CHAPTER I

"After all, we aren't yet living in the millennium, Julian. What I'm afraid of is that some day you'll be wanting to carry these notions of yours beyond the bounds of what's reasonable."

"You mean," said the other young man, with a flash in his dark eyes, "you mean you're afraid I may just chance to be honest in my 'notions,' as you call them, of a scheme of social justice."

As far off as you saw Gavan Napier, you knew him as a scion not only of the governing class, but in all likelihood of one of the governing families. Exactly the sort of man, you would say, to have Eton and Balliol in the past, a present as unpaid, private secretary to a member of his Majesty's Government, and a future in which the private secretary himself would belong to officialdom and employ pleasant, more or less accomplished, and more rather than less idle, young gentlemen to take down occasional notes, write an occasional letter, and see a boring constituent.

It was no boring constituent he was seeing now, out of those cool blue eyes of his, yet he followed with evident dissatisfaction the figure of a woman who had appeared an instant over the sand-dunes and who, as Napier turned to look at her instead of at his ball, changed her tack and sauntered inland.

"What do you suppose she's always hanging about for?" Napier asked his companion.

"As if you didn't know!"

"Well, if you do," retorted Napier, "I wish you'd tell me."

"I shall do nothing of the kind. You're quite conceited enough." Julian shouldered his golf clubs (it was against his principles to employ a caddie) and trudged on at the side of his unencumbered friend. The eyes of both followed the lady disappearing among the dunes.

"I've seen her only two or three times," Julian said, "but I've seen she hasn't eyes for anybody except you."

"That's far from being so," Napier retorted. "But if it were, I should know the reason."

"Of course you do."

"But you don't," Napier still insisted. "The reason is I'm the only person in the house who isn't Miss von Schwarzenberg's slave."

"Oh! I took her at first for just a governess."

"She's a lot besides that!" Napier wagged his head in a curiosity-provoking way.

"There's been so much to talk about since I got back," Julian went on, "or else I've been meaning to ask about her."

"She interests you?" Napier asked a little sharply.

"I confess," said Julian, "I haven't understood her position at the McIntyres."

"If I haven't—it isn't from lack of data. Only,"—Napier wrinkled his fine brows—"did you ever know a person that nothing you know about them seems to fit? That isn't grammar, but it's my feeling about that young woman."

The two played a very evenly matched game. As they walked side by side after their balls, Julian wondered from time to time whether the subject of Miss von Schwarzenberg had been introduced to prevent his reverting to that vision of his—all the clearer since his tour round the world—of a reconstituted society in which vested privilege should no longer have a leg to stand on. Or could it be that Gavan was seriously intrigued by the Rhine maiden who, more or less as a special favor, had consented to superintend the studies and to share the recreations of "that handful," Madge McIntyre, aged sixteen? This girl, with the boyish face and boyish tastes and boyish clothes (whose mane of flaming hair had helped to fasten on her the nickname of Wildfire McIntyre), Julian already knew slightly as the only and much-spoiled daughter of Napier's chief. Sir William McIntyre, K. C. B., adviser to the Admiralty and laird of Kirklamont, had been the notable chairman of endless shipping companies and prime promoter of numberless commercial enterprises, until

he accepted a seat in the cabinet, a man of vigor and some originality of mind, in contrast to his wife—a brainless butterfly of a woman who complained bitterly that she had less trouble with her four sons than with her one daughter. The one daughter, by ill luck, had an inconvenient share of her father's force of character. She had ruled the house of McIntyre till the advent of the lady in question.

That lady's predecessor had been a Miss Gayne. Miss Gayne had been in possession till a fateful morning last summer when Madge, driving along the coast road, came in sight of Glenfallon Castle, and pulled up her pony with a jerk that nearly precipitated poor Miss Gayne out of the cart. "My goodness gracious, the Duke is back!"

Glenfallon, on its cliff above the Firth, commanded a view north and south over the many-bayed and channeled mainland, out over rocky islets—shining jewels of jacinth and jasper and azurite, spilled haphazard into the sea—clear away to that great gray expanse miscalled by the new governess the German Ocean. Nobody had lived at Glenfallon as long as Madge could remember, so that she might perhaps be pardoned for emitting that excited scream at sight of two young men in tennis flannels busying themselves about the net.

"We mustn't sit here staring at them," Miss Gayne remonstrated.

Miss Gayne picked up the reins which Madge had let fall. Madge seized them with an impatient "Don't!" and flung them round the whip.

