OLDMEADOW sat in Mrs. Aldesey’s drawing-room and, the tea-table between them, Mrs. Aldesey poured out his tea. So it was, after three years, that they found each other. So it was, all over the world, Oldmeadow said to himself, that the tea-table, or its equivalent, reasserted itself in any interval where the kindly amenities of human intercourse could root themselves; though the world rocked and flames of anarchy rimmed its horizons.

It was more real, he felt that now, to sit and look at Lydia over her tea than to parch on Eastern sands and shiver in Western trenches; from the mere fact that the one experience became a nightmare while the other was as natural as waking at dawn. Horrors became the dropped stitches of life; and though if there were too many of them they would destroy the stocking, the stocking itself was made up of tea-table talks and walks in the woods with Nancy. He had just come from Coldbrooks.

So he put it, trivially, to himself, and he felt the need of clinging to triviality. The dropped stitches had been almost too much for him and the nightmare, at times, had seemed the only reality. At times he had known a final despair of life and even now he remembered that the worst might still come. One might be called upon to face the death of the whole order of civilization. Faith required one, perhaps, to recognize that the human spirit was bound up, finally, with no world order and unless one could face its destruction as one had to face the death of a loved individual, one was not secure of the spiritual order that transcended all mundane calamity. He believed, or hoped, that during these last three years, in Gallipoli, Egypt and Palestine, when, to the last fibre, he had felt his faiths tested, he had learned to be ready for the great relinquishment, should it be required of him; and it was therefore the easier to doff that consciousness, as he might have doffed a sword, and think of Lydia and of the order that still survived and that she still stood for.

Lydia did not look the worse for the war; indeed she looked the better. She looked as if, in spite of long days in the hospital, she digested better and, in spite of air-raids, slept better, and as they talked, finding their way back to intimacy by the comparing of such superficialities, she told him that for years she hadn’t been so strong or well. “Nothing is so good for you, I’ve found out, as to feel that you are being used; being used by something worth while. People like myself must keep still about our experiences, for we’ve had none that bear talking of. But even the others, even the people bereaved unspeakably, are strangely lifted up. And I believe that the populace enjoys the air-raids rather than the reverse; they give them a chance of feeling that they are enduring something, too; with good-humour and pluck. If anyone is pessimistic about the effect of war on average human nature, I should only ask them to come and talk to our men at the hospital. Of course, under it all, there’s the ominous roar in one’s ears all the time.”

“Do you mean the air-raids?” he asked her and, shaking her head, showing him that she, too, had seen with him and, he believed, with him accepted: “No; I mean the roar of nation after nation collapsing into the abyss. A sort of tumbril roar of civilization, Roger. And, for that, there’s always the last resource of going gallantly to the guillotine. But all the same, I believe we shall pull through.”

It was the spring of 1918 and one needed faith to believe it. She asked him presently about his friends at Coldbrooks. He had gone to Coldbrooks for three days of his one week’s leave. After this he went to France.

“What changes for you there, poor Roger,” said Mrs. Aldesey.

“Yes. Terrible changes. Palgrave dead and Barney broken. Yet, do you know, it’s not as sad as it was. Something’s come back to it. Nancy sits by him and holds his hand and is his joy and comfort.”

“Will he recover?”

“Not in the sense of being really mended. He’ll go on crutches, always, if he gets up. But the doctors now hope that the injury to the back isn’t permanent.”

“And Meg’s married,” said Mrs. Aldesey after a little pause. “Have you seen her?”

“No. She runs a hospital in the country, at her husband’s place, Nancy tells me; and is very happy.”

“Very. Has a fine boy, and is completely reinstated. It’s a remarkable ending to the story, isn’t it? She met him at the front, you know, driving her ambulance; and he has twice as much in him as poor Eric Hayward.”

“Remarkable. Yet Meg’s a person who only needs her chance. She’s the sort that always comes out on top.”

“Does it comfort her mother a little for all she’s suffered to see her on top?”

“It almost comically comforts her. All the same, Eleanor Chadwick has her depths. Nothing will ever comfort her for Palgrave’s death.”

“I understand that,” said Mrs. Aldesey. “Nothing could. How she must envy the happy mothers whose boys were killed at the front. To have one’s boy die in prison as a conscientious objector must be the bitterest thing the war has given any mother to bear.”

“He was a dear boy,” said Oldmeadow. “Heroically wrong-minded.” He could hardly bear to think of Palgrave.

“He wasn’t alone, you know,” said Mrs. Aldesey after a moment. Something was approaching that he would rather not have to speak of; a name he would so much rather not name. And, evading it, feebly, he said, “His mother got to him in time, I know.”

“Yes. But all the time. She went and lived near the prison. Adrienne Toner I mean.”

Her eyes were on him and he hoped that no readjustment of his features was visible. “Oh, yes. Nancy told me that,” he said.

“What’s become of her, Roger?” Mrs. Aldesey asked. “Since Charlie was killed the Lumleys have lived in the country and I hardly see them. I haven’t heard a word of her for years.”

He was keeping his eyes on her and he knew from her expression that he showed some strain or some distress.

“Nor have I. Nancy said that they hadn’t either. She went away, after Palgrave’s death. Disappeared completely.”

“Nancy told you, of course, about the money; the little fortune she gave Palgrave, so that he could leave it to his mother?”

“Oh, yes. Nancy wrote to me of that.”

“It was cleverly contrived, wasn’t it. They are quite tied up to it, aren’t they; whatever they may feel. No one could object to her giving a fortune to the boy she’d ruined. I admired that in her, I must confess; the way she managed it. And then her disappearance.”

“Very clever indeed,” said Oldmeadow. “All that remains for her to do now is to manage to get killed. And that’s easily managed. Perhaps she is killed.”

He did not intend that his voice should be emptier or dryer, yet Lydia looked at him with a closer attention.

“Barney and Nancy could get married then,” she said.

“Yes. Exactly. They could get married.”

“That’s what you want, isn’t it, Roger?”

“Want her to be killed, or them to be married?”

“Well, as you say, so many people are being killed. One more or less, if it’s in such a good cause as their marriage—”

“It’s certainly a good cause. But I don’t like the dilemma,” said Oldmeadow.

He knew from the way she looked at him, discreet and disguised as her recognition was, that he was hiding something from her. Casting about his mind, in the distress that took the form of confusion, he could himself find nothing that he hid, or wished to hide, unless it was the end of Adrienne’s story as Barney’s wife. That wasn’t for him to show; ever; to anyone.

“Perhaps she’s gone back to America,” said Mrs. Aldesey presently, “California, you know. Or Chicago. She may very well be engaged in great enterprises out there that we never hear of. They’d be sure to be great, wouldn’t they.”

“I suppose they would.”

“You saw her once more, didn’t you, at the time you saw Palgrave,” Mrs. Aldesey went on. “Lady Lumley told me of that. And how kind you had been. Adrienne had spoken of it. You were sorry for them both, I suppose; for her as well as for him, in spite of everything. Or did she merely take it for granted that the kindness to him extended to her?”

“Not at all. It was for her too,” said Oldmeadow, staring a little and gathering together, after this lapse of time that seemed so immense, his memories of that other tea-table set up in the chaos: Palgrave’s tea-table on that distant day in Oxford. What was so confusing him was his consciousness that it hadn’t been the last time he had seen Adrienne. “I was as sorry for her as for him,” he went on. “Sorrier. There was so much more in her than I’d supposed. She was capable of intense suffering.”

“In losing her husband’s affections, you mean? You never suspected her of being inhuman, surely? Lady Lumley blamed poor Barney for all that sad story. But, even from her account, I could see his side very plainly.”

“Perhaps I did think her inhuman. At all events I thought her invulnerable.”

“Yes. I remember. With all her absurdity you thought she had great power.” Mrs. Aldesey looked at him thoughtfully. “And it was when you found she hadn’t that you could be sorry for her.”

“Not at all,” said Oldmeadow again. “I still think she has great power. People can have power and go to pieces.”

“Did she go to pieces? That day in Oxford? I can’t imagine her in pieces, you know.”

He had a feeling of drawing back; or of drawing Adrienne back. “In the sense of being so unhappy, so obviously unhappy, over Palgrave,” he said.

He saw that Lydia would have liked to go on questioning, as, of course, it would have been perfectly natural for her to do. Was not Adrienne Toner and her absurdity one of their pet themes? Yet she desisted. She desisted and it was because she felt some change in him; some shrinking and some pain. “Well, let’s hope that she is happy, now, or as happy as she can be, poor thing, doing great deeds in America,” she said. And she turned the talk back to civilization and its danger.

They talked a good deal about civilization during their last three days together. He wanted things, during these three days of mingled recovery and farewell, to be as happy as possible between him and his friend, for he knew that Lydia’s heart was heavy, for him and not for civilization. The front to which he was going was more real to her, because it was much nearer, and his peril was more real than during his absence in distant climes. He felt himself that the French front, at this special time, would probably make an end of him and, for the first time since their early friendship, he knew conjecture as to his relation with Lydia; wondered, if it had not been for Mr. Aldesey in New York, whether Lydia might have been in love with him, and realized, with a curious sense of anxiety and responsibility, that her friendship for him now was the closest tie in her life. The war might to her, too, mean irreparable loss. And he was sorry that it was so; sorry to think that the easy, happy intercourse had this hidden depth of latent suffering.

Lydia’s feeling, and its implications, became the clearer to him when, on their last evening together, she said to him suddenly: “Perhaps you’ll see her over there.”

He could not pretend not to know whom she meant, nor could he pretend to himself not to see that if it troubled Lydia that he should be sorry for Adrienne that could only be because she cared far more for him than he had ever guessed.

He said, as easily as he could manage it, for the pressure of his realizations made him feel a little queer: “Not if she’s in America.”

“Ah, but perhaps she’s come back from America,” said Mrs. Aldesey. “She’s a great traveller. What will you do with her if you do find her? Bring her back to Barney?”

“Hardly that,” he said. “There’d be no point in bringing her back to Barney, would there?”

“Well, then, what would you do with her?” Mrs. Aldesey smiled, as if with a return to their old light dealing with the theme, while, still in her nurse’s coiffe and dress, she leaned back against her chair.

“What would she do with me, rather, isn’t it?” he asked. And he, too, tried to be light.

“She’ll be mended then, you think? Able to do things to people again?”

“I’m not at all afraid of her, you know. She never did me any harm,” he said.

“Because you were as strong as she, you mean. She did other people harm, surely. You warned me once to keep away from her unless I wanted to lose my toes and fingers,” Mrs. Aldesey still smiled. “She does make people lose things, doesn’t she?”

“Well, she makes them gain things, too. Fortunes for instance. Perhaps if I find her, she’ll give me a fortune.”

“But that’s only when she’s ruined you,” she reminded him.

“And it’s she who’s ruined now,” he felt bound to remind her; no longer lightly.

Leaning back in her chair, her faded little face framed in white, Mrs. Aldesey looked at once younger yet more tired than he had ever seen her look and she sat for a little while silent; as if she had forgotten Adrienne Toner and were thinking only of their parting. But all her gaiety had fallen from her as she said at last: “I can be sorry for her, too; if she’s really ruined. If she still loves him when he has ceased to care for her. Does she, do you think?”

With the question he seemed to see a fire-lit room and lovers who had found each other and to smell wet roses. Lydia was coming too near; too near the other figure, outside the window, fallen back with outstretched arms against the roses. And again he felt himself softly, cautiously, disentangle the sleeve, the hair, felt himself draw Adrienne away into the darkness where the smell was now of wet ivy and where he could see only the shape of an accepting grief.

“How could I know?” he said. “She was very unhappy when I last saw her. But three years have passed and people can mend in three years.”

“Especially in America,” Mrs. Aldesey suggested. “It’s a wonderful place for mending. Let’s hope she’s there. Let’s hope that we shall never, any of us, ever hear of her again. That would be much the happiest thing, wouldn’t it?”

He was obliged to say that it would certainly be much the happiest thing; and he was too unhappy about Lydia to be able to feel angry with her. He knew how tired she must be when, for the first time in their long friendship, she must know that she was not pleasing him, yet not be able to help herself.

