T'S so nice—no, not nice, delicious!—to have you here again, Ella. James and I were saying so just now to one another"
The Duke, the Duchess, and Ella Carleton, a friend of long ago, were sitting on the terrace after luncheon. Miss Carleton had arrived at the Castle two days before, but the Duke had only that morning come home, so he had hardly seen her.
"Your being with us again seems to roll back the years," the Duchess went on in a feeling voice. Then, more lightly, she added, "And makes me feel quite ridiculously young again!"
Ella Carleton smiled; but it was such a sad, wistful smile that the Duke told himself that his dear Laura had not been very happily inspired as to that last remark of hers. The Duchess still looked young, in a sense surprisingly young, considering that, unlike the majority of her contemporaries, she made no effort to improve nature with the aid of rouge and lipstick. But the other woman looked like the wraith of the lovely girl who had been the Duchess's closest friend before her marriage.
In those far-off days Ella Carleton's abundant hair had been of that rare and exquisite tint which the French call blond cendré, and she had possessed the delicate rose-leaf complexion which sometimes, not always, goes with that sunny-tinted hair. True, her face still retained its perfect oval, and her blue eyes, if dimmed and tired-looking, were still beautiful. But she now had that indefinable, and in a woman, piteous, look, which can only be described as faded.
The Duke was not a very perceptive man, and he was not given to taking much notice of either people or things that did not concern him nearly. But now there did well up in his heart a feeling of sincere pity for one whose life, at the time he had first known her, had seemed likely to be happier than that falling to the lot of most mortals. She had been the cherished only daughter of a couple who, though not rich, had been in the position to give her many social advantages at that time still denied to the merely wealthy.
As he looked reflectively at his guest, Ella Carleton's host began to recall certain facts concerning her early life. He even remembered, vaguely, that the listless, delicate-looking woman now sitting by his wife's side could more than once have made a brilliant marriage. But her father had died when she was three-and-twenty, and her mother had had a long, lingering, most painful, illness, during the course of which Mrs. Carleton had, all unconsciously, acted with terrible selfishness, scarcely bearing her daughter out of her sight.
After the death of her mother, Ella, then being about thirty, had begun a wandering life, never going far from the beaten track, for such was not her nature, but spending more and more time away from England, till at last she had settled down for life, or so it seemed, in Italy. The outbreak of war had driven her home, and hard war-work had taken away the remnant of youth left to her. Then had come what had seemed a call to keep home for her childless widower brother in South America. But after two years he had died, leaving her lonely indeed.
Now she was back in England for good, throwing herself, with what energy was left to her, into the Girl Guide movement. This was somewhat curious, for Miss Carleton was gentle, abstracted in manner, and very fragile in appearance.
The Duke broke the long—he felt it the almost painful—silence, by saying suddenly, "Whom do you think I knocked up against yesterday afternoon, Laura?" And as, smiling, she shook her head, he went on, "Beau Saberer!"
A little to his surprise, the colour flew into his wife's face. "I thought he'd given up going anywhere," she observed. "Where did you meet him?"
"I was walking across the Green Park, and there was the poor chap sitting on a bench while some evening paper was being read aloud to him by a man-servant whom I remembered as his batman in the war. I spoke to him, of course, and I could see he was really glad to see me, so I sat down, and we had quite a long pow-wow. From what he let out I could see that he leads a queerly solitary life. But he kept his end up. He was always a plucky chap. All the same, there was a kind of"
He hesitated, and the Duchess supplied the words—"aftermath of bitterness? Oh, James, how well I can understand that."
"So can I. When one thinks of what he was like when we were all young together How I used to envy him!"
"He was a good bit older than you," observed the Duchess.
"When one's twenty-three, one longs to be twenty-nine," said the Duke sententiously. "And Beau doesn't look old, even now."
"Has Sir John Saberer been ill?" Miss Carleton asked the question in a quiet, toneless voice.