She turned suddenly toward him.

"Do you remember the supper party at Ludsey?" she asked.

"Of course," he replied: "And the little Frenchman, Monsieur Poizat."

"I was not thinking of him," said Cynthia. A sentence or two spoken at that table by Colonel Challoner had leaped into her memory. Politics meant color in the lives of men. It was the craving for color which fired enthusiasm in the towns of the provinces. Well, she herself craved for bright colors in her life too. Might she not get them out of the paint-pot of politics just as men did?

"If I were to say yes," she remarked, "I would not be content to be merely the witness of your success. I must share the fears which go to make it. I could not sit quiet and twirl my thumbs, shut out from the hopes and apprehensions and endeavors, and just smile admiringly at the result. I must share everything."

"Of course," said Harry Rames. "From the moment you say 'yes,' you share everything. I meant that too when I said that I needed your help."

He spoke gravely and sincerely, and again Cynthia said, "Thank you."

She sat for a little while longer, hesitating upon the brink. To say "yes" would solve the question of a companion. Oh, certainly, there were practical advantages in the acceptance of Harry Rames's proposal.

She would have to abandon the hope of beauty in her life. Color, excitement, interest, she might get. But the beautiful life would not be for her. Still, under no circ.u.mstances, perhaps, might it have been for her. No one, she reflected, and with some sadness--no one by his approach had ever set her heart beating to a quicker tune. Perhaps there was some defect in her, some want of human pa.s.sion, she reflected, which placed her in the second rank of women. When Cynthia was humble there was no girl so humble as Cynthia. And, after all, Harry Rames was honest. To that one stable point all her questions brought her back.

She moved at last, and Harry Rames rose and stood before her.

"Well?" he asked.

Cynthia dropped her hands loose at her sides and answered with a smile:

"Why not?"

It was in those words that she accepted him. There was no spirit in them, and very little of expectation. But she had come to expect not very much; and she had travelled a long way from the garden of her dreams.

"After all, there's a turnstile in this affair, too," she said, with a note of bitterness. "A very important one too. For it leads not into a garden, but straight to the treasury bench."

Harry Rames was bewildered. But he made no comment. Women were queer, and it was good to disregard their moments of excitement. Cynthia sprang up the next moment and laid her hand upon his arm.

"Oh, yes, we'll follow Mr. Smale's advice, Harry," she cried, "and we'll keep our eyes on the treasury bench. Why not? Now go, and come back to-morrow."

She was laughing a little wildly, and Harry Rames had the sense to take her at her word. He went out of the room, and Cynthia flung herself down upon the cushions and cried for an hour by the clock.

"Well," she said to herself at the end, as she rose and dried her eyes, "Mr. Benoliel will be satisfied. That's one thing." Almost she seemed to blame Mr. Benoliel for the fact of her engagement.

CHAPTER XX

AT CULVER

The odd thing in the affair, however, was that Mr. Benoliel did not seem satisfied. Cynthia asked him over the telephone the next day to come to her, and when he came she told him of her engagement.

"But no one knows of it as yet except yourself," she added; "and no one is to know, for the present. I want it kept a secret."

"Oh!" said Mr. Benoliel, looking at her curiously. "And why?"

"There will be a certain amount of ill-natured talk," Cynthia returned in a confusion. "And I want the time for it to be as short as possible. It will cease after we are married."

"People will say that Rames is an adventurer, who is marrying you for your money," said Mr. Benoliel bluntly, and Cynthia turned on him with spirit.

"Lord Helmsdale's mother will, and other mothers would have said the same of Lord Helmsdale if I had married him."

"So it's to spare the feelings of Harry Rames that you are keeping your engagement secret," said Mr. Benoliel with an ironical wonder. "I should never have suspected him of such delicate susceptibilities."

"Well, I should be uncomfortable too!" cried Cynthia, bending puzzled and indignant brows at him. "I think you are quite horrid."