“GOOD LORD!” Oldmeadow heard himself groaning.

Even as he took possession of his physical suffering he knew that there was satisfaction in suffering, at last, himself. Until now the worst part of war had been to see the sufferings of others. This was at last the real thing; but it was so mingled with acquiescence that it ceased to be the mere raw fact. “We’re all together, now,” he thought, and he felt himself, even as he groaned, lifted on a wave of beatitude.

Until now he had not, as a consciousness, known anything. There was a shape in his memory, a mere immense black blot shot with fiery lights. It must symbolize the moment when the shell struck him, bending, in the trench, over his watch and his calculations. And after that there were detached visions, the ceiling of a train where he had swung in a hammock bed, looking up; clean sheets, miraculously clean and the face of a black-browed nurse who reminded him of Trixie. The smell of chloroform was over everything. It bound everything together so that days might have passed since the black blot and since he lay here, again in clean sheets, the sweet, thick smell closing round him and a raging thirst in his throat. He knew that he had just been carried in from the operating room and he groaned again “Good Lord,” feeling the pain snatch as if with fangs and claws at his thigh and belly, and muttered, “Water!”

Something sweet, but differently sweet from the smell, sharp, too, and insidious, touched his lips and opening them obediently, as a young bird opens its bill to the parent bird, he felt a swab passed round his parched mouth and saw the black-browed nurse. “Not water, yet, you know,” she said. “This is lemon and glycerine and will help you wonderfully.”

He wanted to ask something about Paris and the long-distance gun firing on it every day and he seemed to see it over the edge of the trench, far away on the horizon of No-man’s-land, a tiny city flaming far into the sky. But other words bubbled up and he heard himself crying: “Mother! Mother!” and remembered, stopping himself with an act of will, that they all said that when they were dying. But as he closed his eyes he felt her very near and knew that it would be sweet to die and find her.

A long time must have passed. Was it days or only the time of daylight? It was night now and a shaded light shone from a recess behind him and thoughts, visions, memories raced through his mind. Nancy; Barney; he would never see them again, then: poor Lydia and civilization. “Civilization will see me out,” he thought and he wondered if they had taken off the wings of the Flying Victory when they packed her.

A rhythm was beating in his brain. Music was it? Something of Bach’s? It gathered words to itself and shaped itself sentence by sentence into something he had heard? or read? Ah, he was glad to have found it. “Under the orders of your devoted officers you will march against the enemy or fall where you stand, facing the foe. To those who die I say: You will not die: you will enter living into immortality, and God will receive you into his bosom.” He seemed to listen to the words as he lay, quietly smiling. But it was music after all for, as he listened, they merged into the “St. Matthew Passion.” He had heard it, of course, with Lydia, at the Temple. But Lydia did not really care very much for Bach. She might care more for “Litanei.” She had sung it standing beside him with foolish white roses over her ears. How unlike Lydia to wear those roses. And was it Lydia who stood there? A mental perplexity mingled with the physical pain and spoiled his peace. It was not Lydia’s, that white face in the coffin with wet ivy behind it. What suffering was this that beat upon his heart? The music had faded all away and he saw faces everywhere, dying faces; and blood and terrible mutilations. All the suffering of the war, worse, far worse than the mere claws and fangs that tore at him. Dying boys choked out their breaths in agonies of conscious loneliness, yearning for faces they would never see again. Oh, how many he had seen die like that! Intolerable to watch them. And could one do nothing? “Cigarettes. Give them cigarettes,” he tried to tell somebody. “And marmalade for breakfast; and phonographs, and then they will enter living into immortality”—No: he did not mean that. What did he mean? He could catch at nothing now. Thoughts were tossed and tumbled like the rubbish of wreckage from an inundated town on the deep currents of his anguish. A current that raced and seethed and carried him away. He saw it. Its breathless speed was like the fever in his blood. If it went faster he would lose his breath. Church-bells ringing on the banks lost theirs as he sped past so swiftly and made a trail of whining sound.—Effie! Effie! It was poor little Effie, drowning. He saw her wild, small face, battling. Bubbles boiled up about his cry.

Suddenly the torrent was stilled. Without commotion, without tumult, it was stilled. There was a dam somewhere; it had stopped racing; he could get his breath. Still and slow; oh! it was delicious to feel that quiet hand on his forehead; his mother’s hand, and to know that Effie was safe. He lay with closed eyes and saw a smooth waterfall sliding and curving with green grey depths into the lower currents of the stream. He remembered the stream well, now; one of his beloved French rivers; one of the smaller, sylvan rivers, too small for majesty; with silver poplars spaced against the sky on either bank and a small town, white and pink and pearly-grey, clear on the horizon. Tranquil sails were above him and the bells from the distant church-tower floated to him across the fields. Soundlessly, slowly, he felt himself borne into oblivion.

The black-browed nurse was tending him next morning. “You are better,” she said, smiling at him. “You slept all night. No; it’s a shame, but you mayn’t have water yet.” She put the lemon and glycerine to his lips. “The pain is easier, isn’t it?”

He said it was. He felt that he must not stir an inch so as to keep it easier, but he could not have stirred had he wanted to, for he was all tightly swathed and bandaged. He remembered something he wanted specially to ask: “Paris? They haven’t got it yet?”

“They’ll never get it!” she smiled proudly. “Everything is going splendidly.”

The English surgeon was such a nice fellow. He had spectacles on a square-tipped nose and a square, chubby face; yet his hair was nearly white. Oldmeadow remembered, as if of days before the flood, that his name was a distinguished one. Perhaps it was morphia they gave him, after his wound was dressed, or perhaps he fainted. The day passed in a hot and broken stupor and at night the tides of fever rose again and carried him away. But, again, before he had lost his breath, before he had quite gone down into delirium, the quiet hand came and sent him, under sails, to sleep.

Next day Oldmeadow knew, from the way the surgeon looked at him, that his case was grave. His face was grim as he bent over the dressing and he hurt horribly. They told him, when it was over, that he had been very brave, and, like a child, he was pleased that they should tell him so. But the pain was worse all day and the sense of the submerging fever imminent, and he lay with closed eyes and longed for the night that brought the hand. Hours, long hours passed before it came. Hours of sunlight when, behind his eyelids, he saw red, and hours of twilight when he saw mauve. Then, for a little while, it was a soft, dense grey he saw, like a bat’s wing, and then the small light shone across his bed; he knew that the night had come, and felt, at last, the hand fall softly on his head.

He lay for some time feeling the desired peace flow into him and then, through its satisfaction, another desire pushed up into his consciousness and he remembered that, more than about Paris, he had wanted to speak to the nurse about what she did for him and thank her.

“It’s you who make me sleep, isn’t it,” he said, lying with closed eyes under the soft yet insistent pressure. “I’ve never thanked you.”

She did not reply. She did not want him to talk. But he still wanted to.

“I couldn’t thank you last night,” he said, “I can’t keep hold of my thoughts. And when morning comes I seem to have forgotten everything about the night. You are the nurse who takes care of me in the daytime, too, aren’t you?”

Again, for a moment, there was no reply; and then a voice came. “No; I am the night nurse. Go to sleep now.”

It was a voice gentle, cold and soft, like snow. It was not an English voice and he had heard it before. Where had he heard it? Rooks were cawing and he saw a blue ribbon rolling, rolling out across a spring-tide landscape. This voice was not like a blue ribbon; it was like snow. Yet, when he turned his head under her hand, he looked round at Adrienne Toner.

The first feeling that came uppermost in the medley that filled him at the sight of her was one of amused vexation. It was as if he went back to his beginnings with her, back to the rooks and the blue ribbon. “At it again!” was what he said to himself, and what he said aloud, absurdly, was: “Oh, come, now!”

She did not lift her hand, but there was trouble on her face as she looked back at him. “I hoped you wouldn’t see me, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said.

He was reminded of Bacchus and the laying on of hands; but a classical analogy, even more ridiculous, came to him with her words. “Like Cupid and Psyche,” he said. “The other way round. It’s I who mustn’t look.”

The trouble on her face became more marked and he saw that she imagined him to be delirious. He was not quite himself, certainly, or he would not have greeted Adrienne Toner thus, and he made an effort to be more decorous and rational as he said, “I’m very glad to see you again. Safe and sound: you know.”

She had always had a singular little face, but it had never looked so singular as now, seen from below with shadows from the light behind cast so oddly over it. The end of her nose jutted from a blue shadow and her eyes lay in deep hollows of blue. All that he was sure of in her expression was the gravity with which she made up her mind to humour him. “We want you to be safe and sound, too. Please shut your eyes and go to sleep.”

“All right; all right, Psyche,” he murmured, and he knew it wasn’t quite what he intended to say, yet in his flippancy he was taking refuge from something; from the flood of suffering that had broken over him the other night after he had seen that dead face with white roses over its ears. This queer face, half dissolved in blue and yellow, was not dead and the white coiffe came closely down about it. If he obeyed her he knew that she would keep the other faces away and he closed his eyes obediently and lay very still, seeing himself again as the good little boy being praised. This was Psyche; not Ariane. “Ariane ma soeur,” he murmured. It was Ariane who had the white roses—or was it wet ivy? and after her face pressed all the other dying faces. “You’ll keep them away, won’t you?” he murmured, and he heard her say: “Yes; I’ll keep them quite away,” and, softly, a curtain of sleep fell before his eyes crossed by a thin drift of mythological figures.

“I thought it was you who sent me to sleep,” he said to the English nurse next day. He could hardly, in the morning light, believe it was not a dream.

She smiled with an air of vicarious pride. “No indeed. I can’t send people to sleep. It’s our wonderful Mrs. Chadwick. She does a good deal more than put people to sleep. She cures people—oh, I wouldn’t have believed it myself, till I saw it—who are at death’s door. It’s lucky for you and the others that we’ve got her here for a little while.”

“Where’s here?” he asked after a moment.

“Here’s Boulogne. Didn’t you know?”

“I thought I heard the sea sometimes. It’s for cases too bad, then, to be taken home. Get her here from where?”

“From her hospital in the firing-line. Now that we’re advancing at the front everything there is changed and she could come away for a little. Sir Kenneth’s been begging her to come ever since he saw her. He knew she would work marvels here, too.” The nice young nurse was exuberant in her darkness and rosiness with a Jewish streak of fervour in her lips and eyes. “It’s a sort of rest for her,” she added. “She’s been badly wounded once. You can just see the scar, under her cap, on her forehead. And she nearly died of fever out in Salonika. She had a travelling ambulance there before she came to France.”

“It must be very restful for her,” Oldmeadow remarked with a touch of his grim mirth, “if she has to sit up putting all your bad cases to sleep. Why haven’t I heard of her and her hospital?”

“It’s not run in her name. It’s an American hospital—she is American—called after her mother, I believe. The Pearl Ambulance is what it’s called and everybody here knows about it; all of us nurses and doctors, I mean. Her organizing power is as wonderful as her cures; her influence over her staff. They all worship the ground she walks on.”

“Pearl, Pearl Toner,” Oldmeadow was saying to himself. How complete, how perfect it was. And the nurse went on, delighted, evidently, to talk of an idol, and rather as if she were speaking of a special cure they had installed, a sort of Carrel treatment not to be found anywhere else: “Everything’s been different since she came. It’s almost miraculous to see what the mere touch of her hand can do. Matron says she wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out she was a sort of nun and wore a hair shirt under her dress. Whatever she is, it makes one feel better and stronger just to see her and one would do anything for her just to have her smile at one. She has the most heavenly smile.”

It was all very familiar.

“Ah, you haven’t abandoned me after all, though I have found you out,” he said to Adrienne Toner that night.

He was able at last to see her clearly as she came in, so softly that it was like a dream sliding into one’s sleep. She was like a dream in her nurse’s dress which, though so familiar on other women, seemed to isolate and make her strange. Her face was smaller than he had remembered it and had the curious look, docile yet stubborn, that one sees on the faces of dumb-mutes. She might have looked like that had she been deafened by the sound of so many bursting shells and lost the faculty of speech through doing much and saying nothing among scenes of horror. But she spoke to him, after all, as naturally as he spoke to her, saying, though with no touch of his lightness: “You mustn’t talk, you know, if I come to make you sleep. Sir Kenneth wants sleep for you more than anything else.”

