CHAPTER I

"Ah, then, was it all spring weather?

Nay! but we were young—and together."

SHE had always adored him. From the first moment he came to the house—an overgrown, good-looking schoolboy, and had started to bully and domineer over her, Marie Chester had thought him the most wonderful person in all the world. She waited on him hand and foot, she was his willing bondslave; she did not mind at all when once, in an unusual fit of eloquence, she had confided in him that she thought it was the loveliest thing on earth to have a brother, young Christopher answered almost brutally that she "talked rot, anyway, and that sisters were a bally nuisance!"

He looked at her with a sort of contempt for a moment, then added: "Besides, we're not brother and sister, really!"

They were not; but their fathers had been lifelong friends, and when George Chester's wife inconsiderately—or so her husband thought—died without presenting him with a son, and almost at the same time young Christopher Lawless was left an orphan, George Chester promptly adopted him.

"It will do Marie good to have a brother," he maintained, when his sister. Miss Chester, who kept house for him, raised an objection. "She's spoilt—shockingly spoilt—and a boy about the place will knock off some of her airs and graces."

Young Christopher certainly did that much, if no more, for in a fortnight he had turned Marie, who was naturally rather shy and reserved, into a tomboy who climbed trees with him regardless of 2 injury to life and limb, who rode a cob barebacked round the paddock, who did, in fact, everything he dared or ordered her to do.

Miss Chester protested to Marie's father in vain.

"Christopher is ruining her; I can do nothing with her now! She is quite a different child since he came to the house."

Marie's father chuckled. He was not a particularly refined man, and the daintiness and shyness of his little daughter had rather embarrassed him. He was pleased to think that under Christopher's guiding hand she was what he chose to call "improving."

"Do her good!" he said bluntly. "Where's the harm? They're only children."

But the climax came rather violently when one afternoon Marie fell out of the loft into the yard below, and broke her arm.

One of the grooms went running to the rescue and picked her up, a forlorn little heap with a face as white as her frock.

"I fell out myself!" she said with quivering lips. "I fell out all my own self."

Young Christopher, who had clambered down the ladder from the loft, broke in violently:

"She didn't! It was my fault! She made me wild, and I pushed her. I didn't think she'd be so silly as to fall, though," he added, with an angry look at her. "And don't you trouble to tell lies about me."

The groom said afterwards that she had not shed a tear till then, but at the angry words she broke down suddenly into bitter sobbing.

She did not mind her broken arm, but she minded having offended Christopher. It was the greatest trouble she had ever known when— as a consequence of the accident—Christopher was sent away to a boarding school.

Hereafter she only saw him by fits and starts during the holidays, and then he seemed somehow quite different.

He took but little notice of her, and he generally brought a friend 3 home with him from school. He was getting beyond the "boy" stage, and developing a wholesome contempt for girls as a whole!

When—later—he went to a public school, he forgot to ignore her, and took to patronizing her instead. She wasn't such a bad little thing, he told her, and next term if she liked she might knit him a tie.

Marie knitted him two—which he never wore! She would have blacked his boots for him if he had expressed the slightest wish for her to do so.

Then, later still, he went to Cambridge and forgot all about her. He hardly ever came home during vacation save for week-ends; he had so many friends, it seemed, and was in great demand amongst them all.

Marie could quite believe it. She was bitterly jealous of these unknown friends, and incidentally of the sisters which she was sure some of them must have!

She was still at school herself, and her soft brown hair was tied in a pigtail with a large bow at the end.

"You'll soon have to put your hair up if you grow so fast, Marie," Miss Chester said to her rather sadly, when at the end of one term she came home.

Marie glanced at herself in the glass. She was tall and slim for her age, which was not quite seventeen, and as she was entirely free from conceit she could see no beauty in her pale face and dark eyes, which, together with her name of Marie Celeste, she had inherited from her French mother.

"Am I like mother, Auntie Madge?" she asked, and Miss Chester smiled as she answered:

"You have your mother's eyes."

Marie looked at her reflection again.

"Mother was very pretty, wasn't she?" she asked, and Miss Chester said: "Yes—she was, very pretty."

Marie sighed. "Of course, I can't be like her, then," she said, resignedly, and turned away.

