'Qui, la moitiÉ et la plus belle moitiÉ de la vie est cachÉe À l'homme qui n'a pas aimÉ avec passion.'—Stendhal.

I

Above, close to the window of a high narrow room which had once been the Catholic Lord Wantley's oratory, and which was next to the bedroom always occupied by Penelope herself, sat in the darkness Mrs. Mote.

The window directly overlooked the flagged terrace, the leafy scented gardens, and the sea, and there were members of Mrs. Robinson's household who considered it highly unfitting that an apartment so pleasantly situated should be the 'own room' of the plain, sturdy little woman who, after having been Penelope Wantley's devoted and skilful nurse for close on twenty years, had been promoted on her nursling's marriage to be her less skilful but equally devoted maid.

Mrs. Mote had never been what we are wont to call a pleasant woman. She was over thirty when she had first entered Lord and Lady Wantley's service as nurse to their only child, and as the years had gone on her temper had not improved, and her manner had not become more conciliating. Even in the days when Penelope had been a nervous, highly-strung little girl, Lady Wantley had had much to bear from 'Motey,' as the nurse had been early named by the child. Very feminine, under a hard, unprepossessing exterior which recalled that of Noah's wife in Penelope's old-fashioned Noah's ark, Motey instinctively disliked all those women—and, alas! there were many such, below and above stairs—who were more attractive than herself.

Lady Wantley, beautiful, beloved, and enjoying, even among many of the servant's own sort, a reputation for austere goodness and spiritual perfection, was for long years the object of poor Motey's special aversion. Singularly reticent, and taking pride in 'keeping herself to herself,' the woman never betrayed her feelings, or rather she did so in such small and intangible ways as were never suspected by the person most closely concerned. Lady Wantley recognised the woman's undoubted devotion to the child to whom she was herself so devoted, and she simply regarded Mrs. Mote's sullen though never disrespectful behaviour to herself as one of those unfortunate peculiarities of manner and temper which often accompany sterling worth. Lord Wantley had been so far old-fashioned that he disliked going anywhere without his wife, and the mother had felt great solace to leave her daughter in such sure hands; but she had sacrificed excellent maids of her own, and innumerable under-servants, to the nurse's peculiar temper and irritability.

There had been a moment, Penelope being then about seventeen, when Mrs. Mote's supremacy had trembled in the balance. The trusted nurse had played a certain part in the girl's first love affair, acting with a secretiveness, a lack of proper confidence in her master and mistress, which had made them both extremely displeased and angry, and there had been some question as to whether she should remain in their service. Mrs. Mote never forgot having overheard a short conversation between the headstrong girl and her mother. 'If you tell me it must be so, I will give up David Winfrith,' Penelope had declared, sobbing bitterly the while; 'but if you send Motey away I will throw myself into the sea!'

All this was now, however, ancient history. Mrs. Mote had been forgiven her plunge into vicarious romance, and a day had come, not, however, till after Lord Wantley's death, when Penelope's mother had admitted to herself that perhaps Motey had been more clear-sighted than herself. In any case, the old nurse had firmly established her position as a member of the family. She and Lady Wantley had grown old together, and even before Penelope's marriage the servant had learnt to regard her mistress not only with a certain affection, but with what she had before been unwilling to give her—namely, real respect. To her master she had always been warmly attached, and she mourned him sincerely, being pathetically moved when she learnt that he had left her, as 'a token of regard and gratitude,' the sum of five hundred pounds.

The phrase had touched her more than the money had done. Motey, as are so many servants, was lavishly generous, and she had helped with her legacy several worthless relations of her own to start small businesses which invariably failed. These losses, however, she bore with great philosophy. Her home was wherever her darling, her 'young lady,' her 'ma'am,' happened to be, and her circle that of the family with whose fortunes hers had now been bound up for so many years.

Mrs. Robinson's faithful affection for this old servant was one of the best traits in a somewhat capricious if generous character, the more so that the maid by no means always approved of even her mistress's most innocent actions and associates. Thus, she had first felt a rough contempt, and later a fierce dislike, of poor Melancthon Robinson.

There were two people, both men, whom Motey would have been willing to see more often with her mistress.

