CHAPTER I
A WASTER

It was still cold, but the skies were clear. The snow had been carted away and Paris was herself again; the note of her exhilarating, seductive, vibrant—a note at once curiously fiercer and more feminine than that of London.

RenÉ Dax, crossing the Place du Carrousel, stood for a moment listening to that vibrant note, sensible of its charm and challenge; looking westward, meanwhile, across the Tuileries Gardens and Place de la Concorde to the ascending perspective of the Champs-ÉlysÉes. The superb ensemble and detail of the scene, softened by lavender mist at the ground levels, was crowned by the blood-red and gold of a wide-flung frosty sunset—a city of fire, as the young man told himself, built on foundations of dreams!

He had just come away from the press view of a one-man show of his own drawings. The rooms were crowded to suffocation. The success of the exhibition was already assured, promising to be prodigious, to amount to a veritable sensation. He was aware of this, yet his mood remained an unhappy one. As usual the critics showed themselves a herd of imbeciles. They praised the wrong things, or, more exasperating still, praising the right ones praised them wrongly, extolling their weak points rather than their fine ones, misinterpreting their message and inner meaning. Had Adrian Savage been there—unluckily he was still in England—some sense might have been spoken. Adrian was an austere critic, but always an intelligent and discriminating one. As for the rest of the confraternity—RenÉ gazed mournfully at the flaming sunset splendor—they got upon his nerves, they nauseated him.

And it all went deeper than that. For those many square yards of wall, plastered with his mordant verdict upon the human species, got upon his nerves, too, and nauseated him. He recoiled, as he had often recoiled before—taking it thus wholesale—from his own merciless exposure of the follies, vulgarities, the mental and physical deformities and distortions of his fellow-creatures; recoiled from the reek of his own Rabelaisian humor, of his own extravagant ribaldry and ingenious grossness. It was his vocation, as that of other and more famous satirists, to wreak a vindictive vengeance thus upon humanity. Only, in his care, reaction invariably followed. The devil of unsanctified laughter for the time satiated and cast out of him, he wandered—as this evening—a very sad and plaintive little being, firmly resolving—as how often before!—once and for all to throw away his rather horrible pencil, and betake himself exclusively to the construction of those delicate lyrics and rondels from which, whatever minor perversions of sentiment they might exhibit, the witty bestiality common to his caricatures was conspicuously absent.

He wanted to forget the hot, close rooms, packed with admirers, male, and, though happily in a minority, female also. By RenÉ Dax that minority was held in particularly small respect. The woman who relished, or affected to relish, his art ought to be ashamed of herself—such at least was his opinion. His art was meant for men, not for women; and the women who couldn't arrive at that conclusion by instinct, unaided, were women for whom, especially in his existing mood, he had no use whatever, didn't want in the very least. That which he did want, under the head of things feminine, was something conspicuously different—a far-removed, stately, inaccessible type of womanhood. And, still more, he wanted the child who should grow into such womanhood—a tender, elusive, sprite-like, spotlessly innocent and unsoiled creature, to whom moral and physical ugliness were equally unknown and equally, saving the paradox, abhorrent.

Well, were not the tall, old-fashioned houses of the Quai Malaquais across the river there just opposite, and was it not still early enough to pay a visit? But then, as he rather fretfully remembered, Madame St. Leger had been pertinaciously invisible of late. He had called several times, only to be told she was not receiving or that she was out. He had never succeeded in seeing her and little Bette; never, now that he came to think of it, since the day of the great snow, the day when Adrian, whose absence he had just been deploring, left for England.

The bringing of these two facts into any relation of cause and effect had not previously occurred to him. It did not do so seriously even now. Yet unquestionably the names of Madame St. Leger and Adrian Savage took up a position side by side in his mind, thereby subtly coloring his reflections. He had no friend upon whom he depended and who, in his capricious exacting fashion, he loved as he did Adrian. The friendship had remained practically unbroken since the time when Adrian, the healthier, happier-natured boy, protected him, the queer little Tadpole, from tormentors at school. This friendship had been among the wholesomest influences of his life, and, amid many aberrations and perversities of thought and conduct, he clung to it. But it followed on his self-absorption and selfishness, natural and assumed, that his friend's interests and concerns, save in so far as they bore direct relation to his own, were a matter of indifference to him. He had never troubled himself as to the possible state or direction of Adrian's affections, and perhaps consequently, this sudden juxtaposition of names came to him as a surprise, and an irritating one.

Slipping in and out between private cars, taxis, and humbler, horse-drawn vehicles, he crossed the roadway to the Pont des Saints PÈres. The sunset glories faded, while avenues of living white and glow-worm green lights sprang into being. Still, here and there, red splashes, as of blood, stained the livid, swirling surface of the Seine, which, in half flood, fed by the melted snow, hissed and gurgled under the arches and against the masonry of the bridge.

As it happened, just then, a lull occurred in the cross-river traffic, a break in the quick-moving throng of foot-passengers, so that in front of RenÉ Dax the pale arc of the right-hand pavement showed empty in the whole of its length, save for a single tall, slouching, shabby figure, clothed in a blue-serge suit unmistakably English in cut and in pattern. As RenÉ advanced, his mind still working around those two names set in such irritating juxtaposition, he saw the man in the English-made suit first glance sharply to right and left, then bend down, grasping the outer edge of the parapet, while slowly and, as it seemed, furtively, drawing one knee up on to the flat of the coping.

—Was it possible that Madame St. Leger's repeated refusals to receive him were other than accidental? Was it possible they had some connection with Adrian's absence? Was it conceivable his friend had turned traitor, had interfered, saying or hinting at that which might, socially, justify such denial of admission? Suspicion, resentment, self-pity, a lively sense of personal injury invaded him.—

The shabby, slouching loafer's right knee was fairly upon the coping now. He threw up both arms, threw back his head, his mouth opened wide as one letting loose a great cry. RenÉ Dax saw his extended arms, his bare head, his profile with that wide-open mouth, dark against a pale background of buildings and cold, translucent sky. The effect was of the strangest, the more so that no sound came from the apparently loud-crying mouth. Suddenly his chin dropped on his breast. His hands were lowered, clutching at the edge of the parapet again, and he remained thus for a few seconds, immobile, crouched together, his left foot, in a well-cut but bulging hole-riddled boot, still resting upon the pavement.

Then in a flash, awakening from contemplation of his own lately discovered woes, RenÉ realized what was about to occur. His height and reach were insufficient, encumbered as he was, moreover, by a thick fur-lined overcoat, for him to get his arms round the crouching figure. So he just clutched whatever came handiest, the back of the fellow's jacket, the slack of the seat of his trousers. Exerting all his strength, RenÉ hauled and jerked at these well-worn garments. The attack, though neither very forcible nor very scientific, was completely unexpected. The man's grip relaxed. His knee slipped and he fell back, an amorphous indigo and sandy-red heap, upon the pallid asphalt.

RenÉ pulled a scented pocket-handkerchief out of the breast-pocket of his coat and proceeded delicately to wipe the fingers and palms of his gray suÈde gloves. He was unaccustomed to such exertion. His heart thumped against his ribs. His sight was blurred. He felt slightly faint and light-headed and was grateful for the cold back-draught of air off the rapidly flowing river. It was his pride, part of his pose, in fact, never to display emotion; and he now found himself excited and shaken, by no means fully self-possessed. He needed a space of quiet in which to regain his accustomed affectations of bearing and manner. He was aware, too, that those shabby garments were decidedly unpleasant to touch. Therefore he stood still, breathing rather hard through his nostrils, and daintily wiping the neat, little gray suede gloves incasing his quick, clever little fingers.

"I must express regret for my violence," he said, with the utmost civility, to the heap on the pavement, as soon as he judged his voice sufficiently steady for speech. "I must apologize to you for such absence of ceremony, but really, my dear sir, it appeared to me no time should be lost. You had, unconsciously of course, placed yourself in a highly ridiculous position from which it was clearly incumbent upon me, as an amiable and sympathetic person, immediately to remove you. At times one is compelled to act with decision rather than politeness. This was a case in point. Doubtless you are at present annoyed with me. But a few moments' reflection will, I feel sure, commend my action to you. You will recognize how right, even to the point of an apparent sacrifice of personal dignity, I was."

The man by now had got upon all fours, looking like some unsightly, shambling animal. Limply he rose to his feet and, supporting himself against the balustrade, turned upon his savior a dissipated boyish countenance, down which tears dribbled miserably.

"Why the devil couldn't you leave me alone?" he asked, petulantly, in English. "What earthly concern is it of yours? Aren't I my own master?"

His voice rose to a wail.

"I've been trying to—to do it all day, but there have been too many people about. They stared at me. They suspected and followed me. I could not dodge them. Now I thought the opportunity had come. I was rid of them at last. I never saw you, curse you, you're so short. After all, one doesn't think of looking on the ground, except for vermin. And I'd just pulled myself together. I mayn't have the nerve to try again. I've lost my chance," he wailed, childishly, his weak, loose-lipped mouth twisted by the wretchedness of crying. "I've lost my chance through you, you beast. And you've torn my coat, too. It's the only one I have left; and I did want to look decent, when they found me, when I was dead."

He flung away passionately, pressing his face down on his folded arms upon the parapet, while his angular shoulders heaved and his body shuddered under the ragged blue-serge jacket.

"I shall not have the pluck again. I know myself, and I sha'n't have it. By now I should have been out of the whole accursed tangle. The whole show would have been over—over—I should know nothing more. I should be quit of my misery. I should be dead—ah! my God, dead—dead—"

But RenÉ Dax continued to wipe his neat, little gray suÈde gloves. For his mood had changed. The taunt regarding his smallness of stature had turned him wicked, so that the exquisite minor poet, yearning for the companionship of things pure, lovely, and of good report, fled away. The injured friend fled away likewise. And the satirist, the caricaturist, impure and unsimple, greedy of human ugliness and degradation, malignant, mercilessly scoffing, reigned in their stead. And here, in this loose-limbed, blue-eyed, tawny-headed foreign youth—whose voice and speech, coarseness of expression notwithstanding, witnessed to education and gentle blood—vainly essaying to drown himself under the dying sunset skies of the city of fire built on foundations of dreams, was a subject, surely made to the satirist's hand, a subject of great price! The despotism of his art came upon RenÉ Dax, that necessity for vengeance upon humanity; and this time, for him, the edge of vengeance was sharpened by personal insult. For this was no common vagabond wastrel, thrown up from the foul underlying dregs of the population, but a person of condition, once his social equal, whose insolence therefore touched his honor as that of a man of the people could not.

"You are offensive, my young friend," he said, in careful, slightly over-pronounced, but fluent English. "You are also remarkably unattractive and wanting in intelligence. But I, being happily none of these things—offensive, I would say, unattractive or wanting in intelligence—can afford to be magnanimous. Learn, then, that had I not intervened—at much inconvenience to myself—to prevent your projecting your unsavory carcass into the river, but permitted you to carry out your thrice-idiotic purpose, it would not, as you say, have been all over by now and you quit of your misery, not one bit of it! Were you less crude in idea, less bestially ignorant, you would be aware that the principle of life is indestructible. Choking and struggling in the black water there you would have suffered abominable discomfort. But, even when the process of asphyxiation was complete, you yourself would have been still alive, still conscious, and would have discovered, to your infinite chagrin, that you had merely exchanged one state of being for an other and more odious one."

RenÉ rested his elbows upon the top of the balustrade, and, putting his little, tired baby face close, spoke with incisive clearness of enunciation into the young man's ear.

"Be under no delusion," he said. "Once alive, always alive. There is no breaking out of that prison. It is too cleverly constructed. You cannot get away. Your sentence is for life; and there is no term to living—none, absolutely none, forever and forever. You might have killed your present very unpleasing body, I grant, but this would not have advanced matters. For your essential self, the Me, the ego, would have remained and would have been compelled by incalculable and indomitable natural forces to surround itself with another body, in which to endure the shame of birth, the agonizing sorrows of childhood, and all that which, from childhood, has rendered existence intolerable to you, over again. Or you might, very probably, have come to rebirth lower down in the scale of creation—as a beetle to be crushed under foot, a dog to be pinned out on the vivisector's table, a lamb to be flayed at the abattoir, a worm to writhe on the fisherman's hook, a formless grub to bloat itself with carrion."

Here the wretched youth raised his head and stared at his self-constituted mentor. Tearful wretchedness had given place to an expression of moral terror, almost trenching on insanity—terror of immeasurable possibilities, of conceptions monstrous and unnatural.

"Who are you, what are you," he cried, "you mincing little devil? Isn't it all horrible enough already without you trying to scare me? I hate you. And you haven't been dead. How can you know?"

