The Summons | Page 3

the card-rooms of our clubs--we are jolly fine
fellows--and no good. You don't belong, and should get out while you
can."
Luttrell moved uncomfortably in his chair.
"That's all very well. But there's another side to the question," he said,
and from the deck above a woman's voice called clearly down the
stairway.
"Aren't you two coming?"
Both men looked towards the door.
"That side," said Hardiman.
"Yes."
Hardiman nodded his head.
"Stella Croyle doesn't belong either," he said. "But she kicked over the
traces. She flung out of the rank and file. Oh, I know Croyle was a
selfish, dull beast and her footprints in her flight from him were littered
with excuses. I am not considering the injustice of the world. I am
looking at the cruel facts, right in the face of them, as you have got to
do, my young friend. Here Stella Croyle is--with us--and she can't get
away. You can."
Luttrell was not satisfied. His grey eyes and thin, clean features were
troubled like those of a man in physical pain.

"You don't know the strange, queer tie between Stella Croyle and me,"
he said. "And I can't tell you it."
Hardiman grew anxious. Luttrell had the look of a man overtrained, and
it was worry which had overtrained him. His face was a trifle too
delicate, perhaps, to go with those remorseless sharp decisions which
must be made by the men who win careers.
"I know that you can't go through the world without hurting people,"
cried Hardiman. "Neither you nor any one else, except the limpets. And
you won't escape hurting Stella Croyle, by abandoning your chances.
Your love-affair will end--all of that kind do. And yours will end in a
bitter, irretrievable quarrel after you have ruined yourself, and because
you have ruined yourself. You are already on the rack--make no doubt
about it. Oh, I have seen you twitch and jump with irritation--how
many times on this yacht!--for trumpery, little, unimportant things she
has said and done, which you would never have noticed six months ago;
or only noticed to smile at with a pleased indulgence."
Luttrell's face coloured. "Why, that's true enough," he said. He was
remembering the afternoon a week ago, when the yacht steamed
between the green islands with their bathing stations and châlets, over a
tranquil, sunlit sea of the deepest blue. Rounding a wooded corner
towards sunset she came suddenly upon the bridges and the palace and
the gardens of Stockholm. The women of the party were in the saloon.
A rush was made towards it. They were summoned to this first
wonderful view of the city of beauty. Would they come? No! Stella
Croyle was in the middle of a game of Russian patience. She could play
that game any day, every day, all day. This exquisite vision was
vouchsafed to her but the once, and she had neglected it with the others.
She had not troubled, even to move so far as the saloon door. For she
had not finished her game.
Luttrell recalled his feeling of scorn; the scorn had grown into
indignation; in the end he had made a grievance of her indifference to
this first view of the city of Stockholm; a foolish, exasperating
grievance, which would rankle, which would not be buried, which
sprang to fresh life at each fresh sight of her. Yes, of a certainty, sooner

or later Stella Croyle and he would quarrel, so bitterly that all the king's
horses and all the king's men could never bring them again together;
and over some utterly unimportant matter like the first view of
Stockholm.
"Youth has many privileges over age," continued Hardiman, "but none
greater than the vision, the half-interpreted recurring vision of wider
spaces and greater things, towards which you sail on the wind of a great
emotion. Sooner or later, a man loses that vision and then only knows
his loss. Stay here, and you'll lose it before your time."
Luttrell looked curiously at his companion, wondering what manner of
man he had been in his twenties. Hardiman answered the look with a
laugh. "Oh, I, too, had my ambitions once."
Luttrell folded the cablegram which Hardiman had written out and
placed it in the breast pocket of his dinner-jacket.
"I will talk to Stella to-night at dinner. Then, if I decide to send it, I can
send it from the hotel over there at the landing-steps before we return to
the yacht."
Sir Charles Hardiman rose cumbrously with a shrug of his shoulders.
He had done his best, but since Luttrell would talk the question over
with Stella Croyle, shoulder to shoulder with her amongst the lights and
music, the perfume of her hair in his nostrils and the pleading of her
eyes within his sight--he,