The one was David Winfrith, who, if now a successful, almost it might be said a famous man, had played a rather inglorious part in Penelope's first love affair. The other was young Lord Wantley, of whom the old nurse had constituted herself the champion in the days when her master and mistress had merely regarded the presence of the nervous, sensitive boy as an unpleasant duty.

Mrs. Mote's liking for these two young men was completely subordinate to her love for her nursling; she would cheerfully have seen either of them undergo the most unpleasant ordeal had Penelope thereby been saved the smallest pain or hurt. In fact, it was because she well knew how stanch a friend Winfrith could be, and how useful, in perhaps a slightly whimsical way, Lord Wantley had more than once proved himself in his cousin's service, that she would have preferred to see more of these two and less of certain others.

Ah, those others! There had always been a side of Mrs. Robinson's nature which thirsted for sentimental adventure, and yet of the three women who in their several ways loved her supremely—her mother, Cecily Wake, and the old nurse—only the last was really aware of this craving for romantic encounter. Mrs. Mote had too often found herself compelled to stand inactive in the wings of the stage on which her mistress was wont to take part in mimic, but none the less dangerous, combat, for her to remain ignorant of many things, not only unsuspected, but in a sense unthinkable, by either the austere mother or the girl friend.

Perhaps this blindness in those who yet loved her well was owing to the fact that, in the ordinary sense of the term, Penelope was no flirt. Indeed, those among her friends who belonged to a society which, if over-civilized, is perhaps the more ready to extend a large measure of sympathy to those of its number who feel an overmastering impulse to revert, in affairs of the heart, to primitive nature, regarded the beautiful widow as singularly free from the temptations with which they were themselves so sorely beset.

Doubtless because she was herself so physically perfect, physical perfection held for Penelope none of that potent, beckoning appeal it so often holds for even the most refined and intelligent women. Rather had she always been attracted, tempted, in a certain sense conquered, by the souls of those with whom her passion for romance brought her into temporary relation. Even as a girl she had disdained easy conquest, and at all times she had been, when dealing with men, as a skilful musician who only cares to play on the finest instruments. Often she was surprised and disturbed, even made indignant, both by the harmonies and by the discords she thus produced; and sometimes, again, she made a mistake concerning the quality of the human instrument under her hand.

II

As Mrs. Mote sat by her open window, her eyes seeking to distinguish among those walking on the terrace below the upright, graceful form of her mistress, she deliberately let her thoughts wander back to certain passages in her own and Mrs. Robinson's joint lives. In moments of danger we recall our hairbreadth escapes with a certain complacency; they induce a sense of sometimes false security, and just now this old woman, who loved Penelope so dearly, felt very much afraid.

The memory of two episodes came to still her fears. Though both long past, perhaps forgotten by Penelope, to Mrs. Mote they returned to-night with strange, uncomfortable vividness.

The hero of the one had been a Frenchman, of the other a Spaniard.

As for the Frenchman, Motey thought of him with a certain kindness, and even with regret, though he, too, as she put it to herself, had 'given her a good fright.' The meeting between the Comte de Lucque and Mrs. Robinson had taken place not very long after Melancthon Robinson's death, in that enchanted borderland which seems at once Switzerland and Italy.

The French lad—he was little more—was stranded there in search of health, and Penelope had soon felt for him that pity which, while so little akin to love, so often induces love in the creature pitied. She allowed, nay, encouraged, him to be her companion on long painting expeditions, and he soon made his way through, as others had done before him, to the outer ramparts of her heart.

For a while she had found him charming, at once so full of surprising naÏvetÉs and of strange, ardent enthusiasms; so utterly unlike the younger Englishman of her acquaintance and differing also greatly from the Frenchmen she had known.

Brought up between a widowed mother and a monk tutor, the young Count was in some ways as ignorant and as enthusiastic as must have been that ancestor of his who started with St. Louis from Aiguesmortes, bound for Jerusalem. His father had been killed in the great charge of the Cuirassiers at the Battle of Reichofen, and Penelope discovered that he above all things wished to live and to become strong, in order that he might take a part in 'La Revanche,' that fantasy which played so great a rÔle in the imagination of those Frenchmen belonging to his generation.

