For their first night in the new city they stopped at a minor hotel, because they were tired out by their dusty ride and turned naturally to the nearest resting-place that presented itself. The service, however, was poor, and their room close and hot. Muriel slept badly; she turned and tossed the whole night long. They decided to go, next day, to the Grand HÔtel du Louvre et de la Paix; but they began the morning by taking a drive along the Corniche, and there, on the white, curving road beside the blue water, which seemed to them the bluest water they had ever seen, they chanced upon a little villa that bore a sign announcing that this miniature house was to be let, furnished.

"Let's take it," said Muriel.

She was captivated by the beauty of the view, and she was weary of hotels.

"We may have only a short time in France," Jim cautioned her. "We may want to be getting back home when—when all's well again."

"They will surely be willing to rent it for a short time if we are willing to pay them a little more than they would ask on a long lease," Muriel serenely assured him.

Her prophecy proved correct, and they took the house. It was indeed a small house, but comfortable, and its new occupants found nothing in it to complain of. Muriel secured servants, and the Staintons moved in at once.

They were satisfied. Stainton was still showing the effects of their rush through Switzerland and Austria; he was showing, as a matter of fact, his age. Rugged he was and well-kept, and not, as the life of business-adventurers go, an old man; he was nevertheless not young for the career of emotion. He needed quiet, he required routine. As for Muriel, feverish because she was young indeed, and more feverish because she was trying to forget many things that a perverse memory refused to banish, she discovered that when she made concessions to domesticity, to which she was, nevertheless, unused, she became the prey to her own reflections and to her husband's too solicitous inquiry and care. It annoyed her that, at night, he saw that the covers were well over her shoulders; it annoyed her that he should tell her that beef would put roses into her cheeks; she did not want the covers about her shoulders and she did not like beef. Yet, though she still hungered for excitement, even she was glad of an interval for recuperation, and she was heartily sorry for Jim.

It was in one of these moments of her sorrow for him that he ventured to press once more the question of their return to New York. They were sitting on the balcony that opened from the first-floor windows of their villa, and were looking over the blue bay.

"Don't you think," he asked, "that we might get back next month?"

His tone was almost plaintive. In a child or a woman she would have thought it plaintive. She did not want to go back; she wanted never to see New York again, but she was touched by his appeal.

"Perhaps," she granted.

On the third morning of their stay, they drove into town and then out the rue de Rome and across the rue Dragon to the foot of the great hill on the top of which rises, from its ancient foundation, the modern monstrosity called Notre Dame de la Garde. They ascended in the open elevator the high cliff that fronts the rue Cherchell; then they climbed the broken flights of steps that lead to the church on the dome of which stands a gigantic, gilded figure of the Virgin.

The neo-Byzantine interior was cool and still, and they wandered for a quarter of an hour about the place, looking at the crude pictures of storm-tossed ships, the offerings of sailors saved from the clutches of the sea by their prayers to Our Lady of Rescue; at the models of other ships, similarly saved, suspended by cords from the golden ceiling; at the little tiles, from floor to roof, bearing testimony to prayers answered or to the making of other prayers.

"'We have prayed; we have waited; we have hoped,'" read Muriel, stopping before a small oblong of marble. "I wonder what it was," she mused, "that these people wanted."

Stainton had seated himself in a nearby chair.

"I don't know," he said; "but I hope they got it at last."

His words, lightly spoken, seemed cruel to her.

"Let's go outside," she answered, "and look at the view."

"Why hurry?" complained her husband. "It's so cool and comfortable in here."

"There must be a breeze on the terrace. There must always be a breeze out there."

"Well, run along. I'll follow in a few minutes. I want a rest."

Muriel's lips tightened.

"Very well," she said.

She went out to the walled walk that surrounds the church and strolled to the side overlooking the bay.

Far below her, shimmering in the heat, stretched the city, like a panting dog at rest. To the right, across the forest of minor shipping in the vieux port, to the rue Clary and the Gare Maritime, the massed houses of the Old Town stood grim and grey. Directly before her, from the foot of the wall and for miles to the left, across the CitÉ Chabas and the Quartier St. Lambert, to Roucas-Blanc and beyond to Rond Point, where the Prado meets the sea, the hills fell away to the water in terraces of cypress and olive trees and pomegranates in blossom. From dark green to white the foliage waved in a pleasant breeze. The villas on the slopes shone pink in the sun. The sky was of a most intense blue; the lapping waves of the bay mirrored the sky, and in the midst of the waves, among its rocky sister islands, rose the castellated strip of land where towers the ChÂteau d'If.

She leaned upon the parapet and looked out to the distant horizon. The breeze rose and rumpled those strands of her dark hair that had fallen below her wide hat. She was thinking of another landscape—of a landscape of which she had only heard:

"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plateau that seems a world away; the snow-capped mountains to the northward; the faint tinkle of the distant sheep-bells, and the memory of her that sinned and repented and was saved."

