With Edged Tools | Page 8

detailed the very words they had used, and to Millicent Chyne it did not sound like a real quarrel such as might affect two lives to their very end. It was not important. It did not come into her life; for at that moment she did not know what her life was.
"And so," said Jack Meredith, finishing his story, "we have begun badly--as badly as the most romantic might desire."
"Yes, theoretically it is consoling. But I am sorry, Jack, very sorry. I hate quarrelling with anybody."
"So do I. I haven't time as a rule. But the old gentleman is so easy to quarrel with, he takes all the trouble."
"Jack," she said, with pretty determination, "you must go and say you are sorry. Go now! I wish I could go with you."
But Meredith did not move. He was smiling at her in evident admiration. She looked very pretty with that determined little pout of the lips, and perhaps she knew it. Moreover, he did not seem to attach so much importance to the thought as to the result--to the mind as to the lips.
"Ah!" he said, "you do not know the old gentleman. That is not our way of doing things. We are not expansive."
His face was grave again, and she noticed it with a sudden throb of misgiving. She did not want to begin taking life seriously so soon. It was like going back to school in the middle of the holidays.
"But it will be all right in a day or two, will it not? It is not serious," she said.
"I am afraid it is serious, Millicent."
He took her hand with a gravity which made matters worse.
"What a pity!" she exclaimed; and somehow both the words and the speaker rang shallow. She did not seem to grasp the situation, which was perhaps beyond her reach. But she did the next best thing. She looked puzzled, pretty, and helpless.
"What is to be done, Jack?" she said, laying her two hands on his breast and looking up pleadingly.
There was something in the man's clear-cut face--something beyond aristocratic repose--as he looked down into her eyes--something which Sir John Meredith might perhaps have liked to see there. To all men comes, soon or late, the moment wherein their lives are suddenly thrust into their own hands to shape or spoil, to make or mar. It seemed that where a clever man had failed, this light- hearted girl was about to succeed. Two small clinging hands on Jack Meredith's breast had apparently wrought more than all Sir John's care and foresight. At last the light of energy gleamed in Jack Meredith's lazy eyes. At last he faced the "initiative," and seemed in no wise abashed.
"There are two things," he answered; "a small choice."
"Yes."
"The first and the simplest," he went on in the tone of voice which she had never quite fathomed--half cynical, half amused--"is to pretend that last night--never was."
He waited for her verdict.
"We will not do that," she replied softly; "we will take the other alternative, whatever it is."
She glanced up half shyly beneath her lashes, and he felt that no difficulty could affright him.
"The other is generally supposed to be very difficult," he said. "It means--waiting."
"Oh," she answered cheerfully, "there is no hurry. I do not want to be married yet."
"Waiting perhaps for years," he added--and he saw her face drop.
"Why?"
"Because I am dependent on my father for everything. We could not marry without his consent."
A peculiar, hard look crept into her eyes, and in some subtle way it made her look older. After a little pause she said:
"But we can surely get that--between us?"
"I propose doing without it."
She looked up--past him--out of the window. All the youthfulness seemed to have left her face, but he did not appear to see that.
"How can you do so?"
"Well, I can work. I suppose I must be good for something--a bountiful Providence must surely have seen to that. The difficulty is to find out what it intends me for. We are not called in the night nowadays to a special mission--we have to find it out for ourselves."
"Do you know what I should like you to be?" she said, with a bright smile and one of those sudden descents into shallowness which he appeared to like.
"What?"
"A politician."
"Then I shall be a politician," he answered, with loverlike promptness.
"That would be very nice," she said; and the castles she at once began to build were not entirely aerial in their structure.
This was not a new idea. They had talked of politics before as a possible career for himself. They had moved in a circle where politics and politicians held a first place--a circle removed above the glamour of art, and wherein Bohemianism was not reckoned an attraction. She knew that behind his listlessness of manner he possessed a