But when one evening Mrs. Robinson asked suddenly, 'Motey, how would you like to see me become a French Countess?' the nurse had not taken the question as put seriously, as, indeed, it had not been. Still, even the old servant, who regarded the fact of any man's being made what she quaintly called 'uncomfortable' by her mistress as a small, well-merited revenge for all the indignities heaped by his sex on hers—even Motey felt sorry for the Count when the inevitable day of parting came.

At first, Penelope read with some attention the long, closely-written letters which reached her day by day with faithful regularity, but there came a time when she was absorbed in the details of a small exhibition of the very latest manifestations of French art, and the Count's letters were scarcely looked at before they were thrown aside. Then, suddenly he made abrupt and most unlooked-for intrusion into Mrs. Robinson's life, at a time when the old nurse was accustomed to expect freedom from Penelope's studies in sentiment—that is, during the few weeks of the years which were always spent by Mrs. Robinson working hard in the studio of some great Paris artist.

Penelope had known how to organize her working life very intelligently; she so timed her visits to Paris as to arrange with a French painter, who was, like herself, what the unkind would call a wealthy amateur, to take over his flat, his studio, and his servants.

During nine happy weeks each spring Mrs. Robinson lived the busy Bohemian life which she loved, and which, she thought, suited her so well; but Mrs. Mote was never neglected, or, at least, never allowed herself to feel so, and occasionally her mistress found her a useful, if over-vigilant, chaperon. Mrs. Mote was on very good terms with the French servants with whom she was thus each year thrown into contact. Their easy gaiety beguiled even her grim ill-temper, and, fortunately, she never conceived the dimmest suspicion of the fact that they were all firmly persuaded that she was the humble, but none the less authentic, 'mÈre de madame'!

Now in the spring following her stay in Switzerland, not many days after she had settled down to work in Paris, Mrs. Robinson desired the excellent maÎtre d'hÔtel to inform Mrs. Mote that she was awaited in the studio. 'Motey, you remember the French count we met in Switzerland last year?' Before giving the maid time to answer, she continued: 'Well, I heard from him this morning. He asks me to go and see him. He says he is very ill, and I want you to come with me.' Penelope spoke in the hurried way usual to her when moved by real feeling.

Then, when the two were seated side by side in one of the comfortable, shabby, open French cabs, of which even Mrs. Mote recognized the charm, Penelope added suddenly: 'Motey—you don't think—do you doubt he is really ill? It would be a shabby trick——'

'All gentlemen, as far as I'm aware, ma'am, do shabby tricks sometimes. There's that saying, "All's fair in love and war"; it's very advantageous to them. I don't suppose the Count's heard it, though; he knew very little English, poor young fellow!' But Motey might have spoken more strongly had she realized how very passive was to be on this occasion her rÔle of duenna.

At last the fiacre stopped opposite a narrow door let into a high blank wall forming the side of one of those lonely quiet streets, almost ghostly in their sunny stillness, which may yet be found in certain quarters of modern Paris. Penelope gave her companion the choice of waiting for her in the carriage or of walking up and down. Mrs. Mote did not remonstrate with her mistress; she simply and sulkily expressed great distrust of Paris cabmen in general, and her preference for the pavement in particular. Then, with some misgiving, she saw Mrs. Robinson ring the bell. The door in the wall swung back, framing a green lawn, edged with bushes of blossoming lilac, against which Penelope's white serge gown was silhouetted for a brief moment, before the bright vision was shut out.

First walking, then standing, on the other side of the street, finally actually sitting on the edge of the pavement, but not before she had assured herself even in the midst of her perturbation of spirit that it was spotlessly clean, the old nurse waited during what seemed to her an eternity of time, and went through what was certainly an agony of fright.

The worst kind of fear is unreasoning. Mrs. Mote's imagination conjured up every horror; and nothing but the curious lack of initiative which seems common to those who have lived in servitude held her back from doing something undoubtedly foolish.