"It isn't proper to sit like this, staring into a stranger's tennis court. At two strange young men, too!"

"I'm only staring at one. You can have the other."

Presently a tennis ball came over the wall and bounced into the road. Before Miss Gayne could remonstrate, Madge was out of the cart and had sent the ball hurtling back.

The younger man caught it, and the elder advanced to the wall to thank the young lady. He was a very good specimen of fair, broad-shouldered, blunt-featured manhood, but when he opened his mouth he spoke with a foreign accent.

"When are you expecting him?" demanded Madge.

"Expecting whom? We are not expecting anybody, I'm afraid, and the more pleased to see you." He made his quick little bow and turned, to present his brother. "This is Ernst Pforzheim and I am Carl."

Madge nodded, deliberately ignoring Miss Gayne's hurried approach and disapproving presence.

"How do you do? Have you bought Glenfallon?"

No, they had only leased it. They hoped the change and quiet might do their father some good. He hadn't been well ever since ... ever since they lost their mother.

"We have great hopes of this fine air and perfect quiet," said the elder. "The quiet is the very thing for our father—but for us it may become a little triste. So we play tennis. Do you play tennis, Miss ... a ... Miss...?"

"Do I play tennis?" Madge did not long leave any doubt on that score.

The adventure was not smiled on at home, but poor Miss Gayne got all the blame.

There was a touch of irony in the lady's being succeeded by some one recommended by, or at least through, these very undesirable and undoubtedly foreign acquaintances.

The same success which the Pforzheim young men had with their country neighbors generally, they had with Madge. Everybody seemed to like them. Lady McIntyre liked them from the first. "Such charming manners! And so devoted to their poor father!"

With his pleasant malice Napier described the Pforzheims at Kirklamont, and Lady McIntyre's graciousness that "'so hoped to make your father's acquaintance.'" The Pforzheims shook their heads over the poor gentleman's condition, "'confined to a darkened room.'"

"'But we heard that he was out yesterday evening, in your new steam launch.'

"'Ah! that ... yes ... that is because his eyes are very painful. He can't bear the least light. So he gets no exercise and no change of air during the day.'

"'Well, in that case of course he couldn't expect to sleep!' And then Lady McIntyre had an inspiration. 'Doesn't it sound,' she appealed to Sir William, 'extremely like the kind of insomnia Lord Grantbury suffers from? I believe it's the very identical same. And Lord Grantbury has found a cure.'

"Great sensation on the part of the Pforzheims. Oh, would Lady McIntyre tell them.... They'd be eternally grateful if she would only get Lord Grantbury's prescription. But Lady McIntyre could produce it at once. She did produce it. And what did Julian think it was?"

Julian shook his head. He knew quite well now that Arthur was telling him this yarn in order to avoid reopening the subject of their disagreement—the only one in their lives. So he bore with hearing that Lord Grantbury's remedy for insomnia was a combination of motion and absence of daylight. Lord Grantbury had contended that light was a strong excitant. That the consciousness of being seen, of having to acknowledge recognition, or even of knowing your label was being clapped on your back—all that was disturbing in certain states of health. "'So he has himself driven out, they say, about eleven o'clock at night in a sixty-horsepower car, and goes whizzing along lonely roads where there's no fear of police traps, as hard as he can lick. When he comes back, he finds that all that ozone, and whatever it is, has quieted him. He sleeps like a top.' The sons were advised to put Father Pforzheim in a Rolls-Royce car and see what would happen. 'You haven't got a high power car? Till they can send for one,'—Lady McIntyre appealed to her husband—'don't you think, William, we might—?'

"But Carl, profuse in thanks, said that unfortunately his father had a nervous abhorrence of motor cars.

"'How very strange!' said Lady McIntyre.

"'No, it wasn't at all strange. My mother,'—Carl dropped his eyes and compressed his full lips—'our dear mother was killed in a motor accident.'

"'But our father,'—Ernst looked up as he brushed a white, triple-ringed hand across his eyes—'our father finds the water soothing. After all, Carl, swift motion on the water, why shouldn't that do as well as racing along a road?'

"'And darkness,' said Lady McIntyre.

