The Uttermost Farthing | Page 5

part
of provincial men of business, and of young officers in uniform, each
and all eager to prolong to the uttermost their golden moments in Paris;
more than one was engaged in taking an affectionate, deeply
sentimental farewell from a feminine companion who bore about her
those significant signs--the terribly pathetic, battered air of wear and
tear--which set apart, in our sane workaday world, the human
plaything.
The sight of these leave-takings made the American's face flush darkly;
it was hateful to him to think that Mrs. Pargeter must suffer, even for a
few moments, the proximity of such women--of such men. He felt a
violent shrinking from the thought that any one of these gay, careless
young Frenchmen might conceivably know Peggy--if only by sight--as

the charming, "elegant" wife of Tom Pargeter, the well-known
sportsman who had done France the signal honour of establishing his
racing stable at Chantilly instead of at Newmarket! The thought that
such an encounter was within the bounds of possibility made
Vanderlyn for a moment almost hope that the woman for whom he was
waiting would not come after all.
He cursed himself for a fool. Why had he not thought of driving her out
to one of the smaller stations on the line whence they could have
started, if not unseen, then unobserved?
But soon the slowly-growing suspicion that she, after all, was perhaps
not coming to-night, brought with it an agonising pang. Very suddenly
there occurred to him the horrible possibility of material accident. Mrs.
Pargeter was not used even to innocent adventure; she lived the
guarded, sheltered existence which belongs of right to those women
whose material good fortune all their less fortunate sisters envy. The
dangers of the Paris streets rose up before Vanderlyn's excited
imagination, hideous, formidable....
Then, quite suddenly, Margaret Pargeter herself stood before him,
smiling a little tremulously.
She was wearing a grey, rather austere tailor-made gown; it gave a
girlish turn to her slender figure, and on her fair hair was poised the
little boat-shaped hat and long silvery gauze veil which have become in
a sense the uniform of a well-dressed Parisienne on her travels.
As he looked at her, standing there by his side, Vanderlyn realised how
instinctively tender, how passionately protective, was his love for her;
and again there came over him the doubt, the questioning, as to why
she was doing this....
"Messieurs, mesdames, en voiture, s'il vous plaît! En voiture, s'il vous
plaît!"
He put his hand on her shoulder--her head was very little higher than
his heart--and guided her to the railway carriage which had been kept

for them.

II.
And now Laurence Vanderlyn and Margaret Pargeter were speeding
through the night, completely and physically alone as they had never
been during the years of their long acquaintanceship; and, as he sat
there, with the woman he had loved so long and so faithfully wholly in
his power, there came over Vanderlyn a sense of fierce triumph and
conquest.
The train had not started to time. There had come a sound of eager
talking on the platform, and Vanderlyn, filled with a vague
apprehension, had leaned out of the window and with some difficulty
ascertained the cause of the delay. The guard in charge of the train, the
man, that is, whom he had feed so well in order to secure privacy, had
strained his hand in lifting a weight, and another employé had had to
take his place.
But at last the few moments of waiting--to Vanderlyn they had seemed
an hour--had come to an end. At last the train began to move, that slow
and yet relentless movement which is one of the few things in our
modern world which spell finality. To the man and the woman it was
the starting of the train which indicated to them both that the die was
indeed cast.
Vanderlyn looked at his companion. She was gazing up at him with a
strange expression of gladness, of relief, on her face. The long years of
restraint and measured coldness seemed to have vanished, receded into
nothingness.
She held out her ringless hand and clasped his, and a moment later they
were sitting hand in hand, like two children, side by side. With a rather
awkward movement he slipped on her finger a thin gold ring--his dead
mother's wedding-ring,--but still she said nothing. Her head was turned
away, and she was staring out of the window, as if fascinated by the

flying lights. He knew rather than saw that her eyes were shining, her
cheeks pink with excitement; then she took off her hat, and he told
himself that her fair hair gleaming against the grey-brown furnishings
of the railway carriage looked like a golden aureole.
Suddenly Laurence Vanderlyn pressed the hand he was