Presently: "Is Chris coming these holidays?" she asked.

Miss Chester shook her head.

4 "He did not think so. He wrote that he should go to Scotland with the Knights."

Marie flushed. "I hate the Knights," she said pettishly. She had never seen them, but on principle she hated everyone and everything who took Christopher from her.

The following year she was sent to a finishing school in Paris, and while she was there her father died suddenly.

A wire came from England late one night and Marie was packed off home the following morning.

Her father's death was no great grief to her, though in a placid sort of way she had been fond of him. She had written to him regularly every Sunday, and was grateful for all that she knew he had done for her, but any deep love she might have borne for him had long ago gone to Chris. He was the beginning and end of her girlish dreams—the center of her whole life.

As she sat in the stuffy cabin on the cross-Channel boat and listened to the waves outside her chief thought was, should she see Chris? Had they wired for him to come home from wherever he was?

He had left Cambridge now, she knew, but what he was doing or how he spent his time she did not know. All the way up in the train from Dover she was thinking of him, wondering how soon she would see him, but she never dreamed that he would meet the train, and the wild color flew to her face as she saw him coming down the crowded platform.

He looked very tall and very much of a man, she thought, as she gave him a trembling hand to shake. She felt herself very childish and insignificant beside his magnificence as she walked with him to the waiting car, for the house in the country had long since been given up, and George Chester had lived in London for some years before his death.

"Have you got your ticket?" Christopher asked, very much as he might have asked a child, and Marie fumbled in her pocket with fingers that shook.

"I nearly lost it once," she volunteered, and Chris smiled as he answered: "Yes, that's the sort of thing you would do." He looked 5 down at her. "You haven't altered much," he said condescendingly. "You're still just a kid."

Marie did not answer, but her heart swelled with disappointment. She was eighteen, and she knew that he was but six years older.

Years ago that six years had not seemed much of a gap, but now, looking up at him, she felt it to be an insuperable gulf.

He was a man and she was only a school girl with short skirts and her hair down her back.

They sat opposite one another in the car, and Chris looked at her consideringly. "It's a long time since I saw you," he said.

"Yes, eight months," she answered readily. She could have told him the date and the month and almost the hour of their last meeting had she chosen, but somehow she did not think he would be greatly interested.

"It's rough luck—about Uncle George," he said awkwardly, and Marie nodded.

"Yes."

She wondered if he thought she ought to be crying. She would have been amazed if she could have known that he was hoping with all his heart and soul that she would not.

He changed the subject abruptly.

"Aunt Madge would have come to meet you, but there is so much to see to. She sent her love and told me to say she was sorry not to be able to come."

"I don't mind," said Marie. She would infinitely rather have been met by Chris. Her dark eyes searched his face with shy adoration.

She was quite sure there had never been anybody so good-looking as he in all the world; that there had never been eyes so blue, or with such a twinkle; that nobody had ever had such a wonderful smile or such a cheery laugh; that there was not a man in the whole of London who dressed so well or looked so splendid.

As a matter of fact, Christopher was rather a fine looking man, and perfectly well aware of the fact. He had more friends than he knew 6 what to do with, and they all, more or less, spoilt him.

He was generally good-tempered, and always good company. He was run after by all the women with marriageable daughters though, to do him justice, so far he evinced very little interest in the opposite sex.

He looked now at Marie, and thought what a child she was! He would have been amazed could he have known that beneath her black coat her heart was beating with love for him, deep and sincere.

Faithfulness was a failing with Marie, if it can ever be called a failing! There was something doglike in her devotion that made change impossible. Her best friend at school had been unkind to her many times, but Marie's affection had never swerved, and all the tyranny and bullying she had received from Christopher in the past had only deepened her adoration. In her eyes he was perfect.

There were many things she wanted to say to him, but she was tongue-tied and shy. It seemed all too soon that they reached home and Christopher handed her over to Miss Chester.

Miss Chester took Marie upstairs and kissed her and made much of her. She took it for granted that the girl was broken-hearted at the death of her father. She was a sweet, old-fashioned woman who always took it for granted that people would do the right thing, and she thought it was the right thing for any daughter to grieve at the loss of a parent.

"You grow so fast," she said, as she said every time the girl came home. "You will have to put your hair up."

