a stroke of good fortune —and I suppose you did look upon it as a stroke of good fortune?" "Cinderella transformed by one magic wave of a wand into a princess without a prince!" Blaize exclaimed, looking benignly down upon Jocelyn. Mrs. Lambert ignored his interpolation and invited them both inside. "I'm afraid we're in a muddle—we always are!" she apologized, throwing open the door of a room where the enormous black oak dresser captivated Jocelyn's eye at once, and the roses in the middle of the refectory table lost none of their beauty because the table was hopelessly dusty. "My husband is completely preoccupied nowadays with the book he is writing on the Roman influence on Great Britain, and none of the children ever attempts to be in the slightest degree tidy." She whipped a duster from her pocket and wiped it over a chair before Jocelyn sat down, and then darted into the kitchen to free herself of the tea- towel. When she returned she had also discarded her apron, and run a comb through the thick waves of her grey hair, and looked as if she had no objection at all to a visitor at a somewhat awkward hour of the day whom she had not even been expecting. "And now. Miss Cherril, dear, you'll not be saying 'no' to a nice cup of tea, I'm sure," she said, "and it'll be in in half a minute, if you don't mind waiting? Birdie, my one help in the house, has only just left

school, and she's not very quick just yet, but she's coming along nicely." "You really shouldn't put yourself to trouble on my account," Jocelyn told her, feeling guilty and a little cross with Blaize because he had not the slightest right, she thought, to invade a household of this kind at any odd moment that it apparently came into his head to do so. And because he was smiling complacently and sitting on the edge of the dusty table, and swinging one long leg in smartly creased flannels in a negligent fashion, her feeling of being very much out-of-time with him at the moment increased, and she shot him a look under her curling golden-brown eyelashes which caused a whimsical and amused expression to flit across his face. "Nonsense, dear," Mrs. Lambert said heartily, and having seated herself in a straight-backed chair she looked with a kind of naive interest at Jocelyn, taking in as her daughter had once done all the details of her appearance, but in a much more kindly manner than Sheila had obviously felt capable of. "Sheila told me you were very English," she added, "but she didn't tell me you looked like something off the cover of a magazine!" with a motherly smile of approval. "Oh, but I'm sure I don't! -" Jocelyn felt embarrassed, and she felt even more embarrassed when the twinkle in Blaize's eyes increased. "False modesty!" he murmured. "It's not false modesty at all, and I know very well that I've been extremely fortunate. I never expected anything like this to happen to me—" "Never mind, dear," Mrs. Lambert interrupted soothingly, "never mind Blaize, I mean! It's nothing whatever to do with him whether you've been fortunate or not, and as I knew your mother I'm quite

sure she went a long way out of her way to earn what has come to you. She was practically indispensable to old Mrs. Fitzgerald before she went away." "Thank you," Jocelyn murmured gratefully, and from that moment she was certain of one thing— that the over pressed Molly Lambert, whose husband had become so deeply immersed with the past and could provide her with few of the things that mattered in a woman's life and made it easier, envied her none of the good fortune that had come her way. And she was not prepared to view her with any sort of hostility, either, although her daughter Sheila had so obviously felt hostility from the moment they first met. The tea arrived, and Mr. Lambert came drifting vaguely in to be introduced to Jocelyn, whom he acknowledged with an absentminded smile. He had the same greenish-hazel eyes that Sheila possessed, only in his case they were benign and friendly, and hers were never free from a rather sulky look of dislike. Sheila herself appeared in the untidy but pleasant sitting-room a few minutes before Jocelyn and Blaize took their departure, and it was quite obvious that she had been recently employed in feeding the hens. She wore an old and faded cotton dress. and her cheeks were flushed, her hair wind-blown, and there was a smudge of chicken meal on the tip of her nose. Whether she had observed their arrival much earlier, and had deliberately prolonged the task allotted to her in the hopes that it would not be necessary for her to make her appearance at all, Jocelyn could only conjecture, but she noticeably resented being taken at what she no doubt felt was a disadvantage, and the dark look she directed at Blaize—who returned it with a faintly impish smile —said clearly that she held him directly responsible for this intrusive visit.

Mrs. Lambert did her best to lighten the atmosphere by referring to the dance to be given by Mrs. Fitzgerald at Mount Clodagh on the twenty-fourth of the month, and declared that they were all looking forward to it, and that it was the one event of the year for which she permitted herself a new dress. "I've no doubt you've received an invitation?" Sheila said surlily to Jocelyn. "Well, as a matter of fact, I have," Jocelyn confessed. "Then I might as well stay at home!" Sheila announced, and stalked away to the kitchen, where they heard her sharply reproving one of the dogs for helping itself to something that was not intended for it on the kitchen table. Mrs. Lambert looked apologetically at Jocelyn. "I'm afraid she's rather young," she said in a low voice, but her glance when it rested upon Blaize was not altogether free from censure. In the car, on the way back to Fairhaven House, Jocelyn suddenly asked Blaize quietly: "Why did you want me to meet the Lambert family?" "Why?" Blaize cocked an eyebrow, and looked round at her with a little quizzical quirk of a smile on his lips. "Because I think, as a family, they're rather charming—don't you?" "As a family, yes. But Sheila is not so charming as an individual. That is to say, she's pretty enough —I think she could be quite a beauty with a little careful grooming—but her manners are distinctly uncouth."