"Muriel!"

It was von Klausen; but not the gay von Klausen that she had known and had come to fear. His face was drawn; his eyes grave; his manner serious.

"How did you come here?"

The question escaped her before she had time to fall back upon her weapons of defence.

"It was very simple," he answered. "I called at your hotel the morning after you departed—because I had to see you, whether you wished me or not. They said you were gone. I asked for your forwarding address, and they told me Marseilles. I came here; I searched the hotels; at your hotel the porter told me that your trunks had been carted to a villa on the Corniche. I went to the villa. The maid said that you had come here."

His explanation was long enough to give her a chance to regain her poise.

"How dared you come?" she asked.

"Wait until you have heard what I have to say," he replied.

"There is nothing you can say that will change the situation."

"Hear me first, Muriel, and you will understand."

"I won't listen. I don't like you, and I won't listen!"

"You must." He came nearer to her.

"What do you suppose my husband will say when he finds you here?" she demanded. "He is in the church now; he will be out in a moment."

"I suppose that he will say that he is glad to see me. I am sure that you have told him nothing."

She eyed him menacingly.

"Are you so sure of that?"

"Absolutely," he replied. "But it makes no difference if you have told him all that there is to tell, everything. I am not afraid."

"Then you do not think of what I may be afraid? You do not consider me?—But of course you don't!"

"You have not told him. If you had, I should not say to you what I have come to say—perhaps. I should be discreet, because I could not bear that I should cause you annoyance——"

"You annoy me now."

"But if you have not told him——Well, what I have to say is my excuse. If he is in the church, that is the more reason that I should make haste in saying it."

He moved still nearer.

"I have told him," she said.

"No."

"Go away," said Muriel, but the menace had faded from her large eyes, her tone had ceased to challenge and begun to plead.

"In one moment, if he does not come out and detain me, I shall go," said von Klausen; "but now I must speak. I went to your hotel in Paris to tell you this; I have travelled here to tell you. I will not be denied. I have the right. It is only this, the thing that I am come to say: I have learned the truth about myself and about our relations. Then I was in the power of something so new that I did not understand it. Now I know. I knew so soon as I left you that last evening, and the absence from you has taught me over and over the same lesson. I love you. No, do not draw away. When I told you in Paris that I loved you, I used that word 'love' in the basest of its senses; but now—now, ach, I know I love you truly; that I honour and adore you; that I hold you as sacred as the holy angels. I came only to tell you this and put myself right in your dear eyes; and you must see now that to love you thus truly is my punishment—for I have once approached foully something holy to me, and I know that, even could you care for me and forgive me, I should still be hopeless."

She tried to doubt his sincerity, but she could not. Her hand, though it rested on the warm parapet, shook as if she were trembling from the cold.

"Hopeless?" she repeated.

"You are married," he answered. "Nothing can alter that, for in the eyes of my religion nothing but death can separate you from your husband."

She remembered her teaching in the convent school.

"You came here to tell me this?" she asked.

"I came to tell you this and to ask if, though it will change no fact, you can forgive me for what I said in Paris."

She raised her eyes to answer. As she did so she saw Stainton turning the corner of the promenade.

"Here he is!" she whispered. "You are right: I didn't tell him anything. Wait. There will be another chance for us: I must have one word alone with you before—before——"

"Before," concluded von Klausen, "we say good-bye for the rest of our lives."

The Austrian had not been wrong; Stainton came up smiling.

"Think of you running into us down here!" he said. "I'm glad to see you." He invited the Captain to dinner, and the Captain, after a furtive glance at Muriel, accepted the invitation.

Nor was the dinner unsuccessful. Muriel, resolutely shutting her mind to the thought of so soon losing von Klausen, yet salving her conscience with the brief reflection that, as no positive wrong had been done, so the future was to be clean even of temptation, was almost happy. The Austrian, it is true, was somewhat silent; but Jim held himself altogether at the best.

"The fact is," he explained to von Klausen, "I believe that I've been homesick for a long time without knowing."

"And now," asked the Captain, looking about the pleasant little dining-room, "you have a home, yes?"

"Not here," said Jim. "Not anywhere, in fact; but we soon shall have one. I was not referring to this place. It is all right enough, but we are here only for a few weeks. When I said 'home,' I meant the city that both my wife and I regard as home. I meant New York."

"Then you are returning soon?"

"Three weeks from to-day."

Muriel looked at Jim.

"Is not this a sudden decision?" the guest inquired.

"Not at all. Muriel and I talked it over the other day and quite agreed, didn't we, dear?"

She tried to say "yes," but, though her lips moved, she was mute. She could only nod.

