"She is and she is n't. She won't lay a finger on the tyre either, though. Will you stake your half-crown like a man?"

"I suppose there is a catch about it somewhere," said The Freak resignedly. "Still, I fancy we must humour the young people, Tilly. All right, my lad."

Mr. Carmyle turned to his wife.

"Show them, Connie," he said.

His dutiful helpmeet selected a large tyre-lever, and sitting down in the midst of the King's highway upon the tool-box, in a position which combined the maximum of discomfort with the minimum of leverage, began to pick helplessly at the rim of the wheel. Occasionally she looked up and smiled pathetically.

"Will that do, Bill dear?" she enquired.

"Yes; but try and look a bit more of an idiot."

Mrs. Carmyle complied.

"Now you're overdoing it," said her stage-manager severely. "Don't loll your tongue out like a poodle's! _That's_ better. Hallo, I believe I can hear a car already! Come on, you two--into this wood!"

Next moment Tilly, beginning dimly to comprehend, was propelled over a split-rail fence by two muscular gentlemen and bustled into the fastnesses of the pine wood. The Casabianca-like Connie remained in an att.i.tude of appealing helplessness upon the tool-box.

The pine wood ran up the side of a hill. The trio climbed a short distance, and then turned to survey the scene below them. Round the bend of the road came a car--a bulky, heavy, opulent limousine, going thirty-five miles an hour, and carrying a cargo of fur coats and diamonds.

"Rolls-Royce. Something-in-the-City going down to lunch at Brighton,"

commented d.i.c.ky. "That's the wrong sort, anyhow."

"Connie will be run over," cried Tilly apprehensively.

"Not she," replied the callous Carmyle.

He was right. Connie, diagnosing the character of the approaching vehicle from afar, had already stepped round to the near side of her own, escaping a shower bath of mud and possibly a compound fracture.

"Do you always get your running repairs done this way, Tiny?" enquired d.i.c.ky of Carmyle.

"As a rule. Connie loves it. Gives her a chance of talking prettily to people and smiling upon them, and all that. She thinks her smile is her strong point."

"I should be afraid," said Tilly.

"Connie is afraid of nothing on earth," said Carmyle. "Why, she--" he flushed red and broke off, realizing that he had been guilty of the solecism of paying a public tribute to his own wife. "Here's another car coming," he said. "This looks more like what we want."

A long, lean, two-seated apparition, with a bonnet like the bow of a battleship, had swung round the bend, and was already slowing down at the spectacle of beauty in distress. It contained two goggled and rec.u.mbent figures. Presently it slid to a standstill beside the stranded car, and its occupants leaped eagerly forth.

"Metallurgique, twenty-forty," announced d.i.c.ky, with technical precision.

"Undergraduates--or subalterns," added Carmyle contentedly, beginning to fill his pipe. "That's all right. You two had better go for a little walk, while I stay here and keep an eye on the breakdown gang."

He produced from his greatcoat pocket a copy of "The Sunday Times," and having spread it on the ground at the foot of a convenient tree, sat down upon it with every appearance of cheerful antic.i.p.ation, already intent upon the, to him, never-palling spectacle of his wife adding further scalps to her collection.

d.i.c.ky and Tilly, nothing loath, wandered farther along the hillside, under strict injunctions not to return for twenty minutes. It was the first time that they had found themselves alone since their arrival on the previous evening, and they had long arrears of sweet counsel to make up.

"d.i.c.ky," said Tilly, suddenly breaking one of those long silences that all lovers know, "have you ever--loved any one before me?"

Most men are asked this question at some time in their lives, and few there be that have ever answered it without some mental reservation. But The Freak merely looked surprised--almost hurt.

"Loved any one _before_? I should think I had!" he replied. "Who has n't?"

"I have not," said Tilly,

d.i.c.ky was quite prepared for this.

