That year winter had advanced with a delaying foot thus far across the Belgian Ardennes, but this was the hour chosen by the icy king for the beginning of his real siege of that region. Whilst Paul sat in his study in the dark, the cold gathered about him tenser and more tense until he was fain to seek the warmer shelter of his own room. There across the gleaming darkness of the window-panes he could discern great broad snowflakes loitering down one after the other as if intent on no business in the world, and yet in spite of their seeming want of purpose they had covered the earth six inches deep before daybreak.

He awoke in the morning to look out upon a world of virgin white:—street, and roofs, and far-spread trees and fields all dazzling in their winter cloak beneath a sky of cloudless blue, white towards the horizon where it could catch the lustre of the up-beating brightness of the snow. In the dark cold mornings of the year the hotel people had fallen into a habit of bringing up his coffee and pistolet to his bedroom. He had been willing enough to acquiesce in the custom; but as he sat sipping and munching in dressing-gown and slippers, with a travelling-rug about his knees, and revolving the events of last night in his mind, he heard a noise in the stables, and, thrusting the window open, looked out into the cold, still, clear air. Victor, the shock-headed driver, was leading out a pair of flea-bitten grays already accoutred for a journey, part of their harness dragging through the as yet untrodden snow.

‘Holla!’ he called—‘Victor!’ The man looked up, knuckling at his forehead. ‘Are they shooting to-day?’ Paul asked. ‘It ought to be a good day for the trackers.’

‘No, monsieur,’ Victor answered; ‘it is Madame la Baronne who departs. She takes the express to Verviers at half-past nine. Monsieur will excuse; I am afraid of being late already.’

From the moment at which he had heard the horses moving down below, he had anticipated this without wholly knowing to what he had looked forward. He thrust aside with his foot the ice-cold tub in which it was his custom to rejoice—as befitted an Englishman of his years—and, hastily sponging his face and hands, made a hurried toilet, listening meanwhile for any sound which might bring definite tidings to his mind. When he descended the carriage was still at the main entrance to the hotel, and Victor was pulling on to his chapped hands a huge pair of sheepskin gloves, the wool worn inside.

‘We have but thirty-five minutes,’ the driver grumbled, ‘and two miles to go, and all uphill.’

‘Is that a very awful task?’ Paul asked, for the mere sake of saying something.

He was intent on retaining his name, and on saying farewell in such a fashion that his manner should cast no reflection on the dear departing divinity. Mademoiselle AdÈle was already at the door, wiping her hands upon her apron. Madame Alexis, the cook, was ranged up alongside, and beyond her was the apple-cheeked Flamande maid One of the male hangers-on of the establishment came stumbling down the staircase with a great travelling-trunk upon his shoulders, and arranged his burden alongside the driver’s seat. Then down tripped the Baroness’s maid, carrying a dressing-bag in one hand and a despatch-box in the other. Then followed a nondescript female who charred about the house and did scullery-work, and sometimes, in a borrowed dress, served at table. She came enveloped in rugs and furs, and at every note of preparation for departure Paul’s heart beat faster. At last he could bear to look for the last figure in the procession no longer, for he was bent on an aspect of entire nonchalance, and the desolation of an actual farewell struck more and more on his spirit as he waited.

At last the expected frou-frou, and the soft footfall of the beautifully-shod feet, warned him of the Baroness’s coming.

She paused in the hall to say a gracious word here and there, and to press something of evidently unexpected value into the hands of the attendant trio, for they all curtseyed low, and said, as if awestricken, ‘RÉellement, Madame la Baronne est trop bonne,’ as if their strings had been mechanically pulled, and they had been trained to speak the words in unison.

Paul dared not turn his head, but the gracious little figure paused in passing him. Madame la Baronne was richly befurred and so thickly veiled that he could discern nothing, or little, apart from the sparkling brightness of her eyes. She sprinkled her adieux around her in French to an accompaniment of thanks and curtsies, but she spoke to Paul in English.

‘I am going to Venders,’ she said, ‘and I am afraid my studies will be a little broken. In the meantime I will write to you and give you an address, and I shall be glad if you will answer me.’

