THE journey to Madrid was for Mrs. Gainsborough a long revelation of human eccentricity.

“Not even Mrs. Ewings would believe it,” she assured Sylvia. “It’s got to be seen to be believed. I opened my mouth a bit wide when I first came to France, but France is Peckham Rye if you put it alongside of Spain. When that guard or whatever he calls himself opened our door and bobbed in out of the runnel with the train going full speed and asked for our tickets, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Showing off, that’s what I call it. And carrying wine inside of goats! Disgusting I should say. Nice set-out there’d be in England if the brewers started sending round beer inside of sheep. Why, it would cause a regular outcry; but these Spanish seem to put up with everything. I’m not surprised they come round selling water at every station. The cheek of it though, when you come to think about it. Putting wine inside of goats so as to make people buy water. If I’d have been an enterprising woman like Mrs. Marsham, I should have got out at the last station and complained to the police about it. But really the stations aren’t fit for a decent person to walk about in. I’m not considered very particular, but when a station consists of nothing but a signal-box and a lavatory and no platform, I don’t call it a station. And what a childish way of starting a train—blowing a toy horn like that. More like a school treat than a railway journey. And the turkeys! Now I ask you, Sylvia, would you believe it? Four turkeys under the seat and three on the rack over me head. A regular Harlequinade! And every time anybody takes out a cigarette or a bit of bread they offer it all around the compartment. Fortunately I don’t look hungry, or they might have been offended. No wonder England’s full of aliens. I shall explain the reason of it when I get home.”

The place of entertainment where Sylvia worked was called the Teatro JaponÉs, for what reason it would have been difficult to say. The girls were, as usual, mostly French, but there were one or two Spanish dancers that, as Mrs. Gainsborough put it, kept one “rum-tum-tumming in one’s seat all the time it was going on.” Sylvia found Madrid a dull city entirely without romance of aspect, nor did the pictures in the Prado make up for the bull-ring’s wintry desolation. Mrs. Gainsborough considered the most remarkable evidence of Spanish eccentricity was the way in which flocks of turkeys, after traveling in passenger-trains, actually wandered about the chief thoroughfares.

“Suppose if I was to go shooing across Piccadilly with a herd of chickens, let alone turkeys, well, it would be a circus, and that’s a fact.”

When they first arrived they stayed at a large hotel in the Puerta del Sol, but Mrs. Gainsborough got into trouble with the baths, partly because they cost five pesetas each and partly because she said it went to her heart to see a perfectly clean sheet floating about in the water. After that they tried a smaller hotel, where they were fairly comfortable, though Mrs. Gainsborough took a long time to get used to being brought chocolate in the morning.

“I miss my morning tea, Sylvia, and it’s no use me pretending I don’t. I don’t feel like chocolate in the morning. I’d just as lieve have a slice of plum-pudding in a cup. Why, if you try to put a lump of sugar in, it won’t sink; it keeps bobbing up like a kitten. And another thing I can’t seem to get used to is having the fish after the meat. Every time it comes in like that it seems a kind of carelessness. What fish it is, too, when it does come. Well, they say a donkey can eat thistles, but it would take him all his time to get through one of those fish. No wonder they serve them after the meat. I should think they were afraid of the amount of meat any one might eat, trying to get the bones out of one’s throat. I’ve felt like a pincushion ever since I got to Madrid, and how you can sing beats me. Your throat must be like a zither by now.”

It really did not seem worth while to remain any longer in Madrid, and Sylvia asked to be released from her contract. The manager, who had been wondering to all the other girls why Sylvia had ever been sent to him, discovered that she was his chief attraction when she wanted to break the contract. However, a hundred pesetas in his own pocket removed all objections, and she was free to leave Spain.

“Well, do you want to go home?” she asked Mrs. Gainsborough. “Or would you come to Seville?”

“Now we’ve come so far, we may as well go on a bit farther,” Mrs. Gainsborough thought.

Seville was very different from Madrid.

“Really, when you see oranges growing in the streets,” Mrs. Gainsborough said, “you begin to understand why people ever goes abroad. Why, the flowers are really grand, Sylvia. Carnations as common as daisies. Well, I declare, I wrote home a post-card to Mrs. Beardmore and told her Seville was like being in a conservatory. She’s living near Kew now, so she’ll understand my meaning.”

They both much enjoyed the dancing in the cafÉs, when solemn men hurled their sombreros on the dancers’ platform to mark their appreciation of the superb creatures who flaunted themselves there so gracefully.

“But they’re bold hussies with it all, aren’t they?” Mrs. Gainsborough observed. “Upon me word, I wouldn’t care to climb up there and swing my hips about like that.”

From Seville, after an idle month of exquisite weather, often so warm that Sylvia could sit in the garden of the Alcazar and read in the shade of the lemon-trees, they went to Granada.

“So they’ve got an Alhambra here, have they?” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “But from what I’ve seen of the performances in Spain it won’t come up to good old Leicester Square.”

On Sylvia the Alhambra cast an enchantment more powerful than any famous edifice she had yet seen. Her admiration of cathedrals had always been tempered by a sense of missing most of what they stood for. They were still exercising their functions in a modern world and thereby overshadowed her personal emotions in a way that she found most discouraging to the imagination. The Alhambra, which once belonged to kings, now belonged to individual dreams. Those shaded courts where even at midday the ice lay thick upon the fountains; that sudden escape from a frozen chastity of brown stone out on the terraces rich with sunlight; that vision of the Sierra Nevada leaping against the blue sky with all its snowy peaks; this incredible meeting of East and South and North—to know all these was to stand in the center of the universe, oneself a king.

“What’s it remind you of, Sylvia?” Mrs. Gainsborough asked.

“Everything,” Sylvia cried. She felt that it would take but the least effort of will to light in one swoop upon the Sierra Nevada and from those bastions storm ... what?

“It reminds me just a tiddly-bit of Earl’s Court,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, putting her head on one side like a meditative hen. “If you shut one eye against those mountains, you’ll see what I mean.”

Sylvia came often by herself to the Alhambra; she had no scruples in leaving Mrs. Gainsborough, who had made friends at the pension with a lonely American widower.

“He knows everything,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “I’ve learned more in a fortnight with him than I ever learned in my whole life. What that man doesn’t know! Well, I’m sure it’s not worth knowing. He’s been in trade and never been able to travel till now, but he’s got the world off by heart, as you might say. I sent a p. c. to Mrs. Ewings to say I’d found a masher at last. The only thing against him is the noises he makes with his throat. I gave him some lozenges at first, but he made more noise than ever sucking them, and I had to desist.”

Soon after Mrs. Gainsborough met her American, Sylvia made the acquaintance of a youthful guide of thirteen or fourteen years, who for a very small wage adopted her and gave her much entertainment. Somehow or other Rodrigo had managed to pick up a good deal of English and French, which, as he pointed out, enabled him to compete with the older guides who resented his intrusion. Rodrigo did not consider that the career of a guide was worthy of real ambition. For the future he hesitated between being a gentleman’s servant and a tobacconist in Gibraltar. He was a slim child with the perfect grace of the young South in movements and in manners alike.

Rodrigo was rather distressed at the beginning by Sylvia’s want of appetite for mere sight-seeing; he reproved her indeed very gravely for wasting valuable time in repeating her visits to favorite spots while so many others remained unvisited. He was obsessed by the rapidity with which most tourists passed through Granada, but when he discovered that Sylvia had no intention of hurrying or being hurried, his native indolence blossomed to her sympathy and he adapted himself to her pleasure in sitting idle and dreaming in the sun.

Warmer weather came in February, and Rodrigo suggested that the Alhambra should be visited by moonlight. He did not make this suggestion because it was the custom of other English people to desire this experience; he realized that the SeÑorita was not influenced by what other people did; at the same time the Alhambra by moonlight could scarcely fail to please the SeÑorita’s passion for beauty. He himself had a passion for beauty, and he pledged his word she would not regret following his advice; moreover, he would bring his guitar.

On a February night, when the moon was still high, Sylvia and Rodrigo walked up the avenue that led to the Alhambra. There was nobody on the summit but themselves. Far down lights flitted in the gipsy quarter, and there came up a faint noise of singing and music.

It was Carnival, Rodrigo explained, and the SeÑorita would have enjoyed it; but, alas! there were many rascals about on such nights, and though he was armed, he did not recommend a visit. He brought out his guitar; from beneath her Spanish cloak Sylvia also brought out a guitar.

“The SeÑorita plays? Maravilloso!” Rodrigo exclaimed. “But why the SeÑorita did not inform me to carry her guitar? The hill was long. The SeÑorita will be tired.”

Sylvia opened with one of her old French songs, after which Rodrigo, who had paid her a courteous and critical attention, declared that she had a musician’s soul like himself, and forthwith, in a treble that was limpid as the moon, light, unpassionate as the snow, remote as the mountains, he too sang.

“Exquisite,” Sylvia sighed.

The SeÑorita was too kind, and as if to disclaim the compliment he went off into a mad gipsy tune. Suddenly he broke off.

“Hark! Does the SeÑorita hear a noise of weeping?”

There was indeed a sound of some one’s crying, a sound that came nearer every moment.

“It is most unusual to hear a sound of weeping in the Alhambra au clair de la lune,” said Rodrigo. “If the SeÑorita will permit me, I shall find out the cause.”

Soon he came back with a girl whose cheeks glistened with tears.

“She is a dancer,” Rodrigo explained. “She says she is Italian, but—” With a shrug of the shoulders he gave Sylvia to understand that he accepted no responsibility for her statement. It was Carnival.

Sylvia asked the new-comer in French what was the matter, but for some time she could only sob without saying a word. Rodrigo, who was regarding her with a mixture of disapproval and compassion, considered that she had reached the stage—he spoke with all possible respect for the SeÑorita, who must not suppose herself included in his generalization—the stage of incoherence that is so much more frequent with women than with men whose feelings have been upset. If he might suggest a remedy to the SeÑorita, it would be to leave her alone for a few minutes and continue the interrupted music. They had come here to enjoy the Alhambra by moonlight; it seemed a pity to allow the grief of an unknown dancer to spoil the beauty of the scene, grief that probably had nothing to do with the Alhambra, but was an echo of the world below. It might be a lovers’ quarrel due to the discovery of a masked flirtation, a thing of no importance compared with the Alhambra by moonlight.

