WORLD'S END

The man looked at him, and then pretended to look on the back of the painting. The artist was not a well-known one, and the price was thirty-two hundred francs, or six hundred and forty dollars. "I will take it," Lanny said. "I will pay you two hundred francs down, and if you send the painting to the Hotel Crillon this evening, I will have the rest." The dealer knew then that he should have asked a higher price, but it was too late.

When Lanny told his father what he had done, the latter was much amused. "Do you want to take it to America?"

Lanny laughed in turn. "I thought Beauty and I ought to have it. I'll send it to her, and she can stick it away with Marcel's work."

"It's a queer sort of a present," said Robbie, "but if it's what you want, O.K. There are half a dozen paintings of Beauty somewhere in the world, and you might hunt them up." Then the shrewd businessman added: "Buy options for two years, and you'll get some bargains that'll surprise you. The franc has been pegged, but it won't hold after the war!"

VI

The tongues of the two young men were loosened and they talked about love. Lanny told of his happiness with Rosemary, now almost a year past. He didn't have a right to say how far they had gone - but he found that Rosemary had told Rick's sister, and she in turn had told Rick. These young people had few secrets; their "emancipation" took the form of voluminous talk, and it was a mark of enlightenment to employ the plainest words.

When Lanny said he hadn't been able to be interested in any other girl, Rick told him it was hard luck that he had aimed too high. "I mean," he added, hastily, "from the English point of view. Her family puts on a lot of side. Of course, it's all bally rot; perhaps we'll sack the lot of them before this war is over."

Lanny told what his father had said to Zaharoff, that it might end as it had in Russia; to which Rick replied in his free and easy way that he'd take his chances with a new deal. He informed his friend that the Codwilliger family was planning for Rosemary to marry the oldest grandson of the very old Earl of Sandhaven; the grandson was the future heir, since his father had been killed in the same siege of Gallipoli where Rosemary's father had been wounded. Lanny could see how useless it was for him to hope - that is, of course, from the English point of view. He gathered the impression that he had been greatly honored by having had the future mother of an earl for a temporary sweetheart.

It was Rick's turn to open his heart. "I've been meaning to tell you, Lanny - I'm married."

"What?" cried the other, amazed.

"The night before I left for France. It's quite a long story. If you want to hear it - "

"Oh, do I, Rick!"

The baronet's son had come to London to enlist in the Royal Flying Corps, and at the home of one of his school friends had met a girl just his age, a student at a college not far from his training camp. They had hit it off together, and used to meet whenever Rick had free time. "We talked about love," he said, "and I told her I'd never had a girl. Of course all the chaps want to have one before they go to the front - and all the girls want to have them, it seems. She said she'd try it with me, and we were both quite happy - only of course there wasn't very much time."

Rick paused. "And then?" said Lanny.

"Well, I knew I was going across in a week or so; and Nina - her name is Nina Putney - told me she wanted to have a baby. I mightn't come back - lots of the fellows have been downed on their first flight."

"I know," said Lanny.

"I said: 'What will you do, alone?' And she said: 'I know what I want. I can take care of it somehow.' She has a sister who's an interior decorator, and would take her in. You know people don't pay so much attention to illegitimacy in wartime; they make excuses. And Nina broke down - she said she had to have something to remember me by. I couldn't very well say no."

"Is she going to have it?"

"So she writes me."

"You married her before that?"

"I thought I ought to tell the pater; if he was going to have a grandchild, he'd want to be sure about it. He looked up the family and found out they were all right - I mean, what he calls all right-so then he said we ought to get married. So we got a special license and went over to the church, the night before I reported for duty."

"Oh, Rick, what a story! Do you think she's a girl you'll be happy with?"

"I suppose we've as good a chance as most couples. Nina's game, and says she'll never hold me to it. She swears she wasn't trying to rope me in, and if I ever say it, she'll drop me flat." The young flying officer smiled a rather wry smile.

"You're supposed to be something of a catch, aren't you, Rick - I mean from the English point of view?"

Rick could talk about the social position of the Codwilliger family, but not of the Pomeroy-Nielsons. "The pater says we'll lose The Reaches if they keep piling war taxes on him. And what price a baronet if you have to live in lodgings?"

VII