At last, when she was making up her mind to something very desperate indeed, though what form this desperate something should take she could not determine, there fell on her ears, coming nearer and nearer, the sound of deep sobbing. A few moments later the little green door, opening slowly, revealed two figures, that of Mrs. Robinson, pale and moved, but otherwise looking much as usual, and that of a stout, middle-aged woman, dressed in black, who, crying bitterly, clung to her, seeming loth to let her go.

Very gently, and not till they were actually standing on the pavement outside the open door, did Penelope disengage herself from the trembling hands which sought to keep her. Motey did not understand the words, 'Mon pauvre enfant, il vous aime tant! Vous reviendrez demain, n'est ce pas, madame?' but she understood enough to say no word of her long waiting, to give voice to no grumbling, as she and her mistress walked slowly down the sunny street, after having seen the little green door shut behind the short, homely figure, lacking all dignity save that of grief.

In those days, as Mrs. Mote, sitting up there remembering in the darkness, recalled with bitterness, Mrs. Robinson had had no confidante but her old nurse, and Penelope had instantly begun pouring out, as was her wont, the tale of all that had happened in the hour she had been away.

'Oh, Motey, that is his poor mother! It is so horribly sad. He is her only child. Her husband was killed in the Franco-Prussian War when she was quite a young woman, and she has given up her whole life to him. Now the poor fellow is dying'—Penelope shuddered—'and I have promised to go and see him every day till he does die.'

III

It was with no feeling of pity that Mrs. Mote now turned in her own mind to the second episode.

A journey to Madrid in search of pictured dons and high hidalgos had led Mrs. Robinson to make the acquaintance of a Spanish gentleman, a certain Don JosÉ Moricada; and the old Englishwoman, with her healthy contempt of extravagance of behaviour and language, could now smile grimly as she evoked the striking individuality of the man who had given her the worst quarter of an hour she had ever known.

At the time of their first meeting Don JosÉ had seemed to Penelope to embody in his single person all the qualities which may be supposed to have animated the noble models whose good fortune it was to be immortalized by Velasquez; indeed, he ultimately proved himself possessed to quite an inconvenient degree of the passion and living fervour which the great artist, who was of all painters Penelope's most admired master, could so subtly convey.

With restrained ardour the Don had placed himself, almost at their first meeting, at the beautiful Englishwoman's disposal, and Penelope had seldom met with a more intelligent and unobtrusive cicerone. At his bidding the heavy doors of old Madrid mansions, embowered in gardens, and hidden behind gates which had never opened even to the most courteous of strangers, swung back, revealing treasures hitherto jealously hidden from the foreign lover of Spanish art. Together they had journeyed to the Escurial in leisurely old-world fashion, driving along the arid roads and stony tracks so often traversed at mule gallop by Philip of Arragon; and the mouldering courts of the great death-haunted palace through which her Spanish gallant led Mrs. Robinson had rarely seen the passage of a better contrasted couple.

Softer hours were spent in the deserted scented gardens of Buen Retiro, and not once did the Spaniard imply by word or gesture that he expected his companion's assent to the significant Spanish proverb, Dame ye darte he (Give to me, and I will give to thee).

Penelope had never enjoyed a more delicate and inconsequent romance, or a more delightful interlude in what was then a life overfull of unsought pleasures and of interests sprung upon it. In those days Mrs. Robinson had not found herself. She was even then still tasting, with a certain tearfulness, the joys of complete freedom, and those who always lie in wait, even if innocently, to profit by such freedoms, soon called her insistently back to England.

They had an abettor in Mrs. Mote, whose long-suffering love of her mistress had seldom been more tried than during the sojourn in Spain, spent by the maid in gloomy hotel solitude, or, more unpleasing still, in company where she felt herself regarded by the Spaniard as an intolerable and somewhat grotesque duenna, and by her mistress as a bore, to be endured for kindness' sake. But the boredom of her old nurse's companionship was not one which Penelope often felt called upon to share with her indefatigable cavalier, and, as there came a time when Don JosÉ and Mrs. Robinson seemed to the old nurse to be scarcely ever apart, Mrs. Mote often felt both angry and lonely.

Suddenly Penelope grew tired, not of Spain, but of Madrid, perhaps also of her Spanish friend, especially when she discovered, with annoyance, that he had arranged, if not to accompany her, at least to travel on the same days as herself first to Toledo, and thence to Seville. Also something else had happened which had proved very distasteful to Mrs. Robinson.