“I’m not such a philosopher as you, Rodrigo. I am a poor, inquisitive woman.”

Certainly inquisitiveness might be laid to the charge of the feminine sex, he agreed, but not to all. There must be exceptions, and with a gesture expressive of tolerance for the weaknesses of womankind he managed to convey his intention of excepting Sylvia from Eve’s heritage. Human nature was not all woven to the same pattern. Many of his friends, for instance, would fail to appreciate the Alhambra on such a night, and would prefer to blow horns in the streets.

By this time the grief of the stranger was less noisy, and Sylvia again asked her who she was and why she was weeping. She spoke in English this time; the fair, slim child, for when one looked at her she was scarcely more than fifteen, brightened.

“I don’t know where I was,” she said.

Rodrigo clicked his tongue and shook his head; he was shocked by this avowal much more deeply than in his sense of locality. Sylvia was puzzled by her accent. The ‘w’s’ were nearly ‘v’s,’ but the intonation was Italian.

“And you’re a dancer?” she asked.

“Yes, I was dancing at the Estrella.”

Rodrigo explained that this was a cabaret, the kind of place with which the SeÑorita would not be familiar.

“And you’re Italian?”

The girl nodded, and Sylvia, seeing that it would be impossible to extract anything about her story in her present overwrought state, decided to take her back to the pension.

“And I will carry the SeÑorita’s guitar,” said Rodrigo. “To-morrow morning at eleven o’clock?” he asked by the gate of Sylvia’s pension. “Or would the SeÑorita prefer that I waited to conduct the seÑorita extraviada?”

Sylvia bade him come in the morning; with a deep bow to her and to the stranger he departed, twanging his guitar. Mrs. Gainsborough, who by this time had reached the point of thinking that her American widower existed only to be oracular, wished to ask his advice about the stranger, and was quite offended with Sylvia for telling her rather sharply that she did not want all the inmates of the pension buzzing round the frightened child.

“Chocolate would be more useful than advice,” Sylvia said.

“I know you’re very down on poor Mr. Linthicum, but he’s a mass of information. Only this morning he was explaining how you can keep eggs fresh for a year by putting them in a glass of water. Now I like a bit of advice. I’m not like you, you great harum-scarum thing.”

Mrs. Gainsborough was unable to remain very long in a state of injured dignity; she soon came up to Sylvia’s bedroom with cups of chocolate.

“And though you laugh at poor Mr. Linthicum,” she said, “it’s thanks to him you’ve got this chocolate so quick, for he talked to the servant himself.”

With this Mrs. Gainsborough left the room in high good humor at the successful rehabilitation of the informative widower.

The girl, whose name was Concetta, had long ceased to lament, but she was still very shy, and Sylvia found it extremely difficult at first to reach any clear comprehension of her present trouble. Gradually, however, by letting her talk in her own breathless way, and in an odd mixture of English, French, German, and Italian, she was able to put together the facts into a kind of consecutiveness.

Her father had been an Italian, who for some reason that was not at all clear had lived at Aix-la-Chapelle. Her mother, to whom he had apparently never been married, had been a Fleming. This mother had died when Concetta was about four, and her father had married a German woman who had beaten her, particularly after her father had either died or abandoned his child to the stepmother—it was not clear which. At this point an elder brother appeared in the tale, who at the age of eleven had managed to steal some money and run away. Of this brother Concetta had made an ideal hero. She dreamed of him even now and never came to any town but that she expected to meet him there. Sylvia had asked her how she expected to recognize somebody who had disappeared from her life when she was only six years old, but Concetta insisted that she should know him again. When she said this, she looked round her with an expression of fear and asked if anybody could overhear them. Sylvia assured her that they were quite alone, and Concetta said in a whisper:

“Once in Milano I saw Francesco. Hush! he passed in the street, and I said, ‘Francesco,’ and he said, ‘Concettina,’ but we could not speak together more longer.”

Sylvia would not contest this assertion, though she made up her mind that it must have been a dream.

“It was a pity you could not speak,” she said.

“Yes, nothing but Francesco and Concettina before he was gone. Peccato! Peccato!”

Francesco’s example had illuminated his sister’s life with the hope of escaping from the stepmother, and she had hoarded pennies month after month for three years. She would not speak in detail of the cruelty of her stepmother; the memory of it even at this distance of time was too much charged with horror. It was evident to Sylvia that she had suffered exceptional things and that this was no case of ordinary unkindness. There was still in Concetta’s eyes the look of an animal in a trap, and Sylvia felt a rage at human cruelty hammering upon her brain. One read of these things with an idle shudder, but, oh, to behold before one a child whose very soul was scarred. There was more for the imagination to feed upon, because Concetta said that not only was her stepmother cruel, but also her school-teachers and schoolmates.

“Everybody was liking to beat me. I don’t know why, but they was liking to beat me; no, really, they was liking it.”

At last, and here Concetta was very vague, as if she were seeking to recapture the outlines of a dream that fades in the light of morning, somehow or other she ran away and arrived at a big place with trees in a large city.

“Where, at Aix-la-Chapelle?”

“No, I got into a train and came somewhere to a big place with trees in the middle of a city.”

“Was it a park in Brussels?”

She shrugged her shoulders and came back to her tale. In this park she had met some little girls who had played with her; they had played a game of joining hands and dancing round in a circle until they all fell down in the grass. A gentleman had laughed to see them amusing themselves so much, and the little girls had asked her to come with them and the gentleman; they had danced round him and pulled his coat to make him take Concetta. He had asked her whence she came and whither she was going; he was a schoolmaster and he was going far away with all these other little girls. Concetta had cried when they were leaving her, and the gentleman, when he found that she was really alone in this big city, had finally been persuaded to take her with him. They went far away in the train to Dantzic, where he had a school to learn dancing. She had been happy there; the master was very kind. When she was thirteen she had gone with the other girls from the school to dance in the ballet at La Scala in Milan, but before that she had danced at Dresden and Munich. Then about six months ago a juggler called Zozo had wanted her and another girl to join his act. He was a young man; she had liked him and she had left Milan with him. They had performed in Rome and Naples and Bari and Palermo. At Palermo the other girl had gone back to her home in Italy, and Concetta had traveled to Spain with Zozo through Tunis and Algiers and Oran. Zozo had treated her kindly until they came here to the Estrella Concert; but here he had changed and, when she did not like him to make love to her, he had beaten her. To-night before they went to the cabaret he had told her that unless she would let him love her he would throw the daggers at her heart. In their act she was tied up and he threw daggers all round her. She had been frightened, and when he went to dress she had run away; but the streets were full of people in masks, and she had lost herself.

Sylvia looked at this child with her fair hair, who but for the agony and fear in her blue eyes would have been like one of those rapturous angels in old Flemish pictures. Here she sat, as ten years ago Sylvia had sat in the cab-shelter talking to Fred Organ. Her story and Concetta’s met at this point in man’s vileness.

“My poor little thing, you must come and live with me,” cried Sylvia, clasping Concetta in her arms. “I too am all alone, and I should love to feel that somebody was dependent on me. You shall come with me to England. You’re just what I’ve been looking for. Now I’m going to put you to bed, for you’re worn out.”

“But he’ll come to find me,” Concetta gasped, in sudden affright. “He was so clever. On the program you can read. ZOZO: el mejor prestigitador del mundo. He knows everything.”

“We must introduce him to Mrs. Gainsborough. She likes encyclopedias with pockets.”

“Please?”

“I was talking to myself. My dear, you’ll be perfectly safe here with me from the greatest magician in the world.”

In the end she was able to calm Concetta’s fears; in sleep, when those frightened eyes were closed, she seemed younger than ever, and Sylvia brooded over her by candle-light as if she were indeed her child.

Mrs. Gainsborough, on being told next morning Concetta’s story and Sylvia’s resolve to adopt her, gave her blessing to the plan.

“Mulberry Cottage’ll be nice for her to play about in. She’ll be able to dig in the garden. We’ll buy a bucket and spade. Fancy, what wicked people there are in this world. But I blame her stepmother more than I do this Shoushou.”

Mrs. Gainsborough persisted in treating Concetta as if she were about nine years old and was continually thinking of toys that might amuse her. When at last she was brought to realize that she was fifteen, she was greatly disappointed on behalf of Mr. Linthicum, to whom she had presented Concetta as an infant prodigy.

“He commented so much on the languages she could speak, and he told her of a quick way to practise elemental American, which I always thought was the same as English, but apparently it’s not. It’s a much older language, really, and came over with Christopher Columbus in the Mayflower.”

Rodrigo was informed by Sylvia that henceforth the SeÑorita Concetta would live with her. He expressed no surprise and accepted with a charming courtliness the new situation at the birth of which he had presided. Sylvia thought it might be prudent to take Rodrigo so far into her confidence as to give him a hint about a possible attempt by the juggler to get Concetta back into his power. Rodrigo looked very serious at the notion, and advised the SeÑorita to leave Granada quickly. It was against his interest to give this counsel, for he should lose his SeÑorita, the possession of whom had exposed him to a good deal of envy from the other guides. Besides, he had grown fond of the SeÑorita and he should miss her. He had intended to practise much on his guitar this spring, and he had looked forward to hearing the nightingales with her; they would be singing next month in the lemon-groves. Many people were deaf to the song of birds, but personally he could not listen to them without ... a shrug of the shoulders expressed the incommunicable emotion.

“You shall come with us, Rodrigo.”

“To Gibraltar?” he asked, quickly, with flashing eyes.

“Why not?” said Sylvia.

He seized her hand and kissed it.

“El destino,” he murmured. “I shall certainly see there the tobacco-shop that one day I shall have.”

For two or three days Rodrigo guarded the pension against the conjuror and his spies. By this time between Concetta’s apprehensions and Mrs. Gainsborough’s exaggeration of them, Zozo had acquired a demoniac menace, lurking in the background of enjoyment like a child’s fear.

The train for Algeciras would leave in the morning at four o’clock. It was advisable, Rodrigo thought, to be at the railway station by two o’clock at the latest; he should come with a carriage to meet them. Would the SeÑorita excuse him this evening, because his mother—he gave one of his inimitable shrugs to express the need of sometimes yielding to maternal fondness—wished him to spend his last evening with her.

