"Humph!" There was about her the air of one whose hopes have just been rudely dashed. Then her face brightened and she added with determined cheerfulness. "Never mind, Bates--you'd be amazed if you knew how often doctors are wrong!"

"I hope you're right, Miss Ocky!"

"Suppose we drop the subject for the time. If you will look in the sitting-room you'll find a book on the table called 'The Court of the Borgias.' Bring it to me, please. I think a little quiet reading will settle my thoughts after our conversation."

He went off smiling to get the volume, and presently returned with it.

He lingered to produce a match for the cigarette she took from a stand beside her.

"Thank you for listening to me, Miss Ocky."

"And thank you, Bates, for telling me what you did about father. I am glad he had confidence in my ability to take care of myself, and that he wasn't worrying over me when he had so much else to think about."

"I wish Simon Varr was more like him!" said Bates.

She made no reply to that, and he withdrew in his noiseless fashion.

She did not immediately dip into the sedative history of the Borgias, but remained looking at the corner around which he had vanished with something akin to speculative interest. She was pondering the old man's revelation of his hatred for Varr and the curious glint she had caught in his eye at dinner the night before. It would be amusing, she thought, if Bates instead of handing Simon the carving-knife should sometime so far forget himself as to slip it between his master's shoulders.

Amusing was the word she used to herself; perhaps, as the butler had suggested, she had brought home some terrible ideas from the East--ideas about Kismet and fatalism and the cheapness of human life in comparison to human good. Wrong ideas, from the point of view of the queer, drab, cramped and hypocritical Occidental mind.

She contemplated the Occidental mind briefly, then dismissed it as a negligible quant.i.ty and settled to her book.

_VI: An Aunt in Need_

It was very nearly dinner-time before Copley Varr came back from his talk with Sheila Graham. In deference to a hint from her that the course of true love could not run smooth that afternoon in the vicinity of her father, they had taken a long walk over the hills along quiet country roads where hands could touch unseen by alien eyes. They were happy, but rather nervously so, with something of the nervousness of a young colt about to kick over the traces for the first time and who is a little uncertain about the consequences.

One bit of their afternoon was devoted to a ramble around the grounds of a small, vacant house, whose exterior they viewed and discussed from every possible angle. It stood in the center of a wooded ten-acre tract, a long mile by winding road from Simon Varr's house but not a quarter of that distance from it as a plane flies. It was situated, in fact, at the bottom of the very hill on which Simon's home flaunted its greater magnificence, and it had once formed part of the property until severed from it by the elder Copley's will.

They tried the front and back door, but finding them quite naturally locked they made no further effort to effect an entrance. They contented themselves with strolling around it once again, admiring its shingles that were weather-beaten to a silvery gray, enthusing over the quaintly-gabled windows of its upper story, calling each other's attention to its palpable solidity of structure.

"A few hundred dollars spent on these grounds!" cried Sheila, her cheeks flushed, her blue eyes shining. "Coppie, isn't it a _love_ of a place? Did you ever in your life see a nicer?"

Coppie admitted freely that he never had.

It was for reasons directly connected with this desirable country property that he sought audience of his aunt immediately upon his return home. She was not to be found anywhere downstairs, and since his impatience did not welcome the idea of waiting for a fortuitous opportunity to chat with her in private, he took the stairs three at a time and rapped eagerly on the door of her bedroom.

This was presently opened to him by a tall, bony, angular woman of fifty-odd who regarded him not altogether favorably through steel-rimmed spectacles. This was Janet Mackay, whom the prosaic-minded would have designated a lady's-maid, but who had risen from that humble position to be no less than Chancellor of State to her sovereign majesty, Miss Ocky. The two women had shared the ups-and-downs, the sunshine and shadow, of that mystic, colorful Orient through whose extent the restless curiosity of the younger had led them to and fro. Out there the line between mistress and servant had inevitably been supplanted by the bond of companionship; but when they returned to the more humdrum civilization of the western world, it was Janet whose dour Scotch rect.i.tude had re-established the distinction.

She took her meals with old Bates at a little table in the butlery, found her chief relaxation in the one motion-picture house that Hambleton boasted, and for the rest, "kept herself _to_ herself."

"h.e.l.lo, Janet!" he greeted her. "Is my aunt in there? Ask her if I can come in and speak to her."

The woman drew aside in the doorway as Miss Ocky answered for herself.

"That you, Copley? Come in. I'm out on the veranda. Janet, you needn't wait."

Miss Ocky's bedroom, like all the others on the upper floor, had a small private balcony outside its tall French windows that made a pleasant place to draw a comfortable chair in the late afternoon or the cool of the evening. She was sitting there now and called to him to bring a chair for himself, but he preferred to lounge against the heavy wooden rail of the balcony.