“I promise you to be good,” said Oldmeadow. “But I’m really better, aren’t I? and can talk a little first.”

“You are really better. But it will take a long time. A great deal of sleeping.”

“No one knew what had become of you,” said Oldmeadow, and he remembered that he ought to be sorry that Adrienne Toner had not been killed.

She hesitated, and then sat down beside him. He thought that she had been going to ask him something and then checked herself. “I can’t let you talk,” she said, and in her voice he heard the new authority; an authority gained by long submission to discipline.

“Another night, then. We must talk another night,” he murmured, closing his eyes, for he knew that he must not disobey her. All the same it was absurd that Adrienne Toner should be doing this for him; absurd but heavenly to feel her hand fall softly, like a warm, light bird, and brood upon his forehead.

CHAPTER III

THEY never spoke of Coldbrooks, nor of Barney, nor of Palgrave; not once. Not once during all those nights that she sat beside him and made him sleep.

He had heard from Coldbrooks, of course; letters came often now. And the dark young nurse had written for him since he could not yet write for himself. He had said no word of seeing Adrienne. Nor had he let them know how near to death he had been and, perhaps, still was. He would have liked to have seen Lydia and Nancy if he were to die; but most of all he wanted to be sure of not losing Adrienne. And he knew that were he to tell them, were they to come, Adrienne would go.

She never spoke to him at all, he remembered—as getting stronger with every day, he pieced his memories of these nights together—unless he spoke to her; and she never smiled. And it came upon him one morning after he had read letters that brought so near the world from which she was now shut out, that she had, perhaps, never forgiven him. After all, though he could not see that he had been wrong, she had everything to forgive him and the thought made him restless. That night, for the first time, she volunteered a remark. His temperature had gone up a little. He must be very quiet and go to sleep directly.

“Yes; I know,” he said. “It’s because of you. Things I want to say. I’m really so much better. We can’t go on like this, can we,” he said, looking up at her as she sat beside him. “Why, you might slip out of my life any day, and I might never hear of you again.”

She sat looking down at him, a little askance, though gentle still, if gentle was the word for her changed face. “That’s what I mean to do,” she said.

“Oh, but—” Oldmeadow actually, in his alarm and resentment, struggled up on an elbow—“that won’t do. I want to see you, really see you, now that I’m myself again. I want to talk with you—now that I can talk coherently. I want to ask you; well, I won’t ask it now.” She had put out her hand, her small, potent hand, and quietly pressed him back, and down upon his pillow while her face took on its look of almost stern authority. “I’ll be good. But promise me you’ll not go without telling me. And haven’t you questions to ask, too?”

Her face kept its severity, but, as he found this last appeal, her eyes widened, darkened, looked, for a moment, almost frightened.

“I know that Barney is safe,” she said. “I have nothing to ask.”

“Well; no; I see.” He felt that he had been guilty of a blunder and it made him fretful. “For me, then. Not for you. Promise me. I won’t be good unless you promise me. You can’t go off and leave me like that.”

With eyes still dilated, she contemplated this rebellion.

“You must promise me something, then,” she said after a moment.

He felt proud, delighted, as if he had gained a victory over her.

“Done. If it’s not too hard. What is it?”

“You won’t write to anybody. You won’t tell anybody that you’ve seen me. Only Lady Lumley knows that I am here. And she has promised not to tell. Probably, soon, I shall have left France for ever.”

“I won’t tell. I won’t write. I can keep secrets as well as Lady Lumley. She does keep them, you know. So it’s a compact.”

“Yes. It’s a compact. You’ll never tell them; and I won’t go without letting you know. I promise. Now go to sleep.”

She laid her hand on his forehead, but, for a little while, he heard her breathing deeply and quickly and the sense of his blundering stayed with him so that sleep was longer in coming.

All the same he was much better next day. He was able to sit up and had the glory and excitement of a chop for his midday dinner. And when the pleasant hour of tea arrived it was Adrienne herself who came in carrying the little tray.

He had not seen her in daylight before and his first feeling was one of alarm, for, if she were afoot like this, in daylight, must it not mean that she was soon to leave the hospital? He felt shy of her, too, for, altered as she was by night, the day showed her as far more altered. Whether she seemed much older or much younger he could not have said. The coiffe, covering her forehead, and bound under her chin in a way peculiar to her, left only, as it were, the means of expression visible.

She sat down by the window and looked out, glancing round from time to time as he drank his tea and it was she who found the calm little sentences, about the latest news from the front, the crashing of Bulgaria, that carried them on until he had finished. When he had pushed down his tray she turned her chair and faced him, folding her hands together on her white apron, and she said, and he knew that she had come to say it, “What was it you wanted to ask me?”

He had had, while she sat at the window, her profile with the jutting nose, and her face, as it turned upon him now, made him think suddenly of a seagull. Questing, lonely, with vigilant eyes, it seemed to have great spaces before it; to be flying forth into empty spaces and to an unseen goal.

“Are you going away, then?” He had not dared, somehow, to ask her before. He felt now that he could not talk until he knew.

“Not yet,” she said. “But I shall be going soon. The hospital is emptying and my nights on duty are very short. I have, really, only you and two others to take care of. That’s why I am up so early to-day. And you are so much better that we can have a little talk; if you have anything to ask me.”

“It’s this, of course,” said Oldmeadow. “It seems to me you ought to dislike me. I misunderstood you in many ways. And now I owe you my life. Before we part I want to thank you and to ask you to forgive me.”

Her eyes, seen in daylight, were of the colour of distance, of arctic distances. That had always been their colour, though he had never before identified it.

“But there is nothing to thank me for,” she said. “I am here to take care of people.”

“Even people who misunderstood you. Even people you dislike. I know.” He flushed, feeling that he had been duly snubbed. “But though you take care of everyone, anyone may thank you, too, mayn’t they?”

“I don’t dislike you, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said after a moment. “And you didn’t misunderstand me.”

“Oh,” he murmured, more abashed than before. “I think so. Not, perhaps, what you did; but what you were. I didn’t see you as you really were. That’s what I mean.”

The perplexity, which had grown, even, to amazement, had left her eyes and she was intently looking at him. “There is nothing for you to be sorry for,” she said. “Nothing for me to forgive. You were always right.”

“Always right? I can’t take that, you know,” said Oldmeadow, deeply discomposed. “You were blind, of course, and more sure of yourself than any of us can safely afford to be; but I wasn’t always right.”

“Always. Always,” she repeated. “I was blinder than you knew. I was more sure of myself.”

He lay looking at her and she looked back at him, but with a look that invited neither argument not protest. It remained remote and vigilant. She might have been the seagull looking down and noting, as she flew onward, that the small figure on the beach so far below had ceased to be that of an assailant in its attitude. How remote she was, white strange, fleeting creature! How near she had been once! The memory of how near rushed over his mind. He had, despite the delirious visions of her stricken face, hardly thought at all, since really seeing her again, of that last time. Everything had fitted itself on, rather, to his earliest memories of her, tinged all of them, it was true, with a deeper meaning, but not till this moment consciously admitting it. It rushed in now, poignant with the recovered smell of wet, dark ivy, the recovered sound of her stifled sobs as she had stumbled, broken, beside him in the rain. And with the memory came the desire that she should again be near.

“Tell me,” he said, “what are you going to do? You said you might be leaving France for ever. Shall you go back to America?”

“I don’t think so. Not for a long time,” she answered. “There will be things to do over here, out of France, for a great many years I imagine.”

He hesitated, then took a roundabout way. “And when I get home, if, owing to you, I ever get there, may I not tell them that you’re safe and sound? It would be happier for them to know that, wouldn’t it?”

Her vigilance still dwelt upon him as though she suspected in this sudden change of subject some craft of approach, but she answered quietly:

“No; I think it will be happier for them to forget me. They will be told if I die. I have arranged for that.”

“They can’t very well forget you,” said Oldmeadow after a moment. “They must always wonder.”

“I know.” She glanced away and trouble came into her face. “I know. But as much as possible. You must not make me real again by telling them. You have promised. You care for them. You know what I mean.”

“Yes; I’ve promised. And I see what you mean. But,” said Oldmeadow suddenly, and this, of course, was what he had been coming to. “I don’t want to forget. I want you to stay real. You must let me know what becomes of you, always, please.”

Astonishment, now, effaced her trouble. “You? Why?” she asked.

He smiled a little. “Well, because, if you’ll let me say it, I’m fond of you. I feel responsible for you. I’ve been too deeply in your life, you’ve been too deeply in mine, for us to disappear from each other. Don’t you remember,” he said, and he found it with a sense of achievement, ridiculous as it might sound, “how I held the tea-pot for you? That’s what I mean. You must let me go on holding it.”

But she could feel no amusement. She was pressing her hands tightly together in her lap, her eyes were wide and her astonishment, he seemed to see, almost brought tears to them. “Fond? You?” she said. “Of me? Oh, no, Mr. Oldmeadow, I can’t believe that. You are sorry, I know. You are very sorry. But you can’t be fond.”

“And why not?” said Oldmeadow, and he raised himself on his elbow the more directly to challenge her. “Why shouldn’t I be fond of you, pray? You must swallow it, for it’s the truth and I’ve a right to my own feelings, I hope.”

She put aside the playfulness in which his grim earnest veiled itself. “Because you saw. Because you know. All about me. From the first.”

“Well?” he questioned after a moment, still raised on his elbow but now with the grimness unalloyed. “What of it?”

“You remember what I was. You remember what you saw. You would have saved them from me if you could; and you couldn’t. How can you be fond of a person who has ruined all their lives?”

“Upon my soul,” said Oldmeadow laughing, his eyes on hers, “you talk as though you’d been a Lucrezia Borgia! What were you worse than an exalted, stubborn, rather conceited girl? Things went wrong, I know, and partly because of me. But it wasn’t all your fault, I’ll swear it. And if it was, it was your mistake; not your crime.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” said Adrienne, and the compulsion of his feeling had brought a note of anguish to her voice. “It wasn’t that. It was worse than that. Don’t forget. Don’t think you are fond of me because I can make you sleep. It’s always been so; I see it now—the power I’ve had over people; the horrible power. For power is horrible unless one is good; unless one is using it for goodness.”

“Well, so you were,” Oldmeadow muttered, falling back on his pillow, her vehemence, her strange passion, almost daunting him. “It’s not because you make me go to sleep that I’m fond of you. What utter rubbish!”

“It is! it is!” she repeated. “I’ve seen it happen too often. It always happens. It binds people to me. It makes them cling to me as if I could give them life. It makes them believe me to be a sort of saint!”

“Well, if you can help them with it? You have helped them. The war’s your great chance in that, you’ll admit. No one can accuse you of trying to get power over people now.”

“Perhaps not. I’m not thinking of what I may be accused of, but of what happens.”

“It doesn’t happen with me. I was fond of you—well, we won’t go back to that. And you did use it for goodness. Power came by the way and you took it. Of course.”

“I thought I was using it for goodness. I thought I was good. That was the foundation of everything. We must go back, Mr. Oldmeadow. You don’t see as I thought you did. You don’t understand. I didn’t mean to set myself up above other people. I thought they were good, too. I was happy in my goodness, and when they weren’t happy it seemed to me they missed something I had and that it was a mistake that I could set right for them. I’m going back to the very beginning. Long before you ever knew me. Everything fell into my hand. I loved people, or thought I did, and if they didn’t love me I thought it their mistake. That was the way it looked to me, for my whole life long, until you came. I couldn’t understand at first, when you came. I couldn’t see what you thought. I believed that I could make you love me, too, and when I saw, for you made it plain, that you disliked me, it seemed to me worse than mistake. I thought that you must be against goodness; dangerous; the way you pushed me back—back—and showed me always something I had not thought I meant at the bottom of everything I did. I felt that I wanted to turn away from you and to turn people who loved me away from you, lest you should infect them. And all the while, all the while I was trying to escape—the truth that you saw and that I didn’t.” She stopped for a moment while, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow stared at her. Her breath seemed to fail her, and she leaned forward and put her elbows on her knees and bent her forehead on her joined hands. “It came at last. You remember how it came,” she said, and the passion of protest had fallen from her voice. She spoke with difficulty. “Partly through you, and, partly, through my failure; I had never failed before. My failure with Barney. My failure to keep him and to get him back. I couldn’t believe it at first. I struggled and struggled. You saw me. Everything turned against me. It was as if the world had changed its shape and colour when I struggled against it. Everything went down. And when I felt I wasn’t loved, when I felt myself going down, with all the rest, I became bad. Bad, bad,” she repeated, and her voice, heavy with its slow reiteration, was like a clenched hand of penitence beating on a breast: “really bad at last, for I had not known before what I was and the truth was there, staring me in the face. I did dreadful things, then. Mean things; cruel, hateful things, shutting my eyes, stopping my ears, so that I should not see what I was doing. I ran about and crouched and hid—from myself; do you follow my meaning?—from God. And then at last, when I was stripped bare, I had to look at Him.”