Benoliel sustained her indignation unabashed.

"Is that the only reason, Cynthia?" he asked.

"You wanted me married," Cynthia continued. "You ought to be very, very pleased."

Mr. Benoliel, however, was not to be lured from his question into a discussion upon the propriety of his feelings. He repeated it.

"Is fear of gossip the only reason, Cynthia, which makes you keep your engagement secret?"

Cynthia again showed signs of confusion. Mr. Benoliel wore his air of omniscience. She sat down upon a chair.

"What do you mean, Mr. Benoliel?"

"This," said he. "I have noticed that the young ladies who keep their engagements secret are not, as a rule, very much in love with the men they are engaged to. They leave themselves a loop-hole of escape."

Cynthia's cheeks flamed. Certainly she had intended to spare Harry Rames and herself some uncomfortable weeks. But would she have minded those weeks had she cared for him? The question came swiftly, and as swiftly was answered. Had she cared for him she would have wanted to wear him like a ribbon on her breast for all the world to see. She realized it with a pang. She would have run quickly forward to meet the gossip and do battle. But she had not run forward. It was true that she had left herself a pathway of retreat, and rather by instinct than from any deliberate plan. Her wariness had prompted her. Once more she had wanted to be safe. But nothing of this was she going to acknowledge to Mr. Benoliel.

"I think you are extraordinarily horrid," she said again with a cold dignity, and hoped that her stateliness would crush her inquisitor.

"When do you propose to marry, then?" he asked.

"Just before Whitsuntide. The House will rise for ten days, I hear, at the least. We shall announce the marriage just before the House rises;" and that indeed was the plan upon which she had agreed only that morning with Harry Rames.

"Then there is no hurry," said Mr. Benoliel. "Perhaps you and Captain Rames will pay me a visit in the country before Whitsuntide comes."

He spoke as though he accepted the situation, and turned to other subjects, fearing to confirm Cynthia in obstinacy by any show of opposition.

"Certainly," she said; "we shall be pleased to come;" and a month later she and Harry Rames came one Friday afternoon to Culver.

The house stood within hearing of the bells of Ludsey, but on that side of the city opposite to the White House. Benoliel had built it himself, and to those who knew the man but slightly it was an astonishing production. Captain Rames, for instance, whose taste was not very meticulous, never ceased to marvel at it. Even this Friday afternoon, as the car swung round a turn of the country road and the thing stood before him, he contemplated it with amazement. It was nothing but a monstrous new villa of red and yellow brick, a pretentious ghastliness of towers and flashing gla.s.s rising from the middle of a small bare field within twenty yards of the roadway. An avenue of fir-trees not yet shoulder-high wound to the front door, and there was no need for it to wind. Circular beds of glaring flowers disfigured the new lawns, and little bushes of evergreens, which would one distant day make an effort to be shrubberies, gave to the house a most desolate and suburban look. It seemed wonderful to Harry Rames that so nice and delicate a person as Mr. Benoliel could bear to live in it at all; and still more wonderful that with a dozen of the most beautiful houses in England bosomed in deep meadows and whispered to by immemorial elms, within an easy motor-ride to choose from as his models, he should have devised this unconscionable edifice.

Sir James Burrell, the surgeon, however, who was sitting opposite to Harry Rames in the car, and next to Cynthia, took a different view. He gazed at the house with satisfaction. For it would add yet another subtle paragraph to his character sketch of Mr. Benoliel.

"How extraordinary," he cried, "and yet how like the man! That's just the house which Benoliel would have built. Only one had not the insight to guess it. I love it!" and he leaned his head out of the window and chuckled at the building's grotesqueness. "Yes, I love it.

The fitness of things appeals to me." And he turned to the astonished Captain Rames. "You don't see the exquisite appropriateness of that--let us not call it a house--that detached residence to Isaac Benoliel?"

"Well, I don't," said Harry Rames. "He always seemed to me to set up as a lover of beautiful things."