"You will not," ordered her mistress. Even she had been young once.
"----Yes! glared at me as if you hated the sight of me!" insisted Olwen.
He said, "And weren"t you flirrrting with those two fellows, and simply out to make me wild?"
"No," said the girl, quietly and sincerely.
He could have clasped her for it. "Darling!" said his glance, but aloud he only retorted, "Maybe you were not out to do it, but you certainly pulled it off."
"As for _you_," continued Olwen, "weren"t you talking at me to Mrs.
Cartwright all the time at dinner?"
"No!" he retorted, flagrantly.
"You know you were! _All_ about Woman being the Plaything of Man!"
"Don"t rub it in," he entreated, with another glance down at this plaything so maddeningly near, yet not, perhaps, for him. Yes! If she had had the boldness of the kitten who strikes with soft paws at the Force which could annihilate her, he had the boding patience of that big dog who waits, sitting up, with the lump of sugar on his nose.
It was she who kept him so.... She was--oh, she was getting her own back now!
She broke off as if by the way, to ask him, "Let me see, what was the first thing--almost the first I ever heard you say.... _What_ sort of a judge of women are you?"
It is not true that the Scot is inevitably without a sense of humour. At that moment Fergus Ross saw even the joke against himself, since he thought it would appeal to her. He responded, "What was that about women? Something I"ve hairred in a drim?"
Relentless, Olwen repeated her demand. "What sort of a judge of women are you?"
He looked at her, threw up and shook his head with the action of a boxer who drops his hands as well.
"I guess I"m about as fine a judge of women as a baby is a judge of mothers," he told her, frankly and ruefully. "One he knows; his own. And herrrr he"s got to have!"
But she put it aside. _This_ wasn"t enough of a proposal! She harked back to that party at Mrs. Cartwright"s which had witnessed the last losing fight of this prisoner of hers, taken now with horse, foot and guns.
""What"s Love? An amus.e.m.e.nt,"" she quoted, mischievously, his words upon that occasion. "That"s what you said, four--no! only three days ago,"
she insisted, now feeling that she had got well into her stride and could keep this well-merited strafing of the young man for an hour yet.
"Yes! Just to be horrid to _me_! How you talked! All about how bored a man got "when some woman started in to Love" him----"
Here Olwen stopped, abruptly but too late. She coloured to the deep pink of the little coral brooch at her throat. She saw what she"d said.
So did he.
Very quickly the soldier took advantage of this break in the line of her defence.
"Ah!" His voice lifted. "Well, what of that? What has _that_ got to do with my being "horrid" to you? What----connection is there between you, and any woman starting in to love _me_?"
"Oh, _none_! I didn"t mean _that_," Olwen a.s.sured him, laughing flippantly, but dropping her eyes to gaze so hard at the carpet that only the top of the head was to be seen. Glossily black and shapely enough was the little head upon which Captain Ross had heaped, in his mind, every anathema as well as every endearment that he knew, but he was dashed if he was expected to read what she meant out of the mere top of it. So----
If, a month ago, some one had informed Captain Ross of the Honeycomb that he would ever be reduced for any possible reason, to go down on his knees on the floor at a woman"s feet, he would not have considered the idiotic prophecy was worth a laugh.
But his number was up.
Here he found himself kneeling on the carpet at Olwen"s feet just because there seemed no other way at that moment of getting a really satisfactory glimpse of Olwen"s face.
"Now! my lady," he began, firmly.
But just as he"d thought he meet her eyes squarely she turned her head sidewards and directed that bright gaze of hers, as she"d often done before, over his shoulder and away. She was ready to glance at the blaze of the log fire, at the wall-paper, at the oval china frame all garlands and Loves of the standing mirror, at the large portrait of Professor Howel-Jones in his robes, at anything, yes! anything rather than at the (late) finest judge of women in Europe, at her feet. It was too much.
The pent-up, exasperated longing of months broke out in six words.
"Look at me, you little demon! _look_ at me----"
But even now she did not look; how could she, when she had shut her eyes before the change that had come into his own?
He caught her to him. With his one arm slung about her, he put a scorching kiss upon her throat, under her ear. Then he took her chin in his hand and turned her face round; he kissed the childishly red mouth until little Olwen, all shy and aflame, felt that the shape of his own would be moulded upon her lips.
For all his theorizings, his protestations, his boastings about Love, he was yet a lover ... or perhaps it would be truer to say a lover at last.
As for her.... The whole of her girl"s nature seemed to stretch out gleeful hands to the gift that he made to her--of herself. Till now she had resembled--what? The sea-anemone that for weary hours of low-tide has waited self-contained and folded into itself upon its rock, an inert lump.... At last the warm waves rise, and lo! the rosy fingers spread to welcome its own element have turned it to a lovely thing, a star-shaped flower of flesh.
Into her sigh of delight he heard her murmur, "No! I _mustn"t_----"
"Mustn"t what?" muttered the strange voice of him who was no longer the Captain Ross of this story, but the Fergus of their love-tale that was beginning.
And in Love, after all, all"s well that begins well. (Even though there was no real "proposal" after all.)
He coaxed, "Mustn"t what, Honey?"
"Mustn"t like you any _more_, or you won"t like me as _much_!"
It was Woman"s dearly-bought wisdom----but he laughed at it until his teeth gleamed across his vivid face.
She? Do anything he would not like? Even if she loved him and showed it, even that could not cool this man off, now he knew. The chit had got him going sure enough. Whatever she did or said only added to her attraction, to her long-contested, her triumphant, her Disturbing Charm!
POSTSCRIPT
THE CHARM CONFESSED
With regard to the three words with which the last chapter closed:
The Disturbing Charm....
What was its story, after all, apart from the tangled stories of those people into whose lives it twined its thread of rose colour?
Perhaps it was all summed up in a letter that came, one February morning of Nineteen-Eighteen, to Professor Howel-Jones.
The old botanist was sitting in his study. It was a wide, cleared room with a table as chaotic as that had been at Les Pins, set, as at Les Pins, before a window; but the view here was not of a lagoon with a belt of dunes and a lighthouse. It showed the roofs of Liverpool.