The Brightener

								

quiet room where the Carstairs sat. They were not alone. An American
friend of the ex-cowboy was with them--(another self-made millionaire,
but a much better made one, of the name of Roger Fane)--and with him a
school friend of mine he was in love with, Lady Shelagh Leigh. Shelagh
ran to me with her arms out, but I pushed her aside. A darling girl, and
I wouldn't have done it for the world, if I had been myself!
She shrank away, hurt; and vaguely I was conscious that the dark man
with the tragic eyes--Roger Fane--was coaxing her out of the room. Then
I forgot them both as I turned to the Carstairs for news. I little
guessed how soon and strangely my life and Shelagh's and Roger Fane's
would twine together in a Gordian knot of trouble!
I don't remember much of what followed, except that a taxi rushed
us--the Carstairs and me--to the Grand Hotel, as fast as it could go
through streets filled with crowds shouting over one of those October
victories. Mrs. Carstairs--a mouse of a woman in person, a benevolent
Machiavelli in brain--held my hand gently, and said nothing, while her
clever old husband tried to cheer me with words. Afterward I learned
that she spent those minutes in mapping out my whole future!
You see, she knew what I didn't know at the time: that I hadn't enough
money in the world to pay for Grandmother's funeral, not to mention our
hotel bills!



       *       *       *       *       *
A clock, when you come to think of it, is a fortunate animal.
When it runs down, it can just comfortably stop. No one expects it to do
anything else. No one accuses it of weakness or lack of backbone because
it doesn't struggle nobly to go on ticking and striking. It is not
sternly commanded to wind itself. Unless somebody takes that trouble off
its hands, it stays stopped. Whereas, if a girl or a young, able-bodied
woman runs down (that is, comes suddenly to the end of everything,
including resources), she mayn't give up ticking for a single second.
She must wind herself, and this is really quite as difficult for her
to do as for a clock, unless she is abnormally instructed and
accomplished.
I am neither. The principal things I know how to do are, to look pretty,
and be nice to people, so that when they are with me they feel purry and
pleasant. With this stock-in-trade I had a perfectly gorgeous time in
life, until--Fate stuck a finger into my mechanism and upset the working
of my pendulum.
I ought to have realized that the gorgeousness would some time come to a
bad and sudden end. But I was trained to put off what wasn't delightful
to do or think of to-day, until to-morrow; because to-morrow could take
care of itself and droves of shorn lambs as well.
Grandmother and I had been pals since I was five, when my father (her
son) and my mother quietly died of diphtheria, and left me--her
namesake--to her. We lived at adorable Courtenaye Abbey on the
Devonshire Coast, where furniture, portraits, silver, and china fit for