She held out her hand, and Paul held it for a mere instant, no longer—he was careful of that—than the occasion would have demanded had but the merest friendly acquaintance existed between them. He dared not trust himself to speak, but he raised his hat and pressed the hand, and the pressure was returned. Then the Baroness entered the carriage, Victor cracked his whip impatiently, and the slow Flemish horses bowled away, their hoof-beats silenced by the snow. They had reached the corner, and in another instant would have been out of sight, when Paul gave an artificial start, as if he had suddenly called to mind something of importance, and dashed after the retreating carriage. He overtook it easily enough, and, laying a hand upon it, ran alongside.

‘This is not good-bye?’ he said. ‘Tell me that this is not good-bye.’

‘I hope it is not good-bye,’ she answered. ‘But go now, dear heart, I beg you; you know why I am going.’

The ‘dear heart’ thrilled him through and through.

‘You will write?’ he asked.

‘I will write to-night,’ she said, ‘but you must leave me now.’

He fell from the carriage side, and the vehicle went on its leisurely course, leaving him standing in the snow and staring after it; but recollecting himself in a moment, he turned and plodded slowly back to the hotel, with as unconcerned and commonplace a look as he could summon at short notice.

Annette had one of her old spells of secrecy, and was hidden all day long. He was glad to miss her and to be left alone with his own thoughts. He could not realize himself and he could not realize the Baroness; her promised letter would, however, tell him something. It might enable him at once to find his orient.

He passed through a strange day—a day of resentment and of tenderness, a day of despair and of hope. He could not work or plan, and reading was impossible, and to-morrow morning looked absurdly distant Yet it came at last, after an almost sleepless night, in the course of which he heard Annette moving and the occasional clink of glass. He could see a light gleaming underneath her door half a dozen times, and these reminders of her came to him always with a dull ache of wretchedness, yet he fell asleep at last and overslept himself, so that he escaped the final hours of waiting. The promised letter was to hand, and he tore its envelope open with trembling fingers, not knowing what to expect within.

‘My very dear Friend’ (it began),

‘All day I have thought of you; I do not know what feeling has been strongest in my mind. I make no secret of the esteem I have for you, or of the sorrow I have felt at being forced to end the pleasantest friendship I have ever known. I should not say to end it, for such a companionship of spirit as we have experienced can never be ended, but we must close the first chapter of the book, and the rest will not make such happy reading. I have felt my heart ache more than once in the contemplation of your unhappiness, for though you have never spoken of it, I knew without the episode of last night—I have known almost from the first—how profoundly you have suffered and will continue to suffer. Ah, my dear friend, it is only those who have suffered in that way who can truly sympathize with you. To have found a completer isolation in the search for companionship—that is the tragedy of many souls. It is yours, and I know it and feel it, because it is mine also.

‘I am weary with my journey, and I am so sad and lonely that I have scarce the heart to write; but promise me just this one thing: Give me half an hour of your thoughts each day, and let me know what part of the day you choose, so that I may think of you at the same time. Do you believe that any actual communion of the mind is possible in such conditions? I should like to believe it. How pure, how spiritual, how exquisite a friendship might exist if it were only so!’

Exactly. And what a quagmire a properly experienced lady may lead a man into if she so wills! This particular experiment suggested by the Baroness is singularly successful in the enslaving of the eager, and it has the great merit of permitting the willing horse to do all the work. The lover can moon and rhapsodise at a safe distance, and it makes not a pennyworth of difference to him whether the mistress moons and rhapsodises also, or whether she is engaged in a flirtation through another telepathic line, or whether she has a score of different lines converging upon her all at once.

Paul, of course, most willingly accorded the lady the daily half-hour demanded. He became persuaded in a very little while that the soul of Gertrude met his midway, and when she sent him a description of her little boudoir, so that he might the better realize her in her own surroundings, he used to float away to Verviers in vision, and sit by Gertrude in fancy, and hold Gertrude’s hand, and express to Gertrude all his ardours of friendship and esteem—for, of course, it never got beyond that, or was ever to be permitted to get beyond it—and Gertrude used to give him vow for vow, all in the range of the highest moral feeling. It is possible that there are people who might imbibe this sort of mental liquor and come to no damage by it, but Paul found it remarkably heady. At first he thought the draught stimulative, but in a while he began to know that it was enervating. He began to rebel at himself.

