Tod made another friend that summer, a Mr. Lavender, who kept a quiet little tobacco shop in Greek Street, behind Caroline Crescent. Mr. Lavender made a living by selling pipes and tobacco, but in the life that mattered he was a naturalist and a lover of birds. He was a big, fair, quiet man with a soft voice and blue eyes that were always ready to smile, a great placid, lovable creature, a born countryman and hunter of the woods and uplands, an idler by rivers, one of the few who cared more for life than for money. As an ornithologist he was no mean authority, and it is probable that he was the best read man in Shaston. He read because he loved good books, and not with the spirit of Fred Cragg, who wanted to collect information, borrowed stones and brilliants with which to dazzle fools. Mr. Lavender had lost his egotism in the great lap of Nature. He knew things that Frederick Cragg would never know—because Life was his book, Life that cares nothing for the intellectual vanities of the fussily clever people.

Tod bought his first pipe from Mr. Lavender, but their friendship began when Tod discovered by some chance that Mr. Lavender had known his father.

“I should think I did know him! We had a tramp’s holiday together twenty-five years ago. Your father was one of the rare birds.”

“In what way?” Tod asked, intensely interested.

“Cared for the real things. Money was dirt to your father, useful dirt, just what it should be.”

“My mother used to say that my father ought to have been a great man.”

“He was a great man, but he wasn’t a successful one according to modern standards. There’s a difference.”

Tod supposed there was; and in the course of a few weeks he and Mr. Lavender became close friends.

Tom Lavender spent each Sunday in the country. He would take the early train for Bidhurst or Willoborough, and walk five and twenty miles before sunset, carrying a haversack, a pair of field-glasses and a stout ash stick. He would lie in a ditch or under a tree for an hour, watching some bird, and sometimes he turned into a village church and joined in the service. There was not a wild flower that he could not tell you the name of, and he could spin all sorts of fascinating yarns about the life of an ant or a bee. Nor was he a mere naturalist. He had a sense of colour and of atmosphere, a love of landscape and an eye for all the strangeness of beauty.

He made a disciple of Tod, and they spent many Sundays together tramping the lanes and the field-paths and watching the life of the woods. Tod learnt many things from old Tom Lavender: the tricks of the squirrel, the notes and plumage of shy and elusive birds, how the woodpecker earns his living, where bumble bees live, how trees should be grown, how to tell an adder, where to look for plovers’ eggs, where trout might still be found; but the most precious picture of all was the picture of old Lavender himself. Tod was the better for having realised the gentleness and the wisdom of the old man. Lavender gave his youth a new outlook on life, a new choice, a new understanding. Here was a man who loved things for themselves, who despised money and pitied greed, a man who was not feverish, and to whom the world could offer no bribe.

“It’s up to all of us to choose,” he told Tod. “There are two ways of owning things—by loving them and not wanting to put them in your pocket, or by grabbing Life and trying to sell it. It’s up to all of us to choose.”

“I don’t want a lot of money,” said Tod.

“Somebody else may.”

“Who?”

“The woman you marry.”

Tod had not thought of that.

“Why should she?”

“Women like a man to be successful. In the old days you got a horse and knocked over other men, or you went on a great adventure. Success and money are synonymous nowadays.”

“I shan’t marry a girl like that. Besides, my mother loved my father.”

“She wasn’t a money fool. She thought of the inside of her man before she thought of the furniture.”

“That’s true,” said Tod.

So life promised well for Julian Burgetrode’s protégé. He had his feet on the upland track and his eyes on the clear sky ahead of him. He was healthy in body and mind, and he seemed in a fair way to escape the two things that damn a young man most, cheap women and cheap money. He played a good deal of tennis that summer, and he played much of it with Bertha Cragg. He had joined the local club and had become something of an expert.

He was known among the gossips as “Bertha’s boy.” The middle-class young women were making a jest of it, but Tod was the most innocent thing on earth just then.

Bertha knew.

But Bertha Cragg was not an average young woman. There was a fineness about her, a reticence, a shrewdness that could watch and wait. She understood Tod, glimpsed him as a healthy wholesome, delightful boy whose whole attention was concentrated on the life outside him, on doing things, and on doing them well. He was deep in his book of adventure, his Crusoe story, and there was no woman in it. Some day a ship would heave-to off Crusoe’s Island, the ship of sex, and Bertha Cragg hoped to be the young mistress of that ship.

She loved Tod very dearly, but she hid her love so well that he never caught the sheen of it. She wanted him to come to her, to open his eyes to her and find that she had played herself into his life.

“Dear Bertha is growing quite pretty.”

Old ladies made that remark to her mother, and it was true.