Marie turned eagerly. "Oh, auntie! To-night, may I?"

Miss Chester did not think it would matter, and so presently a very self-conscious little figure in black crept downstairs through the silent house and into the dining-room, where Christopher was waiting impatiently for his dinner.

7 He turned quickly as Marie and her aunt entered. He was a man who hated being kept waiting a moment, though if it pleased him he broke appointments without the slightest hesitation.

Conversation was intermittent during dinner. Naturally there was a gloom over the house. It was only as they were leaving the table that Miss Chester said, smiling faintly: "Do you notice that Marie has grown up, Chris?"

"Grown up!" he echoed. He looked at Marie's flushing face.

"She has put her hair up," said Miss Chester.

Christopher looked away indifferently. "Oh, had she? I didn't notice."

The tears started to Marie's eyes. She felt like a disappointed child.

8

CHAPTER II

"All men kill the thing they love

By all let this be heard.

The coward does it with a kiss. . . ."

THERE followed a terribly dull week, during which Marie hardly went out. Miss Chester believed in seven days' unbroken mourning, and she kept the girl to it rigorously.

Christopher came and went. He seemed very busy, and was constantly shut up in the library with men whom Miss Chester said were "lawyers."

"There are a great many things to settle, you know," she told Marie. "Your father had large properties and much money to leave."

Marie said, "Oh, had he?" and lost interest. As yet money had not much significance for her, but she watched the closed library door with anxious eyes. Would it never open?

It was quite late that evening before she saw Chris again, and then he came into the drawing-room, where she was trying to read and trying not to listen for his step, and, crossing to where she sat, stood looking down at her.

It was getting dark—the June evening was drawing to a close—and she could not see his face very distinctly, though she felt in some curious way that there was a different note in his voice when he spoke to her.

"How old are you, Marie?"

She looked up amazed. Surely he ought to know her age when they had grown up together? But she answered at once: "I was eighteen last May."

"And a kid for your age, too," he said abruptly.

9 She closed her book, a faint sense of hurt dignity in her heart.

"I knew a girl who was married at eighteen," she said.

Christopher laughed. "I can't imagine you married, all the same." he said.

"Why not? I don't see why not," she objected, offendedly.

He stood for a moment looking down at her. She could feel his eyes upon her. Then he said, irrelevantly, it seemed: "After all, we've known each other most of our lives, haven't we?"

"Yes." She was mystified. She could not understand him.

"And got on well—eh?" he pursued.

She smiled ever so faintly. "Oh, yes," she said, with heartfelt fervor.

Chris laughed. "Well—I'll take you for a ride in the car to- morrow, if you like," he said, casually.

Marie could not have explained why, but she felt sure that this was not what he had originally intended to say to her, but she answered at once: "Yes, I should love it!"

It was the first ride of many, the first of many blissful days that followed, for Christopher no longer went out and about with his friends. He stayed at home with Marie and Miss Chester.

Sometimes he seemed a little restless and impatient, Marie thought. Often she caught him yawning and looking at the clock as if he were anxiously waiting for something, or for time to pass, but she was too happy to be critical. He was with her often, and that was all that mattered.

And then—quite suddenly—the miracle happened!

It was one Sunday evening—a golden Sunday in June, when London seemed sunbaked and breathless, and one instinctively longed for the sea or the country.

Miss Chester had had friends to tea, but they had gone now, and Chris was prowling round the drawing-room, with its heavy, old- fashioned furniture, hands in pockets, as if he did not know what to do with himself.

10 Half a dozen times he looked at Marie—half a dozen times he took a step towards the door and came back again. There was an oddly nervous expression in his blue eyes, and his careless lips no longer smiled.

Miss Chester had been very silent, too, since the visitors left, and presently, with a little murmured excuse, she gathered up her work and went out of the room.

Chris swallowed hard and ran a finger round his collar, as if he suddenly found it too tight, and his voice sounded all strangled and jerky, when suddenly he said:

"Put on your hat and come out, Marie Celeste! I can't breathe—it's stifling indoors."

He had always called Marie "Marie Celeste" since their childhood. It had been his boy's way of pretending to scorn her French name, but Marie liked it, as she liked everything he chose to do or say.