‘I am throwing away my manhood for a dream,’ he said.

For Gertrude, whose letters were fairly frequent and most sisterly tender, would hear nothing of Paul’s petition that he might be allowed to visit her—would not even listen to any suggestion that they might ever meet again in any approach to the happy seclusion and privacy of the first sweet days.

But Paul Armstrong was feeble in rebellion against himself, and he was here caught firmly in the toils of the first passion of his manhood. The May Gold episode and the Claudie Belmont episode had long been things to laugh at. Marriage had turned out an unredeemed tragedy, which had never had even the poor excuse of a passing infatuation behind it He had never loved Annette, and she was fast growing into a terror and an aversion. And now all this tomfoolery of telepathic communion, this wilful brooding over an absent woman, this summoning of her features to mind, this recalling of her tones, this yearning in which his own soul seemed to beat its mortal bars in the strife to draw her spirit near, made a clean end of the platonic theory so far as he was concerned. The Baroness, at her end of the spirit-wire, appears to have been less potently disturbed. Perhaps she took less pains to disturb herself; possibly she took none whatever.

It came at last on Paul’s side to amount to something very like a possession. Night and day his thoughts hovered about her. He would not admit to his mind one dishonouring thought of her.

And Gertrude was a married woman also, and Paul—who had not too rigidly obeyed the precepts of morality in his day—was bent on honour in this instance. He wrote reams of letters, all of which might have been printed without harm to anybody; but by-and-by his passion began to carry him off his feet, as passion has carried stronger men than he, and the fever of his pulses got into his ink, and he began to make love, but with a dreadful guardedness and a deadly fear lest he should offend the susceptibilities of this creature of the skies. She rebuked him by implication and in a parable. She had had a mournful letter from a friend in Boston, an old and valued correspondent, a lady whose domestic relations were of the saddest sort, who had long believed herself to have established a pure and tender friendship with a person of the opposite sex, and who had now been shocked and horrified beyond measure by a proposal of elopement How rare a genuine friendship between men and women seemed to be! How happy was she in the security she enjoyed in the solidity of his character, in that delicacy of mind and heart which permitted the most delightful intimacies of thought without danger. He wrote back fiercely that he was unworthy of the confidence she reposed in him, that he loved her passionately, adoringly, and without any dream of hope.

‘I will not soil my worship of you by even asking for your forgiveness,’ so he wrote. ‘I have told you what I had to tell. There is no longer any power in me to hide it And now I know that it is good-bye indeed. In the sorrow and the loneliness which are rightly mine—since I earned them with much foolish painstaking—I shall never cease to love you, but I shall not presume to write to you again.’

‘My poor Paul,’ she wrote back to him, ‘what madness!

And how great a cruelty to snatch from me the solace of your friendship ‘Forget the madness, dearest friend. Undo the cruelty. Let us bury the memory of this outburst, let us go back to the past. Alas! did ever man or woman return to the past? But we must not part in this way. You must write to me at times. You must let me know of your artistic hopes. You must give me news of your career.’

He was amazed to find that he was answered at all, and even in his misery he joyed to find himself reprieved from the sentence his own conscience had passed upon him. He was still free to write, and he wrote almost every day, though he sent off his budget only once a week. He did not make love in the sense of seeking to persuade his goddess to descend to him, but he made no further disguise of himself, and he was not again reproved.

This all led to a long space of infertility, and it was stretched still further by the departure of the Baroness to Paris. There, she wrote Paul, she would be much in society, and if he should find himself in the gay city at any time during her stay, she could introduce him to charming and useful people. But she was very round in her warnings to him.

‘You must not come,’ she told him, ‘unless you are absolutely sure that there is no danger of making me absurd in the eyes of my friends. Dearly as I esteem you, I should never forgive you that. You have been so very outspoken of late, and I have permitted you to write your heart so freely, that I should be guilty of the foolishest affectation if I were silent on this one matter. We cannot control our affections. It is not given to us to love and dislike at discretion, but we can control our language and our conduct, and I must exact your promise ere you meet me. And I will tell you this once, and I will never breathe it any more: Had we met under happier conditions, had we both been free to choose, I know that I could have loved you. I am thus candid with you because I wish you to know how entirely I rely upon your discretion and respect. We may have happiness denied us, and to choose it now would be to suffer miserably, but we have each a personal esteem to guard. Ah, Paul! be kind to me. Do not make it hard to see you again.’