She had a mass of fine dark hair, good teeth, very pleasant eyes, and the bloom of her sex was upon her. She took great trouble with her dress, wore the neatest of shoes, and was never gaudy.

Yet Tod remained blind. He liked her better than any other girl in Shaston, and he liked her so well and in such a fashion that she wondered whether he would go on liking her in that way till—— But Bertha always shrank from the thought of the other girl who might swoop in and carry Tod off in a night’s flirtation. She bore with the beastly gossip and the sniggers and the knowledge that she was being watched by the merciless eyes of competing flappers. She was always frank and merry with Tod. She was his playmate, his sports-woman; and her dream was that some day he would look into her eyes and discover the woman.

They entered at the local tournament as partners in the mixed doubles, and they won.

Tod had been so keen on winning. Their last match was an uphill affair against a pair who were the local experts. Tod, over zealous, had struck an uncertain and eccentric patch, and was smashing into the net and putting his drives out of the court. It was the girl who steadied him and pulled them through.

“You’re worrying too much——”

“I know. I’m a silly rabbit; I want you to win.”

“I shan’t be cross if we don’t. Let’s stonewall for a while.”

They did, and Tod’s serenity came back. Bertha was returning everything with that beautiful forehand drive of hers, and finding the side lines with nearly all her shots.

“Set all, four all!”

“We are going to beat them, Tod.”

She wanted to call him “dear.”

And beat them they did, Bertha making the finishing stroke with a crisp volley down the centre of the court. Tod had turned to her with an exultant, happy face, “Oh, great shot!” and had tossed his racket in the air.

He was almost the lover as they walked off the court together, and the woman in her thrilled.

“You won it, you know. I should have been all over the place but for you.”

She laughed softly and coloured.

“We never annoy each other, do we?”

“Rather not! I say, you must be tired. Come over here and sit down, and I’ll get you something to drink.”

She was very happy when he made her put on her white blanket-coat.

She was very happy, too, when they took the prize, and Tod made an ingenuous and half-shy little speech.

“My partner did it. She was the best player on the court.”

And some chit remarked to a friend:

“I believe she’s hooked him at last.”

But Tod remained as platonic and as innocent as ever, her playmate and nothing more. The winter arrived, and he bought a dress-suit, took dancing lessons and learnt to play bridge. He was popular and had nice manners, and it leaked out that some very influential person was interested in him. The tennis club carried on weekly subscription dances during the winter, and Tod danced a great deal with Bertha Cragg. He danced with other girls also, and she made a point of being very gay whenever Tod had other partners. There were certain girls whom she hated, mischievous little wretches who made eyes at Tod, and were quite ready to make Bertha look a fool.

In fact, there was a game played by several of them, and they called it “Bagging Bertha’s boy.” It did not prove to be a very successful game, because Tod appeared to be so preposterously unsentimental and so loyal to his comrade.

“You dance better than anyone else,” he told her; “most girls seem to be such silly fools.”

Perhaps it was inevitable that Mrs. Rathbone Cragg should intervene. She had eyes and ears and a maternal pride, and she was very fond of her daughter. Nor had she any spite against Tod; she was quite ready for him to become engaged to her girl. That was just it: the relationship needed labelling, giving proper social significance.

She spoke to Bertha, and there was a quarrel. Mrs. Cragg had not thought of quarrelling, but it happened. Some women are very sensitive.

“But, my dear, it can’t go on like this. You must realise that you are getting talked about. It’s not nice. I know the boy is thoughtless——”

“I’m in love with him,” said the daughter with a queer, hard frankness.

“My dear child, that may be, but you ought to make him realise——”

Bertha flared out with sudden passion.

“You mean, I ought to do what most girls would do, grab him for myself and land him on the sentimental hook. I know it could be done; he’s such a dear boy, and sensitive. But I won’t.”

“You prefer to make a fool of yourself? Really, you are old enough——”

Bertha stood up.

“Mother, I have got a sort of pride that you don’t understand. I’m not going to be clever with Tod; I love him in a better way than that. I want him to come to me, if he is to come at all. As for all the beastly gossip, it is not going to make me a little cad. I’m his friend; I can’t help it—if I am not yet anything else.”

She was much moved, and almost in tears when she reached the door. Her mother, a good soul in spite of all her conventionality, jumped up and held out her hands.

“Bertha dear, we ought not to quarrel. You always were such a proud child.”

“I can’t help it, Mother.”

“Don’t you think it may be that Tod doesn’t realise? I know you have never helped him to realise, and he has seen so much of you. If you were to make a kind of little break—like taking something away from a child so that he missed it and found out how much he wanted it?”