"Ah! you begin to take notice, to listen. And although you continue offensive, that you should listen is satisfactory, as it assures me my amiable attentions and instructive conversation are not altogether wasted. Learn then, my cherished pupil," RenÉ added, in a soft, easy, small-talk tone, "that you are still in error, since I—I who so patiently reason with you—have unquestionably been dead scores, hundreds, probably thousands of times. I have sampled many different incarnations, just as you, doubtless, under less indigent circumstances, have sampled dinners at many different restaurants; with this distinction, however, that whereas, in Paris at all events, you must have eaten a number of quite passable dinners, I have never yet experienced an incarnation which was not in the main detestable, a flagrant outrage on sensibility and good taste. Hence, you see, I do not speak at random, but from a wide basis of fact. I know all about it. And, therefore, I just emphasize this point once more. Engrave it upon the tablets of your memory. It is well worth remembering, particularly in reckless and exaggerated moments. Life is indestructible. To end it is merely to begin it under slightly altered material conditions, with a prelude of acute mental and physical discomfort thrown in; hideous disappointment, moreover, waiting to transfix you when your higher faculties are—like mine—sufficiently developed for you to have acquired the power of looking backward and visualizing the premutations of your past."

The speaker turned sideways, leaning on one elbow. He took his handkerchief neatly from his breast-pocket again and held it to his nose.

"Really, you do need washing rather badly, my young friend!" he said. "But not down there, not in the but dubiously cleanly waters of our beloved Seine. A Turkish bath, and a vigorous shampoo afterward, and, subsequently, a change of linen.—However, that, for the moment, must wait. To return to our little lesson in practical philosophy.—I have rescued you from the disaster of premature reincarnation. I have also striven to improve your mind, to enlighten you, and that at considerable discomfort to myself, for I find it very cold standing and instructing you in the fundamental principles of being, here on this remarkably draughty bridge. I risk double pneumonia in your service. Be grateful, then, and make suitable acknowledgment of the immense charity I have shown you."

"You are a devil, and I hate you. Why can't you go away?" the young man answered in a terrified sulkiness.

"Truly you are mistaken," RenÉ returned, imperturbably. "My charity is too great to permit me to go away until you, my pupil, are provided for. You have so much which it would be to your advantage to learn! I am not a devil. No—but I admit that I am, to-day, one of the most-talked-about persons in Paris. I must therefore entreat you to adopt a more respectful tone and less accentuated manner. We have ceased to be alone. Many people are crossing the bridge. Among them must be those to whom my appearance is familiar; and, if I am remarked pleading thus with a debauched, would-be suicide, I shall certainly read in the morning papers that M. RenÉ Dax has discovered a new method of self-advertisement, a catchy puff for his picture-show. This would be disagreeable to me. My work is big enough to stand on its own merits. Self-advertisement, in my case, is as superfluous as it is vulgar. Compose yourself. Cease to be ridiculous. And above all do not call me rude names in the hearing of the public. Ah! excellent!—There is an empty cab."

He hailed a passing taxi, and, as the chauffeur drew up to the curb, put his arm within that of his companion, persuasively, even affectionately.

"Come, then, my child," he said. "See, my charity is really inexhaustible! I will take you home with me, though I confess you are a far from fragrant fellow-traveler, pending that so desirable Turkish bath. And, listen—I will take you home, I will also feed you. And I will draw little pictures of you, several little pictures, because I find in you a singularly edifying example of a singularly degraded type. After I have drawn as many little pictures as pleases me, I will have you washed, I will give you clothes, I will give you money, and then I will send you away without asking any questions, without so much as inquiring your name."

He moved toward the waiting car, the door of which the chauffeur held open. But the young man showed a disposition to struggle and hang back.

"Get in, dirty animal, or I call the police," RenÉ Dax ordered, sharply, "and recount to them your recent exploit. They will not give you money or clothes, nor will they abstain from asking inconvenient questions. Ah! you decide to accompany me? That is well."

And, with a roughly helping hand from the chauffeur, he projected the limp, wretched figure into the cab.

"A good tip, my son, and drive smartly," he added, after giving an address in the Boulevard du Mont Parnasse.

CHAPTER II
THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

"Yes, I have returned. I am here, veritably here, chÈre Madame et amie. At last I have effected my escape from the Land of Egypt and the House of Bondage—and such a bondage! Ah! it is an incredibly happy thing to be back!"

Adrian permitted himself to hold his hostess's hand some seconds longer than is demanded by strict etiquette. His face was as glad as a spring morning. Tender gallantry lurked in his eyes. His voice had a ring of joy irrepressible. His aspect was at once that of suppliant and of conqueror. And this whole brilliant effect was infectious, finding readier and more sympathetic reflection in Madame St. Leger's expression and humor than she at all intended or bargained for. For the moment, indeed, the charm and the rush of it came near sweeping her off her feet. She ceased to subscribe to theory, ceased to reason, yielded to spontaneous feeling, practice claiming her—the secular and delightful practice of he being man, she woman, and of both being fearless, high-spirited, beautifully human, and beautifully young.

"In any case the House of Bondage has not disagreed with you," she said, gaily. "For I have never seen you looking more admirably well."

"Ah! you must not put that down to the credit of the House of Bondage, but to the fact of my entrancing escape from it, to the fact that once more I am here—here—with you." As he spoke Adrian glanced round the dear rose-red-and-canvas-colored room. He wished to make sure that, in every detail, he found it precisely as he had left it, every article of furniture, every picture, every ornament in its accustomed position. He felt jealous of the minutest change of object or of place. "No, nothing is altered, nothing," he said, answering his own thought aloud in the greatness of his content.

Gabrielle abstained from comment. She owned herself moved, excited, uplifted, by the joyful atmosphere which his presence exhaled. Indeed, that presence affected her far more deeply than she had anticipated, catching her imagination and emotions as in the dazzling meshes of a golden net. Some men are gross, some absurd, some unspeakably tedious when in love. Adrian was very certainly neither of these objectionable things. He struck, indeed, an almost perfect note. And that was just where the danger came in, just why she dared not let this interview continue at the enthusiastic level. She might suffer the charm of it too comprehensively, and—for already she began to reason again—that would entail regret, and, only too likely, worse than regret.

So, steeling herself against the insidious charm which so worked on and quickened her, she moved away from the vacant place before the fire, where she had been standing with Adrian Savage, sat down in her high-backed, rose-cushioned chair and picked up the bundle of white lawn and lace lying on the little table beside it. She needed protection—whether from him or from herself she did not quite care to inquire—and reckoned it wiser to put a barrier of actual space and barrier of sobering employment between herself and this inconveniently moving returned guest and lover. She refused to be taken by storm.

But Adrian's buoyancy of spirit was not so easily to be crushed.

"Ah! only that was needed," he declared, "to complete my satisfaction—that you should place yourself thus and shake out your pretty needlework. It procures me the welcome belief that no time has really been lost or wasted; it almost convinces me that I have not been away at all. You cannot conceive what pleasure, what happiness it gives me, to be here, to see you again. But now that I am able to observe you calmly, chÈre Madame—"

"Yes, calmly, calmly," she put in, without raising her eyes from her stitching. "How I value, how I appreciate calm!"

"Do you not appear a little tired, a little pale?"

"Very possibly," she answered. "I have been troubled about my mother recently. The extreme cold affected her circulation. For some days we were in grave anxiety. Her vitality is low. Indeed, I have passed through some trying hours."

"And I was ignorant of her illness, ignorant of your anxiety! Why did you not write and tell me?"

"Does not the difficulty of answering letters one has never received occur to you?" Gabrielle inquired, mildly. "And it was not I, you know, who volunteered to write."

The young man had drawn a chair up to the near side of the little table. Now he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, both hands extended, as one who offers a petition.

"Do not reproach me with my silence or I shall be broken-hearted," he said. "My inclination was to write reams to you, volumes. I did, in fact, begin many letters. But I restrained myself. I destroyed them. To have sent them would have been selfish and indiscreet. I was bound, by my promise to you at parting, not to allude to the subject which most vitally touches my happiness. And I found over there so much which was perplexing and sad. I asked myself what right I had to inflict upon you a recital of melancholy impressions and events. I came to the conclusion that I really had none."

Madame St. Leger looked at him sideways from between half-closed eyelids. The dimple showed in her cheek, but her smile was distinctly ironic.

"Why not admit that I was right in foretelling that you would find those shadowy ladies, and your mission to them, of absorbing interest? It occupied your time and thoughts to the exclusion of all else—now, was it not so? Was I not right?"

"Yes and no, chÈre Madame," he answered, presently, slowly and with so perceptible a change of tone that his hearer was startled to the point of finding it difficult to go on with her needlework.

Adrian sat silently watching her. The singular character of her beauty, both in its subtlety and suggestion of a reserve of moral force, had never been more evident to him. More than ever, in each gesture, in the long, suave lines of her body and limbs shrouded in clinging black, in the gleam of her furrowed hair as she turned or bent her charming head, in the abiding provocation and mystery of her eyes and lips, did she appear to him unique and infinitely desirable. Watching her, he inclined to become lyrical and cry aloud his worship in heroic fashion, careless of twentieth-century decorum and restraint. But if her room, the material frame and setting of that beauty, to his immense content remained unchanged in every particular, her attitude of mind, to his immense discontent, evidently remained unchanged likewise. In the first surprise of his arrival she had yielded somewhat, catching alight from his flame. But with a determined hand she shut down those sympathetic fires, becoming obdurate as before. He could feel her will sensibly stiffening against his own; and this at once hurt him shrewdly and whipped up passion, preaching a reckless war of conquest, bidding him disregard promises, bidding him speak and thunder down opposition by sheer law of the strongest. In every man worth the name temptation must arise, at moments, to beat the defiant beloved object into an obedient and docile jelly—the defiant beloved object, it may confidently be added, would regard any man as unworthy of serious consideration did it not. But, in Adrian's case, sitting watching her now, though such temptation did very really arise, its duration was brief. Less primitive counsels prevailed. She was far from kind and he was hotly in love; but he was also the child of his age, and a fine gentleman at that, to whom, given time for reflection, berserker methods must inevitably present themselves as both unworthy and ludicrous. So, if she condemned him to play a waiting game, he would bow to her ruling and play it. He had considerable capital of self-confidence to draw upon. In as far as the ultimate issues were concerned he wasn't a bit afraid—as yet. He could afford, so he believed, to wait. Only, since tormenting was about, all the fun of that amiable pastime shouldn't be on her side. And to this end now he would make her speak first.

He remained silent, therefore, still observing her, until the color deepened in the round of her cheeks, and the stitches were set less regularly in the white work, while uneasiness gained on her causing her presently to look up.

"Yes and no?" she said, "yes and no? That is nothing of an answer. I am all attention. I am curious to hear your explanation. And then—yes and no—what next?"

"This," he replied, "that on nearer acquaintance the two ladies proved anything but shadowy. They proved, in some respects, even a little tremendous. Far from being absorbed in them, I came alarmingly near being absorbed by them—which is a very different matter."

"Ah, that is interesting. You did not like them?"

"I really cannot say. They both—but particularly the elder sister, my cousin Joanna—were new to my experience. I do not feel that I have even yet placed them in my mind. The members of all nations above a certain social level can meet on common ground. It is below that level national tendencies and eccentricities actually declare themselves. I went over, strong in the conceit of ignorance. I supposed I knew all about it and should find myself quite at home. I was colossally mistaken. The manners and mental attitude of the provincial middle-class English were a revelation to me of the blighting effects of a sea frontier and a Puritan descent. The men have but three subjects of conversation—politics, games, and their own importance. The women"—Adrian paused, looking full at Madame St. Leger—"I am very, very sorry for the women. Ah! dear Madame," he added, "let us return devout thanks that we were born on this side, the humane, the amiable, the artistic side of the Channel, you and I. For they are really a very uncomfortable people those middle-class Anglo-Saxons. Until I spent this age-long three weeks among them I had no conception what a convinced Catholic—in sentiment, if not, to my shame, altogether in practice—and thorough-paced Latin I was!"

During the above harangue Gabrielle's hands remained idle. He was really very good, meeting her thus half-way in the suppression of the personal and amatory note. She was obliged to him, of course; yet, in honest truth, was she so very much pleased by his readiness to take the hint? She could not but ask herself that—and then hurry away, so to speak, from the answer, her fingers in her pretty ears. His cue was an intelligent exchange of ideas then? An excellent one!—She stopped her ears more resolutely.—She, too, would be intelligent.

"Increased faith and increased patriotism as the result of your journey! How admirable! Clearly it is highly beneficial to one's morale to cross the Channel. Were it rather later in the year, and were the weather less inclement, I should be disposed to take the little cure, without delay, myself."

