CHAPTER I
SOME PASSAGES FROM JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE's
LOCKED BOOK

The drought was slow in breaking. Day after day ragged-headed thunder pillars boiled up along the southeastern horizon; and, drifting northward, inland, in portentous procession as the afternoon advanced, massed themselves as a mighty mountain range against the sulky blue of the upper sky. About their flanks, later, sheet lightning streaked and quivered, making the hot night unrestful, as with the winking of malevolent and monstrous eyes.

Owing to the lie of the land and the encircling trees, this aerial drama was not visible from the Tower House. But the atmospheric pressure, and nervous tension produced by it, very sensibly invaded the great woodland. The French window of Joanna Smyrthwaite's bedroom stood wide open on to the balcony. She had drawn an easy-chair close up to it, and, dressed in her white woolen nÉgligÉ, sat there in the half-dark. She left the nÉgligÉ unfastened at the neck, it being an unsuitably warm garment to wear on so hot a night. She was aware it caused her discomfort; despite which she wore it. The pristine freshness of it was passed. It was slightly soiled, and the knife-pleatings, losing their sharpness of edge, sagged irregularly in places, like the bellows of an old concertina. More than once Mrs. Isherwood had declared, "Miss Joanna ought to buy herself a new wrapper, or at any rate let this poor old object go to the cleaners'." But Joanna refused, almost angrily, to part with it even for a week. She gave no reason for her refusal, but locked the insulted garment away in a drawer of her wardrobe, whence she extracted it with jealous tenderness after Isherwood had left her at night. Then she wore it, if but for half an hour; and, wearing it, she brooded, fondling her right hand, which, upon two occasions, Adrian Savage had kissed.

At the opposite end of the lawn, in front of the tennis pavilion, figures sauntered to and fro and voices were raised in desultory talk. Amy Woodford giggled. The elder Busbridge boy whistled "Yip-i-addy," and, losing his breath, coughed. The odor of cigarettes mingled with that of the trumpet-honeysuckle and jasmine encircling the pillars of the veranda below the window. Joanna neither looked at nor listened to the others. Her eyes were fixed upon the circle of fir-trees, where the dense plumed darkness of their topmost branches met the only less dense darkness of the sky. And she brooded. Once she kissed the hand which Adrian Savage had kissed.

But the figures and voices came nearer. Amy Woodford, her Oxford undergraduate brother, and the two Busbridge boys were saying good-night. Their feet tapped and scraped on the quarries of the veranda. Somebody ran into a chair, toppled it over, gave a yelp, and the whole company laughed. These playful goings-on came between Joanna and her brooding. She rose impatiently, crossed the room to her bureau, lighted the candles, and sat down to write.

"August 21, 190-

"We are never alone. I try not to be irritable, but this constant entertaining wears me out. It is contrary to all the traditions of our home life. I cannot help thinking how strongly papa would have condemned it. Even mamma would have disapproved. I fear I am wanting in moral courage and firmness in not expressing disapproval more often myself; but Margaret always imputes wrong motives to me and inverts the meaning of that which I say. She cannot be brought to see that I object on principle, and accuses me of a selfish attempt to shirk exertion. She says I am inhospitable and elusive. She even accuses me of being niggardly and grudging my share in the increased household expenditure. This is unjust, and I cannot help resenting it. Yesterday I remonstrated with her, and our discussion degenerated to a wrangle, which was painful and unbecoming. To-day she has avoided speaking to me unless positively obliged to do so. I feel I have failed in regard to Margaret, and that I ought to have kept up a higher standard since papa died and I became, virtually, the head of the house. Margaret is entirely occupied with amusement and with dress. This must be, in part, my fault, though dear mamma always feared frivolous inclinations in Margaret. It is all very trying. I doubt whether Marion Chase's influence is good for her. I am sure Mr. Challoner's is not. Marion is fairly well educated, but is without cultivated tastes. Mr. Challoner is not even well educated. They both flatter her and defer to her wishes far too much. Other people flatter her too, even serious persons, such as the Norbitons and Mrs. Paull. I do not think I am jealous of Margaret, but I will scrutinize my own feelings more closely upon this point.

"I am afraid the servants observe that she and I are not on happy terms. This worries me. I dread the household taking sides. Isherwood and Johnson, and, I believe, Smallbridge are quite faithful to me. So is Rossiter, though I cannot help attributing that mainly to her dislike of the increased work in the kitchen. But Margaret's new maid and her chauffeur—whose manner I consider much too familiar—create a fresh element in our establishment. They both are showy, and I mistrust the effect of their companionship upon the younger servants. I no longer really feel mistress in my own house. My position is rendered undignified. Sometimes I regret the old days at Highdene, or here, before papa's death. But that is weak of me, even hypocritical, since it is dread of responsibility rather than affection for the past which dictates the wish. I must school myself to indifference, and try more earnestly to rise superior to these worries. I must look forward rather than look back."

Joanna laid down her pen, held up her right hand, kissed the back of it just above the ridge of the knuckles, thrust it within the open neck of her nÉgligÉ and, placing her left hand over it, pressed it against her meager bosom.

"I must look forward," she said half aloud. "'Nothing is changed between us.' He told me so himself the night before he left. I must rest in that."

She got up and paced the length of the room for a while, repeating—"I must rest in that, must rest in that."

A sound of voices still rose from the garden, now a man's and a woman's in low and evidently intimate talk. Joanna stood still. The note of intimacy excited subconscious, unacknowledged envy within her. She did not distinguish, nor did she attempt to distinguish, the words said. The tones were enough. It got upon her nerves to hear a man and woman speak thus. A little longer and she felt she should be unable to bear it—she must command them to stop.

She went back to her bureau again. Here, at a distance from the window, the voices were less audible. She sat down and forced herself to write.

"This is the second dinner-party we have given, or, rather, which Margaret has given, within a week. I absented myself, pleading neuralgia, and remained up-stairs in the blue sitting-room. With the exception of Marion and Mr. Challoner, it was a boy-and-girl party. I do not feel at my ease in such company. I fail to see the point of their slang expressions and their jokes, and I do not understand the technical terms regarding games which they so constantly employ. No doubt my dining up-stairs will be a cause of offense, but I cannot help it. If Margaret invites her own friends here so often she must at least contrive sometimes to entertain them without my assistance. I will try to dismiss this subject from my mind. To dwell upon it only irritates me.

"I really needed to be alone to-night. I live stupidly, from day to day. I feel that I ought to have a more definite routine of reading and of self-culture. I ought to spend the present interval in educating myself more thoroughly for my future occupations and duties. I will draw up some general scheme of study. And I will keep my diary more regularly. I so seldom write now, yet I know it is good for me. Writing obliges me to be clear in my intentions and in my thought. I am self-indulgent and allow myself to be too indefinite and vague, to let my mind drift. Papa always warned me against that. He used to say no woman was ever a sufficiently close thinker. The inherent inferiority of the feminine intelligence was, he held, proved by this cardinal defect. I know my inclination has always been toward too great introspection, and I regret now that I have not striven more consistently after mental directness and grasp. I have been reading the RÉvue de Deux Mondes lately, feeling it a duty to acquaint myself with modern French literature. The luminous objectivity of the French mind impresses me very strongly—an objectivity which is neither superficial nor unduly materialistic. When listening to Adrian I was often struck by this quality—"

Joanna laid down her pen once more. She sat still, her hands resting upon the flat space of the desk on either side the blotting-pad, her head thrown back and her eyes closed. The voices in the garden had ceased, and the silence, save for the shutting of a door in a distant part of the house and the faint grinding of wheels and bell of a tram-car on the Barryport Road, was complete. For some minutes she remained in the same position, her body inert, her inward activity intense. At last she raised her hands as though in protest, and, bending down, fell to work upon her diary again with a smothered violence.

"I have resisted the temptation to write about it till now. I have been afraid of myself, afraid for myself. But to-night I feel differently. I feel a necessity to refer to it—to set it down in words, and to relieve myself of the burden of the 'thing unspoken.' On former occasions when I have been greatly harassed and troubled I have found alleviation in so doing.

"I want to make it quite clear to myself that I have never doubted consideration for me, a desire to spare me distress and agitation, dictated Adrian's silence regarding his sudden and unexpected departure. He knew how painful it would be to me to part with him, particularly after our conversation regarding Bibby. Seeing how overwrought I had been by that conversation, he wished to put no further strain upon me. I want to make it quite clear to myself that the letter he left for us with Smallbridge was all that good taste and courtesy demanded. Yet it hurt me. It hurts me still. He took pains to thank us for our hospitality and to express his pleasure in having helped us through all the business connected with our succession to papa's property. He said a number of kind and friendly things. Few persons could have written a more graceful or cousinly letter. I know all this. I entertain no doubt of his sincerity. Still the letter did hurt me. Margaret appropriated it. It was addressed to her as well as to me, so, I suppose, she believed herself to have a right to take possession of it. And I am not sure I wished to keep it. I could not have put it with his other letters, since it only belonged to me in part. Yet I often wonder what Margaret has done with it—thrown it into the waste-paper basket most likely! And it is very dreadful to think any letter of his has been thrown away or burned. Just because it was only half mine I feel so bitterly about it. I am afraid I have allowed this bitterness to affect my attitude toward Margaret; but it is very painful that she should share, in any degree, the correspondence which is of such infinite value to me. I do accept the fact that he acted in good faith, without an idea how deeply so apparently simple a thing would wound me. I excuse him of the most remote wish to wound me. But I was, and am, wounded; and his letters since then—there are five of them—have failed to heal the wound.

"It is dreadful to write all this down; but it is far more dreadful to let it remain on my mind, corroding all my thought of him. Not that it really does so. In my agitation I overstate. 'Nothing is changed between us.' No, nothing, Adrian—believe me, nothing. Yet in those last five letters I do detect a change. They have not the playful frankness of the earlier ones. I detect effort in them. They are very interesting and very kind, I know; still there is something lacking which I can only describe as the personal note. They are written as a duty, they lack spontaneity. He tells me he has been detained in Paris, all the summer, by the illness—nervous breakdown—of a former schoolfellow. He tells me of his continued efforts to trace Bibby. But these are outside things, of which he might write to any acquaintance. I read and re-read these letters in the hope of discovering some word, some message, actual or implied, addressed to me as me, the woman he has so wonderfully chosen. But I do not find it, so the wound remains unhealed.

"Yet how ungrateful I am to complain! To do so shows me my own nature in a dreadful light—grasping, impatient, suspicious. Innumerable duties and occupations may so readily interfere to prevent his writing more frequently or more fully! Why cannot I trust him more? Is it not the very height of ingratitude thus to cavil and to doubt?"

Overcome by emotion, Joanna left the bureau and paced the room once more, her arms hanging straight at her sides, her hands plucking at the pleatings of her nÉgligÉ. The heat seemed to her to have increased to an almost unbearable extent, notwithstanding which she clung to her woolen garment. Crossing to the washing-stand, she dipped a handkerchief in the water and, folding it into a bandage, held it across her forehead. She blew out the candles and, returning to the open window, sank into the easy-chair. The sky remained unclouded, but in the last hour had so thickened with thunder haze that it was difficult to distinguish the tree-tops from it. Joanna gazed fixedly at this hardly determinable line of junction. Presently she began to talk to herself in short, hurried sentences.

"I know I told him I would wait. I believed I had strength sufficient for entire submission. But I am weaker than I supposed. I despise myself for that weakness. But I cannot wait. He is my life. Without him I have no life—none that is coherent and progressive. My loneliness and emptiness, apart from my relation to him, are dreadful. And lately jealousy has grown shockingly upon me. I think of nothing else. I am jealous of every person whom he sees, of every object which he touches, of his literary work because it interests him—jealous of the old schoolfellow whom he is nursing; jealous of Bibby, for whom he searches; jealous of the very air he breathes and ground on which he treads. All these come between him and me, stealing from me that which should be mine, since they are close to him and engage his attention and thought."

Joanna stopped, breathless, and, closing her eyes, lay back in the chair, while drops oozing from the wet bandage trickled downward and dripped upon her thin neck and breast.

"Now at last I am honest with myself," she whispered. "I have spoken the truth—the hateful truth, since it lays bare to me the inner meanness of my own nature. I no longer palliate my own repulsive qualities or attempt to excuse myself to myself. I admit my many faults. I call them by their real names. Now, possibly, I shall become calmer and more resigned. The completeness of my faith in him will come back. And then, some day in the future, when I tell him how I repent of my suspicions and rebellious doubts, he will forgive me and help me to eradicate my faults and make me more worthy of the wonderful gift of his love."

Then she lay still, exhausted by her paroxysm of self-accusation.

"Here you are at last! You do take an unconscionably long time saying good-night! I nearly gave up and went indoors to bed."

This chaffingly, from the terrace outside the veranda, in Marion Chase's hearty barytone.

"I imagine people in our situation usually have a good deal to say to each other."

Rustlings of silk and creakings followed, occasioned by the descent of a well-cushioned feminine body into a wicker chair.

"And pray, how far did you go with him?" still chaffingly.

"Only to the end of the carriage-drive, and then into the road for a minute to see the lightning. Really, it's too odd—quite creepy. Looking toward the County Gates, the sky seems to open and shut like the lid of a box."

"I shouldn't mind its opening wider and giving us some rain. It's too stuffy for words to-night. And then he proceeded to walk back with you, I suppose?"

"No, he didn't, because I dismissed him. I can be firm when I choose, you know; and I am sure it is wisest to begin as I mean to go on. I intend to be my own mistress—"

"And his master?"

"Doesn't that follow as a matter of course—a 'necessary corollary,' as Joanna would say? Too, I didn't want to run the risk of meeting any of the servants coming in. He is liable to be a little demonstrative when we are alone, don't you know."

"Margaret!"

"Well, why not? I take demonstrations quite calmly so long as they are made in private. It would be silly to do otherwise. They're just, of course, part of the—"

"Whole show?"

"Yes, if you like to be vulgar, Marion, and quote the Busbridge boys—I limit my quotations to Joanna—of the whole show."

After a short pause.

"Maggie, did you settle any dates to-night? I thought he seemed preoccupied, as if he meant business of some sort. You don't mind my asking?"

"Not in the least. He says he is bothered because his position is an equivocal one."

"So it is." This very sensibly from Marion Chase. "People begin to think you are simply mean to keep him dangling."

"Do they? How amusing!"

"Not for him, poor beast." And both young women laughed.

"He is wild to have the announcement made at once."

"In the papers, do you mean?"

"Yes, The Times and Morning Post, of course, and two local ones. He suggests the Stourmouth and Marychurch Chronicle and the Barryport Gazette. I should have thought the Courier ranked higher, but he says it's not nearly so widely read as the Chronicle. Then we ought to put it in a Yorkshire paper as well, I think."

"How awfully thrilling!"

At first to Joanna, at the open window above, still laboring with the aftermath of her gloomy outbreaks of passion, this conversation had been but as a chirping of birds or squeaking of bats. Such slipshod telegraphic chatterings between the two young ladies, obnoxious alike to her taste and scholarship, were her daily portion. Joanna had scornfully trained herself to ignore them. She could not prevent their assailing her ears; but she could, and as a rule did, successfully prevent their reaching her understanding.

To-night, however, strained and on edge as she was, her will proved incapable of prolonged effort, and indifference was unsustainable. Gradually the manner of the speakers and significance of that which they said mastered her unwilling attention. Surprise followed on surprise. She knew how the two friends talked in her presence. Was this how they talked in her absence, disclosing—especially in the case of her sister—an attitude of mind, let alone definite purposes and actions, of which she had been in total ignorance? And—to carry the question a step farther—did this connote corresponding ignorance on her part in other directions? Was she, Joanna, living in worlds very much unrealized, where all manner of things of primary importance remained unknown to or misinterpreted by her?

The thought opened up vistas packed with agitation and alarm. Self-defense admits few scruples; and it appeared to poor Joanna just then that every man's hand was against her. Living in the midst of deceptions, what weapon except deceit—and in this case deceit was tacit only—remained to her? Her sense of honor, and along with it the self-respect in which the roots of honor are set, went overboard. Instead of leaving the window and refusing to hear more, Joanna stayed. A morbid desire to know, to learn all that which was being kept from her, to get at the truth of these lives lived so close to her own, to get at the truth of their opinion of her, seized upon her.

She took the moist handkerchief off her forehead, and, slipping noiselessly out of her chair, knelt upon the rug laid along the inner side of the window-sill, craning her neck forward so that no word of the conversation might escape her.

"Personally, as I told him, I was in no particular hurry."

"Pleasant news for him!" Marion Chase returned.

"But I'm not. There are several good reasons for waiting—our mourning for one thing. And then the question of a house. Heatherleigh's not large enough, or smart enough—all very well for a bachelor establishment, I dare say. What I should like is this house; but I doubt whether Joanna would give it up, though it really is altogether too extensive a place for her alone. I don't mean that she could not afford to keep it up. She could afford to; but it would be ostentatious, ridiculously out of proportion for an unmarried woman."

Joanna's indignation nearly flamed into speech. She moved impatiently, causing the chair behind her to scrape on its casters.

"What was that?" from Marion Chase.

"A fir-cone falling probably. It's hotter than ever.—No, I haven't the smallest intention of not going through with this business; but I'm in no hurry. Things are quite amusing as they are."

"I believe you enjoy taking people in, you wicked old thing."

"If keeping quiet about my own affairs is taking people in, I suppose I do enjoy it. And then, of course, you see I am bound to tell Joanna first. There's no help for that—"

"Magsie, you know her windows are open? You don't think we can be overheard?"

"No; it's all right. I looked when I came back. There's no light. Either she's still in the blue sitting-room or she's gone to bed. Too, I must do her the justice to say Joanna is not the sort of person who listens. She would consider it wrong."

Joanna drew back and was on the point of rising. Again the chair scraped.

"And then she would never condescend to listen to anything I might happen to be saying. There is a compensating freedom in being beneath notice!"

Joanna remained on her knees at the open window.

"I own I most cordially dislike the idea of telling her," Margaret continued. "I know she will be unreasonable and say things which will lead to all sorts of disputes and disagreeables between us."

"Oh! but she must know perfectly well already, only she means to make you speak first," the other returned. "It's too absurd to suppose she hasn't spotted what's been going on. Why, his state of mind has been patent for ages. She can't be off seeing."

"I don't believe for a single moment she does see. She's so frightfully self-absorbed and self-occupied. You know yourself, Marion, how extraordinarily obtuse she can be. She lives in the most hopeless state of dream—"

Joanna swayed a little as she knelt and laid hold of the folds of the striped tabaret window-curtain for support.

"I know she always has been inclined to dream; but recently it has grown upon her. For me to say anything to her about it is worse than useless. She only sits upon me, and then we 'have words,' as Isherwood says. At bottom Joanna is awfully obstinate. In many ways she reminds me very much of papa; only, being a woman, unfortunately one can't get round her as one could round him. People are beginning to notice what an odd, moody state she is in. Mrs. Norbiton said something about it when they dined here on Monday. She said Joanna seemed so absent-minded, and asked whether I thought she wasn't well. And Colonel Haig mentioned it to me the afternoon we had tea with him at the golf club. That really led to his telling me what he had heard in Paris."

"Telling you—oh, I remember! What he had heard about Mr. Savage?" Marion Chase remarked.

Joanna got on to her feet, went out on to the balcony, and hung over the red balustrade into the hot, thick darkness.

"Margaret!" she called. "Margaret, I must speak to you. Please come to my room. It is something urgent. Come at once."

CHAPTER II
RECORDING A SISTERLY EFFORT TO LET IN LIGHT

When Margaret Smyrthwaite entered her sister's bedchamber she brought the atmosphere of a perfumer's shop along with her. Under the elder and sterner reign scent-sprays and scent-caskets were unknown at the Tower House, Montagu Smyrthwaite holding such adjuncts to the feminine toilet in hardly less abhorrence than powder or paint itself. A modest whiff of aromatic vinegar or of eau-de-Cologne touched the high-water mark of permitted indulgence. But in the use of perfumes, as in other matters, Margaret—so Mrs. Isherwood put it—"had broke out sadly since the poor old gentleman went." The intellectual streak common to the Smyrthwaite family had from the first been absent in the young lady's composition; while the morbid streak, also common in the family, was now cauterized, if not actually eliminated, by the sunshine of her seven thousand a year. A North-country grit, a rather foxy astuteness and a toughness of fiber—also inherited—remained, however, very much to the fore in her, with the result that she would travel—was, indeed, already traveling—the grand trunk road of modern life without hesitation, or apology, or any of those anxious questionings of why, wherefrom, and whither which beset persons of nobler spiritual caliber.

In the past few months she had shed the last uncertainties of girlhood. She had filled out and was in act of blossoming into that which gentlemen of the Challoner order, in moments of expansion, not without a cocking of the eye and moistening of the lip, are tempted to describe as a "d—d fine woman." Now the light of the candle she carried showed the rounded smoothness of her handsome neck and arms, through the transparent yoke and sleeves of her black evening blouse, touched the folds and curls of bright auburn hair upon her forehead, and brought the hard bright blue of her eyes into conspicuous evidence. A deficiency of eyelash and eyebrow caused her permanent vexation. This defect she intended to remedy—some day. Not just at present, however, as both Joanna and Isherwood were too loyally wedded to the aromatic vinegar and eau-de-Cologne rÉgime for such facial reconstructions to pass without prejudiced and aggravating comment.

Advancing up the room, all of a piece and somewhat solid in tread, she offered a notable contrast to Joanna, who awaited her palpitating and angular, ravaged by agonies and aspirations, indignantly trembling within the sagged knife-pleatings of her soiled white nÉgligÉ. The rough copy and Édition de luxe, as Adrian had dubbed them, just then very forcibly presented their likeness and unlikeness; yet, possibly, to a discerning eye, the rough copy, though superficially so conspicuously lacking in charm, might commend itself as the essentially nobler of these two human documents.

"What is the matter, Joanna?" the Édition de luxe inquired. "Why couldn't you send Isherwood to say you wanted to speak to me? It's fortunate Marion's and my nerves are steady, for your calling out gave us both an awful start."

"I did listen," the other returned, in a breathlessness of strong emotion. "I was sitting at the window in the dark when you began talking. At first I paid no heed; but, as your conversation went on, I found it bore reference to matters which you are keeping from me and with which I ought to be acquainted. I found it concerned me—myself. I offer no apology. I acted in self-protection. I listened deliberately."

Margaret laid the magazines and illustrated fashion papers, she carried under her arm, upon the slab of the open bureau. She set down her flat candlestick beside them, thus creating a triad of lighted candles—unlucky omen!

"Then, Nannie," she said, coolly, "you did something which was not at all nice."

The word stung Joanna by its grotesque inadequacy either to the depth of her sufferings or of her transgression against the laws of honor. To range at the tragic level, in relation to both, would have afforded her consolation and support. Margaret denied such consolation by taking her own stand squarely upon the conventional and commonplace. Joanna's transgression began to show merely vulgar. This compelled her to descend from tragic heights.

"Am I to understand that you really are engaged to Mr. Challoner?" she therefore asked, without further preamble.

"If you listened you must have gathered as much, I imagine," Margaret said.

"I did—I did, but I refused to believe it. I thought I must be mistaken. I was unprepared for such news. It came to me as such a shock, such a distressing surprise."

"Really, it's quite your own fault, Joanna," Margaret returned. "What did you suppose he'd been coming here for constantly?"

"Not for that—"

"Thank you!" Margaret said.

"You know I have always objected to his being here so much. I tried to prevent it. I feared it might lead to gossip. I felt you did not consider that seriously enough. It is so dreadful that what we do or say should be commented upon. Until the business connected with the property was settled I recognized a necessity for Mr. Challoner's frequent visits, but not since then, not for the last three months. I am quite willing to admit his good points. I quite believe he has served us faithfully in business.—Pray do not suppose I underrate his services in that respect. But I never supposed he could presume to propose to you, Margaret."

"I don't see anything presumptuous in his proposing. He admires me very much. Is it such an unheard-of thing that he should wish me to marry him?"

"No—no—but that you should give him encouragement.—For you must have encouraged him—"

"And"—with disconcerting composure from the Édition de luxe—"why not?"

Joanna began to pace the room restlessly in her trailing draperies.

"Because—because"—she said—"your own instinct must tell you what an unsuitable marriage this would be for you—for our parents' daughter, for my sister. I don't want to be selfish, Margaret, but I have a right to consider my own future to some extent; and Mr. Challoner—I dislike to seem to deprecate him—it is invidious to do so—indeed, it is intensely distasteful to me to point out his peculiarities—but when I think of him as a brother-in-law—his antecedents, his standard of manners and conversation strike me as so different to those to which we have always been accustomed. I cannot avoid seeing this. It is so very palpable. Others must see it too—members of our family, I mean, with whom we are, or may in the future be, intimately associated."

In her excitement clearness of statement failed somewhat. Margaret stood listening, calmly obstinate, her head a little bent, while she straightened the magazines and picture papers lying on the slab of the bureau with her finger-tips.

"I didn't for one moment imagine you would be pleased at my engagement—that's why I have not told you sooner. I was sure you'd be disagreeable about it. And you are disagreeable, Joanna, very disagreeable indeed. Like most people who plume themselves on being very high-minded, you end by being very vulgar-minded and worldly. I quite expected this tone from you; and so I put off telling you as long as possible. Even now, you must remember, you have surprised my confidence. I have not given it voluntarily. Useless discussions, such as this, bore me."