At two o’clock next morning Rodrigo had not arrived, but at three a carriage drove up and the coachman handed Sylvia a note. It was in Spanish to say that Rodrigo had met with an accident and that he was very ill. He kissed the SeÑorita’s hand. He believed that he was going to die, which was his only consolation for not being able to go with her to Gibraltar; it was el destino; he had brought the accident on himself.

Sylvia drove with Mrs. Gainsborough and Concetta to the railway station. When she arrived and found that the train would not leave till five, she kept the coachman and, after seeing her companions safely into their compartment, drove to where Rodrigo lived.

He was lying in a hovel in the poorest part of the city. His mother, a ragged old woman, was lamenting in a corner; one or two neighbors were trying to quiet her. On Sylvia’s arrival they all broke out in a loud wail of apology for the misfortune that had made Rodrigo break his engagement. Sylvia paid no attention to them, but went quickly across to the bed of the sick boy. He opened his eyes and with an effort put out a slim brown arm and caught hold of her hand to kiss it. She leaned over and kissed his pale lips. In a very faint voice, hiding his head in the pillow for shame, he explained that he had brought the accident on himself by his boasting. He had boasted so much about the tobacco-shop and the favor of the SeÑorita that an older boy, another guide, a—he tried to shrug his shoulders in contemptuous expression of this older boy’s inferior quality, but his body contracted in a spasm of pain and he had to set criticism on one side. This older boy had hit him out of jealousy, and, alas! Rodrigo had lost his temper and drawn a knife, but the other boy had stabbed first. It was el destino most unhappily precipitated by his own vainglory.

Sylvia turned to the women to ask what could be done. Their weeping redoubled. The doctor had declared it was only a matter of hours; the priest had given unction. Suddenly Rodrigo with a violent effort clutched at Sylvia’s hand:

“SeÑorita, the train!”

He fell back dead.

Sylvia left money for the funeral; there was nothing more to be done. In the morning twilight she went down the foul stairs and back to the carriage that seemed now to smell of death.

When she arrived at the station a great commotion was taking place on the platform, and Mrs. Gainsborough appeared, surrounded by a gesticulating crowd of porters, officials, and passengers.

“Sylvia! Well, I’m glad you’ve got here at last. She’s gone. He’s whisked her away. And can I explain what I want to these Spanish idiots? No. I’ve shouted as hard as I could, and they won’t understand. They won’t understand me. They don’t want to understand, that’s my opinion.”

With which Mrs. Gainsborough sailed off again along the platform, followed by the crowd, which, in addition to arguing with her occasionally, detached from itself small groups to argue furiously with one another about her incomprehensible desire. Sylvia extricated their luggage from the compartment, for the train to go to Algeciras without them; then she extricated Mrs. Gainsborough from the general noise and confusion that was now being added to by loud whistles from the impatient train.

“I was sitting in one corner and Concertina was sitting in the other,” Mrs. Gainsborough explained to Sylvia. “I’d just bobbed down to pick up me glasses when I saw that Shoushou beckoning to her, though for the moment I thought it was the porter. Concertina went as white as paper. ‘Here,’ I hollered, ‘what are you doing?’ and with that I got up from me place and tripped over your luggage and came down bump on the foot-warmer. When I got up she was gone. Depend upon it, he’d been watching out for her at the station. As soon as I could get out of the carriage I started hollering, and every one in the station came running round to see what was the matter. I tried to tell them about Shoushou, and they pretended—for don’t you tell me I can’t make myself understood if people want to understand—they pretended they thought I was asking whether I was in the right train. When I hollered ‘Shoushou,’ they all started to holler ‘Shoushou’ as well and nod their heads and point to the train. I got that aggravated, I could have killed them. And then what do you think they did? Insulting I call it. Why, they all began to laugh and beckon to me, and I, thinking that at last they’d found out me meaning, went and followed them like a silly juggins, and where do you think they took me? To the moojeries! what we call the ladies’ cloak-room. Well, that did make me annoyed, and I started in to tell them what I thought of such behavior. ‘I don’t want the moojeries,’ I shouted. Then I tried to explain by illustrating my meaning. I took hold of some young fellow and said ‘Shoushou,’ and then I caught hold of a hussy that was laughing, intending to make her Concertina, but the silly little bitch—really it’s enough to make any one a bit unrefined—she thought I was going to hit her and started in to scream the station-roof down. After that you came along, but of course it was too late.”

Sylvia was very much upset by the death of Rodrigo and the loss of Concetta, but she could not help laughing over Mrs. Gainsborough’s woes.

“It’s all very well for you to sit there and laugh, you great tomboy, but it’s your own fault. If you’d have let me bring Mr. Linthicum, this wouldn’t have happened. What could I do? I felt like a missionary among a lot of cannibals.”

In the end Sylvia was glad to avail herself of the widower’s help, but after two days even he had to admit himself beaten.

“And if he says they can’t be found,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, “depend upon it they can’t be found—not by anybody. That man’s as persistent as a beggar. When he came up to me this morning and cleared his throat and shook his head, well, then I knew we might as well give up hope.”

Sylvia stayed on for a while in Granada because she did not like to admit defeat, but the sadness of Rodrigo’s death and the disappointment over Concetta had spoiled the place for her. Here was another of these incomplete achievements that made life so bitter. She had thought for a brief space that the solitary and frightened child would provide the aim that she had so ardently desired. Concetta had responded so sweetly to her protection, had chattered with such delight of going to England and of becoming English; now she had been dragged back. El destino! Rodrigo’s death did not affect her so much as the loss of that fair, slim child. His short life had been complete; he was spared forever from disillusionment, and by existing in her memory eternally young and joyous and wise he had spared his SeÑorita also the pain of disillusionment, just as when he was alive he had always assumed the little bothers upon his shoulders, the little bothers of every-day existence. His was a perfect episode, but Concetta disturbed her with vain regrets and speculations. Yet in a way Concetta had helped her, for she knew now that she held in her heart an inviolate treasure of love. Never again could anything happen like those three months after she left Philip; never again could she treat any one with the scorn she had treated Michael; never again could she take such a cynical attitude toward any one as that she had taken toward Lily. All these disappointments added a little gold tried by fire to the treasure in her heart, and firmly she must believe that it was being stored to some purpose soon to be showered prodigally, ah, how prodigally, upon somebody.

That evening Sylvia had made up her mind to return to England at once, but after she had gone to bed she was awakened by Mrs. Gainsborough’s coming into her room and in a choked voice asking for help. When the light was turned on, Sylvia saw that she was enmeshed in a mosquito-net and looking in her nightgown like a large turbot.

“I knew it would happen,” Mrs. Gainsborough panted. “Every night I’ve said to myself, ‘It’s bound to happen,’ and it has. I was dreaming how that Shoushou was chasing me with a butterfly-net, and look at me! Don’t tell me dreams don’t sometimes come true. Now don’t stand there in fits of laughter. I can’t get out of it, you unfeeling thing. I’ve swallowed about a pint of Keating’s. I hope I sha’n’t come out in spots. Come and help me out. I daren’t move a finger, or I shall start off sneezing again. And every time I sneeze I get deeper in. It’s something chronic.”

“Didn’t Linthicum ever inform you how to get out of a mosquito-net that collapses in the middle of the night?” Sylvia asked, when she had extricated the old lady.

“No, the conversation never happened to take a turn that way. But depend upon it, I shall ask him to-morrow. I won’t be caught twice.”

Sylvia suddenly felt that it would be impossible to return to England yet.

“We must go on,” she told Mrs. Gainsborough. “You must have more opportunities for practising what Linthicum has been preaching to you.”

“What you’d like is for me to make a poppy-show of myself all over the world and drag me round the Continent like a performing bear.”

“We’ll go to Morocco,” Sylvia cried.

“Don’t shout like that. You’ll set me off on the sneeze again. You’re here, there, and everywhere like a demon king, I do declare. Morocco? That’s where the leather comes from, isn’t it? Do they have mosquito-nets there too?”

Sylvia nodded.

“Well, the first thing I shall do to-morrow is to ask Mr. Linthicum what’s the best way of fastening up a mosquito-net in Morocco. And now I suppose I shall wake up in the morning with a nose like a tomato. Ah, well, such is life.”

Mrs. Gainsborough went back to bed, and Sylvia lay awake thinking of Morocco.

Mr. Linthicum came to see them off on their second attempt to leave Granada. He cleared his throat rather more loudly than usual to compete with the noise of the railway, invited them to look him up if they ever came to Schenectady, pressed a book called Five Hundred Facts for the Waistcoat Pocket into Mrs. Gainsborough’s hands, and waved them out of sight with a large bandana handkerchief.

“Well, I shall miss that man,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, settling down to the journey. “He must have been a regular education for his customers, and I shall never forget his recipe for avoiding bunions when mountaineering.”

“How’s that done?”

“Oh, I don’t remember the details. I didn’t pay any attention to them, because it’s not to be supposed that I’m going to career up Mont Blong at my time of life. No, I was making a reference to the tone of his voice. They may be descended from Indians, but I dare say Adam wasn’t much better than a red Indian, if it comes to that.”

They traveled to Cadiz for the boat to Tangier. Mrs. Gainsborough got very worried on the long spit of land over which the train passed, and insisted on piling up all the luggage at one end of the compartment in case they fell into the sea, though she was unable to explain her motive for doing this. The result was that, when they stopped at a station before Cadiz and the door of the compartment was opened suddenly, all the luggage fell out on top of three priests that were preparing to climb in, one of whom was knocked flat. Apart from the argument that ensued the journey was uneventful.

The boat from Tangier left in the dark. At dawn Cadiz glimmered like a rosy pearl upon the horizon.

“We’re in Trafalgar Bay now,” said Sylvia.

But Mrs. Gainsborough, who was feeling the effects of getting up so early, said she wished it was Trafalgar Square and begged to be left in peace. After an hour’s doze in the sunlight she roused herself slightly:

“Where’s this Trafalgar Bay you were making such a fuss about?”

“We’ve passed it now,” Sylvia said.

