That little army of fashion which daily takes the air of the Bois rarely begins its invasion through the Porte Dauphine before mid-afternoon, and so the long, lofty avenues of what was once the ForÊt de Rouvray and the Parc de St. Ouen were as yet almost deserted. Through the city streets and the Champs ElysÉes, Muriel and von Klausen had chatted in sporadic commonplaces, but when their open carriage, driven by a stolid coachman seated well ahead of his passengers, passed the Chinese Pavilions and turned to the left into the wide Route de Suresnes, a strained silence fell upon the pair. For fully ten minutes neither spoke, and then the horses slackened their pace upon the Carrefour du Bout des Lacs.

"Shall we walk?" asked von Klausen.

Muriel hesitated.

"Why?" she enquired.

"It is beautiful, the promenade here," explained von Klausen. "It is the most picturesque portion of the Bois, though none of the artificiality of the Bois well compares with the nature of my own country, which you have been good enough to visit."

His words roused her antagonism. She experienced a perverse impulse to contradict him. She looked out at the Lac InfÉrieur, with its shaded banks and its twin islands, on one of which stood a little restaurant in imitation of a Swiss chalet. She was resolved to prefer this to his Austrian Tyrol, if for no better reason than that he claimed the Austrian Tyrol as his own.

"I like these woods better than your mountains," she declared.

"Better? But—why?"

"Your mountains are too lonely and fierce. These woods are pleasant and inviting."

"Good. We shall then accept their invitation," said von Klausen, smiling.

He leaped out and offered her his hand. Muriel, acknowledging herself fairly caught, lightly touched his hand and descended. The Captain turned to the driver.

"Meet us at the Cascade," he directed.

There was another moment of silence as they began their walk along the undisturbed path. Then the Austrian turned to his companion.

"I regret," he said, "that you are angry with me."

Muriel raised her fine dark brows. "I am not angry with you."

"Ah, yes, madame; you have been angry with me since we again met after your return from your visit to my country."

"You are quite mistaken." She almost convinced herself while she said this, and her tone certainly should have carried conviction to her companion. "I assure you that you are entirely mistaken. Indeed, I have not been thinking much about you one way or the other."

"I am sorry," said von Klausen.

"That I am angry? But I tell you that I am not angry."

"That you have been so angry as to banish me from your mind altogether."

"Did you bring me here to tell me this?" asked Muriel.

"Yes."

She had scarcely expected him to acknowledge it. She glanced quickly at his blond, boyish face and saw that it was absolutely serene.

"How dared you?" she gasped.

"I dared do no less," he answered. "I could no longer bear being, for a reason unexplained, in the book of your displeasure. I had to know."

"Well, you shan't know."

"You judge me, dear lady, without giving the accused an opportunity to plead in his own defence?"

"You are not accused—and you aren't judged."

"I wish," said von Klausen, slowly, "that I could believe you; but how is that possible?"

"Do you mean to say that I am not telling you the truth?"

"I mean, dear Mrs. Stainton, that I have no choice. You leave me none. Your words say one thing, but your tone, your manner, say another. To accept your truth in one of your expressions is to deny your truth in another of them."

Muriel bit her red under-lip.

"Let us go back," she said.

"I regret. The carriage has gone ahead."

They walked a few steps forward.

"You will, then, not explain?" he pleaded.

"I tell you there is nothing to explain. You are rude and you are presumptuous."

"Yet you have changed since our first acquaintance."

"You speak as if you had known me for a long time, Captain."

"For a short time I hoped that I knew you well."

"What nonsense!"

"Well enough it at least really was, for us to share a small secret, madame."

Muriel's eyes flashed.

"That is not fair!" she exclaimed. "You are referring to an incident that you know it is ungallant for you to mention."

Von Klausen bowed.

"Then I beg your pardon," he said; "but I insist that you forced me to the reference."

"I did not."

"You required an explanation of my statement that we had once a close acquaintanceship."

"I required nothing—and, anyway, you presumed upon the incident. It was the merest trifle."

