The Summons | Page 6

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 ?neas, 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 Luttrell could speak another word, the music crashed and all that assemblage was on its feet. The orchestra was playing the Swedish National Anthem; and upon that, one after the other, followed the hymns of the peoples who had taken part in the Games. In turn the representatives of each people stood and resumed their seat, the music underlining their individuality and parking them in sections, even as rivalry had parked them in the Stadium. The majestic anthem of Russia, the p?an of the Marseillaise, the livelier march of Italy, the song of Germany, the Star-Spangled Banner; and long before the band struck into the solemn rhythm of "God save the King," Stella Croyle at all events knew that Calypso had lost. For she saw a flame illumine Luttrell's face and transfigure him. He had slipped out of her reach. The doubts and perplexities which had so troubled him during the last months were now resolved. As he listened to the Hymns, he saw as in