"Useless?" Joanna interrupted.

"Quite useless, unless I happen to change my mind, which I shall not do. I have considered things all round. I have talked everything over with Marion. You must make what you like of it, Joanna; but I am going to marry Challoner."

The scriptural Christian name annoyed her as suggesting possibilities of humorous retrospect. The "mister" under existing romantic circumstances savored of underbred, middle-class ceremony. So she struck for the surname, pure and simple, thereby conferring, in some sort, the noble conciseness of a title upon her admirer.

"I don't share your very exalted opinions of our position and importance," she continued. "Papa was a successful Yorkshire mill owner. Challoner is the head of a firm of successful South-country solicitors. You talk of his antecedents. His father was a very enterprising man, who built up the business here which he has carried on and developed. Everybody in this part of England knows who Challoner, Greatrex & Pewsey are. The firm's reputation is above suspicion. They opened a branch office four years ago at Southampton, and one last year at Weymouth. Really, I can't see what you have to object to on the score of position, Joanna? Andrew Merriman's grandfather was only a mill-hand."

"You need not have alluded to that," the other cried, sharply. Then, fighting for self-control, she added, "You know quite well it is a marriage you would never have thought of making while papa was living."

"And you know equally well, Nannie, it was utterly hopeless to think of any marriage whatever when papa was alive. We hardly ever saw a man. Papa snubbed every one who came near us. No one dared propose, even if they wished to do so. Remember all the Andrew Merriman business?"

"Pray don't refer to that again," Joanna said.

"I only wanted to give you an instance—Nannie, would you mind sitting down? It makes me so dreadfully hot to watch you roaming about in that way. We could talk ever so much better if you would only keep still.—And there is a great deal which has to be talked over some time. As we have begun to-night, we may as well go on and get through with it. The heat makes me fidgety. I'm not inclined to go to bed."

Thus admonished, Joanna sank into the easy-chair once more. She doubled herself together, working her hands nervously, ball-and-socket fashion, in her lap. The perception that this was a new Margaret, a Margaret wholly unreckoned with, grew upon her. And along with that perception an apprehension of fronting things unknown yet of vital significance, things which, when known, must inevitably color all her future outlook, grew upon her likewise. As yet the screen of ignorance, dense though impalpable as the dense thunder-thickened sky there outside, interposed between her and those fateful things veiling them. But Margaret, the new, composed, practical, highly perfumed Margaret, was in act of drawing that screen aside. Then what would she, Joanna, see? What concourse of cruel verities lurked behind, waiting to jump on her?—Asking herself this, she shivered, notwithstanding the heat of the atmosphere and of her woolen gown, with premonition of coming chill—chill of loneliness, chill of disaster, of which such loneliness was at once the bitter flower and the root.

Her sister had followed her to the window, and stood just within it, nonchalant and comely, fanning herself with a little fan hanging by a ribbon from her waistband. The silver spangles upon the black gauze sparkled sharply in the candle-light, and the ebony sticks ticked as she waved it to and fro.

"I do so wish you wouldn't make a tragedy of all this, Nannie," she said. "But of course I knew you would, because you always think it your duty to get into a wild state of mind over everything I say or do. It would be so much more comfortable for both of us if you could get it into your head once and for all that you're not responsible for me in any way. We are equals. We're the same age—you always seem to forget that—and I'm quite as competent to manage my affairs as you are to manage yours. You have no authority over me of any description, legal or moral, none whatsoever, you know."

"I am only too well aware that I have failed to influence you, Margaret," Joanna returned, while waves of scented air, set in motion by the black and silver fan, played upon her face. "I had been thinking of that to-night, before I overheard your and Marion's conversation. I had been reproaching myself. I know we are the same age; but our dispositions are different, and I have always occupied an elder sister's position toward you. It is very distressing to me to realize how entirely I have failed to influence you. This contemplated marriage of yours gives the measure of my non-success."

"Oh! dear me! Influence—failure—really, you know, Nannie, you are most awfully provoking!" the other exclaimed. "I don't want to lose my temper and be cross, but I am so frightfully sick of this whole responsibility mania. It's been the bugbear of our lives ever since we were children. Papa and mamma sacrificed themselves and sacrificed us to it, with the result that we've always been in an unnatural attitude, like dogs trying to walk on their hind legs."

"Margaret, Margaret!" Joanna protested, scandalized by the filial profanity of the suggested picture.

"So we have, Nannie. And in what has this everlasting preaching of responsibility ended? Why, simply in making papa believe he was doing right by being rude and arrogant and dreadfully disagreeable over trifles. In making mamma a hopeless invalid. In ruining Bibby, body and soul, making him untruthful and dishonest, and inclined to do all sorts of horrid, ungentlemanly things. Hush? No, I am not going to hush, Joanna. You asked me to come here, and you asked me a question. Now you really must listen till I have said all I have to say in answer. I want to get it over. It's far too unpleasant to go through twice. And this mania about responsibility has been disastrous for you too—you know that perfectly well. It has spoiled your life by keeping you in a perpetual state of fuss and worry, and of dissatisfaction with your own conduct and everybody else's. As for me, it made me hysterical and fretful, and deceitful too. How could one help being deceitful when one was always dodging some silly trumped-up fault-finding or bother? I believe it would have broken up my nerves altogether if it had gone on much longer. And what on earth does it all mean? What were we responsible for? Who were we responsible to?" she went on contemptuously. "I don't know. And I don't believe you know either, Joanna, if you would only use your common-sense and give up worshiping words and phrases. The whole thing is nonsense, and rather lying nonsense—just a pretending to oneself that one is better and cleverer than other people. When you come to think of it, this craze for superiority is so frightfully conceited! For who cares, or ever has cared, whether we Smyrthwaites were intellectual, and high-minded, and cultured, and well-read, and all the rest of it, or not? In my opinion the system on which our parents brought us up, and on which their parents brought them up, is nothing but an excuse for self-adulation and pharisaism. I am sick to death of the whole thing, and I mean to break away from it. And the simplest way to do so is to marry Challoner. He's about as far away from it all as anybody well can be—just a modern, practical man, who cares for real things, not for advanced thought, and reform, and political economy, and questions of morals, and so on. He isn't a bit intellectual. He only reads the newspapers, or an occasional novel in the train when he's traveling, I am thankful to say. And, I am awfully glad he belongs to the Church of England, for I mean to break with the Unitarian Connection, Joanna. I don't care about doctrine one way or another; but I can see how narrow-minded and exclusive it makes people when they belong to a small sect. Unitarians are always so frightfully pleased with themselves because they believe less than other people. They're always living up to their own cleverness in not believing; and it does make them awfully hind-leggy and boring.—And then, of course, being a Nonconformist cuts one out of a lot. Socially it is no end of a disadvantage to one. It didn't signify so much in the North, but here it has stood horridly in our way. Lots of nice people would have called on us when we first came if we hadn't been dissenters. And, please understand, I mean to know everybody now and be popular. I should enjoy giving away prizes and opening bazaars, and entertaining on a big scale, and taking part in all that goes on here. It would amuse me. I can give large subscriptions, and I mean to give them. As I say, I intend to be popular and to be talked about. I intend to make myself a power in the place. And then, Joanna, there's something more—I dare say you'll think it necessary to be scandalized—but there's this—"

She stopped fanning herself, and looked out into the hot darkness, smiling, a certain luster upon her smooth skin and a fullness about her bosom and her lips. Her voice took on richer tones when she spoke.

"I want to marry, and I mean to marry. I am nine and twenty, and I'm tired of not knowing exactly what marriage is. So I'm not going to wait, and hawk myself and my fortune about on the chance of a smarter match. I have decided to be sensible and make the best of what I have—namely, Challoner. I don't pretend he is perfect. I take him as he stands. After all, he is only just forty and he is in excellent health. I care about that, for I dislike sickly people, especially men. They're always horridly selfish and fanciful. Either they oughtn't to marry at all or ought to marry hospital nurses.—Then Challoner is making a good income. We've talked quite frankly over the money question. And then—then—"

For the first time she showed signs of slight embarrassment, laughing a little, pursing up her lips and fanning herself again lightly.

"Then," she repeated, "he is desperately in love with me, and I enjoy that. I want more of it. It interests and amuses me. It is exciting to find one can twist a great, hard-headed fellow like Challoner round one's little finger; make him go hot and cold, grow nervous and all of a tremor just by a word or a look. He is like so much dough in my hands. I can shape him as I like. There's nothing he wouldn't do to please me. Oh! yes, he is desperately in love with me!"

This drawing back of the interposing screen and exhibition of the Smyrthwaite tradition and system, stripped to the skin, stripped, indeed, to an almost primordial nothingness, had been richly distressing to poor Joanna. For was not she intrinsically the product and exponent of the said tradition and system? Did it not stand for the loom upon which the whole pattern of her character and conduct was woven? In thus stripping the system, she was painfully conscious that Margaret stripped her also to a like miserable nakedness and nothingness. For, admitting the laws which she had been brought up to reverence, and to obey which she had trained herself with such unsparing diligence, were nugatory, what remained to her for guidance or inspiration? Admitting her strenuously acquired mental attitude and habit to be but senseless posturing, as of dancing dogs, how deplorably she had wasted herself upon that which profiteth not! If the formative processes of her education and culture represented nothing better than laborious subscription to exploded fallacy, must she not make a return, with all possible speed, upon whatever remnant of unalloyed instinct and spontaneous purpose might still be left in her? But how to make such a return? How to reform, to recreate, her attitude and outlook?

These questions assailed Joanna, bewildering alike in their multiplicity and intricacy. The wheels of her over-taxed brain whizzed and whirred. For the curse of the system-ridden, of the pedant, of the doctrinaire, is loss of clear-seeing simplicity, of initiative, of that power of direct and unaided action which is the reward of simplicity. Stripped of encompassing precept and precedent, deprived of sustaining prejudice, Joanna found herself naked and helpless indeed. She ran wildly in search of fresh precept and precedent in which to clothe herself. And found them, after a fashion normal and natural enough had they happened to be grounded in fact instead of in most pitiful illusion.

For as, distressedly watching her sister's rather cynical exposure of the family tradition, she asked herself—in face of the said exposure—what to her, personally, remained, she answered that Adrian Savage remained. And thereupon proceeded with all the intensity and pent-up passion of her morbidly introspective nature to fling herself upon the thought of that delightful young man and his matrimonial intentions. Hounding out doubts, furiously repressing misgivings, she grappled herself to belief in Adrian with hooks of iron, chained herself to it with links of steel, drank from the well of splendid promise which it offered to the verge of inebriety. In him she hailed her savior. Adrian would make good the wasted years. Adrian would teach her where she had been mistaken, and where her intelligence had gone astray. Adrian would instruct and counsel her, would supply her with a rule of living at once just and distinguished. Adrian would be gentle to her errors—had he not shown himself so already on more than one occasion?—would be sympathetic, playful and charming even in merited rebuke. She heard his voice once again. Saw him, in his habit as he lived, gallant, courteous, eager yet debonair; and seeing, her poor heart spilled itself upon the ground like water at his conquering feet.

Joanna could sit still no longer. Her agitation was too vital, too overmastering. She left the chair by the window and began to roam to and fro, her hands plucking at the pleatings of her dress, her pale, prominent eyes staring fixedly, her lips parted, her expression rapt.

"'Because thou art more noble and like a king,'" she quoted, silently, turning to the sonnets from the Portuguese for adequate expression of her emotion. "'Thou canst prevail against my fears and fling thy purple round me.'"

The consequence of all of which was that she paid scant attention to the concluding portion of her sister's comprehensive argument in favor of her projected espousal of Joseph Challoner, and only awoke from the state of trance induced by her access of Adrian-worship when the repetition of Margaret's assertion of the violent character of Challoner's affection and the slightly ambiguous laugh following that assertion struck her ear. Then she turned upon the speaker with the righteous wrath of one who hears sacred words put to unworthy uses.

"Desperately in love?" she said harshly. "And do you intend me to understand, Margaret, that you are desperately in love with Mr. Challoner in return?"

"Oh dear, no!" the lady addressed replied calmly enough. "Though if I were, I see no occasion for your scolding me about it, Nannie.—What does make you so restless and cross to-night? However, if you're determined to be uncomfortable, I'm not—so I shall sit down here in your chair. Did you see the lightning then? No, I'm not the least silly about Challoner; but then I should be very sorry to be silly about any man. I don't think it dignified for a woman to be in a wild state of mind about her fiancÉ. It's not nice. I like Challoner well enough to marry him, and well enough not to mind his making love to me. That's quite sufficient, I think."

Jealous curiosity pricked Joanna. She stopped in her agitated walk and stood stretching out her right hand and gazing abstractedly at it.

"What—what precisely do you mean when you speak of his making love to you, Margaret?" she said, in a thin, urgent whisper.

"Really, for a person who plumes herself upon being particularly refined you do say the most singular things, Joanna!" the other exclaimed, laughing. "You can hardly expect me to go into details. Making love is making love."

"Kissing your hand—do you mean?" Joanna gasped, in awestruck accents, a dry sob rising in her throat.

"One's hand? Why, anybody might kiss one's hand. Challoner's proceedings, I'm afraid, are considerably more unrestrained than that. But I positively can't go into details. How extraordinary you are, Nannie! Doesn't it occur to you there are questions which one doesn't ask?"

Streaks of pain shot across the back of Joanna's right hand, as though it were struck again and again with a rod. Moaning, just audibly, she thrust it within the open bosom of her white nÉgligÉ, and laid her left hand upon it, fondling it as one striving to soothe some sorely wounded creature.

Margaret leaned back in the easy-chair, fingering her little fan, a sleekness, a suggestion of almost animal content in her expression and attitude.

"No, really I can't explain any further," she said, laughing a little. "I'm quite hot enough as it is, and refuse to make myself any hotter. You must wait till somebody makes love to you, I'm afraid, Nannie, if you want to know exactly what the process consists in. An object-lesson would be necessary, and I am hardly equal to supplying that."

Joanna's roamings had taken her as far as the door leading on to the gallery. She waited, leaning against it. The back of Margaret's chair was toward her, so that she was safe from observation. For this she was not sorry, as the pain in her hand was acute, particularly upon the spot where Adrian's lips had once touched it. There it throbbed and smarted, as though a live coal were pressing into the flesh. Her face was drawn with suffering. She dreaded to have her sister ask what ailed her. But that young lady's thoughts were quite otherwise engaged. She spoke presently, over her shoulder. Her voice sounded curiously cozy.

"This evening, when he said good-by to me, Challoner lifted me right off my feet when he was kissing me. He had never done so before. I liked it. It showed how strong he is. I felt a wee bit nervous, but I enjoyed it too. I revel in his strength. My ribs ache still.—There, Nannie, is that little sample of love-making illuminating enough?"

And, leaning against the polished surface of the door, Joanna shivered, nursing and fondling her burning hand.

CHAPTER III
IN WHICH JOANNA EMBRACES A PHANTOM BLISS

The obscure psychological relation existing between twins necessarily produces either peculiar sympathy or peculiar opposition of tastes and sentiment. The record of these twin sisters was of the discordant sort. Unspoken rivalry and jealousy had divided them. Unconsciously, yet unremittingly, they had struggled for pre-eminence. At the present moment, in Joanna's case these feelings combined to produce a sensation approaching active hatred. As she leaned shivering against her bedroom door, in the oppressive warmth of the summer night, all her petty griefs and grudges against her more attractive and popular sister complained in chorus. As a child Margaret had been pretty and taking. At school, though lazy and by no means clever, she had been petted and admired. Such affection as Montagu Smyrthwaite was capable of displaying he had displayed toward her. "Margaret was sensitive, Margaret was delicate"—which meant that Margaret knew just when to cry loud enough to excite pity; just when to announce tiredness or a headache, so as to escape unwelcome exertion. She had, in short, reduced the practice of selfishness—so Joanna thought—to a fine art.

And now, finally, to-night, not timidly with disarming apology, but with flaunting assurance, Margaret dared to infringe her—Joanna's—copyright in the wonder-story of a man's love, thereby capping the climax of offense. Her transcript of the said story might be of the grosser sort; yet on that very account it showed the more convincing. No misgivings, no agonized suspense, no tremulously anxious reading between the lines, were demanded. It was printed in large type, and in language coarsely vigorous as Joseph Challoner himself! Morally it repelled Joanna, although inflaming her imagination with vague drivings of desire. Her whole poor being, indeed, was swept by conflicting and but half-comprehended passions, from amid the tempest of which this one thing declared itself in a rising scale of furious insistence—namely, that Margaret should not once again best her; that no marriage Margaret might elect to make should endanger her own marriage with Adrian Savage; that by some means, any means fair or foul, Margaret must be prevented tasting the fullness of man's love—never mind how poor an edition of love this might be, how unpoetic, bow vulgar—as long as she, Joanna, was denied love's fullness. Yet so deeply were tradition and system ingrained in her that, even at this pass, she paid homage to their ruling, since instead of making a direct attack, and owning anger as the cause of it, she tricked herself with a fiction of moral obligation.

"Margaret," she began presently from her station at the door, speaking with such self-command as she could muster, "I dislike alluding to the subject very much. No doubt you will be annoyed and will accuse me of interference; still there is something I feel I ought to say to you. If I do not say it now, there may not be a suitable opportunity later."

"Then pray say it now. As I have told you, I want to get the whole thing thoroughly thrashed out to-night, so that we may avoid odious discussions in the future. What is it, Joanna?"

"I can't help observing that it is only since papa's death Mr. Challoner has paid you so much attention. Before then—"

Margaret rose and faced round upon the speaker. Her manner remained composed, but her blue eyes held the light of battle.

"You mean it is not me, but my fortune, Challoner is in love with? I quite expected you would tell me that, Joanna, sooner or later; but I am bound to say it is not a very elegant compliment either to him or to me."

"I did not intend to bring such an accusation against him," Joanna protested. "It would be very dreadful to suppose any one's affection, any one's choice, could be seriously influenced by the fact we have money."

"I'm afraid my views are less romantic than yours. It seems to me quite natural money should prove an attraction—particularly in cases where other attractions are rather wanting."

For some reason Joanna felt the stroke of a rod across her hand again. The pain excited her. She came forward a step or two.

"You do not give me time to explain myself, Margaret. Before papa's death Mr. Challoner's name was very freely associated with that of Mrs. Spencer. Both you and Marion Chase spoke of an engagement between them as certain. Others spoke of it also. The probability of a marriage was accepted. I cannot forget this."

Margaret laughed.

"Really, it's too funny that you of all people should champion wretched little Mrs. Spencer! Why, Joanna, you invariably intimated she was quite beneath your notice, and have lost no opportunity of snubbing her. I've had to be nice, more than once, simply because I felt so awfully ashamed of your rudeness to her."

"I do not like her. She is unladylike. Still I think Mr. Challoner's change of attitude requires explanation."

"Do you?" Margaret retorted. "Here is the explanation then. Simply that Challoner is too kind-hearted to save himself at the expense of a woman, even when she has treated him badly. He told me all about her months ago. He felt I had better hear it from him, but he did his best to excuse her. He showed wonderfully nice feeling about it all. I was not prepared for his being so scrupulous, and it made me admire him. For she is the sort of person who spends her time in extracting money and presents from every man she can get hold of. Challoner admits he was taken in by her at first, and was foolishly weak with her. She pretended to be almost penniless, and worked upon his feelings so much that he let her live in that house of his in Silver Chine Road, rent free, for nearly two years. And when her demands became too extortionate, and she persecuted him so disgracefully that he was compelled in self-defense to get rid of her, he found her another house at Marychurch, and, I believe, pays half the rent of it for her still. I know he gave her sister, Beattie Stacey—who is engaged to an officer on one of the Cape liners—a beautifully fitted traveling-bag as a wedding present. Marion saw it only last week.—Those are the facts, Joanna. I hope now your conscience is easy."

She stood looking down, pressing back an upturned corner of the rug, upon which Joanna had knelt earlier in the evening, with the pointed toe of her beaded slipper.

"Of course I sha'n't receive her," she said. "I told Challoner my magnanimity wouldn't carry me as far as that after the abominable way in which she's exploited him. All the same, I'm rather grateful to the wretched little woman. But for her I mightn't have known how generous Challoner could be. I really believe the satisfaction of rescuing him from her clutches is among my chief reasons for accepting him—that, and then, of course, Cousin Adrian Savage."

With a sort of rush Joanna came close—the violence of some half-starved creature in her pale eyes, her drawn face and her parted lips.

"Adrian?" she cried. "Adrian? What possible connection can there be between Cousin Adrian and your engagement to Mr. Challoner?"

For some seconds Margaret Smyrthwaite looked hard and thoughtfully at her sister. Then, holding the skirt of her dress aside, she pressed the upturned corner of the rug into place again with the pointed toe of her slipper.

"I shall be so thankful," she said, "when you give up wearing that frightful old dressing-gown, Nannie. Decidedly, it is not as clean as it might be, and it looks so horridly stuffy. I never have understood your craze for hoarding—"

"But—but—Adrian?" Joanna insisted.

"Adrian? Surely you must have seen, Nannie? It's just one of those things which aren't easy to put into words, but which I should have thought even you must have grasped, though you are so different to most people. I sometimes have wondered lately, though, whether you really are so different to other people, or whether you're only extraordinarily secretive.—But, naturally having a young man like Cousin Adrian staying so long in the house this winter, put ideas into one's head and made one think a good deal about marriage, and so on. I took for granted papa had some notion of that kind when he appointed Adrian his executor. He had a great opinion of him, and would have liked him as a son-in-law—or fancied he would. Of course he wanted to bring us together—that was the object of the appointment."

"You think so?" Joanna questioned. Joy, anxious but great, arose in her.

"I haven't a doubt about it. All the same I couldn't, out of respect for papa's wishes, make advances to a young man who showed quite clearly he didn't care a row of pins about me."

"He was always kind and civil to you, Margaret," Joanna interrupted restrainingly. Jealousy folded its beating wings, betaking itself to most unaccustomed repose.

"Civil and kind, I dare say. But—well, of course there are signs one can't mistake, unless one blinds oneself wilfully to their meaning."

She tossed her head, her eyes hard and bright. Joanna's expression meanwhile became increasingly ecstatic.

"Yes, there are signs one cannot mistake—signs which it would be weak and faithless to mistake," she whispered.

"I don't deny I felt rather enraged," Margaret continued, too busy with her own vexation to remark the other's singular aspect. "I could have been very much upset about it all if I had let myself go."

"I am sorry," Joanna murmured, touched by unexpected pity. "Indeed, Margaret, I am sorry."

"Oh, you weren't to blame in any way, Nannie. And, you see, I didn't let myself go. I just turned my attention to Challoner. There is nothing ambiguous about his admiration. And now"—she glanced curiously at her sister—"now," she continued, "as things have turned out, I'm most uncommonly glad I didn't allow myself to get into a state of mind about Adrian."

"As things have turned out?—I understand. I am pleased you do not blame me, Margaret. Yes, as things have turned out!" Joanna repeated excitedly.

For here, as she saw it, was the hour of her triumph, of assured and splendid victory. The room seemed too small to hold her rapture. Hardly aware of that which she did, she brushed past her sister—still standing, fan in hand, beside the chair at the window—and went out on to the balcony.

She required to be alone, so as to savor to the full the heady sweetness of her own emotion. She wanted to forget every one, everything, save that only. She wanted to abandon herself without reserve to the thought of Adrian Savage; to gloat over every incident of her intercourse with him, and project her imagination onward to the closer, the continuous and exclusive intercourse of the future. For had not Margaret's confession—the more persuasive because reluctantly made—amounted to an admission that Adrian's affection belonged to her, and to her only? Did it not supply reasonable confirmation of her sorely tried faith in him, and ratify all her hopes by setting the seal of witness upon the fact of his love for her?

Such was the meaning she read into the recent conversation, piecing evidence together into a coherent whole. Never before had she been absolutely certain. Now, as she told herself, she was certain—could safely be so, in that Margaret had admitted the fact, if not in so many words, yet implicitly. Her father's wish and purpose had been that the young man should marry one of his two daughters—Margaret had perceived this. And she, Joanna, was the one he had chosen, thereby justifying all her past efforts and labors, and rehabilitating the poor, cynically denuded family system into the bargain. Was not the whole habit and conduct of her life vindicated, inasmuch as it led to this superb result? The years had not been wasted, but were, on the contrary, the patient seed-time of this welcome harvest. She had been right from the first, right in every particular, so that not upon her or her methods, but upon those who differed from, undervalued, or slighted her rested the onus of proof. And here the intellectual and moral arrogance latent in Joanna Smyrthwaite's nature upheaved itself mightily and stood aggressively erect. Overweening self-esteem, as on giant wings, sustained her. For to such disastrous inflations of pride are introspective persons liable when they fail—as they do so frequently fail—to discriminate between deeds and emotions, between the barren power to feel and the fertile, the life-giving power to act! Of all traps set by Satan for the catching of souls, the trap of "feelings" is perhaps the wiliest and the worst. And into this trap poor Joanna walked, head in air, careless of consequence. She felt deified, lifted above the crawling, common ways of common men, defiant of all opposition, all criticism; since, being the chosen and desired of him whom she so dotingly worshiped, she became an object worthy of worship in and to herself.