Von Klausen fixed his steady blue eyes upon her.

"It was," he said, slowly, "a trifle that you chose not to confide to your husband."

She drew back from him. Her gaze was hot with indignation; her dusky cheeks were aflame.

"How low of you!" she cried.

But von Klausen only smiled his young, careless smile.

"To mention the truth?" he murmured.

"To bring up such a trifle—to trade on such a confidence—to make of an impulsive action and of the consequences of that action—you know—I told you at the time, and you must know—that I didn't mention the circumstances to my husband merely because to mention it would have been to betray your terror of the fog, and I thought that, as a soldier, you would not want your terror known."

"Ah—so you did think of me, then?"

"I shall never think of you again, at any rate."

They were now half-way along the Lac InfÉrieur. Under the arching trees in their new spring green and through the silence of the sunlit spring morning, there came to them the music of the falling water from the Carrefour des Cascades. Von Klausen leaned toward his unwilling companion. His lithe figure trembled, his pink cheeks burned; in his blue eyes there gleamed a fire that had been too long repressed.

"No!" he said, hoarsely. "You have thought of me since ever you touched my hand, Muriel, and you shall think of me always—think of me deeply. I cannot help what I say. I must say it. I must say it, and you must listen. I tell you now, once and forever—I tell you——"

Muriel felt only a torrent of emotions that she could in no wise understand. She was terribly angry; she was a little afraid; yet there was a fascination in this spectacle of a strong man with passions wholly unloosed—the first time that she had seen such a man so moved in spite of all the hampering harness of convention—and she was undeniably curious. Outraged, surprised, hurt, she nevertheless felt a certain sensation of flattery in her leaping heart: the not unsatisfactory knowledge that she had done this thing; that, in the last analysis, this soldier trained to discipline, this alien educated to respect marriage and to find beauty in the familiar types of his own land, had been goaded beyond endurance by her own body and soul into a rebellion against all his inherited traditions, into an overthrow of his inherent opinions. And beyond this, more vital than this, there was something else—something unguessed: the call of Youth to Youth, the demand of the young for the young, careless of racial difference, regardless of ancestral training, which, once unleashed, shatters every barrier of elaborately conceived convention.

Education is, however, a force that must be reckoned with. Even at the last, it will have its word.

"Stop!" said Muriel.

Von Klausen did not heed. He put out his hands to seize her.

"No," he declared; "I will not stop. If I stopped, I should think. I do not care to think. Now I see only how beautiful you are; now I see only a young girl bound to a husband in whom the tide of life runs low and slowly; now——"

Yet that reference to Stainton, a reference so characteristically Continental, proved the blow that shattered, at least for that time, the Austrian's spell. It struck upon the armour of the American reverence for humdrum domesticity, and the armour bent its edge.

Muriel recovered herself. The image of her husband as her husband was evoked before her mental eye. Anger and horror rose uppermost in her soul—and close under them, no doubt, a subtle and powerful consciousness of shame at the only partly realised feelings of the moment before.

She raised a trembling hand.

"I hate you!" she cried. "I hate you! Jim is as young and as strong as ever you are, and if I were to tell him about this, he would—I believe he would kill you."

Von Klausen smiled in ridicule or in disregard of such a suggestion; but the intense certainty of her tone had brought him to pause. His hands fell to his sides, and he stood before her breathing heavily.

"I once told you that I might be a coward in some things or before some phenomena of nature," he said, "and that may be; but I am afraid of no man that lives."

"You are afraid of this thing which you are doing," she answered: "afraid and ashamed."

"Not afraid."

"Ashamed, then." She softened, in spite of herself, as she looked at the splendid passion in his young face. "Ashamed of treating me in this way. Captain von Klausen, I love my husband."

It was simply said: so simply that it effected the desired result. Afterward, when he came to think it all over, he was by no means so deeply affected, but now, alone with her under the trees of that alley in the Bois, tossed in the surging trough of his immediate emotions, he did not, as he had said, care to think. He could, indeed, only feel, and the literal meaning of her words, he seemed in a flash to feel, was somehow inexplicably true.