"Mrs. Stainton," said von Klausen, looking narrowly at Muriel, "did not mention it to me when we met to-day."

"How did that happen, dear?" asked Jim. His eyes met hers. He smiled pleasantly. "You must have forgotten."

She wanted to ask him how he had taken her qualified assent to a departure a month hence to be an expression of willingness to sail in three weeks, but there seemed to be something underlying his obvious manner that made her wish to hide her surprise. She wondered if there were anything underlying his manner; she wondered if what troubled her were not the sense of her deception of him.

"I forgot," she said.

"I booked by telephone just fifteen minutes ago while you were dressing, my dear," said Stainton, "and when I was rude enough to leave the Captain for a few minutes with his dubonais. We have an outside stateroom on the upper deck of the Prinzess Wilhelmina, and we sail from Genoa."

He fell to talking of what he had heard of the advantages of the southern route for the return journey to America. Presently he produced another surprise.

"By the way, Captain," he said, "do you know anything about the trains to Lyons? I shall have to run up there to-morrow. I can't get back here until the next day, but I want to start as early as possible."

This time Muriel felt herself forced to speak.

"Why, Jim," said she, "you never mentioned this to me."

"Didn't I?" he said. "That's curious. Or, no, come to think of it, it's not curious, for the letter was waiting for me when we came in, and you had to to run right off to dress, you know."

"Why must you go?"

"Those French purchasers again."

"I thought you were through with them."

"So did I, my dear; but, you see, they have just discovered that they have bought the mine without the machinery, and they're angry because I wrote to them and fixed a price on that."

"You don't mean that you tricked them?"

"Certainly not. I mean only that they do not understand American ways of doing business."

"You didn't say you had written them."

"My dear, when do I bore you with business affairs?" Stainton turned to von Klausen. "I hate to leave the little girl alone," he said. "But perhaps you will be good enough to look in on her here to-morrow evening and see that she is not too much depressed."

Muriel tried to catch the Austrian's eye, but Jim's eye had immediately shifted to her, and von Klausen promised. She wanted to ask him where he was stopping, for she feared his coming to the house when she was alone there; she wanted to see him, but she wanted to see him in the open, and she wanted to get a note to him to tell him not to come to the house. Yet she felt her fears growing; she was afraid to put her question, and the Austrian left without naming his hotel.

When the door closed on him, Jim continued to talk much about nothing, although he had lately been more than commonly silent in her company. She bore it as long as she could. Then she asked:

"Why are you going away to-morrow?"

Jim was surprised.

"For what reason in the world but the one I have just given?"

"Then I think you might have told me when he wasn't here."

"My dear, you gave me no chance."

"And you booked passage back, Jim?"

"Passage home, yes."

Muriel's mouth drooped.

"Oh, I loathe New York!" she said.

He came to her and took both her hands. His grave eyes looked searchingly into hers.

"Won't you think about me," he asked, "a little?"

"I know, Jim, but I never promised——"

"I have tried to deserve consideration, Muriel."

He had been kind. She reflected that he had been as kind as he knew how to be. She felt ashamed of her selfishness, and she felt, too, that, within a few hours, it would matter little to her whether she lived in France or America.

"You're right," she said. "Forgive me. It's very late. You say you want to leave early. We had better go to bed."

She thought it strange that he had not asked her to go with him to Lyons, for she remembered his vow never to leave her alone again. Yet she knew that, had he asked her to go with him, thus breaking his rule never to bring her into touch with business, she would have regarded that as a sign that he was suspicious. So she lay awake and was silent, and in the morning accompanied him up the hill to the station and watched him climb aboard his train.

She spent the entire day in a restless waiting for the night. She tried to think of some way to get word to von Klausen and could think of none. As the evening came and darkened, she became more and more afraid. When nine o'clock followed eight, she grew afraid of something else: she grew afraid that the Austrian would not keep his appointment. She welcomed him in an almost hysterical manner when, at half-past nine, he was shown into her drawing-room.

"You shouldn't," she said—"you shouldn't have come!"

Von Klausen was in the evening clothes of a civilian. He looked young and handsome.

"Why not?" he asked.

"Because of Jim."

"He invited me."

"Yes, I know, but——" She clasped her fingers before her and knitted her fingers.

"But what now?" pressed von Klausen. "See: you give no reason."

"He was queer. His manner—I don't know. Only I had not promised to go home in three weeks."

"No?"

"He had said a month, and I had said 'Perhaps.'"

Von Klausen smiled.

"We men interpret as 'Yes' a lady's 'Perhaps.'"

"Not Jim. And he hadn't told me that he wrote to those people in Lyons and asked them if they weren't going to buy the machinery."

"Why should he? In your country husbands do not tell their wives of business. I know that; surely you should know it better."

"That business wasn't like him."