"It would not suit you in the least," Adrian asserted. "You would dislike it all quite enormously."

Gabrielle St. Leger at the Tower House! The idea produced in him a violent unreasoning repulsion, as though she ran some actual physical danger. Heaven forbid!

"I should not go with any purpose of enjoyment, but rather as a penance, hoping the dislike of what I found over there might heighten my appreciation of all my blessings here at home."

Whereupon Adrian, careless of diplomacy, clutched at his chance.

"Then you are not so entirely satisfied, chÈre Madame et amie," he cried, laughing a little in his eagerness, "not so utterly happy and content!"

"Is one ever as devout, ever as patriotic, as one ought to be?" she asked, gravely.

"Or as sincere?" he returned, with corresponding gravity.

The hot color deepened in the young woman's face, and she picked up her needlework again quickly.

"I—insincere?" she asked. "Is not that precisely why you find me slightly vexatious, my dear Mr. Savage, that I am only too sincere, a veritable model of sincerity?"

And she rose, gracious, smiling, to receive another guest.

"Ah! ma toute belle, how are you, and how is the poor, darling mother? Better? Thank God for that! But still in her room? Dear! dear! Yet, after all, what can one expect? In such weather convalescence must necessarily be protracted. I am forced to come and ask for news in person since you refuse to have a telephone. Just consider the many annoying intrusions, such as the present, which that useful instrument would spare you!"

Anastasia Beauchamp, overdressed and genial as ever, interspersed these remarks with the unwinding of voluminous fox furs, all heads and tails and feebly dangling paws, the kissing of her hostess on either cheek, and finally a hand-shake to Adrian.

"So you are restored to us, my dear Savage," she continued. "I am more than delighted to see you, though at this moment I am well aware that delight is not reciprocated.—There, there, it is superfluous to perjure yourself by a denial.—And you are back just in time to write a scathing criticism of your protÉgÉ M. Dax's exhibition, in the Review. Here is matter for sincere congratulation, for, believe me, very plain speaking is demanded. The newspapers are afraid of him. They cringe. Their pusillanimity is disgusting. Really this time he has broken his own record! It is just these things which create a wrong impression and bring France into bad odor with other nations. He is a traitor to the best traditions of the art of this country. I deplore it from that point of view. His exhibition is a scandal. The correctional police should step in."

"You have yourself visited the exhibition, dear Anastasia?" Madame St. Leger inquired, demurely.

"Naturally, I have been to see it. Don't I see everything which is going? Isn't that my acknowledged little hobby, my dear? Then, too, where does the benefit of increasing age come in unless you claim the privileges of indiscretion conferred by it? Still, even in senile indiscretion, one should observe a decent limit. I went alone, absolutely alone, to inspect those abominable productions. I wore a thick veil, too, and—I blushed behind it. Needless to relate, I now and then quivered with laughter. One is but human after all, and to be human is also to be diverted by impropriety. But I could have whipped myself for laughing, even though quite alone and behind the veil. Go and judge for yourself whether I am not justified in my disgust, my dear Savage. And as for you, ma toute belle, do not, I implore you, go at all—unless you have had the misfortune to do so already—even though going would effectually cure you of any kindness you may entertain toward the artist—an end, in my poor opinion, greatly to be desired."

"I have not seen M. Dax's exhibition, nor have I seen M. Dax himself for some length of time," Gabrielle remarked, quietly.

"You have dropped him? I rejoice to hear it. A man of so villainous an imagination is unfit to approach you."

"I will not say that I have dropped him." As she spoke she was aware that Adrian looked keenly, inquiringly at her. And this displeased her, as an intrusion upon her liberty of action. "M. Dax has a charming devotion to my little Bette," she continued. "No one whom I know is so perfect a playfellow to children. His sympathy with them is extraordinary. He understands their tastes and pleasures, and is unwearied in his kindness to them. Only, perhaps, his games are a little overstimulating, overexciting. After his last visit my poor Bette suffered from agitating dreams and awoke in the night frightened and crying. I had difficulty in soothing her."

"Praiseworthy babe, how profoundly right are her instincts!" Miss Beauchamp declared, fervently. "But, Heaven help us, what's this!" she added, under her breath. "Perfidious infant, how these praiseworthy babies can fool one!"

She nodded and beckoned to Adrian, still speaking under her breath.

"As you value my friendship, don't go, on no account go, my dear Savage. Come and sit here by me and tell me about your time in England. Like the chivalrous young man you are, stick to me. Supply me with a valid excuse for remaining. For, manners or no manners, I am resolved not to leave her alone with that depraved little horror. I am resolved to outstay him."

CHAPTER III
A STRAINING OF FRIENDSHIP

Bette, light-footed, sprightly, in beaver cap, pelisse, and muff, brown cloth gaiters and boots to match, her face pink from air and exercise, her eyes wide and bright with consciousness of temerity, spricketed toward her mother, leading RenÉ Dax by the hand.

"I found him outside in the courtyard as I returned from my walk with my little friends," she piped, the words tumbling over one another in her pretty haste. "He told me that he wished so much to see us, but that he never found us at home now. And he looked unhappy. You have always instructed me that it is our duty to console the unhappy. So I informed him that I knew you were at home to-day, because you would not leave my grandmother, and I assured him that, speaking in your name, it would give us much pleasure to receive him. And then I invited him to come up-stairs with me. And that was all quite proper, wasn't it, mamma, because we do not like him to be unhappy, and it does give us pleasure to receive M. Dax, does it not?"

"Assuredly it gives us pleasure to receive M. Dax," Gabrielle said, her head carried high and a just perceptible ring of defiance in her voice.

She smiled graciously upon the young man, and for an instant the three stood hand in hand—RenÉ Dax, the Tadpole, offering the very strangest of connecting links between the beautiful mother and delicious little girl.

Miss Beauchamp uttered a sharp exclamation, which she vainly attempted to mask by a cough. Adrian Savage looked, saw, and turned his back. He stared blindly out of window at Paris beneath, sparkling in the keen-edged February sunshine. The sweat broke out on his forehead. He had received an agonizing, a hateful impression, amounting, sound and self-confident though he was, to acute physical pain. "No, not that, not that," he cried to himself. "Of all conceivable combinations, not that one. It is hideous, unbearable, out of nature!"

Miss Beauchamp touched him on the arm. Her face spoke volumes.

"Talk to me, my dear Savage," she said, urgently. "I can imagine what you feel. But talk. Create some, any excuse for staying, and take It, that depraved little horror, away with you when you go. Rally your resources, my dear friend. Play up, I entreat you, play up."

Then louder.

"You had a deplorable crossing—fog, coming into Calais? Yes, February is among the most odious months of the year. But I go over so seldom now, you know, since my poor brother's death. Nearly all my friends are on this side; and, after all, one only has to wait. Everybody who is anybody must pass through Paris sooner or later.—Talk, my dear Savage, talk. Support me.—Ah yes, in London you observed many changes? I hear a mania has taken the authorities lately for improvements. You did not stay in town? Ah no, of course not. Stourmouth?—Yes, I remember the place vaguely. Interminable black fir-trees and interminable, perambulating pink-and-white consumptives—I like neither. Yes, talk—talk—my own remarks are abysmal in their fatuity. But no matter. It's all in a good cause. Let us keep on."

RenÉ, meanwhile, successfully affected ignorance of any human presences save those of his hostess and his little guide.

"Why have you refused me? Why have you never let me see you?" he asked, gazing mournfully at Madame St. Leger.

"I have not been receiving," she replied. "My mother has been ailing, and my time has been devoted to her."

"But to see me, even to be aware that I was near her, would have done her good," he returned. "She has a great regard for me; and, in the case of a sensitive organization, the proximity of a person to whom one is attached acts as a restorative. It was on that account I have needed to come here. I, too, have been ailing. My exhibition is a howling success. Being a person of refinement, this naturally has disagreed with me, inducing repeated fits of the spleen, flooring me with a dumb rage of melancholy. As a corrective I required the soothing society of Madame, your mother, and of Mademoiselle Bette. I required also to be with you, Madame, to look at you. This I believed would prove beneficial to my nerves, lacerated by frenzied public admiration. By excluding me, you have not only wounded my susceptibilities, but prolonged my ill health. As I have already proved to you, Madame Vernois's regrettable illness is no sufficient reason for that exclusion. There must have been some further reason."

"There was a further reason," Gabrielle replied, quietly.

RenÉ gazed up at her, a point of flame in his somber eyes. All of a sudden, with an amazingly quick, very vulgar, street-boy gesture and a wicked grimace, tipping his thumb over his shoulder, he indicated the other two guests holding uneasy converse at the other side of the room. The thing was done in a twinkling, and he regained his accustomed plaintive solemnity of aspect.

"What further reason, that he, the janitor, otherwise Adrian the Magnificent, was away?"

"You are impertinent," Madame St. Leger said, sternly. At first her anger concentrated itself upon RenÉ Dax. Then, quite arbitrarily and unjustly, it took a wider sweep. She called Bette to her; and, kneeling down, the train of her dress trailing out across the rosy carpet, her head bowed, began undoing the frogs of the child's fur pelisse.

"Pray understand," she said, still sternly, "Mr. Savage's presence or absence is a matter which in no degree affects my actions."

While in the pause which followed Adrian's voice, harsh from his effort to make it sound quite disengaged and natural, asserted itself forcibly.

"Yes," he was saying, "Colonel Rentoul Haig.—You cannot surely have been so heartless as to have forgotten his existence, dear Miss Beauchamp, when he retains such enthusiastic memories of you and of the brilliancy of your conversation?"

"Rentoul Haig? Rentoul Haig? Ah! to be sure! I have it at last. Yes, certainly, in the early eighties, at my cousin Delamere Beauchamp's place in Midlandshire. Of course, of course—a neat, little, tea-party subaltern, out in camp with some militia regiment, in general request for answering questions and running messages, and so on; qualifying, even then, as a walking hand-book of the English landed and titled gentry."

"He has continued in that line until his genealogical learning has reached truly monumental proportions," Adrian returned, in the same harsh voice. "It possesses and obsesses him, keeping him in a perpetual ferment of apprehension lest he should be called upon to associate with persons of no family in particular. In this connection my arrival, I fear, caused him cruel searchings of heart. His mother and my father were hundredth cousins. Hence, alarms. Should I prove presentable to the funny old gentlemen at the local club, or should I compromise him? He has hardly marched with the times, and pictured me—this I learned from his own ingenuous lips—as some long-haired, threadbare, starveling Bohemian, straight out of the pages of Henri MÜrger or EugÈne Sue. My personal appearance did, I rejoice to say, reassure him to a certain extent. But your name, and recollections both of your cousin's fine place and of your own conversational powers, did much more toward allaying the torment of his social sense. He ended, indeed, by conveying to me that, my beloved mother's alien nationality and my beloved father's profession notwithstanding, I was really quite a credit to the united houses of Savage and Haig."

"Are you going again to exclude me, are you going to shut the door on me, because I have been that which you qualify by the word 'impertinent'?" RenÉ Dax asked, softly and sadly, as Madame St. Leger—the little girl's coat removed and her frilled white skirts straightened out—rose proudly to her feet.

"You richly deserve that I should do so," she replied.

"Ah! pardon—but just consider. For to be cross with me, to repudiate me, is so conspicuously useless. It only serves to accentuate my faults—always supposing I really have any. I am controlled, I am led, by kindness, and I possess most engaging qualities. In the interests of all concerned you should encourage the display of those qualities."

"Pray do not be severe with M. Dax any more," little Bette put in, prettily and busily. "You have, perhaps, dear mamma, been so on my account, therefore it is for me to plead with you."

Madame St. Leger's expression softened. The Tadpole, his big overdeveloped brain and puny body, touched the springs of maternal compassion in her, somehow. She glanced at him. Surely she had exaggerated the disturbing influences which could be exercised by so quaint and relatively insignificant a creature? Then, stooping down, she took little Bette up in her arms, smiling, her figure finely poised, both in lifting and bearing the weight of that graceful burden. In an ecstasy of affection the child snuggled against her, cheek to cheek.

"I am no longer afraid of his little walking-cane," Bette murmured, in a confidential whisper. "That was a silly dream. I assure you I shall not allow it to trouble me, should it repeat itself. So I entreat you, mamma, tell M. Dax he may come here again and play with me and my little friends as he used to do."