“Oh, well, I dare say it wasn’t anything to look at. I’m bound to say the chocolate we had this morning does not seem to go with the sea air. They’re arguing the point inside me something dreadful. I suppose this boat is safe? It seems to be jigging a good deal. Mr. Linthicum said it was a good plan to put the head between the knees when you felt a bit—well, I wouldn’t say seasick—but you know.... I’m bound to say I think he was wrong for once. I feel more like putting my knees up over my head. Can’t you speak to the captain and tell him to go a bit more quietly? It’s no good racing along like he’s doing. Of course the boat jigs. I shall get aggravated in two twos. It’s to be hoped Morocco will be worth it. I never got up so early to go anywhere. Was that sailor laughing at me when he walked past? It’s no good my getting up to tell him what I think of him, because every time I try to get up the boat gets up with me. It keeps butting into me behind like a great billy-goat.”

Presently Mrs. Gainsborough was unable even to protest against the motion, and could only murmur faintly to Sylvia a request to remove her veil.

“Here we are,” cried Sylvia, three or four hours later. “And it’s glorious!”

Mrs. Gainsborough sat up and looked at the rowboats filled with Moors, negroes, and Jews.

“But they’re nearly all of them black,” she gasped.

“Of course they are. What color did you expect them to be? Green like yourself?”

“But do you mean to say you’ve brought me to a place inhabited by blacks? Well, I never did. It’s to be hoped we sha’n’t be eaten alive. Mrs. Marsham! Mrs. Ewings! Mrs. Beardmore! Well, I don’t say they haven’t told me some good stories now and again, but—”

Mrs. Gainsborough shook her head to express the depths of insignificance to which henceforth the best stories of her friends would have to sink when she should tell about herself in Morocco.

“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, when they stood upon the quay. “I feel like the widow Twankay myself.”

Sylvia remembered her ambition to visit the East, when she herself wore a yashmak in Open Sesame: here it was fulfilling perfectly her most daring hopes.

Mrs. Gainsborough was relieved to find a comparatively European hotel, and next morning after a long sleep she was ready for any adventure.

“Sylvia!” she suddenly screamed when they were being jostled in the crowded bazaar. “Look, there’s a camel coming toward us! Did you ever hear such a hollering and jabbering in all your life? I’m sure I never did. Mrs. Marsham and her camel at the Zoo. Tut-tut-tut! Do you suppose Mrs. Marsham ever saw a camel coming toward her in the street like a cab-horse might? Certainly not. Why, after this there’s nothing in her story. It’s a mere anecdote.”

They wandered up to the outskirts of the prison, and saw a fat Jewess being pushed along under arrest for giving false weight. She made some resistance in the narrow entrance, and the guard planted his foot in the small of her back, so that she seemed suddenly to crumple up and fall inside.

“Well, I’ve often said lightly ‘what a heathen’ or ‘there’s a young heathen,’ but that brings it home to one,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, gravely.

Sylvia paid no attention to her companion’s outraged sympathy. She was in the East where elderly obese Jewesses who gave false weight were well treated thus. She was living with every moment of rapturous reality the dreams of wonder that the Arabian Nights had brought her in youth. Yet Tangier was only a gateway to enchantments a hundredfold more powerful. She turned suddenly to Mrs. Gainsborough and asked her if she could stay here while she rode into the interior.

“Stay here alone?” Mrs. Gainsborough exclaimed. “Not if I know it.”

This plan of Sylvia’s to explore the interior of Morocco was narrowed down ultimately into riding to Tetuan, which was apparently just feasible for Mrs. Gainsborough, though likely to be rather fatiguing.

A dragoman was found, a certain Don Alfonso reported to be comparatively honest. He was an undersized man rather like the stump of a tallow candle into which the wick has been pressed down by the snuffer, for he was bald and cream-colored, with a thin, uneven black mustache and two nodules on his forehead. His clothes, too, were crinkled like a candlestick. He spoke French well, but preferred to speak English, of which he only knew two words, “all right”; this often made his advice unduly optimistic. In addition to Don Alfonso they were accompanied by a Moorish trooper and a native called Mohammed.

“A soldier, is he?” said Mrs. Gainsborough, regarding the grave bearded man to whose care they were intrusted. “He looks more like the outside of an ironmonger’s shop. Swords, pistols, guns, spears. It’s to be hoped he won’t get aggravated with us on the way. I should look very funny lying in the road with a pistol through my heart.”

They rode out of Tangier before a single star had paled in the east, and when dawn broke they were in a wide valley fertile and bright with flowers; green hills rose to right and left of them and faded far away into blue mountains.

“I wish you’d tell that Mahomet not to irritate my poor mule by egging it on all the time,” Mrs. Gainsborough said to Don Alfonso, who, realizing by her gestures that she wanted something done to her mount, and supposing by her smile that the elation of adventure had seized her, replied “All right,” and said something in Moorish to Mohammed. He at once caught the mule a terrific whack on the crupper, causing the animal to leap forward and leave Mrs. Gainsborough and the saddle in the path.

“Now there’s a nice game to play!” said Mrs. Gainsborough, indignantly. “‘All right,’ he says, and ‘boomph’! What’s he think I’m made of? Well, of course here we shall have to sit now until some one comes along with a step-ladder. If you’d have let me ride on a camel,” she added, reproachfully, to Sylvia, “this wouldn’t have occurred. I’m not sitting on myself any more; I’m sitting on bumps like eggs. I feel like a hen. It’s all very fine for Mr. Alfonso to go on gabbling, ‘All right,’ but it’s all wrong, and if you’ll have the goodness to tell him so in his own unnatural language I’ll be highly obliged.”

The Moorish soldier sat regarding the scene from his horse with immutable gravity.

“I reckon he’d like nothing better than to get a good jab at me now,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Yes, I dare say I look very inviting sitting here on the ground. Well, it’s to be hoped they’ll have the ‘Forty Thieves’ or ‘Aladdin’ for the next pantomime at Drury Lane. I shall certainly invite Mrs. Marsham and Mrs. Beardmore to come with me into the upper boxes so as I can explain what it’s all about. Mrs. Ewings doesn’t like panto, or I’d have taken her too. She likes a good cry when she goes to the theater.”

Mrs. Gainsborough was settling down to spend the rest of the morning in amiable reminiscence and planning, but she was at last persuaded to get up and mount her mule again after the strictest assurances had been given to her of Mohammed’s good behavior for the rest of the journey.

“He’s not to bellow in the poor animal’s ear,” she stipulated.

Sylvia promised.

“And he’s not to go screeching, ‘Arrassy,’ or whatever it is, behind, so as the poor animal thinks it’s a lion galloping after him.”

Mrs. Gainsborough was transferring all consideration for herself to the mule.

“And he’s to throw away that stick.”

This clause was only accepted by the other side with a good deal of protestation.

“And he’s to keep his hands and feet to himself, and not to throw stones or nothing at the poor beast, who’s got quite enough to do to carry me.”

“And Ali Baba’s to ride in front.” She indicated the trooper. “It gets me on the blink when he’s behind me, as if I was in a shooting-gallery. If he’s going to be any use to us, which I doubt, he’ll be more useful in front than hiding behind me.”

“All right,” said Don Alfonso, who was anxious to get on, because they had a long way to go.

“And that’s enough of ‘all right’ from him,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “I don’t want to hear any more ‘all rights.’”

At midday they reached a khan, where they ate lunch and rested for two hours in the shade.

Soon after they had started again, they met a small caravan with veiled women and mules loaded with oranges.

“Quite pleasant-looking people,” Mrs. Gainsborough beamed. “I should have waved my hand if I could have been sure of not falling off again. Funny trick, wearing that stuff round their faces. I suppose they’re ashamed of being so black.”

Mrs. Gainsborough’s progress, which grew more and more leisurely as the afternoon advanced, became a source of real anxiety to Don Alfonso; he confided to Sylvia that he was afraid the gates of Tetuan would be shut. When Mrs. Gainsborough was told of his alarm she was extremely scornful.

“He’s having you on, Sylvia, so as to give Mohamet the chance of sloshing my poor mule again. Whoever heard of a town having gates? He’ll tell us next that we’ve got to pay sixpence at the turnstile to pass in.”

They came to a high place where a white stone by the path recorded a battle between Spaniards and Moors. Far below were the domes and rose-dyed minarets of Tetuan and a shining river winding to the sea. They heard the sound of a distant gun.

“Sunset,” cried Don Alfonso, much perturbed. “In half an hour the gates will be shut.”

He told tales of brigands and of Riffs, of travelers found with their throats cut outside the city walls, and suddenly, as if to give point to his fears, a figure leaning on a long musket appeared in silhouette upon the edge of the hill above them. It really seemed advisable to hurry, and, notwithstanding Mrs. Gainsborough’s expostulations, the speed of the party was doubled down a rocky descent to a dried-up watercourse with high banks. Twilight came on rapidly and the soldier prepared one of his numerous weapons for immediate use in an emergency. Mrs. Gainsborough was much too nervous about falling off to bother about brigands, and at last without any mishap they reached the great castellated gate of Tetuan. It was shut.

“Well, I never saw the like,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “It’s true, then. We must ring the bell, that’s all.”

The soldier, Mohammed, and Don Alfonso raised their voices in a loud hail, but nobody paid any attention, and the twilight deepened. Mrs. Gainsborough alighted from her mule and thumped at the iron-studded door. Silence answered her.

“Do you mean to tell me seriously that they’re going to keep us outside here all night? Why, it’s laughable!” Suddenly she lifted her voice and cried, “Milk-ho!” Whether the unusual sound aroused the curiosity or the alarm of the porter within was uncertain, but he leaned his head out of a small window above the gate and shouted something at the belated party below. Immediately the dispute for which Mohammed and Don Alfonso had been waiting like terriers on a leash was begun; it lasted for ten minutes without any of the three participants drawing breath.

In the end Don Alfonso announced that the porter declined to open for less than two francs, although he had offered him as much as one franc fifty. With a determination not to be beaten that was renewed by the pause for breath, Don Alfonso flung himself into the argument again, splendidly assisted by Mohammed, who seemed to be tearing out his hair in baffled fury.

“I wish I knew what they were calling each other,” said Sylvia.

