A great writer has remarked, that between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first motion, all the interim is like a phantasma or a hideous dream, and that the state of man under those circumstances, like to a little kingdom, suffers the nature of an insurrection. Although the step that Clytie was about to take was not of the character that Brutus contemplated, it was sufficiently serious for the interval between her engagement and her marriage to be a time of great mental and moral upheaval. Her “genius and mortal instruments” had periods of fierce council, in which the latter always obtained turbulent victory. Dreading these inner conflicts, she shrank from introspection. When doubts began to creep over her she shook them off, and sat down and wrote letters to Thornton which she burned an hour or two afterwards. But it was only when she was alone in the studio hastily finishing the orders she had in hand, or during the few lonely evenings that she passed in her sitting-room, that these torturing misgivings arose. When Thornton was near she forgot that any had ever come to her. He overpowered her will and her senses, dominated her with a caressing word, a touch of the hand, a glance from the depths of his dark eyes. In the lucid intervals between these periods of dizzying surrender she did not recognise herself. It was almost as if some Morgan le Fay had cast around her a spell of woven paces, and changed her into she knew not what, while she saw the old Clytie fading like a dream-shape away. To women of finer temperament marriage looms shadowy, formless, a great enchanter that will change all things, deliver into their keeping the secrets of pain and delight. But to Clytie it was something less and something more. Its material responsibilities were less of a mystery to her than to most girls of her age, owing to the peculiarities of her self-training; but its spiritual and moral results were hidden from her in a cloud, denser, more lurid, more extensive. She loved Hammerdyke, not indeed as she would have loved Kent had he made one little effort to turn the wavering friendship into love—for then passion would have been finely tempered with tenderness, trust, and generous sympathy; but still certain chords of her nature vibrated fully in response to the touch of the man she was about to marry. The one might have, as it were, awakened the full organ, but the single diapason that was pulled rang out none the less true.

During the short period of their engagement Hammerdyke was unceasing in tokens of his love. It was the nature of the man to throw his whole being into the delight or danger of the moment. Many a woman who cares lukewarmly, perhaps reluctantly, is fired with a gratitude akin to love by unending, passionate devotion. All the more responsive is the woman of full blood and emotional temperament who already cares greatly. Thornton gave Clytie no reason to doubt his affection; if anything, he frightened her by its excess. She yielded to him in all things, sometimes half dreamily, indifferently, without regret and without sweetness; sometimes the surrender was infinite joy.

In one matter, however, she was called upon to exercise her will: Thornton did not care how or where the marriage was performed. A man loathes weddings, particularly his own. It is only the barbarian that lingers, as people say, in the heart of woman that demands ceremonies and pomps and vanities; a man, finer in some things, strangely enough, sees a certain indelicacy in the brazen publicity of the wedding rites. True, this view never presented itself to Thornton, who merely wanted to call Clytie his own and looked upon the formality of the marriage bond as a necessary nuisance, but it came vividly to Clytie, and caused her, as she was called upon to decide in the matter, to choose as quiet a wedding as possible. She shrank with repugnance from the meaningless ordeal of bridesmaids, favours, and a wedding-breakfast. It was only in deference to Durdleham susceptibilities that she did not entertain the idea of a civil marriage before a registrar.

The announcement of her engagement caused a flutter of excitement in the family. Mrs. Blather and Janet could not understand a girl's art life, but they could understand a wedding. They settled it between themselves that Clytie and her fiancÉ should come down to Durdleham to be there married in the orthodox fashion. They had already drawn up a list of guests and a scheme of wedding arrangements when a letter arrived from Clytie saying that she was to be married almost immediately, and that on no account could the ceremony take place at Durdleham. The sisters were disappointed. Mrs. Blather remonstrated, adding arguments and entreaties that brought tears of desperation to Clytie's eyes. She hated the thought of willingly giving pain to her father and sisters, but a family ceremony was more than she could bear. By trying to explain the inexplicable she made matters worse. If Mrs. Blather and Janet had failed to understand her simple needs of a free, untrammelled girlish life, how could they unravel the tangled complexities involving her repugnance to their proposals? At last she wrote that the day was definitely fixed, and that if her sisters would not come to town, no one but her friends the Farquharsons and Winifred would be present at the ceremony. To journey up to London for the purpose of standing in a bleak, empty church on a dismal March morning just to see Clytie married in a travelling dress was a prospect not pleasing enough to be entertained. The sisters resigned themselves with a sigh to circumstances and to a catalogue of Clytie's eccentricities from her earliest years. Mrs. Blather sent Clytie a pair of silver candlesticks, Janet sent her a tea-service, and old Mr. Davenant, who had been courteously addressed by Hammerdyke on the subject of the marriage, sent her a check for one hundred pounds. And that ended the matter.