"Oh, she's only a kid—not long left school. She'll grow up one day, and then they'll improve." "How old is she?" He appeared to give the matter thought. "Somewhere around eighteen, I should think— possibly not quite eighteen." "When I was eighteen," Jocelyn told him, in rather amusing voice, "I was already earning my own living, and my manners had to be reasonably good otherwise I might have lost my job." "Really?" He shot out a quick hand and lightly, caressingly, touched her knee. "Then in that case I'm glad you don't have to earn your living any longer!" "Thank you," she said. Just before they shot like a red streak up the Fairhaven drive she made a slightly crisp observation: "I hope Sheila's growing-up process will not be retarded by her association with you, Blaize! I've noticed that you don't have the best kind of effect upon her, and I think Mrs. Lambert has noticed it, too!" Blaize laughed, as if he was really amused. "Mrs. Lambert, bless her heart, has had the matter thrust on her—but I won't bore you by going into all that now! And, believe me, Sheila will grow up, one day!" But he did not explain why it was that he had whisked Jocelyn off on, apparently, the spur of the moment to meet the family who dwelt in the tumbledown house on the edge of the village. Although it seemed

that he thought they were charming, which probably meant that he considered Sheila had certain aspects of charm clinging to her, too, despite her frustrated development.

CHAPTER TEN JUNE the twenty-fourth had none of the magic of mid-summer about it, for it rained practically the whole of the day, and it was not until late evening that the clouds dispersed and the stars shone down palely on Mount Clodagh. The fairy-lights in the drive, which had looked as if they were doomed to be extinguished by the rain, shone forth like colored flowers nestling in green leaves bespattered with diamond drops, and the moist air was laden with the scent of real flowers growing in profusion under the rain-washed sky. There was the scent of the sea, too, tangy like the odor of chrysanthemums, which left a trace of salt on the lips, and through the open lighted windows of the big house these conflicting perfumes stole and mingled with the emanations from the banked- up masses of exotic hot-house flowers that decorated almost the whole of the ground floor. For Mrs. Fitzgerald never did anything by halves, and the invitations to her Midsummer Ball were accepted by half the County. She had engaged an orchestra which played soft dance music behind a screen of . yellow roses, and an enormous buffet had been set up at one end of the dance floor where refreshments could be obtained. There were quantities of champagne bottles reposing in ice-pails, and champagne-cup for those who preferred it. A team of waiters were there to serve supper when the moment arrived, and a room had been set apart for the dowagers and elderly ladies who preferred to while away the hours with whist or bridge, or even gin-rummy if they felt like it. Nothing was overlooked, and everybody was thought of, and it was generally expected that the evening, in spite of the unkindness of the weather, which would lessen the attractions of the grounds for the young people, would be a tremendous success.

The guests began to arrive soon after dinner, and it was not long before a stream of cars blocked the drive. There were expensive, high-powered limousines, family cars, jaunting-cars, ancient twoseaters, and even a couple of side-cars attached to decrepit motorbicycles, as well, of course, as a few odd taxis and hired cars. Jocelyn and Aunt Caro arrived at the foot of the imposing flight of steps before the front door in a car the former had hired for the evening in Welltown, and although it could not compete with the limousines, it was not altogether unworthy of Cinderella when Jocelyn alighted from it in her dress of foaming white net, with a white stole spangled softly with rhinestones like the bodice of the dress draped about her slender shoulders. Mrs. Fitzgerald, who was waiting at the foot of the broad staircase, welcomed her with a certain amount of empressement, and then handed her over to Blaize, who was looking almost dangerously handsome in full evening-dress, with a white tie and tails. His lips curved upwards in his little quizzical quirk of a smile when his eyes first rested on Jocelyn, and she knew from the undisguised admiration in his eyes that her appearance was all and more than she had hoped it might be when she started to dress. They danced together so much during the early part of the evening that Jocelyn began to be aware of the eyes of the other women following them, and she was not sure that their looks were always approving. Artie was doing his duty by dancing impartially with girls he had known from childhood, and doing it with a grace that became him. But Blaize, who was by far the superior dancer, declined to surrender Jocelyn to any of the men who so plainly wanted to dance with her until an hour before supper, when he stood aside while she went through the steps of the tango with a young local man who was so full of her sudden acquisition of fortune that he asked her naive questions about it, and she was almost grateful to Blaize when he claimed, her again and whisked her out on to the terrace.