She raised herself and leaned back in her chair. Her voice had trembled more and more with the intensity of the feeling that upheld her and she put her handkerchief to her lips and pressed it to them, looking across at him. And, sunken on his pillows, Oldmeadow looked back at her, motionless and silent.

Was it sympathy, pity or tenderness that almost overwhelmed him as he gazed at her? He could not have said, though knowing that the unity that was in them both, the share of the eternal that upheld their lives, flowed out from his eyes into hers as he looked and from hers to his. They were near at last; near as it is rarely given to human beings to experience nearness, and the awe of such a partaking was perhaps the ground of all he felt.

“You see,” he said, and a long time had passed, “I was mistaken.”

She did not answer him. Perhaps she did not understand.

“I never knew you were a person who could come to the truth like that,” he said.

Still holding her handkerchief to her lips, she slightly shook her head.

“Even you never thought that I was bad.”

“I thought everybody was bad,” said Oldmeadow, “until they came to know that goodness doesn’t lie in themselves. The reason you angered me so was that you didn’t see you were like the rest of us. And only people capable of great goodness can know such an agony of self-recognition.”

“No,” she repeated. “Everyone is not bad like me. You know that’s not true. You know that some people, people you love—are not like that. They need no agony of recognition, for nothing could ever make them mean and cruel.”

He thought for a moment. “That’s because you expected so much more of yourself; because you’d believed so much more, and were, of course, more wrong. Your crash was so much greater because your spiritual pride was so great. And I thought you were a person a crash would do for; that there’d be nothing left of you if you came a crash. That was my mistake; for see what there is left.”

She rose to her feet. His words seemed to press her too far. “You are kind,” she said in a hurried voice. “I understand. You are so sorry. I’ve talked and talked. It’s very thoughtless of me. I must go now.”

She came and took the tray, but he put his hand on her arm, detaining her. “You’ll own you’re not bad now? You’ll own there’s something real for me to be fond of? Wait. I want you to acknowledge it, to accept it—my fondness. Don’t try to run away.”

She stood above him, holding the tray, while he kept his hold on her arm. “All I need to know,” she said, after a moment, and she did not look at him, “is that no one is ever safe—unless they always remember.”

“That’s it, of course,” said Oldmeadow gravely, “and that you must die to live; and you did die. But you live now, really, and life comes through you again. Your gift, you know, of which you were so much afraid just now, lest it had enveigled me. Don’t you see it? How can I put it for you? You had a sort of wholeness before. There must be wholeness of a sort if life is to come through; harmony of a sort, and faith. It wasn’t an illusion even then. When you were shattered you lost your gift. The light can’t shine through shattered things; and that was when you recognized that without God we are a nothingness; a nothingness and a restlessness mingled. You know. There are no words for it, though so many people have found it and tried to say it. I know, too, after a fashion. I’ve had crashes, too. But now your gift has come back, for you are whole again; built up on an entirely new principle. You see, it’s another you I am fond of. You must believe in her, too. You do believe in her. If you didn’t you could not have found your gift.”

She had stood quite still while he spoke, looking down, not at him but at the little tray between her hands, and he saw that she was near tears. Her voice was scarcely audible as she said: “Thank you.” And she made an effort over herself to add: “What you say is true.”

“We must talk,” said Oldmeadow. He felt extraordinarily happy. “There are so many things I want to ask you about.” And he went on, his hand still on her arm, seeing that she struggled not to cry and helping her to recover: “You’re not going away for some time, yet, I hope. Please don’t. There’ll soon be no need of hospitals of this sort, anywhere, will there? and you must manage to stay on here a little longer. I shan’t get on if you go. You won’t leave me just as you’ve saved me, will you, Mrs. Barney?”

At the name, over-taxed as she was already, a pitiful colour flooded her face and before his blunder made visible his own blood answered hers, mounting hotly to his forehead. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” he murmured, helpless and hating himself, while his hand dropped. She stood over him, holding herself there so as not to hurt him by the aspect of flight. She even, in a moment, forced herself to smile. It was the first smile he had seen on her face. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said, as she had said before. “You’re very kind to me. I wish I could tell you how kind I feel you are.” And as she turned away, carrying the tray, she added: “No; I won’t go yet.”

CHAPTER IV

HE did not see her again for two days; and she did not even come at night. But he now kept possession of his new strength and slept without her help. The sense of happiness brooded upon him. He did not remember ever having felt so happy. His life was irradiated and enhanced as if by some supreme experience.

It was already late afternoon when, on the second day, she appeared; but in this month of August his room was still filled with the reflection of the sunlight and the warm colour bathed her as she entered. She wore a blue cloak over her white linen dress and she had perhaps been walking, for there was a slight flush on her cheeks and a look almost of excitement in her eyes.

She unfastened her cloak and put it aside and then, taking the chair near the window, clasping her hands, as before, in her lap, she said, without preamble and with a peculiar vehemence: “You hear often from Barney, don’t you?”

Oldmeadow felt himself colouring. “Only once, directly. It rather tires him to sit up, you know. But he’s getting on wonderfully and the doctors think he’ll soon be able to walk a little—with a crutch, of course.”

“But you do hear, constantly, from Nancy, don’t you,” said Adrienne, clasping and unclasping her hands but speaking with a steadiness he felt to be rehearsed. “He is at Coldbrooks, I know, and Nancy is with him, and his mother and Mrs. Averil. It all seems almost happy, doesn’t it? as happy as it can be, now, with Palgrave dead and Barney shackled.”

Startled as he was by her directness Oldmeadow managed to meet it.

“Yes; almost happy,” he said. “I was with them before I came out this last time and felt that about them. Poor Mrs. Chadwick is a good deal changed; but even she is reviving.”

“She has had too much to bear,” said Adrienne. “I saw her again, too, at the end, when she came to Palgrave. She can never forgive me. Meg is happy now, but she will never forgive me either. I wrought havoc in their lives, didn’t I?”

“Well, you or fate. I don’t blame you for any of that, you know,” said Oldmeadow.

“I don’t say that I blame myself for it,” said Adrienne. “I may have been right or I may have been wrong. I don’t know. It is not in things like that that I was bad. But what we must face is that I wrought havoc; that if it hadn’t been for me they might all, now, be really happy. Completely happy. If I had not been there Palgrave would not have been so sure of himself. And if I had not been there Nancy and Barney would have married.”

“I don’t know,” said Oldmeadow. “If Barney hadn’t fallen in love with you he might very probably have fallen in love with some one else, not Nancy.”

“Perhaps, not probably,” said Adrienne. “And if he had he would have stayed in love with her, for Barney is a faithful person. And it may have been because I was so completely the wrong person for him that he came to know so quickly that Nancy was completely the right one. What I feel is that anybody but Nancy would always have been, really, wrong. And now that he loves her but is shackled, there’s only one thing more that can be done. I have often thought of it; I needn’t tell you that. But, till now, I could never see my way. It’s you who have shown it to me. In what you said the other day. It’s wonderful the way you come into my life, Mr. Oldmeadow. You made me feel that I had a friend in you; a true, true friend. And I know what a friend Nancy and Barney have. So the way opens. We must set Barney free, Mr. Oldmeadow. He and Nancy must be free to marry. You and I can do it for them and only you and I.”

“What do you mean?” Oldmeadow murmured as, after her words, the silence had grown deep between them. He repeated, using now the name inevitably and forgetting the other day. “What do you mean, Mrs. Barney?”

To-day she did not flush, but to-day there was a reason for her acceptance. It was, he saw in her next words, only as Barney’s wife that she could help him.

“He must divorce me,” she said. “You and I could go away together and he could divorce me. Oh, I know, it’s a dreadful thing to ask of you, his friend. I’ve thought of all that. Wait. Let me finish. I’ve thought of nothing else since the other day. It came to me in the night after you had been so wonderful to me; after that wonderful thing had happened to us. You felt it, too, I know. It was as if we had taken a sacrament together. I’m not a Christian. You know what I mean. We felt the deepest things together, didn’t we. And it’s because of that that I can ask this of you. No one else would understand. No one else would care for me enough, or for him. And then, you could explain it all to him and no one else could do that. You could explain that it had been to set him free. To set me free. Because they’d have to think and believe it was for my sake, too, that you did it, wouldn’t they? so as to have it really happy for them; so that it shouldn’t hurt. When it was all over you could go and explain why you had done it. All we have to do, you know, is to stay in a hotel together; I bearing your name. It’s very simple, really.”

He lay staring at her, overwhelmed. The tears had risen to his eyes as her beauty and her absurdity were thus revealed to him, and as she spoke of their sacrament; but amazement blurred all his faculties. He had never in his life been so amazed. And when he began to emerge, to take possession of himself again, it was only of her he could think; not of himself or Nancy and Barney. Only of her and of her beauty and absurdity.

“Dear Mrs. Barney,” he said at last, and he did not know what to say; “it’s you who are wonderful, you alone. I’d do anything, anything for you that I could. Anything but this. Because, truly, this is impossible.”

“Why impossible?” she asked, and her voice was almost stern.

“You can’t smirch yourself like that.” It was only one reason; but it was the first that came to him.

“I?” she stared. “I don’t think it is to be smirched. I shall know why I do it.”

“Other people won’t know. Other people will think you smirched.”

“No one I care for. Everyone I care for will understand.”

“But to the world at large? Your name? Your reputation?” Oldmeadow protested. “Do they mean nothing to you?”

A faintly bitter humour touched her lips. “You’ve always taken the side of the world in all our controversies, haven’t you, Mr. Oldmeadow? and you were probably right and I was probably wrong; but not because of what the world would think. I know I’m right now, and those words: name: reputation—mean nothing to me. The world and I haven’t much to do with each other. A divorced wife can run soup-kitchens and fever hospitals just as well as the most unsmirched woman of the world. I’m not likely to want to be presented at courts, am I? Don’t think of me, please. It’s not a question of me. Only of you. Will you do it?”

“I couldn’t possibly do it,” said Oldmeadow, and he was still hardly taking her monstrous proposal seriously.

“Why not?” she asked, scrutinizing him. “It’s not that you mind about your name and reputation, is it?”

“Not much. Perhaps not much,” said Oldmeadow; “but about theirs. That’s what you don’t see. That it would be impossible for them. You don’t see how unique you are; how unlike other people. Nancy and Barney couldn’t marry on a fake. The only way out,” said Oldmeadow, looking at her with an edge of ironic grimness in his contemplation, “if one were really to consider it, would be for you to marry me afterwards and for us to disappear.”

She gazed at him and he saw that she weighed the idea. “But you’d be shackled then,” she said, and her thoughts were evidently clear. “It would mean, besides, that you would lose them.”

“As to being shackled,” Oldmeadow, still grimly, met the difficulty, “that’s of no moment. I’m the snuffy, snappy bachelor type, you remember, and I don’t suppose I’d ever have married. As to losing them, I certainly should.”

“We mustn’t think of it then,” said Adrienne. “You and Barney and Nancy mustn’t lose each other.”

“But we should in either way. I could hardly take up my friendship with them again after Barney had divorced you on account of me, even if you and I didn’t marry. It would give the whole thing away, if it were possible for them to meet me again. As I say, they’d feel they had no right to their freedom on such a fake as that.”