Gabrielle's smile sweetened to a tender merriment. With her child pressed close against her, thus, she felt so satisfied, so secure in the strong, pure joys of her motherhood, that she gave caution the slip. So safeguarded, what, she asked herself, could disquiet her soul or harm her? RenÉ Dax was right, moreover, in saying he possessed engaging qualities—though it mightn't be the best taste in the world that he, himself, should announce the fact. What a good work, then, to nurture those qualities, and, by keeping them in play, strengthen and redeem all that was best in the young man's complex and wayward nature! A quite missionary spirit, toward the singular Tadpole, arose in her. And something further—though this she did not willingly acknowledge—namely, a hot desire to assert the completeness of her personal liberty before witnesses just now present. She would conserve her freedom, and demonstrate unequivocally to present company that she intended so doing.

"Good, most precious one," she said, returning the child's fluttering kisses. Then: "Since my little daughter wishes it, the door shall remain open, M. Dax."

But here Adrian Savage, partially overhearing the conversation, partially divining that purpose of demonstration, smitten, moreover, by Madame St. Leger's resolved and exalted aspect, was overcome by alarm and distress altogether too acute for further concealment. Miss Beauchamp might wave her long, thin arms, and pour forth cascades of transparently artificial conversation in the effort to delay his departure, but he could bear the position no longer. She, after all, was actuated by motives of social expediency and of friendship only, was merely an onlooker at this drama, while he was a principal actor in it, all his dearest hopes, all his future happiness at stake. He had reached the limits of moral and emotional endurance. His handsome face was drawn and blanched to an unnatural pallor as against his black, pointed beard, black eyebrows, and dark, close-cropped hair. A few moments more and he felt he might be guilty of some irretrievable breach of good manners, might make a scene, commit some unpardonable folly of speech and action, or that just simply he might collapse, might faint. So, then and there, he bounded tiger-like, so to speak, into the open space before the fire where his hostess still stood, addressing her rapidly, imperatively, wholly ignoring her companion, RenÉ Dax.

"Pardon me, Madame, that I interrupt you, but I have already, as I fear, greatly outstayed your patience and will delay no further to bid you good-by. My excuse, both for coming to-day and for remaining so long, must be that I am here, in Paris, probably for but a few days on the business of the Review. I may be recalled to England at any moment, and it is conceivable in the press of work which demands my attention that I may not have another opportunity of presenting myself to you before I go."

"Behold Vesuvius in full eruption," RenÉ murmured, gazing pensively at his hostess.

The latter had stood little Bette down on the seat of the rose-cushioned chair. She still held the child close, one arm round her waist. The unaccustomed tones of Adrian's voice, his vehemence, and air of unmistakable suffering, agitated her. Was it the price of her independence to hurt a faithful friend so sorely as all this?

"I was unaware you were likely to leave Paris again so soon," she said. "I supposed you had returned for good; and there is so much that I wished to hear, so much that I had promised myself the entertainment of having you recount to me."

"Unfortunately the claims of my venerable cousin's affairs are inexorable," Adrian replied, with a not very successful attempt at lightness, looking her in the eyes while his lips perceptibly shook. "In death, as in life, he has proved himself an unscrupulously devouring old tyrant. Indeed, I am quite unable to forecast, as yet, when I shall escape out of the house of bondage for good."

"Mamma, dearest," little Bette whispered, politely, "I like it of course, but you will excuse me if I mention that you are squeezing me so very tight?"

And thereupon, somehow, Gabrielle's gentler mood evaporated. She ceased to be touched by the young man's troubled aspect, or to regret her share in the production of that trouble. She felt angry, though not very certainly with innocent Bette. Mockery supplanted concern in the expression of her beautiful face as she gave her hand to her unhappy lover.

"In time the arrangement of even the richest succession must be terminated. When that termination is reached we shall hope to welcome you back, Mr. Savage—unless, of course, you have any thought of forming ties which will necessitate your settling permanently in England?"

And, before Adrian had either time or heart to parry this cruel thrust, RenÉ intervened, patting him delicately on the back.

"So you are going, mon vieux? See, I will accompany you. No, no—indeed, I gladly go with you, leaving Mademoiselle Beauchamp—who detests me—as she so earnestly desires, in possession of the field of battle. Why should I not go, my dear fellow? You do not hurry my departure in the least. I have accomplished the object of my visit. I am restored, soothed comforted. I have got all—all that, for the moment, I want."

As the door closed behind the two young men Anastasia advanced. She re-adjusted her frisky hat, pulled her long gloves up at the elbow, cast the heads and tails and feebly dangling paws of her fox furs about her neck and shoulders.

"Ma toute belle, at the risk of your being angry and requesting me to mind my own business, I am constrained to tell you that I fear you are committing a very grave folly," she said.

But Madame St. Leger was engaged in caressing little Bette.

"My poor angel, did I hurt you?" she asked. "Forgive me. I am ten thousand times sorry.—A grave folly, dear Anastasia? Ah no, believe me, you are altogether

CHAPTER IV
IN WHICH ADRIAN SETS FORTH IN PURSUIT OF THE
FURTHER REASON

Coming from under the porte-cochÈre into the street, Adrian, pleading a business appointment as excuse, shook off his companion somewhat unceremoniously, and hailing the first empty motor-cab, sped away to the office, his Review, in the rue Druoi. The rush across the center of Paris, through the thick of the afternoon traffic, with its lively chances of smashing or being smashed, served to steady him. Yet he was still under the empire of considerable emotion when he entered his private room at the office, and Emile Konski, his secretary, a roundabout, pink-cheeked, gray-headed, alert little man of fifty, arose bowing and beaming to relieve him of hat, coat, and umbrella.

"Thanks, thanks, my good Konski," he said. "And now just arrange the copy I have to revise, will you kindly, and take your own work into the outer office. I am rather hurried. I will call through to you should I want you."

"Perfectly, sir," the good Konski returned, obediently; but he beamed no more. His employer was also the god of his ingenuous idolatry, and to leave the private room for the outer office was to leave the Sanctuary for the Court of the Gentiles. Opportunities of devotion had been limited lately, hence banishment became the more grievous.

Once alone, Adrian sat down before his writing-table. The fortnightly chronique of home and foreign politics awaited his revision, so did literary and art notices. Among the latter a critique of RenÉ Dax's picture-show remained to be written, Adrian having expressed an intention of dealing with it himself. He meant to have passed an hour in the galleries after calling upon Madame St. Leger this afternoon, but had relinquished his purpose. For he desired rightly to divide the word of truth regarding RenÉ's eccentric performances; and just now, for reasons quite independent of their inherent merits or demerits, he feared they might stink in his nostrils to a degree subversive of any just exercise of the critical faculty.

He made an honest effort to settle to work and absorb himself in the affairs of Morocco, the last new books, the last debates in the Chamber. But the neatly typed words and sentences proved singularly lacking in interest or meaning. He read them over and over again, only to find them crumble into purposeless units, like so much dry sand, incapable of cohesion. For what mattered—so, in a crisis, is even the cleverest of us dominated by personal feeling—what mattered the future of Morocco, for instance, though involving possibilities of war to all Europe, as against the future of himself, Adrian Savage?

And that future did, unquestionably, present itself just now as lamentably parlous. That he might fail, that Madame St. Leger might eventually and finally refuse to marry him, had never really seriously entered his head before. That he might have to diplomatize, to lay long and patient siege to the enchanting and enchanted beleaguered city before it fell he had long ago accepted; but that, in the end, it would most assuredly fall and he rapturously claim it by right of conquest, in his triumphant masculine optimism he had never, till this afternoon, doubted. Now the doubt did very really present itself and proved a staggering one. Nor was this all. For, save during those first few delicious moments of greeting he had been sensible of a sinister element battling against him, painfully affecting him, yet which he failed to define or to grasp.

Adrian stared at the copy outspread on his blotting-pad, and its blank, unmeaning sentences. Never before had he realized what a terrible, imprisoning, stultifying thing it may be to love! Morocco? Morocco? What, in the name of all which makes a man's life worth living, did he care about the fate of that forbidding North African coast? Let it stew in its own barbarous juice! All the same, his inability to concentrate his attention upon the subject of that disagreeable country served to increase his perturbation and distress. Thanks to admirable physical health, he was accustomed to have his faculties thoroughly and immediately at command, and this refusal of his brain to work to order fairly infuriated him.

There was the critique of RenÉ Dax's picture-show to be written, too!

Adrian rose from the table and walked restlessly, almost distractedly, about the room. For where exactly, in respect of the resistance of that beloved beleaguered city, did RenÉ come in? Oh! that Tadpole of perverted genius, that perniciously clever Tadpole, who from childhood he had protected and befriended, whose fortunes he had so assiduously pushed! And again now, as when staring forth blindly from the high-set windows of la belle Gabrielle's thrice-sacred drawing-room at Paris, glittering in the sharp-edged sunshine, Adrian's whole being cried aloud against the blasphemy of a certain conceivable, yet inconceivable, combination in a passionate, agonized "God forbid!"

But verbal protest against that combination, however loud-voiced and vehement, ranging ineffectually within the narrow confines of his office, was a transparently inadequate mode of self-expression. His native impetuosity rendered uncertainty and suspense intolerable to him. He must act, must make a reconnaissance, must discover some means of ascertaining whether anything had occurred during his absence which served to explain the apparently existing situation. But, here, the intrinsic delicacy of the said situation asserted itself; since precisely those questions to which an answer is most urgently needed are the questions which a person of fine feeling cannot ask. Good breeding, sensibility, a chivalrous regard for the feelings of others are, as he reflected, at times a quite abominable handicap.

He sat down once again at the writing-table. What should he do? At his elbow stood the ebonized upright of the telephone, the long, green, silk-covered wire of it trailing away across the parquet floor to the plug in the wainscot. From a man he could not ask advice or information. But from a woman—surely it was different, permissible? Adrian left off pulling the ends of his upturned mustache and meditated. Distraction slightly lifted and lessened. He looked up an address in the directory; and, after an at first polite then slightly acrimonious parley with the operator at the exchange, got into communication with the person wanted. Would she be at home to-night after dinner, say about eight forty-five? Might he call? And, with multiplied apologies, might he depend upon finding her alone? To these questions the replies proved satisfactory, so that, in a degree solaced, his thirst for immediate action in a measure appeased and his scattered wits consequently once more fairly at command, Adrian resolutely turned his attention to the affairs of neglected Morocco.

As to RenÉ Dax's exhibition? Well, till to-morrow, at all events, it must wait.

Ever since he could remember, Miss Beauchamp had occupied the same handsome, second-floor flat in a quiet street just off the Parc Monceau. Adrian recalled a visit, in company with his mother, made to her there at a period when he still wore white frilled drawers and long-waisted holland tunics. Later, during his early school-days, he vaguely recollected a period during which his grandmother rarely mentioned Anastasia, and then with a suggestive pursing up of the lips and lift of the eyebrows. Afterward he came to know how, for some years, Miss Beauchamp's name had been rather conspicuously associated with that of a certain famous Hungarian composer resident in Paris. But the said composer had long since gone the way of all flesh, and the question as to whether his and Anastasia's friendship was, or was not, strictly platonic in character had long since ceased to interest society. Other stars rose and set in the musical firmament. Other scandals, real or imaginary, offered food for discussion to those greedy of such fly-blown provender. Miss Beauchamp, meanwhile, had become an institution; was received—as the phrase goes—everywhere. Report declared her rich. Her generosity to young musicians, artists, and literati was, unquestionably, large to the verge of prodigality.

The aspect of her domicile, when he entered it this evening, struck Adrian as much the same now as on that long-ago visit with his mother. The suite of living-rooms was lofty, having coved and painted ceilings, captivating to his childish fancy. The rooms opened one from another in a sequence of three. The two first, both somewhat encumbered with furniture, pictures, and bric-À-brac—of very varying value and merit—were dimly lighted and vacant, places of silence and shadows, the atmosphere of them impregnated with a scent of cedar and sandal wood. From the third, the doorway of which was masked by thick curtains of Oriental embroidery, came the sound of a grand piano, played, and in masterly fashion, by a man's hands.

Adrian stopped abruptly, turning to the elderly maid.

"Miss Beauchamp informed me she would be alone," he said.

"Mademoiselle is alone," the maid answered. "She gave instructions no one was to be admitted save monsieur."

"Thanks—I will not detain you. I will announce myself," Adrian said.

He crossed the second and larger room, threading his way in and out of a perfect archipelago of furniture; and held one curtain partially aside, while the purpose of his visit and the smart of his own distractions alike were merged in a sensation of curiosity and surprise.

Miss Beauchamp sat at a grand piano, placed in the middle of the bare polished floor at right angles to the doorway. Adrian saw her face and high-shouldered, high-waisted figure in profile. She wore a cinnamon-colored tea-gown, opening over an under-dress of copper sequin-sewn net. A veritable pagoda of fiery curls crowned her head. Yet, though thin and bony, hers were the man's hands which compelled such rich, forcible music from the piano, making it speak, declaim, sing, plead, touch tragedy, triumphantly affirm, in this so very convincing a manner. The method and mind of the player, in their largeness of conception and fearless security of execution, held the young man captive, raising his whole attitude and outlook to a nobler plane. The music, indeed, carried his imagination up to regions heroic. He was in no haste to have it cease. He waited, therefore.

