If you look in your Baedeker's "Southern France," you will find, in very small type, on page 479, the following brief paragraph:

"From Aubagne or Auriol to the Ste. Baume. From Aubagne an omnibus (5 fr.) plies four times weekly via (3 M.) GÉmenos to the (4 hrs.) HÔtellerie (see below). From Auriol an omnibus (50 c.) plies to the (5½ M.) St. Zacherie (Lion d'Or), whence we have still 8 M. of bad road (carr. 10-20 fr.) to the HÔtellerie de la Ste. Baume, situated on the plateau or Plan d'Aulps, ¾ hr. below the grotto. The E. portion of the plateau is occupied by a virgin *Forest with fine trees—The Ste. Baume is, according to tradition, the grotto to which Mary Magdalen retired to end her days; it has been transformed into a chapel and is still a frequented pilgrim resort. It has given its name to the mountains among which it lies."

So much for Baedeker. But Baedeker either does not know everything, or else, like a really good traveller, he keeps to himself, lest tourists spoil, some of the best things that he has seen. The plateau above which hangs the cave that tradition describes as The Magdalen's last residence is, in fact, as far out of the world as if its first tenant had tried to climb as near to Heaven as she could before she quitted the earth altogether, and so far as the wandering American is concerned, it might quite as well be across the celestial border.

Yet it was to the Ste. Baume that Muriel had gone, and that she had written to her husband. For Muriel, too, had passed a night of wracking reflection, and the dim dawn had found her clear upon one resolve.

The anger that had been kindled by Stainton's accusation slowly died away. She saw that, though he had assumed her love for von Klausen to have carried her so much farther than she had indeed been carried, the difference was only of degree; and, though she was far from condemning herself, she knew that her husband would, even knowing all, condemn her because he would judge her by the standards of that ancient fallacy which sees wrong not in the deed but in the desire.

She was clear in her own mind as to the course that she had pursued, but she was equally clear that Jim had acted as truly in conformance with his lights as she had with hers. She recognised as she had never before recognised those qualities in Jim which, she felt, should have at least won from her a less recriminative tone than she had, the night before, assumed toward him. She remembered the evening when she had promised herself to him in that long ago and far away New York—how tall and strong and fine he had seemed, how virile and yet how much the master, of his fate and of himself as well. She remembered how he had crushed her to his breast—how she had responded. She was changed. She was sure that she was changed for the better. But what was it that had changed her? That night in New York the miracle had happened. Were miracles of such short life?

In an agony of endeavour she set herself to recalling his thousand little kindnesses, and each one seemed to rise at her summons to point its accusing finger at her anger. Why couldn't she have been gentler to him? She was at a loss for the answer. She told herself that, in character, he was unscalable heights above her. She was ashamed of her anger, ashamed of her hatred; she regarded him, in her self-abasement, as something even of a saint, yet love him she could not: the thought of any physical contact with him made her shiver.

Franz von Klausen she knew that she did love and would always love. She was married to Jim, and Franz himself said that marriage was a sacrament. Where, then, was the occult power of the sacrament that it could not hold her heart? She could not, in honesty, live with Jim as his wife; according to von Klausen's standard, she could not in moral rectitude live with von Klausen. What was left for her but to run away?

Thus it was that she arrived at her decision. In her primal impulses she was still only a young animal that had been caught in the marriage trap, that had torn herself free, and that now, wounded and bleeding, wanted to hide and suffer alone.

She had some money in her purse—a thousand francs. She wrote the note to Jim, who she felt certain would supply her with any more money that she might require, gave it to the maid, left the house on her tiptoes and, after a few hesitant enquiries of a lonely policeman, took the tram to Aubagne. In Aubagne she hired a carriage for the Ste. Baume.

It was a marvellous drive under a sky of brilliant blue. Leaving behind a fruitful valley dotted with prettily gardened, badly designed villas, they climbed for four hours, into a tremendous sweep of rugged mountains. Upward, until the vegetation lost its luxuriance and became sparse, the carriage curved around and around peak set upon peak, only thirty miles from the sea, yet nine hundred metres above it. Sometimes, looking over the side, she could count five loops of the road beneath her and as many more above, glistening yellow and deserted among the gaunt outlines of rock. Not a house, not another wayfarer was in view, only the billowing mountains that rose out of wild timberlands below to gigantic cliffs bare of any growth, perpendicular combs, sheer precipices miles long and nearly a thousand feet in height, which seemed to bend and sway along the sky-edge. With a sudden curve that showed even Marseilles and the ocean shimmering against the horizon, they rounded the last height, descended but a few hundred feet upon a wide plateau, the sides of which were partially wooded chasms, and came, among a dozen scattered houses, to the HÔtellerie that had for many years been a Dominican monastery and still maintained the simplicity of its builders.

