been like the people who when they hear the scream of somebody being murdered say it is only the cat. I have been a little brute all my life, and in all probability it is past half-time for me already; in fact it certainly is unless I am going to live to be ninety. I'm not sure that I want to, and yet I don't want to die one bit."
"I should be very much annoyed if you ventured to do anything of the sort," remarked Jack.
"Yes, and that is so wonderful of you. You ought to have wished me dead a hundred times. What's the phrase? 'Yes, she would be better dead.' Just now I want to be better without being dead. I often think we all have a sort of half-time in our lives, like people in foot-ball matches, when they stop playing and eat lemons. The lemons, you understand, are rather sour reflections that we are no better than we might be, but a great deal worse. And somehow that gives one a sort of a fresh start, and we begin playing again."
They arrived at Winston late in the afternoon; the village had turned out to greet them, flags and arches made rainbow of the gray street with its thatched houses and air of protected stability, and from the church-tower the bells pealed welcome. Dodo, always impressionable and impulsive, was tremendously moved, and with eyes brimming over, leaned out of one side of the carriage and then the other to acknowledge these salutations.
"Oh, Jack, isn't it dear of them?" she said. "Of course I know it's all for you really, but you've endowed me with everything, and so this is mine too. Look at that little duck whom that nice-faced woman is holding up, waving a flag! Hark to the bells! Do you remember the poem by Browning, 'The air broke into a mist with bells'? This is a positive London fog of bells; can't you taste it? Is it the foghorns, in that case, that make the fogs? And here we are at the lodge and there's the lake, and the house! Ah, what a gracious thing a summer evening is. But how fragile, Jack, and how soon over."
That wistful, underlying tenderness in her nature, almost melancholy but wholly womanly, rose for the moment to the surface. It was not the less sincere because it was seldom in evidence. It was as truly part of her (and a growing part of her) as her brilliant enjoyment and insouciance. And the expression of it gleamed darkly in her soft brown eyes, as she leaned back in the carriage and took his hand.
"I will try to make you happy," she said.
He bent over her.
"Don't try to do anything, Dodo," he said. "Just—just be."
For a moment a queer little qualm came over her. Had she followed her immediate impulse, she would have said, "I don't know how to love like that. I have to try: I want to learn." But that would have done no good, and in her most introspective moments Dodo was always practical. The qualm lasted but a moment, as the door was opened, when they drew up. But it lasted long enough to cause her to wonder whether it would be the past that would be entered again instead of the future, entered, too, not by another door, but by the same.
On the doorstep she paused.
"Lift me over the threshold, Jack," she said; "it is such bad luck for a bride to stumble when she enters her home."
"My dear, what nonsense."
"Very likely, but let's be nonsensical. Let us propitiate all the gods and demons. Lift me, Jack."
He yielded to her whim.
"That is dear of you," she said. "That was a perfect entry. Aren't I silly? But no Austrian would ever dream of letting his wife walk over the threshold for the first time. And—and that's all about Austria," she added rather hastily.
Dodo looked swiftly round the old, remembered hall. Opposite was the big open fireplace round which they so often had sat, preferring its wide-flaring homely comfort to the more formal drawing-rooms. To-day, no fire burned there, for it was midsummer weather; but as in old times a big yellow collie sprawled in front of it, grandson perhaps, so short are the generations of dogs, to the yellow collies of the time when she was here last. He, too, gave good omen, for he rose and stretched and waved a banner of a tail, and came stately towards them with a thrusting nose of welcome. The same pictures hung on the walls; high up there ran round the palisade of stags' heads and Dodo (with a conscious sense of most creditable memory) recognized the butler as having been her first husband's valet. She also remembered his name.
"Why, Vincent," she said, holding out her hand, "It is nice to see another old face. And you don't look one day older, any more than his lordship does. Tea? Yes, let us have tea at once, Jack. I am so hungry: happiness is frightfully exhausting, and I don't mind how exhausted I am."
Suddenly Dodo caught sight of the portrait of herself which had been painted when this house was for the first time her home.
"Oh, Jack, look at that little brute smiling there!" she said. "I was rather pretty, though, but I don't think I like myself at all. Dear me, I hope I'm not just the same now, with all the prettiness and youth removed. I don't think I am quite, and oh, Jack, there's poor dear old Chesterford. Ah, that hurts me; it gives me a bitter little heart-ache. Would you mind, Jack, if—"
Jack felt horribly annoyed with himself in not having seen to this.
"My dear," he said, "it was awfully thoughtless of me. Of course, it shall go. It was stupid, but, Dodo, I was so happy all this last month, that I have thought of nothing except myself."
Dodo turned away from the picture to him.
"And all the time I thought you were thinking about me!" she said. "Jack, what a deceiver!"
He shook his head.
"No: it is that you don't understand. You are me.
"Am I? I should be a much nicer fellow if I was. Jack, don't have that picture moved. It only hurt for a moment: it was a ghost that startled me merely because I did not expect it. It is a dear ghost: it is not jealous, it will not spoil things or come between us. It—it wants us to be happy, for he told me, you know, it was the last thing he said—that I was to marry you. It is a long time ago, oh, how long ago, though I say it to my shame. Besides, if you are to pull down or put away all that reminds me of that dreadful young woman"—Dodo put out her tongue and made a face at her own picture—"you will have to pull down the house and drink up the lake and cut down the trees. Ah, how lovely the garden looks! I was never here in the summer before: we only came for the shooting and hunting and the garden invariably consisted of rows of blackened salvias and decaying dahlias. But it is summer now, Jack."
There was no mistaking the figurative sense in which she meant him to understand the word "summer." It had been winter, winter of discontent—so the glance she gave him inevitably implied—when she was here before, and she rejoiced in and admired this excellent glory of summer-time. And yet but a moment before the picture in the hall had "hurt" her, until she remembered that even on his death-bed her first husband had bidden her marry the man who had brought her back here to-day. She had neglected to do as she was told for about a quarter of a century, and had married somebody else instead, and yet this amazing variety of topics that concerned her heart, any one of which, you would have expected, was of sufficient import to fill her mind to the exclusion of all else, but bowled across it, as the shadows of clouds bowl across the fields on a day of spring winds, leaving the untarnished sunshine after their passage. It was not because she was heartless that she touched on this series of somewhat tremendous topics: it was rather that her vitality instantly reasserted itself: it was undeterred, impervious to discouraging or disturbing reflections.
Dodo ate what may be termed a good tea, and smoked several cigarettes. Then noticing that a small golf links had been laid out in the fields below the garden, she rushed indoors to change her dress, and play a game with her