"It was very—shrewd. My dear Muriel, you must not thus vex yourself. Why should I not be here? What wrong do I? Besides, the American married man is not jealous. I have heard of one in Washington who found his wife in his friend's arms and said only, 'Naughty, naughty! Flirting once more!'"

She smiled at that and let him quiet her. When he reminded her that this was to be their farewell she was quieted altogether. She sat on a sofa, the only light, that of a distant lamp, softly enveloping her bare shoulders and warm neck; and she allowed him to sit beside her there.

The room was small and panelled in white, with empty sconces along the walls and parquet floor covered with oriental rugs. The door was half hidden in shadow. Both felt that in this stage they were about to say good-bye forever.

Von Klausen, by the battlements of the promenade at Notre Dame de la Garde, had spoken the truth. He was deeply in love. He was truly in love for the first and last time in his life; and because animal passion had asserted itself in Paris, and because that passion seemed to be the characteristic of those butterfly affairs that had preceded this love for Muriel, he now repudiated it, or at least repressed it, altogether. This love was a holy thing to him, and so much of it as he could not have with the sanction of holy authority he would not now attempt at all to secure. The fact of his previous relations with other women, and of his once having looked upon Muriel with the same eyes with which he had looked upon those others, made it impossible for him now to do more than kneel before her in an agony of renunciation and farewell as one might kneel at the shrine of some virginal goddess before starting upon a lifelong journey into the countries where that goddess is unknown.

They had talked for hours before he so much as touched her hand; yet Muriel had her moments of frank rebellion.

"If you saw things as I do," she said, "you would see that what we now think of as so right might end by being very wrong."

"Nothing," he answered, "can be wrong that religion has decreed to be right."

"Not the ruin of our lives?"

"When the saving of our happiness involves the wreck of your husband's——"

"Do I help him by giving you up and living on with him when I don't honestly love him? Can't you see what I mean? I am fond of Jim; he is good and kind and brave; but somehow—I don't know why: I don't know why, but, oh, I can't love him! I even understand now that I never did love him."

"Nevertheless, you are married to him."

"Yes; but is a divorce wrong when——"

"A divorce is always wrong."

"Your church didn't perform the marriage, why should it consider the marriage a real one?"

"Because it has decreed that a true marriage according to the rite of any faith is binding."

"But marriage is a contract."

"Marriage is a sacrament."

They would get so far—always darting down this byway and that of casuistry, only to find that the ways were blind alleys ending against the impregnable wall of arbitrary custom—and then she would come back to his point of view. She would came back with tears, which made her great eyes so lovely that he could only just restrain himself from taking her into his arms; and she would brush away the tears and smile, and, sitting apart, they would be joined in their high sorrow, made one in a passion of abnegation.

But he could not leave the house. Each knew that when he did leave it must be forever. They were agreed upon the impossibility of a continued proximity, upon the mockery of a sentimental friendship, and they clung, with weak tenacity to every slipping moment of this concluding interview.

In one of their long pauses a clock struck twelve.

Muriel started.

"Twelve o'clock," said von Klausen. It was as if he spoke of a tolling bell.

"Twelve o'clock," repeated Muriel stupidly.

They rose simultaneously and faced each other; two children caught in that mesh of convention which men have devised to thwart the heart of man.

Then a timid recollection that had long been rankling in Muriel's mind rushed to her lips. She recalled her glimpse of von Klausen with the Spanish dancer at L'Abbaye, and she told him of it.

"How could you?" she asked. "How could you?"

With a waxing tide of earnestness, he told her of his emotional life. He told her of his escapades, of how lightly he had esteemed them when they occurred and how heavily they bore upon him now. He repented as passionately as he had sinned, and he vowed himself thenceforth to chastity.

To Muriel, however, as he told it, all that he had done in the past seemed of moment only in a manner other than that in which he regarded it. She saw it, in one quick flash, as the natural deviations of a force balked by unnatural laws. She saw that this man had learned where Jim had remained ignorant. It even seemed to her well that dissipation had once held him, since at this last, by freeing himself, he was proving how much stronger was her hold on him.

"It doesn't matter," she said; "it doesn't matter." And she put out her hand.

They had come at last, they felt, to the parting of their ways. A moment more and they would go on, forever, apart.

He looked at her cheek, turned pale; at her wide eyes, stricken with pain. As she had appeared to Stainton on that night at the Metropolitan Opera House, so now she appeared to Stainton's successor, but richer, fuller, mature: she was slim and soft, this woman he was losing; her wonderful hair was as black as a thunder-cloud in May; she had high, curved brows and eyes that were large and dark and tender; her lips were damp, and she was warm and dusky and clothed in the light of the stars. He took her hand and, at the touch, he gave a gasping cry and encircled her in his arms.

It was then that Stainton entered the room.