“They couldn’t feel really free unless some one had really committed adultery for their sakes?” Again Adrienne smiled with her faint bitterness and he wondered if a man and woman had ever before had a more astonishing conversation. “That seems to me to be asking for a little too much icing on your cake. Of course it couldn’t be a nice, new, snowy wedding-cake; poor Mrs. Chadwick wouldn’t like it at all, nor Mrs. Averil; but it would be the best we could do for them; and I should think that when people love each other and are the right people for each other they’d be thankful for any kind of cake. Even if it were a good deal burned around the edges,” Adrienne finished, her slight bitterness evidently finding satisfaction in the simile.

“But they wouldn’t see it at all like that,” said Oldmeadow, now with unalloyed gravity. “They’d see it as a cake they had stolen; a cake they had no right to. It’s a question of the laws we live under. Not of personal, but of public integrity. They couldn’t profit by a hoodwinked law. It’s that that would spoil things for them. According to the law they’d have no right to their freedom. And, now that I am speaking seriously, it’s that I feel, too. What you are asking of me, my dear friend, is no more nor less than a felony.”

She meditated, unmoved, still almost sternly, turning her eyes from him and leaning her elbow on the window-sill, her head upon her hand. “I see,” she said at last. “For people who mind about the law, I see that it would spoil it. I don’t mind. I think the law’s there to force us to be kind and just to each other if we won’t be by ourselves. If the law gets tied up in such a foolish knot as to say that people may sin to set other people free, but mayn’t pretend to sin, I think we have a right to help it out and to make it do good against its own will. I don’t mind the law; luckily for them. Because I won’t go back from it now. I won’t leave them there, loving each other but never knowing the fullness of love. I won’t give up a thing I feel right because other people feel it wrong. So I must find somebody else.”

Oldmeadow looked at her in a culminated and wholly unpleasant astonishment. “Somebody else? Who could there be?”

“You may well ask,” Adrienne remarked, glancing round at him with a touch of mild asperity. “You are the only completely right person, because only you and I feel enough for them to do it for them. What I must do now is to find some one who would feel enough, just for me, to do it for me. It makes it more unfair for him, doesn’t it. He’ll have only the one friend to help. But on the other hand it will leave them without a scruple. They’d know from the beginning that with you and me it was a fake; but with him it might seem quite probable. Yes; it’s strange; I had a letter from him only yesterday. I shouldn’t have thought of him otherwise. I might have had to give up. But the more I think,” Adrienne meditated intently, her head on her hand, her eyes turned on the prospect outside, “the more I seem to see that Hamilton Prentiss is the only other chance.”

“Hamilton Prentiss?” Oldmeadow echoed faintly.

“You met him once,” said Adrienne, looking round at him again. “But you’ve probably forgotten. At the dinner we gave, Barney and I, in London, so long ago. Tall, fair, distinguished looking. The son of my Californian friend; the one you and Mrs. Aldesey thought so tiresome.”

He felt himself colouring, but he could give little thought to the minor discomfiture, so deeply was his mind engaged with the major one.

“Did we?” he said.

“And you thought I didn’t see it,” said Adrienne. “It made me dreadfully angry with you both, though I didn’t know I was angry; I thought I was only grieved. I behaved spitefully to Mrs. Aldesey that night, you will remember, though I didn’t know I was spiteful. I did know, however, that she was separated from her husband”—again Adrienne looked, calmly, round at him—“and it was a lie I told Barney when I said I didn’t. Sometimes I think that lie was the beginning of everything; that it was when I told it that I began to hide from myself. However—” She passed from the personal theme. “Yes; Hamilton is, I believe, big enough and beautiful and generous enough to do it.”

“Oh, he is, is he?” said Oldmeadow. “And I’m not, I take it. You’re horribly unkind. But I don’t want to talk about myself. What I want to talk about is you. You must drop this preposterous idea of yours. Really you must. You’ve had ideas like it before. Remember Meg; what a mess you made there. I told you then that you were wrong and I tell you you’re wrong now. You must give it up. Do you see? We’re always quarrelling, aren’t we?”

“But I don’t at all know that I was wrong about Meg, Mr. Oldmeadow,” said Adrienne. “And if I was, it was because I didn’t understand her. I do understand myself, and I don’t agree that I’m wrong or that my plan is preposterous. You won’t call it preposterous, I suppose, if it succeeds and makes Barney and Nancy happy. No; I’m not going to drop it. Nothing you could say could make me drop it. As for Hamilton, I don’t set him above you; not in any way. It’s only that you and he have different lights. I know why you can’t do this. You’ve shown me why. And I wouldn’t for anything not have you follow your own light.”

“And you seriously mean,” cried Oldmeadow, “that you’d ask this young fellow—I remember him perfectly and I’m sure he’s capable of any degree of ingenuousness—you’d ask him to go about with you as though he were your husband? Why, for one thing, he’d be sure to fall head over heels in love with you, and where would you be then?”

Adrienne examined him. “But from the point of view of hoodwinking, that would be all to the good, wouldn’t it?” she inquired; “though unfortunate for Hamilton. He won’t, however,” she went on, her dreadful lucidity revealing to him the hopelessness of any protest he might still have found to make. “There’s a very lovely girl out in California he’s devoted to; a young poetess. He’ll have to write to her about it first, of course; Hamilton’s at the front now, you see; and I must write to his mother. She and Carola Brown are very near each other and will talk it out together and I feel sure they will see it as I do. They’ll see it as something big I’m asking them to do for me—to set me free. I’m sure I can count on Gertrude and I’m sure Hamilton can count on Carola. She’s a very rare, strong spirit.”

Oldmeadow, suddenly, was feeling exhausted, and a clutch of hysterical laughter, as she spoke these last words, held his throat for a moment. He laid his head back on his pillow and closed his eyes, while he saw Adrienne and Hamilton Prentiss wandering by the banks of a French river where poplars stood against a silver sky. He knew that he had accepted nothing when he said at last: “Shall we talk about it another time? To-morrow? I mean, don’t take any steps, will you, until we’ve talked. Don’t write to your beautiful, big friend.”

“You always make fun of me a little, don’t you,” said Adrienne tranquilly. She seemed aware of some further deep discomposure in him and willing, though not comprehending it, to meet it with friendly tolerance. “If he is big and beautiful, why shouldn’t I say it? But I won’t write until we’ve talked again. It can’t be, anyway, until the war is over. And I’ve had already to wait for four years.”

CHAPTER V

SHE might feel that he had cruelly failed her; but when she came at the same hour next day it was evident to him from her demeanour that she imagined him resigned, if not converted, to her alternative plan. She carried a bunch of late roses and said that she had been having a lovely drive with a dear old friend from Denver, who had managed to get to Boulogne to see her.

“Your friends all come from such distant places,” said Oldmeadow with a pretended fretfulness that veiled an indescribable restlessness. “California, Denver, Chicago. They have, all of them, an implacably remote sound, as if they were carrying you, already, off to other planets.”

“Well, it doesn’t take so long, really, to get to any of them,” said Adrienne, placing the roses in a glass of water by his side, a close, funny little bunch, red roses in the middle and white ones all round. She had taken off her cloak and laid a newspaper down on the little table, seating herself, then, in the window and keeping in her hands a pocket-book that, in its flatness and length and the way she held it, reminded him of the little blue and grey fan of the dinner-party where she had told her first lie. His mind was emptied of thought. Only pictures crossed it, pictures of Adrienne and the tall, fair youth with the ingenuous eyes, wandering by the French river; and, again, Adrienne on that night, now as distant as California, when, with her fan and pearl-wreathed hair, she had met his persiflage with her rebuking imperturbability. But under the pictures a sense of violent tension made his breathing shallow. He fixed his eyes on the pocket-book and wondered how she had nursed people with those ineffectual-looking hands.

“Where were you trained for nursing?” he asked her suddenly. “Out here? or in England?”

“In England. In Oxford. Before Palgrave was taken,” said Adrienne. “I gave up my philosophy very soon for that. I worked in a hospital there.”

“And how came you to go out to Salonika? Tell me about it. And about your hospital here,” he went on with a growing sense of keeping something off. “It’s your own hospital I hear, and wonderfully run. Sir Kenneth was talking to me about you this morning.”

“What a fine person he is,” said Adrienne. “Yes, he came to see us and liked the way it was done.” She was pleased, he saw, to tell him anything he chose to ask about. She told him about her hospital and of all its adventures—they had been under fire so often that it had become an everyday event; and about how admirable a staff she had organized—“rare, devoted people”—and about their wounded, their desperately wounded poilus and how they came to love them all. He remembered, as she talked, that she was rich; even richer than he had thought, since she could leave a fortune to Palgrave and yet equip hospitals in France and in Salonika. She told him about Salonika, too. It had been a fever hospital there and the misery and suffering had seemed worse than the suffering here in France. Yes; she had caught the fever herself and had nearly died.

She had no gift for the apt or vivid word. Her nature had been revealed to him as barbarous, or sublime, in its unconventionality, yet it expressed itself only in the medium of trite convention. But his time of jibbing at her platitudes was long since passed. He listened, rather, with a tender, if superficial interest, seeing her heroic little figure moving, unconcerned, among pestilences and bombardments. “It’s not only what you tell me,” he said, when she had brought her recital up to date. “I heard so much from Sir Kenneth. You are one of the great people of the war.”

“Am I?” she said. That, too, unfeignedly, left her unconcerned.

“You’ve the gift of leadership. The gift for big things generally.”

She nodded. “I’m only fit for big things.”

“Only? How do you mean?”

“Little ones are more difficult, aren’t they. My feet get tangled in them. To be fit for daily life and all the tangles; that’s the real test, isn’t it? That’s just the kind of thing you see so clearly, Mr. Oldmeadow. Big things and the people who do them are just the kind of things you see through.”

“Oh, but you misunderstood me—or misunderstand,” said Oldmeadow. “Big things are the condition of life; the little things can only be built up on them. One must fight wars and save the world before one can set up one’s tea-tables.” He remembered having thought of something like this at Lydia’s tea-table. “Tea-tables are important, I know, and the things that happen round them. But if one can nurse a ward of typhus patients single-handed one must be forgiven for letting the tea-pot slip. Really I never imagined you capable of all you’ve done.”

“I always thought I was capable of anything,” said Adrienne smiling slightly, her eyes meeting his in a tranquil partaking of the jest, that must be at her expense. “You helped me to find that out about myself—with all the rest. And I was right enough in thinking that I could face things and lead people. But I wasn’t capable of the most important things. I wasn’t capable of being a wise and happy wife. I wasn’t even capable of being truthful in drawing-rooms when other women made me angry. But I can go on battle-fields and found hospitals and tend the sick and dying. Shells and pestilences”—her smile was gone—“if people knew how trivial they are—compared to seeing your husband look at you with hatred.”

She had turned her eyes away as she was thus betrayed into revealing the old bitternesses of her heart and he dropped his to the little pocket-book that now lay still between her hands. The feeling in her voice, the suffering it revealed to him, with the bitterness, woke an unendurable feeling in himself. He did not clearly see what the test was to which he put himself; but he knew that what he must say to her was the most difficult thing he had ever had to say; and he found it only after the silence had grown long.

“Mrs. Barney—everything has changed, hasn’t it; you’ve changed; I’ve changed; Barney may have changed. It was only, after all, a moment of miserable misunderstanding between you. He never really knew what you were feeling. He thought you didn’t care for him any longer, when, really, you were finding out how much you cared. Don’t you think, before you take final decisions, that you ought to see Barney again? Don’t you think you ought to give him another chance? I could arrange it all for you, when I got home.”

The flood of colour, deep and sick, had mounted to her face, masking it strangely, painfully, to where the white linen cut across her brow and bound her chin. And, almost supplicatingly, since he saw that she could not speak, he murmured: “You can be a wise and happy wife now; and he loved you so dearly.”

She did not lift her eyes. She sat there, looking down, tightly holding the pocket-book in her lap.

“Let me tell him, when I get home, that I’ve seen you again,” he supplicated. “Let me arrange a meeting.”

Slowly, not lifting her eyes, she shook her head and he heard her, just heard her say: “It’s not pride. Don’t think that.”