The English Ambassador, an old friend of her parents, and a man who, as he had begun by reminding Penelope at the outset of their detestable conversation, was almost old enough to be her grandfather, had called on Mrs. Robinson and said a word of caution.

The word was carefully chosen; for the old gentleman was not only a diplomatist, but he had lived in Spain so many years that he had caught some of the Spanish elusiveness of language and courtesy of phrase. Penelope, with reddening cheek, had at first made the mistake of affecting to misunderstand him. Then, with British bluntness, he had spoken out. 'Spaniards are not Englishmen, my dear young lady. You met your new friend at my house, and so I feel a certain added responsibility. Of course, I know you have been absolutely discreet; still, I feel the time has come when I should warn you. These Spanish fellows when in love sometimes give a lot of trouble.' He had jerked the sentence out, angry with her, angrier perhaps with himself.

The day before Mrs. Robinson was leaving Madrid, and not, as she somewhat coldly informed Don JosÉ Moricada, for Toledo, there was a question of one last expedition.

On the outskirts of the town, in an old house reputed to have been at one time the country residence of that French Ambassador, Monsieur de Villars, whose wife had left so vivid an account of seventeenth-century Madrid, were to be seen a magnificent collection of paintings and studies by Goya. According to tradition, they had been painted during the enchanted period of the Don Juanesque artist's love passages with the Duchess of Alba, and very early in her acquaintance with the Spaniard Penelope had expressed a strong desire to see work done by the great painter under such romantic and unusual circumstances. And Don JosÉ had been at considerable pains to obtain the absent owner's permission. His request had been acceded to only after a long delay, and at a moment when Mrs. Robinson had become weary both of Madrid and of her Spanish gallant's company.

It seemed, however, churlish to refuse to avail herself of a favour obtained with so much difficulty. For awhile she had hesitated; not only did the warning of the old Ambassador still sound most unpleasantly in her ears, but of late there had come something less restrained, more ardent, in the attitude of the Spaniard, proving only too significantly how right the old Englishman had been. But even were she to return another year to Madrid, the opportunity of visiting this curious old house and its, to her, most notable contents, was not likely to recur.

The appointment for the visit to Los Francias was therefore made and kept; but when Don JosÉ, himself driving the splendid English horses of which he was so proud, called at the hotel for Mrs. Robinson, he found, to his angry astonishment, that her old nurse, the maid he so disliked, was to be of the company.

During the drive, Mrs. Mote, in high good-humour at her approaching release from Madrid, noticed with satisfaction that her mistress's Spanish friend seemed preoccupied and gloomy, though Mrs. Robinson's high spirits and apparent pleasure in the picturesque streets and byways they passed through might well have proved infectious.

At last Los Francias was reached; and after walking through deserted, scented gardens, where Nature was disregarding, with triumphant success, the Bourbon formality of myrtle hedges, marble fountains, and sunk parterres, the ill-assorted trio found themselves being ushered by a man-servant, with great ceremony, into a large vestibule situated in the centre of a house recalling rather a French chÂteau than a Spanish country-house.

In answer to a muttered word from the Spaniard, Mrs. Mote heard her mistress answer decidedly: 'My maid would much prefer to come with us than to stay here with a man of whose language she doesn't know a word. Besides, this is not the last time. I hope to come back some day, and you will surely visit England.'

On hearing these words Don JosÉ had turned and looked at his beautiful companion with a curious gleam in his small, narrow-lidded eyes, and a foreboding had come to the old servant.

The high rooms, opening the one into the other, still contained shabby pieces of fine old French furniture, of which the faded gilding and moth-eaten tapestries contrasted oddly with the vivid, strangely living paintings which seemed ready to leap from the walls above them. The heavy stillness, the utter emptiness, of the great salons oddly affected the old Englishwoman, walking behind the other two; she felt a vague misgiving, and was more than ever glad to remember that in a few days Mrs. Robinson would have left Madrid.

Suddenly, when strolling through the largest, and apparently the last of the whole suite of rooms, Mrs. Mote missed her mistress and Don JosÉ.