“Something highly insulting, I should think,” Mrs. Gainsborough answered. “Wonderful the way they use their hands. He doesn’t seem to be worrying himself so very much. I suppose he’ll start in shooting in the end.”

She pointed to the soldier, who was regarding the dispute with contemptuous gravity. Another window in a tower on the other side of the gate was opened, and the first porter was reinforced. Perspiration was dripping from Don Alfonso’s forehead; he looked more like a candle stump than ever, when presently he stood aside from the argument to say that he had been forced to offer one franc seventy-five to enter Tetuan.

“Tetuan,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Tetuarn’t, I should say.”

Sylvia asked Don Alfonso what he was calling the porter, and it appeared, though he minimized the insult by a gesture, that he had just invited forty-three dogs to devour the corpse of the porter’s grandmother. This, however, he hastened to add, had not annoyed him so much as his withdrawal from one franc fifty to one franc twenty-five.

In the end the porter agreed to open the gate for one franc seventy-five.

“Which is just as well,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, “for I’m sure Mohamet would have thrown a fit soon. He’s got to banging his forehead with his fists, and that’s a very bad sign.”

They rode through the darkness between double walls, disturbing every now and then a beggar who whined for alms or cursed them if the mule trod upon his outspread legs. They found an inn called the HÔtel Splendide, a bug-ridden tumble-down place kept by Spanish Jews as voracious as the bugs. Yet out on the roof, looking at the domes and minarets glimmering under Venus setting in the west from a sky full of stars, listening to the howling of distant dogs, breathing the perfume of the East, Sylvia felt like a conqueror.

Next morning Mrs. Gainsborough, finding that the bugs had retreated with the light, decided to spend the morning in sleeping off some of her bruises. Sylvia wandered through the bazaars with Don Alfonso, and sat for a while in the garden of a French convent, where a fountain whispered in the shade of pomegranates. Suddenly, walking along the path toward her she saw Maurice Avery.

Sylvia had disliked Avery very much when she met him in London nearly two years ago; but the worst enemy, the most flagitious bore, is transformed when encountered alone in a distant country, and now Sylvia felt well disposed toward him and eager to share with any one who could appreciate her pleasure the marvel of being in Tetuan. He too, by the way his face lighted up, was glad to see her, and they shook hands with a cordiality that was quite out of proportion to their earlier acquaintance.

“I say, what a queer place to meet!” he exclaimed. “Are you alone, then?”

“I’ve got Mrs. Gainsborough with me, that’s all. I’m not married ... or anything.”

It was absurd how eager she felt to assure Avery of this; and then in a moment the topic had been started.

“No, have you really got Mrs. Gainsborough?” he exclaimed. “Of course I’ve heard about her from Michael. Poor old Michael!”

“Why, what’s the matter?” Sylvia asked, sharply.

“Oh, he’s perfectly all right, but he’s lost to his friends. At least I suppose he is—buried in a monastery. He’s not actually a monk. I believe he’s what’s called an oblate, pursuing the Fata Morgana of faith—a sort of dream....”

“Yes, yes,” Sylvia interrupted. “I understand the allusion. You needn’t talk down to me.”

Avery blushed. The color in his cheeks made him seem very young.

“Sorry. I was thinking of somebody else for the moment. That sounds very discourteous also. I must apologize again. What’s happened to Lily Haden?”

Sylvia told him briefly the circumstances of Lily’s marriage at Rio. “Does Michael ever talk about her?” she asked.

“Oh no, never!” said Avery. “He’s engaged in saving his own soul now. That sounds malicious, but seriously I don’t think she was ever more to him than an intellectual landmark. To understand Michael’s point of view in all that business you’ve got to know that he was illegitimate. His father, Lord Saxby, had a romantic passion for the daughter of a country parson—a queer, cross-grained old scholar. You remember Arthur Lonsdale? Well, his father, Lord Cleveden, knew the whole history of the affair. Lady Saxby wouldn’t divorce him; so they were never married. I suppose Michael brooded over this and magnified his early devotion to Lily in some way or other up to a vow of reparation. I’m quite sure it was a kind of indirect compliment to his own mother. Of course it was all very youthful and foolish—and yet I don’t know....” he broke off with a sigh.

“You think one can’t afford to bury the past?”

Avery looked at her quickly. “What made you ask me that?”

“I thought you seemed to admire Michael’s youthful foolishness.”

“I do really. I admire any one that’s steadfast even to a mistaken idea. It’s strange to meet an Englishwoman here,” he said, looking intently at Sylvia. “One’s guard drops. I’m longing to make a confidante of you, but you might be bored. I’m rather frightened of you, really. I always was.”

“I sha’n’t exchange confidences,” Sylvia said, “if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“No, of course not,” Avery said, quickly. “Last spring I was in love with a girl....”

Sylvia raised her eyebrows.

“Oh yes, it’s a very commonplace beginning and rather a commonplace end, I’m afraid. She was a ballet-girl—the incarnation of May and London. That sounds exaggerated, for I know that lots of other Jenny Pearls have been the same to somebody, but I do believe most people agreed with me. I wanted her to live with me. She wouldn’t. She had sentimental, or what I thought were sentimental, ideas about her mother and family. I was called away to Spain. When my business was finished I begged her to come out to me there. That was last April. She refused, and I was piqued, I suppose, at first, and did not go back to England. Then, as one does, I made up my mind to the easiest thing at the moment by letting myself be enchanted by my surroundings into thinking that I was happier as it was. For a while I was happier; in a way our love had been a great strain upon us both. I came to Morocco, and gradually ever since I’ve been realizing that I left something unfinished. It’s become a kind of obsession. Do you know what I mean?”

“Indeed I do, very well indeed,” Sylvia said.

“Thanks,” he said with a grateful look. “Now comes the problem. If I go back to England this month, if I arrive in England on the first of May exactly a year later, there’s only one thing I can do to atone for my behavior—I must ask her to marry me. You see that, don’t you? This little thing is proud, oh, but tremendously proud. I doubt very much if she’ll forgive me, even if I show the sincerity of my regret by asking her to marry me now; but it’s my only chance. And yet—oh, I expect this will sound damnable to you, but it’s the way we’ve all been molded in England—she’s common. Common! What an outrageous word to use. But then it is used by everybody. She’s the most frankly cockney thing you ever saw. Can I stand her being snubbed and patronized? Can I stand my wife’s being snubbed and patronized? Can love survive the sort of ambushed criticism that I shall perceive all round us? For I wouldn’t try to change her. No, no, no! She must be herself. I’ll have no throaty ‘aws’ masquerading as ‘o’s.’ She must keep her own clear ‘aou’s.’ There must not be any ‘naceness’ or patched-up shop-walker’s English. I love her more at this moment than I ever loved her, but can I stand it? And I’m not asking this egotistically: I’m asking it for both of us. That’s why you meet me in Tetuan, for I dare not go back to England lest the first cockney voice I hear may kill my determination, and I really am longing to marry her. Yet I wait here, staking what I know in my heart is all my future happiness on chance, assuring myself that presently impulse and reason will be reconciled and will send me back to her, but still I wait.”

He paused. The fountain whispered in the shade of the pomegranates. A nun was gathering flowers for the chapel. Outside, the turmoil of the East sounded like the distant chattering of innumerable monkeys.

“You’ve so nearly reached the point at which a man has the right to approach a woman,” Sylvia said, “that if you’re asking my advice, I advise you to wait until you do actually reach that point. Of course you may lose her by waiting. She may marry somebody else.”

“Oh, I know; I’ve thought of that. In a way that would be a solution.”

“So long as you regard her marriage with somebody else as a solution, you’re still some way from the point. It’s curious she should be a ballet-girl, because Mrs. Gainsborough, you know, was a ballet-girl. In 1869, when she took her emotional plunge, she was able to exchange the wings of Covent Garden for the wings of love easily enough. In 1869 ballet-girls never thought of marrying what were and are called ‘gentlemen.’ I think Mrs. Gainsborough would consider her life a success; she was not too much married to spoil love, and the captain was certainly more devoted to her than most husbands would have been. The proof that her life was a success is that she has remained young. Yet if I introduce you to her you’ll see at once your own Jenny at sixty like her—that won’t be at all a hard feat of imagination. But you’ll still be seeing yourself at twenty-five or whatever you are; you’ll never be able to see yourself at sixty; therefore I sha’n’t introduce you. I’m too much of a woman not to hope with all my heart that you’ll go home to England, marry your Jenny, and live happily ever afterward, and I think you’d better not meet Mrs. Gainsborough, in case she prejudices your resolve. Thanks for giving me your confidence.”

“Oh no! Thank you for listening,” said Avery.

“I’m glad you’re not going to develop her. I once suffered from that kind of vivisection myself, though I never had a cockney accent. Some souls can’t stand straight lacing, just as some bodies revolt from stays. And so Michael is in a monastery? I suppose that means all his soul spasms are finally allayed?”

“O Lord! No!” said Avery. “He’s in the very middle of them.”

“What I really meant to say was heart palpitations.”

“I don’t think, really,” said Avery, “that Michael ever had them.”

“What was Lily, then?”

“Oh, essentially a soul spasm,” he declared.

“Yes, I suppose it was,” Sylvia agreed, pensively.

“I think, you know, I must meet Mrs. Gainsborough,” said Avery. “Fate answers for you. Here she comes.”

Don Alfonso, with the pain that every dog and dragoman feels in the separation of his charges, had taken advantage of Sylvia’s talk with Avery to bring Mrs. Gainsborough triumphantly back to the fold.

“Here we are again,” said Mrs. Gainsborough, limping down the path. “And my behind looks like a magic lantern. Oh, I beg your pardon! I didn’t see you’d met a friend. So that’s what Alfonso was trying to tell me. He’s been going like an alarm-clock all the way here. Pleased to meet you, I’m sure. How do you like Morocco? We got shut out last night.”

“This is a friend of Michael Fane’s,” said Sylvia.

“Did you know him? He was a nice young fellow. Very nice he was. But he wouldn’t know me now. Very stay-at-home I was when he used to come to Mulberry Cottage. Why, he tried to make me ride in a hansom once, and I was actually too nervous. You know, I’d got into a regular rut. But now, well, upon me word, I don’t believe now I should say ‘no’ if any one was to invite me to ride inside of a whale. It’s her doing, the tartar.”