And the night—playing into the devil's hands somewhat, as at times the aspects of Nature will—in its windless silence and opaque, hot darkness, appeared queerly reflective of and sympathetic to Joanna's mood of portentous self-exaltation. The planes rather than the forms of all which composed the scene were perceptible. Joanna's eyes detected the slope of the veranda roof immediately beneath the balcony, the flat outspread of the gardens and lawns, and the vertical palisade of lofty trees encircling them; but no single object detached itself—all were fused by and soaked in that thick broth of thunder-smoke. And this heated obscurity she welcomed, because it ministered to the sense of solitude and of aloofness which she craved. Nothing visible interfered to distract her attention from herself and the thought of her high destiny. Only once or twice the sky opened, for the distant storm had moved westward, striking the black canopies of the firs, their stems and many branches, into vivid and instantaneous relief, while behind and above them, midway to the zenith, lightning licked and flickered like some miracle of soundless, sardonic laughter playing over the livid features of a corpse nine days dead.

It was in the moment of one such disquieting celestial display that Margaret Smyrthwaite, stifling an audible yawn, strolled on to the balcony. She had gathered up her magazines and papers again, and tucked them under her arm.

"If you don't intend to come in and talk any more, Nannie," she said, rather irritably, "I may as well go. I'm getting frightfully sleepy, and I've promised Challoner to motor him over to Weymouth to-morrow. We make an early start. Too, Marion's sure to be waiting to hear how my talk with you has gone off, and I've a conscience about keeping her up any longer.—Now, you do quite understand, don't you, that I am going to marry Challoner, and that opposition is absolutely no good? It would look ever so much better, and be so very much more comfortable for every one concerned, if you could only make up your mind to be nice about it. You're always saying how you hate people talking over our affairs. Why give them occasion to talk then by being disagreeable and contrary about a thing which is really no business of yours, and which you are quite powerless to prevent?"

Contemptuously Joanna turned from contemplation of that strangely flickering sky and contemplation of her own—subjective—glory. She resented the intrusion of Margaret, with her perfumes and fashion papers, her complacent utilitarianism, her motor-car and underbred lover; but resented it half-pityingly, as the weakness of an inferior being behaving according to the manner of its kind.

"I may be powerless to prevent your marriage," she said, "still I most deeply object to it. I cannot do otherwise. I consider it unsuitable and most unfortunate. I cannot disguise from myself that it will stand between us in the future and render intercourse difficult. There can be little sympathy between two persons whose aims and interests are as far apart as yours and mine must inevitably be. I feel it my duty to mention this to you, Margaret, although I know that I have ceased to exercise any influence over you. It is all very sad. It is painful to me that you should repudiate our parents' teaching, all the more painful because I never understood as fully as I now do how noble that teaching is, and how much it has done to form my character and tastes, thus preparing me for the position and duties to which I am called."

She drew her breath sharply, raising her hands to her forehead, greatly moved by the thought of that high calling.

"This for us is the parting of the ways, Margaret," she added, a singular effect of dramatic tension in her manner, her pale ungracious face and figure against the red-brick background of the house-front, momentarily illuminated by a swift amazement of lightning rippling and shuddering behind the fir-trees in the west. "The parting of the ways," she repeated. "You go yours, I mine. I deplore your choice. Can I do otherwise, seeing how different my own prospects are? But as, after due consideration, you have made that choice, all further argument must, I fear, be wasted upon you."

"Very well, then—there's an end of the matter."

As she spoke Margaret crossed the balcony, and, leaning upon the balustrade, looked down into the gloom-shrouded garden. The candle-light streaming outward through the open window touched her shapely back and shoulders, and her bright, curled and folded, auburn hair.

"There's an end of it, then," she repeated coldly, rather bitterly. "We agree to part. You might easily have been kinder and nicer to me; but I bear you no ill-will. I suppose you can't help being disagreeable. Certainly it's nothing new.—Only, Nannie, though I don't want to upset you or make a quarrel, there is something I should like to be quite clear about, because, I own, I've been half afraid lately that you were getting yourself into a silly state over Adrian Savage."

She stood upright, looking full at Joanna.

"I know you've corresponded with him a good deal, so, of course, you may know already. Colonel Haig told me. He met her in Paris, on his way to Carlsbad, and was awfully smitten with her. Has Cousin Adrian ever spoken to you about Madame St. Leger?"

Silence followed. A distinct menace was perceptible in Joanna's tone when she at last answered.

"I have never attempted to force myself into Adrian's confidence. To do so would be the worst possible taste under existing circumstances. I should never dream of asking him questions regarding his—his former friends."

"Then you don't know about Madame St. Leger, Nannie?"

"I do not know, nor have I the least wish to hear anything respecting any acquaintance of Adrian's, except what he himself may choose to tell me."

Joanna spoke violently, her back against the wall, both in the literal and figurative sense.

"That's all very proper, but I really think you ought to hear this. In the end it may save everybody a lot of misunderstanding and worry. I'm pretty sure Colonel Haig meant me to pass the information on to you. That was why he told me."

Joanna stretched her arms out on either side, the palms of her hands toward the wall. As her fingers worked, opening and closing, her nails gritted upon the rough surface of the brick.

"I do not wish to hear anything, Margaret, not anything," she repeated vehemently.

"But evidently there's no secret about this whatever. Every one, so Haig says, knows the whole story in Paris. The affair has been going on for ever so long; only until Madame St. Leger's husband died, of course, there couldn't be any question of marriage. I don't mean to imply the smallest harm. Haig says there never has been the slightest scandal. But her husband was years and years her senior, and she is very beautiful—Haig raves about her. I have never heard him so enthusiastic over any one. And he was told Adrian has been in—"

"I refuse to hear anything more. I will not, Margaret—no—no—I will not. This is a wicked fabrication. I do not believe it. It is not true, I tell you—it is not true," Joanna panted, her finger-nails tearing at the brickwork.

"But what possible object could Haig have in repeating the story if it wasn't true? I'm awfully sorry to put you in such a fuss, Nannie, but Haig believes it implicitly himself. There isn't the least doubt of that. And when one comes to think, it does explain Adrian's behavior when he was with us. One sees, of course, how improbable it is that a young man like him should not have some attachment which—"

Joanna quitted the sheltering wall, and came toward the speaker, holding up her hands—the finger-tips frayed and reddened—with a threatening gesture.

"Go away, Margaret!" she cried passionately. "Go away! Leave me alone—you had much better. This story is false—it is false, I tell you. And I forbid you to repeat it. I will not listen. I will not have it said. Go—or I may do something dreadful to you. Go—and never speak to me again about this—never dare to do so—never—never—do you hear?"

"Really, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, Nannie," the other protested, half angry, half frightened. "I'm positively astonished at your making such an exhibition of yourself—"

But Joanna laid hold of her by the shoulders, and pushed her back forcibly through the open window, into the center of the quiet, softly lighted room.

"Take your candle and go," she said, and her face was terrible, forbidding argument or rebuke. "This is a wicked falsehood, concocted by some jealous person who is trying to alienate Adrian's affection from me. Who that person is I do not know. I had better not know. It is all very cruel, very dreadful; but I want no explanations, or questions, or advice. Above all I want no sympathy. I only want to be alone.—And I warn you, Margaret, if you ever betray what has happened here to-night I will take my own life. I shall be certain to find you out sooner or later, and I will not survive betrayal, so my death will lie at your door. Remember that, if you are tempted to gossip about me with Mr. Challoner or Marion Chase.—And now, pray, go away, and leave me to myself. That is all I ask of you. Don't call Isherwood and send her to me. I want nothing—nobody. If she came I should not let her in. Go away—here is your candle—go away and leave me alone!"

Joanna locked the door behind her sister, came back to the middle of the room and stood there motionless, her arms stiffly extended. She had no words, no thoughts, but an ache through mind and body of blank misery, at once incomprehensible and deadening from its very completeness. Presently she blew out the lights. They irritated her as showing her definite objects, her own reflection in the cheval glass beside the dressing-table, her diary and silver writing-set upon the slab of the open bureau, all the ornaments and fittings of her bedroom. She called on the darkness to cover her, and to cover these things also, blotting remembrance of them out. She needed to make her loneliness more lonely, her solitude more unmitigated and absolute.

An intolerable restlessness seized on her. She began to range blindly, aimlessly, to and fro. More than once she knocked against some angle or outstanding piece of furniture, bruising herself; but she was hardly sensible of pain. At last, treading upon the trailing fronts of her pleated nÉgligÉ, she stumbled, fell her length, face downward, and lay exhausted for a time; then slowly dragging herself into a sitting position, she remained there, massed together stupidly, upon the floor—while, through the large, well-ordered, soberly luxurious house, the clocks chimed the hours and half-hours, to be answered by the chime of the stable clock out of doors.

As the night drew toward morning the lightning became faint and infrequent behind the fir-trees in the west, for the drought still held and the refreshment of rain would not be yet. But in the gray of the dawn a cool breathing of wind came up from the sea. Then, for a minute or so, the great woodland stirred, finding its lost voice; and the tree-tops swayed, singing together to hail the sun-rising and the coming day.

The cool draught of air sweeping in at the still open window aroused Joanna somewhat from her stupor. In the broadening light she looked about her. The room was in disorder—chairs pushed aside, a table thrown down, well-bound books, fragments of a gold and glass bowl, sprigs of lemon verbena and fading roses, the wallet in which she kept Adrian Savage's letters lying open, alongside its contents, scattered broadcast upon the ground.

Joanna stared at these treasured possessions apathetically. She put up her hands to push back her hair, which hung down in heavy strands over her face and shoulders. Her fingers felt sticky. They pricked and smarted. She examined them. The nails were nicked and jagged, in places the tips were raw.

"I will wait until they have healed," she said half aloud in her thin, toneless voice, "then I will write to Adrian and ask him if it is true. But I must wait till they are healed, I think. Now I had better sleep. There is nothing else left for me to do."

She staggered to her feet, walked unsteadily across the intervening space and threw herself, unkempt and half-dressed as she was, upon the fine embroidered linen sheets and delicate lace coverlet of the satinwood bed.

CHAPTER IV
"COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS"

"A thousand times welcome, my dear Savage!" Anastasia Beauchamp cried, taking Adrian's hand in both hers and looking up at him affectionately from beneath a broad-brimmed brown hat crowned by a positive vineyard of purple and white glass grapes and autumn foliage, the whole inwrapped cloudily in a streaming blue gauze veil. "You have played the good Samaritan quite long enough in my opinion, and it's high time you bestowed some attention upon the rest of us, though we are neither insane nor conspicuously immoral. And here we all are, that's to say, all of us who matter, in this really quite tidy, comfortable hotel, plus the amiable family Bernard, my devoted, despised little Byewater and his compatriot Lenty B. Stacpole—note the inevitable transatlantic initial, I beseech you! Clever, excellent fellows both of them, though a trifle slight temperamentally. And here, to complete our circle, you arrive as the God in the Car."

Anastasia's smile bore effective testimony to her appreciation of Adrian's handsome looks and gallant bearing.

"Yes, very much the God in the Car, my dear boy," she repeated. "You are the picture of health. Playing the good Samaritan, it must be conceded, hasn't damaged you.—And I honestly believe, though I won't swear to it for fear of committing an indiscretion, that every one, every one, mind you—save possibly our excellent Americans, to whom your near neighborhood may reveal their own temperamental deficiencies—will be as genuinely happy to see you as I am myself."

"Kindest and most sympathetic of friends," Adrian returned, touched both by her words and warmth of manner, "how inexpressibly good you are to me!"

"I only pay an old debt. Your mother was good to me once—well—" She caught at an end of her streaming veil and brought it to anchor under her chin. "Well—when I stood in need of a wise and sweet counselor very badly. And I never forget. Gratitude can be—mind, I don't say it always is, but it can be—a very delightful sentiment to entertain.—But now you are expiring for a detailed account of a certain dear lady. At this moment she is down on the beach with the rest of our company. They will be back shortly for tea. So come here with me on to the piazza, while we wait for them, and I'll give you all the news I can."

Adrian, the brave song of the engines still in his ears, his eyes still dazzled by the seventy-mile rush along the white roads of the rich and pleasant Norman country, followed Miss Beauchamp and her somewhat Bacchanalian headgear from the large, light-colored hotel saloon into the arcade, found her a comfortable seat, and stationed himself beside her.

From thence he commanded a comprehensive view of the opposite side of the shallow valley, dotted with modest green-shuttered villas and rustic chalets set in ledges of roughly terraced garden. Of the rutted road, bordered by elms and sycamores, leading down from the fertile uplands through the straggling gray village of Ste. Marie to the shore. Of the high chalk cliffs forming the headland, which closed the view westward, and the quarter-mile-wide sweep of grass running up the back of it, stunted, bronzed oak and thorn thickets filling in the rounded hollows. Of the curving beach, its rows of gaily painted wooden bathing-cabins, and chairs arranged in friendly groups along the fore-shore occupied by women in airy summer costumes,—their docile men-kind, assisted in some cases by white-capped nurses, dealing meanwhile with a slightly turbulent infant population upon the near shingle and the dark mussel and seaweed covered reef of rocks just below.

Upon that same friendly grouping of chairs Adrian's glance directed itself eagerly, seeking a feminine presence acutely interesting to him, but without result. Open parasols and hats of brobdingnagian proportions rendered their charming owners practically invisible. Wistfully he relinquished the search. Then, looking at the scene as a whole, his poetic sense was fired by the spaciousness and freedom of the expanse of gleaming sands for which Ste. Marie is celebrated. Furrowed in places and edged by rare traceries of blue shadow, traversed by sparkling blue-green waterways, interspersed with broad, smooth lagoons—where the rather overdefined forms of pink-armed, pink-legged bathers, clad in abbreviated garments, swam, splashed, and floated—the sands ranged out under a translucent clearness of early afternoon sunshine to the first glinting ripples of the gently inflowing tide. Farther still, along the horizon, the solid blue of the intervening belt of deep sea melted, by imperceptible gradations, into low-lying tracts of furrowed, semi-transparent opaline cloud.

Those gold and silver shimmering levels, washed by and rimmed with heavenly blue, commanded Adrian's imagination. He found the strong air sweet to breathe, the keen scent of the brine pleasant to his nostrils. Disease, age, death, and kindred ugly concomitants of human experience lost their vraisemblance and meaning. Only glad and gracious things were credible. These in multitude innumerable; and along with them, making audible the note of pathos without which even perfect beauty still lacks perfection, the haunting solicitation of the Beyond and of the Unattained, forever beckoning the feet of man onward with the promise of stranger and more noble joys hidden from him as yet within the womb of the coming years.

Whereupon Anastasia Beauchamp, divining in some sort the trend of her companion's meditations, proceeded to pat him genially upon the arm.

"My dear young god, 'come down off that roof right away,' as little Byewater would put it, and listen to my recital of sordid domestic woes recently suffered by our belle Gabrielle."

Adrian became practical, his nose at once pugnacious and furiously busy, on the instant.

"Great heavens!" he exclaimed, "who has dared to offer her annoyance?"

"Mice, my dear Savage, beetles, and, to be quite plain with you, drains. Yes, you may well make a grimace. That mild-looking little chalet yonder across the valley—the one with the parterre of marigolds—which she had rented without preliminary inspection, proved a veritable pest-house. When I arrived in July—mainly with a view to safeguarding your interests, since frankly I hold most seaside places in abhorrence—"

"How can I ever be sufficiently grateful to you!" the young man murmured fervently.

"I have no child—and—perhaps, at my age, even the ghost, even the fiction, of motherhood is better than nothing.—But this is a digression—sentimental or scientific, which? To return. I found Madame Vernois nervous and debilitated, little Bette with a temperature and sore throat, the indispensable maid Henriette drowned in tears and sulks, and our poor, beautiful Gabrielle in a most admired distraction."

Harrowed by which description, her hearer gave way to smothered imprecations.

"Exactly. At the time I too made little remarks. Then I sniffed once—twice. Twice was quite sufficient. Better sacrifice a month's rent than be poisoned. Without ceremony I bundled them over here, bag and baggage, since when, dear creatures, they flourish. The Bernards, who had taken the villa next door to the pest-house, also had cause for dissatisfaction. They joined us. This addition to our party I could have dispensed with. I entertain the highest respect for M. Bernard's acquirements, only I could wish he had learned early in life that imparting information and making conversation are by no means synonymous. Never am I alone with him for over five minutes but he positively lapidates me with the remains of the architectural past. Conversation should be interchange of opinions, ideas, experiences, not a bombardment with facts which one is perfectly competent to read up for oneself if one's a mind to. Should you ever be tempted to start a hobby—we none of us know what we may come to!—avoid archÆology, my dear Savage, I implore you, out of retrospective tenderness for my sufferings during the last few weeks! Yes—and then I must record one truly alarming episode. The great ZÉlie and a horde of her nauseating adherents threatened a descent upon Madame St. Leger. Promptly I engaged all the vacant rooms in the hotel—fortunately they weren't very numerous—until the peril was over-past."

"You are not only the kindest and the most superb of friends, but you are a great general. You should command armies," Adrian declared. "Forever shall archÆology be anathema to me!"

"Saving the proposed raid of the objectionable ZÉlie, our history has been of the simplest," Anastasia continued. "People, pleasant and unpleasant, have come and gone; we remain—and there's the sum total of it. Now tell me about yourself. How long do we keep you?"

"Alas, only until this evening. I must go back to Rouen, where my letters await me. We have been moving daily from place to place, as inclination suggested. To-morrow I must rejoin RenÉ Dax—for a few days, a week probably, to observe how the new treatment prospers. It is decided that he shall remain in the country-house, near Caen, of an intelligent young doctor who has been in attendance upon him during our touring. His man-servant, of course, is with him. And there he can also have his pet animals."

"Will he recover?"

Adrian raised his shoulders and spread out his hands.

"God knows!" he answered. "He is quite gentle, quite tractable. At moments he is irresistibly entertaining. On his good days he composes little poems of an exquisite fancifulness and fragility—iridescent flowers as of spun glass. But whether he will ever draw or paint again is an open question."

"It is pathetic," Miss Beauchamp put in musingly. "What a sequel to his extravagant popularity!"

And both lapsed into silence, looking out across the immense expanse of gleaming sands. Adrian was the first to speak. He did so with uncertain hesitation.

"You said it was high time I came, tres chÈre Mademoiselle. Does that imply that I have stayed away too long? I feared to be precipitate, lest I might appear to take unfair advantage of the—"

"The studio escapade—precisely."

"And employ it to further my own interests. On that account I have resolutely effaced myself. To do so has constituted a severe penance; but to do otherwise would, in my opinion, have shown an odious lack of imagination and of delicacy."

"I venture to doubt whether in affairs of the heart delicacy has not more miscarriages of happiness to answer for than precipitancy! The word too much, as between man and woman, is more easily forgiven than the word too little."

"It is inconceivable," Adrian broke out hotly, all of a fume and a fluster, "that Madame St. Leger should mistake my motives."

"Take it from me, my dear Savage," Anastasia replied, with a finely humorous smile, "that exactly in proportion as a woman is indifferent is she just and clear-sighted. Let her care for one of you tiresome male creatures ever, yes, ever so little, and those praiseworthy qualities suffer instant suspension. Reason and probability pick up their petticoats and scuttle. She develops a positively inordinate ingenuity in misconstruction and mistake."

Adrian turned an eagerly inquiring countenance upon the speaker, his whole soul in his eyes.

"But, dearest, most deeply valued friend, tell me, tell me, may I believe that she does then care?"

And asking it he bared his head, instinctively doing homage to that most lovely idea. Miss Beauchamp's smile changed in character, softening to a sweetness which held something of relinquishment and farewell.

"Ah! the good years, the good years," she said, "when love and all the world is young!—May you believe that she cares, my dear boy? Well, without its being the least unnatural, she very well might care, I fancy. But you really must find that out for yourself. Listen—the chirruping of the children. Here they all come."

She rose and went forward; and Adrian, an odd tingling sensation in his blood, went forward too and stood beside her under the central arch of the arcade watching the little procession winding its way by the rough path up the broken grass slope from the beach.

First, slender-legged, short-kilted, fresh as flowers, frisking lambkin-like and chattering in high-pitched, clear little voices, came Bette and her two little friends. Next M. Bernard, dignified, serious, robust, wearing light-brown tweeds, Panama in hand, decidedly warm, expounding, recounting, archÆologically dilating to Madame Vernois—refined, fragile, dressed in black—who leaned upon his arm. At a little distance Madame Bernard, small, fair-haired, neat-featured, pretty, inclining to stoutness, her person rigorously controlled by the last word in corsets and clothed in the last word of mauve linen costumes and mauve and white hats. She was not an ardent pedestrian, and mounted laboriously with the help of a long-handled parasol, uttering reproachful little ejaculations and complaints the while for the benefit of the two young Americans, who, good-naturedly loaded up with the ladies' folding chairs, rugs and cushions, followed close behind.

And there, apparently, was an end of the procession. Whereupon Adrian turned to Anastasia with a deeply injured countenance and a quite lamentably orphaned look in his handsome eyes.

"Madame St. Leger is not with them? What can have occurred? Where then can she be?" he demanded, in tones of child-like disappointment and distress.

"There—there!" Anastasia returned, merrily. "See, no ill-chance has befallen your goddess, my dear distracted young god. Look—look—near the cliff edge, to the right."

Then noting the change which came over Adrian's expression and bearing as his eyes followed her pointing hand, Miss Beauchamp's broadly amused smile faded. She shook her head, sighed, turned away, while the witty, large-featured face grew gray, aged, sibylline beneath the shadow of her broad-brimmed, vine-crowned, slightly rampageous hat.

"Like to like," she murmured. "However, others before now have gone through that enchanted and perilous gate! Only may the Almighty permit these two not to cram their romance into one flimsy, purple-patched, paper-bound yellow-back, but print it openly and honestly in three good, stout volumes, of which all save the first twenty or thirty pages deal with the married state."

CHAPTER V
IN WHICH ADRIAN MAKES DISQUIETING ACQUAINTANCE
WITH THE LONG ARM OF COINCIDENCE

Adrian sat well back in the car. The tires ate up the long perspectives of white road, while the brave music of the engines made accompaniment to the lyrics of his thought. On either side the lines of poplars galloped, and behind them the great gold, green and rusty-red squares of the crops, marked only by the nature of their respective growths, innocent of dividing fence or hedge-row, swished back, half the circle, as on a turn-table. In the valleys herds of oxen and stout-built, white-bellied, tortoise-shell cows moved leisurely through the rich meadow-grass. Prosperous gray homesteads, flanked by mellow wide-ranging barns and sheds, orchards of reddening apples, and yards containing a cheerfully garrulous population of poultry, calves, and pigs, came into view only to vanish backward along with the rest. In places, tracts of forest, the trees crowded and for the most part very tall and slight, as is the habit of northern French woodlands, made a dark stain amid the gilded brightness, casting long shadows across the downward-sloping pastures at their foot. A note of pastel blue in farmers' and peasants' clothing, now and again of lustrous dappled gray in the barrel or buttocks of some well-shaped draught-horse, of orange or rose in a child's frock or walled garden close, of white in airing linen, struck momentarily into observation. But dominant was the gilt of the level sunlight, the gold of the harvest, and the silver powdering dust of the highway. All these found sublimated repetition in the iridescence of a sunset modulated to rare half-tones by the near neighborhood of the sea. And Adrian sat well back in the car, restful yet keen, affected sensuously and passively rather than consciously and actively by the fair, fruitful landscape fleeting to right and left of him, revising his impressions of the past day.

Those impressions were, as he told himself, in a high degree both stimulating and poetic. He had been happy, very happy; but his happiness was of the traveling rather than the stationary order. No touch of satiety showed in it; rather much haunting solicitation of the Unattained and the Beyond. From Pisgah height he had beheld the Land of Promise, for the first time reasonably secure of entrance into that ardently coveted and most delectable country. But the waters of Jordan still rolled between; and whether these would pile themselves politely apart, bidding him cross dry-shod, or whether a pretty smart bit of swimming would be required before he touched the opposite bank, he was as yet by no means sure. Enfin—he could swim for it, if all came to all, and would swim for it gaily and strongly enough!

As that afternoon he first caught sight of Gabrielle St. Leger standing, tall and svelte in her light summer dress, upon a grass-grown mound on the turn of the slope, her strong yet pliant figure detaching itself in high relief against the immense expanse of Ste. Marie's blue lagoons and gleaming sands, Adrian apprehended that she too suffered those solicitations of the Unattained and the Beyond. Her attitude, indeed, was eloquent of questioning expectation. It recalled to him the superb and ill-fated drawing of her, uplifted amid the cruel and witty obscenities of poor RenÉ Dax's studio—the exalted Madonna of the Future, her child upon her arm, going forth from things habitual and familiar in obedience to the call of Modernity, of the new and tremendous age. Resemblance was there; yet as he looked a difference in her to-day's attitude soon disclosed itself to this analytic though ardent lover. For, assuredly, the sentiment of this second and living picture of her was less abstract, more warm and directly human? Not devotion to a Cause, to an impersonal ideal or idea, inspired that outlooking of questioning expectation across the shimmering levels to the freedom of the open sea, but some stirring of the heart, some demand of her sweet flesh for those natural joys which were its rightful portion. This difference—and then another, which, even here by himself in the rapidly running car, Adrian approached sensitively and with inward deprecation. In to-day's picture she had been alone. She had not carried her child on her arm; so that only the woman, beautiful and youthful, not the already made mother, was present.