Had they gone forward or turned back? She looked round her, utterly bewildered, then spied in the wall a narrow aperture to which admission was apparently given by a hinged panel, hung, as was the rest of the salon, with red brocade.

This, then, was where and how the other two had disappeared. She felt relieved, even a little ashamed of her unreasoning fear.

For a moment she hesitated, then stepped through the aperture into a narrow corridor, shaped like an S, and characteristic—but Motey knew nothing of this—of French chÂteau architecture; for these curiously narrow passages, tucked away in the thickness of the wall, form a link between the state rooms of many a great palace and the 'little apartments' arranged for their owner's daily and familiar use.

The inner twist of the S-shaped corridor was quite dark, but very soon Mrs. Mote found that the passage terminated with an ordinary door, through which, the upper half being glazed, she saw her mistress and the Spaniard engaged in an apparently very animated conversation.

The room in which stood the two she sought was almost ludicrously unlike those to which it was so closely linked by the passage in which the onlooker was standing. Perhaps the present owner of the old house, or more probably his wife, had found the Goyas oppressive company, for here no pictures hung on brocaded walls; instead, the round, domed room, lighted only from above, was lined with a gay modern wall-paper, of which the design simulated a fruitful vine, trained against green trellis-work. Modern French basket furniture, the worse for wear, was arranged about a circular marble fountain, which, let into the tiled floor, must have afforded coolness on the hottest day.

Memories of former occupants, and of another age, were conjured up by a First Empire table, pushed back against the wall; and opposite the door behind which the old nurse stood peering was the entrance, wide open, to a darkened room, while just inside this room Mrs. Mote was surprised to see a curious sign of actual occupancy—a small, spider-legged table, on which stood a decanter of white wine, a plate of chocolate cakes, and a gold bowl full of roses.

But these things were rather remembered later, for at the time the old woman's whole attention was centred on her mistress and the latter's companion. Mrs. Robinson, her back turned to the darkened room beyond, was standing by a slender marble pillar, rimmed at the top with a tarnished gilt railing; a long grey silk cloak and boat-shaped hat, covered with white ostrich feathers, accentuated her tall slenderness, for in these early days of widowhood Penelope was exquisitely, miraculously slender. With head bent and eyes cast down, she seemed to be listening, embarrassed and ashamed, to Don JosÉ Moricada. One arm and hand, the latter holding a glove, rested on the marble pillar, and her whole figure, if instinct with proud submissiveness, breathed angry, embarrassed endurance.

As for the Spaniard, always sober of gesture, his arms folded across his breast in the dignified fashion first taught to short men by Napoleon, he seemed to be pouring out a torrent of eager, impassioned words, every sentence emphasized by an imperious glance from the bright dark eyes, which, as Mrs. Mote did not fail to remind herself, had always inspired her with distrust.

The unseen spectator of the singular scene also divined the protestations, the entreaties, the reproaches, which were being uttered in a language of which she could not understand one word.

For a few moments she felt pity, even a certain measure of sympathy for the man. To her thinking—and Mrs. Mote had her own ideas about most matters—Penelope had brought this torrent of words and reproaches on herself; but when the old nurse heard the voice of the Spaniard become more threatening and less appealing, when she saw Mrs. Robinson suddenly turn and face him, her head thrown back, her blue eyes wide open with something even Motey had never seen in them before—for till that day Penelope and Fear had never met—then the onlooker felt the lesson had indeed lasted long enough, and that, even at the risk of angering her mistress, the time had come when she should interfere. Her hand sought and found the handle of the door. She turned and twisted it this way and that, but the door remained fast, and suddenly she realized that Penelope was a prisoner.

In this primitive, but none the less potent, way had the Spaniard made himself, in one sense at least, master of the situation—the old eternal situation between the man pursuing and the woman fleeing.

Caring little whether she was now seen or not, Mrs. Mote pressed her face closely to the glass pane. She looked at the lithe sinewy figure of Penelope's companion with a curiously altered feeling; a great sinking of the heart had taken the place of the pity and contempt of only a moment before.