Bertha looked straight into her mother’s eyes.

“Perhaps. To please you, I’ll try. Supposing I go and stay with Aunt Ethel for a month?”

Mrs. Cragg kissed her.

“The very thing,” she said.

If Tod had had more personal vanity he might have discovered Bertha’s secret. She went away to her aunt who lived at Surbiton, and Tod managed to see her off at the station, a piece of boyish courtesy that clouded the issue. He was not conscious of any gap in his life when Bertha Cragg had gone. He did his work, played his games, took his food with the usual zest, and went out with Thomas Lavender on Sundays, for the country was never dead to old Lavender; he loved it wet and he loved it fine. Tod danced once a week, and Mrs. Cragg had him to “Clovelly” to play bridge. She was rather motherly and mysterious with Tod, but Tod remained the most healthily unsubtle young idiot, and most ingenuously blind.

The Horroxes were giving a big dance after the New Year, and Bertha wrote to Tod to ask him if he would go with her. Each girl was taking a man. Tod accepted, and thought no more about it. He liked dancing with Bertha Cragg because it always seemed so easy, and he had not to chatter; they both loved dancing for itself, the quick glide of their youth together and the lilt of the music. There had never been any mystery in it to Tod, no quiver of madness in the nearness of her, in the whiteness of her shoulders or the smell of her hair. She had not the spark to set him alight, and that was her woman’s tragedy.

Bertha did not return to Shaston till the day before the dance, and she did not see Tod until he came up to “Clovelly” to share her cab. She had brought a new dress with her from town, a most beautiful rose silk thing, and she had spent more than an hour in dressing. It was her “Flaming June,” her challenge of the youth in him, the conscious and romantic assertion of the sex in her. She had scented her hair, and fastened a spray of roses in her dress, and as she came down the stairs a little pair of silver shoes flashed in and out under the rose-red skirt.

Tod was waiting for her in the hall. He was glad to see Bertha, but it was a sort of brother gladness, a cheerful “Hope-you-have-a-good-time” welcome. There was no mystery about him. He took her black velvet cloak and placed it over his shoulders.

“Very good of you to ask me to come,” he said; “the cab is waiting. Do you think you’ll be warm enough in that thing?”

“Quite,” she answered very calmly, and smiling at her mother who had come into the hall to see them off.

“Mind you take great care of her, Tod.”

“Of course I shall,” said Tod.

“I think we were lucky to get her back safely from Surbiton. She was rather gay there.” And Mrs. Cragg smiled mysteriously and conspiringly at Tod.

Bertha betrayed a moment’s impatience. She loathed being advertised.

“Time we were off. Come along, Tod.”

It is probable that that was the most unhappy evening the girl had ever spent. Tod sat like “good dog Tray” in the cab, and talked like a brother. The dance was a very sumptuous affair, for old Horrox had plenty of money and knew how to spend it. He liked “display,” and the Regent’s Hotel knew how to cater for people with social vanity. The string band had been brought from town, and the room was decorated with rambler roses. To do the unexpected and the expensive thing in the middle of winter was an extravagance old Horrox loved. He had been an expert at window-dressing in the days of his youth.

“Aren’t the roses lovely?”

“They are just the colour of your dress,” said Tod.

That was the only suggestively personal remark he made to her during the evening. The interlude had taught him nothing. She was still his playmate and nothing more, and he was as much at his ease with her as though she were a man. She had hoped perhaps for a sudden and subtle shyness in this boy, a sense of strangeness, an unfamiliar “What has happened to you?” in his frank eyes. She gave him five dances, and he always welcomed the return of their partnership, but he did not come to her with the look of a lover, but with the air of a man calling her to a game.

She was strangely silent as they drove home in the cab, lying well back in her corner with a kind of languor. Tod was puzzled by her silence. He did not understand.

“Tired?”

“A little.”

“It’s nearly three, you know, and I’m called at seven.”

“Poor Tod!”

She was strangely gentle with him; all her bitterness was against herself. A sort of mother pathos softened her mood. She would not let him leave the cab when it reached “Clovelly.”

“No. You need not fuss about me. You can drive straight on to the terrace.”

“It’s been a jolly evening, hasn’t it?”

“Splendid! Good night!”

The cab rolled on, and Tod felt a healthy pleasure in the prospect of going to bed. Bertha Cragg was in her room, bending forward and looking at her face in her mirror. It was a plain face—a little drawn, tired, colourless, for the joy of life had left it. She felt that she hated that face of hers, hated it as she had never hated anything on earth before.

“You fool!”

Her hands went to the shoulder straps of that exquisite dress of hers, and ripped it relentlessly from bosom to waist.