“No; no; I know it’s not. Good heavens, I couldn’t think it that. You feel it’s no good. You feel that his heart is occupied. It is. I can’t pretend to hide from you that it is. But your place in it was supreme. There would be no unfairness if you took it again. Nancy would be the first person to want you to take it. You know that that is true of Nancy.”

“I know. I heard her plead for me,” said Adrienne.

The sentence fell, soft and trenchant; and he remembered, in the silence that followed, what she had heard. He drew a long breath, feeling half suffocated. But he had met his test. It was inevitable, he knew it now, that she should say “Barney and I are parted for ever.”

Silence dropped again between them. He did not know what was passing behind its curtain and whether bitterness or only grief was in her heart.

He lay, drawing the slow, careful breaths of his recovery, and saw her presently put out her hand and take up her New York Herald and unfold it. She looked down the columns unseeingly; but the little feint of interest helped her.

Slowly the colour faded from her face and it was as if the curtain lifted when, laying the paper down, she said, and he knew that she was finding words to comfort him: “Really everything is quite clear before me now. I shall write at once to Hamilton, and to his mother. If he agrees, if they all agree, he and I can go away very soon I think. Afterwards, I shall stay over here. I’ve quite made up my mind to that. There’ll be so much to do; for years and years; for all one’s lifetime. Ways will open. When one is big,” she smiled the smile at once so gentle and so bitter, “and has plenty of money, ways always do. I’m a dÉracinÉe creature; I never had any roots, you know; and I can’t do better, I’m sure, than to make soil for the uprooted people to grow in again. That’s what’s most needed now, isn’t it? Soil. It’s the fundamental things of life, its bare possibilities, that have been so terribly destroyed over here. America has, still, more soil than she can use, and since I’m an American, and a rich one, my best plan is to use America, in my fortune and my person, for Europe. Because I love them both and because they both need each other.”

She had quite recovered herself Her face had found again its pale, fawn tints and she was looking at him with her quietest contemplation while he, in silence, lay looking at her.

“It’s not about the things I shall do that I’m perplexed, ever,” she went on. “But I’m sometimes perplexed about myself. I sometimes wish I were a Roman Catholic. In an order of some kind. Under direction. To put oneself in the hands of a wise director, it must be so peaceful. Like French friends I have; such wise, fine women; so poised and so secure. I often envy them. But that can’t be for me.”

She must feel in his silence now the quality of some extreme emotion, and that she believed it to be pity was evident to him as she went on, seeking to comfort him; and troubled by his trouble: “You mustn’t be sorry. I am not unhappy. I am a happy person. Do you remember that Sunday morning at Coldbrooks, long ago? How I said to Mother—to Mrs. Chadwick—that I had no doubts? You thought me fatuous. I dimly saw that you thought me fatuous. But it’s still true of me. I must tell you, so that you shan’t think I’m unhappy. I’ve been, it seems to me, through everything since then. I’ve had doubts—every doubt: of myself; of life; of all the things I trusted. Doubt at last, when the dreadful darknesses came—Barney’s hatred, Palgrave’s death—of God. We’ve never spoken of Palgrave, have we? I was with him, you had heard, and at the very end it was he who helped me rather than I him. He held me up. When he was dying he held me up. He made me promise him that I would not kill myself—for he guessed what I was thinking; he made me promise to go on. And he saved me. The light began to come back to me while I sat beside him after he had died.”

She had not looked at him while she spoke, but down at her hands that, trembling, turned and returned the little pocket-book. And controlling her voice as she sought to control the trembling of her hands, she said: “Perhaps it is always like that. When one confesses one’s sin and hates it in oneself, even if it is still there, tempting one, the light begins to come back. After that it came more and more. What you call my gift is part of it. Isn’t it strange that I should have had that gift when I was so blind? But what you said was true. I had a sort of wholeness then, because I was blind. And now that I see, it’s a better wholeness and a safer gift. That is what I wanted to say, really. To explain, so that you shan’t be sorry. No one who can find that light can be unhappy. It comes to me now, always, when I need it. I can make it shine in other people—as Palgrave made it shine in me. Love does it. Isn’t it wonderful that it should be so? Nothing else is real beside it. Nothing is real without it. And when it happens, when one feels it come through and shine further, it is more, far more, than happiness.”

All the while that she had spoken, pale, and with her trembling hands, he had lain looking at her in silence, a silence that was dividing him, as if by a vast chasm, from all his former life.

He and Adrienne stood on one side of this chasm, and, while it seemed to widen with a dizzying rapidity, he saw that on the other stood Barney, Nancy, Coldbrooks, and Lydia—poor Lydia—and that they were being borne away from him for ever. He saw nothing before him but Adrienne; and for how long was he to keep her? That was his supreme risk; but he could not allay it or step back to the further brink. It was his very life that had fallen in two while she had spoken and without the sense of choice; though he dimly saw that, in the restlessness and urgency of the hours since he had seen her last, the choice had been preparing.

He was taking the only step possible for him to take on the narrow foothold of the present when he said, in a voice so quiet that she might even be unaware of his seeming gross irrelevance, “Do you know, about your plan—for Barney and Nancy—I’ve been thinking it over and I’ve decided that it must be I, not Hamilton.”

HER eyes met his for a long time before he realized that she might find not only irrelevance but even irreverence. She had shown him her very soul and he had answered with this announcement. Of course it had been because of what she told him that he had seen at last his own necessity; but he could not tell her that.

“I’m not sorry for you,” he said. “I envy you. You are one of the few really happy people in the world.”

“But I’d quite given that idea up, Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said. “What has made you change?”

He saw the trouble in her face, the suspicion of her power and its compulsion over the lives of others. He took the bull by the horns.

“You, of course. I can’t pretend that it’s anything else. I want to do it for you and with you.”

“But it’s for Barney and Nancy that it’s to be done,” she said, and her gravity had deepened. “It’s just the same for them—and you explained yesterday that it would spoil it for them.”

“It may spoil it somewhat,” said Oldmeadow, contemplating her with a curious tranquillity; she was now all that was left him in life to contemplate; and she was all he needed. “But it won’t prevent it. I still think it a wrong thing to do. I still think it a felony. But, since I can’t turn you from it, what I’ve come to see is that it’s, as you said, for you and me, who care for them, to do. It’s not right, not decent or becoming, that anyone who doesn’t even know them should be asked to do such a thing.”

“But Hamilton wouldn’t do it for them,” she said. “It would be for me he would do it. And he wouldn’t think it a felony.”

“All the more reason that his innocence shouldn’t be taken advantage of. I can’t stand by and see it done. It’s for my friends the felony will be committed and it’s I who will bear the burden for them. As to his doing it for you, I know you better than he possibly can know you, and care for you more than he possibly can. If you’re determined on committing a crime, I’ll share the responsibility with you.”

“I know you care more. You are a wonderful friend. You are my best friend in the world.” She gazed at him and he saw that for once he had troubled and perplexed her. “And it’s wonderful of you to say you’ll do it. But Hamilton won’t feel it a burden; not as you will; and for him to do it won’t spoil it for them. If you do it, it will spoil it for them. You said so. And how can I let you do a thing you feel so wrong for my sake?”

“You’ll have to. I won’t have Hamilton sacrificed in order that their cake shall have no burnt edges. They’ll have to pay something for it in social and moral discomfort. It would be nothing to the discomfort of Miss Brown, would it? I shall be able to put it clearly to Barney when I write and tell him that it’s for your sake as well as his and that he and Nancy, who have never sought anything or hoped for anything, are in no way involved by our misdemeanour. I won’t emphasize to Barney what I feel about that side of it. He’s pretty ingenuous, too. It will be a less tidy happiness they’ll have to put up with. That’s all it comes to, as far as they are concerned.”

She was looking at him with the trouble and perplexity and she said:

“They’ll have to pay in far more than social and moral discomfort.”

“Well? In what way? How?” he challenged her.

“You said they’d lose you.”

“Only, if you married me,” he reminded her.

But she remembered more accurately. “No. They’d lose you anyway. You said so. You said that if they could ever see you again it would make it too blatantly a fake. And it’s true. I see it now. How could you turn up quietly, as if nothing had happened, after Barney had divorced me with you as co-respondent? There’s Lady Cockerell,” said Adrienne, and, though she was so grave, so troubled, it was with a touch of mild malice. “There’s Mr. Bodman and Johnson, to say nothing of Mrs. Chadwick and Nancy’s mother. No, I really don’t see you facing them all at Coldbrooks after we’d come out in the ‘Daily Mail’ with head-lines and pictures.”

Her lucidity could indeed disconcert him when it sharpened itself like this with the apt use of his vocabulary. He had to stop to think.

“There won’t, at all events, be pictures,” he paused by the triviality to remark. “We shan’t appear. It will be an hotel over here and the case will be undefended. We needn’t, really, consider all that too closely. At the worst, if they do lose me, it’s not a devastating loss. They’ll have each other.”

“Ah, but who will you have?” Adrienne inquired. “Hamilton will have Carola and they will have each other. But who will you have?”He lay and looked at her. There was only one answer to that question and he could not make it. He was aware of the insufficiency of his substitute. “I’d have your friendship,” he said.

“You have that now,” said Adrienne. “And though I’m so your friend, I’ll be leaving you, soon, probably for ever. We’ll probably never meet again, Mr. Oldmeadow. Our paths lie so apart, don’t they? My friendship will do you very little good.”

Her words cut into him, but he kept a brave countenance. “I’d have the joy of knowing I’d done something worth while for you. How easily I might have died here, if it hadn’t been for you. My life is yours in a sense and I want you to use it rather than Hamilton’s. I have my work, you know; lots of things I’m interested in to go back to some day. As you remarked, a divorced wife can run soup-kitchens and in the same way a co-respondent can write articles and go to concerts.”

“I know. I know what a fine, big life you have,” she murmured, and the trouble on her face had deepened. “But how can I take it from you? A felony? How can I let you do, for my sake, something you feel to be so wrong?”

“Give it up then,” said Oldmeadow. And if he had found it difficult to make his plea for Barney a little while before, how much more difficult he found it to say this, and to mean it, now. “Give it up. That’s your choice, and your only choice. You owe that to me. Indeed you do. To give it up or to accept me as your companion in iniquity. I’m not going to pretend I don’t think it iniquity to give you ease. You’re not a person who needs ease. And I can do without it, too. For your sake. So there you have it.”

“Not quite. Not quite,” she really almost pleaded. “I couldn’t ask it of Hamilton if he felt about it in the least little way as you do. And Carola doesn’t care a bit about the law either. She’s an Imagist, you know.”—Adrienne offered this fact as if it would help to elucidate Carola’s complaisances. “She’s written some very original poetry. If it were Hamilton no one would lose anything, and Barney and Nancy would be free. Indeed, indeed I can’t give it up when it’s all there, before me, with everything to gain and nothing to lose for anybody, if it’s Hamilton.”

“Then it must be me, you see,” said Oldmeadow. “And I shan’t talk to you about the iniquity again, I promise you. I’ve made my protest and civilization must get on as best it can. You’re a terrible person, you know”—he smiled a little at her, finding the banter so that she should not guess at the commotion of his heart. “But I like you just as you are. Now where shall we go?”

CHAPTER VII

HE could not have believed that it would be so delicious to live with Adrienne Toner.

Even at the moment when he had known that he loved her, he had been, though filled with the sense of a present heaven, as aware as ever of the discrepancies between them, and during the three months that separated them, he at Cannes, she nursing in Paris, he knew many doubts; never of his love, but of what it was making him do and of where it was going to lead them. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine what was to become of them if his hopes were fulfilled, for he hardly saw himself following her off to Central Europe—it was to Serbia, her letters informed him, that her thoughts were turning—nor saw them established in London under the astonished gaze of Lydia Aldesey.

She had selected Lyons as their place of meeting, because of the work for the rapatriÉs that she wished to inspect there, and from the moment that he saw her descend from the Paris express, dressed in dark civilian clothes and carrying, with such an air of competence, her rug and dressing-case, all doubts were allayed and all restlessness dispelled.

He had arrived the day before and had found an old-fashioned hotel with spacious rooms overlooking the SaÔne, and, as they drove to it on that November evening, she expressed herself, scrutinizing him with a professional eye, as dissatisfied with his recovery.