"I meant men--not girls," he said. "Girls are different. Not that some of them don't fall in and out of love rather easily, but they only do it as a sort of pleasant emotional exercise. The average male lover, however youthful, means business all the time. Quite right, too! It is a healthy masculine instinct for an Englishman to want to found a household of his own just as soon as he grows up. But it is this very instinct which often sends him after the wrong girl. He is full of natural affection and sentiment, and so on, and he wants some one to pour it out upon. So he picks out the first nice girl he meets, endows her in his mind with all the virtues, and tries to marry her. Usually it comes to nothing--the girl sees to that; for she is gifted by nature with a power of selection denied to men--and in any case it is hardly likely that he will meet the right girl straight off. So he goes on seeking for his mate, this child of nature, in a groping, instinctive sort of way, until at last he finds his pearl of great price. Then he sells all that he has, which being interpreted means that he straightway forgets all about every other girl he ever knew, and loves his Pearl forever and ever. Therefore, Tilly, if ever a man comes to you and tells you that you are the only girl he ever loved, trust him not. It is not likely. It is against nature."

"A girl likes to believe it, all the same, dear," answered Tilly, voicing an age-long truth.

"I don't see why she should," argued the ingenious d.i.c.ky. "It is no compliment to be loved by a man who has had no experience. Now _I_ can love and appreciate you properly, because I am able to compare you with about"--he counted upon his fingers, finally having recourse to a supplementary estimate on his waistcoat-b.u.t.tons--"with about fourteen other ladies, of all ages, whom I have admired at one time and another; and can unhesitatingly place you in Cla.s.s One, Division One, all by your own dear self, so far as they are concerned. Is n't that something?"

But Tilly was not quite satisfied.

"I should like to feel," she said, instinctively giving utterance to that point of view which makes a woman's love such an intensely personal and jealously exacting thing in comparison with a man's, "that you could never have been happy with any woman in the world but me. Could you, d.i.c.ky?"

d.i.c.ky pondered.

"It depends," he said, "on what you mean by happy. Our measure of happiness, it seems to me, depends entirely on what we _have_ compared with what we want. If I had never met you, I could never have missed you; and so I dare say I might have settled down happily enough--or what I considered happily enough--with some other girl. But that is impossible now. I have met you, you see. If I were to lose you"--Tilly caught her breath sharply--"no one else could ever take your place.

Love like ours makes all subst.i.tutes tasteless and colourless, as they say in chemical laboratories. You have raised my standard of love so high that no one but yourself can ever attain to it. So," concluded the philosopher, with a smile which brought more happiness and rea.s.surance into Tilly's heart than all the laborious logic-chopping in the world could have done, "though I don't know that I never _could_ have been happy with any one but you, I can truly say this, that I never _can_ be happy with any one but you. It's merely a matter of the difference between two conditional sentences, that's all."

But a girl talking with her lover is not interested in points of syntax.

"And will you go on loving me?" asked Tilly, putting a small but unerring finger upon the joint in d.i.c.ky's harness.

d.i.c.ky glanced down upon the eager, wistful face beside him, and smiled whimsically.

"Madam," he said, "your fears are groundless."

"How do you know?" enquired Madam, convinced in her heart, but anxious to be rea.s.sured.

"Because," said d.i.c.ky simply, "you love me. You have said it. Don't you see how that binds me to you? The mere fact of your love for me makes mine for you imperishable. The moment a man discovers that the woman he loves loves him in return, he is hers, body and soul. Previous to that something has held him back. Pride--reserve--caution--call it what you like--it _has_ held him back. He has not let himself go _utterly_.

After all, we can only give of our best once in this life, and usually some instinct inside us makes us refuse to surrender that best, however prodigal we may have been of the inferior article, until we know that we are going to get the best in return." d.i.c.ky was talking very earnestly now. "I have been keeping my best for you all these years, little maid, though neither of us knew it. Such as it is, you have it. That is why I _know_ I can never go back on you. Besides, what man worthy of the name could let a girl down, once she had abandoned her reserve--her beautiful woman's reserve--and confessed her great secret to him? Why, I once nearly married a girl whom I could not stand at any price, just because the little idiot gave herself away one day when we were alone together."

"Why should you have married her," asked single-minded, feminine Tilly wonderingly, "if you did n't love her?"

"It seemed so mean not to," said d.i.c.ky.

Tilly nodded her head gravely.

"Yes," she said, "I think I understand." (As a matter of fact, she did not. To her, as to most women, such a quixotic piece of folly as that to which d.i.c.ky had just confessed was incomprehensible. But she desired to please her lover.) "It was like you to do it, but I hate the girl.

I expect she was a designing minx. But go on, dear. Go on convincing me. I love it. Say it over and over again."

"Say what?" enquired d.i.c.ky, who was not aware that he had been saying anything unusual.

"Pearls, and things like that," replied Tilly shyly.