Part 59 (1/2)

Yet, perhaps, at that particular moment, had she seen the lines:

_”Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits - and then Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?”_

In her present mood she might have recognised also the stateliness and the beauty of a thought transcribed into verse.

Or possibly she would have obstinately a.s.serted there was no occasion to introduce the word Love at all - and it was no one's Heart's Desire she wanted, but just a common-sense, reasonable amount of pleasure for all, and a spring-cleaning of all the gloomy, wooden faces.

In the sitting-room at Bloomsbury she threw her hat down on the sofa, and ran her fingers through her hair with an almost petulant air.

”I just feel to-night as if it was a rotten old world after all,” she said.

Dudley, sitting poring over some plans with a reading-lamp, looked up in mild surprise.

”And what has made you feel all that? - not Basil, I'm sure.”

”Well, there's no occasion to be so very sure. I think it's decidedly rotten where Basil is concerned.”

She came and half-sat on one of the arms of his chair, and rested her hand on his coat-collar.

”I wonder what G would think of a sane man spending his evening ruling pointless-looking lines on a big sheet of paper?”

”And who may 'G' be?”

”I hardly know - except that she's the quaintest person I've ever struck yet - and I've seen some funny ones.”

”Oh, I know who you mean. Yes; she is an oddity. Well, how was every one. How was Doris?”

”I hardly know. She was not there when I arrived, and she did not come in until a few minutes before Ethel.”

”I wonder where she was?” thoughtfully. ”I asked her to come for tea and a walk in the Park to-day, and she said she could not leave Basil.”

Hal looked keenly into his face, and immediately he smiled and said:

”I suppose the tenant opposite was free unexpectedly, and Doris was able to get out after all. Poor little girl. I'm glad. But I wonder she didn't telephone me.”

Hal turned away, feeling a little sick at heart.

Were they all then in the maelstrom of this gloomy sense of an engulfing cloud? What could be the meaning of Doris's behaviour? Did Dudley suspect anything? Certainly he had been a good deal preoccupied of late, and spoken very little of the future.

She looked out of her window across the blue of London lights, and her thoughts roved a little pitifully across the wide reaches of her own small world. From Sir Edwin, with his high post in the nation's councils, and Lorraine with her brilliant atmosphere of success and triumph, to the dingy block of flats in Holloway, where, in spite of almost tragic circ.u.mstances, to quote Basil, they had ”lots of fun”

among themselves.

She believed he meant it, too. It was no empty phrase. Rather something in touch with Life's great scheme of compensations, which she manipulates in her own great way, beyond the comprehension of puny humans.

Certainly neither Sir Edwin nor Lorraine could boast of ”lots of fun.”

Rather, instead, much care and worry and brain-weary grappling with problems of modern succesful conditions.

She wondered, with a still further sinking at heart, if perhaps the time had come when she would have to grapple too. Was it very likely, after their delightful friends.h.i.+p, and after that confession of his the previous Sat.u.r.day, Sir Edwin was prepared tamely to give her up? In her heart, she knew him better.