And the above fact, it must be owned, contributed in no small degree to the young man's content. A thousand times, notwithstanding his love of analysis, he had refused and shied away from analysis of precisely this—namely, the feeling he entertained toward little Bette. She was a delicious being, granted; but she was also poor Horace St. Leger's child, and from much which this implied Adrian did quite incontestably shrink. La belle Gabrielle might still be, as he sincerely believed still was, essentially la Belle au Bois Dormant, just as he himself was the princely adventurer selected by Providence for the very agreeable task of waking her up. Yet, during that protracted sleep of hers, things had happened, primitive and practical things, to the actuality of which delicious Mademoiselle Bette's existence bore indubitable witness. Hence to carry away with him that other picture of Gabrielle as seen to-day, interrogating the fair sunlit spaces unaccompanied, gave him quite peculiar satisfaction. In the glow of which his thoughts now turned affectionately to the memory of poor Horace St. Leger. For wasn't la belle Gabrielle, after all, his, and not Adrian's, discovery? And wasn't he, Adrian, consequently under a gigantic debt of gratitude to Horace for so speedily taking his departure and leaving the coast clear? He might have lived on—agonizing reflection!—ten, twenty, even—since centenarians are at present so conspicuously the fashion—a good thirty years longer; lived on, indeed, until it ceased to matter much whether he took his departure or not. Thinking over all which, Adrian forgave the poor man his abbreviated enjoyment of paternity, and in so doing made his final peace with the existence of little Bette.

Not to have done so would, in his opinion, have betrayed a culpably ungenerous and churlish spirit. The more as when—her attention attracted by the pretty outcry of little Bette herself and of Madame Vernois—Gabrielle turning her gaze landward became aware of his presence, the light in her face and quick welcoming gesture of her hand showed his advent as far from displeasing to her. Both expression and action struck him so spontaneous and unstudied that, without undue vanity, he might well believe himself to count for something in those allurements of the Beyond and the Unattained. Delightfully certain it was, in any case, that she descended with haste from her grassy monticule, and—he could most joyfully have sworn—put some restraint upon herself so as to advance and offer her greetings with due soberness and dignity.

All through his visit her manner had remained gentle, serious, touched even with a hint of embarrassment. From these signs he drew most hopeful auguries. After tea, under the quite perceptibly out-of-joint noses of the two excellent young Americans, she had drawn him aside and plied him with questions respecting his nursing of RenÉ Dax. In response he gave her a detailed account of the last two months. With the artist's happy faculty for playing two mutually destructive parts at one and the same time in all sincerity, he mourned RenÉ's mental affliction and felt the pity of it while looking into Gabrielle's eyes, watching her every change of expression and reveling in the emotion his eloquent recital evoked. Her quickness of sympathy and comprehension were enchanting. Never had he found her so responsive. Never had he felt so closely united to her in sentiment.—And that the egregious Tadpole, of all living creatures, should prove so excellent a stalking-horse!

Putting aside the high delight of having Madame St. Leger as a listener, he found sensible relief in speaking freely of the subject. For the responsibility of his position had been severe and wearing. Especially had it been so during those, at first, frequently recurrent periods of acute mania, when his affection and philosophy alike were strained to breaking-point, making him doubt whether the protracted struggle to keep wayward soul and distempered body together was either merciful or obligatory. If this unhappy lunatic of genius was so passionately desirous of letting loose that same wayward soul of his through a gaping wound in his throat, why the deuce should he, Adrian, in company with three or four other strong and healthy men, be at such tremendous pains to prevent it? Mightn't the poor Tadpole know very much best what was best for him? And wouldn't it, therefore, be more humane and intelligent to leave nicely sharpened razors within easy reach, ignoring the probable consequences of such intentional negligence? Are there not circumstances which render connivance at suicide more than permissible? Time and again he had argued the vexed question with himself as to the binding necessity, even the practical morality, of preserving human life when, through disease, life has so cruelly lost its distinctively human characteristics and values.

"And," Gabrielle St. Leger remarked, with a smile edged by engagingly gentle mockery, "then invariably ended, against your better judgment, by still carefully removing the razors!"

That same smile dwelt in the young man's memory as singularly rich with promise, justifying the belief that a lifetime spent in la belle Gabrielle's society would fail to exhaust her power of—to put it vulgarly—jumping the unexpected upon you, and bracing your interest by the firing off of all manner of fine little surprises. Monotony, he thanked Heaven, would very certainly not be among the dangers to be feared in marriage with Madame St. Leger!

But while his imagination played about these agreeable matters the music of the engines changed its tune, the brakes gripped under Martin the chauffeur's boot-sole, and the car slowed down to a crawl in passing a flock of sheep. Two large dogs, bobtailed and shaggy, their red mouths widely open as they raced barking to and fro, rounded up the scared and scattering flock into a compact, bleating, palpitating mass of bister color picked out with rusty black upon the dust-whitened strip of turf by the roadside. The shepherd, tall and lean, a long staff in his hand, his felt hat, hawk-nosed face, unkempt beard, ragged cloak and string-girt leggings, presenting a study in rich browns and umbers under the last glinting gold of the sunset, gesticulated and shouted, directing the evolutions of the racing dogs in a harsh and guttural patois. The scene, a somewhat violent pastoral, stamped itself as a picturesque inset upon the wide-margined page of Adrian's reflections.

The sheep once safely cleared and the pace again quickening, his thought centered complacently upon the moment of his farewells. For surely these showed handsomely on the credit side of his day's pleasure?

The friendly little company—not exclusive of the forgiving though cheapened Americans—had gathered at the hotel entrance to witness his start. Anastasia's voice and manner were rich with meaning and affectionate admonition as she invited him speedily to return. In the expression of Madame Vernois's refined face he seemed to read something approaching appeal as she gracefully seconded that invitation. While Gabrielle herself—she standing a little apart from the rest, nearer to the waiting automobile—answered, not lightly, but with a sweet and grave dignity, on his asking her:

"And you, chÈre Madame et amie, have I your invitation also? May I soon come back? Without your sanction it would, perhaps, be preferable, be wiser, more desirable for me to stay away."

"I, too, hope you may find it possible soon to return here. If your doing so depends in any degree upon my sanction I give that sanction readily."

And thus speaking she had looked him full in the eyes. Whereupon, though furiously unwilling to quit the dear sight and sound of her, this very modern young god mounted up into his very modern car in quite celestial serenity of spirit.

But as the dusk deepened and the lights of Rouen multiplied in the distance, happy retrospect gave place to happy on-looking, since, at nine and twenty, no sound and wholesome man seriously questions the existence of earthly bliss.

Yes, a week, possibly even a few days, would suffice to assure him all went well with RenÉ in his new quarters. Then he might reckon himself at liberty to return to Ste. Marie and the dear people there. And, once there, no overstrained delicacy should withhold him from putting it to the touch with Gabrielle St. Leger. Bowing to Anastasia's advice, he would risk saying the word too much, so as to avoid the greater danger of saying the word too little;—risk it the more gladly because he gratefully believed it mightn't prove the word too much, but the word acceptable, even the word actually, though silently and proudly, waited for. The immediate consequence of which belief was that, the car striking into the town through the Faubourg Beauvosine and traveling the Boulevard and the rue St. Hilaire successively, it appeared to Adrian in act of traversing an altogether heavenly city, whose now poetic ancient buildings, now stately new ones, were alike built of silver, and whose deep-resounding streets, in the growing brilliance of the lamp-light, were paved with gold. Such extravagant tricks, even in this machine-made, mammon-worshiping twentieth century, can love still contrive to play upon the happy lover!

On the way to the hotel, where he had left his light traveling baggage when passing through from Caen in the morning, Adrian alighted at the central post-office, in the rue Jeanne d'Arc, to claim his two-days' mail forwarded from Paris.

Coming out, he stood awhile at the edge of the pavement verifying the several items. Two consignments of proofs—this pleased him. A slim one from the office, containing, as he knew, his fortnightly chronique of current home and foreign politics for the forthcoming number of the Review. The other—and his glance settled upon it affectionately—was stouter, holding the slips of a story of some forty pages. Into that story he had put all the imaginative and verbal skill of which he, as yet, felt himself capable. It was a drama, at once pathetic and brutal, of the Paris underworld which he had this year so intimately investigated during his unsuccessful search for Bibby Smyrthwaite. He felt keen to know how it looked and read in print; for in the back of his mind lurked a hope that just conceivably it might prove a little masterpiece and assure his place among those writers of contemporary fiction whose literary output really counts.

And here for the moment it must be owned the lover was called upon to make room for the artist, while Adrian promised himself the best of good hours, after dinner to-night, in revising punctuation, correcting misprints, and leisurely making those carefully considered alterations in wording so absorbing to one emulous of combining grace and high finish with pungency and vivacity of style. Tenderly he laid the packet down on the seat of the waiting car, and raised his eyes as in invocation to the star-pierced blue of the summer sky roofing the perspective of silver-gray houses and silver-gilt street. For mightn't he take it as a fortunate omen that the proofs should come to hand on this so fortunate day? Omen that the story would strike home and its readers acclaim him as a doer of notable and living work?

He glanced rapidly at the envelopes of his private letters; and, while thus occupied, became aware that Martin, the chauffeur, was engaged—as not infrequently—in an altercation. The man was a clever driver, and to him, Adrian, a willing and trustworthy servant. But his temper was inconveniently inflammable, and he inclined to pick quarrels with half the men and make amorous overtures to more than half the women he met, thus involving both himself and his master in superfluously dramatic incidents. Under provocation his language became variegated and astonishingly ripe. Epithets of the latter description he was now in process of discharging upon some individual who had knocked up against him, in passing, as he stood at the edge of the pavement bending down to examine the tire of the near front wheel of the car.

"Martin, stop that, if you please," Adrian said, warningly, over his shoulder, and returned to the survey of his letters.

There was one from Anastasia Beauchamp. Bless the dear woman, wasn't she indeed a jewel of a friend! And there was one, black-bordered, and addressed, though less neatly than usual, in Joanna Smyrthwaite's small, scholarly handwriting. Adrian was conscious of impatience, of an unreasoning sense of injury. For why, of all days in the year, should he hear from Joanna to-day? He had thought of her seldom lately, owing to preoccupation with and anxiety regarding RenÉ Dax; and it struck him as a rather wanton smirching of his delightful day's record and subtle menace to the success of his precious little story that the rather unpleasant matter of poor Joanna should thus obtrude itself. Undefinable apprehension of coming trouble flashed through his mind.

All this was a matter of seconds; but during those seconds, the voice of the choleric chauffeur had risen from a gusty snarl into the screech of a blazing sky-rocket, bursting finally into a star-shower of unrecordable invective.

Adrian, imposingly tall in his long dust-colored frieze motor-coat, wheeled round upon the man angrily.

"Ah, par exemple! but this is intolerable!" he exclaimed. "Have I not already commanded you to be silent? Do you propose to disgrace me, as well as yourself, by fighting in the open street? Behave respectably, not like an idiot. Do you hear—get in behind your steering-wheel and keep quiet until I am ready to start."

"But, Monsieur, the fellow has grossly insulted me. He cannoned into me by design, the thrice filthy animal, the sodden ass, and would have rolled me in the gutter had I not skilfully braced myself. Clearly his intention was robbery. He is a danger to society, a thief, a pickpocket. Only let Monsieur look for himself, and declare whether a more verminous gaol-bird has ever been presented for his inspection?"

And looking, Adrian beheld the chauffeur, fiery-eyed, with bristling black mustache, and, struggling in his vicious grip, Joanna Smyrthwaite herself—Joanna dissipated, degraded, with prominent, blear blue eyes and weak hanging underlip, masquerading in man's attire, as in those infamous, now obliterated drawings upon RenÉ Dax's studio wall.

Disgust, and a vague apprehension of something unnatural and outside reason, seized on Adrian Savage. The sight was loathsome, to a degree, both in suggestion and in fact. Then he understood; and, understanding, suffered a moment of acute indecision. But a crowd was collecting. The police might arrive upon the scene. Making a strong effort to surmount his disgust, he said:

"Let him go, Martin. I know him. I will explain to you presently. Now I require your help."

Then he added rapidly, in English:

"Pardon my servant's rudeness. In the end you shall not have cause to regret it. You are William Smyrthwaite—Bibby—are you not?"

Martin relinquished his hold sulkily. His victim, dazed and breathless, stood at bay; a ring of curious, contemptuous faces behind him, and Adrian, stern, yet excited, and with difficulty repressing evidences of his repugnance, in front.

"And, if I am Bibby Smyrthwaite, what the devil is that to you?" he answered petulantly in English. "I never set eyes on you before. Why should you interfere with me? Haven't I as much right to the pavement as that liveried brute of yours? I've got a job as cab-washer. If I'm late at the yard I shall forfeit my pay. And I want my pay."

His loose-lipped mouth twisted miserably and tears began to dribble down his sunken cheeks.

"Let me go," he blubbered. "I haven't done you any harm, and I want my pay."

Then Adrian, moved by compassion, came close to him and spoke kindly.

"See here, my poor boy," he said. "I am commissioned by persons who have a regard for you to provide for you. You need not worry about your pay. I will take care of all that. For months I have tried to find you to tell you this. I am Adrian Savage, a cousin of your late father, and his executor."

The tears ceased, and the young man's face was overspread by an expression of almost imbecile rapture. Adrian turned sick. Exactly thus had Joanna looked, more than once.

"Is my father dead, then?" Bibby asked.

"Yes, he is dead," Adrian replied, in bewilderment.

Bibby reeled forward and squatted on the broad footboard of the car, his head thrown back, holding his sides, his thin, loose-jointed limbs and body writhing with and shaken by hysterical laughter.

"Dead!" he quavered out—"dead! By God! they've got him at last, then—got him, the stinking, slave-driving old hypocrite! And, please God, they're cooking him now—now—at this very identical minute—cooking him to a turn, down in hell."

CHAPTER VI
CONCERNING A CURSE, AND THE MANNER OF ITS GOING
HOME TO ROOST

The room, furnished in dark walnut, was upholstered in red Utrecht velvet, the walls hung with a striped fawn-and-red paper. A mirror, in a florid gilt frame, was fixed above the low mantel-shelf. The atmosphere held odors reminiscent of cigarettes, patchouli, and food in process of cooking. The dinner-table had, by Adrian's orders, been placed near the central window, the two casements of which stood open to the ground. After so many hours spent in the open air, dining in present company he felt the necessity of such freshness as he could by any means get. In the center of the long flagged courtyard the big palmate leaves of a row of pollarded chestnuts caught the light coming from the offices on the left. White-coated, white-capped chefs and scullions passed to and fro. An old liver-colored bitch, basset as to her legs and pointer as to her body, waddled after them, her nose in the air, sniffing, permanently hopeful of scraps. On the flags, just outside the salon window, three tabby kittens played—stalking one another round pots of fuchsia and musk, bouncing out, leaping in the air, spitting, galloping sideways, highly diabolic with teapot-handle tails. Farther along the courtyard, hidden by the lower branches of the intervening trees, a stable-helper sang and whistled as he washed down the hotel omnibus. The servants talked, laughed, scolded over their work. Almost incessantly from the rue Jeanne d'Arc came the long-drawn rattle and swish of the electric trams. And opposite to Adrian at table, clad in a complete outfit of his, Adrian's clothes—a white flannel suit with a faint four-thread black stripe on it, a soft, pale blue shirt, an immaculate collar and narrow black tie—sat William Smyrthwaite, outwardly, at all events, surprisingly transformed.

Adrian had hesitated to propose him as an inmate; but an up-to-date motor-car, a ruffling chauffeur, a well-built suit-case and kit-bag bearing an English name, a very good Paris address, are calculated to promote not only faith, but charity. The hotel proprietor, a short, fat, bland little man with a dancing step and a shrewd, rapacious Norman eye, was sympathy itself.

"That Monsieur should remove his effects and seek another, an inferior, hotel would desolate him, was not to be thought of! He would arrange the affair on the instant. Such lamentable lapses will occur at times—are there not, alas, members of the most respectable, the most distinguished, families who turn badly? Let Monsieur, then, rest assured he was infinitely touched by the confidence Monsieur reposed in him. And, see"—tapping his forehead with a fat forefinger—"the little suite at the back on the ground floor, giving upon the courtyard, became precisely this morning vacant. True, these were not the rooms he should have selected for Monsieur's occupation; but, under the circumstances, it was conceivable they would serve. They were comfortable though modest. They were retired—two bed-chambers connected by a salon. There Monsieur and his guest could dine in private, secure from the intrusive observation of strangers. But, indeed, no—Monsieur was too amiable! He himself was undeserving of thanks, since did it not become evident that Monsieur was engaged in a work of the highest benevolence—the attempted reclamation of an unhappy fellow-creature?—With which work to be associated, even in the humblest capacity, could not but be esteemed by any person of feeling as a privilege."

Then with a rapid change of manner, becoming autocratic, Napoleonic:

"Gustave," he cried, over his shoulder, "portez les bagages de ces messieurs aux numeros sept et huit."—And waving Adrian to follow, he bounced lightly away down the corridor; his eyebrows drawn together as he inwardly debated how many francs extra he dared charge for the Utrecht-velvet upholstered suite without seeming too flagrantly extortionate.

After that first outbreak of unseemly rejoicing at the announcement of his father's death, young Smyrthwaite subsided into a state of acquiescent apathy. He did as he was bid, but with what mental reservations, what underlying thoughts or emotions, Adrian failed to discover. Somewhere, in this weak, slipshod creature, he suspected a bed-rock of obstinacy. He also suspected predatory instincts. Or, was it only that the instinct of self-preservation had taken—as under the stress of poverty it almost must take—a predatory form?

At the beginning of dinner Smyrthwaite spoke little, but sat, his elbows upon the table, his head bent low over his plate, putting away food with the sullen haste of an animal suspicious of its fellow-animal's intentions and appetite. And when Adrian, to whom this exhibition of gluttony proved anything but agreeable, hinted civilly there was no cause for hurry, he looked across the nicely ordered table with a half-sneering yet oddly boyish smile.

"Oh! it's all very well for you," he said. "You're safe enough to have your solid three meals to-morrow, and all the other blooming to-morrows as long as you live. But, I tell you, I mean to make jolly sure of this meal while I can get it. I've learned not to put much trust in to-morrows. I want to be on the safe side, so that if the wind changes, as far as this meal goes, anyhow, I shall have nothing to repent of."

"But, my good fellow, the wind will not change. That is exactly what I have been trying to assure you," Adrian interposed, pity and repulsion playing see-saw within him to a bewildering extent. "For the future you can be just as secure of three meals a day as I myself am if you choose."

"Bully!" Smyrthwaite said. "I wonder! The old man cut up well?" he added, his face again bent down over the table.

"Your father left a large fortune," Adrian replied, repulsion now very much on the top.

"To me? Not likely!"

"To your sisters. And Joanna"—Adrian hesitated, conscious of a singular distaste to using the Christian name—"at once devoted a considerable sum of money to be employed, in the event of your return, for your maintenance."

With his coarse, thick-jointed fingers Smyrthwaite rubbed a bit of bread round his plate, sopping up the remains of the gravy.

"That's no more than right," he said, "if you come to think of it. Why should the girls have all the stuff?"

His hand went out furtively across the table to a dish of braised beef and richly cooked vegetables which he proceeded to transfer to his own plate.

"All the same, it's nice of Nannie. We were rather chummy in the old days—the blasted old days which I've nearly forgot. But I didn't suppose she cared still. Poor old Nannie! What a beastly hash my father made of our lives! Nannie ought to have married Merriman. Then I should have had a home. Andrew's a bit peachy, but he's a rare good sort."

He slushed in the food silently for a while; and Adrian, anxious to avoid observation of the details of that process, watched the kittens sporting round the flower-pots on the flags just outside.

He had searched for Bibby, spending time, money, even risking personal safety, in that search. He had found Bibby. He had brought him here to civilized quarters. He had clothed him from head to foot.—Adrian felt a pang, for they were such nice clothes! He was rather fond of that particular flannel suit. Really it cost him not a little to part with it; and, he could almost fancy, hanging now upon Bibby's angular, narrow-chested frame, that it bore the plaintive air of a thing unkindly treated, consciously humiliated and disgraced. He apologized to it half sentimentally, half humorously, in spirit.—And then because the small things of life whip one's sense of the great ones into higher activity, the trivial matter of the ill-used flannel suit brought home to Adrian with disquieting clearness the difficulties of this whole third affaire Smyrthwaite in which he had, as it now occurred to him, rather recklessly embarked.

As if the two first affaires, those of father and daughter, hadn't been enough, he must needs go and add that of the degenerate son and brother! And who, after all, would thank him? Wasn't he very much a fool, then, for his pains? Psychologically and in the abstract, as an example of lapse and degradation, Smyrthwaite presented an interesting and instructive study. But in the concrete, as a guest, a companion, as a young man, a relation, moreover, to be reclaimed from evil courses and socially reinstated, the situation took on quite other color. Looking across the table now as, his plate again empty, Bibby sank back in his chair, slouched together, his hands in his trousers pockets, his blue eyes turned upon the door, anxiously awaiting the advent of the garÇon with the next course, Adrian was tempted to deplore his own philanthropic impulse. All hope of pulling the boy up to any permanently decent level of living seemed so unspeakably remote.

And, as though some silent transmission of thought had taken place between them, Bibby's next speech went to confirm Adrian's fears.

"You say if I choose," he began; "but the question is, can I choose? You see I'm so beastly out of the habit of all that.—Now I'm getting full I seem to understand things, so I'd best talk at once."

"I ask nothing better than that you should talk," Adrian put in, good-temperedly. For Heaven's sake, let him at least gain whatever scientific knowledge of and from Bibby he could!

"Presently I shall turn sleepy," the other continued, with a curiously unblushing directness of statement. "I always do when I'm first filled up after going short. You see, I've never set eyes on you before, and you come along and tell me some blooming fairy story about poor old Nannie and her money. It may be true or it may be false, but anyhow I don't seem to tumble to it. I fancy these clothes and I fancy this feed, but I don't feel to go much beyond that.—Chicken?—Yes, rather. Leave me the breast. Golly! I do like white meat! Two or three years ago it would have set me on fire. I should have felt like bucking up and making play with it—repentant prodigal, don't you know, and all that kind of rot. But now I don't seem to be able to bother much. If it was winter I suppose I should be more ready to fix on to it, because I'm afraid of the cold. When you're empty half the time cold makes you so beastly sick; and then I get chilblains and my skin chaps. But in the summer I'd just as soon lie out.—Say, can I have the rest of the fowl?"

"By all means," Adrian replied, handing him the dish.

"You see, it's like this," he went on, picking up the bones and ripping off the meat with his teeth, "I've knocked about so long it's grown second nature. I have to move on. I can't stick to one job or stop in one place. I suppose that's left over from the old days, when my father was always down on me with some infernal row or other. He hated me like poison. It's a trick Englishmen have with their sons. They've not got the knack of paternity like you French. I got into the habit of feeling I'd best run because he was sure to be after me; and that's a sort of feeling you can't be quit of. It keeps you always looking over your shoulder to see what's coming next. People haven't been half nasty to me on the whole, and I mightn't have done so badly if I could have stuck. A little mincing devil of an artist, with a head like the dome of St. Paul's—draws for the comic papers—you may know him—RenÉ Dax—"

"Yes, I know him," Adrian said.

"He picked me up this winter when I was just pitching myself into the river. It was cold, you see, and I'd been drinking. It's silly to drink when you're empty. It gives you the hump. He took me home with him, and drew funny pictures of me. They were pretty low down some of them, but they made me laugh. He did me very well as to food and all that, but two or three days of it was enough. I couldn't stand the confinement. I pinched what I could and left."

Adrian raised his eyebrows and passed his hand down over his black beard meditatively. A sweet youth, a really sweet and promising youth this!—RenÉ had never mentioned the thieving incident to him, and it explained much. It also showed RenÉ's conception of the duty entailed by hospitality in an admirable light. Even active exercise of the predatory instinct must be passed over in silence in the case of a guest.

"What he paid me, with what I took, kept me going quite a good while," Smyrthwaite said, stretching and yawning audibly. "But I'm turning thundering sleepy. I told you I should. I'll be shot if I can sit up on end jawing any more like this," he added querulously. "You might let a fellow have ten minutes' nap."

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, all the minutes of the unnumbered ages spent by Bibby in slumber would, Adrian just then felt, supply a more than grateful respite! He lit a cigarette and stepped out of the open window on to the flags, thereby startling the tabby kittens, who, with arched backs and frenzied spittings, vanished behind the flower-pots. An arc lamp was fixed to the wall just over the kitchen entrance. One of the white-clad chefs brought out a chair, and sat there reading a flimsy, little two-page evening paper. The heavy foliage of the chestnuts hung motionless. In the distance a bugle sounded to quarters. And Adrian thought of Gabrielle St. Leger, standing on the grass-grown monticle looking across the gleaming sands of Ste. Marie into the beckoning future. When next they met he would speak, she would answer—and Adrian's eyes grew at once very gay and very gentle. He pushed up the ends of his mustache and smoothed the tip of his pointed beard. Then he remembered on a sudden that in the houroosh over the finding of Bibby he had forgotten all about his letters.

