The Summons | Page 5

fear to see those eyes glisten with tears--for she so seldom shed them!
And even more than the evidence of her pain he feared the dreadful
submission with which women in the end receive the stroke of fortune.
He had to meet her gaze now, however.
"I put off telling you," he began lamely.
"So that this evening of mine with you might not be spoilt," she
returned. "But, my dear, my evening was already spoilt before the
launch left the yacht gangway. I am not so blind."
Stella Croyle was at this date twenty-six years old; and it was difficult
to picture her any older. Partly because of her vivid colouring and
because she was abrim with life; partly because in her straightness of
limb and the clear treble of her voice, she was boyish. "What a pretty
boy she would make!" was the first thought until you noticed the slim
delicacy of her hands and feet, the burnish of gold on the dark wealth of
her hair, the fine chiselling of brow and nose and chin. Then it was seen
that she was all woman. She was tall and yet never looked tall. It
seemed that you could pick her up with a finger, but try and she warned
you of the weakness of your arm. She was a baffling person. She ran
and walked with the joyous insolence of eighteen, yet at any moment
some veil might be rolled up in her eyes and face to show you for one

tragic instant a Lady of Sorrows.
She leaned towards Luttrell, and as Hardiman had foreseen the perfume
of her hair stormed his senses.
"Tell me!" she breathed, and Luttrell, with his arguments and reasons
cut and dried and conned over pat for delivery, began nevertheless to
babble. There were the Olympic Games. She herself must have seen
how they were fatal to their own purpose. Troubles were
coming--battles behind the troubles. All soldiers knew! They knew this
too--the phrase of a young Lieutenant-Colonel lecturing at the Staff
College.
"Battles are not won either by sheer force or pure right, but by the one
or the other of those two Powers which has Discipline as its Chief of
Staff."
He was implying neither very tactfully nor clearly that he was on the
way to dwindling into an undisciplined soldier. But it did not matter in
the least. For Stella Croyle was not listening. All this was totally
unimportant. Men always went about and about when they had difficult
things to say to women. Her eyes never left his face and she would
know surely enough when those words were rising to his lips which it
was necessary that she should mark and understand. Meanwhile her
perplexities and fears grew.
"Of course it can't be that," she assured herself again and again, but
with a dreadful catch at her heart. "Oh no, it can't be that."
"That," was the separation which some day or another--after a long and
wondrous period--both were agreed, must come. But, consoling herself
with the thought that she would be prepared, she had always set the day
on so distant an horizon that it had no terrors for her. Now it suddenly
dismayed her, a terror close at hand. Here on this crowded balcony
joyous with lights and gay voices and invaded by all the subtle
invitations of a summer night above the water! Oh no, it was not
possible!

Luttrell put his hand to his breast pocket and Stella watched and
listened now with all her soul. More than once during dinner she had
seen him touch that pocket in an abstraction. He drew from it two
papers, one the cablegram which he had received from Cairo, the other
Hardiman's reply. He handed her the first of the two.
"This reached me this morning."
Stella Croyle studied the paper with her heart in her mouth. But the
letters would not be still.
"Oh, what does it mean?" she cried.
"It offers me service abroad."
Stella's face flushed and turned white. She bent her head over the
cablegram.
"At Cairo," she said, with a little gasp of relief. After all Cairo was not
so far. A week, and one was at Cairo.
"Further south, in the Sudan--Heaven knows where!"
"Too far then?" she suggested. "Too far."
"For you? Yes! Too far," Luttrell replied.
Stella lifted a tragic face towards him; and though he winced he met her
eyes.
"But you are not going! You can't go!"
Luttrell handed to her the second paper.
"You never wrote this," she said very quickly.
"Yet it is what I would have written."
Stella Croyle shot one swift glance at Sir Charles Hardiman. She had

recognised his handwriting. Hardiman was in Luttrell's cabin while the
rest of the party waited on the