They ushered her through the tiled halls, past the chapel, and, amid sacred images set in the whitewashed walls, to her room, the bare cell of a priest, with the name of one of the early Fathers of the Church inscribed above the door and a crucifix over the narrow iron bed.

A flood of memories from her convent days deluged her. Muriel sank upon her knees and prayed.

She had not breakfasted, and she could eat no lunch. A half-hour after her arrival she began her ascent to the Grotto of the Magdalen.

She walked across the plain, first through the fields and then through a gradually mounting forest to which an axe had never been laid. The hill became steeper and steeper; it grew into a mountain. The leaf-strewn path turned, under ancient trees with interlacing branches, about giant boulders covered with moss through the centuries that had gone by since they were first flung there from the towering frost-loosened crags above. She passed an old spring and a ruined shrine, and so she reached at last the foot of a precipice as bare as her hand, a huge wall of smooth rock that leaned far forward from the clouds as if it were about to fall.

Under a crumbling gateway she passed and ascended the worn, canting steps, which, by a series of sharply angular divergences, led a third of the way up the face of the precipice. There, fronting a narrow, deserted natural balcony, was the grotto.

Doors had been placed at the mouth of the great cave, but the doors were open. Through them, far in the cool shadows, Muriel caught a glimpse of the white altar and a sound of dripping water that fell from the cavern's ceiling of living rock into the Holy Pool. She took an irresolute step toward this strange chapel; then she turned toward the low parapet and looked over the mountain side, over the primÆval forest, to the plateau far below and the peaks and ridges beyond. She remembered von Klausen's words:

"The silent chapel; the long, fertile plain that seems a world away; the snow-capped peaks to the northward; the faint tinkle of distant sheep-bells, and the memory——"

She gave a little gasp: her husband was coming up the steps.

He mounted slowly. His back bent painfully to the climb. She could see that he was breathing heavily and, as he raised his face to hers, she noticed with a throb of self-accusation that it looked tired and old.

"You followed?"

He nodded briefly.

"Why did you follow me?" she asked.

It was fully a minute before he regained his breath; but when he spoke he spoke calmly and gently.

"I came," he said, "to say some things that I should have said last night."

Muriel braced herself against the parapet.

"Very well," said she.

He understood her.

"I don't mean to scold you, dear," began Stainton.

His eyes regarded her wistfully, and she turned away, glancing first over the precipice where, below them, the treetops tossed and then up, far up, straight up, to the awful height of sheer cliff overhead where, somewhere just beyond her sight, there nestled, she knew, the little chapel of St. Pilon.

"Why not?" she asked.

"Wait and you will understand."

She felt now that forgiveness was the one thing that she could not bear. She was learning the most difficult of the moral lessons: that, hard as punishment may be, there is nothing so terrible as pardon.

"I want you to be angry," she said. "You ought to be angry. I was angry with you. That is what I am sorry for. It is all that I am sorry for, but I am very, very sorry for it. I ought to love you—I promised to love you; I thought I did love you, and if ever a man deserved to be loved, you deserve it. And yet I don't love you. I can't! Oh, I'll come back with you. I can't live with you as your wife, but I'll live with you. If you want me to, we can start right away."

But Stainton would not yet hear of that.

"Wait," he said, "wait. Perhaps we can think of something. Perhaps something will turn up." Jim put out a hand, a hand grown thin and heavily veined since his marriage, and timidly patted her arm. "My poor little girl!" he whispered. "My poor little child!"

"No, no!" she said, drawing away. "You must hate me!"

"I could never do that, Muriel."

"But you have to! Think of it: I don't love you—you, my husband—and I do—I do——"

The words that had come so easily by night and in anger she dared not utter here in calmness and by day. But Stainton supplied:

"You do love him?"

She bowed her dark head in assent.

"You are very sure?" he asked.

"Very, very sure."

"So that it was not"—he hesitated as if he knew that he had no right to put the question—"it was not merely passion?"

Muriel looked straight into his eyes.

"It was so far from merely passion," she answered, "that I have only twice even so much as kissed him."