Although it was no longer raining, and the stars were now quite brilliant overhead, it was cool enough for Jocelyn to shiver and to look very unwilling to be where she was when the glass doors of the pleasantly heated ballroom closed behind them. "I'll fetch you a wrap," he said, and returned to the house to reappear with a soft mink stole in his hands, which he draped about her shoulders. "There!" he exclaimed, his black eyes glowing a little strangely in his dark, almost swarthy face. "That becomes you very well indeed!" "But I can't possibly wear it!" Jocelyn exclaimed, looking faintly horrified as she made a quick attempt to remove it, "It's mink, and it's not mine -" "My mother's," he told her, his voice very soft, and he drew her over to the low balustrade and kept his hand beneath her elbow while they stood there looking out across the star-silvered grounds, while the night wind stirred the branches of the age- old trees in the drive, where the fairy lights gleamed like colorful eyes. The moon was rising low down in the sky and its light was reflected in the placid waters of the lake that were beginning to take on a kind of milky phosphorence. Behind them, from the ballroom, the strains of a seductive waltz reached them. "Where is Lucien?" Jocelyn asked, looking over her shoulder at the lighted windows behind them, and trying to pick out the one that contained the narrow couch and the etchings and the moss-green carpet. "Doesn't he ever put in an appearance on occasions such as this?" "No; it would be too much for him, even if it happened to be one of his good days." Blaize's strong, firm fingers closed possessively

about her arm, and he drew her down the steps on to the crisp, close turf that was such a brilliant green in the daylight. "Let's go for a walk," he said. "Let's go down to the edge of the lake. The moon's just rising. and in another ten minutes it'll be light enough to get a boat out and go over to the island." But Jocelyn stopped short, as if the idea did not appeal to her at all, and complained that the high heels of her thin shoes were already sinking into the sodden grass. "I'd much rather go back." She toned quickly to remount the terrace steps, but he prevented her by putting an arm about her and drawing her up against him, holding her so strongly that she found it impossible to free herself. He laughed softly against her ear. "Why struggle?" he demanded, his eyes like glowing coals now in that strange dark face. "I've been dying to kiss you all the evening— you must have sensed that!—and there's absolutely no reason why we should go back yet -" "There is! You haven't danced with anyone else but me all the evening -" She was trying to hold him off with her small hands, pressing them hard against his gleaming white shirt front, but his strength was well-nigh impossible to resist. "There's Sheila -" "Sheila!" He laughed mockingly. "She hasn't started to grow up yet!" "She has! She's grown up enough to be in love with you -" "And I'm in love with you!" His head was bent swiftly forward and his mouth came down on hers, hard and a little merciless, so that she could scarcely breathe, while his arms put an end to her futile struggles and crushed her up against him.

The moon sailed serenely higher into the heavens and shed a sudden white light across the strip of terrace immediately in front of the long line of windows, and the two who stood at the foot of the terrace steps were also bathed in a lightning rush of silver Jocelyn, as with a frantic effort she extricated herself from the almost brutal clasp of the arms that had pinioned her so closely, blinked stupidly upwards at the terrace as the light poured over her, and she saw that one of the windows had opened outwards, and Hudson appeared in the aperture pushing a wheel-chair. Jocelyn was conscious of a distinct sensation of shock as she gazed at the occupant of the wheelchair and saw that he was in evening-dress, with a light rug over his knees, and that he was gazing directly at her. His cool, mask-like face told her nothing at all, but the eyes were fixed on her, and whether it was because her own senses and perceptions in that moment were heightened to come extraordinary degree because of the moment of struggle with Blaize, and the frantic need she had felt to break away from him, she was unable to tell, but it seemed to her that under the thickly- fringed eyelids those eyes were full of something reproachful and, at the same time, melancholy. She thrust away the one arm with which Blaize still sought to keep her close to him, and, hastening as if compelled up the time-worn steps, moved to the side of the wheel-chair. Blaize followed her, but only after he had stood absolutely still and alone at the foot of the steps for several seconds. "Mr. Fitzgerald—Lucien!" Jocelyn exclaimed, and she did not even realize that she was calling him by his Christian name for the first time. "Good-evening, Miss Cherril!" His voice sounded remote and, like that look in his eyes, it was a melancholy remoteness. "I hope you're having a good time? The day was not very propitious, but tonight the

