It would be a wild adventure to feel herself alone and independent in this welter of London, and then, more thrilling still, to burst in upon her Great High Belovedest, not in his palace,--that, alas! he had given, up,--but in his Great High Mansion at Kilburn.
Where Kilburn was she had not the remotest idea; but it was somewhere in Fairy-land. The chauffeur would know; he seemed to know everything. The temptation overpowered her. She yielded. Orders were given to a bewildered and protesting maid. What would Lady Blount say?
“That 's a matter between Lady Blount and myself,” said Stella.
“I am going alone, Morris.” She had the gracious, but imperative, way of princesses. Morris dared argue no more. She attended her mistress to the door of the motor, and saw her driven away in prodigious state.
It was a glorious adventure. How could she have spoiled it by allowing the protection of a prosaic serving-maid? Hitherto she had not strayed alone beyond the confines of the gardens of the Channel House. Now she had the thrill of the first mariner who lost sight of land. She was on an unknown sea, bound for a port of dreams. Of the port she knew nothing definite. Since the dispersion of the apocryphal palace household, John had told her little of his domestic life. The old habit of deception had been too strong, and her other intimates had entered into the conspiracy of silence. Why trouble her with accounts of his Aunt Gladys, of whom she had never heard; of Unity, of whom it were best that she should not hear; of the poor, little, economical establishment,--Unity at the head, watching the pennies--which, together with the one in Fulham, was all that his means allowed him to maintain? All her life he had been to Stellamaris the prince eating off gold plate. _Cui bono_, to whose advantage and to what end, should he break the illusion and confess to chipped earthenware? Although she now recognized (to her sadness) the palace story as overlapping the fable, and set Lilias and Niphetos side by side with the cat Bast and the dog Anubis in the shrine of myth, yet her ingenuous fancy still pictured Risca as the writer of compelling utterances which caused ministers of state to clutch their salaries with trembling fingers and potentates to quake on their thrones. And she still imagined a fitting environment for such a magnifico. On his private life during the week, outside his work, she scarcely speculated. For her it was spent at Southcliff from Saturday to Monday. It was difficult to realize that Southcliff was not the world.