"'And darkness!' the brothers echoed her together. 'We can never thank you enough, Lady McIntyre. We will persevere with your friend Lord Grantbury's remedy.'" The brothers clicked their heels and pressed their lips to her hand and left her in a flutter. The poor young men's anxiety was most touching! Especially Carl's. Lady McIntyre, according to Napier, doted on Carl. He wasn't so taken up by his filial preoccupations either, that he couldn't sympathize with the anxiety of a mother. Lady McIntyre's about Madge. Mr. Carl agreed that Miss Gayne was not the person. He had seen that at once. No influence whatever. Miss McIntyre was a very charming young lady. Full of character. Fire, too. She required special handling.

"'Ah! how well you understand! Now, what do you advise me to do? Seeing you reminds me,' Lady McIntyre said with her infantile candor, 'that we've never tried a German governess. We've had so many French ones. And quite an army of English and Scotch—'

"'Ah! a German governess!'"—he pulled at his mustache. Mr. Pforzheim promised to consult his aunt. The widow of a Heidelberg professor.

By a special providence Frau Lenz knew of a young lady who was at that moment in London, on her way home from America. She would be the very person to consult.

"She was the very person to get," Lady McIntyre said, when she came back from interviewing the paragon. "And, Heaven be praised, I've got her!"

They had gone back to London on account of that commission Sir William had insisted on having appointed. There were a lot of people in London that July, and things going on. Madge in the thick of everything, as though she'd been twenty-five instead of fifteen. That's how the von Schwarzenberg found her, neglecting lessons, ignoring laws, living at the theater, figuring at her father's official parties, sitting up till all hours of the night, smoking cigarettes till her fingers looked as if she'd been shelling green walnuts, gossiping, arguing, on every subject under the sun. That's the situation to which Miss von Schwarzenberg was introduced as the latest in a long and sorry line.

Napier had watched the transformation.

"They've raised the Schwarzenberg's salary twice." She had subdued every member of the minister's household.

"Not you, I hope?" Julian said quickly.

Napier laughed. "She would set your mind at rest on that score. Only the other day she got me into a corner. 'What have you got against me, Mr. Napier?' she said. 'You don't like me.' It took me so by surprise, I stammered: 'I?... What an idea!' 'Why don't you like me, Mr. Napier?' Mercifully just then Wildfire McIntyre flamed across our path."

CHAPTER II

When the young men reached Kirklamont, the McIntyres were already gathered about the tea-table in the hall of the big, ugly, Scotch country house. "The family" consisted at the moment only of three, the fourth person present being Miss von Schwarzenberg, for it was mid-July. In another month the absent sons (two soldiers and a sailor) would come up for the shooting and bring their friends.

All this presupposed—as nobody found the least difficulty in doing—that Sir William's recent "little heart attack" would leave no legacy more destructive of the usual routine than abandonment of London a fortnight or so earlier than had been planned. A more acute anxiety might have touched Lady McIntyre had her husband not deliberately thrown her off the track. He dubbed the great specialist "a verra reasonable fella," who didn't make a mountain out of a molehill. The patient did not add the means by which he had been coerced into turning his back on public affairs at a moment made so critical for the Government by Irish affairs.

"A break in the London strain, at once and often, or else smash."

That was the dour deliverance which had installed the McIntyres in their beloved Kirklamont two weeks earlier than they could have hoped. It was a party which, with a single exception (again Miss von Schwarzenberg), had shaken off London by every token of tweed garment, stout boots, of golf stockings, and of gaiters.

Cup in hand, Sir William, as became the head of the house, stood planted on wide-apart legs in front of the fireplace—a sanguine-colored, plump, little partridge of a man with a kind, rather rusé face.

Lady McIntyre, behind the urn—fair, fluffy-haired, blue-eyed—looked, as such women will, far older in the country than she did in her "London clothes." But she was far too correct not to make any sacrifice called for by the unwritten law of her kind. Behold her, therefore, bereft of all fripperies save the dangling diamond ear-rings, which emphasized painfully an excuse for frivolity which had been outlived. To tell the blunt truth, Lady McIntyre looked like some shrunken little duenna, attendant on the opulent majesty of the heavy-braided, ox-eyed Juno at her side. For Miss von Schwarzenberg shared the High Seat—otherwise Lady McIntyre's carved settle. At her feet sat Madge, her pupil, and an Aberdeen terrier.

"You really!"—the high-pitched excitement in the girl's voice reached the young men depositing their golf clubs and caps in the lobby—"you really and truly want to learn golf—after all?"

"If nobody has any objection," a voice answered, in an accent very slightly foreign, and to the English ear suggesting, as much as anything, Western American.