clouds have all cleared away, and it's a perfect night for a midsummer ball. I expect you found the ballroom a little warm?" "Y-yes," Jocelyn answered, feeling for some reason as if she was very young and immature and had been guilty of behaving in a fashion that had caused her to fall steeply in his estimation, so that he was being meticulously and chillingly polite to her. "It was rather warm." For one instant his eyes roved over her, taking in her frothy net skirts and his mother's stole hugged closely about her shoulders, the sparkle of the amethyst at her white throat, and the way in which her soft brown curls bad been disordered by the roughness of Blaize's embrace and were now being blown about by the light breeze. The fact that her charming blue eyes were gazing at him anxiously, almost pleadingly, he did not apparently notice. "I asked Blaize if I was likely to see you tonight," she said hastily, finding a sudden spurt of voice, "but he said that you did not appear on occasions such as this—that it would be too much for you!" "Ah, but tonight is rather different," he answered her smoothly, signing to Hudson—whose look, too, was a little disappointed, or so Jocelyn decided, when it rested on her—to propel the wheel-chair forward along the terrace in the direction of the blaze of lights that streamed from the ballroom windows. "Tonight we are expecting a guest who has not visited ,us for nearly five years, and who has only just arrived back in this country from New Zealand. She was at one time a most successful singer, but her career was interrupted by marriage." He seemed to be peering ahead down the dark avenue of trees amidst which the fairy-lights gleamed, and along which a highpowered car was even then travelling at speed, the brilliance of its headlights reaching out until they swept like an arc across the terrace, pin-pointing the three figures who walked close to the wheel-chair,

and the face of the man who sat in it, so that its intentness was all at once irradiated. "And here," concluded Lucien, "I think she is!" The ballroom doors were swung wide for the entrance of the wheelchair by Blaize, who all at once was extremely attentive to his brother, and as Hudson negotiated the slight step without any noticeable jarring of the invalid, and propelled him forward over the glistening ballroom floor, Jocelyn, falling slightly behind, decided to become lost in the welter of guests who thronged the floor. She looked round for a means of escape from the gay company and the lights, the smiles and the pleased murmurs that greeted Lucien, the lilting strains of the music, and decided to take advantage of an open door that led to the hall, from which she eventually reached the seclusion of the cloakroom, where she made up her mind to remain for a while. She was still angry with Blaize, and she felt that his uninvited action in making love to her was quite unforgivable, but she was more upset because Lucien had left his own sitting-room at the moment that Blaize had her in his arms, and the revealing moonlight had made everything so clear to him— clear, but not quite clear enough, for he probably thought she had welcomed his brother's attentions! And although, of course, it didn't matter in the least that Lucien had seen her and Blaize alone together—or it wouldn't have mattered if she had welcomed Blaize's attentions—the fact that she hadn't welcomed Blaize's advances, and that Lucien was the one who had to come upon them like that, disturbed her for some reason which was by no means in the least clear to her. She was re-doing her face, and enjoying the comparative coolness and peace of the cloakroom, when Aunt Caro, who had been thoroughly enjoying herself making up a bridge four, came into the

room and insisted that she return downstairs with her at once because they were going in to supper. "And there's been a late arrival," she announced, "a most glamorous person! A Mrs. Wanda Hayward —a singer!—who looks like no one I've ever seen before, because she is quite breathtakingly beautiful! You must come along and meet her, my dear— you'll find it hard to keep your eyes off her! Already half the men are simply gaping at her hungrily and hoping for an opportunity to dance with her— and rumor has it (although, of course, it may be nothing more than rumor!) that poor Lucien was at one time engaged to marry her, and that she gave him up because of his accident It seems that she is now a widow!"

CHAPTER ELEVEN IN after days Jocelyn never clearly remembered the details of the remainder of that midsummer night. She knew that she accompanied Aunt Caro back to the ballroom, and that Blaize claimed her and took her into supper, and that he was not in the least repentant because he had kissed her. Her displeasure, which she let him see quite clearly, had as little effect on him as if instead of displeasure she had signified her approval of his attempt to make love to her. And she knew that she was introduced to Mrs. Hayward, and that the picture Aunt Caro had painted of her was very far from being an exaggeration. If anything, it was an understatement of the brilliant looks of this tall and graceful woman whose age might have been anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five, although the quality of her attraction—in the eyes of a man, at any rate, Jocelyn decided— must have been ageless and timeless. She had a skin like the waxen petals of a camelia, and the cast of her features was patrician and a little aloof. Her eyes were large and dark and a little mysterious, and her hair was wound in a coronet of flaxen braids about her regally poised head. The combination of dark eyes and fair hair was in itself sufficiently striking, but the fact that she also knew just how to use those eyes and incline that fair head as if the object receiving her immediate attention had aroused in her a profound interest, added something far more to the nature of her appeal. To Jocelyn, for no apparent reason, she was particularly charming, and such effortless ease of manner, and so much exuded sweetness —which was not, however, in the least cloying— made the younger girl feel both awkward and ungracious by comparison, particularly as she was not in a mood just then to be at her best with anyone.

She had no opportunity for any further speech with Lucien that night, for following the visitor's arrival he withdrew to his own apartments, and very shortly afterwards the visitor also withdrew— to have a little quiet conversation with him away from all the crush and press and noise of the ballroom, Jocelyn wondered? Afterwards, when they got home. Aunt Caro declared that she had had a wonderful evening, and in her opinion it had been a delightful ball. But Jocelyn could not echo her enthusiasm, and looking at her a little curiously Aunt Caro thought she had an air of being completely deflated—even completely depressed. Certainly there was none of that after-the-ball- was-over exhilaration about her which was probably affecting quite a number of young women who had passed the last few hours at Mount Clodagh.