For awhile neither Penelope nor Don JosÉ saw the face behind the door. Mrs. Robinson had turned away, and had begun walking slowly round the domed hall, her companion following her, but keeping his distance. At last, when passing for the second time the open door leading to the darkened room beyond, she had looked up, uttered an exclamation of angry disgust, and had slackened her footsteps, while he, quickening his, had decreased the space between them....

When, in later life, Penelope unwillingly recalled the scene, her memory preferred to dwell on the grotesque rather than on the sinister side of the episode. But at the moment of ordeal—ah, then her whole being became very literally absorbed in supplication to the dead two who when living had never failed her: her father and Melancthon Robinson.

They may have been permitted to respond, or perhaps a more explicable cause may have brought about a revival of pride and good feeling in the Spanish gentleman; for when there came release it seemed as if Mrs. Mote was the unwitting dea ex machina.

The two, moving within panther and doe wise, both saw, simultaneously, the plain, homely face of Mrs. Robinson's old nurse staring in upon them, and the sight, affording the woman infinite comfort and courage, seemed to withdraw all power from the man, for very slowly, with apparent reluctance, Don JosÉ Moricada turned on his heel, and unlocked the door.

The maid did not reply to the rebuke, uttered in a low tone, 'Oh, Motey, we've been waiting for you such a long time.' Instead, she turned to the Spaniard. 'My lady is tired, sir. Surely you've showed her enough by now.'

He bent his head, silently opening again the glazed door and waiting for them to pass through, as his only answer.

But Penelope's nerve had gone. She was clutching her old nurse's arm with desperate tightening fingers. 'I can't go through there, Motey, unless'—she spoke almost inaudibly—'unless you can make him walk through first.'

Mrs. Mote was quite equal to the occasion. 'Will you please go on, sir? My mistress is nervous of the dark passage.'

Again the Spaniard silently obeyed the old servant, and Penelope never saw the look, full of passionate humiliation and dumb craving for forgiveness, with which he uttered the words—though they brought vague relief—explaining that he was leaving his groom to drive her and her maid back to the hotel alone.

During the moments which followed, Mrs. Robinson, looking straight before her, spoke much of indifferent matters, and pointed out to Mrs. Mote many an interesting and characteristic sight by the roadside; but both the speaker's knee and the hands clasped across it trembled violently the while, and when they were at last safely back again in the hotel, after Mrs. Robinson had said some gracious words to Don JosÉ Moricada's English groom, and had given him more substantial tokens of her gratitude for the many pleasant drives she had taken with his noble master, a curious thing happened.

Having prepared the bath which had been her mistress's first order when they found themselves in their own rooms, Motey, now quite her stolid self again, on opening the sitting-room door, found her mistress engaged in a strange occupation. Mrs. Robinson, still standing, was cutting the long grey silk cloak, which she had been wearing but a moment before, into a thousand narrow strips. The maid's work-basket, a survival of Penelope's childhood—for it had been the little girl's first birthday-gift to her nurse—had evidently provided the sharp cutting-out scissors for the sacrifice.

To a woman who has done much needlework there is something dreadful, unnatural, in the wanton destruction of a faithful garment, and Mrs. Mote stood looking on, silent indeed, but breathing protest in every line of her short figure. But Penelope, after a short glance, had at once averted her eyes, and completed her task with what seemed to the other a dreadful thoroughness.

Then the relentless scissors attacked the charming hat. Each long white plume was quickly reduced to a heap of feathery atoms, and the exquisitely plaited straw was slashed through and through. 'You can give all the other things I have worn to-day to the chambermaid,' Mrs. Robinson said quickly, 'and Motey—never, never speak of—of—our stay here, in Madrid I mean, to me again. We shall leave to-night, not to-morrow morning.'

And now, looking down below, seeing the moving figures pacing slowly all together, then watching two of the shadowy forms detach themselves from the rest, and wander off into the pine-wood, then back again, down the steps which led to the lower moonlit terraces and so to the darker sea-shore, Mrs. Mote felt full of vague fears and suspicions.

Again she felt as if she were standing behind a door, barred away from her mistress. But, alas! this time it was Penelope who had turned the key in the lock, Penelope pursuing rather than pursued, and longing for the moment of surrender.