Winifred spent the night before the marriage with Clytie.

“Do come, Winnie dear,” the latter had said. “I shall be so lonely and miserable.”

So Winnie came like a spirit of peace, and the two girls cried a little in each other's arms, and it was the weaker who comforted the stronger.

“I shall keep on the studio,” said Winifred,—“I am getting quite rich, you know,—and then you can come sometimes and take off your things and make believe to be back again. And I shall come and see you in your big house—if you will tell your big husband not to frighten me away.”

“You will always be my own sweet Winnie,” said Clytie tenderly, “and you will always get the very best out of me even if I change utterly to everybody else.”

“But how can you change, dear?” asked Winifred in her simple faith. For she had lost her first instinctive distrust of Hammerdyke in the glamour of Clytie's love for him. “How can you ever be different from what you are and what you have always been?”

“Oh, I may grow very, very wicked and selfish one of these days, and not care for simple things any longer; and then you might be hurt, and you would know how unworthy I was that you should care for me, and you would shrink from me.”

“Oh, Clytie, darling!” cried Winifred, throwing her arms about her neck, “how can you say such things?”

“It is silly, I know,” said Clytie; “but I sometimes feel that I might do something very wicked without much compunction before I die.”

“But you are going to lead a splendid, beautiful life!” said Winnie. “You will live in a great house, and have at your command the most brilliant society in London, all the clever, artistic people—just what you like. And you won't have to paint for orders, so you need never have to cramp your genius, dear. Oh, Clytie, you will simply be overflowing with happiness all your life long.” Clytie sighed. The independence of her half-Bohemian life was very dear to her. This was the last night on which, if it so pleased her, she could go forth into the streets, uncontrolled, whither she would. Henceforward her actions would have to be referred to an authority. To-morrow she would even change her name; be transformed from the Clytie Davenant whom she knew into Mrs. Hammerdyke, a vague, mysterious entity, with whose nature she was unfamiliar. No matter how glorious the future, there is always some regret in leaving forever a past phase of life:

At leaving even the most unpleasant people


And places, one keeps looking at the steeple.

But this was a pleasant place Clytie was about to quit, and she looked back upon its associations with a sigh.

In the morning a commissionnaire sent by Thornton came and fetched away her trunks, for the newly married pair were to start for the Continent immediately after the ceremony. When these were despatched Clytie stood for a moment before her glass, adjusted the clasp of her cape and the set of her broad gray beaver hat, and turning to Winifred, said quietly: “Let us go, dear.”

They drove together in a hansom to St. Luke's Church, close by, where Thornton and the Farquharsons were waiting for them, in the porch. It was a bright morning, warm for the time of year, and the sparrows and a stray thrush plucked up heart of grace and twittered cheerily from the trees in the churchyard. Two little street children, with arms about each other's necks, stood by a near gravestone and looked at the little group with somewhat disappointed eyes. They had expected a bride in a long white veil and orange-blossoms, a costume always mysteriously fascinating to the unsophisticated. Perhaps it was only a christening after all, one remarked to the other. But where was the baby? The interior of the empty church was more cheerful than empty Protestant churches are wont to be. The slanting sunlight streamed many-coloured through the stained windows across the nave, and a broad shaft poured in from the open south door upon the vacant pews in the aisle. From outside came faintly the hum and rattle of the King's Road. The influences were peaceful, encouraging, and Clytie, sensitive to impressions, felt grateful. The two little children, with their eyes on the verger, peeped in through the door and satisfied themselves that it was a wedding after all.

They whispered together with many smiles and nods, guessing at the dramatis personÆ. Clytie noticed them, smiled back and nodded. It was as if a bit of her past life had come to bid her be of good cheer. The party stood for a while in the body of the church, talking gaily in low tones. Mrs. Farquharson was radiant at the prospective accomplishment of a dear wish.

“You must be proud of your bride,” she said to Thornton. “Is she not looking beautiful?”

And she whispered to Clytie:

“You must be proud of your husband. Have you ever seen a man to compare with him?”