If all this were written, as Paul came most devoutly to believe in later days, with the single-minded desire to enslave him yet more completely, it was truly heartless, but that was certainly the end it gained. It seemed to him the most pathetic and womanly of effusions, for what woman would write that she could have loved a man in happier conditions unless she did truly love him? She suffered as he suffered. Without her warrant it would have been coxcombical to believe it But the belief made her altogether sacred in his eyes, and he vowed a thousand times that no word or tone of his should ever offend that angel delicacy and tenderness. A curious part of this maniac experience was his estimate of himself as it proceeded. He was in a mood entirely heroical. The Baron de Wyeth, who was making money to supply the most whimsical needs of the absent Gertrude, never entered into his head. It did not offer itself on any single occasion to his intelligence to think that there was anything to be reprehended in this sterile dalliance.

As for Annette, she had grown to be impossible. She resented the guardianship exercised over her with an increasing fierceness. When she could smuggle her contraband through the enemy’s lines, she locked herself in her room, and remained there until the supply was exhausted She would emerge blotched, pale, and haggard, and companionship between herself and her husband was out of question.

At the time at which the letter just cited reached Paul Annette’s cunning had been unequal to the war for at least a fortnight, and her constitution was still youthful and strong enough to enable her to return to something of her earlier aspect after a few days of abstinence.

‘I have business which will take me to Paris in a little while,’ her husband told her.

‘Very well,’ she said indifferently.

‘Do you prefer to come with me, or to stay here?’ he asked.

‘To go with you?’ she demanded. ‘Under what conditions?’

‘Under the conditions I have always offered,’ he returned: ‘that you are accompanied by a female companion of my choice.’

‘I shall stay here,’ Annette said curtly.

‘As you will.’

He was relieved by her decision, not merely because the last thread of comradeship between them was broken, but because he dreaded the exposure of the cupboard skeleton, which was always putting out a ghastly head at him. In a great city like Paris there might arise an occasion of escape from control at any moment, and Heaven alone knew what esclandre might ensue upon a single escapade.

He made his preparations for departure. Laurent promised his most careful supervision of affairs, and Paul left him with plenary powers. There were no adieux to make, for Annette declined to see him. He travelled to Brussels, and thence to Paris, going away with a relief which was made the more complete by the latest intelligence the doctor had brought him: there was to be no child of Annette’s and his. That hope or fear—and he had barely known which to think it—was over.

At Montcourtois Madame la Baronne de Wyeth had been content to live in extreme simplicity, and her account of her own surroundings at Veryiers did not express any dose approach to luxury; but in Paris she occupied apartments of great splendour, had a considerable entourage about her, and entertained a limited number of charming people, who were all more or less celebrated. Her music was as fine as anything that could be got in Paris, for she knew all the great singers and instrumentalists, and though the season was about at an end, there was still enough genius in the basket to pick and choose from.

It was with a wildly beating heart that Paul alighted at her door, and as he stood awaiting her in the luxuriously furnished salon which was the centrepiece of her apartments, his knees trembled with agitation. He was there to meet for the first time the woman he loved. That was strange and yet true. When he had last seen her he had not yet grown to love her, or, if he had, he had granted himself no knowledge of it. But now he loved, and he had confessed his love, and what was potentially a return avowal had been made by her. And they were to meet just as friends. There was to be no word spoken of all the passion which thrilled and filled his heart and tingled through his veins.

She came at last in a gentle silken rustle, dressed already for the reception of the guests who were expected to arrive an hour later. She had accorded him this one tÊte-À-tÊte—this and no other. She was transfigured in his eyes, and did indeed show to her best advantage in full toilette. The lucent rosy whiteness of arms and shoulders seemed to dazzle him.

He extended both hands to her, and she came forward with her lithe gait and a smile of great sweetness, and took them in her own.

‘Gertrude!’ he whispered, and she answered with the one word ‘Paul!’ and had his life depended upon it, he could not have spoken further at that instant.