Avery had learned a certain amount of Arabic during his stay in Morocco and he made the bazaars of Tetuan much more interesting than Don Alfonso could have done. He also had many tales to tell of the remote cities like Fez and Mequinez and Marakeesh. Sylvia almost wished that she could pack Mrs. Gainsborough off to England and accompany him into the real interior. Some of her satisfaction in Tetuan had been rather spoiled that morning by finding a visitor’s book in the hotel with the names of traveling clergymen and their daughters patronizingly inscribed therein. However, Avery decided to ride away almost at once, and said that he intended to banish the twentieth century for two or three months.

They stayed a few days at Tetuan, but the bugs were too many for Mrs. Gainsborough, who began to sigh for a tranquil bed. Avery and Sylvia had a short conversation together before they left. He thanked her for her sympathy, held to his intention of spending the summer in Morocco, but was nearly sure he should return to England in the autumn, with a mind serenely fixed.

“I wish, if you go back to London, you’d look Jenny up,” he said.

Sylvia shook her head very decidedly. “I can’t imagine anything that would annoy her more, if she’s the girl I suppose her to be.”

“But I’d like her to have a friend like you,” he urged.

Sylvia looked at him severely. “Are you quite sure that you don’t want to change her?” she asked.

“Of course. Why?”

“Choosing friends for somebody else is not very wise; it sounds uncommonly like a roundabout way of developing her. No, no, I won’t meet your Jenny.”

“I see what you mean,” Avery assented. “I’ll write to Michael and tell him I’ve met you. Shall I tell him about Lily? Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never had even a post-card. My fault, really. Yes, you can tell Michael that she’s probably quite happy and—no, I don’t think there’s any other message. Oh yes, you might say I’ve eaten one or two rose-leaves but not enough yet.”

Avery looked puzzled.

“Apuleius,” she added.

“Strange girl. I wish you would go and see Jenny.”

“Oh no! She’s eaten all the rose-leaves she wants, and I’m sure she’s not the least interested in Apuleius.”

Next day Sylvia and Mrs. Gainsborough set out on the return journey to Tangier, which, apart from a disastrous attempt by Mrs. Gainsborough to eat a prickly pear, lacked incident.

“Let sleeping pears lie,” said Sylvia.

“Well, you don’t expect a fruit to be so savage,” retorted Mrs. Gainsborough. “I thought I must have aggravated a wasp. Talk about nettles. They’re chammy leather beside them. Prickly pears! I suppose the next thing I try to eat will be stabbing apples.”

They went home by Gibraltar, where Mrs. Gainsborough was delighted to see English soldiers.

“It’s nice to know we’ve got our eyes open even in Spain. I reckon I’ll get a good cup of tea here.”

They reached England at the end of April, and Sylvia decided to stay for a while at Mulberry Cottage. Reading through The Stage, she found that Jack Airdale was resting at Richmond in his old rooms, and went down to see him. He was looking somewhat thin and worried.

“Had rather a rotten winter,” he told her. “I got ill with a quinsey and had to throw up a decent shop, and somehow or other I haven’t managed to get another one yet.”

“Look here, old son,” Sylvia said, “I don’t want any damned pride from you. I’ve got plenty of money at present. You’ve got to borrow fifty pounds. You want feeding up and fitting out. Don’t be a cad now, and refuse a ‘lidy.’ Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! You know me by this time. Who’s going to be more angry, you at being lent money or me at being refused by one of the few, the very few, mark you, good pals I’ve got? Don’t be a beast, Jack. You’ve got to take it.”

He surrendered, from habit. Sylvia gave him all her news, but the item that interested him most was her having half taken up the stage.

“I knew you’d make a hit,” he declared.

“But I didn’t.”

“My dear girl, you don’t give yourself a chance. You can’t play hide and seek with the public, though, by Jove!” he added, ruefully, “I have been lately.”

“For the present I can afford to wait.”

“Yes, you’re damned lucky in one way, and yet I’m not sure that you aren’t really very unlucky. If you hadn’t found some money you’d have been forced to go on.”

“My dear lad, lack of money wouldn’t make me an artist.”

“What would, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Being fed up with everything. That’s what drove me into self-expression, as I should call it if I were a temperamental miss with a light-boiled ego swimming in a saucepan of emotion for the public to swallow or myself to crack. But conceive my disgust! There was I yearning unattainable ‘isms’ from a soul nurtured on tragic disillusionment, and I was applauded for singing French songs with an English accent. No, seriously, I shall try again, old Jack, when I receive another buffet. At present I’m just dimly uncomfortable. I shall blossom late like a chrysanthemum. I ain’t no daffodil, I ain’t. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that I was forced when young—don’t giggle, you ribald ass, not that way—and I’ve got to give myself a rest before I bloom, en plein air.”

“But you really have got plenty of money?” Airdale inquired, anxiously.

“Masses! Cataracts! And all come by perfectly honest. No, seriously, I’ve got about four thousand pounds.”

“Well, I really do think you’re rather lucky, you know.”

“Of course. But it’s all written in the book of Fate. Listen. I’ve got a mulberry mark on my arm; I live at Mulberry Cottage; and Morera, that’s the name of my fairy godfather, is Spanish for mulberry-tree. Can you beat it?”

“I hope you’ve invested this money,” said Airdale.

“It’s in a bank.”

He begged her to be careful of her riches, and she rallied him on his inconsistency, because a moment back he had been telling her that their possession was hindering her progress in art.

“My dear Sylvia, I haven’t known you for five years not to have discovered that I might as well advise a schoolmaster as you, but what are you going to do?”

“Plans for this summer? A little gentle reading. A little browsing among the classics. A little theater-going. A little lunching at Verrey’s with Mr. John Airdale. Resting address, six Rosetree Terrace, Richmond, Surrey. A little bumming around town, as SeÑor Morera would say. Plans for the autumn? A visit to the island of Sirene, if I can find a nice lady-like young woman to accompany me. Mrs. Gainsborough has decided that she will travel no more. Her brain is bursting with unrelated adventure.”

“But you can’t go on from month to month like that.”

“Well, if you’ll tell me how to skip over December, January, and August I’ll be grateful,” Sylvia laughed.

“No, don’t rag about. I mean for the future in general,” he explained. “Are you going to get married? You can’t go on forever like this.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you’re young now. But what’s more gloomy than a restless old maid?”

“My dear man, don’t you fret about my withering. I’ve got a little crystal flask of the finest undiluted strychnine. I believe strychnine quickens the action of the heart. Verdict. Death from attempted galvanization of the cardiac muscles. No flowers by request. Boomph! as Mrs. Gainsborough would say. Ring off. The last time I wrote myself an epitaph it led me into matrimony. Absit omen.”

Airdale was distressed by Sylvia’s joking about her death, and begged her to stop.

“Then don’t ask me any more about the future in general. And now let’s go and be Epicurean at Verrey’s.”

After Jack Airdale the only other old friend that Sylvia took any trouble to find was Olive Fanshawe. She was away on tour when Sylvia returned to England, but she came back to London in June, was still unmarried, and had been promised a small part in the Vanity production that autumn. Sylvia found that Olive had recaptured her romantic ideals and was delighted with her proposal that they should live together at Mulberry Cottage. Olive took very seriously her small part at the Vanity, of which the most distinguished line was: “Girls, have you seen the Duke of Mayfair? He’s awfully handsome.” Sylvia was not very encouraging to Olive’s opportunities of being able to give an original reading of such a line, but she listened patiently to her variations in which each word was overaccentuated in turn. Luckily there was also a melodious quintet consisting of the juvenile lead and four beauties of whom Olive was to be one; this, it seemed, promised to be a hit, and indeed it was.

The most interesting event for the Vanity world that autumn, apart from the individual successes and failures in the new production, was the return of Lord and Lady Clarehaven to London, and not merely their return, but their re-entry into the Bohemian society from which Lady Clarehaven had so completely severed herself.

“I know it’s perfectly ridiculous of me,” said Olive, “but, Sylvia, do you know, I’m quite nervous at the idea of meeting her again.”

A most cordial note had arrived from Dorothy inviting Olive to lunch with her in Curzon Street.

“Write back and tell her you’re living with me,” Sylvia advised. “That’ll choke off some of the friendliness.”

But to Sylvia’s boundless surprise a messenger-boy arrived with an urgent invitation for her to come too.

“Curiouser and curiouser,” she murmured. “What does it mean? She surely can’t be tired of being a countess already. I’m completely stumped. However, of course we’ll put on our clean bibs and go. Don’t look so frightened. Olive, if conversation hangs fire at lunch, we’ll tickle the footmen.”

“I really feel quite faint,” said Olive. “My heart’s going pitter-pat. Isn’t it silly of me?”

Lunch, to which Arthur Lonsdale had also been invited, did nothing to enlighten Sylvia about the Clarehavens’ change of attitude. Dorothy, more beautiful than ever and pleasant enough superficially, seemed withal faintly resentful; Clarehaven was in exuberant spirits and evidently enjoying London tremendously. The only sign of tension, well not exactly tension, but slight disaccord, and that was too strong a word, was once when Clarehaven, having been exceptionally rowdy, glanced at Dorothy a swift look of defiance for checking him.

“She’s grown as prim as a parlor-maid,” said Lonsdale to Sylvia when, after lunch, they had a chance of talking together. “You ought to have seen her on the ancestral acres. My mother, who presides over our place like a Queen Turnip, is without importance beside Dolly, absolutely without importance. It got on Tony’s nerves, that’s about the truth of it. He never could stand the land. It has the same effect on him as the sea has on some people. Black vomit, coma, and death—what?”

“Dorothy, of course, played the countess in real life as seriously as she would have played her on the stage. She was the star,” Sylvia said.

“Star! My dear girl, she was a comet. And the dowager loved her. They used to drive round in a barouche and administer gruel to the village without anesthetics.”

“I suppose they kept them for Clarehaven,” Sylvia laughed.

“That’s it. Of course, I shouted when I saw the state of affairs, having first of all been called in to recover old Lady Clarehaven’s reason when she heard that her only child was going to wed a Vanity girl. But they loved her. Every frump in the county adored her. It’s Tony who insisted on this move to London. He stood it in Devonshire for two and a half years, but the lights of the wicked city—soft music, please—called him, and they’ve come back. Dolly’s fed up to the wide about it. I say, we are a pair of gossips. What’s your news?”

