Part 23 (1/2)

It was her first hint of success achieved amid standards which she had been taught to believe were all-prevalent. Brushed lightly by the pa.s.sing wing of triumph, she became eager and self-confident, even rather over-clamorous in the a.s.sertion of her own individuality, as had been the child Alex in the nursery at Clevedon Square.

Lady Isabel did not check her. She made subtle exploitation of Alex'

youth and sudden, rather boisterous gaiety, and occasionally laughed a little, and alluded to the collaboration scheme between her and Noel Cardew. ”But all the same, darlin' child,” she observed to Alex in private, ”I can't have you correspondin' with young men all over the country unbeknown to me. Once in a way is all very well, perhaps, but you'll have to let me see the letters, I think.”

Alex was only mildly resentful of the injunction. She surmised shrewdly enough that her mother was more anxious to establish the authentic existence of a correspondence between Noel Cardew and herself than to supervise the details of it. She herself waited with frantic, furtive eagerness for his first letter.

It did not reach her until after her return to London. Secretly bitterly disappointed, she read the short, conventional phrases and the subscription:

”I never know how to end up a letter, but hope this will be all right--Yours very sincerely,

”NOEL E. CARDEW.”

Across the top of the front page was a postscript.

”Next month I shall be in town. Don't forget that I am coming to call upon you. I hope you won't be 'out'!”

Alex, to whom nothing was trivial, saw the proposed call looming enormous upon the horizon of her days.

Every afternoon she either sat beside Lady Isabel in the carriage in an agony, with only one thought in her mind--the expectation of finding Noel's card upon the hall table on their return--or else took her part disjointedly and with obvious absent-mindedness in the entertainment of her mother's visitors.

When, during a crowded At Home afternoon, in the course of which she had necessarily ceased to listen for the sound of the front-door bell, ”Mr.

Cardew” was at length announced, Alex felt almost unable to turn round and face the entering visitor.

Her own imagination, untempered either by humour or by experience, had led her to picture the next encounter between herself and Noel so frequently, and with such a prodigal folly of romantic detail, that it seemed incredible to her that the reality should take place within a few instants, amidst brief, conventional words and gestures.

Noel did not talk about the book that they were to write together, although he remained beside Alex most of the afternoon. Only just as he was leaving, he asked cheerfully:

”You've not forgotten our collaboration, have you, partner? I've heaps of things to discuss with you, only you were so busy this afternoon, looking after all those people.”

”We shall be in on Sunday,” Alex told him eagerly, ”and there won't be such a crowd.”

”Oh, good,” said Noel. ”Perhaps we'll meet in the Park before that, though.”

”I hope so,” said Alex.

They met in the Park and elsewhere, and Noel, all through the ensuing weeks before Christmas, called often at the house in Clevedon Square.

Lady Isabel twice asked him to dinner, but although he was once placed next her, on neither occasion, to Alex' astonished resentment was he a.s.signed to her as a partner.

Alex, for the first time conscious of being sought after, and receiving with avidity the fragments that fell to her share, forced herself to believe that they would eventually const.i.tute that impossible whole of which she had dreamed wildly and extravagantly all her life.

Into the eager a.s.sents which she gave to all Noel's many theories, she read a similarity of outlook, into her almost trembling readiness to fall in with his every suggestion, a community of tastes, and into his interminable expositions of his own views an appeal to her deeper sympathies that surely denoted the consciousness of affinity between them.

She was happy, although princ.i.p.ally in a nervous antic.i.p.ation of happiness to come. She was able, when alone, to imagine that from absolutely impersonal good comrades.h.i.+p, Noel would suddenly plunge into the impa.s.sioned declarations of her own fancy, but when she was actually with him, his cool, pleasant, boyish voice dispelled the folly, and her fundamental shyness, that never deserted her save in the realm of her own thoughts, was relieved, with an intense and involuntary relief, that it should be so.

She saw Noel's father and mother again, and was greeted by the latter with a bright and conditional affectionateness that inspected even while it acclaimed.

It was after this that the trend of Noel's thoughts appeared suddenly to change, and he spoke to Alex of the place in Devons.h.i.+re.