So he took them out of his pocket and looked at them. It wasn't necessary to read dear Anastasia's letter now, since he knew pretty well what it must contain, having seen her so lately. But here was Joanna's black-edged envelope. He shrugged his shoulders.—Oh! this interminable famille Smyrthwaite! Why, the dickens, had his great-aunt committed the maddening error of marrying into it? With an expressive grimace, followed by an expression of saintly resignation, Adrian tore the envelope open. The letter was a long one, worse luck! He read a few lines, and moved forward to where the arc lamp gave a fuller light. "Par exemple!" he said, once or twice; also, very softly, "Sapristi!" drawing in his breath. Then all lurking sense of comedy deserted him. He straightened himself up, his face bleaching beneath its brown coating of sunburn and his eyes growing hot. The old dog waddled across from the offices and planted herself in front of him, wagging a disgracefully illegitimate tail, looking up in his face, sniffing and feebly grinning. He paid no heed to her feminine cajoleries; paid no heed to the fact that his cigarette had gone out, or to the antics of the again emergent kittens, or to the intermittent sounds from the courtyard and city, or to the all-pervasive stable and kitchen smells.

"Dear Cousin Adrian," Joanna's letter ran, "I find it difficult and even painful to write to you, yet I can no longer refrain from writing. In refraining I might be guilty of an injustice toward you. This nerves me to write. I have suffered very greatly in the past week. I know suffering may purify, but I am not purified by this suffering. On the contrary, the tendencies of my nature which I least approve are brought into prominence by it. I owe it to whatever is best in me; I owe it to you—yes, above all to you—to take steps to check this dreadful florescence of evil in myself.

"But before explaining the principal cause of my suffering, I must tell you this. You may have heard from Margaret. In that case forgive my repeating what you already know. She has engaged herself to Mr. Challoner. The news came to me as a great shock. From every point of view such a marriage is displeasing to me. I have regretted Mr. Challoner's influence over Margaret. Already I cannot but see she is deteriorating, and adopting a view of life dreadfully wanting in elevation of feeling and thought. I know you will sympathize with me in this, and that you will also deplore Margaret's choice. Indeed, the thought of the effect that this news must have upon your mind has caused me much sorrow. You may so reasonably object to Mr. Challoner entering our family. I have never considered that he appreciated your great superiority to himself both in position and in attainments, or treated you with the deference due to you. Mr. Challoner is not a gentleman, and I am humiliated by the prospect of his becoming nearly connected with you by marriage. You are too just to visit this upon me; but it must color your thought of me and of all our future relation.

"I speak of our future relation; and there the agony of suspense in which I have lately lived overcomes me. I can hardly write. Believe me, Adrian, I do not doubt you; I know you are incapable of an inconsiderate, still more of a cruel, action. My trust in you is as deep as my affection. It is myself whom I distrust. Knowing my absence of talent and beauty, knowing my own faults of character from the first, the wonder of your love for me has been almost overpowering, almost incredible."

Adrian folded the thin sheets together and walked back and forth over the flags, looking up at the fair night sky above the big-leaved chestnuts.

"My God! Poor thing! poor Joanna! What can one do? Poor thing!" he said.

Then he stood still again in the lamplight and re-opened the letter.

"And hence, when gossiping reports reach me, however contrary to my knowledge of you and however unworthy of credence they may be, aware as I am of my many shortcomings, they torture me. I cannot control my mind. It places dreadful ideas before me. I realize my utter dependence upon you for all that makes life desirable—I could almost say for all that makes its continuance possible. Before you came to us, at the time of papa's death this winter, I was unhappy, but passively unhappy, as one born blind might be yearning for a sense denied and unknown to him. Now, when fears regarding our relation to each other assail me I am like one who, having enjoyed the rapture and glory of sight, is struck blind, or who learns that sightlessness, absolute and incurable, awaits him. A horror of great darkness is upon me. Only you can relieve me of that horror; therefore I write to you.

"Col. Rentoul Haig tells Margaret he heard from acquaintances of yours in Paris this summer that you have long been attached to a lady there who would in every respect be a suitable wife for you. I know that this cannot be true. Indeed, I know it. But I implore you to tell me yourself that it is not true. Set my mind at rest. The limits of my endurance are reached. Misery is undermining my health, as well as all the nobler elements of my character. I am a prey to insomnia, and to obtain sleep I am obliged to have recourse to drugs. I grow afraid of my own impulses. Dear Adrian, write to me. Forgive me. Comfort me. Reassure me. Yours,

"JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE."

Adrian folded up the letter slowly, returned it to his pocket, and stood thinking.

Thanks to his strong dramatic sense, at first the thing in itself, the isolating intensity of Joanna's passion, filled his imagination. Every word was sincere, dragged live and bleeding out of her heart. Baldness of statement only made it the more telling. This was what she actually believed regarding herself, what she really felt and meant.—"The limits of my endurance are reached, I suffer too much, I grow afraid of my own impulses." This was not a way of talking, rhetoric, a pose; it was reasoned and accurate fact. And, if he understood Joanna aright, her capacity of suffering was enormous. If the limit of endurance had now been reached, about all which lay short of that limit it was terrible to think! She had been tortured, and only in the extremity of torture did she cry for help.

But here Adrian's dramatic sense gave before the common instinct of humanity. The most callous of men might very well be moved by Joanna's letter; and Adrian was among the least callous of men, especially where a woman was concerned. Therefore, for him, practically, what followed? This question struck him as quite the ugliest he had ever been called upon to answer in the whole course of his life. To use poor Joanna's favorite catch-word, a "dreadful" question—a very dreadful question, as he saw it just now, taking the warmth out of the sunshine and the color out of life. He recalled those extremely disagreeable ten minutes, spent among the sweet-scented allspice bushes, in the garden of the Tower House. He had argued out the question, or the equivalent of the question, then—and, as he had believed, answered it fully and finally, once and for all. But apparently he hadn't answered it finally, since on its recurring now the consequences of either alternative presented themselves to him with such merciless distinctness.—The fact that his conscience was clear in respect of Joanna, that she was the victim of self-invented delusion—in as far as reciprocal affection on his part went—made little appreciable difference to the situation. Indeed, to prove his own innocence was merely to cap the climax of her humiliation with conviction of presumptuous folly.

Indescribably perplexed and pained, shocked by the position in which he found himself, Adrian passed absently back from the courtyard into the salon. He had forgotten the third affaire Smyrthwaite in the storm and stress of the second. Here, the third affaire presented itself to him under a guise far from encouraging.

Bibby, the whiteness of the flannel suit bringing out his limp, slatternly yet boyish figure into high relief as against the red Utrecht velvet, lay crumpled sideways in the largest of the chairs. His legs dangled over one arm of it, his head nodded forward, sunk between his pointed shoulders, his chin rested on his breast. An ill-conditioned, hopeless, irreclaimable fellow! Yet still the family likeness to Joanna remained—to the degraded Joanna of the "funny pictures" upon RenÉ Dax's studio wall—a Joanna wearing his, Adrian's, clothes, moreover, whose mouth hung open as he breathed stertorously in almost bestial after-dinner sleep.

Adrian looked once, picked up his hat, and fled.

For the ensuing three or four hours he walked aimlessly up and down the streets of Rouen, along the pleasant tree-planted boulevards and the quays beside the broad, silent-flowing Seine. He was aware of lights, of blottings of black shadow, of venerable buildings rich in beautiful detail, of the brightly lighted interiors of wine-shops and cafes open to the pavement, of people loud-voiced and insistent, and of vehicles—these in lessening number as it drew toward midnight—passing by. But all his impressions were indefinite, his vision strangely blurred. He walked, as a living man might walk through a phantom city peopled by chaffering ghosts, for all that his surroundings meant to him, his thoughts concentrated upon the overwhelming personal drama, and personal question, raised by Joanna's letter.

Must he, taking his courage rather brutally in both hands, disillusion her and risk the results of such disillusionment? Chivalry, pity, humanity, the very honor of his manhood, protested as against some dastardly and unpardonable act of physical cruelty. How he wished she hadn't employed that illustration of blindness and sight! The thought of her pale eyes fixed on him, doting, imploring, worshiping, hungry with unsatisfied passion, starving for his love, pursued him, making itself almost visible to his outward sense. How was it possible to sear those poor eyes, extinguishing light in them forever by application of the white-hot iron of truth? Before God, he could not do it! It was too horrible.

And yet, the alternative—to lie to her, to lie to love, to be false to himself, to be false to the hope and purpose of years, didn't his manhood, every mental, and moral, and—very keenly—every physical fiber of him protest equally against that? He saw Gabrielle as he had seen her only this afternoon, in her fresh, grave beauty, the promise of hidden delights, of enchanting discoveries in her mysterious smile. Saw, as he so happily believed, a certain awakening of her heart and sense toward the joys which man has with woman and woman with man. How could he consent to cut himself from all this and take Joanna's meager and unlovely body in his arms? It wasn't to be done. He turned faint with loathing and unspeakable distress, staggered as though drunk, nearly fell.

Bibby Smyrthwaite and Joseph Challoner for brothers, Margaret Smyrthwaite for sister, Joanna for bride—this, all which went along with it and which of necessity it implied, was more than he could face. He would rather be dead, rather ten thousand times. He said so in perfect honesty, knowing that were the final choice offered him now and here, notwithstanding his immense value of life and joy in living he would choose to die.

But in point of fact no such choice was offered him, since in his opinion it is the act of a most contemptible poltroon to avoid the issue by means of self-inflicted death. No, he must take the consequences of his own actions, and poor Joanna must take the consequences of her own actions—in obedience to the fundamental natural and moral law which none escape. And among those consequences, both of her and of his own past actions, was the cruel suffering which he found himself constrained to inflict. He shrank, he sickened, for to be cruel was hateful to him, a violation of his nature. In a sort of despair he went back upon the whole question, arguing it through once more, wearily, painfully, point by point.

Adrian's aimless wanderings had, now, conducted him to a small public garden laid out with flower borders, shrubberies, and carefully tended islands of turf, beneath the shadow of a chaste yet florid fifteenth-century church. Clerestory windows glinted high above, touched by the lamplight, and flying buttresses, thick with fantastic carven flowers and little lurking demons, formed a lace-work of stone against the sky. He sat down on one of the garden benches, laying his hat beside him on the seat. He doubled himself together, his elbows upon his knees, pressing his hands against either side of his head.

He was very tired. He was also desperately sad. Never before had he felt the chill breath of a trouble from which there seemed no issue save by the creation of further, deeper trouble. Never before had he—so it now appeared to him—gauged the possibilities of tragedy in human life. And the present situation had grown out of such wholly accidental happenings—well-meant kindnesses and courtesies, an overstrained delicacy in admitting the reality of poor Joanna's infatuation and making her understand that his affections were engaged elsewhere. In his fear of assuming too much and appearing fatuous, he had let things drift. He had been guilty of saying that fatal word "too little" against which dear Anastasia Beauchamp to-day fulminated. There he was to blame. There was his real error, his real mistake. It gnawed mercilessly at his conscience and his sensibility. It would continue so to gnaw, whatever the upshot of this disastrous business, as long as he lived. In the restrained and conventional intercourse of modern, civilized life, the difficulty of avoiding that fatal word "too little" is so constant and so great. His mind, spent with thought and emotion, dwelt with languid persistence upon this point. In this particular he had shirked his duty both to Joanna and to himself, with the terrible result that he was doomed to inflict a cruel injury upon her or to wreck his own life.

And at that moment, dully, without any quickening of interest, amiable or the reverse, he perceived that a young woman sat at the farther end of the bench. When he came to think of it, he believed she had followed him through the streets for some little time. Now she coughed slightly and moved rather nearer to him, fidgeted, pushing about the loose, shingly gravel, which made small rattling noises, with her foot. Adrian still sat doubled together pressing his hands against either side of his head. Presently she began to speak, making overtures to him, praising his handsome looks, his youth his dress, his bearing, his walk, flattering and wheedling him after the manner of her sorry kind. While expressing admiration and offering endearing phrases, her voice remained toneless and monotonous. And this peculiarity rather than what she said aroused Adrian's attention. He looked round and received a definite impression, notwithstanding the dimness of the light. Her reddish hair was turned loosely back from her forehead. Her face was gaunt and worn under its layer of fard. Her mouth was large, and the painted lips, though coarse, were sensitive—her soul had not yet been killed by her infamous trade. Her eyes were pale, desperate with shame and with entreaty. And these were the eyes which, if he would save all which made life noble and dear to him, Adrian must strike blind!

During some few seconds he looked straight at her. Then, feeling among the loose coins in his pocket, he found a gold twenty-franc piece and put it into her hand.

"It is no use," he said gravely and very sadly—speaking whether to her or to Joanna Smyrthwaite he could not tell. "I do not want you. My poor woman, I do not want you. It is not possible that I ever should want you. I am bitterly grieved for you, but you waste your time."

And he rose and moved away, having suddenly regained full possession of himself. He had ceased to doubt in respect of Joanna. That passing of money was to him symbolic, setting him free. He understood that to marry Joanna would be a crime against God-given instinct, against God-given love, against the God-given beauty of all wholesome and natural things. The sour, pedantic, man-imagined deity of some Protestant sect might demand such hideous, almost blasphemous sacrifice from its votaries; but never that supreme artist, Almighty God the Creator, maker of man's flesh as well as of his spirit, le bon Dieu of the divinely reasonable and divinely human Catholic Church. To marry Joanna would, in the end, constitute a blacker cruelty than to tell her the whole truth. For he couldn't live up to that lie and keep it going. He would hate her, and sooner or later show that he hated her; he would inevitably be unfaithful to her and leave her, thereby ruining her life as well as his own.

He went back to the hotel. The little red Utrecht-velvet upholstered salon still smelled of cooking, patchouli, and cigarettes, plus the dregs of a tumbler of brandy and soda and a something human and insufficiently washed. Smyrthwaite's door was shut, and no sound proceeded from behind it, for which Adrian returned thanks and betook himself to bed. He was dog-tired. He slept till broad day. On making a morning reconnaissance he found Smyrthwaite's door still locked, nor did knocking elicit any response. Somewhat anxious, he went out into the courtyard. The window was ajar, the room vacant, the bed undisturbed. Then he remembered to have seen a tall, slight, loosely made figure, wearing whitish garments, flitting hastily away down a dim side-street as he turned into the rue Jeanne d'Arc on his way home. Later Adrian discovered that a pair of diamond and enamel sleeve-links, a set of pearl studs, some loose gold and a hundred-franc note were missing from his suit-case, of which the fastening had been forced.

True to his predatory and roving instincts, Bibby had "pinched" what he could and left.

CHAPTER VII
SOME PASSAGES FROM JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE'S LOCKED BOOK

The long drought broke at last in an afternoon and night of thunder and scourging violence of rain, drowning out summer. A week of chill westerly weather followed, lowering gray skies, a perpetual lament of wind through the great woodland, combined with a soaking, misty drizzle which forced the firs and pines into their blue-black winter habit and rusted the pink spires of the heather. The flower-garden, dashed by the initial downpour, became daily more sodden, its glory very sensibly departed. Water stood in pools on the lawns. Leaves, dessicated by the continuous sun-scorch, fell in dingy brown showers from the beeches; and a robin, perching upon one of the posts of the tennis-net, practised the opening, plaintively sweet notes of his autumn song.

On the Thursday evening of this wet week, Joanna Smyrthwaite went to her room immediately after dinner, and, lighting the candles, sat down at her bureau. The rain beat against the windows. She heard it drip with a continuous monotonous tapping off the edge of the balcony on to the glass and tile roof of the veranda below. She heard the intermittent sighing sweep of the wind through the near trees, and the wet sucking sob of it in the hinges and fastenings of the casements. Nature wept, now petulantly, now, as it seemed, with the resignation of despair; and Joanna, sitting at the bureau with her diary open before her, listened to that weeping. It offered a fitting accompaniment to her gloomy concentration and exaltation of mind.

"August 29, 190-

"I supposed that I should have received an answer to my letter in the course of to-day at latest, but none has reached me," she wrote. "I am not conscious of regretting the delay. The reply, when it does come, can only confirm that which I already now know. I am no longer in suspense, and I wait to receive the reply merely to prevent the possibility of its falling into other hands than my own. That I could not permit. Although it can modify neither my intention nor my thought, it is mine, it belongs to me alone; and I refuse to allow the vulgar curiosity of any third person to be satisfied by perusal of it. I am sure that I do not regret the delay. It gives me time to reckon with myself and with all that has occurred. It also gives me time to test myself and make sure that I am not swayed by impulse, but that my will is active and my reason unbiased by feeling. I am quite calm. I have been so all day. For this I am thankful, although whether my calmness arises from self-control or from physical incapacity of further emotion I cannot decide. I do not know that the cause really matters, yet I should prefer to believe it self-control."

Joanna paused, leaning upon her elbow and listening to the sobbing of wind and rain.

"I suppose finality must always produce repose, however dreadful the cost at which finality is obtained. Only so can I account for my existing attitude of mind. I want, if I can, to put down clearly and consecutively exactly what happened last night. I think it may be useful to me in face of this period of waiting for the answer to my letter; also, I wish to live through it again step by step. I have learned very much during the last twenty-four hours. I have learned that pain, self-inflicted pain, can be voluptuous. Even a few days ago I should have been scandalized by such an admission. I am no longer scandalized. Torture has emancipated me from many delusions and overnice prejudices. I have not time now, even had I still inclination, to be overnice.

"Margaret and Marion Chase dined in town and went to the theater with Mr. Challoner last night. A London touring company is giving some musical comedy at Stourmouth. When they returned I was still awake. I had not taken any of the tabloids Doctor Norbiton gave me to procure sleep. I did not care to sleep. I preferred to think. Margaret and Marion remained some time upon the gallery laughing and talking rather excitedly. They kept on repeating scraps of a frivolous song which they had heard at the play; and of which, so Margaret told me to-day—she apologized for the thoughtless disturbance they had made—neither could remember the exact tune. Their voices and the interest they evidently took in so senseless and trivial a thing jarred upon me. I felt annoyed and resentful. Their behavior offered such a startling contrast to my own trouble and to the whole tenor of my life that I could not but be displeased by their light-mindedness. I felt my own superiority. I did not attempt to disguise the fact of that superiority from myself. I despised them. I may have done wrong in despising them, but I did not care. The ambition to assert myself, in some striking and forcible manner which should compel recognition not only from Margaret and Marion, but from the whole circle of our acquaintance, took possession of me. I have always shrunk from publicity and been weakly sensitive to criticism and remark. I have been disposed to efface myself. To rule others has been an effort to me. Any influence I may have exercised has been exercised in obedience not to inclination but to my sense of duty. Now I felt differently. I felt my nature and intelligence had never found their full expression, that the strength of my character had never fully disclosed itself. I desired—I still desire—to manifest what I really am, of what I am capable. I even crave after the astonishment and possible alarm such a disclosure would create.

"Thinking steadily, I came to the conclusion this desire for entire and arresting self-expression is not actually new in me. I saw that I have always, implicitly though silently, entertained a conviction that the opportunity for self-expression would eventually present itself. This conviction has supported me under many mortifications. In the events of the last six months that opportunity appeared in process of taking tangible and very perfect shape. More than my imagination had ever dared suggest was in process of being granted me. If I married Adrian—"

Joanna raised her hand from the paper, or rather it raised itself, with a jerk, refusing further obedience. She sat stiffly upright, listening to the wind and the rain. The steady drip off the edge of the balcony on to the roof below sounded indescribably mournful in its single, muffled, reiterated note. Taken in connection with the words she had just written, that mournfulness threatened her composure. The muscles of her poor face twitched and her winged nostrils quivered, in her effort to repress an outbreak of emotion. After a struggle she turned fiercely to her open diary.

"If I married Adrian Savage," she wrote, "this, in itself, would bear indisputable witness to the fact of my superiority, would justify me to myself and command the respect of others. But, last night, I saw it was necessary to go beyond that, and ask myself a question which, even in my worst hours of doubt, I have never had sufficient fortitude to ask myself before. I am anxious here to state positively that I did ask myself the said question; and that I answered it deliberately and calmly before certain things happened, which I shall presently set down. If I did not marry Adrian—"

Again Joanna's hand jerked away from the paper, while every nerve in her body was contracted by a spasm of almost intolerable pain. She put her left hand over her heart, gasping, the agony for the moment was so mercilessly acute. Yet, during that same moment, the old doting, ecstatic expression overspread her face. In a sense she welcomed, she gloried, in this visitation of pain.

"If I did not marry Adrian," she went on, "what then? The need for self-justification, the need for entire self-expression, would in that very dreadful event become more than ever desirable—the only solace, indeed, which could remain to me. Therefore, what had better happen? What—because I definitely and irrevocably willed it—must and should happen? I answered the question last night, and my purpose has never wavered. To-day I have spent some time in examining the stock arguments against this purpose of mine. They do not affect my determination, as I find that each one of them is based upon some assumption which my reason condemns as unsound and inadequate, or which is not applicable in my peculiar case. I know what I am going to do. The relief of that knowledge was immediate. It continues to sustain me."

Here Joanna rose and paced the room. She still wore the black silk and lace evening gown she had worn at dinner. Her hair was dressed with greater care than usual. Plain, flat-bosomed, meager, hard lines seaming her cheeks and forehead, yet there was nothing broken or weak in her bearing or aspect. Rather did she show as a somewhat tremendous creature, pacing thus, solitary, the familiar and soberly luxurious room, bearing with indomitable pride the whole realized depth and height of her trouble—a trouble to the thought of which, even while it racked her, she clung with jealous obstinacy as her sole possession of supreme and splendid worth. Her restlessness being somewhat assuaged, she went back and sat down to write.

"I do not attempt to account for what followed; I only set it down in good faith and with such accuracy as my memory permits. My memory has always been good, and, since now I have nothing left to gain or to lose, I have no temptation either to invent or to falsify. About an hour after Margaret and Marion Chase returned from the theater, and without any intervening period of unconsciousness—my mind, indeed, still occupied with the decision I had arrived at regarding my future action—I found myself walking through the streets of some foreign city. I was anxiously following a person of whose name and character I was ignorant, but who I was aware had a message of great importance which he needed to deliver to me, and to whom I felt an overpowering wish to speak. He walked apparently without any particular destination in view, yet so rapidly that I found it difficult to keep him in sight. Being tall, however, and of fashionable appearance, he, fortunately for me, was easily distinguishable from all other persons whom I met.

"I say, I—yet I am conscious, dreadfully, even infamously, conscious, that throughout I shared this experience with a woman of different antecedents, of a lower social position and inferior education to myself. Our two personalities inhabited one and the same body, for independent possession and control of which we contended without intermission, sometimes I, sometimes she, gaining the advantage. This association was very frightful to me. I felt soiled by it. And, not only did I in myself feel soiled, but hopes, emotions, aspirations which until now I had believed to be pure and elevated, assumed a vile aspect when shared by this woman's mind and heart. Still I knew that of necessity I must remain with her, continue to be, in a sense, part of her, if I was to get speech of the man whom I—we—followed, and to receive the message which he had to deliver.

"After long wandering through streets, some modern and reminding me of Paris, others narrow, crooked, and lined with ancient houses, I came to a small, formally laid-out pleasure garden in the center of the town, dominated by a singularly beautiful Gothic building, probably a church. Benches were placed at intervals round the garden along the shingled paths, between massed shrubs and beds of heliotrope and roses. Upon one of these benches, being overcome by fatigue and by a conviction of unescapable fate, I sat down. So doing, I perceived that, at the far end of the bench, the man whom I had so long followed already sat. His attitude was expressive of extreme dejection. His figure was bowed together. His elbows rested upon his knees, his hands were pressed against the sides of his head. I felt drawn to him not only by a very vital attraction, but by pity, for I could not doubt that, for some cause, he had recently suffered severely, and was suffering severely even now. I saw that this suffering blinded him to the outer things, rendering him quite indifferent to or unaware of my presence. Notwithstanding which, I—or she—the woman to whom my personality was so horribly united—after making some vulgar efforts to arouse his attention, began to speak to him, pouring forth, to my utter and inextinguishable shame, a gross travesty of my love for Adrian Savage, of my most secret thoughts and sensations in relation to that love, of my joy in his presence, of my admiration for his talents, even for his person, employing words and phrases meanwhile of a nature revolting to me which outraged my sense of propriety and self-respect—words and phrases which I was utterly incapable of using and of which I had never indeed gauged the actual meaning until they passed her lips.

"A considerable time passed before the man gave any sign that he heard what she—what I—said. He remained immersed in thought, his head bent, his hands supporting it. At last—"

And Joanna closed her eyes, waiting for a space, listening to the sobbing of wind and dripping of rain.

"—he looked round at me. His face," she wrote, "was that of Adrian; but of an Adrian whom I had never seen before. It was worn and very pale. There were blue stains beneath the eyes. All the gaiety, the beautiful, self-confident strength and hopefulness were banished from his expression, which was very stern though not actually unkind. Then I knew that he had received and read my letter; that the marks of suffering which he bore had been caused by the contents of my letter. I knew that the message which he had to deliver to me, and to obtain which I had followed him through the streets, forcing myself into union with this vicious woman—in whose speech and actions I so dreadfully participated—was nothing less than his answer to that letter.