Thornton held his head erect as he gave Clytie his arm and walked up to the communion rail. He was proud of her. The quiet gray of her broad hat and her cloak threw into relief the rich colouring of her hair and eyes and lips. The past two years had completed her womanly beauty. Irregularities of contour below the eyes had been toned down, the delicacy of modelling of her face had been accentuated, and the new emotions of the past three weeks had filled her great dark blue eyes with a new, mysterious light. Thornton pressed her hand against his side, and whispered, “My darling,” so close to her that she felt his breath warm upon her ear. She looked at him for a moment, her full lips quivering ever so slightly.

“I should like to kiss you,” he whispered again. “You are so beautiful.”

In a few moments it was over. The words compromising a lifetime had been said. The wedding ring gleamed upon her finger. As she passed with the others into the vestry she looked down at it in a daze. There it was and there it must remain till death parted them, a token of submission and obedience. In the vestry there were embraces, congratulations. Thornton kissed her after the gallant fashion of a man who can afford to wait for a warmer caress. Winifred threw her arms round her neck, weeping. Mrs. Farquharson kissed her in her affectionate, motherly way. George kissed her gravely on the forehead and dipped the pen in the ink for her to sign “Clytie Davenant” for the last time. Then they found themselves in the porch again, saying farewell. Caroline laughingly called her “Mrs. Hammerdyke” as they finally parted. And then the little knot of three waved their handkerchiefs as the cab drove off that took her husband and herself towards Victoria.

“You are mine now, my darling,” he said, taking her hand. “All that is most mine.”

“I am glad,” she murmured, returning his pressure. “Yours for always.”

The commissionnaire met them at the station. He had taken their tickets, settled their luggage, engaged a carriage. A bouquet of violets lay upon the seat. Clytie flashed a quick glance at her husband.

“Thank you for thinking. I love them so much.”

He arranged her hot-water can and her rugs and sat down by her side, thrusting up the dividing arms impatiently. As soon as the train had moved out of the station he put his arms around her and kissed her, and spoke to her in tender, passionate words. The stop at Croydon broke the continuity of this first wedded embrace. On the platform outside the carriage window a loud altercation was in progress between the ticket-collector and a young couple who objected to pay for the ticket of a tiny terrier the woman was carrying. They were of the lower middle class, both in their Sunday clothes. She was a fair, delicate woman of some refinement; but the husband was coarse, vulgar, with the stamp of sensuality on his sharp, somewhat handsome face. Moreover, he was slightly intoxicated, and used a foul expression to qualify the collector after the official had departed. A flush rose to the young woman's forehead.

“Don't, John,” she pleaded. “He's in his rights.”

But the cad consigned his rights to perdition, and moved off vulgarly proclaiming his own.

Clytie had heard this small scene in a life's drama and she vividly constructed the miserable tragedy. When the train moved on again she shivered, with a nameless, indefinable sense of fear. Three months ago she would have noted the scene for vigorous transference to canvas. Now the woman more than the artist was stirred.

“Please don't talk—just for a little, Thornton,” she said as he began to speak.

He looked at her somewhat reproachfully. She drew off her glove and put her hand into his.

“You can't understand—it all seems so strange. Let me gather myself together for a moment—darling.”

She trembled on the last word. It was the first time she had used it to him.

He pressed her hand and leaned back on the cushions. Clytie looked out of the window at the telegraph poles and trees and broad fields swaying past. Whither was this tearing train carrying her? Out of her life into a new, strange world whose habits and customs and laws and speech were all foreign to her? She was married. She no longer belonged to herself. Her independence was gone. She had promised to love, honour, and obey this man by her side until death should part them. That would be a long time—many, many years. The thought frightened her. Until then she had scarce realised what married life meant, in this respect. Why had she married this man? As this question passed through her mind her husband raised the hand he held to his lips. The blood rushed hot to her cheeks, she did not finish the mental question, but turning quickly, looked at him for a moment, and falling under the spell of his eyes, yielded to his arm, forgetting all things. He had the power of drowning in a more lurid blaze those glimmerings of self-revelation. She whispered so to him laughingly, and he accepted it as a man generally does accept such things—not seeing that it was of deeper significance than a woman's ordinary tribute of tenderness.

“You are my beautiful Clytie,” he said, kissing her, and for a season she was content with the response.