Stainton believed her now. His hand dropped from her arm. It seemed to him that she would have hurt him less had her love for von Klausen been baser.

There was a long pause.

"I see," said Stainton at last; and again: "I see."

He looked up at the high cliff bending far above them.

"And—von Klausen," he presently pursued—"you will let me ask it, won't you? In a moment you will see that I have a good reason. You are sure that his love for you is—is of the same sort that yours is for him?"

"Quite."

"Why?"

"On the same evidence."

"I see. I had begun to think so this morning. He came to see me."

She gave a short cry.

"Is he hurt?" she asked.

"Why should I hurt him? It is not his fault that he has hurt me. No, I didn't hurt him; I merely came by train to Aubagne, and thence here by motor-bus, to learn—what I have learned; and to say—what I am about to say."

"You told him where I was?"

"I did not name the place. I simply said that you had gone away, leaving a note in which you told me that you were bound for a certain secluded spot to be alone."

Muriel clasped her white hands in distress.

"He will guess," she said. "He will guess from that. It was he told me of this place—told me only the other day in much those words."

Stainton smiled a little.

"I fancied he would guess," said he: "I intended that he should."

"But he will follow!"

"No doubt."

"You—you—why do you speak so?"

"He can't get a convenient train from Marseilles, so he will probably come the whole way by motor."

"He will—he will! He will know that you have come——"

"I told him that I meant to."

"And he will think you mean to punish me——"

"Yes."

"And—oh, don't you see?—he will come to protect me!"

The husband again put his hand timidly upon her arm.

"My dear," he said, "that is just what I wanted him to do—and what I feared he might not do if I told him that I wanted it. The worst thing about this whole tragedy is that it is unnecessary, a quite useless tragedy. I've thought a great deal since you spoke out plainly to me, and I am beginning to see—even I, who wish not to see it—that you were not so far from right; for if man's stupidity hadn't devised for itself a wholly crooked and muddled system for the conduct of his life, this sort of now common catastrophe simply couldn't happen. Listen."

He plucked at her sleeve, and she turned her pale face toward him.

"All my life," he went on, "I've been afraid of two things: old age and—something else. Perhaps I've learned better in the last few hours. I've tried to learn that only the laws of man are horrible and bad and that no natural law can be, if we face it for what it is, either repellent or wrong. Before, I tried to be young. I trained myself to be young. I denied my youth, believing that I could strengthen and prolong it. I decided that youth was a state of mind—that it could be retained by an effort of the will. I postponed love with that in mind, and I postponed too long. Then, when I never doubted myself, I married you."

He released her arm.

"I married you," he continued; "and so, from sinning against myself, I began to sin against another. Much that you said last night was right. I have been selfish. I have robbed you of your youth, and I've given you nothing in return but what a man might give to spoil a child or to flatter a mistress. It wasn't a marriage. I see that now. The white heat of passion fused together two pieces of greatly differing metals, but when the passion cooled, the welding wouldn't hold: the joint snapped. I thought I could hold you. Hold you—as if that could be love which must be held! I took a low advantage of your ignorance of life. I came to you, who knew nothing, and said: 'I will teach you'—but—I was giving you the half-sunshine of the sunset when your just portion was the blaze of noon. I was keeping youth from youth."

Her large eyes were tender with tears.

"Do you mean it?" she asked. "Do you really mean—all this?"

"As I never meant anything else in my life. I violated nature and must pay the price."

Throughout all time and lands, he now felt, youth calls to youth, generation to generation, and not all the laws upon the statute-books of all the world can silence it.

"I've thought that you were ignorant," he was saying; "perhaps you were wiser than I. You are not breaking the law. You are fulfilling it. I was the one that was ignorant. I was the one that was wrong."

Out of sheer generosity, though her brain and heart cried assent to his every word, she tried to protest. But the youth in her heart clamoured that he was speaking truth.

"And so," he concluded, "now that I am sure that you truly love each other, I mean to step aside."

She looked at him blankly.

"Step aside?" she repeated.

"I mean to make what reparation is possible: I must."

Muriel's face quivered.

"So that I—that we——" she started.

"So that you and von Klausen may marry."

"But we can't anyhow! Oh—that's the horror of it! That's why the thing can never be mended. In his religion there is no divorce. Marriage is a sacrament. Final. It lasts until one or the other dies."

Stainton frowned. It was a slight frown, rather of annoyance than of pain.