"At last, looking fixedly at me, he said, very sadly: 'It is no use. I do not want you. Poor woman, I do not want you. It is not possible that I should ever want you. I am bitterly grieved for you; but you waste your time.'

"As he spoke he placed some money in her hand, and, having finished speaking, he rose and went away. Not once did he hesitate or look back, but held himself erect and walked as a man whose decision is deliberate. She clutched the money tightly, whimpering; but I had no part in her tears. I had no disposition to cry then; nor have I had any since. I understood what that piece of money meant. It was the price of Adrian's freedom from my love. He paid me to go away.

"I remember noticing the fantastic carven stonework of the church outlined against the night sky, while shame and despair devoured me—shame and despair intimate, merciless, unmitigated. Still clutching the piece of money, the woman got up. I do not know anything more about her, what she did, or who she was, or where she went. For a time, as far as I am concerned, the pulse of the world ceased to beat. And then I lay here, at home, in my own room at the Tower House, and heard the rain and wind in the trees just as I hear them to-night.

"When Isherwood brought me my tea, at half-past seven, she expressed concern at my appearance. I told her I had not slept and that I felt tired and faint. She insisted upon sending for Doctor Norbiton. I let her do so. It was matter of indifference to me whether I saw him or not. Nothing can change either facts or the event. But Isherwood has always been kind and faithful to me. I did not want to hurt her by opposing her wishes. Doctor Norbiton sounded my heart. He told both Isherwood and Margaret it was in a weak state; but added that he believed such mischief as exists to be functional rather than organic. He recommended me to take the tabloids, which he gave me for insomnia, sparingly, as their effect upon the heart is depressing. I listened and agreed. Margaret expressed regret at my condition. She offered to see Rossiter for me and spare me the trouble of housekeeping. I let her do so.

"It has rained all day; but I have been fully occupied in going through papers and accounts, and making sure that my own affairs and those of the household are in perfect order. This almost mechanical work is soothing. I have always been fond of accounts. I remain quite calm. Why should I be otherwise? I know the truth, and have nothing left, therefore, either to fear or to hope."

The following evening Joseph Challoner was due to dine at the Tower House. Pleading a return of faintness and disinclination for conversation, Joanna remained up-stairs in the blue sitting-room and retired early to bed. The next entry in her diary reads thus:

"THE TOWER HOUSE, August 30, 190-, 9 P.M.

"I let Isherwood undress me. I asked her for my white pleated nÉgligÉ, which I found she had sent to the cleaners' during the time my hands were hurt and I had been obliged to give her my keys. I am glad to wear it to-night. Isherwood was very kind and attentive to me. I could almost think she suspected something, but I did what I could to dissipate any suspicion she might entertain. I promised her I would call her if I wanted her during the night; but all that I really needed is quiet. This is perfectly true. I do need quiet, unbroken quiet.

"Still I must try to put down events in their proper order.—And first, I feel it is only just that I should note how much I have thought of papa during these last two very dreadful days. I have felt singularly near to him in spirit and in sympathy. I know that I have rebelled against his methods; and have both thought and spoken harshly of him. I am sorry for this. I see now that, in his position and possessing his authority, I should have acted as he did. He valued wealth as lightly as I do; though he was interested in the acquisition of it. Business to him was an occupation rather than an end in itself. He craved for entire self-expression—as I have craved for it; and it was impossible for him to find such expression in business. In public affairs, economic or social reform, he might have found it; and to the last, I believe, he hoped some opportunity of entire self-expression would present itself. That, I think, was why he disliked the idea of dying. He was ambitious of impressing himself upon the mind of his generation in the manner he inwardly felt himself capable of doing. It hurt and angered him to leave life with his personal equation unrecorded. He knew himself—as I have known myself—to be superior to others both in intellect and in the nature of his aims and ambitions. He despised weakness. He despised what is common, trivial, ignorant. He could not tolerate that those about him should run after cheap pleasures in which the mind has no part.

"This morning, about twelve o'clock, the rain lessened. I ordered the carriage and drove by myself to the West Stourmouth Cemetery. Leaving the carriage at the entrance gates, I walked to his grave. The cemetery is still but partially laid out. Patches of heather remain, making the tombstones and monuments look bare and white. I am glad papa's grave is on the highest ground. Standing by it, I saw, through scuds of driving mist, the Baughurst Woods, sloping to the shore, and beyond them the sea. The loneliness of this growing camp of the dead was sympathetic to me. I am leaving instructions that I am to be buried beside papa's grave, if not in it. I have never been so much of a companion or help to any one as to him. He, at least, wanted me, though he often frightened and wounded me. So I will go back to him in death; and lie beside him in the rain, and snow, and wind, and sunshine out there under the barren gravel of the moor.

"I received Adrian's answer to my letter by the six-o'clock post this evening. I feared giving way to emotion on opening it; but I experienced very little emotion. Of this I am glad. I am glad, too, infinitely glad, that I determined what I would do before I so strangely saw Adrian and spoke with him the night before last. If I had not determined my state of mind would have been far more agonizing. Calmness and self-respect would have been impossible. Margaret was with me in the blue sitting-room when Edwin brought me my letters. I do not know whether she observed that I received one from Adrian. I fancy not. I waited until she had gone before reading it. It proved just such a letter as I might have anticipated, written with every intention of kindness. It exhibits his character in a very agreeable light—affectionate, courteous, penetrated by regret on my account. He does his utmost to spare my feelings and soften the blow he is compelled to deal me. I appreciate all this. He praises my intelligence, and points out to me, very gracefully, the advantages of my education and of my wealth. He points out, too, the endlessly varied interests of life. He admits that he has loved Madame St. Leger for many years; and he reproaches himself deeply with not having spoken to me about his affection for her when he stayed here in May, and when I pressed him to tell me whether he was suffering from any anxiety in which I could be helpful to him.

"That is the answer of the man of society, the well-bred man of the world; the man, moreover, of sensibility and nice feeling. I quite appreciate the tone and tact of his letter. But I had already received the answer of the man himself. It was simpler, so simple as to need no supplement—'It is no use. I do not want you. My poor woman, I do not want you. It is not possible that I should ever want you. I am bitterly grieved for you; but you waste your time.'

"He has never wanted me. I have wasted my time.—That is all. And assuredly that is enough, and more than enough? I will waste no more time, Adrian. I will go where time, thought, love, and the rejection of love are not.

"The rain has come back. It drips and drips upon the veranda roof. I have burned all your letters. No one has ever seen or touched them save myself. This volume of my diary I leave to you. I shall seal it up, and direct it to you. At least read it—I am no longer ashamed. I want you to know me as I really am. Life is already over. I am already dead. So I am not afraid. I welcome the darkness of the everlasting night which is about to absorb me into itself.—I wear the white gown I wore the second time you kissed my hand.—I do not blame you, Adrian. It is just as natural that you should not love me as that I should have loved you. I understand that.

"And very soon now all my trouble will be over and passed. Soon I shall sleep in the arms of the lover who has never failed man or woman yet—in the arms of Death. JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE."

CHAPTER VIII
IN WHICH A STRONG MAN ADOPTS A VERY SIMPLE METHOD
OF CLEARING HIS OWN PATH OF THORNS

Challoner stood turning up the collar of his mackintosh. Looking back between the lines of dark, wind-agitated trees, the red mass of the house, through a dull whiteness of driving rain, showed imposing both in height and in extent. Challoner measured it with a satisfied, even triumphant, eye. Its large size suited his own large proportions capitally. This evening, though early and still light, all the blinds were drawn down. This was as it should be. He favored the observance of such outward conventional decencies. Then, as he moved away with his heavy, lunging tread, the rain and wind took him roughly on the quarter.

This rearward onslaught caused him no annoyance, however, since his thoughts were altogether self-congratulatory. Circumstance had played, and was playing, into his hands in the handsomest fashion. Well, every one gets his deserts in the long run; so he could but suppose he deserved his present good fortune! Only in this case the run had proved such an unexpectedly short and easy one. For hadn't he arrived, practically arrived, feeling every bit as fresh as when he started?—Here a turn of half-superstitious, half-cynical piety took him. The Lord helps those who have the nous to help themselves. He praised the Lord! Having offered which small tribute, or bribe, to the Judge of all the Earth who cannot do other than right, he proceeded to check off a few of his well-earned blessings.

The announcement of his engagement to Margaret Smyrthwaite had appeared, about three weeks previously, in the society columns of local and London papers. Stourmouth buzzed with the news, to a loudness which he found both humorous and flattering. In private Challoner laughed a horse-laugh more than once at thus finding how he had made his fellow-townsmen "sit up." He enjoyed the joke of his own social elevation and prospective wealth hugely. And Mrs. Gwynnie had been quite good, thank the Powers! If the rest of his acquaintance had been made to "sit up" by the news, she—to quote his own graceful manner of speech—had "taken it lying down." Really he felt very kindly toward her. She'd given no trouble. But then the world was going a lot better with Mrs. Gwyn than she'd any right to expect. Her rent and her quarterly allowance were paid with absolute regularity. Not every man would have done as much for her after the dance she'd led him! Beattie Stacey was safely married last week to her young R.M.S. second officer. And, so Challoner heard, mainly on the strength of the said young officer's excellent reputation, Gwynnie herself had taken out a new lease of social life since her installation in the white house opposite the Marychurch Borough Recreation Ground. She'd been cute enough to throw herself into that department of Anglican religio-parochial activity which busies itself with variety entertainments, rummage sales, concerts, "happy evenings," bazaars, and such-like contrivances for providing—under cover of charity—audiences for idle amateurs ambitious of publicity. Curates waxed enthusiastic over "Mrs. Spencer's splendidly unselfish helpfulness" and "wonderful organizing power."—The thought of that poor little, earnest, light-weight, impecunious baggage of an Anglo-Indian widow in the character of a church-worker tickled her ex-lover consumedly.

But now Challoner felt constrained to put a term to the slightly ribald mirth induced by this checking of his well-deserved blessings, and bestow himself within the four corners of an appropriately black-edged manner. For, as he turned out of the gates at the end of the carriage-drive, he caught sight of Col. Rentoul Haig's unmistakable figure, pompous and dapper even when clothed in an "aquascutum" and carrying a streaming umbrella, walking briskly down The Avenue. Making a pretense of deep abstraction, Challoner passed him; then, drawing up suddenly, wheeled round.

"You, Colonel?" he said. "I beg your pardon. For the minute I didn't recognize you. My thoughts were elsewhere."

He looked on the ground, as one who struggles with manly pride against strong emotion.

"You may have heard of the trouble we are in at the Tower House?" he added.

Rentoul Haig disapproved the "we"; but then he warmly and articulately disapproved the whole matter of the Challoner-Smyrthwaite alliance. Nevertheless he hungered for first-hand news, thirsted for retailable detail; and who could supply these better than Challoner? He pocketed disapproval, and answered with fussy alacrity, peering upward, into the younger man's curiously non-committal countenance, from beneath the shelter of his umbrella.

"Very fortunate to run across you like this, Challoner," he said. "I was coming to leave cards and inquire. Shocking news this, most shocking. I heard the report from Woodford, at the Club, after luncheon, and, I give you my word, it quite upset me."

"I'm not surprised, Colonel," Challoner put in gloomily.

"Why, only yesterday morning I saw her out driving between twelve and one—just upon the half-hour it must have been—as I was crossing The Square on my way to the Club. When Woodford told me, I said, 'God bless my soul, it's incredible!'"

Challoner's lips parted with an unctuous smack.

"Incredible or not, Colonel, it is only too sadly true. In the midst of life we are in death, you know. I don't set up to be a serious man, but an event like this does bring the meaning of those words home to you—makes you think a bit, reminds you what an uncommonly slippery hold even the healthiest of us has on life."

Watching the effect of these lugubrious moralizings upon his auditor, Challoner had the pleasure of seeing the latter's face grow small and blue in the shade of the wet umbrella.—"Looks like a sick frog under a toadstool," he reflected. "Well, let snobby old froggy turn blue, feel blue—the bluer the better." It served him jolly well right. Hadn't he said no end of nasty things about his, Challoner's, coming marriage? Then he proceeded with the amiable operation commonly known as "rubbing it in."

"Ah! yes," he said, "I knew how you'd feel it, Colonel. Without being oversentimental, it is a thing to break up one's sense of personal security. And a relation of yours too! Only nine-and-twenty—a mere child compared to you, of course, Colonel. It's always painful to see the younger generation go first. Yes, I knew how you'd feel it. Kind of you to come off at once like this to make inquiries. It will please Margaret, poor, dear girl. She sent for me directly they made the discovery this morning, and I've been with her ever since, looking after her and putting things through. You see, Joanna always kept the management of the establishment in her own hands, and the whole household fell to pieces like a bundle of sticks to-day. All the servants lost their heads. Somebody had to step in and lay hold. Margaret is behaving beautifully. This bearing up is all very well at first, but I'm afraid she's bound to pay later. However, thank God! I've the right, now, to take care of her."

"Quite so—no doubt—yes, exactly," Haig responded, in rather chilly accents. "Of course. But I have heard nothing but the bare fact, Challoner. Quite sudden, was it—quite unexpected?"

"Yes, and no." He spoke slowly, as one weighing his words.

"I sincerely trust there isn't any question of an inquiry?"

From his superior height Challoner looked down at the speaker in momentary and sharp suspicion. What story was current in Stourmouth, he wondered? Could the servants have talked? Had the empty tabloid bottle and the tumbler with a film of white sediment clouding the inside of it, become a matter of common knowledge? He found Rentoul Haig's expression reassuring.

"Certainly not—quite uncalled for, I am thankful to say," he replied largely. "No, no, Colonel, nothing of that sort. An inquest is a pretty sickening business under ordinary circumstances; but it amounts to a positive insult, in my opinion, in the case of a refined, sensitive gentlewoman."

Rentoul Haig came near dancing with impatience.

"True, true," he murmured.

"So, pray put that idea out of your head, and out of everybody else's head, Colonel. You'll be doing Margaret a kindness, doing poor Joanna a kindness too. People are awfully unscrupulous in the reports they circulate. But then, of course, I know we can count on your gentlemanly feeling and good taste."

A moment more and Colonel Haig believed he should burst. He was being patronized—patronized, he the bright, particular star of the most elect circle of Stourmouth society, and by Joseph Challoner!

"The fact is she hasn't been in a good state of health for some time. Margaret has spoken to me about it and a lot of people have remarked upon it. Her peculiarities seemed to grow upon her lately. And she was not an easy person to deal with—in some ways very like our poor friend her father. Margaret hasn't said much to me, but I fancy she's found her sister's temper a little trying. Health, I dare say, as much as anything. Norbiton has been treating her for sleeplessness and general debility—nerves, you know. She always was highly strung. Yesterday morning, they tell me, she looked appallingly ill and complained of having fainted in the night. They had Norbiton in, and he sounded her—was not at all satisfied with the heart's action. I am not surprised at that. You remember how peculiar her eyes were—globular—"

Challoner looked down with rich enjoyment at the "pop-eyes," so he gracefully phrased it, staring eagerly, angrily up from beneath the streaming umbrella.

"Globular," he repeated; "and with that pale circle round the edge of the iris, which invariably, in my experience, indicates a weak heart. Norbiton prescribed for her, and told her to keep quiet. Margaret, poor, dear girl, did her best; but Joanna insisted on driving out. I was dining there last night, and she didn't come down. They told me Norbiton's opinion, but I supposed it was just a case for care. And then, when her maid went to call her this morning, she found her stone cold. She must have been dead several hours—died in her sleep."

And both men stood silent, awed in spite of themselves, by the thought of Joanna Smyrthwaite lying dead.

"Shocking occurrence, very shocking indeed!" Colonel Haig remarked presently, fussily clearing his throat. "You say peculiarities had grown upon poor Miss Smyrthwaite recently. One would be glad to know why—to have some clue to the reason for that. There were rumors, I believe, a few months back of an—er—of an attachment on her part, which—it is a delicate subject to approach—was, in fact, rather misplaced. And—well—you know, one cannot help putting two and two together."

"Oh, as to anything of that sort," Challoner returned somewhat roughly, throwing his big body back from the hips and moving a step aside, as though to conceal justifiable annoyance,—"you really must excuse me, Colonel. Standing in the relation I do to both the Smyrthwaite ladies, it is a subject I hardly care to discuss. I can't help knowing a good deal, and I can't help what I've noticed; but I don't feel at liberty to speak. Mr. Savage stayed twice at the Tower House this year, as you are aware; and—people have eyes in their heads. I don't mind telling you, he and I came to loggerheads over the division of the property. That's what first really brought Margaret and me together. I had to protect her interests, or she would have come off a very bad second. And, though it's early days to mention it, I don't mind telling you in confidence—the strictest confidence, you understand, Colonel—"

"You know by this time, I hope, Challoner, how entirely you can trust me?" the other remonstrated, at once famished for further information and bristling with offended dignity.

"To be sure I do.—Well, then, it may interest you to hear that Margaret has the old home secured to her. I am pleased on her account, for she's fond of the place. Personally, there are several houses in Baughurst Park I prefer. However, that's neither here nor there. If she's pleased I'm pleased, naturally. But, exclusive of the house and its contents, she hardly benefits at all under her sister's will."

In his excitement Rentoul Haig lost control of his umbrella, which, tilting in a gust of wind, discharged a small cataract of water down the back of his neck.

"Bless my soul," he exclaimed, "you don't say so! What ungodly weather! Where on earth does all her money go to?"

"You may well ask," Challoner replied grimly. "In the case of her dying unmarried her share in the mills and the rest of the Yorkshire property is left to Mr. Andrew Merriman, the partner and manager—a self-made man, who had the wit to get round old Mr. Smyrthwaite. He's feathered his own nest very tidily, it strikes me, one way and another. And the bulk of the invested property—prepare yourself for a pleasant surprise, Colonel—Joanna leaves, on trust, to her scrapegrace, rascally brother."

A flashlight hope of a solid legacy had momentarily illuminated Rentoul Haig's horizon. But the light of hope was extinguished almost as soon as kindled, giving him just time to be mortally disappointed. His face fell, while Challoner, watching, could barely repress his glee.

"But, but," he bubbled, "every one has been assured for years that the good-for-nothing boy was dead!"

"I don't want to be inhuman, but I can only say that, for the sake of my future wife's peace of mind, I most sincerely and cordially trust he is dead—dead and done with. Judging by what you told me yourself, Colonel, from a child he has been a downright bad lot, a regular waster. You may also be interested to hear we owe this precious bit of business to Mr. Adrian Savage. He came to Joanna, when he was over last, with some cock-and-bull story about young Smyrthwaite's turning up, half-starved, in Paris last winter. Worked upon her feelings no end with a whole lot of Frenchified false sentiment—brother and sister, the sacredness of family, and that sort of fluff-stuff. I am bound to say plainly I date the break-up of her health from that moment. He spoke to me about young Smyrthwaite, but, of course, I refused to touch it. Gave him a piece of my mind which I fancy he didn't quite relish, as he packed up and took himself off, on the quiet, next morning. As I told him, if he and Merriman wanted to dump the young scoundrel upon his two unfortunate sisters they mustn't look to me for assistance—the job, as I told him, wasn't in Joseph Challoner's line, not at all. Now, Colonel, I ought not to detain you any longer. I'm pleased to have had the chance to set your mind at ease on one or two points. And you'll do both Margaret and myself a favor if you will tell every one it was heart, just simply heart—a thing that might happen to any one of us, you or me, for instance, any day. Margaret will feel it very kind and thoughtful of you to call, like this at once, to inquire. Now I really must be off. Good-evening to you. Let you know the date of the funeral? Of course—good-evening."

And he swung up The Avenue, in the shrinking light, under the swaying, dripping trees, highly elate.

"Choked old froggy off neatly," he said to himself, "and got my knife into highty-tighty Cousin Adrian too. I wonder if he did carry on with Joanna. I'd give something to know—dare say it'll come out in time. Anyhow, he wouldn't touch her money; though it would have been bad policy to acquaint old Haig with that little fact. Better take the short-cut home. Stiff from standing so long in the wet; but it's worth while, if only for the fun of making old Haig feel so confoundedly cheap."

Supported by these charitable reflections, he turned off the main road into a footpath which, after skirting the gardens of a large villa facing on to The Avenue, struck northwestward across an as yet unreclaimed portion of the Baughurst Park Estate. By following this route Challoner took the base instead of the two sides of a triangle, thus saving about a quarter of a mile in his walk home to Heatherleigh. A dark plain of high, straggling heather, broken here and there by a thicker darkness of advancing ranks of self-sown firs, lay on either side the grayness of the sand and flint strewn track. Even in sunshine the region in question was cheerless, and, as seen now, in the driving rain and fading daylight, it bore a positively forbidding aspect. But to this Challoner, having returned to enumeration of his well-deserved blessings, was sublimely indifferent.

And among those blessings—here, alone, free to disregard conventional black-edged decencies and be honest with himself—Joanna Smyrthwaite's death, although an ugly suspicion of suicide did hang around it, might, he felt, be counted. Making the admission, he had the grace to feel slightly ashamed of his own cynicism. In the first shock of the tragedy, when Marion Chase sent for him in the morning, he had been genuinely troubled and overset. But, as the day wore on, the advantages of the melancholy event disclosed themselves more and more clearly. Joanna Smyrthwaite never liked him, considered him her social inferior, didn't mince matters in expressing her objection to her sister's engagement. Ignored him, when she got the chance, or snubbed him. Distinctly she'd done her best to make him feel awkward; and there was bound to be friction in the future both in their family relation and in the management of the Smyrthwaite property. Joanna was uncommonly strong. He, for one, had never underrated the force of her character. He even owned himself a trifle afraid of her, afraid of some pull—as he expressed it—that she might have over Margaret. Now he would have Margaret to himself, exclusively to himself—and Challoner's blood grew hot, notwithstanding the chill dreariness of wind and wet, thinking of that.

For his feeling toward Margaret Smyrthwaite had come to be the master power of his life, of all his schemes of self-aggrandizement. After the somewhat coarse and primitive manner of his kind, he was over head and ears in love with her. He was proud of her, almost sensitively anxious to please her; ready, for all his burly, bullying roughness, to play faithful dog, fetch and carry and slave for her. No woman had ever affected him or excited his passions as she did. In food he relished highly seasoned dishes to apprehend the flavor of which you do not need to shut your eyes and listen. And Margaret Smyrthwaite's attractions were of the highly seasoned order, the effect of her full-fleshed, slightly overdressed and overscented person presenting itself without any baffling reserve, frankly assailing and provoking the senses.—Oh! he'd treat her like a queen; work for her; buy her jewels, motor-cars, aeroplanes if she fancied them; pet, amuse, make Stourmouth bow down to, make himself a great man, for her!—Sir Joseph and Lady Challoner—a loftier flight than that—who could tell? Maybe a peerage. Lord and Lady Baughurst—why not? After all, if you play your cards cleverly enough such apparently improbable things do happen, particularly in this blessed twentieth century, when money is the prime factor.

And there was money in plenty, would be more, unless he was uncommonly out of his reckoning. At the start, so he calculated, their united incomes—his own and Margaret's—would amount to getting on for twelve thousand. All to the good, too, since there was no drain of a large landed estate absorbing more than half its yearly revenue in compulsory outgoings. They would be married soon, quite soon. Her sister's death and her present loneliness supplied ample reason for pushing on the wedding. It must be a quiet one, of course, out of respect for black-edged decencies. But he didn't object to that. The thing was to get her.—And then he'd carry her away, right away, shaking her free of the dismal, old-fashioned, Smyrthwaite rut altogether. They'd take a three months' honeymoon and travel somewhere, anywhere; go a yachting trip, say, up the Mediterranean. Never since he was a boy at school had he taken a holiday. It had been grind, grind, scheme, scheme, climb, climb without intermission. Not but what he'd climbed to some purpose, since he'd got high enough at forty to pluck such a luscious mouthful as Margaret off the apple-tree against which he'd set up his ladder! Now he would take a holiday, if only to show other men what a prize Joseph Challoner had won in the shape of a woman.

Amorous, uxorious, his whole big body tingling with emotion, he forged along the path across the darkling moorland, breasting the wind-driven sheets of cold rain.

"Hi! slow up there, you great, lumbering, greasy-skinned elephant, and tell me where the devil I've got to in this blasted old wilderness!" a voice shouted.

At the same time he was aware that a narrow strip of the gray pathway in front of him reared itself up on end, assuming human form—a human form, moreover, oddly resembling that of Adrian Savage.

The style of the address was scarcely mollifying, and Challoner had all a practical man's hatred both of being taken by surprise and of encountering phenomena which he could not account for at once in a quite satisfactory and obvious manner. He came straight to the baffling apparition, and looked it steadily, insolently, up and down, the bully in him stirred into rather dangerous activity. The ridicule of his personal appearance wounded his vanity. The interruption of his dreams of love and glory infuriated him; while the fancied likeness of the speaker to Adrian Savage sharpened the edge of both offenses.

"I advise you to keep a civil tongue in your head, or you may happen to find this wilderness an even more blasted and blasting locality than will at all suit you," he said threateningly.