‘I am very glad to see you, Paul,’ she said, ‘very glad indeed.’ She released one of his hands, and by the other led him to a causeuse near one of the splendidly curtained windows. ‘But what has happened to you? she asked. ‘My poor Paul, you are ill! You are not yourself at all. There are brown circles round your eyes, and your cheeks have fallen in, and you are growing positively gray at the temples.’

‘I am not ill,’ Paul answered, trying to smile. ‘I have had a somewhat trying experience of late, and I am here to forget it.’

‘May I know of it?’ she asked

‘No,’ said Paul; ‘the topic is forbidden.’

She laughed gaily and blushed a little.

‘Now, that is very clever, and very wicked of you,’ she purred. ‘That topic is not to be approached even elliptically. But really and truly, my poor Paul, you are not well, and I shall see that you take proper care of yourself. You will take a glass of wine at once.’

‘No,’ he said, waving a hand against her as she made a motion to rise.

‘You used not to contradict my orders,’ she told him, ‘and you shall not do it now. I can give you a really excellent glass of champagne—not a lady’s champagne, be it understood, a man’s wine—a connoisseur’s.’

He made no further protest, and she rang a small silver bell near her hand. A grave serving-man appeared in answer to this summons, received his mistress’s order, and glided away again.

‘I have all your news?’ the Baroness asked, turning to her guest again.

‘All,’ he answered—’ all there is to tell.’

He had known perfectly well at one time that she was not strictly a beautiful woman. He had been able to analyze her, to admit very fine eyes and teeth, and a clear, if somewhat florid, glow of complexion. He had granted, further, fine hair, and very beautiful hands and arms. But he wondered at himself, and could have laughed at his own blindness. The power of analysis had gone out of him because he was in love. She was merely a soft, dazzling splendour in aspect now, and every look and tone and attitude was a witchery and a wonder.

‘I have not seen you in evening dress before to-night, Paul,’ she said. ‘I like you in evening dress. It is a great test of a man’s distinction. It is cruel to all but the few. It is distinctly not cruel to you.’

‘I am proud to be approved of,’ he answered, trying to speak lightly.

The grave serving-man brought in the wine, which proved worthy of the hostess’s praise. Paul was grateful for it, for it helped to steady his shaken nerve. He felt pretty much as he imagined a man might feel who was learning to stand under fire.

‘It was kind of you,’ he said, ‘to give me this one hour to myself. I shall try to learn my lesson in it I want to assure you how much I have laid your injunction to heart, and to promise you that from this time forth you shall be implicitly obeyed. When I wrote that wild letter to you at Venders I had not the faintest hope of your forgiveness. I need not tell you how I thank you for it, how I shall strive to show my gratitude. But, indeed, you are my Anthea, Gertrude, and may command me anything.’

‘Another man would not have found forgiveness, Paul,’ she answered, turning away her head, and looking downward. ‘I do not deny to you now that I was deeply amazed, and, at first, humiliated. Then for a time I was angry, and I had to ask myself of what indiscretion I had been guilty to lay me open to the receipt of such a letter from my dearest friend. But we women are weak creatures where the affections are concerned, and I felt that I could not afford to lose you, Paul. You will not make it necessary for me to lose you?’

‘No,’ he declared. ‘No spoken word of mine shall hurt you. God knows what you have been to me since first I met you.’ She raised her hand against him and looked up with a glance of appeal. ‘Oh, surely I may say this!’ he urged. ‘I have been through dark days, Gertrude. I am young, and reputation and fortune are calling to me, and I have put a millstone about my neck, and but for your friendship I should have broken my heart.’

‘Paul,’ she said, ‘my poor boy! My poor, dear boy! I think I would give my life if I could comfort you.’

‘You do comfort me,’ he answered. ‘You are the one comfort I have. I shall learn in time to think of you as if you were a saint in heaven.’

‘Oh!’ she purred, ‘you dear, simple-souled enthusiast! Don’t you know yet—haven’t you found it out, that simple truth?—that when a man has relegated a living woman to the position of a saint in heaven he has ceased to care about her? I am not going to turn you into a sanctified figure.’

‘I should scarcely look for that,’ said Paul, with a momentary gleam of humour.