When the final chords were struck Anastasia Beauchamp, raising her hands from the keyboard, rested the tips of her fingers upon the edge of the empty music-desk, and sat motionless, absorbed in thought. Then, as the seconds passed, Adrian's position became, in his opinion, equivocal, courtesy demanding that he should either make his presence known or withdraw. He chose the former alternative and, taking a step forward, let the curtain fall into place behind him. Imperiously, with a lift of the chin, Miss Beauchamp turned her head and looked full at him; and, for a moment, the young man was fairly taken aback. For, setting of flaming pagoda and frisky tea-gown notwithstanding, he beheld a countenance no longer bizarre, that of an accredited jester, but sibylline, that of a woman who, in respect of certain departments of human knowledge, has touched ultimate wisdom, so that, in respect of those departments, life has no further secrets to reveal. Here was something outpacing the province of Adrian's self-confident, young masculine attainment; and it was to his credit that he instantly recognized this, accepting it with quick-witted and intuitive sympathy.

"Forgive me if I have presumed upon your indulgence, dear lady," he said, advancing with a disarming air of admiration and modesty, "by remaining here unannounced. I could not permit any interruption of your wonderful playing. It would have amounted to profanity. Your art is sublime, is so altogether impressively great. But oh! why," he added, as the sibylline countenance softened somewhat, "have you elected to let me, to let your many friends, remain in ignorance? Why have you deprived us all of the joy of your superb musical gift?"

"Because that gift served its turn very fully many years ago, when you, my dear Savage, were little more than a baby," she answered. "Since then I have felt at liberty to regard my playing as a trifle of private property which I might keep to and for myself."

As she spoke Miss Beauchamp rose from her seat at the piano, and began replacing a multiplicity of bracelets and rings, laid aside during the performance.

"As we grow older we, most of us, are disposed to practise such reservations, I suppose, whether openly acknowledged or not," she continued. "They may take their rise in inclinations of a sentimental, avaricious, or penitential nature; but, however divergent their cause, their object is identical—namely, to keep intact one's individuality, menaced by the disintegrating wear and tear of outward things. The tendency of the modern world is to render one invertebrate, to pound one's character and opinions into a pulp. In self-defense one is forced to reserve and to cultivate some hidden garden, wherein one's poor, battered individual me may walk in assuaging solitude and recollection. Especially"—she looked bravely at Adrian through the shaded light, while her long-armed, ungainly, rusty-gold figure, and strangely wise face surmounted by that flaming top-knot, appeared to him more than ever impressive—"especially, perhaps, is this the case if that garden once represented—as my music possibly once did—a Garden of Paradise in which one did not walk altogether solitary. But, come. You want to speak to me. Let us go into the drawing-room and have our talk there."

"Let us talk, by all means," Adrian put in, quickly, "but let it be here, please. This room is sympathetic—full of splendid echoes good for the soul."

Anastasia's expression softened yet more.

"That is charmingly said. We will stay here, since you wish it. The sofa? Yes, this is my corner—thanks. And now, to be quite frank with you, understand that I had lost count of time and you were inordinately punctual, or you wouldn't have caught me making music. And understand, further, that had I not been unusually moved, by something which occurred this afternoon, I should not have made music at all. I rarely walk in the hidden garden now. As one grows older one has to economize one's emotions. They are too tiring, liable to endanger one's sleep afterward. But this evening circumstances, associations, were too strong for me. The garden called to me and—I walked."

CHAPTER V
WITH DEBORAH, UNDER AN OAK IN THE PARC MONCEAU

Miss Beauchamp leaned back against the piled-up sofa cushions shading her eyes with her left hand; and that hand must have been a little unsteady, since Adrian heard the bracelets upon her wrist rattle and clink.

"Shall I tell you what the something was which so moved me?" she asked. "Unless I am greatly mistaken it is the main cause of our present interview, so that to speak of it may help to make that interview easier for us both."

"Pray tell me." Adrian felt curious as to what should follow; but his curiosity was tempered by deepening respect.

"It comes to this, then, my dear young man, I think," she said. "For those who have once been acquainted with true love—I am not speaking of mere sexual passion, still less of silly flirtations or wanton amorettes—those who have once known that uniquely beautiful and illuminating condition can neither forget nor mistake it. They carry an infallible touchstone in their own eyes, and ears, and hearts. It is my privilege to carry such a touchstone; and this afternoon—there, there, don't wince; quite, quite reverently and gently I put my finger on the fact—I beheld true love again; but true love tormented and far from happy. Wasn't it so?"

"Yes," Adrian replied, with a touch of bitterness, "it was."

"And that brought certain events and experiences—your dear mother's sympathy and friendship among them—so vividly before me that I could only come home here, to this practically deserted room, and make music, as long ago, when another man, another true lover, sat where you now sit. Do you follow me?"

Adrian's heart was somewhat full. He bowed his head in silent assent.

"The ice is satisfactorily broken then? I am an old woman now. Many people, I don't doubt, describe me as a flighty, prankish old spinster, who apes departed youth in a highly ridiculous manner."

She no longer shaded her eyes with her hand, but looked full at Adrian, through the quiet light, smiling—half sibyl, half jester, but, as he felt, wholly wise, wholly kind.

"Such criticisms matter to me rather less than nothing," she continued, "since the hidden garden knows the why and wherefore of all that, and more besides. And now, my dear boy, I have said enough, I think, to show you that you can unburden yourself without reserve or hesitation. You will not speak to me of an undiscovered country."

But just then Adrian felt it difficult to speak. Coming to this woman, he had found so much more than he had asked for or expected—namely, a finding of high romance, of almost reckless generosity, which made him feel humble, feel indeed quite quaintly ignorant and inexperienced. It followed that, when he did speak, he did so in child-like fashion, protesting his innocence as though needing to disarm censure.

"Believe me, I have not acted unworthily," he said. "From the first I was charmed, I was enthralled, but I made every effort to restrain myself. Even in thought I was loyal to poor St. Leger. I did my best to conceal my admiration—I kept away, as much as I could without discourtesy. You see, her very perfection is, in a sense, her safeguard, for how inconceivably vile to endanger the peace of mind of so adorable a creature by any hint, any suggestion! It is only since St. Leger's death that I—"

"Yes, yes, I take all that for granted," Anastasia broke in. "Doesn't it stand to reason, since we are talking of true love?"

And Adrian could not forbear to smile, notwithstanding his humbled condition; the touch was so deliciously feminine in its assumption and non-logic. Unless, by chance, she was laughing at him out of her larger wisdom? Possibly she was. Well, she could do nothing but right, anyhow—so he didn't care! Whereupon he proceeded to pour forth the history of his affection in all its phases, from its first inception to the existing moment, with dramatic fervor, spreading abroad his hands descriptively, while the sentences galloped with increasing velocity and the mellow, baritone voice rose and fell.

"Ah! and can you not conceive it? After that dismal time in England, burying the dead, contending with all manner of tiresomenesses, with narrow-minded, over-strenuous, over-educated women and men—ye gods, such men!—to come back, to see her, was like coming from some underground cavern into the sunshine. She received me exquisitely. I tasted ecstasy. I was transported by hope. Then, abruptly, her manner changed; and that change did not appear to me spontaneous, but calculated—as though, in obedience to some alien influence, she unwillingly put a constraint upon herself. Since then I have reconstituted the scene repeatedly—"

"My poor dear boy!" Anastasia murmured.

"Yes, repeatedly, repeatedly. I try to convince myself that her change of manner was unwilling, not the result of caprice."

"Madame St. Leger is not capricious."

"I am sure of it. Her nature, at bottom, is serious. She reasons and obeys reason. But in this case what reason? Not dislike of me? No, no, my mind refuses such an explanation of her conduct. It would be too horrible, too desolating."

"Isn't there another rather obvious explanation of Madame St. Leger's attitude—the fear of liking you a little too much?"

"But why should she fear to like me?" poor Adrian cried. "I am no devouring monster! I have some talent, sufficient means, and no concealed vices."

And there the thought of RenÉ Dax invaded him, scorching him with positively rampant jealousy and repulsion. For could this, which he had just asserted regarding himself, be asserted with equal truth regarding the Tadpole of genius? He knew very well it could not. Still, even so, he shrank from the rÔle of treacherous friend or detractor.

"She can be gracious enough to others," he contented himself by saying, gazing at his hostess meanwhile, his expression altogether orphaned and pathetic.

"Dangerously gracious. And that is why I did all in my power to delay your departure this afternoon, although I knew perfectly well you were on the rack."

"But, dear God in heaven!" he broke out, incoherently, burying his face in both hands, "you cannot imply, you cannot intend to convey to me your belief—"

"That Gabrielle St. Leger contemplates marrying that libelous little horror, M. Dax? Never in life!"

Adrian got up and walked unsteadily—for indeed the floor seemed to shift and lurch beneath his feet—across the room. Without the faintest conception of what he was looking at, he minutely examined a landscape hanging upon the opposite wall. He also blew his nose and wiped his eyes. While Anastasia Beauchamp, her jaw set, leaning back against the sofa cushions, very actually and poignantly walked in that hidden garden of hers—once a Garden of Eden, and not an Adamless one—wrapped about by remembrance.

After a time the young man came back and sat down beside her. His face was white and his eyes were luminous.

"Most dear and kind friend, forgive me," he said, very gently. "I have climbed giddy pinnacles of rapture, and tumbled off them—plop—into blackest morasses of despair to-day, and my nerves have suffered."

"Ah! it has got you!" she returned. "I'm not a bit sorry for you. On the contrary, I congratulate you. For you are very handsomely and hopelessly in love."

Adrian nodded assent, pushing up the ends of his mustache with a twist of his fingers and smiling.

"Yes, yes, indeed I know," he said. "It is a thing for which to be immeasurably thankful. Yet, all the same, it has its little hours of inconvenience, as I have to-day discovered. It can hold the field to the exclusion of all else; and that with a quite demoralizing intensity, making one feel murderous toward one's oldest friends and, in respect of one's work, no better than a driveling idiot."

"Such are inevitable symptoms of the blessed state. I still congratulate you."

"But you admit, at least, that they are practically extremely impeding? And so, dear Mademoiselle, you whom my mother loved and who loved my mother, you who have done so much to help and comfort me in the last half-hour—will you do something more?"

"I suppose I shall," Anastasia answered, with a laugh which was against herself rather than against him. "I seem to be pretty thoroughly committed to this business for—well, for two people's sakes, perhaps."

"Yes, for her sake also—for hers as well as mine," Adrian cried, impetuously. "Those few words are beautifully full of encouragement. For see here," he went on, "in some ways I am just simply an obstinate, pig-headed Englishman. You permit me to speak quite freely? Loosing her, I cannot console myself elsewhere. It is not merely a wife that I want; having reached the age when a man should range himself a well-bred, healthy, and generally unexceptionable mother for his children! Don't imagine that I would not like to make my subscription to humanity in the form of charming babies. Of course I should. Still those small people, however beguiling, are not to the point in this connection. I am not in pursuit of a suitable marriage, but of—"

"La belle Gabrielle—only and solely la belle Gabrielle—that must be conspicuously evident to the meanest intelligence," Anastasia put in, merrily. "But there, unfortunately, we run up against the crux of the whole situation. For, it is only fair to tell you, our exquisite young woman is even less in pursuit of a suitable marriage than you yourself are. We have had some intimate conversations, she and I. Don't imagine for an instant your name, or any other name, has been hinted at, much less mentioned. But she has been good enough to bestow her confidence upon me, in as far as she bestows it upon any one. Fundamentally she is a mysterious creature, and that's exactly why, I suppose, one finds her so endlessly interesting. And, from those conversations, I gather her mind is set on things quite other than marriage."

"Ah! just Heaven—and what things, then?" poor Adrian exclaimed, distraction again threatening him.

"She would, I think, have very great difficulty in telling you."

Here distraction did more than threaten. It jumped on him, so that in his agitation he positively bounced, ball-like, upon the seat of the sofa.

"I knew it," he cried. "I was sure of it. Almost immediately I detected an alien and inimical influence intrude itself between us, as I have already told you, and battle against me. And this was the more detestable to me because I felt powerless to combat it, being ignorant whence it came and what its nature actually was."

Miss Beauchamp looked at him indulgently. And he, distraction notwithstanding, perceived that her countenance once more had grown sibylline. This served sensibly to quiet and steady him.