At close quarters the slouching figure was certainly not that of Adrian Savage, nor was the weak, dissolute, blue-eyed face. Yet, although seen indistinctly in the waning light, the said face struck Challoner as unaccountably familiar. What on earth, who on earth was the fellow? Not an ordinary tramp, for his speech, though thick with drink, and his clothes, though ill-kept and dirty, were those of a man of education and position. Challoner continued to scrutinize him. And under that unfriendly and menacing scrutiny the young man's tone changed, declining to petulant almost whining apology.

"You needn't bluster," he said. "I meant no harm; and you know you did look awfully funny and shiny! I want to know where I am. I came across from Havre to Barryport in an onion-boat, because it was cheapest. I'm not overflush of cash. So I've come to look up some of my people who live about here."

"Charming surprise for them," Challoner said.

"And it blew like blazes all last night. Between the motion and the stench of the onions I was as sick as Jonah's whale. Nothing left inside of me except just myself. One of those Breton sailor chaps, hawking his beastly vegetables, came a bit of the way from Barryport with me. He told me to cut across these commons and I should be sure to come out all right; but I expect he lied just to get quit of me."

"More than possible," Challoner said.

"I ought to have stuck to the tram-lines, but my head's rather light. I haven't got over the Jonah business yet. I lost my bearings altogether somehow, through feeling so awfully slack. I've been sheltering in under those mangy old fir-trees for I don't know how long, hoping somebody might pass. And I'm wet to the skin, and as cold as charity."

"Very interesting indeed, but no earthly concern of mine. So if you've got to the end of your tale I'll continue my walk. Good-day," Challoner commented, preparing to resume his homeward journey.

The young man caught him by the arm.

"Say, but you can't leave me alone in this God-forsaken hole?"

"Oh yes, I can," Challoner answered. "Kindly take your dirty paw off my sleeve, will you? else I may be compelled to have a word with the local authorities about a case of assault, attempted robbery with violence, and such sweet little games. However, it wouldn't be the first time you've made acquaintance with the inside of a police cell, unless I'm much mistaken."

"I don't mean any harm. I only want you to tell me the way. I can't lie out here in the wet all night. It would rot me with chills and fever."

The wind had increased in force. Now the tumult of it was loud. It rushed through the firs, bending them low, tearing off dry branches and tufted tassels; then fled on, screaming, across the dark plain of heather like some demented thing let loose. The speaker craned his neck upward and raised his voice to a quavering shout in the effort to make himself heard. His face was close to Challoner's; and again the latter was puzzled by something unaccountably familiar in the features and general effect of it. Whereupon the bullying instinct gave place to caution.

"See here," he said, "you must behave like a reasonable being, not like a driveling sot, if you want me to take any trouble about you. Tell you your way, you young fool, your way where?"

"To the Tower House, something Park—Baughurst Park—that's the blooming name of it, where my people live."

Challoner started; he could not help it. Then he waited till the next gust of wind had spent its fury, and, in the lull which followed, spoke very slowly.

"So that's the blooming name of the blooming place where your people live, is it? And who may your people be, if you please, and what is your business with them?"

"What, the deuce, does that matter to you?" the other answered, trying to ruffle, yet shrinking away nervously, while the wind, gathering force again, whipped his legs and back, showing the lines of his wasted, large-boned frame through his thin, light-colored clothing.

"As it happens, it matters very much to me," Challoner retorted, "because some very particular friends of mine live at the Tower House. It may amuse you to hear I have just come from there, and that you very certainly can't gain access to the Tower House without my permission, and that I very certainly shall not give that permission. Young gentlemen of your particular kidney aren't required there. The men-servants would kick you out, and quite properly. We know how to treat loafers and tippling impostors who try to sponge upon gentlewomen here in England.—Now come along with me. I'll see you as far as the tram-line, and pay your fare to Barryport, and you can go on board your onion-boat again. Also I'll telephone through to the central police station directly I get home and give the Stourmouth and Barryport police a little description of you. So step out, if you please. No malingering."

As he finished speaking Challoner grasped the young man solidly by the shoulder, propelling him forward, but the latter, slippery as an eel, wriggled himself free.

"Let go, you great hulking beast!" he cried. "I'm not an impostor. I'm William Smyrthwaite, and my sister Joanna means to provide for me. I know all about that. A chap who I ran across three days ago in Rouen told me. We always were chummy in the old days, Nannie and I. She'll tell you I'm speaking the truth fast enough, and make you look d—d silly. She'll recognize and acknowledge me, see if she don't!"

"Upon my word, I'm afraid she's not likely to have an opportunity of doing anything of the kind, poor lady," Challoner returned; and he laughed at his own rather horrible joke. "So come along, Mr. Who-ever-you-are, alias William Smyrthwaite, Esq. I begin to think I'd better see you safe on board your precious onion-boat myself, and have you affectionately looked after till she sails. It may save both of us trouble."

"You beast, you cursed, great, shiny, black devil!" Bibby shouted. And he clawed and struck at his tormentor passionately.

The first touch of those striking, clawing hands let the underlying wild animal loose in Challoner. A primitive lust of fight took him, along with a savage joy in the act of putting forth his own immense physical strength. Still, at first, his temper remained fairly under control, and he played with his adversary, feinted and parried. But the wretched boy did not fight fair. He indulged in sneaking, tricky dodges learned amid the moral and social filth of the Paris under-world and in South American gambling hells and doss-houses. Soon Challoner lost his temper, saw his chance, took it; delivered one blow, straight from the shoulder, which, landing on Bibby's temple, dropped him like so much lead on the rain-washed flints of the crown of the pathway. Then he stood breathing heavily, his eyes bloodshot, the veins standing out like cords on his forehead, the intoxication of battle at once stupefying and maddening him.

Presently Bibby's limbs twitched; and, as though moved by a spring, he sat bolt upright, his elbows set back, his hands, the thick-jointed fingers wide apart, raised to the level of his shoulders.

"He's done me in, the clumsy, murderous brute!" he panted. Then childishly whimpering—"Nannie," he wailed, "poor old Nannie, so you're dead too. Golly, what a sell! Never mind. I'm just coming."

He lurched and fell sideways, rolling over face downward into a long, sandy puddle edging the pathway.

Five minutes, nearly ten minutes passed, while Challoner remained standing stock-still in the volleying wind and blinding rain and forlorn fading light of the moorland. At last he shook himself, went forward and knelt beside the motionless Thing lying close against the black ragged fringe of heath, upon its stomach, in the sandy wetness. For some time he couldn't bring himself to touch it. Then putting strong constraint upon himself, he turned it over and bent low, staring at it. It reminded him of the big, white, yellow-headed maggots he used to pick out of the decaying wood of the old summer-house in the little garden at home as a boy, and use for bait when he went fishing in the river at Mary church. Yes—it was queerly like those maggots. But somehow it wore the clothes of Adrian Savage. And its poor face was that of Joanna Smyrthwaite as he had seen her this morning in the agitated silence of her room, stretched cold and lifeless beneath the fine lace coverlet of her satin wood bed. Only her eyes were shut, and this Thing's eyes were wide, wide open. Now its loose lips parted. Its mouth opened too, while a dark thread trickled slowly down its chin into the hollow of its throat inside its dirty, crumpled collar.

Challoner tumbled up hastily and waited, breathing hard and brushing the rain and sweat off his face with the back of his hand. Gradually his mind began to work clearly. His sense of ordinary every-day happenings, their correlation and natural consequences, of his own identity, his business, his hopes of worldly advancement, wealth and titles, came back to him. He understood that he must decide, act, cover up what he had done, get rid of this accusing, motionless Thing lying open-eyed, open-mouthed in the pathway.

He knelt down again, put his arms round the limp body, with a mighty lift and heave flung it sack-like across his shoulder, staggered on to his feet, and, heading southwestward in the teeth of the gale, laboring under the weight of that which he carried, plowed his way doggedly across the desolate outstretch of rough, resilient heather, down into the heart of the straining, bellowing, storm-swept woodland.

It was late, long past his usual dinner-hour, when Challoner reached Heatherleigh. To his own surprise, he accounted for himself to his servant as the man helped him off with his mackintosh. He'd been detained, had got a chill, he believed; didn't know that he wanted any dinner. Yes—let them send whatever they'd got ready—hot, and the plainer the better. He'd have it when he came down—in ten minutes. He must change first, he was so confoundedly wet.

For the sake of appearances he made an effort to eat; but the sight and smell of food turned his stomach. Still complaining of chill, he left the table and went into the smoking-room. Though an abstemious man, both from habit and policy, he mixed himself a remarkably stiff brandy and soda, set it down on the large writing-table—loaded with bundles of folded papers, documents engrossed on vellum and tied with pink tape—and forgot to drink it. Went round the room turning all the incandescent gas-lamps full on. The chocolate-colored imitation leather paper with which the walls were hung made the room dark; and Challoner felt a strong aversion to the dark. He wanted to see every object quite plainly and in its entirety. He took a cigar from the cedar-lined silver box Margaret Smyrthwaite had given him, standing on the revolving bookcase—looked at it and put it back. Somehow he couldn't smoke. Sank down in an arm-chair and sat glowering, like some sullen, savage, trapped animal, into the empty grate.

More than once, fatigue overcoming him, he dozed, only to wake, with a start, crying out loud:

"It wasn't my fault. I didn't begin it. He hit me first."

Then, clearer understanding returning, he continued:

"I struck him in self-defense—before God—as I hope to be saved, I did. At most they could bring it in manslaughter. I did it for Margaret's sake, to save her from being exploited and sponged on by the drunken young rotter. Ah! my God—but if it was true, if, as he claimed to be, he was her brother, how can I go to her with his blood on my hands? Margaret—I'm in hell. Forgive me—don't believe it! Never know—my own poor, splendid darling—God, how I love her—Margaret—Margaret—never know—I can't, I can't lose you."

And Challoner broke down, sobs shaking his great, amorous body and tearing his bull throat.

Toward morning at the turn of the tide the gale abated and the rain ceased. When daylight came, but not until then, Challoner went up-stairs to his bedroom, the windows of which faced east. He drew back the curtains, pulled up the wooden-slatted Venetian blinds and watched the brightness widen outward and upward behind the ragged crests of the stone pines. As a rule he had not time or care to waste on the beauties of nature, but he found vague, inarticulate solace in the gaudy colors of this wild sunrise. He was calmer now, and the strong daylight helped to drive out exaggerations of sentiment and fearful fancies. In short, his impregnable health and physical courage, his convenient coarseness of moral fiber and indomitable tenacity of purpose, began to assert themselves. He began to argue and not unably to plead his own cause to himself.

For, look at the ghastly episode what way you pleased, how could he be blamed for it? The whole thing was accident, accident pure and simple, which he could not foresee, and equally could not prevent. It had been sprung on him out of a clear sky. He was rushed, not given an instant's breathing space for consideration. And that was manifestly unfair. Any man might lose his head and be betrayed into violence by such vile provocation.

His spirits revived.

And, when all came to all, there was not a tittle of evidence against him! After parting with Haig he had not met a soul. He could swear no one had seen him turn out of The Avenue into the footpath. The rain would have obliterated all traces of the struggle by this time, and wet heather, thank goodness, doesn't show tracks. Though why he should trouble about such details he didn't know. It was blitheringly silly, for, who the devil would be on the lookout for tracks? A thousand to one the body would not be found until the estate foresters cut the bracken in November; and by then—

Sweat broke out on Challoner's forehead, and he was not sorry the sun stood high behind the pines, throwing slanting shafts of light between their dark stems across the rain-swamped garden, where the blackbirds and thrushes patroled, worm-hunting, on the turf.

By that time, whatever was left would be in no condition to tell tales. "Painful discovery in the Baughurst Park Woods"—he could see the headlines in the local papers—"Mysterious death"—"No clue to the identity of the remains"—None, thank the Lord, none, none! But for a couple of francs and a few English coppers the boy's pockets were empty. Challoner, praise to God! had mustered sufficient spunk to ascertain that.

All the same—and here callousness failed him a little—his and Margaret's honeymoon should be a long one, long enough to insure their being far away from Stourmouth when the foresters cut the bracken in November. Distance, travel, new scenes and new interests, are said to draw the sting of remembrance. And it was best, immeasurably best, not only for himself, but indirectly for Margaret also, that remembrance should be blunted, that he should—if he only could—forget.

For, after all—his spirits in the honest sunshine reviving yet further—what proof had he the miserable drink and vice corrupted wastrel had spoken the truth? Wasn't it much more probable Haig's story was the right one, and that this was some low, blackmailing scoundrel trading upon scraps of hearsay information he'd happened to pick up? A lying, misbegotten whelp, in short, of whom society at large was extremely well rid—really, to expend sentiment upon the summary removal of such refuse came near being maudlin. As to any fancied resemblance he bore to Joanna Smyrthwaite, one couldn't attach any serious importance to that. In the ghostly twilight it was impossible to see distinctly. And, after the uncommonly nasty upset of the morning and the bullying he'd been obliged to give that old grannie, Norbiton, before the latter would consent to ignore the empty tabloid bottle, and certify the cause of death simply as syncope, it was hardly surprising if he'd got poor Joanna's personal appearance a little upon his brain. No—it is an awful misfortune, no doubt, to be, however accidentally, the means of taking a fellow-creature's life; but, looking at the whole occurrence coolly, he—Challoner—came to the comforting conclusion that he was hardly more to blame, more responsible, than he would be if some reckless fool had blundered across the road under the nose of his motor and got run down.

Whereupon, the sun having now cleared the crests of the pines and it being imperative not to give the servants any handle for gossip, Challoner undressed and went to bed.

He succeeded in advancing the date of the wedding; but during the five weeks which elapsed before it took place his moods caused some perplexity and no small discomfort to his poorer clients, junior partners, and clerks. At moments he indulged in boisterous mirth; but for the most part was abominably bad-tempered, irritable, and morose.

Colonel Haig, however, noted unexpected signs of grace in him, concerning which he spoke to Mr. Woodford one day at the Club.

"Challoner's coming more into line," he said; "he is less noisy and self-assertive—very much less so. A good deal of the improvement in his manner is due to me, I flatter myself. I have been at the trouble of giving him some very strong hints. If you propose to associate with gentlemen you must learn to behave like a gentleman. His election to the Club vexed me at the time. Too much country-attorney sharp practice in the methods he employed, I thought. So I am relieved, greatly relieved, he has taken my friendly admonitions to heart. It would have annoyed me extremely if his membership had lowered the social tone of the Club. Too, it's pleasanter for me personally, as I am bound, I suppose, to see a good deal of him in the future, on my cousin, Margaret Smyrthwaite's, account."

When alone with his fiancÉe during this period of waiting Challoner's attitude alternated between anxious, almost servile, humility and extravagant making of love. Margaret, however, being a young woman of limited imagination, put down both humility and "demonstrations" to the potent effect of her own charms, thus remaining altogether sensible, self-complacent, outwardly composed, inwardly excited, and, in fine, very well content. While unknown to her, unknown, indeed, to all save the man who so slavishly obeyed and fiercely caressed her, the unsightly Thing, which had once been her playmate and brother, lay out, below the ever-talking trees, among the heath, and sedge-grass, and bracken, the tragedy and unspeakable disgrace of its decomposition not hidden by so much as a pauper's deal coffin-lid.

CHAPTER IX
WHEREIN ADRIAN SAVAGE SUCCEEDS IN AWAKENING
LA BELLE AU BOIS DORMANT

In consequence of the bad weather every one returned to Paris early that autumn. Anastasia Beauchamp's first reception—the fourth Thursday in September—proved a crowded and animated function. Each guest expressed rapture at meeting every other guest, and at being back, yes, once again veritably established in our dear, good, brave, inexhaustibly interesting, intelligent and entertaining Paris! How they—the speakers—ever mustered sufficient fortitude to go away, still more to stay away, they could really now form no conception. But it was finished, thank Heaven! the mortally tedious exile; and they were restored to the humanities, the arts, the sciences, in short, to civilization, of which last dear Mademoiselle Beauchamp's hospitality represented so integral and so wholly charming a part. This and much more to this effect. The French mind and French diction rarely fumble; but arrive, with graceful adroitness, squarely on the spot. Lightness of touch and finish of phrase effectually safeguarded these raptures against any suggestion of insincerity or absurdity. They were diverting, captivating, as were the retailers of them. And Anastasia listened, retorted, sympathized, capped a climax with further witty extravagance, heartily pleased and amused.

Nevertheless, to her, this yearly rentrÉe was not without an element of pathos. In the matter of reminiscence and retrospect Miss Beauchamp was the least self-indulgent of women; her tendency to depress her juniors by exaltation of the past at expense of the present being of the smallest. To hours of solitary communing in her hidden garden she restricted all that. Still this joyous homing, when the members of her acquaintance taking up their residence once again in Paris blossomed into fullness of intellectual and social activity, left her a little wistful, a little sad. Recognition of the perpetual shifting of the human scene, of the instability of human purpose, oppressed her. How few of those who greeted her to-day with such affectionate empressement were precisely the same in thought, circumstance or character as when they bade her farewell at the end of May! She could not but note changes. Those changes might be slight, infinitesimal, but they existed. Not only do things, as a whole, march on; but the individual marches on also—marches on, too often, out completeness of sympathy, completeness of comprehension, or, through the ceaselessly centrifugal, scattering action of the social machine, marches on actually out of hearing and out of sight! And this thinning of the ranks, these changes in those who remained, did cause her sorrow. She could not bring herself to acquiesce in and accept them with entire philosophy.

Arrayed in a dress of clove carnation satin veiled with black ninon de soie, Miss Beauchamp stood near the door opening from the first of the suite of reception-rooms—in which tea had been served—on to the entrance hall. She had taken up her position there when bidding her guests adieu. In the second room two persons were talking, Lewis Byewater's slow, detached, slightly nasal accents making themselves clearly audible.

"Lenty Stacpole feels Madame Vernois is just the loveliest mature French feminine type he has yet encountered. He would be gratified to work up those thumbnail sketches of her he made at Ste. Marie into a finished portrait for exhibition with his other work in New York this winter—"

With an unconscious, but very expressive, little gesture of reprobation Anastasia moved across to the embrasure of the near window, pleasant from the fresh, pungent scent of a bank of white and lemon-colored chrysanthemums. She looked up into the limpid clarity of the twilight sky seen above the house-roofs on the opposite side of the quiet street.

... Yes, the perpetual shifting of the human scene, the instability of human purpose. And, as concrete example of all that, a portrait of gentle, shrinking, timid, pre-eminently old-world Madame Vernois on exhibition in New York! The shouting incongruity of the proposition! Would her daughter, la belle Gabrielle, entertain it? And there, as Anastasia confessed to herself, she ran up against the provoking cause of her quarrel with existing conditions and tendencies. For, of the two living persons whom she had recently come to hold dearest, wasn't the one changed and the other absent?

Since that pleasant afternoon at Ste. Marie she had neither sight nor word of Adrian Savage. The young man appeared to have incontinently vanished. She rang up his office in the rue Druot. The good Konski replied over the telephone, "Monsieur was, alas! encore en voyage." She rang up his home address in the rue de l'UniversitÉ, only to receive the same response; supplemented by the information that Adrian had not notified the date of his return, nor left orders as to the forwarding of his letters. What did this mean? She became anxious.

"Lenty has worried quite a wearing amount," Byewater was saying, "whether it would be suitable he should ask you to let him work up a portrait. I tell you, Madame St. Leger, Lenty's silver-point is just a dream. Do not go thinking it is because I am his friend I judge it so. Mr. Dax positively enthused when he saw some samples last fall; and Lenty has broken his own record since then—"

Anastasia, still consulting the calm evening sky, began to play a quite other than calm little fantasia with the fingers of one hand upon the window-pane. For why, in the name of diplomacy, of logic, of Eros himself, had Adrian Savage elected to vanish at this moment of all conceivable moments? The goal of his ambitions was in sight—hadn't she told him as much at Ste. Marie? Eros awaiting, as she believed, to crown him victor in the long, faithful fight. And then that he, the dear, exasperating young idiot, should gallop off thus, the Lord only knew whither, instead of claiming the enchanting fruit of his victory! Really, it was too wildly irritating. For la belle Gabrielle wasn't pleased—not a bit of it. She resented his absence at this particular juncture, as any woman of spirit not unreasonably must. Only too probably she would make him pay for his apparent slight of her. And to what extent would she make him pay? Faster and faster grew the time of the fantasia upon the window-pane, for this question greatly disturbed Anastasia.

For if Adrian must be cited as an example of the absent, la belle Gabrielle must be cited as among the changed. Miss Beauchamp, who watched her with affectionate solicitude, perceived something was a little bit wrong with her. She was not quite contented, not quite happy. Her manner had lost its delightful repose, her beauty, though great, its high serenity. Her wit had a sharp edge to it. She avoided occasions of intimacy. To-day she had helped Anastasia receive; and the latter remarked that, during the whole course of the afternoon, men had gathered about her and that she flirted—gracefully—yet undeniably—with each and all in turn. Since her return to Paris she had discarded the last outward signs of mourning. The smoke-gray walking-suit she wore to-day was lavishly embroidered in faint pastel shades of mauve, turquoise, and shell-pink, the pattern outlined here and there in silver thread, which glinted slightly as she moved. The same delicate tones tipped the panache of smoke-gray ostrich plumes set at the side of her large black hat. In this donning of charming colors Anastasia read the signing of some private declaration of independence, some assertion, not only of her youth and youth's acknowledged privilege of joyous costume, but of intention to make capital out of the admiration her youth and beauty excited after the manner of other fair mondaines.

Clearly Madame St. Leger had arrived at a definite and momentous parting of the ways. Her mourning, all which it implied and which went along with it, was a thing of the past. Her nature was too rich—let it be added, too normal and wholesome—for the senses not to play their part in the shaping of her destiny. She had coquetted with Feminism, it is true; but such appeals and opportunities as Feminism has to offer the senses are not of an order wholesome natures can accept. To Gabrielle those appeals and opportunities were, briefly, loathsome; while, in her existing attitude, an exclusively intellectual fanaticism—such as alone can render advanced Feminism morally innocuous—no longer could control or satisfy her. Against it her ironic and critical humor rebelled, making sport of it. It followed, therefore, as Anastasia saw, that la belle Gabrielle would inevitably seek satisfaction, scope for her young energies, for her unimpaired joy of living, elsewhere. And this signaled possible danger. For, just now, being piqued, as Anastasia believed, and pushed by wounded pride, she might commit a folly. She might marry the wrong man, marry for position merely, or for money. Plenty of aspirants, judging by this afternoon, needed but little encouragement to declare themselves. She had borne the trials of one loveless marriage bravely, without faintest breath of scandal or hint of disaster. Throughout she had been admirable, both in taste and in conduct. But what about a second loveless marriage, made now in the full bloom of her womanhood?

Miss Beauchamp's fingers positively drummed upon the window. For she had come to love them both so closely, love them foolishly, even weakly, much—perhaps—this very attractive young couple, of whom the one, just now, was absent, the other changed! Beyond measure would it grieve her if the consummation of their romance should be frustrated or should come about other than quite honest and noble lines. Why, oh! why, in Heaven's name, did Adrian Savage absent himself? Why, at this eminently psychologic moment, was he not here? Anastasia could have wept.

Then, becoming aware of footsteps, and some presence entering from the hall behind her, she turned round hastily to find herself confronted by Adrian himself.

"Enfin!" she cried, enthusiastically. "What an inexpressible relief to see you, my dear Savage! You discover me in the very act of exhaling my doubtfully pious soul in prayers for your speedy return. You are late, in some respects perhaps dangerously late; but 'better late than never'—immeasurably better in this connection. Only, pardon me, where on earth have you been?"

The young man held her hand affectionately.

"In a land which possesses no frontiers, alas!" he said; "a land which bears no relation to geography."

"Hum! Hum!" Anastasia responded, just a trifle impatiently, shaking her head. "And in addition to its other peculiarities is this famous country devoid of a postal system, may I ask?"

"Practically, yes," Adrian answered. "Unless one is prepared to make oneself a really unpardonable bore. Some people call it the Land of Regrets, dear friend, others call it Purgatory. The two names are synonymous for most of us, I imagine. I have spent several weeks there, and the atmosphere of the accursed place still so clings to me that, although I needed immensely to see you, I shrank from coming here to-day until, as I supposed, all your other guests would have gone."

Then Anastasia, looking at him, perceived that this delightful young man—her great fondness for whom she did not attempt to disguise or deny—must also be added to the number of the homing Parisians who had suffered change since she saw them last.

To begin with, he was in mourning of the correct French order, which, in man's attire only in a degree less than in woman's, prescribes uncompromising severity of black. But the change in him, as she quickly apprehended, went deeper than such merely outward acknowledgment of mournful occurrence. Some profound note had been struck since she saw him at Ste. Marie of the gleaming sands and alluring horizons, revealing tremendous and vital issues to him; and, in view of those same issues, revealing him to himself. From the effect of this revelation his whole being was still vibrant. Anastasia's heart went out to him in large and generous sympathy; but she abstained from question or comment. The matter, whatever it might be, was grave, not to be taken lightly or played with. If he intended to give her his confidence, he would find an opportunity for doing so himself. Men, as she reflected, in their dealings with women are made that way. Express no desire to learn what troubles them, and they hasten to tell you. Show, however discreetly, your anxiety to hear, and they roll like hedgehogs, prickles outward, at once! So she merely said, smiling at him:

"I am afraid you should have waited even longer, my dear Savage, if your object was to avoid all my guests. Two, in any case, still linger. Listen—we cannot hope for solitude À deux just yet."