The next few days seemed intensely flat and flavorless to Jocelyn, for some reason which she was quite at a loss to understand. It could be, she realized, that she had looked forward to the dance —again for some reason that was not altogether clear to her—and now that it was over, and not even Blaize came near to visit them, life all at once assumed a most unsatisfactory aspect, as if there was something vital and important about it which all at once she had recognized she was missing. She was still very indignant with Blaize for making light love to her on the night of the ball, but she would have found it easier to forgive him if Lucien had not been a witness of that unfortunate incident. For somehow she was certain that she had sunk, considerably, in Lucien's estimation as a result of what he had seen, or thought he had seen. It might have been a guilty conscience that kept Blaize away from Fairhaven House, but whatever it was the days passed without any

sign of his red car making its appearance in the short drive. And they were days when it did nothing but rain, too, following the pattern of Midsummer Day, and Jocelyn and Aunt Caro, cooped up inside Fairhaven House, felt as if they were forgotten by the little world about them. Aunt Caro was more philosophical about both a patch of bad weather and Blaize's defection than Jocelyn, in her present mood of sudden dissatisfaction with most things, was capable of being. Not that she missed Blaize's constant attentions, but it seemed to her strange that, with the arrival of a beautiful widow, she herself should be all at once completely neglected. She pictured the family party at Mount Clodagh, with the radiant Wanda Hayward in their midst— basking in the smiles from those alluring dark eyes —and remembering that it was rumored (although possibly nothing more than rumor) that Lucien had at one time been engaged to marry Wanda, a feeling that she could no longer remain indoors and calmly dwell upon what was, or was not, happening behind the dignified front of Mount Clodagh rushed over Jocelyn, and there and then she decided to brave the elements in a mackintosh, and go for a considerable walk. Aunt Caro watched her go with a somewhat grave and thoughtful look on her face, and then Jocelyn plunged into the dripping woods at the rear of her property and felt better because at least she was no longer confined within four walls. The branches tore at her and ripped back the hood from her head, and her hair became loosened and blown about her face, and wet with the moisture that dripped upon her through the trees. But after a while a little sparkle of contentment reappeared in her eyes, for after all the world was a pleasant place even on such a day as this, with the smell of fresh growing things rising like a perfume to her nostrils, the peaty smell that is the very breath of Ireland joining that perfume and

exciting her vaguely, because after all this green and vivid land had become her own land since now she resided in it, and owned a tiny corner of it. She slipped and slithered down slopes, being caught at by brambles and serenaded by the feathered life that haunted the woodlands, and when at last she reached the road not only was she plastered above the ankles with mud, but her mackintosh was ripped in one place and her whole appearance was dishevelled. But she didn't greatly care. In fact, she didn't care at all, until all at once a long black car slid noiselessly to a standstill beside her on the glistening surface of the road, and she looked up to meet a familiar pair of eyes. They were Lucien's eyes, a little reserved at the moment, but unmistakably Lucien's eyes. And, beside him in the pearl-grey upholstered seat, was Wanda Hayward, looking like something out of a fashion magazine, with irresistibly smiling eyes surveying Jocelyn—or so she thought—from head to toe. "My goodness, you do look wet!" the lovely singer exclaimed, after leaning forward to let down the window. "You're absolutely soaking! Won't you let us give you a lift?" Jocelyn was so taken by surprise that for a moment she could say nothing, only stand and gape with the color rushing up painfully over her face and neck. And then Lucien murmured, in rather a tired voice: "Miss Cherril has a habit of getting wet, and I have a habit of coining upon her when she's at her wettest." Wanda smiled, as if genuinely amused. "But isn't that courting pneumonia? And surely you don't walk for pleasure on a day like this. Miss Cherril?"

"As a matter of fact, I do," Jocelyn answered in a voice that she was aware sounded very stiff and formal, although her blue eyes looked abashed and confused. "And it isn't really at all bad once you're out in it, and personally I don't mind getting wet in the least" Mrs. Hayward's delicately pencilled eyebrows rose. "Then I must say I admire your fortitude. But do get in," she besought the girl, making room for her on the wide seat by the simple process of lifting the Aberdeen terrier who always accompanied his master on to her own lap, and patting the vacant space, "and don't bother about making the car in a mess." She spoke as if it was her own car as well as Lucien's, and the confident manner in which she issued her invitation did not escape Jocelyn, and filled her with sudden determination under no circumstances to accept a lift. "No, thank you," she said quickly, quietly. "I'd much rather walk, if you don't mind, and I really would make a dreadful mess of the car." "Nonsense!" It was Lucien who spoke with even more forceful quietness. Jocelyn declined to meet his eyes. "Please do shut the window," she said, "otherwise the rain will drive in on you, and I'm not in any hurry to get back home." "Then come back with us to tea," Mrs. Hayward invited. Jocelyn smiled at her politely, but was quite firm in refusing this invitation also. She stepped back against the hedge, and then something forced her —was it, she wondered afterwards, some sort of personal magnetism which flashed between them? —to lift her eyes and meet the slightly puzzled grey look of the man who lay there as if completely at his ease in his corner of the big car, and for

