There was no letter from Nick, but a scribbled message from Mrs. Melrose: would Susy come into her room presently, for a word? Susy jumped up, hurried through her bath, and slipping on a dressing-gown, knocked at her hostess's door. In the immense low bed that faced the rich umbrage of the park, Mrs. Melrose lay smoking cigarettes and glancing over her letters. She looked up with her vague smile, and said dreamily: "Susy darling, have you any particular plans — for the next few months, I mean?"

Susy coloured: she knew the intonation of old, and understood all that it implied.

"Plans, dearest? Any number... I'm tearing myself away tomorrow... to the Gillows' moor, very probably," she hastened to announce.

Instead of the relief she had expected to read on Mrs. Melrose's dramatic countenance she discovered there a shade of disappointment.

"Oh, really? That's too bad. Is it absolutely settled —?"

"As far as I'm concerned," said Susy crisply.

The other sighed. "I'm too sorry. You see, dear, I'd meant to ask you just to stay on here quietly and look after the Fulmer children. Fulmer and I are going to Italy next week — I want to be with him when he makes his studies, receives his first impressions;

such a marvellous experience, to be with him where he and Italy meet!" She broke off, lost in prospective ecstacy. "And, you see, as Grace Fulmer insists on coming with us —"

"Ah, I see."

"Well, there are the children — such a problem," sighed the benefactress. "If you were at a loose end, you know, dear, while Nick's away with his friend, I could really make it worth your while..."

"So awfully good of you, Violet; only I'm not, as it happens!"

Oh, the relief of being able to say that, gaily, firmly and even truthfully! Take charge of the Fulmer children, indeed! Susy remembered how Nick and she had fled from them, that autumn afternoon in New Hampshire. The offer gave her a salutary glimpse of the way in which, as the years passed, and she lost her freshness and novelty, she would more and more be used as a convenience, a stop-gap, writer of notes, runner of errands, nursery governess, or companion. She called to mind several elderly women of her acquaintance, pensioners on her own account, and others of the same group, who still wore its livery, struck its attitudes and talked its jargon, but had long since been ruthlessly relegated to these slave-ant offices. Never in the world would she join their numbers.

Mrs. Melrose's face fell, and she looked at Susy with the plaintive bewilderment of the wielder of millions to whom everything that cannot be bought is imperceptible.

"I can't see why you can't change your plans," she murmured with a soft persistency.

"Ah, well, you know —" Susy paused on a slow inward smile — "they're not mine only, as it happens."

I48.

Strefford, as he had suggested, and then look about for some temporary
occupation until ... until she became Lady Altringham? Well, perhaps.

At any rate, she was not going back to slave for Ursula.

She shock her head with a faint smile. "I'm so sorry, Ursula:
of course I want awfully to oblige you —"

Mrs. Gillow's gaze grew reproachful. "I should have supposed
you would," she murmured, and Susy, meeting her eyes, looked down
the long vista of favours bestowed, and perceived that Ursula was not the woman to
forget on which side the obligation lay between them.

Susy hesitated: she remembered the weeks of ecstasy she had
owed to the Gillows' wedding cheque, and it hurt her to appear un-
grateful.

"If I could, Ursula... but really... I'm not free at the
moment." She paused, and then took an abrupt decision. "The fact is,
I'm waiting here to see Strefford."

"Strefford? Lord Altringham?" Ursula stared. "Ah, yes — I
remember. You used to be great friends." Her attention deepened. If
Susy were waiting to see Lord Altringham — one of the richest men in
England. Suddenly Ursula opened her gold-meshed bag and snatched a
little vellum diary from it.

"But wait a moment — yes, it's next week! I knew it was
next week he's coming! But, you darling, that makes everything all
right. You'll send him a wire and come with me tomorrow, and meet
him at Ruan instead of in this nasty sloppy desert... Oh, Susy, darling
if you knew how hard life is for me in Scotland, between the Prince
and Fred, you couldn't possibly say no!"

The whole of his past life, that very tendency, on which he
had rather prided himself, to live in the present, and take whatever
chances it offered, now made it more difficult for him to act. He
began to see that he had never, even in the closest relations of life,
looked ahead of his own immediate satisfaction. He had thought it
rather fine to be able to give himself so intensely to the fullness
of each moment, instead of hurrying past it in the pursuit of some-
thing more, or something else, like the over-scrupulous or the under-
imaginative, whom he had always equally commiserated. It was not until
he had linked his life with another that he had begun to feel it dimly
reaching forward into a future he suddenly found himself longing to
make sure of, to fasten upon, to model according to his own wants and
purpose, so that the future had become what he actually lived in,
become his only real present, his all-absorbing moment of time.

Now that moment was shattered, and the power to rebuild it
failed him. He had never before thought about putting together broken
bits: he felt like a man whose house has been destroyed by an earth-
quake, and who, for lack of labour, is called upon to wield a trowel
and carry bricks for the first time. He simply did not know how.

Will-power, he now understood, was not a thing one could
suddenly decree oneself to possess. It must be built up slowly,
imperceptibly, laboriously — as laboriously as the unskilled carrying
of bricks — out of a succession of small efforts to keep a single
object before one, and to meet daily difficulties instead of cleverly
eluding them or shifting their burden on others' shoulders. The making
of the substance called character was a process about as slow and
arduous as the building of the Pyramids; and the thing itself, like
those awful edifices, was mainly useful to lodge one's descendants

Grace was probably the only person anyone Susy's friends who would could have understood why Susy could not make up her mind to Altimplum. But at the moment she was too much absorbed in her own problems to pay much attention to her friend's; and according to her own the immediate "unpacked" her difficulties.

Nal was not telling what she had hoped at
A his words, European art and literature.
On she was much of an artist herself to
know that there must be fallen periods -
that the impact of new impressions did
not always produce immediate results.
She had allowed female that. But her past
experience of Nal had täeepled her to know
that when he was assimilatip where
impressions were fixifyip in line. And

The task she had undertaken for want of a better gave her no
sense of a missed vocation: "mothering" on a large scale would
never, she perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, in odd ways,
the sense of being herself mothered, of taking her first steps in
the life of immaterial values which seemed so much more substantial
than any she had known.

On the day when she had gone to Grace Fulmer for counsel and
comfort she had little guessed that they would come to her in this
form. She had found her friend, more than ever distracted and yet
bouyant, riding the large untidy waves of her life with the
splashed ease of an amphibian.

she saw by the smoothing out of his puckered mouth and the look
in his large round seraphic eyes that he was going to give her a
the delicious but not wholly surprising surprise of being a good
boy.

Thoughtfully he examined her face as she fell on her knees
beside the cot; then he put out a small sticky finger and pressed
it on her tearful cheek.

"Poor Susy — got a pain too," he said, putting his arms
about her neck; and as she hugged his hot little body to hers, he
added, in a tone of manly consolation: "Geordie'll make up a
splendid new story to tell it away."