It was because of the restlessness, of course, that he had not got as well as he should have, and he knew that he must, in the stress of feeling that now beset him, look strangely, and he promised her, feeling that he spoke the truth, that now that he had his nurse again complete recovery would be only a matter of days.

“I want you to see our view,” he said to her when the porter had carried up her little box and they were left alone in the brocaded and gilded salon that separated their rooms; “I chose this place for the view; it’s the loveliest in Lyons, I think.”

There was still a little twilight, and standing at the window they looked down at the lighted quai with its double row of lofty plane-trees and across the jade-green SaÔne at St. Jean, the grey cathedral, and at the beautiful white archevÊchÉ glimmering in a soft, dimmed atmosphere that made him think of London.

“There’s a horrible modern cathedral up on the hill,” he said; “but we don’t need to see it. We need only see the river and the archevÊchÉ and St. Jean. And in the mornings there’s a market below, a mile of it, all under huge mushroom-coloured umbrellas; flowers and cheeses and every kind of country produce. I think you’ll like it here.”

“I like it very much. I think it’s beautiful,” said Adrienne. “I like our room, too,” and she turned and looked up at the painted ceiling and round at the consoles and mirrors, inlaid tables and richly curved, brocaded chairs. “Isn’t it splendid.”

“Madame RÉcamier is said to have lived here,” Oldmeadow told her. “And this is said to have been her room.”

“And now it’s mine,” said Adrienne, smiling slightly as though she found the juxtaposition amusing.

Already the stealing sense of deliciousness was breathing over him. The very way in which she said, “our room,” was part of it. Even the way in which she said that made him feel the peace, comfort, and charm of a shared life as he had never before felt it. And the sense grew and grew on that first evening.

It was delicious to hear the waiters address her as Madame, and to know that it was his madame they imagined her to be, when he sat opposite to her at their little table in the dining-room. She wore a grey dress now and, with her quiet, her calm glances cast about her, might indeed have been the veritable Madame Oldmeadow inscribed at the bureau. If they had the aspect of a devoted, long-mated couple, it was because of her calm. But she would have been as unperturbed, he felt sure, had she been stopping there under her own name instead of his and looked upon as his well-established mistress. Situations would never embarrass her as long as she knew what she was doing with them. That night when she gave him her hand at bedtime she said, looking at him with the affectionate, professional eyes: “I’ll come and put you to sleep if you need me; be sure to let me know.”

But he had no need to call her. He slept as soundly as though she sat beside him with her hand upon his brow.

So the mirage of conjugal felicity was evoked about him.

She poured out his coffee for him in the morning wearing a silk nÉgligÉ edged with fur, and said, as they buttered their rolls, that they must buy some honey for their breakfasts. She said, too, that they must do a great deal of sight-seeing in the afternoons. “There is so much to be seen in Lyons. And I shall finish with my rapatriÉ work in the mornings.” He asked if he might not come with her to the rapatriÉ work, but was told that he was not yet strong enough for more than one walk in the day. “In our evenings, after tea,” she went on, “I thought perhaps you’d like to study Dante a little with me. My Dante is getting so rusty and I’ve brought a very fine edition. Are you good at Italian?”

He said he wasn’t, but would love to read Dante with her.

“And we must get a piano,” she finished, “and have music after dinner. It will be a wonderful holiday for me.”

So the days fell at once into a series of rituals. He saw that she had always mapped them out conscientiously, as Mrs. Toner had doubtlessly taught her to do, careful of the treasure of time—as Mrs. Toner would have said—entrusted to each soul by life. So, no doubt, Adrienne would put it still. And what he would, in first knowing her, have found part of her absurdity, he found now part of her charm.

That was what it all came back to. He saw, reconstructing their past, that from the beginning she had had her deep charm for him.

It was the trivial word for the great fact; the compulsion of personality; the overflow of vitality; the secret at once of the saint and of the successful music-hall singer. Her own absorption in life was so intense that it communicated itself. Her confidence was so secure that it begot confidence. Her power was implicit in all she did. It was not only the rapatriÉs she dealt with, as, at the first, she had dealt with the wounded. She dealt as successfully and as accurately with the little things of life. Honey was on their breakfast-table; flowers on the consoles; music on the piano. The gilded hotel salon became a home.

She was still, in demeanour, the cultured, travelled American, equipped always, for their walks, with a guide-book or history, from which she often read to him as they paused to lean on the parapets of the splendid quais. There were few salient facts in the history of the potent city that were not imparted to him; and with anyone else what a bore it would have been to have to listen! But he was more than content that she should tell him about the Romans or Richelieu. It was everything to him to feel that they shared it all, from the honey to Richelieu.

And with all the intimacy went the extreme reserve.

She had showed him, when it was necessary for their understanding as friends, the centre of her life; yet she remained, while so gentle, so absorbed, and even loving, as remote, as inaccessible, as he had felt her to be on those first days in the hospital. She never referred to her own personal situation not to any emotion connected with it. She never referred to herself or expressed a taste or an opinion touched with personal ardour. He did not know what she was really feeling, ever. Though, when he looked at her, sitting opposite him in her grey and addressed by the assiduities of the waiters, he could imagine that he was living with a wife, he could imagine more often that he was living with a nun. Her control and her selflessness were cloistral. He could not think her in any need of a director.

They walked one afternoon along the Quai des Brotteaux, returning from the park of the TÊte d’Or, where they had wandered on the gravel under the tall, melancholy trees and fed the deer. The ugly yet magnificent city was spread before them in one of its most splendid aspects, climbing steeply, on the further banks of the RhÔne, to the cliff-like heights of the Croix Rousse and marching, as it followed the grandiose curve of the river, into a sunset sky where the cupola of the Hospice hung like a dark bubble against the gold and the Alps, not visible from the river level, seemed yet to manifest themselves in the illumined clouds ranged high above the horizon.

Ten days of their appointed fortnight had now passed and while Oldmeadow kept a half unseeing yet appraising eye upon the turbulent glories of the river, he was wondering when and how he should make his revelation and his appeal. If her reserve made it more difficult to imagine, her intimacy did not make it more easy. It was because she was so intimate that she had remained so unaware. For all his self-command he felt sure that in any other circumstances she could not, for these ten days, have remained so blind.

Here she walked beside him, the Madame Oldmeadow of the hotel, looking before her as she walked and thinking, he would have wagered, not of him but of Serbia.

She wore a beautifully adjusted little costume, conveying in its sober darkness the impression of richness and simplicity that her clothes had always given him. Fur was turned up about her ears and a small hat of fur and velvet was turned down over her eyes as she had always worn her hats. The straight fringe of gold showed under its brim and under the gold were those calm, those questing, melancholy eyes.

Or perhaps—he carried further his rueful reverie—she was thinking about the date of the Hospice. He had the guide-book in his pocket.

“Isn’t it jolly?” he suggested, as she looked up at him, indicating the prospect spread before them and adding, since he knew that his English instinct for boyish understatement still puzzled her: “Like a great, grim queen in shabby clothes; raised on such a throne and crowned with such jewels that one feels her glorious rather than ugly.”

Adrienne studied the shabby queen attentively and then looked back at him. Perhaps something dwelling in his eyes, something for her only and not at all for Lyons, caught her more special attention, for she said suddenly, and so unexpectedly that, with a sort of terror, he felt that his crisis might be coming: “You’ve been very dear to me, Mr. Oldmeadow, in all our time here. I feel it to have been a great privilege, you know; a great opportunity.”

“Really? In what way?” He could at all events keep his voice quiet and light. “I thought it had been you who made all the opportunities.”

“Oh, no. I never make any of the opportunities I am thinking of,” said Adrienne. “I only know how to take them. It isn’t only that you are more widely and deeply cultured than I am—though your Italian accent isn’t good!”—she smiled; “but I always feel that you see far more in everything than I do, even when you seem to be seeing less. I have to go carefully and pick up fact by fact, while you see things in a sort of vision and they are all related as they enter your mind. That’s where my privilege comes in. You make me share your vision sometimes. You have the artistic mind, and I am not really artistic at all—though Mother always wanted that for me more than anything; with all that goes with it.”

She was speaking of herself—though it was only in order to express more exactly her gratitude, and, as he walked beside her, he was filled with the mingled hope and terror. After all he had still four more days of her. It would be terrible to spoil them.

“No; you aren’t artistic,” he agreed. “And I don’t know that I am, either. Whether I am or not, I feel mine to have been the opportunity and the privilege.”

“I can’t understand that at all,” she said, with her patent candour.

“It may be part of the artistic temperament to feel things one can’t understand. Though I do understand why I feel it,” he added.

“And it’s part of the artistic temperament not to try”—Adrienne turned their theme to its more impersonal aspect. “Never to try to enjoy anything that you don’t enjoy naturally. I don’t believe I ever enjoy any of the artistic things quite naturally. I’ve always been trained to enjoy and I’ve always tried to enjoy; because I thought it was right to try. But since I’ve been here with you I’ve come to feel that what I’ve enjoyed has been my own effort and my mastery of the mere study, and I seem to feel that it might be as well to give up trying and training and fall back on the things that come naturally; scenery artists would think sentimental, and babies; and patriotic songs.” She smiled a little as she found her list. But she was grave, too, thinking it out and adding another to her discovered futilities.

“It may be as well to limit your attention to the sentimental scenery and the babies, since you’ve so many other things to do with it,” he acquiesced. “We come back to big people again, you see; they haven’t time to be artistic; don’t need to be.”

“Ah, but it’s not a question of time at all,” said Adrienne, and he remembered that long ago, from the very first, he had said that she wasn’t stupid. “It’s a question of how you’re born. That’s a thing I would never have admitted in my old days, you know. I would never have admitted that any human soul was really shut out from anything. Perhaps we’re not, any of us, if we are to have all eternity to grow in. But as far as this life is concerned I see quite clearly now that some people are shut out from all sorts of things, and that the sort of mistake I made in my old time was in thinking that anyone who had the will could force eternity into any given fragment of our temporal life. I did do a little philosophy, you see! That’s what I mean and you understand, I know. All the same I wish I weren’t one of the shut-out people. I wish I were artistic. I’d have liked to have that side of life to meet people with. I sometimes think that one doesn’t get far with people, really, if all that one has to give are the fundamental things like the care of their minds and bodies. One goes deep, of course; but one doesn’t go far. You can do something for them; but there’s nothing, afterwards, that they can do with you; and it makes it rather lonely in a way—when one has time to be lonely.”

He did not know, indeed, whether she saw the beauty of the scene spread before them as they walked, and he was remembering, with a sort of tranced tenderness, the flower-wreathed shepherdess and her crook; and Mrs. Toner with her lilies and seagulls. But why should she see beauty when she made it? It was all that he could see in her now.

“What you can do for them afterwards is to pour out their coffee for them in the most enhancing way,” he suggested, “and make sight-seeing a pleasure, and arrange flowers and place chairs and tables so that a hotel salon becomes loveable. If you find the person to whom you can give the fundamental things and do all sorts of homely things with afterwards, why be lonely? We are very happy together, aren’t we? We get a great deal out of each other. I can speak for myself, at all events; and you’ve just told me that I give something, too. So why should you go off to Central Europe next week? Why not go back with me to the South,” he finished, “and wander about together enjoying, quite naturally, the sentimental scenery?”

He held his breath after he had thus spoken, wondering with intensity, while he felt his heartbeats, what she would make of it. He knew what he could make of it, seizing his opportunity on the instant, if only she would recognize the meaning that underlay the easy words. And framed in the little hat on the background of transfigured Lyons, Adrienne’s face was turned towards him and, after he had made his suggestion, she studied him in silence for what seemed to him a long lapse of time. Then she said, overwhelmingly:

“That’s perfectly lovely of you, Mr. Oldmeadow.”

“Not at all; not perfectly lovely at all,” he stammered as he contradicted her and he heard that his voice sounded angry. “It’s what I want. I want it very much.”

“Yes. I know you do. And that’s what’s so lovely,” said Adrienne. “I know you want it. You are sorry for me all the time. And you want to cheer me up. Because you feel I’ve lost so much. But, you know; you remember; I told you the truth that time. I don’t need cheering. I’m not unhappy. One can be lonely without being unhappy.”

