The Summons | Page 6

deck and the launch throbbed at the
gangway. If a woman's glance had power, he would have been stricken
that instant. But she wasted no more than a glance upon the
worldly-wiseman at the head of their table. She turned again to the first
telegram.
"This is an answer, this cablegram from Cairo?"
"Yes."
"To a cable of yours?"
"Sent three days ago."
The answers she received were clear, unhesitating. It was a voice from
a rock speaking! So utterly mistaken was she; and so completely
Luttrell bent every nerve to the service of shortening the hour of misery.
The appalling moment was then actually upon her. She had foreseen
it--so she thought. But it caught her nevertheless unprepared as death
catches a sinner on his bed.
She stared at the telegrams--not reading them. His arguments and
prefaces--the Olympic Games, Discipline and the rest of it--what she
had caught of them, she blew away as so much froth. She dived to the
personal reason.
"You are tired of me."
"No," Luttrell answered hotly. "That's not true--not even a half-truth. If
I were tired of you, it would all be so easy, so brutally easy."
"But you are!" Her voice rose shrill in its violence. "You know you are
but you are too much of a coward to say so--oh, like all men!" and as
Luttrell turned to her a face startled by her outcry and uttered a
remonstrant "Hush!", she continued bitterly, "What do I care if they all
hear? I am impossible! You know that, don't you? I am quite
impossible! I have gone my own way. I am one of the people you

hate--one of the Undisciplined."
Stella Croyle hardly knew in her passion what she was saying, and
Luttrell could only wait in silence for the storm to pass. It passed with a
quickness which caught him at loss; so quickly she swept from mood to
mood.
He heard her voice at his ear, remorseful and most appealing. "Oh,
Wub, what have I done that you should treat me so?"
Sir Charles Hardiman, watchful of the duel, guessed from the
movement of her lips what she was saying.
"These nicknames are the very devil," he exclaimed, apparently about
nothing, to his startled neighbour. "The first thing a woman does when
she's fond of a man is to give him some ridiculous name, which doesn't
belong to him. She worries her wits trying this one and that one, as a
tailor tries on you a suit of clothes, and when she has got your fit, she
uses it--publicly. So others use it too and so it no longer contents her.
Then she invents a variation, a nickname within a nickname, and that
she keeps to herself, for her own private use. That's the nickname I am
referring to, my dear, when I say it's the very devil."
The lady to whom he spoke smiled vaguely and surmised that he might
be very right. For herself, she said, she had invented no nicknames;
which was to assert that she had never been in love. For the practice
seems invariable, and probably Dido in times long since gone by had
one for Æneas, and Virgil knew all about it. But since she was a
woman, it would be a name at once so absurd and so intimate that it
would never have gone with the dignified rhythm of the hexameter.
"Wobbles" had been the first name which Stella Croyle had invented
for Harry Luttrell, though by what devious process she had lighted
upon it, psychology could not have discovered. "Wub" was the
nickname within the nickname, the cherished sign that the two of them
lived apart in a little close-hedged garden of their own. Luttrell's eyes
were upon her as she spoke it. And she spoke it with a curious little
wistful pursing of soft lips so that it came to him winged with the
memory of all her kisses.

"Oh, Wub, must you leave me?" she pleaded in a breaking whisper.
"What will be left to me if you do?"
Luttrell dropped his forehead in his hands. All the character which he
had in those untried days bade him harden himself against the appeal.
But his resolution was melting like metal in a furnace. He tried to
realise the truth which Hardiman had uttered three or four hours before.
There would be sooner or later a quarrel, a humiliating, hateful quarrel
over some miserable trifle which neither Stella nor he would ever
afterwards forgive. But her voice was breaking with a sob in a whisper
at his ear and how could he look forward so far?
"Stella!"
He turned impulsively towards her.
"The game's up," reflected Sir Charles Hardiman at the end of the table.
"Calypso wins--no, by God!"
For before