"Objection! Quite the contrary. Capital idea!" Sir William spoke heartily.

Bobby, fourteen but looking nearer eighteen, spilled over and sprawled out of an arm-chair as he beat the arm, and cried out with animation and a mouth full of griddle cake, "Bags I teach you, Fräulein!"

"I hope you've been taking it out of Gavan," Sir William had called out by way of greeting to Julian. Julian played up by proceeding to describe with mock braggadoccio how he'd completely taken the shine out of the champion. That person, handing tea, contented himself with privately observing yet again how his friend, long and lithe and dark, offered to the rotund little figure of the eminent official a contrast that ministered pleasantly to a sense of the ludicrous. Sir William's bald bullet head barely reached the height of Julian's chest. But it was notorious—and Napier had not worked for two years with Sir William without finding good reason to share the prevalent opinion—that inside the aforesaid bullet was an uncommon amount of shrewd sense and a highly developed skill in organizing power.

Sir William ran his department as he ran his vast commercial enterprises, with an ease that was own child of intelligence of a high degree. But now, as though it were the main factor in life, he talked golf.

The governess, after a perfunctory "how do you do" to the visitor, had leaned over to stroke the Aberdeen. The lady's full-moon face—with its heavy, shapely nose, its smooth apple cheeks, its quiet, beautiful mouth—was bent down till her chin rested on her generous bust. It occurred to Napier that she often adopted this pose. It gave her an air of pensiveness, of submission, the more striking in a person of so much character.

Also, the little tendrils of yellow hair that escaped from under the Gretchen-like banded braids cast delicate shadows on the whitest neck Napier had ever seen. Oh, she had her points.

"Did you hear, Mr. Grant?" Madge called out. "Miss von Schwarzenberg says now she wants to learn our foolish national game."

"Never!" Julian turned back to the tea-table. His tone was faintly ironic—as though the sensation created by this lady's conversion to golf seemed disproportionate to its importance.

Lady McIntyre lifted her appealing eyes. "I wonder if you'd be very kind, Mr. Grant, and help the children to teach Miss von Schwarzenberg?"

The almost infinitesimal pause was cancelled, obliterated, by Miss von Schwarzenberg's promptitude. "Oh, I couldn't think of being such a trouble." She had risen. "Sit here, Mr. Grant," she said. "Yes, please. I've finished." In spite of his protest, she retired to a chair on the far side of the fireplace—Napier's side—and picked up her knitting.

Madge followed, dog-like, and so did the Aberdeen.

"It is a comfort," Lady McIntyre went on, "to find such a terribly clever person"—she nodded significantly in the direction of Miss von Schwarzenberg—"taking an interest in the things ordinary mortals care about. It's been the one fault I've had to find with Greta. She doesn't play games. They don't, you know. But the Germans are a wonderful people! Take this young girl"—she lowered her voice. But, however, little of the conversation was lost on Miss von Schwarzenberg. She knitted steadily. Madge played with the dog.

"Greta's only twenty-five or six," Lady McIntyre went on. "Her father was an officer of Uhlans. An invalid now. And somehow they lost their money. An uncle in America is tremendously rich, and he's had Greta at one of the great women's colleges over there. She insisted on going home every summer ... so domestic, the Germans! I always think it's extremely nice of them to feel affectionate toward such a horrid country as Germany—don't you, Mr. Grant? And such a language to wrestle with, poor things! Do you know, they call a thimble a finger hat? Yes, and a pin a stick needle!"

"Well, well!"—Sir William broke off in the middle of the golf discussion, and rattled his seals with great vigor, as though they were a summons to industry—a simulacrum of factory bell or works whistle. "I must write one more letter. No, I don't need you, Gavan."

"But that translation?"

"It's done."

"Done!" said the astonished Napier.

"And couldn't be better," said Sir William, as he disappeared into the library.

"Miss Greta did it!" triumphed Bobby.

"I wonder," said the lady, smiling, "which of you two would go and get me the rest of my wool?"

Bobby was on his feet, staring helplessly round.

"In your work bag?" asked Madge.

Greta nodded, and the two raced each other upstairs. Miss Greta lifted her candid eyes. "Does it require a great deal of practice, Mr. Napier, to play golf passably?" She blushed slightly as she went on: "I suppose I've hoped that if I watched you, I'd stand a better chance of playing a fair game myself some day. Fair, that is," she added, with her meek droop of the braid-crowned head, "fair for a woman."