There was a lover's silence between them, which she broke at length by saying:

“Don't you think it would have been much nicer if we could have had one another on trial—say for six months?” >

“So that you could all the time be thinking whether you should repent of your bargain? Oh, dear, no!”

“Ah! you say that; but would it not have been better, if we grew to hate each other, to be able to shake hands and say good-bye? For we may quarrel dreadfully, you know.”

He answered her with tender assurances, laughed at her fears.

“We shall never quarrel if you are a good little girl and do as you are told,” he said.

Clytie laughed, seeing only jesting in the remark.

“And we shall never quarrel if you let me go where I like and do what I like and say what I like.”

“But you will always want to go and do and say as I like, darling,” said Thornton. “So we shall never quarrel.”

“Then you will never want me to be severely respectable?” asked Clytie, with a touch of insistence.

“I shan't allow you to flirt with any and everybody, if you mean that,” he replied, showing his white teeth as he smiled.

“I didn't mean that—for the simple reason that I have a certain amount of brains.”

“There have been many coquettes with magnificent intellects.”

She made no reply. Then, seeing that he had ruffled her, he adroitly turned their talk into less dangerous channels.

They stayed in Paris a couple of days and then continued their journey to the Riviera. It was Clytie's own desire. In the first flush of his passion all places were alike to Thornton, provided she were with him. But she longed to get away from England, to cut herself adrift for a while from all old associations, to surround herself with new conditions, so that nothing should disturb the wonder of this new love. And when, with a lover's hyperbole, he had bidden her choose any spot on the whole terrestrial globe for the passing of their honeymoon, she had selected the Mediterranean.

They went to the little Italian town of Bordighera, hidden away at the foot of the mountains amidst its palms and olive trees. Besides being one of the most beautiful spots on that beautiful coast, it has the charm of quiet. There is no casino at Bordighera, no public garden, no municipal band. It holds out to visitors no attractions but its own loveliness—hence the absence of the banal, the rococo. A few villas are dotted round it, away from the sea. One long, straggling street of shops, narrowing gradually, leads up to the old, picturesque, evil-smelling town on the hill. And this with its narrow sunless streets flanked by high, dingy, gray houses, between which the sky above seems a narrow strip of Prussian blue ribbon, its crooked byways and basement loggie of cool malodour, its cobble pavements on which great entrance gateways gape like dark, noisome caverns, offers few attractions other than those of quaintness and curiosity to any but its own inhabitants. It is a quiet place, devoid of the cosmopolitan tohubohu of Mentone or Cannes. An index of this is the fact that, save the commoner qualities of the Italian regie, cigarettes are not to be bought for love or money in Bordighera, and these in the greasiest ramshackle shop imaginable. If you want civilised shops you must go to San Remo.

Thornton and Clytie spent the earlier portion of their honeymoon here in unbroken happiness. Beyond casual gossip with their table d'hÔte neighbours they held intercourse with no one. All fears, doubts, flutterings of regret, vanished from Clytie's heart, together with all sense of subjective life. She was tasting the physical joy of existence as it came to her in the passion, sunlight, colour, warmth, and scents of the south. She had chosen with unconscious wisdom. The intensity of the beauty of the Mediterranean, its positivism, its splendid denial of the melancholic and mysterious, held her being in tone with the love with which Thornton had inspired her. It intoxicated her with a complementary passion.

They drove one day from Bordighera through Ventimiglia to Mentone. Halfway they stopped at a wayside inn, and breakfasted under a trellis of grape-vine. On the one side was the dazzling white road, flanked by the terraced hill of olive-trees, the white underparts of their leaves flashing like silver; on the other, below, the gold sand and the purple sea. And the sun streamed through the vine, checkering the table and their hands and faces. The fare was poor and the Asti none of the best, but the wine sparkled and bubbled in the thick tumbler they used in common, and brought a keener sparkle into Clytie's eyes, and a more joyous abandonment into her laugh. When they had resumed their drive, and a turn of the road brought them into sight of Mentone, her heart leaped at the suddenness with which the blaze of colour was revealed. Below, over a declining foreground of olive and orange gardens, lay the white town in a setting of bright green foliage, stretching from horn to horn of the bay. Behind the eastern horn projected dark and bold the promontory of Monaco with the flashing white of its castle. Behind the town rose the two bare peaks of the Berceau standing out in deep blue-gray against the intense violet sky. Before it swept the broad belt of yellow sand, on which lapped, in little idle waves whose ebb left a delicate fringe of white, a still, unbroken sea of lapis lazuli, melting through infinite gradations of blue streaked with arbitrary purples into the deep ultramarine that met the paler sky far away on the horizon. The burst of intense colour of sky and sea and land, glowing as far as the eye could sweep, drowned Clytie's being in a sensuous flood. It was, as it were, the projection of physical passion into something visible, thus baring to the eyes its wonderful beauty. She uttered a little inarticulate gasp, a catching of the breath. They were quite alone, the coachman half asleep in the sun on his box. Thornton put his arm round her and drew her to him. She turned, closed her eyes. All creation, from the world of wonder before her to the tiniest quivering fibre within her, vibrated with an intoxicating thrill of delight. She caught his hand, drew his arm tighter, and lifted her lips to his in a long, long kiss.