“I met Maurice Avery, in Morocco.”

“What, Mossy Avery! Not really? Disguised as a slipper, I suppose. Rum bird. He got awfully keen on a little girl at the Orient and tootled her all over town for a while, but I haven’t seen him for months. I used to know him rather well at the ‘Varsity: he was one of the esthetic push. I say, what’s become of Lily?”

“Married to a croupier? Not, really. By Jove! what a time I had over her with Michael Fane’s people. His sister, an awfully good sort, put me through a fearful catechism.”

“His sister?” repeated Sylvia.

“You know what Michael’s doing now? Greatest scream on earth. He’s a monk. Some special kind of a monk that sounds like omelette, but isn’t. Nothing to be done about it. I buzzed down to see him last year, and he was awfully fed up. I asked him if he couldn’t stop monking for a bit and come out for a spin on my new forty-five Shooting Star. He wasn’t in uniform, so there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have come.”

“He’s in England, now, then?” Sylvia asked.

“No, he got fed up with everybody buzzing down to see what he looked like as a monk, and he’s gone off to Chartreuse or Benedictine or somewhere—I know it’s the name of a liqueur—somewhere abroad. I wanted him to become a partner in our business, and promised we’d put a jolly little runabout on the market called The Jovial Monk, but he wouldn’t. Look here, we’d better join the others. Dolly’s got her eye on me. I say,” he chuckled, in a whisper, “I suppose you know she’s a connection of mine?”

“Yes, by carriage.”

Lonsdale asked what she meant, and Sylvia told him the origin of Dorothy’s name.

“Oh, I say, that’s topping. What’s her real name?”

“No, no,” Sylvia said. “I’ve been sufficiently spiteful.”

“Probably Buggins, really. I say, Cousin Dorothy,” he went on, in a louder voice. “What about bridge to-morrow night after the Empire?”

Lady Clarehaven flashed a look at Sylvia, who could not resist shaking her head and earning thereby another sharper flash. When Sylvia talked over the Clarehavens with Olive, she found that Olive had been quite oblivious of anything unusual in the sudden move to town.

“Of course, Dorothy and I can never be what we were to each other; but I thought they seemed so happy together. I’m so glad it’s been such a success.”

“Well, has it?” said Sylvia, doubtfully.

“Oh yes, my dear! How can you imagine anything else?”

With the deepening of winter Olive fell ill and the doctors prescribed the Mediterranean for her. The malady was nothing to worry about; it was nothing more than fatigue; and if she were to rest now and if possible not work before the following autumn, there was every reason to expect that she would be perfectly cured.

Sylvia jumped at an excuse to go abroad again and suggested a visit to Sirene. The doctor, on being assured that Sirene was in the Mediterranean, decided that it was exactly the place best suited to Olive’s state of health. Like most English doctors, he regarded the Mediterranean as a little larger than the Serpentine, with a characteristic climate throughout. Olive, however, was much opposed to leaving London, and when Sylvia began to get annoyed with her obstinacy, she confessed that the real reason for wishing to stay was Jack.

“Naturally, I wanted to tell you at once, my dear. But Jack wouldn’t let me, until he could see his way clear to our being married. He was quite odd about you, for you know how fond he is of you—he thinks there’s nobody like you—but he particularly asked me not to tell you just yet.”

“Of course I know the reason,” Sylvia proclaimed, instantly. “The silly, scrupulous, proud ass. I’ll have it out with him to-morrow at lunch. Dearest Olive, I’m so happy that I like your curly-headed actor.”

“Oh, but, darling Sylvia, his hair’s quite straight!”

“Yes, but it’s very long and gets into his eyes. It’s odd hair, anyway. And when did the flaming arrow pin your two hearts together?”

“It was that evening you played baccarat at Curzon Street—about ten days ago. You didn’t think we’d known long, did you? Oh, my dear, I couldn’t have kept the secret any longer.”

Next day Sylvia lunched with Jack Airdale and came to the point at once.

“Look here, you detestably true-to-type, impossibly sensitive ass, because I to please me lent you fifty pounds, is that any excuse for you to keep me out in the cold over you and Olive? Seriously, Jack, I do think it was mean of you.”

Jack was abashed and mumbled many excuses. He had been afraid Sylvia would despise him for talking about marriage when he owed her money. He felt, anyway, that he wasn’t good enough for Olive. Before Olive had known anything about it, he had been rather ashamed of himself for being in love with her; he felt he was taking advantage of Sylvia’s friendship.

“All which excuses are utterly feeble,” Sylvia pronounced. “Now listen. Olive’s ill. She ought to go abroad. I very selfishly want a companion. You’ve got to insist on her going. The fifty pounds I lent you will pay her expenses, so that debt’s wiped out, and you’re standing her a holiday in the Mediterranean.”

Jack thought for a moment with a puzzled air.

“Don’t be absurd, Sylvia. Really for the moment you took me in with your confounded arithmetic. Why, you’re doubling the obligation.”

“Obligation! Obligation! Don’t you dare to talk about obligations to me. I don’t believe in obligations. Am I to understand that for the sake of your unworthy—well, it can’t be dignified with the word—pride, Olive is to be kept in London throughout the spring?”

Jack protested he had been talking about the loan to himself. Olive’s obligation would be a different one.

“Jack, have you ever seen a respectable woman throw a sole Morny across a restaurant? Because you will in one moment. Amen to the whole discussion. Please! The only thing you’ve got to do is to insist on Olive’s coming with me. Then while she’s away you must be a good little actor and act away as hard as you know how, so that you can be married next June as a present to me on my twenty-sixth birthday.”

“You’re the greatest dear,” said Jack, fervently.

“Of course I am. But I’m waiting.”

“What for?”

“Why, for an exhortation to matrimony. Haven’t you noticed that people who are going to get married always try to persuade everybody else to come in with them? I’m sure human co-operation began with paleolithic bathers.”

So Olive and Sylvia left England for Sirene.

“I’d like to be coming with you,” said Mrs. Gainsborough at Charing Cross. “But I’m just beginning to feel a tiddley-bit stiff, and well, there, after Morocco, I shouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than a cannibal island, and it’s too late for me to start in being a Robinson Crusoe, which reminds me that when I took Mrs. Beardmore to the Fulham pantomime last night it was Dick Whittington. And upon my soul, if he didn’t go to Morocco with his cat. ‘Well,’ I said to Mrs. Beardmore, ‘it’s not a bit like it.’ I told her that if Dick Whittington went there now he wouldn’t take his cat with him. He’d take a box of Keating’s. Somebody behind said, ‘Hush.’ And I said, ‘Hush yourself. Perhaps you’ve been to Morocco?’ Which made him look very silly, for I don’t suppose he’s ever been further East than Aldgate in his life. We had no more ‘hushes’ from him, I can tell you; and Mrs. Beardmore looked round at him in a very lady-like way which she’s got from being a housekeeper, and said, ‘My friend has been to Morocco.’ After that we la-la’d the chorus in peace and quiet. Good-by, duckies, and don’t gallivant about too much.”

Sylvia had brought a bagful of books about the Roman emperors, and Olive had brought a number of anthologies that made up by the taste of the binder for the lack of it in the compiler. They were mostly about love. To satisfy Sylvia’s historical passion a week was spent in Rome and another week in Naples. She told Olive of her visit to Italy with Philip over seven years ago, and, much to her annoyance, Olive poured out a good deal of emotion over that hapless marriage.

“Don’t you feel any kind of sentimental regret?” she asked while they were watching from Posilipo the vapors of Vesuvius rose-plumed in the wintry sunset. “Surely you feel softened toward it all now. Why, I think I should regret anything that had once happened in this divinely beautiful place.”

“The thing I remember most distinctly is Philip’s having read somewhere that the best way to get rid of an importunate guide was to use the local negative and throw the head back instead of shaking it. The result was that Philip used to walk about as if he were gargling. To annoy him I used to wink behind his back at the guides, and naturally with such encouragement his local negative was absolutely useless.”

“I think you must have been rather trying, Sylvia dear.”

“Oh, I was—infernally trying, but one doesn’t marry a child of seventeen as a sedative.”

“I think it’s all awfully sad,” Olive sighed.

Sylvia had rather a shock, a few days after they had reached Sirene, when she saw Miss Horne and Miss Hobart drive past on the road up to Anasirene, the green rival of Sirene among the clouds to the west of the island. She made inquiries at the pension and was informed that two sisters Miss Hobart-Horne, English millionaires many times over, had lived at Sirene these five years. Sylvia decided that it would be quite easy to avoid meeting them, and warned Olive against making friends with any of the residents, on the plea that she did not wish to meet people whom she had met here seven years ago with her husband. In the earlier part of the spring they stayed at a pension, but Sylvia found that it was difficult to escape from people there, and they moved up to Anasirene, where they took a villino that was cut off from all dressed-up humanity by a sea of olives. Here it was possible to roam by paths that were not frequented save by peasants whose personalities so long attuned to earth had lost the power of detaching themselves from the landscape and did not affect the onlooker more than the movement of trees or the rustle of small beasts. Life was made up of these essentially undisturbing personalities set in a few pictures that escaped from the swift southern spring: anemones splashed out like wine upon the green corn; some girl with slanting eyes that regarded coldly a dead bird in her thin brown hand; red-beaded cherry-trees that threw shadows on the tawny wheat below; wind over the olives and the sea, wind that shook the tresses of the broom and ruffled the scarlet poppies; then suddenly the first cicala and eternal noon.

It would have been hard to say how they spent these four months, Sylvia thought.

“Can you bear to leave your beloved trees, your namesakes?” she asked.

“Jack is getting impatient,” said Olive.

“Then we must fade out of Anasirene just as one by one the flowers have all faded.”

“I don’t think I’ve faded much,” Olive laughed. “I never felt so well in my life, thanks to you.”