"I fancy that influence comes from very deep and very far," she said. "A woman of so much temperament and so much intelligence as Gabrielle St. Leger must, of necessity, be the child of the age in which she lives, in touch with the spirit of it. Her eyes are turned toward the future, and the strange unrestful wind, the wind of Modernity, which blows from out the future, is upon her face. This is the influence you have to battle against, my dear young man, I am afraid, nothing less than the Spirit of the Age, the spirit of Modernity. You have your work cut out for you! To combat it successfully will be—to put it vulgarly—a mighty tough job."

"Like King David of old, I'd rather fall into the hands of God than into those of man," Adrian returned, with rather rueful humor.

"Is one so very sure they are the hands of the Almighty? Too often one has reason to suspect they belong to exactly the opposite person—the inspirer—namely, of so many of your friend M. RenÉ Dax's unpardonable caricatures. But there," she added, "I don't want to give place to prejudice; though whether Modernity is veritably the highroad to the state of human earthly felicity its exponents so confidently—and truculently—predict, or not rather to some appalling and final catastrophe, some Armageddon, and Twilight of the Gods, appears to me, in the existing stage of its evolution, open to the liveliest question. Fortunately, at my time of life one is free to stand aside and look on, passively awaiting the event without taking part in the production of it. But with Madame St. Leger, as with yourself, it is different. You are on the active list. Whether you like or not, you are bound to participate in the production of the event—and she, at least, is by no means unwilling to do so."

"But how, chÈre Mademoiselle, but how?" Adrian questioned.

"After a fashion you can hardly be expected to indorse enthusiastically."

Miss Beauchamp shaded her eyes with her left hand again, while the many bracelets slipping up her thin wrist clinked and rattled.

"See here, my dear Savage," she said, "among all the destructions and reconstructions, the changes—many of them nominal rather than real, and, consequently, superfluous—of which Modernity is made up, one change is very real and has, I sincerely believe, come to stay. I mean the widespread change in thought and attitude of my sex toward yours."

"Feminism, in short."

"In short, Feminism."

A little silence followed. Then: "You take the dose very nicely," Anastasia said.

"Perhaps I take it so nicely because I am convinced it is innocuous. On the other hand, perhaps I don't take it at all. Really, I am not certain which."

He shifted his position, planting his elbows on his knees and his chin in the hollow of his hands.

"The deuce, the deuce!" he said, softly, tapping one long-toed boot meditatively upon the floor.

Miss Beauchamp watched him, amused, observant, making no comment.

"I am sorry," he went on, presently. "It's all moonshine, of course. Nature's too strong for them. In the end they must come into line."

"Moonshine has often proved a very dangerous, because so very intangible an enemy. And the end promises to be far off."

"Yes, I am sorry," Adrian repeated, "very sorry, we were over in England I could understand. Women there have an excuse for revolt. All Englishmen are pedants, even in their games, even in their sport. They have been called a nation of shopkeepers. They might with equal truth be called a nation of schoolmasters; not because they desire to impart knowledge, but because they crave to exercise power and prove, to themselves, their innate superiority by the chastisement of others. Ah! I have witnessed plenty of that in the last month! Truly, they are very disagreeable sons, husbands, and fathers, those middle-class Britons, the schoolmaster, so to speak, permanently on top. And there are not even enough of them to go round! Numerically they are inferior; and this helps to feed their arrogance and inflame their conceit. But even if there were enough, they wouldn't—if I may so express myself—go round. On the contrary, they would go in the opposite direction, to their own selfish pleasures, their clubs, their playing-fields, their interminable football, and cricket, and golf."

"Hum—hum! What about the British flag you waved so vigorously five minutes ago?"

"Did I? Forget it, then. It was a passing aberration. I repent and wrap myself once more in the folds of the tricolor. Most distinctly that is the flag under which a lover of your adorable sex should fight!"

"With the Gallic cock set symbolic at the top of the flag-staff?"

"And why not? Why not? Who can do otherwise than behold with approval that smart, well-groomed, abundantly amatory, I grant you, but also abundantly chivalrous fowl? His absence is, in a sense, precisely that with which I quarrel on the other side of the Channel. It goes to make the revolt of the Englishwoman comprehensible. Her countrymen's relation to her is so inartistic, so utilitarian, so without delicate humor. We hear of her freedom from annoyance, her personal security. But in what do these take their rise? Simply in her countrymen's indifference to her—to her emotions, her mentality, her thousand and one delicate needs, elusive and charming necessities. If he thinks about her at all, it is with the schoolmaster's odious design of correcting her faults, of improving her. The blatant conceit of the animal! As if she could be improved, as if she were not perfect already! But stay. There I pause to correct myself. The Englishwoman is susceptible of improvement. And how? By being snubbed, depressed, depreciated, grumbled at, scolded, made to think meanly of herself? Never a bit.—She has suffered generations of that treatment already. By being admired, reverenced, playfully delighted in, appreciated, encouraged."

Adrian spread abroad his hands with the most amiably persuasive expression and gesture.

"Ah! believe me, dear friend," he cried, "when Luther, the burly renegade German monk; Calvin, the parchment-dry, middle-class Picard lawyer, and English 'King Hal,' of grossest memory, conspired to depose Our Blessed Lady from her rightful throne in heaven, they, incidentally, went far to depose woman from her rightful throne here upon earth. So that, small wonder, having no eternal, universal Mother, whose aid and patronage she can invoke in hours of perplexity and distress, the modern, non-Catholic woman is constrained to rush around in prison-vans, or any other unlovely public vehicle which may come handy, invoking the aid of parliamentary suffrage and kindred dreary mechanical forms of protection against the tedious tyrannies of arrogant, sullen, selfish, slow-witted, birch-rod-wielding, pedagogic man. Yes, truly, as over there, I understand, I sympathize. But here, where, though we may have tolerated, even invented, Revolution, we have at least withstood that most time-serving and inartistic compromise, Reformation—with an impudent capital letter—here, in the patrimony of Chantecler, enveloped in the folds of the gallant tricolor, surely such revolt is unreasonable, is out of place! For here are we not all Feminists, every man-jack of us? ChÈre Mademoiselle, you know that we are. What more, then, have the members of your adored sex to ask?"

And, for the moment, Anastasia Beauchamp's usually ready tongue played her false. The whirl of words had been somewhat overpowering, while, through the whirl, his good faith was so transparently apparent, his argument suggested rather than aggressively pressed home, so evidently to himself conclusive, that a cogent answer was far from easy to frame.

"What more have they to ask?" she said, presently, smiling at him. "Well, just those alluring, because new, untried and intangible satisfactions which the Spirit of the Age promises so largely, and which you, my dear Savage, if you'll pardon my saying, don't and can't promise at all."

"The Spirit of the Age now, as so often in history, will prove a false prophet, a charlatan and juggler, making large promises which he will fail to redeem," Adrian declared. "See, do not art, nature, the cumulative result of human experience, combine to discredit his methods and condemn his objects?"

"Convince Gabrielle St. Leger of that, and my thanks and applause will not be wanting."

"I will convince her," Adrian cried, with growing exaltation. "I will convince her. I devote my life to that purpose, to that end."

And thereupon a certain solemnity seemed to descend upon and diffuse itself through the quiet, lofty room, affecting both speaker and listener, causing them to sit silent, as though in hushed suspense, awaiting the sensible ratification of some serious engagement entered into, some binding oath taken. In the stillness faint, fugitive echoes reached them of the palpitating life and movement of the city outside. The effect was arresting. To Adrian it seemed as though he stood on the extreme edge, the crumbling, treacherous verge, of some momentous episode in which he was foredoomed to play a part, but a part alien to his desires and defiant of his control. While—and this touched him with intimate, though half-ashamed, shrinking and repudiation—not Gabrielle St. Leger, but Joanna Smyrthwaite appeared to stand beside him imploring rescue and safety upon that treacherously crumbling verge. His sense of her presence was so acute, so overmastering in its intensity, that he felt in an instant more he should hear her flat, colorless voice and be compelled—how unwillingly!—to meet the fixed scrutiny of her pale, insatiable eyes.

Then, startling in its suddenness as the ping of a rifle-bullet, came a very different sound to that of Joanna's toneless voice close at hand. For, with a wrenching twang and thin, piercing, long-drawn vibration which shuddered through the air, shuddered through every object in the room, strangely setting in motion that pervasive scent of cedar and sandalwood, a string of the piano broke.

Miss Beauchamp uttered an angry, yet smothered, cry, as one who receives and resents an unexpected hurt. And Adrian, alarmed, agitated, hardly understanding what had actually occurred, turning to her, perceived that her countenance again had changed. Now it was that neither of sibyl nor of jester, but vivid, keen with fight. Yet, even as he looked, it grew gray, grief-smitten, immeasurably, frighteningly old.

Natural pity, and some inherited instinct of healing, made the young man lean toward her and take her hand in his, holding and chafing it, while his finger-tips sought and found the little space between the sinews of the wrist where the tides of life ebb and flow. Her pulse was barely perceptible, intermittent, weak as a thread.

Adrian took the other passive hand, and, chafing both, used this contact as a conduit along which to transmit some of his own fine vitality. His act of willing this transmission was conscious, determined, his concentration of purpose great; so that presently, while he watched her, the grayness lifted, her lips regained their normal color, her pulse steadied and strengthened, and her face filled out, resuming its natural contours. Then as she moved sat upright, smiling, an unusual softness in her expression.

"Don't attempt to speak yet," he said, still busy with and somewhat excited by his work of restoration. "Rest a little. I have been a shameless egoist this evening. I have talked too much, have made too heavy a demand upon your sympathies, and so have exhausted you."

"Whatever you may have taken, you have more than paid back," she answered. She was touched—a nostalgia being upon her for things no longer possible, for youth and all the glory and sweetness of youth. "It is not for nothing that you are the son of a famous physician and of a woman of remarkable imaginative gifts," she went on. "You have la main heureuse, life-giving both to body and spirit. This is a power and a great one. But now that, thanks to you, my weakness is passed we will not remain in this room. You said it was full of splendid echoes, good for the soul. It is rather too full of them, since one's soul is still weighted with a body. I find them oppressive in their suggestion and demand. Frankly, I dare not expose myself to their influence any longer."

Helped by Adrian, she rose and, taking his arm, moved slowly toward the doorway.

"Sometimes, unexpectedly, the merciful dimness which holds our eyes is broken up, giving place to momentary clear-seeing of all which lies beyond and around the commonplace and conventional medium in which we live. Unless one is rather abnormally constituted that clear-seeing is liable to blind rather than to illuminate. Flesh and blood aren't quite equal to it. And so with the snapping of the piano string. Doubtless the causes were simple enough—some peculiar atmospheric conditions, along with the fact that the instrument has been unused for many months. Still in me it produced one of those fateful instants of clairvoyance. I knew it for the signing of a death-warrant. Not my own. Thanks to the kindly ministrations of la main heureuse the signature of that particular warrant is postponed for a while yet. Nor yours either, of that I am convinced. I cannot say whose. The clear-seeing was too rapidly obscured by failing bodily strength. I am not talking nonsense. This has happened twice before. The second time a string broke my brother's death followed within the year."

"And the first time?" Adrian felt impelled to ask. His recent expenditure of will-power had left his nerves in a state of slightly unstable equilibrium which rendered him highly impressionable.

"The first time?" Miss Beauchamp repeated, lifting her hand from his arm. "The death of that other true lover, who listened here to my playing, of the friend who walked with me in the hidden garden, followed the breaking of the first string."

Adrian stepped forward and held aside the embroidered curtain, letting her pass into the drawing-room. Here the air was lighter, the moral and emotional atmosphere, as it seemed to him, lighter likewise. He was aware of a relaxation of mental tension and a deadening of sensation which he at once welcomed and regretted. He waited a few seconds until he was sure that in his own case, too, any disquieting tendency to clairvoyance was over and the conventional and commonplace had fairly come back.

Miss Beauchamp passed on into the first room of the suite. Here the lights were turned on and he found her seated at a little supper-table, vivacious, accentuated in aspect and manner, flaming pagoda of curls and frisky cinnamon-colored, sequin-sewn tea-gown once again very much in evidence. But these things no longer jarred on him. He could view them in their true perspective, as the masquerade make-up with which a proud woman elected—in self-defense—to disguise too deep a knowledge, too sensitive a nature, and too passionate a heart.

"Yes, sit down, my dear Savage," she cried, "sit down. Eat and drink. For really it is about time we both indulged in what are vulgarly called 'light refreshments.' We have been surprisingly clever, you and I, and have rubbed our wits together to the emission of many sparks! I am not a bit above restoring wasted tissue in this practical manner—nor, I trust, are you. Moreover, our lengthy discourse notwithstanding, I have still five words to say to you. For, see, very soon Madame St. Leger's period of mourning will be over. She will begin to go into society again."