"Well, Romeo! I expect affairs have been marching with you and Juliet or you wouldn't be hunting me up so promptly."

"See here, Aunt Ocky, I'm just tickled pink and all that, but are you sure you ought to have done it?"

"Suggested the elopement?"

"N-no, of course not. That's all right. That's lovely. We are going to take your advice and grab our happiness. What I'm fussing about is the house business."

"Yes, you'd find something to fuss about, wouldn't you! I didn't encounter any such obstinacy in Sheila, but women are much more practical than men in every respect. When I told her I owned that particular property and proposed to settle it on you jointly as a wedding-gift, she yelped with joy. It's true that after that she began to make polite gestures of remonstrance, but the yelp came first by a good, wide margin! I'm glad one of you has some common-sense."

"I'm just as grateful as I can be, but--"

"Really, Copley, you're a downright nuisance. Let me tell you something, my child. I've a great deal more money than your mother or you or any one else around here has any idea of. I've made investments in my time that would have turned a banker's hair gray, and never one of them but brought me huge returns. That property is of negligible value to me--how negligible you don't know--and yet it will be very valuable to you and Sheila as a haven of security that you can call your own. As a rich aunt, I have every legal and moral and ethical right to give it to you--and as a poor but deserving nephew, it is your cue to say 'Thank you' and accept."

"You're a brick, Aunt Ocky," said the young man soberly, for the second time that afternoon. "Sheila spoke of a check for a thousand--"

"For your honeymoon. If you don't splurge too hard, there'll be some of it left for initial expenses."

"You bet there will." He drew a long breath. "Thank you, Aunt Ocky,"

he said obediently. "I accept. But, look here--there'll be a holy row when my father hears what you've done. He'll want your head on a charger!"

"Better men than he have wanted that--and it's still neatly articulated to the end of my spinal column!" She gave a low, reminiscent chuckle.

"There was a Chinese general, once, whom it was my privilege to annoy, and he went so far as to put quite a flattering price on it. He lost his own! Shall I tell you the story?"

He eagerly a.s.sented, and the gory narrative of the unlucky Chinese head-hunter occupied them until dinner was announced.

It was scarcely to be wondered at that Copley was exuberantly cheerful during the meal. His aunt might really have succeeded in her wish to graft a bit of her nerve on to his backbone, for he felt a new sense of self-reliance and resolution. Once married to Sheila, and with the immediate future provided for by the generosity of Miss Ocky, he had no doubt of his ability to pluck a pearl necklace from the world that was his oyster! He knew quite a bit about the tanning business, a knowledge acquired casually during summer vacations, and he also knew--from Sheila--something of Graham's disappointed ambitions in respect to a partnership, if his prospective father-in-law elected to seek his fortune in another field, there was no reason why he shouldn't hitch his wagon to Graham's star as Graham had once hitched his to Varr's. The golden sun of finance was rising in the East for him, and he and Sheila, hand in hand, would walk into the dawn--

So ran his thoughts, and between them he kept up a flow of badinage with Ocky, rallied his quiet mother into some show of life, and even directed a few flippancies at the glum figure which graced the head of the table. The tanner was taciturn, abstracted, and the only show of emotion registered by his wooden countenance was a flash of uneasiness when Copley made some casual reference to Leslie Sherwood. Miss Ocky did not miss that, and again she wondered what lay behind.

His son's airiness of manner distinctly jarred on Simon. A young man just bereft of his allowance and under orders to renounce his lady-love had no right to act like that. It wasn't natural--or else he had something up his youthful sleeve. Humph. That might bear looking into!

"What are you going to do this evening, Copley?" he demanded, as he returned the quill toothpick to his pocket and rose from table.

"Nothing special, sir. Read a while and turn in early."

"I'm going to be busy with some work for an hour or so. I wish you would come to my study at nine. Want to talk to you."

Copley's heart sank as he nodded acquiescence. Then it rose again, for his eyes had strayed across to Miss Ocky and the sight of his powerful ally braced his courage--just as Simon, the day before, had gained fresh confidence from the glimpse of a cabbage. Nothing could harm him while Aunt Ocky held up his arm!

Punctually at nine o'clock he pa.s.sed through the living-room on his way to the appointment, and paused for a word with Ocky, who was reading by the lamp in the center of the room. She had checked him with a gesture.

"What does he want to see you about?"

"I don't know. Just a snappy laying down of the laws of the Medes and the Persians, I expect."

"Well, don't quarrel with him!"

"You mean--he's my father, after all? Right. It takes two to make a quarrel anyway."

"The most ridiculous aphorism ever coined! I've made lots of them myself, single-handed. And it was policy, not filial respect, that dictated my caution. If you quarrel, you'll lose your temper; if you lose your temper, you may let something slip that will reveal your plans."