‘I am going to keep you for a living, large-brained, human-hearted friend, and I hope that if we do not see too much of each other, we may both grow content with that arrangement.’

She spoke with a smiling vivacity, but she set a delicate little trifle of lace and cambric to her eyes, and then looked up and smiled again.

‘You do not wish,’ he asked, ‘that we should see much of each other?’ His face was very gloomy.

‘I mean,’ she said gently, laying her hand upon his shoulder, and looking into his mournful eyes, ‘that we should be discreet I do not mean that at all as regards the opinion of others, for there I can trust myself and you without a fear. I mean with respect to ourselves. It will not be well for your own happiness that we should meet often as we are meeting now.’

She rose, and moved away from him a little, standing with the fingers of her hands interlaced, and the palms downward. This is a very pleasing sort of attitude when adopted by the right kind of person. Taken in conjunction with a pensive, sidelong droop of the head, it will yield an expression of gently sorrowing coy confidence when employed by a competent artist.

‘You will promise me,’ said the Baroness, with a voice not wholly steady, ‘that you will never repeat to me what I am going to tell you.’

‘You may command me anything,’ Paul answered. ‘I promise.’

‘It will not be well,’ she went on, repeating the words she had spoken so little a while before, ‘for your own happiness that we should meet often as we are meeting now. Nor will it be well for mine, Paul. That is why I have hesitated so long before I have dared to permit you to see me—before I have dared to permit myself to see you. I am strong enough now to trust myself, and I put faith, too, in your friendship and your chivalry. You will not add to my unhappiness?’

Paul also had left his seat. He stood almost at her shoulder. He was near enough to have taken her in his arms.

‘Gertrude,’ he murmured, ‘if anything could add to what I feel for you, this would do it. You shall have my tenderest adoration, my constant obedience.’

She turned her head slowly, as if she did it almost against her will. She raised her eyes and looked at him with a strange steadfastness. She spoke in a soft, half-whisper.

‘This is our good-bye to love. We have met and we have spoken, and we part again. In half an hour we shall meet as friends, and never, never, never again as we part now.’

She faced round upon him. Her fingers unlaced themselves and she stood with both arms open to him. For one burning instant he held her.

‘Your promise!’ she whispered, in a frightened voice. ‘Your promise, Paul! Your promise!’

He suffered her to escape, and she drew herself away lingeringly, with the same strange steadfast glance.

‘Good-bye, my lover. Good-bye, my king. I shall never meet him again. I shall come back to meet my friend.’

The words were but breathed so as to reach the ear, and she turned and walked droopingly from the room. So might a bruised lily have been borne away.

As for Paul, he had half an hour before the earliest guest was expected to arrive, and he tried hard to compose himself. It was heavy work, for he was constantly rolling down the hill of endeavour with exclamations of wonder and worship. What a woman! What a pearl among women! What candour! What courage! What tenderness! What purity! What beauty! He was at the height of felicity and the depth of misery with such rapid alternations that he lost the sense of difference, and could not tell one from the other. But when the half-hour of waiting had almost vanished he drank another glass of the wine his dÉesse had commanded for him, and was at least prepared to face the world with a pretence of self-possession.

The guests began to arrive. There were but six more, and all were masculine. The Baroness made a radiant entrance to greet them. She made Paul known to each of them in turn, and all were men of mark. He heard everywhere a name which had been long familiar to him, but the latest comer of all, whom he had not found time to notice, was familiar in something more than name. For it was Ralston—Ralston the great, who had been the god of his boyhood—Ralston with his big gray head worn on one shoulder or another, with the look of fighting wisdom in his face, quite as of old.

‘Mr. Ralston,’ said the hostess, ‘you must know my young friend Mr. Armstrong. We saw his comedy together, you remember.’

Ralston remembered, and seemed to remember more than the name.

‘We have met before this?’ he asked.

‘Once,’ Paul replied.

‘Castle Barfield?’

‘Exactly.’

‘If you’d rather shelve that——’

‘Certainly not—between ourselves.’

The hostess took the escort of the eminent diplomatist who was the doyen of the party. The men followed as it pleased them. Ralston and Paul went last.

‘I am a prophet,’ said Ralston, subduing that richly hoarse voice of his. ‘I told you you would do, and you have done.’