Like a very echo to her words, he changed. His passion fell from him. His blue eyes softened. His entire aspect changed. A moment more and he was pleading forgiveness as earnestly as he had been pleading his love.

Oddly enough, she now listened favourably. For her part, Muriel could not understand why she did it, and yet, before she realised what she was doing, she found herself excusing his offence. Perhaps this was only the result of that flattery, that pleasant knowledge of how her own beauty had caused this outbreak, which she had experienced when the outbreak began. Perhaps it was a softer and tenderer phrase in that Call of Youth which she had heard a few minutes earlier. Whatever the reason, regard his offence as she would, she could not regard his repentance unmoved.

"Don't; please don't say any more about it," she heard herself murmuring. "We will forget it. I am sorry—very sorry. We will never speak of it again—not to ourselves—and not to anybody else."

"But we shall be friends?" he asked.

"Wait," she said. They had reached the Cascade and the carriage was before them. She let him help her into it and she noticed that his manner in offering her his hand was not the manner in which his hand had previously been offered. As the carriage started forward: "You will never speak so to me again?" she asked, her eyes turned away toward a herd of deer that was feeding in the forest upon her side of the road.

When one is young such promises are lightly made.

"Never," he vowed.

"And never," she kept it up, "refer in any way to anything about this affair to me?"

"Never again, dear lady."

"You should even stop thinking of me," she almost faltered, "in—in that way."

He pressed her hand ever so slightly.

"Ah," he said, "now you ask what my will cannot accomplish."

"But the thoughts are wrong."

"Yes, I understand that now. You have made me understand it. But I cannot sever from myself what has become a part of my mind; I can only master my tongue. Yet you need not fear me, nor need I fear myself. The good St. Augustine has said that we cannot control our desires, but he has not neglected to remind us that we can and must control our actions. I shall remember always his words."

She said nothing for awhile, but gradually he released her hand, and their talk, though still freighted with feeling, fell, or seemed to them to fall, upon trivial things.

"You did not stop in Marseilles?" he asked her, turning again to the subject of her fevered trip with Jim.

"We didn't get anywhere near it. I—we were in a hurry to get back to Paris. We—we thought it would be warmer in Paris."

"Warmer in Paris than Marseilles?"

"Well, warmer in Paris than in the snowstorms that met us when we crossed the Austrian border into Italy and didn't stop until they had driven us out of Italy. We didn't think about Marseilles, and so we came right back here."

"You were not far from Marseilles. It is a pity that you did not see it. It is one of the cities in France the most worth seeing. All the world goes there: Chinamen, Moors, Oriental priests and Malay sailors. You sit at a table before one of the cafÉs, of an evening in summer or of a Sunday afternoon in winter, anywhere along the CannebiÈre or the rue Noailles. I should much like to show you Marseilles sometime—you and your husband."

"Sometime, perhaps," said Muriel, "we shall go there, Mr. Stainton and I."

"But the best of Marseilles," pursued von Klausen, "is thirty miles and more away: a place that tourists miss and that only a few devout persons seem really to know. I mean the Sainte Baume."

She had never heard of it; and at once he began singing its praises.

"It is," he said, "a place that should be shrine for every soul that has sinned the sins of the flesh. It is on a plateau—the particular point that I mean—a plateau of precipitous mountains. Upon this plateau are set more mountains, and one of these, the highest, a sheer cliff, rises almost to the clouds. Nearly at its top, a precipice below and a precipice above, there is a great cave converted into a chapel. That cave is the grotto where the Sainte Marie MagdelÈne spent, in penance, the last thirty years of her life."

He stopped, his last sentence ending in an awed whisper.

Muriel was not unmoved by his reverence.

"You have been there, then?" she asked.

"Long, long ago," he answered, "as a boy. But now, when my heart hungers and my soul is tired, I dream of that spot—the silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau, which seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells from below, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."