"Yes," he said. "I gave all my earlier life for my superstition, and now——"

"You see," she was running on, "in his faith, a marriage——"

"Yes, yes," he interrupted. "I know. They are flat-footed on that. I am only wondering——"

His speech dropped from the vocabulary of emotion to the trivial phrases of the colloquial.

"Look there!" he broke off.

Her eyes followed his pointing finger: in a little gap through the tree-tops they could see the path below, and up the path a figure was bounding: fevered, lithe, young.

Muriel clutched the parapet.

"It's Franz!" she said.

"Yes, it's Franz," said Jim. "Just as I began talking to you, I thought I saw a motor scorching down the road toward the HÔtellerie. He must have left the car there and come right on."

"I know it is he. It is." She turned to her husband. "And, O, Jim, what shall I do?"

"See him, of course."

"Why? Why should we fight it all over again? There's no way out: we'll just have to go on forever. There's nothing to do. Why should I fight it all over again? I'm tired—I'm so tired!"

Stainton looked at her long and earnestly. He did not speak, did not take her hand. He did nothing, he believed, that she could afterward translate into a good-bye.

"Nonsense!" he said, shortly. "You see him and try to bring him around to looking at marriage as the mere contract that the law has made it."

"There is no chance. The other view is part of his life—you've said so yourself."

Stainton smiled.

"Anyhow," he said, "there's no harm in trying. See him and make one more appeal. I'll cut around here and have a try at climbing to the top of the cliff. There's a path by the back way. The hotel proprietor spoke enough English to tell me there was a small chapel on the top of this cliff over our heads, and a wonderful view, from Toulon to Marseilles—Try it, Muriel—for my sake. I want to pay up. I don't pretend to be happy, but I want to pay up. So long! Good luck. And never say die!"

He rattled out his careless words so swiftly that she could not answer. He scarcely reached their end before he raised his hat and darted down the steps.

She saw him disappear, and waited. She waited until von Klausen's young head and shoulders came above the steps.

"Franz!" she cried.

The Austrian hurried to her.

Stainton did not look back at them. He turned up the path that led around the rock, moving with the elastic step of a schoolboy going from his classroom to the playground. He almost ran up the wooded steep behind the cliff, and he was conscious of a familiar pride in the ease with which he made his way over the rapidly increasing angle of the mountainside. When he passed the timber line and came to the walls of bare rock along which the narrowed path wound more and more dangerously, his breath was shorter than it used to be in his climbing days in the Rockies, yet he moved swiftly. He ran along ledges that would make most men's heads swim, spurned stones that slipped beneath him, leaped from towering rocks to rocks that towered over hidden descents. He was driven by a mighty exaltation, by a stinging delight in the approach of finality. He was drunk with the most potent of sensations: the sensation that nothing could matter, that the worst to befall him was the measure of his desire. He was about to make the great sacrifice. He was about to fling himself from the cliff at the beetling chapel of St. Pilon. By ending his life in such a way that Muriel would suppose that end an accident, he was, for the woman he loved, about to court the death that he had all his life feared.

He reached the mountain's bald top, and there flamed about him the panorama of the ChaÎne de la Sainte Baume from Toulon to Marseilles, from the mountains to the sea. It was blue, intensely blue, under a full sun and in an air vibrant with health. The sky was a vivid blue, cloudless, the distant water was a blue that danced before his eyes. The summits of stone that fell away at his feet among cliffs and precipices were grey-blue. The deep valleys' greens were bluish green, and here and there, where he could barely distinguish the cottage of a forester or the hut of a charcoal-burner, there rose, incapable of attaining half-way to the awful height on which he stood, lazy wreaths of a smoke that was blue.

He was alone. Ahead of him and ten feet above stood the chapel: a single room, its third side open to the air, its walls seeming to totter on the edge of a tremendous nothingness. He walked resolutely around the chapel; found that, in reality, there was a ledge a yard wide between it and the drop; looked over and then instinctively fell on his knees and so upon his belly, thrusting his head over the awful descent.

He saw below him—far, far below him, past perpendicular walls of blue rock—the narrow projection that was the parapet before the grotto of the Magdalen. He saw two figures beside the parapet. He saw, beyond the parapet, the precipice continue to the primÆval forest, the trees of which presented a blurred mass of lancelike points to receive him. Beyond them he could not see. He grew dizzy; his stomach writhed.

He shut his eyes, but he saw more clearly with his eyes shut than open. He saw his father drawing the razor across his throat, and that father after the razor had been drawn across his throat. He saw his own body below there, this trembling body that he had so cared for, so believed in, impaled, broken, torn, crushed, an unrecognisable, pulpy inhuman thing....