Thenceforward her stay on the Riviera was one uninterrupted delight. It was a dream in which the mind lay subject to the sense. She was in a blue mist, which hid impenetrably past and future, and informed the visible area about her feet with unutterable sweetness. “Don't expect me to write letters,” she said in a hastily scribbled note to Caroline. “This is a land in which words have no part. You might as well expect me to talk the 'Moonlight Sonata' to you.” And Caroline, being a wise woman, smiled. Yet, after all, her wisdom had nothing to do with it—for anything feminine would have divined. The days flew on wings of fire. She never read, never worked; her sketch-book remained empty. Often they sat at their sitting-room window, looking out on to the Strada Romana, hand in hand, without speaking, save for a murmured caress, for an hour together. Or they walked up between the olives, past the famous high wall with its gorgeous coat of mesembryanthemum, through the narrow, crooked town, down the rugged descent to the surf-beaten shore, where the great white solitary casa stands, and there sat down in the shade of the big rocks and watched the glowing “countless laughter” of the sea. Often they rambled through the cool, sunless olive gardens, rising terrace after terrace apparently into the deep violet sky. The scent of the rosemary and wild thyme beneath their feet rose penetrating and filled the blood, and Thornton would pick a handful, and laughingly hold it between them above their lips as he kissed her. And when they reached the top of the hill they sat under a tree, and Clytie rested her head on his shoulder, and let her eye wander over the low-lying ridges of the Maritime Alps rising in endless soft-rounded undulations, like the many-breasted mother of men, in each bosom nestling a compact white townlet gathered around the slated cupola of its church; and the soft sunlight lay over all, transfused through the blue atmosphere. Then she would say: “Don't let us talk, Thornton,” but there was a different meaning to the words from that which they had when she uttered them in the train as it left Croydon.

Sometimes they went away from Bordighera for two or three days; visited Nice, Cannes, Monte Carlo. At Monte Carlo Clytie won three or four hundred francs at the roulette tables. Gambling had never come before within her experience of things. She plunged into it with childish recklessness, looking round with glowing face and laughter in her eyes at her husband when she won, and drawing a short little breath of dismay when the croupier raked in her stake. The game, the intensity of the strange faces, seen nowhere else,—faces which bore the stamp of combinations of the seven deadly sins taken from two to half a dozen together,—the subtle working in that great, glittering room of all the passions under heaven, attracted her, fascinated her. The artistic temperament caught the impressions, instinctively, unconsciously registered them, thus widening and deepening her conception of life. It was a luxury of sense to leave the babel passion of the Casino and to walk arm in arm on the terrace or in the grounds. There the music came faintly and mingled with the far-off splash of the sea away below them and the rustle of the palms and drachinas. On the right stretched out Monaco, clustering like a group of fireflies below the white bastioned castle. Behind them rose the black mass of the Maritime Alps with the Mont Agel towering distinct above. The air was soft and warm, recovering from the sudden shock of sundown. What they said to one another matters little. He saw that she was beautiful and filled with the sense of his love, and he was happy. To Clytie life meant unutterable things.

On the third morning of their stay at Monte Carlo Thornton returned from a short stroll and came into their room.

“A man I know has just come by the train and I fled from him,” he said; “let us go somewhere else.”

Clytie was pleased.

“I am glad you still want us to be quite, quite alone,” she replied. “But you are sure you are not a little bit weary of me?”