Jack and Olive were married at the end of June. It was necessary to go down to a small Warwickshire town and meet all sorts of country people that reminded Sylvia of Green Lanes. Olive’s father, who was a solicitor, was very anxious for Sylvia to stay when the wedding was over. He was cheating the gods out of half their pleasure in making him a solicitor by writing a history of Warwickshire worthies. Sylvia had so much impressed him as an intelligent observer that he would have liked to retain her at his elbow for a while. She would not stay, however. The particular song that the sirens had sung to her during her sojourn in their territory was about writing a book. They called her back now and flattered her with a promise of inspiration. Sylvia was not much more ready to believe in sirens than in mortals, and she resisted the impulse to return. Nevertheless, with half an idea of scoring off them by writing the book somewhere else, she settled down in Mulberry Cottage to try: the form should be essays, and she drew up a list of subjects:—

Sylvia found that when she started to write on these and other subjects she knew nothing about them; the consequence was that summer passed into autumn and autumn into winter while she went on reading history and philosophy. For pastime she played baccarat at Curzon Street and lost six hundred pounds. In February she decided that, so much having been written on the subjects she had chosen, it was useless to write any more. She went to stay with Jack and Olive, who were now living in West Kensington. Olive was expecting a baby in April.

“If it’s a boy, we’re going to call him Sylvius. But if it’s a girl, Jack says we can’t call her Sylvia, because for us there can never be more than one Sylvia.”

“Call her Argentina.”

“No, we’re going to call her Sylvia Rose.”

“Well, I hope it’ll be a boy,” said Sylvia. “Anyway, I hope it’ll be a boy, because there are too many girls.”

Olive announced that she had taken a cottage in the country close to where her people lived, and that Sylvius or Sylvia Rose was to be born there; she thought it was right.

“I don’t know why childbirth should be more moral in the country,” Sylvia said.

“Oh, it’s nothing to do with morals; it’s on account of baby’s health. You will come and stay with me, won’t you?”

In March, therefore, Sylvia went down to Warwickshire with Olive, much to the gratification of Mr. Fanshawe. It was a close race whether he would be a grandfather or an author first, but in the end Mr. Fanshawe had the pleasure of placing a copy of his work on Warwickshire worthies in the hands of the monthly nurse before she could place in his arms a grandchild. Three days later Olive brought into the world a little girl and a little boy. Jack was acting in Dundee. The problem of nomenclature was most complicated. Olive had to think it all out over again from the beginning. Jack had to be consulted by telegram about every change, and on occasions where accuracy was all-important, the post-office clerks were usually most careless. For instance, Mr. Fanshawe thought it would be charming to celebrate the forest of Arden by calling the children Orlando and Rosalind; Jack thereupon replied:

“Palestine!” exclaimed Olive.

“Obviously Valentine,” said Sylvia. “But look here, why not Sylvius for the boy and Rose for the girl? ‘Rose Airdale, all were thine!’”

When several more telegrams had been exchanged to enable Olive, in Warwickshire, to be quite sure that Jack, by this time in Aberdeen, had got the names right, Sylvius and Rose were decided upon, though Mr. Fanshawe advocated Audrey for the girl with such pertinacity that he even went as far as to argue with his daughter on the steps of the font. Indeed, as Sylvia said afterward, if the clergyman had not been so deaf, Rose would probably be Audrey at this moment.

On the afternoon of the christening Sylvia received a telegram.

“Too late,” she said, with a laugh, as she tore it open. “He can’t change his mind now.”

But the telegram was signed “Beardmore” and asked Sylvia to come at once to London because Mrs. Gainsborough was very ill.

When she arrived at Mulberry Cottage, on a fine morning in early June, Mrs. Beardmore, whom Sylvia had never seen, was gravely accompanying two other elderly women to the garden door.

“She’s not dead?” Sylvia cried.

The three friends shook their heads and sighed.

“Not yet, poor soul,” said the thinnest, bursting into tears.

This must be Mrs. Ewings.

“I’m just going to send another doctor,” said the most majestic, which must be Mrs. Marsham.

Mrs. Beardmore said nothing, but she sniffed and led the way toward the house. Mrs. Marsham and Mrs. Ewings went off together.

Inside the darkened room, but not so dark in the June sunshine as to obscure entirely the picture of Captain Dashwood in whiskers that hung upon the wall by her bed, Mrs. Gainsborough lay breathing heavily. The nurse made a gesture of silence and came out tiptoe from the room. Down-stairs in the parlor Sylvia listened to Mrs. Beardmore’s story of the illness.

“I heard nothing till three days ago, when the woman who comes in of a morning ascertained from Mrs. Gainsborough the wish she had for me to visit her. The Misses Hargreaves, with who I reside, was exceptionally kind and insisted upon me taking the tram from Kew that very moment. I communicated with Mrs. Marsham and Mrs. Ewings, but they, both having lodgers, was unable to evacuate their business, and Mrs. Gainsborough was excessively anxious as you should be communicated with on the telegraph, which I did accordingly. We have two nurses night and day, and the doctor is all that can be desired, all that can be desired, notwithstanding whatever Mrs. Marsham may say to the contrary; Mrs. Marsham, who I’ve known for some years, has that habit of contradicting everybody else something outrageous. Mrs. Ewings and me was both entirely satisfied with Doctor Barker. I’m very glad you’ve come, Miss Scarlett, and Mrs. Gainsborough will be very glad you’ve come. If you’ll permit the liberty of the observation, Mrs. Gainsborough is very fond of you. As soon as she wakes up I shall have to get back to Kew, not wishing to trespass too much on the kindness of the two Misses Hargreaves to who I act as housekeeper. It’s her heart that’s the trouble. Double pneumonia through pottering in the garden. That’s what the doctor diag—yes, that’s what the doctor says, and though Mrs. Marsham contradicted him, taking the words out of his mouth and throwing them back in his face, and saying it was nothing of the kind but going to the King’s funeral, I believe he’s right.”

Mrs. Beardmore went back to Kew. Mrs. Gainsborough, who had been in a comatose state all the afternoon, began to wander in her mind about an hour before sunset.

“It’s very dark. High time the curtain went up. The house will be getting impatient in a minute. It’s not to be supposed they’ll wait all night. Certainly not.”

Sylvia drew the curtains back, and the room was flooded with gold.

“That’s better. Much better. The country smells beautiful, don’t it, this morning? The glory die-johns are a treat this year, but the captain he always likes a camellia or a gardenia. Well, if they start in building over your nursery, pa.... Certainly not, certainly not. They’ll build over everything. Now don’t talk about dying, Bob. Don’t let’s be dismal on our anniversary. Certainly not.”

She suddenly recognized Sylvia and her mind cleared.

“Oh, I am glad you’ve come. Really, you know, I hate to make a fuss, but I’m not feeling at all meself. I’m just a tiddley-bit ill, it’s my belief. Sylvia, give me your hand. Sylvia, I’m joking. I really am remarkably ill. Oh, there’s no doubt I’m going to die. What a beautiful evening! Yes, it’s not to be supposed I’m going to live forever, and there, after all, I’m not sorry. As soon as I began to get that stiffness I thought it meant I was not meself. And what’s the good of hanging about if you’re not yourself?”

The nurse came forward and begged her not to talk too much.

“You can’t stop me talking. There was a clergyman came through Mrs. Ewings’s getting in a state about me, and he talked till I was sick and tired of the sound of his voice. Talked away, he did, about the death of Our Lord and being nailed to the cross. It made me very dismal. ‘Here, when did all this occur?’ I asked. ‘Nineteen hundred and ten years ago,’ he said. ‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘it all occurred such a long time ago and it’s all so sad, let’s hope it never occurred at all.’”

The nurse said firmly that if Mrs. Gainsborough would not stop talking she should have to make Sylvia go out of the room.

“There’s a tyrant,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “Well, just sit by me quietly and hold my hand.”

The sun set behind the housetops. Mrs. Gainsborough’s hand was cold when twilight came.

Sylvia felt that it was out of the question to stay longer at Mulberry Cottage, though Miss Dashwood, to whom the little property reverted, was very anxious for her to do so. After the funeral Sylvia joined Olive and Jack in Warwickshire.

They realized that she was feeling very deeply the death of Mrs. Gainsborough, and were anxious that she should arrange to live with them in West Kensington.

Sylvia, however, said that she wished to remain friends with them, and declined the proposal.

“Do you remember what I told you once,” she said to Jack, “about going back to the stage in some form or another when I was tired of things?”

Jack, who had not yet renounced his ambition for Sylvia’s theatrical career, jumped at the opportunity of finding her an engagement, and when they all went back to London with the babies he rushed about the Strand to see what was going. Sylvia moved all her things from Mulberry Cottage to the Airdales’ house, refusing once more Miss Dashwood’s almost tearful offer to make over the cottage to her. She was sorry to withstand the old lady, who was very frail by now, but she knew that if she accepted, it would mean more dreaming about writing books and gambling at Curzon Street, and ultimately doing nothing until it was too late.

“I’m reaching the boring idle thirties. I’m twenty-seven,” she told Jack and Olive. “I must sow a few more wild oats before my face is plowed with wrinkles to receive the respectable seeds of a flourishing old age. By the way, as demon-godmother I’ve placed one thousand pounds to the credit of Rose and Sylvius.”

The parents protested, but Sylvia would take no denial.

“I’ve kept lots for myself,” she assured them. As a matter of fact, she had nearly another £1,000 in the bank.

At the end of July Jack came in radiant to say that a piece with an English company was being sent over to New York the following month. There was a small part for which the author required somebody whose personality seemed to recall Sylvia’s. Would she read it? Sylvia said she would.

“The author was pleased, eh?” Jack asked, enthusiastically, when Sylvia came back from the trial.

“I don’t really know. Whenever he tried to speak, the manager said, ‘One moment, please’; it was like a boxing-match. However, as the important thing seemed to be that I should speak English with a French accent, I was engaged.”

Sylvia could not help being amused at herself when she found that her first essay with legitimate drama was to be the exact converse of her first essay with the variety stage, dependent, as before, upon a kind of infirmity. Really, the only time she had been able to express herself naturally in public had been when she sang “The Raggle-taggle Gipsies” with the Pink Pierrots, and that had been a failure. However, a tour in the States would give her a new glimpse of life, which at twenty-seven was the important consideration; and perhaps New York, more generous than other capitals, would give her life itself, or one of the only two things in life that mattered, success and love.