The Common Law

Neville went. Cameron and Stephanie, equipped with buckskin gloves, a fox terrier, and digging apparatus, joined them just where the slender meadow brook entered the woods.

"There are mosquitoes here!" exclaimed Cameron wrathfully. "All day and every day I'm being stung down town, and I'm not going to stand for it here!"

Stephanie let him aid her to the top of a fallen log, glancing back once or twice toward Neville, who was sauntering forward among the trees, pretending to look for ginseng.

"Do you notice how Louis has changed?" she said, keeping her balance on the log. "I cannot bear to see him so thin and colourless."

Cameron now entertained a lively suspicion how matters stood, and knew that Stephanie also suspected; but he only said, carelessly: "It's probably dissipation. You know what a terrible pace he's been going from the cradle onward."

She smiled quietly. "Yes, I know, Sandy. And I know, too, that you are the only man who has been able to keep up that devilish pace with him."

"I've led a horrible life," muttered Cameron darkly.

Stephanie laughed; he gave her his hand as she stood balanced on the big log; she laid her fingers in his confidently, looked into his honest face, still laughing, then sprang lightly to the ground.

"What a really good man you are!" she said tormentingly.

"Oh, heaven! If you call me that I'm really done for!"

"Done for?" she exclaimed in surprise. "How?"

"Done for as far as you are concerned."

"I? Why how, and with what am I concerned, Sandy? I don't understand you."

But he only turned red and muttered to himself and strolled about with his hands in his pockets, kicking the dead leaves as though he expected to find something astonishing under them. And Stephanie glanced at him sideways once or twice, thoughtfully, curiously, but questioned him no further.

Gordon Collis pottered about in a neighbouring thicket; the fox terrier was chasing chipmunks. As for Neville he had already sauntered out of sight among the trees.

Stephanie, seated on a dry and mossy stump, preoccupied with her own ruminations, looked up absently as Cameron came up to her bearing floral offerings.

"Thank you, Sandy," she said, as he handed her a cluster of wild blossoms. Then, fastening them to her waist, she glanced up mischieviously:

"How funny you are! You look and act like a little boy at a party presenting his first offering to the eternal feminine."

"It's my first offering," he said coolly.

"Oh, Sandy! With your devilish record!"

"Do you know," he said, "that I'm thirty-two years old? And that you are twenty-two? And that since you were twelve and I was twenty odd I've been in love with you?"

She looked at him in blank dismay for a moment, then forced a laugh:

"Of course I know it, Sandy. It's the kind of love a girl cares most about—"

"It's really love," said Cameron, un-smiling—"the kind I'm afraid she doesn't care very much about."

She hesitated, then met his gaze with a distressed smile:

"You don't really mean that, Sandy—"

"I've meant it for ten years…. But it doesn't matter—"

"Sandy!… It does matter—if—"

"No, it doesn't…. Come on and kick these leaves about and we'll make a million dollars in ginseng!"

But she remained seated, mute, her gaze a sorrowful interrogation which at length he could not pretend to ignore:

"Stephanie child, don't worry. I'm not worrying. I'm glad I told you….

Now just let me go on as I've always gone—"

"How can we?"

"Easily. Shut your eyes, breathe deeply, lifting both arms and lowering them while counting ten in German—"

"Sandy, don't be so foolish at—such a time."

"Such a time? What time is it?" pretending to consult his watch with great anxiety. Then a quick smile of relief spread over his features: "It's all right, Stephanie; it's my hour to be foolish. If you'll place a lump of sugar on my nose, and say 'when,' I'll perform."

There was no answering smile on her face.

"It's curious," she said, "how a girl can make a muddle of life without even trying."

"But just think what you might have done if you'd tried! You've much to be thankful for," he said gravely.

She raised her eyes, considering him:

"I wonder," she said, under her breath.

"Sure thing, Stephanie. You might have done worse; you might have married me. Throw away those flowers—there's a good girl—and forget what they meant."

Slowly, deliberately, blossom by blossom she drew them from her girdle and laid them on the moss beside her.

"There's one left," he said cheerfully. "Raus mit it!"

But she made no motion to detach it; appeared to be unconscious of it and of him as she turned her face and looked silently toward the place where Neville had disappeared.

An hour or two later, when Gordon was ready to return to the house, he shouted for Neville. Cameron also lifted up his voice in a series of prolonged howls.

But Neville was far beyond earshot, and still walking through woods and valleys and pleasant meadows in the general direction of the Estwich hills.

Somewhere there amid that soft rolling expanse of green was the woman who would never marry him. And it was now, at last, he decided that he would never take her on any other terms even though they were her own terms; that he must give her up to chance again as innocent as chance had given her into his brief keeping. No, she would never accept his terms and face the world with him as his wife. And so he must give her up. For he believed that, in him, the instinct of moral law had been too carefully developed ever to be deliberately ignored; he still believed marriage to be not only a rational social procedure, not only a human compromise and a divine convention, but the only possible sanctuary where love might dwell, and remain, and permanently endure inviolate.

CHAPTER XIV

The Countess Hélène had taken her maid and gone to New York on business for a day or two, leaving Valerie to amuse herself until her return.