"That's more interesting still. Earning a living in New York is like the proverbial looking for the needle in the haystack. The needle is there, but it takes--"

"Very good eyesight to detect it. All right, dad. I shall be on the job."

"Good! And when do you propose to begin?"

It had not been Hugh's intention to begin at any time in particular, but, thus challenged, he said, boldly, "To-morrow."

"That's excellent. But why put it off so long? I should think you'd start out--to-night."

Mrs. Billing's "Ha-a!" subdued and prolonged, was like that tense exclamation which the spectators utter at some exiting moment of a game.

It took no sides, but it did justice to a sporting situation. As Hugh told me the story on the following day he confessed that more than any other occurrence it put the next move "up to him." According to Ethel Rossiter he lumbered heavily to his feet and crossed the room toward his father. He began to speak as he neared the architectural chimneypiece, merely throwing the words at J. Howard as he pa.s.sed.

"All right, father. Since you wish it--"

"Oh no. My wishes are out of it. As you defy those I've expressed, there's no more to be said."

Hugh paused in his walk, his hands in the pockets of his dinner-jacket, and eyed his father obliquely. "I don't defy your wishes, dad. I only claim the right, as a man of twenty-six, to live my own life. If you wouldn't make yourself G.o.d--"

The handsome hand went up. "We'll not talk about that, if you please.

I'd no intention of discussing the matter any longer. I merely thought that if I were in the situation in which you've placed yourself, I should be--getting busy. Still, if you want to stay the night--"

"Oh, not in the least." Hugh was as nonchalant as he had the power to make himself. "Thanks awfully, father, all the same." He looked round on the circle where each of the chorus sat with an appropriate expression of horror--that is, with the exception of the old lady Billing, who, with her lorgnette still to her eyes, nodded approval of so much spirit.

"Good night, every one," Hugh continued, coolly, and made his way toward the door.

He had nearly reached it when Mildred cried out: "Hugh! Hughie! You're not going away like that!"

He retraced his steps to the couch, where he stooped, pressed his sister's thin fingers, and kissed her. In doing so he was able to whisper:

"Don't worry, Milly dear. Going to be all right. Shall be a man now. See you soon again." Having raised himself, he nodded once more. "Good night, every one."

Mrs. Rossiter said that he was so much like a young fellow going to his execution that she couldn't respond by a word.

Hugh then marched up to his father and held out his hand. "Good night, dad. We needn't have any ill-feeling even if we don't agree."

But the Great Dispenser didn't see him. An imposing figure standing with his hands behind his back, he kept his fingers clasped. Looking through his son as if he was no more than air, he remarked to the company in general:

"I don't think I've ever seen Daisy Burke appear better than she did to-night. She's usually so badly dressed." He turned with a little deferential stoop to where Mrs. Brokenshire--whom Ethel Rossiter described as a rigid, exquisite thing staring off into vacancy--sat on a small upright chair. "What do you think, darling?"

Hugh could hear the family trying to rally to the hint that had thus been given them, and doing their best to discuss the merits and demerits of Daisy Burke, as he stood in the big, square hall outside, wondering where he should seek shelter.

CHAPTER VI

What Hugh did in the end was simple. Finding the footman who was accustomed to valet him, he ordered him to bring a supply of linen and some suits to a certain hotel early on the following morning. He then put on a light overcoat and a cap and left the house.

The first few steps from the door he closed behind him gave him, so he told me next day, the strangest feeling he had ever experienced. He was consciously venturing forth into life without any of his usual supports.

What those supports had been he had never realized till then. He had always been stayed by some one else's authority and buoyed all round by plenty of money. Now he felt, to change the simile as he changed it himself, as if he had been thrown out of the nest before having learnt to fly. As he walked resolutely down the dark driveway toward Ochre Point Avenue he was mentally hovering and balancing and trembling, with a tendency to flop. There was no longer a downy bed behind him; no longer a parent bill to bring him his daily worm. The outlook which had been one thing when he was within that imposing, many-lighted mansion became another now that he was turning his back on it permanently and in the dark.

This he confessed when he had surprised me by appearing at the breakfast loggia, where I was having my coffee with little Gladys Rossiter somewhere between half past eight and nine. He was not an early riser, except when the tide enticed him to get up at some unusual hour to take his dip, and even then he generally went back to bed. To see him coming through the shrubbery now, carefully dressed, pallid and grave, half told me his news before he had spoken.

Luckily Gladys was too young to follow anything we said, so that after having joyfully kissed her uncle Hugh she went on with her bread and milk. Hugh took a cup of coffee, sitting sidewise to the table of which only one end was spread, while I was at the head. It was the hour of the day when we were safest. Mrs. Rossiter never left her room before eleven at earliest, and no one else whom we were afraid of was likely to be about.