one instant she thought that a hint of something faintly reproachful replaced the expression of being slightly at a loss. And then she looked away again quickly, and saw that Wanda Hayward was lying back again at her ease, With her smart little close-fitting hat resting against the padded back of the seat, and on her smoothly lovely face there was now a look which suggested that, although inwardly amused, she was prepared to humor this young and extremely gauche girl if she wished, and to waste no more time courting rebuffs. And, framed by the window of the car, with a mutation mink stole hugging her slender shoulders, and diamonds winking in her perfect ears, Jocelyn felt her heart turn over following a sudden little furious stab of envy—for the lovely widow was sitting in close proximity to Lucien; she could spend hours at a time with him if she wished—and no doubt did wish!—and she looked so absolutely right sitting there beside him, and she was the woman he had once loved and wanted to marry! Jocelyn was so sure now that he had loved her and wanted to marry her that the effect the disturbing burst of certainty had on her was to upset her judgment and her thinking processes, and she turned away with almost schoolgirl awkwardness and lack of graciousness and muttered something about not holding them up any longer, just as a flash of red appeared in the road behind them and Blaize's rakishlooking sports-car drew up with a noiseless application of well-tired brakes. Blaize smiled at her in his old, gay, careless manner and called out: "Give you a lift?" "Thanks."

To her own astonishment Jocelyn found herself accepting the offer, and as she scrambled into the seat beside him at the wheel she saw the big car ahead of them move off silently, and Mrs. Hayward turning her head gracefully over her shoulder and smiling a little enigmatically, while all she could see of Lucien was the sleek black line of his head resting rather wearily against the cushions.

CHAPTER TWELVE BLAIZE allowed his brother's car to disappear round the bend in the road ahead of them before he started up his own, with a loud roar from its exhaust, and then backed it into a convenient by-lane in order to turn and drive Jocelyn to Fairhaven House. He was looking at her rather quizzically sideways while he did so, and because she knew that she was dripping all over his red leather seat, and she was also aware that she was not looking at her best just then, she frowned and kept her eyes fixed on the windscreen in front of her. "So you've no desire to improve your acquaintance with Mrs. Hayward?" he remarked suddenly, an odd note in his voice. Jocelyn bit her lip, and then looked at him quickly and away again. "I didn't want to mess up their car, and probably Mrs. Hayward as well — she looked so extremely immaculate." He nodded, smiling quietly, "She's always extremely immaculate. She's also very easy on the eyes, don't you think? — quite sensational, in fact!" "She's very beautiful," Jocelyn said stiffly. "Lucien used to think so years ago, when they were engaged. I wonder what he thinks about her now?" Jocelyn was quite shocked by this abrupt reference to something that had happened before Lucien had ceased to be as other men were, and for a few moments the distaste aroused by the reference prevented her saying anything at all. And then she observed, in rather a remote voice: "Whatever he thinks, it's hardly anyone else's concern, is it?"

"Well — well, as to that" — Blaize's beautiful, strong brown hands spun the wheel expertly and turned the car off the main road and into a leafy, tunnel-like lane which was a short-cut to Fairhaven House — "when I was much younger, and much more ardent in my defence of the afflicted, I would have despatched her outright for what she did to Lucien, and considered it more or less a duty. But now I'm not so sure. For, after all, she has come back, and her coming has resulted in something that might turn out to be a good thing for Lucien —although on the other hand, it could be quite disastrous!" "What — what do you mean?" Jocelyn found herself stammering uneasily. Blaize shot one of his quick sideways glances, and then concentrated on following the twists and curves of the narrow road. "Wanda is very anxious for Lucien to undergo an operation in London that might make him a whole man again! In fact, that's one reason why she's come back, because she's heard of this chap who performs miracles sometimes! — in cases like Lucien's, and she's doing her utmost to persuade him to run the risk. And, after all, when you've spent years of your life as Lucien has — sometimes on his back for weeks at a time, and even during his best periods liable to attacks of Excruciating agony! — the risk is not so much a risk as a possibility of escape — whichever way things go!" Jocelyn was so appalled that she felt herself go cold inside, and she knew that she did actually turn pale. She had just refused to go back to tea with Lucien — scarcely noticed him! — and he — he was contemplating! . . . Her mouth felt dry as she asked: "How great is the risk?"