She rose now with alacrity. She was ready in a few minutes, and they went out together into the deserted streets.

It was very hot still, and Chris suggested they should go down to the Embankment.

"There'll be a breeze," he said.

It was a very silent walk, though Marie did not notice it She was perfectly happy; she was sure that every woman they passed must be envying her for walking with such a companion. Now and then she looked up at him with adoring eyes.

They walked along the Embankment, and away from it towards Westminster Abbey. There was a service going on inside, and through the open doors they could hear the wonderful strains of the organ.

Marie stopped to listen—she loved music, and Chris stopped, too, though he fidgeted restlessly, and drew patterns with his stick on the dusty path at his feet.

When they walked on again he said abruptly:

"We've got on very well since you came home—eh, Marie Celeste?"

Her dark eyes were raised to his face.

"Oh, Chris! Of course!"

He frowned a little.

11 "I mean—do you think we should always get on as well?" he asked, with an effort.

She was miles away from understanding his meaning, but something in his voice set her heart beating fast. When she tried to answer, her voice died away helplessly.

Christopher looked down at her, then he said with a rush: "The fact is—I mean—will you marry me?"

Marie stopped dead. All power of movement had deserted her. A wave of crimson surged over her face, rushing away again and leaving her as white as the little rose which she wore in her black frock.

Chris slipped a hand through her arm. He was afraid that she was going to faint. He was feeling pretty bad himself.

"Well, is it so dreadful to think about?" he asked with a mirthless laugh.

"Dreadful!" She found her voice with a gasp. The sudden rapture that flooded her heart was almost unbearable. But for his arm in hers, she was sure she would have fallen.

There was a seat close by, and Chris made her sit down. He sat beside her and stared at his feet while she recovered a little, then he looked up with a strained smile.

"Well, do you think you could put up with me for the rest of your life?" he asked.

Marie's face was radiant. Nobody could ever have said then that she was not pretty. Her eyes were like stars. She seemed to have blossomed all at once into perfect womanhood.

She wanted to say so many things to him, but no words would come. She just gave him her hand, and his fingers closed hard about it.

For a little they sat without speaking, while through the open doors of the cathedral came the wonderful strains of the organ. Then suddenly it ceased, and Chris took his hand away as if the spell that had been laid upon them was broken.

He rose to his feet, looking a little abashed.

"Well, then—we can tell Aunt Madge that we're engaged?" he said.

12 "Yes."

But even then she could not believe it She dreaded lest with every moment she would wake and find it all a dream.

But it was still a reality when they got back home, and Aunt Madge pretended to be surprised, and cried and kissed them both, and said she had never been so glad about anything.

She wanted them to have a glass of wine to celebrate the occasion, though, as a rule, she was a staunch teetotaler, but Chris said no, he could not stay—he had an appointment. He went off in a great hurry, hardly saying good-night, and promising to be round early in the morning.

At the doorway he stopped and looked back at the two women.

"I'll—er—you must have a ring, Marie Celeste," he said. "I'll— er—I'll tell them to send some round," and he was gone.

It was a strange wooing altogether, but to Marie there was nothing amiss. She was in the seventh heaven of happiness. When she went to bed she looked out at the starry sky, and wished she were clever enough to write a poem about this most wonderful of nights.

She saw nothing wrong with the days that followed either. To be awkwardly kissed by Chris—even on the cheek—was a delirious happiness; to wear his ring, joy unspeakable; to be out and about with him, all that she asked of life.

The wedding was to be soon. There was nothing to wait for, so Chris and Aunt Madge agreed. They also agreed that it must of necessity be quiet, owing to their mourning. Marie Celeste agreed to everything—she was still living in the clouds. She could hardly come down to earth sufficiently to choose frocks and look at petticoats and silk stockings.

Aston Knight, a friend of Christopher's, was to be best man, and Marie's special school chum, Dorothy Webber, was to be maid of honor.

"I hope you won't mind such a quiet wedding, my dear child." Miss 13 Chester said anxiously to Marie. "But if one starts to invite people, Chris has so many friends, it will be difficult to know where to stop. So I thought if Mr. Knight and Dorothy came, and just your father's lawyer and myself . . ."