The Grey Room | Page 3

her
three days after he had been declared out of danger. Then did Mary
begin to live, and looking back, she marvelled how horses and dogs and

a fishing-rod had been her life till now. The revelation bewildered her
and she wrote her emotions in many long pages to her cousin. The
causes of such changes she did not indeed specify, but he read between
the lines, and knew it was a man and not the war that had so altered and
deepened her outlook. He had never done it, and he could not be angry
with her now, for she had pretended no ardor of emotion to him. Young
though he was, he always feared that she liked him not after the way of
a lover. He had hoped to open her eyes some day, but it was given to
another to do so.
He felt no surprise, therefore, when news of her engagement reached
him from herself. He wrote the letter of his life in reply, and was at
pains to laugh at their boy-and-girl attachment, and lessen any regret
she might feel on his account. Her father took it somewhat hardly at
first, for he held that more than sufficient misfortunes, to correct the
balance of prosperity in his favor, had already befallen him. But he was
deeply attached to his daughter, and her magical change under the new
and radiant revelation convinced him that she had now awakened to an
emotional fulness of life which could only be the outward sign of love.
That she was in love for the first time also seemed clear; but he would
not give his consent until he had seen her lover and heard all there was
to know about him. That, however, did not alarm Mary, for she
believed that Thomas May must prove a spirit after Sir Walter's heart.
And so he did. The sailor was a gentleman; he had proposed without
the faintest notion to whom he offered his penniless hand, and when he
did find out, was so bewildered that Mary assured her father she
thought he would change his mind.
"If I had not threatened him with disgrace and breach of promise, I do
think he would have thrown me over," she said.
And now they had been wedded for six months, and Mary sat by the
great log fire with her hand in Tom's. The sailor was on leave, but
expected to return to his ship at Plymouth in a day or two. Then his
father-in-law had promised to visit the great cruiser, for the Navy was a
service of which he knew little. Lennoxes had all been soldiers or
clergymen since a great lawyer founded the race.

The game of billiards proceeded, and Henry caught his uncle in the
eighties and ran out with an unfinished fifteen. Then Ernest Travers and
his wife - old and dear friends of Sir Walter - played a hundred up, the
lady receiving half the game. Mr. Travers was a Suffolk man, and had
fagged for Sir Walter at Eton. Their comradeship had lasted a lifetime,
and no year passed without reciprocal visits. Travers also looked at life
with the eyes of a wealthy man. He was sixty-five, pompous, large, and
rubicund - a "backwoodsman" of a pattern obsolescent. His wife, ten
years younger than himself, loved pleasure, but she had done more than
her duty, in her opinion, and borne him two sons and a daughter. They
were colorless, kind-hearted people who lived in a circle of others like
themselves. The war had sobered them, and at an early stage robbed
them of their younger boy.
Nelly Travers won her game amid congratulations, and Tom May
challenged another woman, a Diana, who lived for sport and had joined
the house party with her uncle, Mr. Felix Fayre-Michell. But Millicent
Fayre - Michell refused.
"I've shot six partridges, a hare, and two pheasants to-day," said the girl,
"and I'm half asleep."
Other men were present also of a type not dissimilar. It was a
conventional gathering of rich nobodies, each a big frog in his own
little puddle, none known far beyond it and none with sufficient
intellect or ability to create for himself any position in the world save
that won by the accident of money made by their progenitors.
Had it been necessary for any of them to earn his living, only in some
very modest capacity and on a very modest plane might they have done
so. Of the entire company only one - the youngest - could claim even
the celebrity that attached to his little volume of war verses.
And now upon the lives of these every-day folk was destined to break
an event unique and extraordinary. Existence, that had meandered
without personal incident