For once more Byewater's slow, penetrating accents made themselves audible.

"If you feel not to be able to entertain Lenty Stacpole's proposal, Madame St. Leger, I would not have you hesitate to tell me. I believe I catch on to your objection, though in America our ladies do not have such strong prejudices against publicity. I will explain to Lenty the way you feel. I would not wish to put you to any worry of refusing his proposal yourself."

"Eh! Par exemple! And pray what next?" Adrian said, under his breath, with raised eyebrows, looking his hostess inquiringly in the face.

"Ste. Marie offered only too many fatally magical quarters of an hour. They are both very hopelessly far gone, the two poor innocents!"

"Both? But it is preposterous, incredible! Dearest friend, you do not say to me both—not both?" Adrian cried, in a rising scale of heated protest.

To which Anastasia, hailing these symptoms of militant jealousy as altogether healthy, replied genially, taking his arm:

"If you doubt my word, come and judge for yourself."

Lewis Byewater, his hands clasped behind him, leaned his limp height against one of the few wall-spaces unincrusted with pictures, mirrors, china and other liberal confusion of ornament. Madame St. Leger stood near him, smoothing out the wrinkles in the wrists of her long gloves. To Adrian, as he entered the room, her charming person presented itself in profile. He perceived, and this gave him a curious turn in the blood, half of subtle alarm, half of high promise, that she once more wore colors.

Anastasia Beauchamp felt his arm tremble.

"Yes," she murmured, "a certain enchanting woman puts on her armor and takes the field again. Believe me, it is time, high time, you came back!"

"You are so very good to try to spare me the pain of making Mr. Stacpole a refusal," Gabrielle was saying sweetly to the young American. "But you do always show yourself so very amiable, so thoughtful I think your countrymen are of the most—how do you say?—the most unselfish of any—"

Turning her head—"Ah!" she exclaimed, quite sharply, living red leaping into the round of her cheeks and living light into her eyes—"it is you, Mr. Savage?"

But even while the answering light leaped into Adrian's eyes, very effectually for the moment dissipating their melancholy, her expression hardened, becoming mocking and ironic.

"You have the pleasure to know my kind friend, M. Byewater?" she asked, with a graceful wave of the hand toward that excellent youth, who had ceased to lounge against the wall and stood rather anxiously upright, the blankness of unexpected discomfiture upon his ingenuous countenance.

"Incontestably I have the pleasure of knowing M. Byewater," Adrian replied. "I have also had the pleasure of reading, and further, of publishing, two of his a little—yes, I fear, perhaps just a little—lengthy articles."

"I did condense all I knew," Byewater put in ruefully, addressing his hostess. "But I presume I was over-weighted by the amount of my material."

"Quite so; and the whole secret both of style and of holding your reader's attention lies in selection, in the intuitive knowledge of what to leave out," Adrian declared, his eyes fixed with positively ferocious jealousy upon la belle Gabrielle's partially averted face.

That poor, inoffensive Byewater should receive this public roasting was flagrantly unjust, Anastasia felt, still she abstained from intervention. The silence which followed was critical. She refused to break it. The responsibility of doing so appeared to her too great. One or other of the two principal actors in the little scene must undertake that. She really couldn't. At last, coldly, unwilling, as though forced against her inclination to speak, Madame St. Leger, turning to Adrian Savage, said:

"It is long since we have any news of him. How is M. Dax?"

Adrian shrugged his shoulders.

"I have not heard, chÈre Madame," he replied.

Whereupon Miss Beauchamp, satisfied that, whether for good or ill, relations were safely established between this altogether dear and not a little perverse young couple, called cheerfully to the American youth.

"Come here, come here, Mr. Byewater. I have hardly had one word with you all this afternoon, and there is something I greatly wish to ask you. What is this that I hear about our good, clever Mr. Stacpole's leaving for New York?"

"It is so, Miss Beauchamp. Lenty is fairly through with the work for his winter exhibition, and he looks to start the first of the month."

"But I do not comprehend how it is you do not bring any news of M. Dax. Have you not then been with him all the time since we have last seen you?"

"I have been abroad," Adrian replied. "My cousin, of whom you may remember to have heard me speak—Joanna Smyrthwaite—"

He hesitated, and his companion, though stoutly resolved against all yielding and pity in his direction, could not but note the melancholy and extreme pallor of his handsome face.

"But certainly I remember," she returned rather hastily. "Is she ill, then, poor lady, one of those pensive abstractions whom it has been your interesting mission to materialize and rejuvenate?"

"She is no longer ill," he answered. "She is dead."

"Ah! quel malheur inattendu! Truly that is most sad," Gabrielle said in accents of concern. Then for a moment she looked at Adrian with a very singular expression. "I offer you my sympathy, my condolences, Mr. Savage, upon this unhappy event."

And, turning aside, she began to move toward the doorway of the outer room, upon the threshold of which her hostess stood talking to Byewater.

But Adrian arrested her impetuously.

"Stay, Madame!" he cried, joining his hands as in supplication. "Stay, I implore you, and permit me a few minutes' conversation. By this you will confer the greatest benefit upon me; for so, and so only, can misunderstandings and misconstructions be avoided."

Thus admonished, Gabrielle paused. Her aspect and bearing were reserved, as those of one who yields in obedience to good manners rather than to personal inclination. But Adrian, nothing daunted, followed up his advantage.

"I came here to-day, chÈre Madame," he said, "as soon as possible after my return. My idea was to consult our friend Miss Beauchamp, to ask her advice and enlist her assistance. I feared my conduct might have appeared erratic, inexplicable. I proposed begging her to act as my ambassadress, asking her to recount to you certain things which have taken place since we parted at Ste. Marie—things very grievous, in a way unexampled and unnatural. But as I have the good fortune to find you here, I entreat you to wait and hear me while I acquaint you with those occurrences myself. You will remain, yes? Let us go over there then, out of earshot of the insupportably recurrent Mr. Byewater. I need to speak to you alone, chÈre Madame, without frivolous interruptions. And Mr. Byewater is forever at hand. He annoys me. He is so very far from decorative. He reminds me of a fish—of an underdone filet de sole."

Madame St. Leger's reserve gave slightly.

"Unhappy Mr. Byewater!" she murmured.

"Yes, indeed unhappy, since you too observe the likeness," Adrian pursued, darting positively envenomed glances in the direction of the doorway. "Yet is it not unpardonable in any man to resemble the insufficiently fried section of a flat fish? You recognize it as unpardonable? Sit down here then, trÉs chÈre Madame, at the farthest distance possible from that lanky poisson d'AmÉrique. Ah! I am grateful to you," he added, with very convincing earnestness. "For in listening you will help to dissipate the blackness of regret which engulfs me. You will hear and you will judge; yes, it is for you, for you only and supremely to do that—to judge."

"I fear you will be no end fatigued, Miss Beauchamp, standing all this long time talking," the excellent, and, fortunately, quite unconscious Byewater was meanwhile saying. "I believe I ought to go right now. I had promised myself I would escort Madame St. Leger home to the Quai Malaquais. But I don't believe I stand to gain anything by waiting. Recent developments hardly favor the supposition that promise is likely to condense into fact."

He nodded his head, indicating the couple ensconced at the opposite end of the room in two pillowed, cane-seated, cane-backed gilt chairs of pseudo-classic pattern. The wall immediately behind them carried a broad, tall panel of looking-glass, the border of which blossomed on either side at about half its height into a cluster of shaded electric lamps. The mellow light from these covered the perfectly finished figures of the young man and woman, sitting there in such close proximity, and created a bright circle about them, as Anastasia Beauchamp noted, curiously isolating them from all surrounding objects save their own graceful images repeated in the great looking-glass. Her eyes dwelt upon them in indulgent tenderness. Might they prosper! And therewith, very genially, she turned her attention to the fish-like Byewater once more.

But that same bright isolation and close proximity worked strongly upon Gabrielle St. Leger. Her pulse quickened. A subtle excitement took possession of her, which, just because of her anxiety to ignore and conceal it, obliged her to speak.

"Your cousin's death has evidently pained you. You mourn her very truly, very much?"

"I cannot mourn enough."

"Indeed!" she said, dwelling upon the word with a peculiar and slightly incredulous inflection.

"No," he repeated, "I cannot mourn enough. But to make my state of mind intelligible to you—and it is vitally important to me to do so—it is necessary you should know what has happened. I cannot deny that I am very sad."

He bowed himself together, setting his elbows on his knees, pressing his hands against either side of his head.

"I have cause to be sad," he continued. "Involuntarily I have contributed to the commission of a crime. All the values are altered. I am become a stranger to myself. Therefore I ask just this of you, to hear me and to judge."

Surprised, impressed, alarmed even, Gabrielle St. Leger gathered herself back gravely in her gilded, long-seated pseudo-classic chair. The young man's genuine and undisguised trouble combined with his actual physical nearness to threaten her emotional equilibrium. More eagerly than she cared to admit even to herself had she looked forward to his return to Ste. Marie. Her disappointment was proportionate, causing her anger. The thought of the slight he had put upon her rankled. She was, or rather wished to be, angry still. But just now wishes and feeling ranged themselves in irritating opposition and conflict. And during the silence following his last strangely sorrowful and self-accusing words—he so very near to her, dejected, abstracted, with bent head—feeling gained, waxing masterful and intimate. The personal charm of the man, his distinction of appearance, his quick brain and eloquent speech, his unimpeachable sincerity, his virility—refined, but in no degree impaired by the artificial conditions of modern life—even his boyish outbreak of jealousy toward Lewis Byewater, stirred and agitated her, proving dangerous alike to her senses and her heart. The culminating moment of that terrible experience in RenÉ Dax's studio, when, half beside herself from the horror of madness and death, she had flung herself upon Adrian's breast, there finding safety and restoration to all the dear joys of living, presented itself to her memory with importunate insistence. Was it conceivable that she craved to have that moment repeat itself?

"Mr. Savage—you asked me to listen. I listen," she said, and her voice shook.

In response the young man looked up at her, a rather pitiful smile on his white face.

"Thank you—it was like this, then, chÈre Madame et amie," he said. "Pushed by certain sinister fears, without waiting to communicate with you or with any one, I went straight to England on receiving from her sister the announcement of my cousin's death. Letters had passed between us during the previous fortnight which rendered that announcement peculiarly and acutely distressing to me."

Adrian bent his head again and sat staring blindly at the floor.

"She had asked a pledge of me which neither in honor nor in honesty could I give," he said, bitterly. "My cousin was an admirable woman of business. I knew that all her worldly affairs were scrupulously regulated. I was in no way concerned in the distribution of her property. I went to attend her funeral as a tribute of regard and respect. I also went in the hope the sinister fears of which I have spoken might prove unfounded. I stayed in London, merely going down to Stourmouth for a few hours. It was a wretched, wretched day, the weather cold and wet."

He ceased speaking. For at this moment—whether through some inward compelling, some mental necessity to arrive at a just and comprehensive estimate of the history of the last eight months, or whether through some external influence emanating from the unseen world of spirit and striving to dominate and coerce him, he could neither then, nor afterward, determine—the whole gloomy affaire Smyrthwaite, in its entirety, from start to finish, presented itself to his mind. The slightly bizarre yet charming room, its crowded furniture, subdued gaiety of lights and flowers, even Gabrielle St. Leger's well-beloved and ardently desired presence, became strangely unreal to him and remote; while his mind fixed itself in turn upon the autocratic, self-centered husband and father warping the lives of wife and children in obedience to cold-blooded theory; upon the interruption of his own work, and prosecution of his fair romance, by the tedious labors of the executorship; of his long fruitless search amid the filth of the Paris underworld for the wastrel degenerate, Bibby; of the squalid finding, the still more squalid redisappearance of the wretched fellow, and the disquieting uncertainty which even now covered his whereabouts and his fate; and lastly, with sharp inward shrinking, upon the commencement, the progress, the extinction, of Joanna's infatuation for himself.

And as sum total and result what remained? What was there to show in the way of harvest for all that strenuous and painful sowing? Only this—that now, very strangely, he himself at once participant and spectator, he saw in the mournful chill of the rain-swept September day a dark, straggling, ill-assorted procession passing up a trampled, puddle-pocketed road between ranks of pale and vulgarly commonplace monuments set against a backing of somber fir-trees and heather. Margaret Smyrthwaite, composed, callous, and comely, swathed in abundance of brand-new crape, walked beside him immediately behind a coffin—the hard, polished lines of which were unsoftened by pall or by flowers—carried shoulder high. The big Yorkshireman, Andrew Merriman, followed in company with Joseph Challoner—the latter oddly subdued and nervous, obsequious even in bearing and in speech. Next came fussy little Colonel Haig, Doctor Norbiton, and the amazon Marion Chase. A contingent of servants from the Tower House, headed by Smallbridge, the butler; Johnson, the portly coachman, and Mrs. Isherwood, brought up the rear. Isherwood, alone of the company, wept, silently but heart-brokenly, mourning not only a mistress who was to her as a daughter, but the passing of an order of things which had filled and molded her life and in the service of which she had grown old. To Adrian the faithful woman's tears supplied the one sincere and human note in the otherwise cruelly barren and perfunctory performance. And, to his seeing, her desolation found sympathetic echo in the desolation of the autumn moorland, of the bare coffin, and the gray curtain of drifting mist blotting out the distance—the vast amphitheater of the Baughurst Park woods, the streets and buildings of Stourmouth, and all the noble freedom of the sea. The hopelessness of that desolation clutched at him still, penetrating him, even now and here, with conviction of failure and futility, with doubt of any eternal and reasoned direction and purpose in things human, and with very searching doubt of himself. His fine and healthy optimism—in other words, his faith in God's goodness—suffered bitter eclipse.

"I would not be surprised if I concluded to take the trip with Lenty the first of the month, Miss Beauchamp."

As he spoke Lewis Byewater's mild and honest eyes, half humorously, half reproachfully, sought the delightful young man and young woman sitting silent in their gilded chairs.

"I am ever so grateful to you for all the splendid times you have given me," he continued, rather irrelevantly; "but I begin to have a notion it would prove healthier for me to leave Paris this fall."

Again his eyes sought the silent couple enthroned before the tall mirror.

"Yes," he said, "I feel pretty confident I will accompany Lenty. Seems as though this gay city had turned ever so lonesome and foreign to-night. Europe is enervating for a continuance. I know others who have found it affect them that way. There is too much atmosphere over here. I have a notion my moral system is in need of toning up; and I believe our bright American climate might help me some if I took a spell of it."

Madame St. Leger threw back her head and loosened the lace scarf about her rounded throat.

"Return, Mr. Savage. Again I remind you that I wait to hear that which you ask to tell me, that I listen. Return, lest I grow too impatient of waiting," she said.

Adrian straightened himself. His looked dazed, absorbed. He passed his hands across his eyes and forehead, as one who awakens from a feverish sleep.

"Ah! forgive me, chÈre Madame," he answered. "But that is precisely what I need, what I desire—just that—to return, to come back; and to come back by your invitation, at your calling. I ask nothing better, nothing else."

He spread out his hands, leaning sideways in his chair, looking at her.

"Forgive me. I am very stupid, incoherent; but the events of the last three weeks are still so vividly present to me that they confuse and distract me. I cannot see my way clearly. I find it difficult to tell you what is necessary, just what I should. See, then, it had been the habit of my cousin to keep a journal daily from early childhood. The last volume of that journal she had, I found, left as a legacy to me. Her sister gave it to me after the funeral. I took it back with me to London. The night was wet, and I was in no humor for amusement. I remained indoors, in my room at the hotel. The sinister fears which I entertained in connection with my cousin's death had not been allayed by my visit to Stourmouth. A certain mystery appeared to surround the circumstances attending it. I perceived a great unwillingness to answer my inquiries on the part of those most nearly concerned. That night, after dinner, I opened the packet containing the journal, unwillingly, I own; I would rather have delayed. But I could not do so. With the muffled roar of the ceaseless London traffic in my ears I sat and read the journal from cover to cover. Having once begun, I could not leave off. I did not go to bed that night. In the morning early I left London. I left England. I traveled. I hardly know where I went, Madame. I wanted to escape. I wanted to get away from every person I knew, whom I had ever seen. Above all I wanted to get away from myself; but I was obliged to take myself along with me. And I found myself a dreadful companion. I hated myself."

Madame St. Leger moved slightly in her gilded chair.

"My poor friend!" she murmured almost inaudibly.

"Yes, I hated myself," Adrian repeated. "That journal is the most poignant, the most convincing human document I have ever read. My cousin had the misfortune to love a person who did not return her affection. In the pages of her journal, with uncompromising truthfulness, with appalling self-scrutiny, self-revelation and unflinching courage, with, I may add, the amazing abandon possible only to a rigidly virtuous woman, she has recorded the successive phases of that love, from its first unsuspected and almost unconscious inception to the hour when by an act of will, so extraordinary as to be little short of miraculous, she sent her soul out of her body, across land and sea, in pursuit of the man whom she loved and forced from his own lips the confession of his indifference to her."

Again Madame St. Leger moved slightly.

"You tell me this soberly, Mr. Savage?" she asked. "In good faith?"

Adrian looked fixedly at her. Her beautiful face, her whole attitude, was tense with excitement.

"In absolute good faith, Madame," he replied. "I have not only the detailed testimony of her journal, but the perfectly independent and equally detailed testimony of the person whom she loved. The two statements agree in every particular."

"Still," Gabrielle cried, a sudden yearning in her eyes, "still I cannot count her as altogether unfortunate, your poor cousin! For it is not given to many—it is the mark of a very strong, a very great nature, to be capable of such love. And when she had obtained this man's confession?"

"She decided to live no longer," Adrian replied hoarsely. "She had no religion, no faith in Almighty God or in the survival of human personality and consciousness, no hope of a hereafter, to restrain her from taking her own life. She made her preparations calmly and silently, with the dignity of sincere and very impressive stoicism. The concluding words of the terrible book, in which she has dissected out all the passion and agony of her heart, of her poor tortured body as well as her poor tortured soul, are words of pity, of tenderness, toward the man who found himself unable to return her affection."

For a time both remained silent, while in the outer room Miss Beauchamp bade a genial farewell to the disconsolate Byewater.

"Yes, go, my dear young man, go," she said, "and breathe the surprising air of your very surprising native land. I shall miss you. But I understand the position, and give you my blessing. Later you will return to us—for Europe is full of illumination and of instruction. You will return, and, be very sure, we shall all be delighted to see you. Be sure, also, that you leave an altogether pleasant and friendly reputation behind you."

"But, but," Gabrielle said, presently, with a certain protest and hesitancy, "it pains, it angers me to think of so great a waste. For it is no ordinary thing, the bestowal by any woman of so magnificent a gift of love. That a woman, young and rich, should die for love—and now, at the present time, when our interest moves quickly from person to person, when we console ourselves easily with some new occupation, new friendship, when our morals are perhaps a little—how do you say?—easy, is it not particularly surprising, is it not, indeed, unique? To reject such affection, is not that to throw away, in a sense, a positive fortune? How could such devotion fail to attract, fail to create a response? Why, Monsieur, could not this man of whom you tell me return your cousin's great love?"

Adrian Savage spread out his hands with a gesture at once hopeless and singularly appealing.

"Because, Madame, because the man already loved you," he said. "And, that being so, for him there could be no possible room, no conceivable question, of any other love."

Madame St. Leger remained absolutely motionless, expressionless, for a moment; then she threw back her head, closing her eyes. "Ah!" she sighed, sharply. "Ah!"

And Adrian waited, watching her, a sudden keenness in his face. For what, indeed, did it betoken, where did it lead to, this praise and advocacy of Joanna Smyrthwaite's tragic devotion, followed by that singularly unrestrained and unconventional little outcry? The said outcry struck right through him, giving him a queer turn in the blood—carrying him back in sentiment, moreover, to the horrible yet perfect experience in RenÉ Dax's studio, when he had felt the whole weight of Gabrielle's beloved body flung against him and the clasp of her arms about his neck. He straightened himself, took a deep breath, his nostrils dilated, his lips parted. He emerged from the confusion and lethargy which had oppressed him, quickened by that same outcry into newness and fullness of life. To him all this was as the drawing aside of some gloomy, jealously impenetrable curtain—the curtain of desolate gray mist, was it, blotting out the distance, the town, the great woods, and the noble freedom of the sea, when he walked in that ill-assorted funeral procession up the wet road behind Joanna's coffin?—a drawing of it aside and letting the glad and wholesome sunlight shine on him once more. He no longer felt a stranger to himself. The past—all which had happened, all which went to shape his character and inspire his action, all which he had desired and held infinitely dear before the affaire Smyrthwaite imposed itself upon him—linked up with the present, in sane and intelligible sequence of cause and effect. Thus, chastened, it is true, a little older, sadder, wiser, but fearless, ardent, purposeful as ever, did Adrian the Magnificent come into his own again.

He drew nearer to her, laid his right arm somewhat possessively upon the arm of Madame St. Leger's chair, and spoke softly, yet with much of his former impetuosity.

"See, chÈre Madame, see," he said; "do you perhaps remember, this winter, in the week of the great snow, when I came to tell you I was summoned to my cousins' home in England? You were not quite, quite kind. You mocked me a little, suggesting a solution of the problems raised by my impending visit. The solution you proposed was, as I ventured to explain to you, impossible then. It remained impossible to the end, the cruel end, and for the same reason."

His manner changed. His voice deepened.

"Yet, believe me, when by degrees, against my will, against my respect for my cousin and sincere desire for her happiness, the fact of her unfortunate partiality was brought home to me, I tried with all my strength to command my heart. Twice I faced the situation without reserve, and tried to submit, to sacrifice myself, rather than cause her humiliation and distress."

Adrian looked away across the crowded, pleasant room, with its scent of autumn flowers, cedar, and sandalwood, and its many shaded lights. His lips worked, but at first no sound passed them.

"I could not do it," he said. "I could not. I loved you too much."

He raised his hand from the arm of la belle Gabrielle's chair, turning proudly upon her, as a man who on his trial fiercely protests his own innocence.

"I had given her no cause for her disastrous delusion—before God, Madame, I had not. And my passion, too, has its authority, its unalienable rights. I could not, I dared not, betray them. It may be that the happiness to which I aspire will never be granted me. Very well. I shall suffer, but I shall know how to accommodate myself. But to cut myself off voluntarily from all hope of that happiness by marriage with another woman was like asking me to mutilate myself. I refused. Could the situation repeat itself, I should again refuse, although when I read her terrible journal and learned the reason of my cousin's suicide I was consumed by remorse, by grief and self-reproach."

Adrian paused.

"Now I have told you everything, Madame," he added, quietly. "I leave myself in your hands. It is for you to condemn or to acquit me, to judge whether I have behaved as an honorable man, whether I have done right."

After a silence, a pathetic bewilderment in her mysterious eyes, Gabrielle St. Leger answered brokenly:

"I do not know. I do not know. I cannot presume to judge. What you tell me is all so difficult, so sad—only I may say, perhaps, that I am glad you did not sacrifice yourself."

"You are glad? Then—" Adrian stammered, "then you will marry me?"

"Eh! but," la belle Gabrielle cried, and her voice shook, though whether with tears or with laughter she herself knew not, "you go so quick, so very quick!"

"You are mistaken—pardon me. I do not go quick, but slow, slow as the centuries, as Æons, as innumerable and cumulative eternities. Have I not served for you, tres chÈre Madame, a good seven years?"

"So long as that?"

"Yes, as long as that. Ever since the day I first saw you. You had but recently come to Paris. Much has happened—for both of us—since that date. Yes, I can still describe to you the gown you wore, the manner in which your hair was dressed, can recall the subjects of our conversation, can repeat the words which you said."

Madame St. Leger gathered herself back in her gilded chair, her head bent. For a quite perceptible space of time she remained absolutely still. The inclination of her head and the shadow cast by the brim of her hat concealed her face. Adrian's heart thumped in his ears. His breath came short and thick. At last he could bear the suspense no longer. He leaned forward again.

"Madame, Madame," he called softly, urgently, "think of the seven years. Remember that I am young and that I am on fire, since I love as the young love. Do not prolong my trial. Give me my answer—yes or no—now, here, at once."

Thus adjured, Madame St. Leger raised her head, looked full at him with wide-open eyes, something profound, exalted, in a way desperate, in her expression. She shivered slightly, and holding out both her hands:

"I surrender," she said.

The young man took her extended hands in his, bent down and kissed them reverently; then looked back at her gravely, resolutely, though he was white to the lips.

"But not under compulsion, not out of pity?" he said. "Now, even now, with the consummation of all my hopes and desire within my grasp, I would rather you sent me away than, than—that—"

La belle Gabrielle shook her head gently, smiling.

"No, no," she answered. "Not under compulsion, not out of pity, mon ami; but because I find nature is too strong for me. Because I find I too love, and find—since you will have me lay bare my heart and tell you everything—it is you, precisely and solely you, whom I love."

And from the inner room—into which Anastasia Beauchamp had passed unperceived by her two guests during this, for them, momentous colloquy—came strains of heroic music, good for the soul.

THE END