Like some gigantic, foul-breathed bird of prey, the old fear swooped down upon him and rolled him over and over away from the edge, around the chapel, his face buried in the loose stones, his flanks heaving.

He lay there unable to rise, but able at last to reason. Reason pointed unflinchingly to self-destruction. He tried agonisedly to find one argument against it and could find none. He tried to aid reason, tried to reform the panic-mad ranks of his courage. He thought how wonderful was this thing which he had planned to do for Muriel, but with that thought his thoughts lost all order. He recalled how happy he had been with his wife before they came abroad, and at the same time realised that they could never be happy together again. He thought about the child that was to have been, and immediately remembered that it was at the first mention of the child that Muriel's love for him began to lessen. He made one more effort to lash himself toward fortitude. His father was a suicide, his child was murdered; he himself had nothing to live for, and his wife had nothing to live for if he lived. An unclean old man! After all his years of difficult restraints, after all the affection that he had given her, she had called him that. And she was right. He was an unclean old man. Was he to be also a coward?

He cried aloud. He dared not open his eyes, but, bathed in a sweat that he thought must be a sweat of blood, he tried to wriggle blindly and like a worm, back toward the mouth of the precipice. It cost him nearly all his strength, but he shoved himself forward and fell—a foot, over a stone.

He looked about him. He had been wriggling away from his death.

Stainton rose to his hands and knees. He headed about and crawled again to the chapel and around it. The journey seemed interminable, but he gained the edge, looked over——

One little push would do it; one leap.

His head swam. He dug his toes in the loose rocks before him until his fingers were cut and his palms ripped. With every nerve and muscle in his body, his body writhed away and rolled back to the front of the chapel and to safety.

He lay before the open front of the chapel and knew that his adventure was over, that he could not do the thing that he had highly determined. He saw the future with clear eyes. He told himself that if he could not die for his wife, it must be that he did not love her; that to go back to her was, therefore, to chain himself to a woman that he did not love, to spoil the life of a man that did love her, to ruin the life of a woman that he himself had promised to love. It was useless to imagine that he might live and leave her, for he knew that if he left her she, unable to marry von Klausen, would marry no one and would come to what Stainton believed to be a worse estate. He knew that if he lived, he would have to live beside her and not with her, a despised protector. If passion should once or twice more flicker in its socket, it would be an animal passion that he detested and that would make Muriel and him detest each other.

The glamour of their miracle-love for each other was dispelled. They must henceforth see with straight eyes. She would look upon him as an unclean old man; he would see in her the death to his hope of physical immortality; and the three, von Klausen, Muriel, and he would share a secret, a secret of which they might never rid themselves. He, unwanted, why did he not go? He saw Muriel grow into a starved and thwarted woman; he saw himself sink into a terrified and lonely and loathed old age. His voice broke out in a shrill sob; but he knew that he would have to live. The old dread had conquered.

He sat up. Possessed by a fear that the entire summit of the mountain might fall with him, he began to drag himself down the way that he had so carelessly ascended. It was a hideous descent. There were points in it that he could scarcely believe he had managed to pass. He came down in thrice the time that he had gone up, and he came down much of the way on his hands and knees, shaking like a frightened child.

They were standing by the parapet when he staggered, panting, toward them: Muriel's black eyes shining with tears, and a light in von Klausen's boyish face that made the husband wince.

"Why, Jim," said Muriel, "how muddy your clothes are. You look perfectly ridiculous."

Stainton was thinking:

"I must get her away. I must get myself away from this awful place. I must take her with me. I am afraid to be alone. I must get her away."

What he said was:

"Yes. Come away from that wall. Don't stand so near that wall! Yes, I had a little tumble."

They both started forward.

"Are you hurt?" they asked, and they asked it together.

"No—no; I'm all right. Quite all right." He looked at Muriel. "You can't fix it up?"

She shook her head.

He looked at von Klausen.

"You"—he wet his lips with his thick tongue—"you won't change your prejudices?"

The Austrian flushed.

"I cannot change my religion," said he.

Stainton clumsily drew his watch from his pocket.

"Then," said Stainton, "you and I must be hurrying, Muriel. I'm sorry, Captain; but the bus leaves the HÔtellerie in half an hour, and we've got to hurry to catch it. Good-bye. Muriel, come on."

THE END