"Alas! yes." Adrian sighed.

"You don't like it? Probably not. You would prefer keeping her, like blessed St. Barbara, shut up on the top of her tower, I dare say. But doesn't it occur to you that there are as insidious dangers on the tower top as in the world below—visits from the little horror, M. RenÉ Dax, for example? Anyhow, she will shortly very certainly descend from the tower. For we are neither of us, I suppose, under the delusion she has buried all her joy of living in poor Horace St. Leger's grave."

"I have no violent objection to her not having done so," Adrian said, with becoming gravity.

"That first descent after her long seclusion will be critical. She will need protection and advice."

"Her mother, Madame Vernois, is at hand," Adrian remarked, perhaps rather tentatively.

"Yes, a sweet person and a devoted mother; but a little conspicuously with the outlook and moral standards of a past generation. She is at once too charitable and too humble-minded to be a judge of character—one born to follow rather than to lead—and, though a woman of breeding and position, always a provincial. She followed Professor Vernois as long as he was here to follow. Then she followed her noble and needy relations away in ChambÉry. Now she follows her beautiful daughter. And the daughter, in the near future, is going to be a mark for the archers—male and female. Already I have reason to believe that archery practice has begun. The sweet, timid mother, though perplexed and anxious, hasn't a notion how to turn those arrows aside."

Miss Beauchamp gazed into the shallow depths of her wine-glass.

"It's an unsavory subject," she continued, "and, I agree with you, Feminism has next to no legitimate excuse for existence here. That is just why, I imagine, it has allied itself with ideas and practices not precisely legitimate. It makes its appeal to by no means the most exalted elements of our very mixed human nature."

"Ah! but," Adrian broke out in a white heat of anger, "it is not possible! Such persons would never presume—"

"They have already presumed. ZÉlie de Gand, helped by I don't quite know who, though I have my suspicions, has approached Madame St. Leger. She is crazy to recover lost ground, to get herself and her clique reinstated. Madame St. Leger's beauty, brains, and her reputation—so absolutely unsullied and above suspicion—represent an immense asset to any cause she may embrace."

"But need she embrace any cause?"

"My dear young man," Miss Beauchamp returned, smiling rather broadly, "you had better take it for said, once and for all, that a beautiful young woman of seven and twenty, who is beginning the world afresh after being relieved of a not entirely satisfactory marriage, is perfectly certain to embrace—well—well—Something, if she doesn't embrace Somebody."

Presently, after a silence, Anastasia spoke again, gently and seriously.

"I am altogether on your side," she said. "But I cannot pretend it is plain sailing for you. There is a reserve of enthusiasm in her nature, an heroic strain pushing her toward great enterprises. It may be she will suffer before she arrives, will be led astray, will follow delusions. Her mind is critical rather than creative. She is disposed to distrust her instincts and to reason where she had ten thousand times better only feel. And, as I tell you, she looks toward the future; the restless wind of it is upon her face, alluring, exciting her. No—no—it is not plain sailing for you, my dear young man. But, for Heaven's sake, don't let true love be your undoing, seducing you from work, from personal achievement in your own admirable world of letters. For remember, the greater your own success the more you have to offer. And the modern woman asks that. She requires not merely Somebody to whom to give herself, but Something which shall so satisfy her brain and her ambitions as to make that supreme act of giving worth while."

Anastasia smiled wistfully, sadly.

"Yes, indeed, times have changed and the fashion of them! Man's supremacy is very quaintly threatened. For the first time in the history of the human race he finds sex at a discount.—But now good-night, my dear Savage. Whenever you think I can help you, come. You will always be welcome. And—this last word at parting—do your possible to keep that little horror away from her. In him Modernity finds a most malign embodiment. Farewell."

CHAPTER VI
RECORDING THE VIGIL OF A SCARLET HOMUNCULUS AND
ARISTIDES THE JUST

The gray lemur sat before the fire in a baby's scarlet-painted cane chair. He kept his knees well apart, so that the comfortable warmth, given off by the burning logs and bed of glowing ashes, might reach his furry concave stomach and the inside of his furry thighs. His long, ringed tail, slipped neatly under the arm of the little scarlet chair, lay, like a thick gray note of interrogation, upon the surface of the black Aubusson carpet. Now and again he leaned his slender, small-waisted body forward, grasping the chair-arms with his two hands—which resembled a baby's leather gloves with fur backs to them—and advanced a sensitive, inquisitive, pointed muzzle toward the blaze, his nose being cold. His movements were attractive in their composure and restraint. For this quadrumanous exile from sub-tropic Madagascan forests was a dignified little personage, not in the least addicted, as the vulgar phrase has it, to giving himself away.

At first sight the lemur, sitting thus before the fire, appeared to be the sole inhabitant of the bare white-walled studio. Then, as the eye became accustomed to the dusky light, shed by hanging electric lamps with dark smoked-glass shades to them, other queer living creatures disclosed their presence.

At the end of the great room farthest from the door, where it narrowed in two oblique angles under high, shelving skylights, in a glass tank—some five feet by three and about two feet deep—set on a square of mosaic pavement, goldfish swam lazily to and fro. In the center of the tank, about the rockwork built up around the jet of a little tinkling fountain, small, dull-hued tortoises with skinny necks and slimy carapaces and black-blotched, orange-bellied, crested tritons crawled. While all round the room, forming a sort of dado to the height of above five feet, ran an arabesque of scenes and figures, some life-size, some even colossal, some minute and exquisitely finished, some blurred and half obliterated, in places superimposed, sketched one over the other to the production of madly nightmarish effects of heads, limbs, trunks, and features attached, divided, flung broadcast, heaped together in horrible promiscuosity. All were drawn boldly, showing an astonishing vivacity of line and mastery of attitude and expression, in charcoal or red and black chalk, or were washed in with the brush in Indian ink and light red. In the dusky lamplight and scintillating firelight this amazing decoration seemed endowed with life and movement, so that shamelessly, in unholy mirth, hideousness, and depravity it stalked and pranced, beckoned, squirmed, and flaunted upon those austerely snow-white walls.

For the rest, chairs, tables, easels, even the model's movable platform, were, like the carpet, dead black. Two low, wide divans upholstered in black brocade stood on either side of the deep outstanding chimney-breast; and upon the farther one, masked by a red-lacquer folding screen, amid a huddle of soft, black pillows, flat on its back, a human form reposed—but whether of living man or of cleverly disposed lay figure remained debatable, since it was shrouded from head to heel in a black silk resai, even the face being covered, and its immobility complete.

On taking leave of Anastasia Beauchamp, Adrian Savage had found himself in no humor either for work or for sleep. His search for the further reason had led him a longer journey than he anticipated. And in some of its stages that journey offered disquieting episodes. He admitted he was still puzzled, still anxious; more than ever determined as to the final result, yet hardly more clear as to how the result in question might be obtained. There were points which needed thinking out, but to think them out profitably he must regain his normal attitude of mind and self-possession. So, reckoning it useless to go home to his well-found bachelor apartments in the rue de l'UniversitÉ, he decided to walk till such time as physical exercise had regulated both his bodily and mental circulation.

It happened to be the moment of the turn-out of theaters and other places of entertainment, and, as the young man made his way down toward the Place de l'OpÉra, the aspect of the town struck him as conspicuously animated and brilliant. His eyes, still focused to the quiet English atmosphere and landscape, were quick to note the contrast to these presented by his existing surroundings. He invited impressions, looking at the scene sympathetically, yet idly, as at the pages of a picture-book. Strong effects of light and color held the ground plan, above which the tall, many-windowed houses rose as some pale striated cliff-face toward the strip of infinitely remote, star-pierced sky. It was sharply cold, and through the exciting tumult of the streets he could detect a shrill singing of wind in telegraph and telephone wires and amid the branches of the leafless trees. In like manner, passing from the material to the moral plane, through the accentuated vivacity of the amusement-seeking crowd, he seemed to detect, as so often in Paris—is not that, indeed, half the secret of her magic and her charm?—a certain instability and menace, a shrill singing of possible social upheaval, of Revolution always there close at hand awaiting her surely recurrent hour of opportunity.

To Adrian, after precedent-ridden, firmly planted, middle-class England and the English, that effect of instability, that shrill singing of social upheaval, proved stimulating. He breathed it in with conscious enjoyment while negotiating thickly peopled pavements or madly tram- and- motor-rushed crossings. For these dear Parisians, as he told himself, alike in mind and in appearance, are both individual and individualists with a positive vengeance, possessing not only the courage of their physical types—and making, for beauty or the reverse, the very most of them—and the courage of their convictions; but the courage of their emotions likewise. And how refreshingly many are those emotions, how variegated, how incalculable, how explosive! How articulate, too, ready at a moment's notice to justify their existence by the discharge of salvos of impassioned rhetoric! If the English might fairly be called a nation of pedants, these might, with at least equal fairness, be called a nation of comedians; not in the sense of pretending, of intentionally playing a part—to that affectation the English were far more addicted—but in the sense of regarding themselves and life from a permanently dramatic standpoint. Wasn't it worth while to have been away for a time, since absence had so heightened his appreciation of racial contrasts and power of recognizing them?

And there he paused in his pÆan. For on second thoughts, were these psychologic determinations so well worth the practical cost of them? Is gain of the abstract ever worth loss in the concrete? His thought turned with impatience to Stourmouth, to the Tower House and its inhabitants, and to the loss of precious time which devotion to their affairs had, in point of fact, caused him. Resultant appreciation of psychologic phenomena seemed but a meager recompense for such expenditure. For this absence had made him lose ground in relation to Madame St. Leger. Miss Beauchamp intimated as much; intimated, too, that while he lost ground others had gained it, had done their best to jump his claim, so to speak, and had, in a measure at least, succeeded—take Mademoiselle ZÉlie de Gand, for example.

Whereupon Adrian ceased to take any interest, philosophic or otherwise, in the wonderful midnight streets and midnight people; becoming himself actively, even aggressively, individualist, as he brushed his way through the throng, his expression the reverse of urbane and his pace almost headlong.

For who, in the devil's name, had dared give that much-discussed, plausible, very astute and clever, also very much discredited arrivist and novelist—ZÉlie de Gand—an introduction to Madame St. Leger? Miss Beauchamp owned to a suspicion. And then, yes, of course he remembered last year meeting the great ZÉlie at RenÉ Dax's studio! Remembered, too, how RenÉ had pressed a short story of hers upon him for publication in the Review; and had sulked for a week afterward when—not without laughter—he had pronounced the said story quite clearly unprintable. Did RenÉ, after all, represent the further reason, not as aspirant to la belle Gabrielle's thrice-sacred hand indeed; but as her mental director, inciting her to throw in her lot with agitators and extremists, Feminists, Futurists, and such-like pestilent persons—enemies of marriage and of the family, of moral and spiritual authority, of all sane canons of art, music and literature, reckless anarchists in thought and purpose if not, through defective courage, in actual deed? Was this what Anastasia Beauchamp hinted at? Was it against risk of such abominable stabling of swine in his own particular Holy of Holies—for the young man's anger and alarm, now thoroughly aroused, tended to express themselves in no measured language—she did her best to warn him?

Again, as earlier that day, a necessity for immediate and practical action laid hold on him. Delay became not only intolerable, but unpardonable. He must know, and he must also prevent this campaign of defilement and outrage going further. Wherefore he bolted into the first empty cab, had himself whirled to the Boulevard du Montparnasse, and projected himself, bomb-like, bursting with protest and indignation, into RenÉ Dax's great, dusky, white-walled studio; to find, in the stillness, nothing more pertinent to the matter in hand than the gentle, gray lemur sitting in its scarlet-painted baby's chair before the fire, the orange-and-black blotched newts and small ancient tortoises crawling upon the rock-work of the little fountain, while in the glass tank the gleaming fishes swam lazily to and fro. Of the owner of this quaint menagerie no signs were visible.

But neither RenÉ's absence nor the presence of his queer associates held Adrian's attention more than a few seconds; for, upon an easel facing him as he entered, placed where the light of the hanging lamps fell strongest, was a drawing in red chalk, which at once fed his anger by its subject and commanded his unqualified admiration by its consummate beauty and art.