"Not even a fifty-fifty chance! Perhaps considerably less than that — but there is a chance! Always provided this surgeon fellow is willing to operate." "And will Lucien have to go to London to find out whether he is willing to operate?" "No; he is coming over here." "Then — Lucien has made up his mind? He has wasted no time!" Blaize shrugged his shoulders slightly, but said nothing. Jocelyn felt herself draw a long, and rather shuddering breath. "Mrs. Hayward must be very persuasive," she remarked. "Shall we say she's very determined," Blaize corrected her — again with that odd little smile of his — "and also we'll give her credit for having a certain amount of interest in old Lucien still, shall we? Although if we didn't want to be as generous as that we could point out that even today, invalid though he is, Lucien could represent quite a tempting proposition to some women, particularly if they happened to be the least little bit ambitious and things hadn't worked out quite as well for them as they might have done in their chosen walk in life! For a rich man, don't forget, is always a rich man, and as a husband he would still be rich, whatever else he lacked!" Jocelyn could return no answer to this, and inside her that cold feeling spread until it seemed to take possession of her whole body, and she also felt suddenly a little sick. When they turned in at the gates of her own home and stopped at the foot of the flight of steps leading to the front porch Blaize gave an unaccountable little sigh and remarked:

"Well, here we are! And now I hope you're going to ask me in to tea?" "Of course. You haven't been to see us for days." She was answering mechanically, but he looked quickly at her face to mark her expression as she did so. He saw nothing more revealing than a rather pale, set look about her mouth and her eyes which caused him to lift his eyebrows a little, and then exclaim: "Oh, so you have noticed!" "Of course I've noticed." A rather wry look altered the set of his own handsome mouth, and for an instant an expression appeared in his eyes which might have surprised her a little had she noticed it. But she did not notice it — as a matter of fact, she noticed little or nothing just then, and she felt as if she was making fumbling movements in a dream as she went up the steps ahead of him — and he spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders again rather helplessly. "I'll have to go upstairs and change out of my wet things," she said, when they reached the hall, "but you can go and join Aunt Caro in the drawing- room. I won't be long."

When she joined them in the drawing-room Aunt Caro was looking as she always did when Blaize was around, and that was relaxed, and amused, and also a little stimulated, as if his conversation had that effect on her. They were certainly not discussing Lucien, and they appeared quite happy together. Joceyln looked at him a little curiously when she entered, having changed out of her tweed skirt and jumper and into

something soft and feminine which caused him to survey her, too, with appreciation, as she moved towards them, and although she looked a little pale still she was behaving completely normally once again. Only inside herself she was wondering how a brother — and a brother who had revealed himself once under her own eyes as being more than usually devoted — could shelve the question of what might or might not happen to a member of his family near and dear to him in order to exchange light badinage with her aunt. And he was quite prepared to exchange provocative conversation with her also if she was willing, but she was not willing, and her face was a little graver and less revealing than usual as she poured out the tea, and Aunt Caro surveyed her sometimes with a faint air of being a little perplexed. Afterwards, when Blaize had left, Jocelyn was glad to make an excuse to get away alone upstairs in her room, and there, standing in front of the window and looking out across the shaven lawn, a tender deep green in the light of approaching evening, and with the rain clouds dispersed and the rain no longer drip-dripping monotonously, she asked herself how she could possibly bring it about that she could come face to face with Lucien again very soon, and let him know that she hadn't really intended to behave like an awkward schoolgirl -- or was it a resentful and jealous young woman? — when he offered her a lift, and Mrs. Hayward suggested that she went back to Mount Clodagh to tea. The unfortunate thing about it was that there was no Intimacy at all in her association with Mrs. Fitzgerald, and as she had never been officially called upon herself she could not call upon Mrs. Fitzgerald. And just to ask for Lucien would look too strange. And then, all at once, she remembered that when she had sat side by side with him on the terrace on that afternoon when she and Aunt Caro had had tea at Mount Clodagh, and Aunt Caro had gone off to inspect the grounds with Mrs. Fitzgerald, she had mentioned a book which was contained

in the library at Fairhaven House and Lucien had expressed a desire to read it. She had promised him that he should read it — and now, now was her Opportunity to take it to him! How she wished that she had a car to drive up the long, classical drive at Mount Clodagh when she reached it after walking through the woods — taking infinite care this time that her fine stockings and dainty shoes should not be scratched by brambles, or her appearance marred by the attentions of trailing branches — because for some reason she did not feel in the least like a young woman of substance, who had recently inherited a fine property herself, when she drew near to the beauty and dignity of the gracious great-house of the district. And it wasn't simply the house that made her feel very obscure, and a little like a rather cheap interloper. It was the thought that she might come face to face with Mrs. Fitzgerald, who was such a mirror of elegance — and now there was Mrs. Hayward as well, who had something more than elegance with which to intimidate her, or at least make her feel conscious of her own shortcomings. But, considerably to her relief, when the great door was swung open in response to her summons on the powerful electric bell, it was Hudson, Lucien's own manservant, who stood there and confronted her, and delighted her secretly by appearing pleased and almost relieved to see her. "Why, Miss Cherril!" he exclaimed. "The master will be pleased!" "Are — are you sure?" Jocelyn enquired, a little hesitatingly. "I mean — I wouldn't want to disturb him, but — if — if he is well enough today to see me for a few minutes -?" "Of course, miss," the servant replied, and as the hall door closed behind her Jocelyn felt almost as if it was the sacred door of a church closing on the slightly gaudy world of midsummer without, and leaving her for a moment free to be awed by the solemnity, as well as