He answered as many millions of men more or less sincere have answered. And Clytie thought neither of believing nor of disbelieving him, as many millions of women have done. The subjective is apt to crop up afterwards and it generally causes trouble. But in the passion of a kiss woman, being, like man, of flesh and blood, and not an abstraction, does not calculate remote psychological contingencies; if she does, the kissing is all a mistake. Once, towards the end of their honeymoon, Clytie did touch upon the subjective. They were sitting by the ruined tower on the hill above the Strada Romana. Clytie was heated and had taken off her hat, and the breeze ruffled her hair as she leaned against the trunk of a tree. Thornton sprawled by her side, resting his chin on his hand and looking at her.

“I always grudge your wearing a hat,” he said. “Your beautiful hair ought not to be hidden. You look much lovelier now that it is free for the wind to kiss.”

She laughed a contented little laugh, throwing her chin up, according to her way.

“Do you know, Thornton,” she said with a little hesitation, in which there was much charm, “being called beautiful every day is one of the great novelties of the situation. I always knew I was good to look upon, and sometimes I really was very pleased to behold myself. But before I knew you, dear, it never made anything of a factor in my daily life. And now I almost begin to think it's the only quality I have.”

“Given that, you can let all the others go——” He waved his hand vaguely, consigning them to the Ewigkeit. “But that's not all that you love me for, is it, dear?” An idle question, with an unsuspected fear lurking in its heart.

“I don't know why I love you. It has never occurred to me to investigate the matter.”

“Well, try. It will be like playing the game, 'I love my love with an A'!”

Thornton shook his head boyishly, and laughed.

“It would spoil it all!” he said—“to go worrying about what lies under that sweet face of yours. Can't you understand, darling? What do your qualities matter to me? Provided I can take you in my arms and kiss you as much as I like, what concern is it of mine whether you are acquainted with the cookery book or spell art with a capital A? Don't you think it's more satisfactory to lie here and look into your great blue eyes, and your hair with the sun and wind playing hide and seek in it, and your bosom rising and falling, than to speculate whether you are even-tempered or vindictive or ambitious or fond of Adelaide Proctor's poetry?”

“What a boy you are!” she cried light-heartedly, stretching out her hand so as to run her fingers over his crisp brown hair. “So my face has been my fortune!”

“And your figure,” he remarked critically. “The whole of you!”

“Tell me,” she continued, “what would you have done if I hadn't married you?”

He started up to a sitting posture, and his eyes flashed. “I should have gone straight back to Africa and played the very devil there! But you were bound to marry me, you know; and if you had been already a married woman, I should have got to you somehow. I have been hit before in my time, over and over, but never till I met you did I think a woman worth the marriage service. But you're a witch, Clytie,” he added, resuming his former attitude, “the Belle Dame sans Merci.”

“Poor fellow,” said Clytie, “poor knight-at-arms! And you do look 'so haggard and so woe-begone,' don't you?”

She laughed as she looked at his great frame lying at her feet, and his strong, handsome dark face, with its health and masterfulness. Then she continued in the lightness of her heart:

“But seriously, now, Thornton, very seriously. You do want me to be a little help to you in your life—in other ways—don't you? In your ambitions, your work in the world generally. We must begin to talk about such things soon, you know.”

Thornton laughed lazily as he lit a cigarette.

“My work in the world is to love you, my dear, and I'll promise to let you help me in that as much as you like.”

But Clytie insisted. Sometimes the subjective gets too much for a woman.

“Ah, Thornton dear,” she said. “I want to feel that we are much more than lovers. That will wear off after a time. Oh, yes! don't tell me it won't; a woman learns things all with a rush, you see. And I want to feel that we are one in everything, in all our sympathies and views of life, our ambitions, in all the high and great things that lie before you. I want to be in touch with everything you do and think—to be a real helpmeet for you.”

He took her hand and kissed it, laughing.

“I have got a lot to learn in the way of connubial responsibilities,” he said. “You'll have to train me, my dear. But allow me to remark that the sun is just going to dip over there by the Nervia, and if we want to get in by sunset we shall have to run like the deuce!”

As this was a serious matter,—on the Riviera it is one of the grave responsibilities of life,—Clytie let herself be lifted to her feet, put on her hat quickly, and holding her husband's hand, ran merrily with him down the hill. The exercise and the laughter drove things subjective out of her head for a season. But in the after-time the ghost of this little conversation came and sat at the head of her bed, making mock at a few others who sat on the foot-rail. A thing does not require to be as objective as a murdered monk to have a little ghost all to itself.