"Well, the fat's all in the fire, little Alix," were the words in which he announced his position. "I'm out on my own at last."

I could risk nothing in the way of tenderness, partly because of the maid who was coming and going, and partly because that was something Gladys would understand. I tried to let him see by my eyes, however, the sympathy I felt. I knew he was taking the new turn of events soberly, and soberly, with an immense semi-maternal yearning over him, I couldn't help taking it myself.

He told his tale quietly, with almost no interruption on my part. I was pleased to note that he expressed nothing in the way of recrimination toward his father. With the exception of an occasional fling at old Mrs.

Billing, whom he seemed to regard as a joss or a bottle imp, he was temperate, too, in his remarks about everybody else. I liked his sporting att.i.tude and told him so.

"Oh, there's nothing sporting in it," he threw off with a kind of serious carelessness. "I'm a man; that's all. As I look back over the past I seem to have been a doll."

I asked him what were his plans. He said he was going to apply to his cousin, Andrew Brew, of Boston, going on to tell me more about the Brews than I had ever heard. He was surprised that I knew nothing of the important house of Brew, Borrodaile & Co., of Boston, who did such an important business with England and Europe in general. I replied that in Canada all my connections had been with the law, and with Service people in England. I noticed, as I had noticed before in saying things like that, that, in common with most American business men, he looked on the Army and Navy as inferior occupations. There was no money in either.

That in itself was sufficient to condemn them in the eyes of a gentleman.

I forgot to be nettled, as I sometimes had been, because of finding myself so deeply immersed in his interests. Up to that minute, too, I had had no idea that he had so much pride of birth. He talked of the Brews and the Brokenshires as if they had been Bourbons and Hohenzollerns, making me feel a veritable Libby Jaynes never to have heard of them. Of the Brews in particular he spoke with reverence. There had been Brews in Boston, he said, since the year one. Like all other American families, as I came to know later, they were descended from three brothers. In Norfolk and Suffolk they had been, so I guessed--though Hugh pa.s.sed the subject over with some vagueness--of comparatively humble stock, but under the American flag they had acquired money, a quasi-n.o.bility and coats of arms. To hear a man boasting, however modestly--and he was modest--of these respectable n.o.bodies, who had simply earned money and saved it, made me blush inwardly in such a way that I vowed never to mention the Fighting Adares again.

I could do this with no diminution of my feeling for poor Hugh. His artless glory in a line of ancestry of which the fame had never gone beyond the sh.o.r.es of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay was, after all, a harmless bit of vanity. It took nothing away from his kindness, his good intentions, or his solid worth. When he asked me how I should care to live in Boston I replied that I should like it very much. I had always heard of it as a pleasant city of English characteristics and affiliations.

Wherever he was, I told him, I should be at home--if I made up my mind to marry him.

"But you have made up your mind, haven't you?" he asked, anxiously.

I was obliged to reply with frankness, "Not quite, Hugh, because--"

"Then what's the use of my getting into this hole, if it isn't to be with you?"

"You mean by the hole the being, as you call it, out on your own? But I thought you did that to be a Socialist--and a man."

"I've done it because father won't let me marry you any other way."

"Then if that's all, Hugh--"

"But it isn't all," he interrupted, hastily. "I don't say but what if father had given us his blessing, and come down with another six thousand a year--we could hardly scrub along on less--I'd have taken it and been thankful. But now that he hasn't--well, I can see that it's all for the best. It's--it's brought me out, as you might say, and forced me to a decision."

I harked back to the sentence in which he had broken in on me. "If it was all, Hugh, then that would oblige me to make up my mind at once. I couldn't be the means of compelling you to break with your family and give up a large income."

He cried out impatiently, "Alix, what the d.i.c.kens is a family and a large income to me in comparison with you?"

I must say that his intensity touched me. Tears sprang into my eyes. I risked Gladys's presence to say: "Hugh, darling, I love you. I can't tell you what your generosity and n.o.bleness mean to me. I hadn't imagined that there was a man like you in the world. But if you could be in my place--"

He pushed aside his coffee-cup to lean with both arms on the table and look me fiercely in the eyes. "If I can't be in your place, Alix, I've seen women who were, and who didn't beat so terribly about the bush.

Look at the way Libby Jaynes married Tracy Allen. She didn't talk about his family or his giving up a big income. She trusted him."

"And I trust you; only--" I broke off, to get at him from another point of view. "Do you know Libby Jaynes personally?"