the grandeur, of this vast hall, wherein nothing seemed to move and the softest slippered footfall would have aroused an echo on the polished boards. There were the great, wax-white lilies of high summer arranged in an enormous vase on a black oak Dower chest near the foot of the curving, fanlike staircase, and their perfume floated on the still air. There was a mailed figure — or so it seemed to her at first glance — also standing near the foot of the stairs, and there were portraits gazing at her out of sombre gilt frames crowded closely together on the panelled walls. Bewigged gentlemen and patrician ladies, with high, arched noses and elevated, pronounced eyebrows — very like Blaize's pronounced dark eyebrows — and a cool look of condescension on their faces. She had just such a look on all three of the Fitzgerald brothers' faces at different times, but on Lucien's it lingered for the shortest while. Lucien was not the type who wished to intimidate, ever. Hudson went ahead of her along a thickly- carpeted corridor, and outside one of the stout oak doors sat Lucien's Aberdeen terrier, obviously desiring admittance also. Hudson tapped for an instant on the door and then opened it wide, in response to a quiet voice that called to him permission to do so. Hudson stood aside for her to enter, and Jocelyn thought that his Cockney smile was intended to give her confidence. "Go in, miss," he whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN JOCELYN hesitated just inside the room, attacked by an almost paralyzing sensation of shyness. The room looked very much as she had seen it on the only other occasion when she had found her way into it, save that today instead of violets on the table beside the couch near the window there were one or two choice roses in a small crystal container. And the couch today was occupied, its occupant having the lower part of his body covered with a light camel-hair-rug, while from the waist upwards he appeared to be dressed with care in a neat grey lounge-suit. As usual he appeared to be reclining very much at his ease, black head resting against the carefully arranged cushions behind it. But he was neither reading nor occupying himself in any way, and when Hudson first flung open the door he was lying staring out through the open windows to the terrace without any expression at all on his face. In fact, the complete immobility of the well-cut features, and the absence of any sort of interest in anything whatsoever was the one thing which, acting like a charm, instantly dissipated Jocelyn's shyness, and before he had turned his head slowly in her direction she had moved forward swiftly to the foot of his couch. "Miss Cherril!" He lay looking at her for a moment, a slightly blank look in his eyes, as if the mood 'of abstraction which had claimed him was something he found it difficult to throw off, and as if indeed the spirit which dwelt behind those lacklustre grey eyes had been very far away from the quiet room in which he passed so much of his time. And then, gradually, the eyes lightened, and all at once they were smiling with a kind of undisguised and faintly unbelieving pleasure, and he held out his hand to her. "Miss Cherril! And will you believe me if I tell you that I was thinking about you only a few minutes ago?"

"Were you?" The final shreds of Jocelyn's shyness fled away out of the terrace windows, and she even forgot that the last time they met he had looked at her with a hint of reproach, and the time before that there had been something more than reproach in his eyes. She put her fingers into his and he clasped them and held them warmly, as he had once before, and neither of them seemed to think it strange that he should retain them for several seconds within his clasp, and finally let them go with reluctance. "Do sit down," he begged her. There was a chair drawn up close ta the couch, and she sank on to it and smiled at him. It was warm, almost an eager smile, which looked at him out of her violet-blue eyes, and turned the soft corners of her lips up happily. "I was afraid I might be disturbing you," she said, speaking rather quickly," calling at this hour of the afternoon. But, on the other hand, I didn't quite know when to call, and — and I promised you this -" She handed over the volume of poetry — a small anthology containing many of her own favorites, and in particular one that she hoped he would not read, although it was underlined: "That I should love a bright, particular star, and seek to wed it! "Thank you," he said. But he did not look at the book; he was still looking at her. "You would not disturb me, at whatever hour you called. And, after all, you have seen me at my worst, haven't you?" with a sudden dry and rather harsher note invading his voice. "A good many young women of your age would have sought refuge in flight when they came upon me as you did on that day of my mother's garden-party. But you were wonderful — and I've never forgotten it!" Jocelyn felt herself coloring a little.

"I was secretly terrified," she confessed — "but I was terrified for you, not because I'd come upon you at such a bad moment so unexpectedly." Lucien smiled faintly, and then looked away from her out of the wide open windows and across the sunny lawn. "Your coming was most opportune for me," he admitted. "In fact, if you hadn't arrived at that particular moment I'm not at all sure -" "Yes?" she almost whispered, her heart knocking painfully. "Oh, nothing!" His eyes returned to her, smiling this time in his old drily humorous fashion, and with something faintly rallying in them as well. "Except that I might not have encumbered the earth for quite as long as I have. And that reminds me -" #