Nearly half life-size, the figure poised, the head slightly inclined, proudly yet lovingly, toward the delicious child she carried on her arm, Gabrielle St. Leger stepped toward him, as on air, from off the tall panel of ivory-tinted cartridge paper. The attitude was precisely that in which he had seen her this afternoon, when she told RenÉ Dax the "door should remain open since little Bette wished it." The two figures were rendered with a suavity, yet precision, of treatment, a noble assurance of line and faithfulness of detail, little short of miraculous considering the time in which the drawing must have been executed.—Yes, it was la belle Gabrielle to the life; and alive—how wonderfully alive! The tears came into the young man's eyes, so deeply did this counterfeit presentment of her move him, and so very deeply did he love her. He noted, in growing amazement, little details, even little blemishes, dear to his heart as a lover, since these differentiated her beauty from that of other beautiful women, giving the original, the intimate and finely personal note.

And then anger shook him more sharply than ever, for how dare any man, save himself, note these infinitely precious, because exclusively personal, touches? How dare RenÉ observe, still more how dare he record them? His offense was rank; since to do so constituted an unpardonable liberty, a gross intrusion upon her individuality. RenÉ knew too much, quite too much, and, for the moment, Adrian was assailed by a very simple and comprehensive desire to kill him.

But now a wave of humiliation, salt and bitter, submerged this unhappy lover. For not only was that little devil of a Tadpole's drawing a masterpiece in its realization of the outward aspect of Gabrielle St. Leger, but of insight into the present workings of her mind and heart. Had not he apprehended and set forth here, with the clarity and force of undeniable genius, just all that which Anastasia Beauchamp had tried to tell him—Adrian Savage—about her? What he, Adrian, notwithstanding the greatness of his devotion, fumbled over and misinterpreted, RenÉ grasped unaided, and thus superbly chronicled! For, here indeed, to quote Anastasia, Gabrielle's eyes were turned toward the future and the strange unrestful wind—the wind of Modernity—which blows from out the future, was upon her face; with the result that her expression and bearing were exalted, a noble going forth to meet fate in them, she herself as one consecrated, at once the embodiment and exponent of some compelling idea, the leader of some momentous movement, the elect spokeswoman of a new and tremendous age.

Beholding all which, poor Adrian's spirits descended with most disintegrating velocity into his boots, and miserably camped at that abject level. For though he might declare, and very honestly believe, the idea in question, the movement in question, to be so much moonshine, and the Spirit of the Age a rank impostor, how did he propose to convince Madame St. Leger of that? The inquiry brought him up as against a brick wall. Yes, Miss Beauchamp had been rather cruelly right when she told him his work was cut out for him and would prove a mighty tough job. For what, calmly considered, had he, after all, to offer as against those alluring and immense perspectives?—Really, when he came to ask himself, it made him blush.—Only an agreeable, fairly talented and well-conditioned young man—that was all; and marriage—marriage, an old story to Gabrielle, a commonplace affair about which she already knew everything that there is to know. Of course she didn't know everything about it, he went on, plucking up a little spirit again. Hers had been a marriage of convenience; a marriage of reason. Poor Horace was by a whole generation her senior. Whereas, in the present case, it all would be so different—a great and exclusive passion, et cetera, et cetera. He would have liked to wax eloquent, descanting upon that difference and its resultant illuminating values. But his eloquence stuck in his throat somehow. Himself as a husband—humor compelled him to own, with a pretty sharp stab of mortification, this a rather stale and meager programme as alternative to cloudy splendors of self-consecration to the mighty purposes of Modernity and the Spirit of the Age.

"She is very beautiful, is she not, my Madonna of the Future?"

RenÉ Dax asked the question in soft, confidential accents. He stood at Adrian's elbow, clothed in a scarlet Japanese silk smoking-suit. Upon his neat bare feet he wore a pair of black Afghan sandals. Uttering little loving, crooning cries, the gray lemur balanced itself upon his shoulders, clasping his great domed head with thin furry arms and furry-backed, black-palmed hands, the finger-tips of which just met upon the center of his forehead.

"I have been watching, from behind the screen, the effect she produced on you. I have given up going to bed, you see. I wrap myself in blankets and quilts and sleep here—when I do sleep—upon one of the divans. It is more artistic. It is simpler. The bed, when you come to consider it, is, like the umbrella, the mark of the bourgeois, of the bourgeoise and of all their infected progeny. It represents, as you may say, the battle-cry of middle-class civilization. The domestic hearth? No, no. The domestic bed. How far more scientific and philosophic a definition! Therefore I abjure it.—So I was lying there on the divan in meditation. I am preparing illustrations for an Édition de luxe of Les Contes Drolatiques. It is not designed for family reading. It will probably be printed in Belgium and sold at Port Said. I lie on my back. I cover my face, thus isolating myself from contemplation of surrounding objects, so that my imagination may play freely around those agreeable tales. In the midst of my meditation I heard you burst in. At first I felt annoyed. Then I arose silently and watched the effect this portrait produced on you. I was rewarded; for it knocked the bluster pretty effectually out of you, eh, mon vieux? I saw you droop, grow dejected, pull your beard, wipe your eyes, eh? And you deserved all that, for your manner was offensive this afternoon. You treated me disrespectfully. Have you now come to apologize? It would be only decent you should do so. But I do not press the point. I can afford to be magnanimous, since, in any case, I am even with you. My Madonna is my revenge."

"I did not come to apologize, but to demand explanation," Adrian began, hotly. Then his tone changed. Truly he was very unhappy, very heavy of heart. "You are right," he added. "This drawing is your revenge."

"You do not like my drawing."

"On the contrary, I find it glorious, wonderful."

"And it hurts you?"

"Yes, it hurts me," he answered hoarsely, backing away. "I hate it."

"I am so glad," RenÉ said, sweetly. He put his hand behind his scarlet back, and tweaked the tip of the lemur's long furry tail affectionately.

"You hear, you rejoice with me, oh, venerable Aristides!" he murmured.

To which the little creature replied by clasping his head more tightly and making strange, coaxing noises.

"But there,—for the moment my Madonna has done precisely what I asked of her, so now let us talk about something else, mon vieux, something less controversial. Why not? For here, after all, she is fixed, my Madonna. She can't run away, happily. We can always return and, though she is mine, I will permit you to take another look at her. So—well—do you remark how I have changed my decorative scheme since you last visited me? Is it original, startling, eh? That is what I intended. Again I felt the need to simplify. I called for plasterers, painters, upholsterers. When they will be paid I haven't a conception; but that is a contemptible detail. I rushed them. I harried them. I drove them before me like a flock of geese, a troop of asses. 'Work,' I screamed, 'work. Delay is suffocation to my imagination. This transformation must be effected instantly.' For suddenly color sickened me. I comprehended what a fraud, what a subterfuge and inanity it is. Form alone matters, alone is permanent and essential. Color bears to form the same relation which emotion bears to reason, which sensation bears to intellect. It represents an attitude rather than an entity. I recognized it as adventitious, accidental, unscientific, hysterical. So I had them all washed out, ripped off, obliterated, my tender, tearful blues and greens, my caressing pinks, my luscious mauves and purples, my rapturously bilious, sugar-sweet yellows, all my adorably morbid florescence of putrifaction in neutral-tinted semi-tones, and limited my scheme to this harshly symbolic triad. See everywhere, everywhere, black, white, red—these three always and only—beating upon my brain, feeding my eyes with thoughts of darkness, night, death, the bottomless pit, despair, iniquity; of light, day, snow, the colorless ether, virtue, the child's blank soul, immaculate sterility. And then red—red, the horrid whipper-in and huntsman of us all, meaning life, fire, lust, pain, carnage, sex, revolution and war, scarlet-lipped scorn and mockery—the raw, gaping, ever-bleeding, ever-breeding wound, in short, upon the body of the Cosmos which we call Humanity."

The young man's affectation of imperturbability for once deserted him. He was shaken by the force of his own speech. His voice rose, vibrating with passion, taking on, indeed, an almost maniacal quality, highly distressing to Adrian and altogether terrifying to the lemur, which moaned audibly and shivered as it clutched at his forehead.

"Get down, Aristides," he cried with sudden childish petulance. "Unclasp your hands. You scratch. You hurt me. Go back to your little chair. I am tired. I have worked too hard. The back of my head stabs with pain. I suffer, I suffer so badly."

He came close to Adrian, who, his nerves too very much on edge, still stood before the noble drawing of Gabrielle St. Leger.

"I am not well," he said, plaintively. "Certainly I have overworked, and it is all your fault. Yet listen, mon vieux. Your affection is necessary to me. Therefore do not let us quarrel. I own you enraged me this afternoon. I did not want you just then."

"Nor I you," Adrian returned, with some asperity.

"And your manner was at once insufferably brusque and insufferably possessive. I could not let it pass. I felt it incumbent upon me to administer correction. But I would not descend to anything commonplace in the way of chastisement. I would lay an ingenious trap for you. I came straight home. I seated myself here. I set up this panel, and I drew, and drew, and drew, without pause, without food, in a tense frenzy of concentration, of recollection, till I had completed this portrait. I was possessed, inspired. Never have I worked with such fury, such torment and ecstasy. For I had, at once, to assure myself of your sentiments toward the subject of that picture, and to read you a lesson. I had to prove to you that I, too, amount to something which has to be reckoned with; that I, too, have power."

"You have commanding power," Adrian answered, bitterly. "The power of genius."

"Then, then," RenÉ Dax cried, "since you acknowledge my power, will you consent to leave my Madonna alone? Will you consent not to make any further attempt to interfere between her and me, to pay court to and marry her?"

The attack in its directness proved, for the moment, staggering. Adrian stood, his eyes staring, his mouth half open, actually recovering his breath, which seemed fairly knocked out of him by the amazing impudence of this proposition. Yet wasn't it perfectly in the part? Wasn't it just exactly the egregious Tadpole all over? His mind swung back instinctively to scenes of years ago in play-ground, class-room, dormitory, when—while though himself exasperated—he had intervened to protect RenÉ, a boy brilliant as he was infuriating, from the consequences of some colossal impertinence in word or deed. And that swing back to recollection of their school-days produced in Adrian a salutary lessening of nervous excitement, restoring his self-confidence, focusing his outlook, both on events and persons to a normal perspective.

"So that I may leave the stage conveniently clear for you, mon petit?" he inquired, quite good-temperedly. "No, I am sorry, but I'm afraid I cannot consent to do anything of the kind."

And then he moved away across the studio, leaving the egregious Tadpole to digest his refusal. For he did not want to quarrel, either. Far from it. That instinctive throw-back into their school-boy friendship brought home to him how very much attached to this wayward being he actually was. So that, of all things, he wanted to avoid a quarrel, if such avoidance were consonant with restraint of RenÉ's influence in a certain dear direction and development of his own.

"Nothing will turn me from my purpose, mon petit," he said, gently, even gaily, over his shoulder. "Nothing—make sure of that—nothing, nobody, past, present, or to come."

He proceeded, with slightly ostentatious composure, to study the dado of pictured figures rioting along the surface of the white distempered walls. He had delivered his ultimatum. Very soon he meant to depart, for it was no use attempting to hold further intercourse with RenÉ to-night. Once you brought him up short, like this, for a greater or lesser period he was certain to sulk. It was wisest to let him have his sulk out. And—his eyes growing accustomed to the dusky light—good heavens, how superbly clever, how grossly humorous those pictured figures were! Was there any draftsman living who could compare with RenÉ Dax? No, decidedly he didn't want to quarrel with the creature. He only wanted to prevent his confusing certain issues and doing harm. Yet, as he passed from group to group, from one outrageous witticism to another, the difficulty of maintaining an equable attitude increased upon him. For it was hateful to remember that the same hand and brain which had projected that heroic portrait of Madame St. Leger was responsible for these indecencies as well. Looking at some of these, thinking of that, he could have found it in his heart, he feared, to take Master RenÉ by the throat and put an end to his drawing for ever, so atrocious a profanity did such coexistence, such, in a sense, correlation appear.

And then, moving on again, he started and drew back in absolute consternation. For there, right in front of him, covering the wall for a space of two yards or more, he came on a series of sketches—some dashed in in charcoal, some carefully finished in red and black chalk—of Joanna Smyrthwaite.—Joanna, arrayed in man's clothing, a slovenly, ragged jacket suit, sagging from her thin limbs and angular shoulders; she bareheaded, moreover, her hair cropped, her face telling of drink and dissipation, loose-lipped, repulsive to the point of disgust in its weakness and profligate misery, her attitudes degraded, almost bestial as she cringed on all fours or lay heaped together like so much shot rubbish.

Adrian put his hands over his eyes. Looked again. Turned indignantly to demand an answer to this hideous riddle. But his host had disappeared. Only the gray lemur sat in its scarlet-painted baby's chair before the fire; and from off the tall white panel Gabrielle St. Leger, carrying her child on her arm, stepped forth to meet the Future, while the unrestful wind which blows from out the Future—the fateful wind of Modernity—played upon her beloved face.