“I’m not sorry for you,” poor Oldmeadow rejoined, still in the angry voice. “I’m not thinking of you at all. I’m thinking of myself. I’m lonely, too, and I am unhappy, even if you aren’t.”

She stopped short in her walk. He saw in her eyes the swift, almost diagnosing solicitude that measured his need and her own capacity. It was as though his temperature had gone up alarmingly.

“Dear Mr. Oldmeadow,” she said; and then she faltered; she paused. She no longer found her remedies easily. “It’s because you are separated from your own life,” she did find. “It’s because all this is so bitter to you; what you are doing now—how could I not understand?—and the war, that has torn us all. But when it’s over, when you can go home again and take up your own big life-work and find your own roots, happiness will come back; I’m sure of it. We are all unhappy sometimes, aren’t we? We must be; with our minds and hearts. Our troubled minds; our lonely hearts. But you know as well as I do, dear Mr. Oldmeadow, that our souls can find the way out.”

Her nature expressed itself in platitudes; yet sometimes she had phrases, rising from her heart as if from a fountain fed by unseen altitudes, that shook him in their very wording. “Our troubled minds. Our lonely hearts,” echoed in his ears while, bending his head downwards, he muttered stubbornly: “My soul can’t, without you.”

She still stood, not moving forward, her eyes raised to his. “Please don’t say that,” she murmured, and he heard the trouble in her voice. “It can’t be so, except for this time that you are away from everybody. You have so many things to live for. So many people near you. You are such a big, rare person. It’s what I was afraid of, you know. It happens so often with me; that people feel that. But you can’t really need me any longer.”

He said nothing, still not raising his eyes to hers, and she went on after a moment. “And I have so many things to live for, too. You’ve never really thought about that side of my life, I know. Why should you? You think of any woman’s life—isn’t it true?—as not seriously important except on its domestic side. And you know how important I think that. But it isn’t so with me, you see. I have no hearth and I have no home; I have only my big, big life and it’s more important than you could believe unless you could see it all. When I’m in it it takes all my mind and all my strength and I’m bound to it, yes, just as finally, just as irrevocably as a wife who loves is bound by her marriage vows; because I love it. Do you see? They are waiting for me now. They need me now. There are starving people, dying people; and confusion; terrible confusion. I have a gift for all that. I can deal with it. Those are just the things I can deal with. And I mustn’t put it off any longer—when our time is up. I must leave you, my dear, dear friend, however much I’d love to stay.”

She was speaking at last with ardour, and about herself. And what she said was true. He had never thought about her work except in the sense that he thought her a saint and knew that saints did good deeds. That she was needed, sorely needed, by the starving and dying, was a fact, now that it was put before him, silencing and even shaming him. It gave him, too, a new fear. If she had her blindness, he had his. His hopes and fears, after all, were all that he had to think of; she had the destinies of thousands. He remembered Sir Kenneth’s tone in speaking of her; its deep respect. Not the respect of the man for the tender-hearted, merciful woman; but the respect of a professional expert for another expert; respect for the proved organizer and leader of men.

“I have been stupid,” he said after a moment. “It’s true that I’ve been thinking about you solely in relation to myself. Would you really love to stay? If it wasn’t for your work? It would be some comfort to believe that.”

“Of course I’d love to stay,” she said, eagerly scanning his face. “I’d love to travel with you—to pour out your coffee in Avignon, NÎmes, Cannes—anywhere you liked. I’d love our happy time here to go on and on. If life could be like that; if I didn’t want other things more. You remember how Blake saw it all:

I mustn’t try to bend and keep this lovely time. I must let it fly—and bless it as it goes. And so it will bless me.”

She seldom made quotations nowadays. For this one he felt a gratitude such as his life had rarely known.

“It’s been a joy to you, too, then?”

“Of course it has,” said Adrienne smiling at him and turning at last towards the bridge that they must cross. “It’s been one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me.”

CHAPTER VIII

OLDMEADOW sat at the inlaid table in the gilded salon on the afternoon of the last day. He had two letters to write, for, as he had put off speaking to Adrienne till their last evening, so he had put off writing to Barney and to Lydia Aldesey till this last afternoon, and he saw now how difficult it would be to write coherently while his thoughts stretched themselves forward to those few hours of the night when his fate would be decided.

Adrienne had gone out. She had written her short communication to Barney and brought it in with its envelope and laid it before him, asking him in the voice that, again, made him think of snow: “Is that quite right?”

It was, quite, he told her, after glancing through it swiftly. It stated, in the most colourless terms, the facts that Barney was to take to his solicitor. “Quite right,” he repeated, looking up at her. “Are you going out? Will you post it?—or shall I?”

“Will you post it with yours? Yes. I must go out. But I’ll try to be back by tea-time. It’s very disappointing; our last afternoon. But that poor woman from Roubaix—the one with consumption up at the Croix Rousse—is dying. They’ve sent for me. All the little children, you remember I told you. I’m going to wire to JosÉphine and ask her if she can come down and look after them for a little while.”

“JosÉphine?” he questioned. He had, till now, entirely forgotten JosÉphine. Adrienne told him that she was with her parents in a provincial town. “They lost their only son and are very sad. Fine, brave old people. He is a baker, the old father, and makes the most wonderful bread. I went to see them last summer.”

Their packing was done and the room denuded; the men had taken away the piano that morning. He had his letters to write; so there was really no reason why she should not go. And there was, besides, nothing that they had to say to each other, except the one thing he had to say.

The silence that overtakes parting friends on a station platform had overtaken them since the morning, though, at lunch, Adrienne had talked with some persistence of her immediate plans and prospects and about the unit of doctors and nurses who were to meet her in Italy. There was no reason why she should not go, and he would even rather she did. He would rather see no more of her until evening when everything but the one thing would be over and done with. And so he was left with his letters, leaning his elbows on the table over the hotel paper and staring out at the SaÔne and the white archevÊchÉ.

Both letters were difficult to write; but beside the one to Lydia, the one to Barney was easy. Barney, after all, was to gain everything from what he had to tell him, and Lydia was to lose; how much was Lydia to lose? He recalled their last evening together and its revelations and saw that the old laughing presage was now more than fulfilled. Lydia was to lose more than her toes and fingers; in any case. Even if he returned to her alone, she cared for him too much not to feel, always, the shadow of his crippled heart; his heart not only crippled, but occupied, so occupied that friendships, however near, became, in a sense, irrelevancies. And if he returned with Adrienne—but could he return with Adrienne? What kind of a life could he and Adrienne lead in London?—even if Lydia’s door, generously, was opened to them, as he believed it would be—knowing her generous.

He laid down his pen and fixed his eyes on the river and he tried to see Lydia and Adrienne together. But it was a useless effort. From this strange haven of the Lyons hotel where he had spent the happiest fortnight of his life, he could not see himself into any future with familiar features. He could only see himself and Adrienne, alone, at hotels. To attempt to place her in Lydia’s generous drawing-room was to measure more accurately than he had yet measured it the abyss that separated him from his former life. If it could be spanned; if Adrienne could be placed there, on the background of eighteenth-century fans and old glass, she became a clipped and tethered seagull in a garden, awkward, irrelevant, melancholy. Lydia might cease to find her third-rate and absurd; but she wouldn’t know what to do with her any more than she would have known what to do with the seagull. So what, if Adrienne became his wife, remained of his friendship with Lydia?

He put aside the unresolved perplexity and took Barney first.

“My dear Barney,” he wrote,—“I don’t think that the letter Adrienne has written to you will surprise you as much as this letter of mine. You will understand from hers that she wishes to free herself and to free you. You will understand that that is my wish, too. She only tells you that she has been staying here with me, for a fortnight, as my wife; that’s for your solicitor; you will read between the lines and know that it seemed worth while to both of us to make the necessary sacrifice in order to gain so much for you and for her. I hope that you and my dear Nancy will feel that we are justified, and that you will take your happiness as bravely as we secure it for you. You’ll know that our step hasn’t been taken lightly.

“But, now, dear Barney, comes my absolutely personal contribution. It is a contribution, for it will make you and Nancy happier to know that I have as much to gain as you and she. I have fallen in love with Adrienne and I hope that I may win her consent to be my wife. Yes, dear Barney, unbelievable as it will look to you, there it is; and she dreams of it as little as you could have dreamed of it. I met her again, as her letter informs you, at the Boulogne hospital. She asked me to say nothing about our meeting. She wanted to disappear out of your lives. She saved my life, I think, and I saw a great deal of her. What I found in her that I had not seen before I need not say.

“My great difficulty, my burden and perplexity now, lie in the fact that she has no trace of feeling for me that might give me hope. We became, at Boulogne, the best of friends; such friends that this plan suggested itself to her; and we remain, after our fortnight here, the best of friends; and that is all. Yet I have hope, unjustified and groundless though it may be, and had I not had it from the beginning I couldn’t have entered upon the enterprise; not even for you and Nancy. From one point of view it’s possible that you may feel that I’ve entered upon it in spite of you and Nancy. You may feel inclined to repudiate and disown the whole affair and to remain unaware of it. In that case it would come down to an appeal from me to you to carry it through for my sake. But from another point of view it makes it easier for you; easier for you to accept, since my hope gives integrity to the situation. That’s another thing that decided me. If it had been mere sham I don’t think I could have undertaken it. Adrienne felt none of my scruples on this score. She walked over legal and conventional commandments like a saint over hot ploughshares. But I haven’t her immunities. I should have felt myself badly scorched, and felt that I’d scorched you and Nancy, if my hope hadn’t given everything its character of bona fides.

“Dear Barney, dear Nancy, please forgive me if I’ve been selfish. It hasn’t all been selfishness, that I promise you; it was in hopes for you, too; and I have to face sacrifices. The worst of them will be that if Adrienne takes me I’ll have to lose you. You can measure the depth of my feeling for her from the fact that I can make such sacrifices. Perhaps you’ll feel that even if she doesn’t take me I’ll have to lose you. I hope not. I hope, in that case, that mitigations and refuges will be found for me and that some day you’ll perhaps be able to make a corner in your lives where I may creep and feel my wounds less aching. In any case, after Adrienne, you are the creatures dearest to me in the world and I am always and for ever your devoted friend,

Roger.”

And now Lydia. There was no use in thinking about it. The plunge must be taken.

“My dear Lydia,” he wrote,—“I have fallen in love with Adrienne Toner. I feel that with such a friend as you it’s better to begin with the bomb-shell. She doesn’t know it, and if we are here in this Lyons hotel together, it’s only, she imagines, because she wishes to set Barney free and that I’ve undertaken, for her sake and for Barney’s, a repugnant task. It is a repugnant task, in spite of what it may mean to me of happiness. I hate it for her, and for Barney and for myself. But since she was determined on it and since, if it wasn’t I it was to be another friend, and since I have fallen in love with her, I saw that it was only decent that the co-respondent in the case should be the man who married her afterwards. For I hope to become her husband, and I haven’t one jot of ground for my hope. We are studying Dante together, and she shows me the sights of Lyons. She is just the same. Yet completely altered.

“I don’t know whether you’ll feel you can ever see me again, with or without her. I don’t want to cast myself too heavily on your compassion, so I’ll only remind you that even if I return to England alone I shall probably have to lose Nancy and Barney and that you will be my only refuge. It will be the culmination of my misfortunes if I have to lose you.

“Dear Lydia, I am always your devoted

“Roger”

But he hadn’t lost her. He knew he hadn’t lost her; in any case. And the taste of what he did was sharp and bitter to him, for she was generous and loyal and he had cut off her very limbs. When he had addressed and stamped the letters he went downstairs, and, for the sense of greater finality, carried them to the post instead of dropping them into the hotel-box.

He had almost the sense of disembodiment as he returned to the empty and dismantled room. He seemed to have become a mere consciousness suspended between two states of being. The past was gone. He had dropped it into the post-box. And he saw no future. He felt, for the moment, no hopes. At the moment it seemed absurd to think that Adrienne could ever love him. He tried to picture Coldbrooks and Somer’s Place when the bomb-shell struck them. Would Barney show Nancy the letter? Nancy would be pale, aghast, silent. Barney would have to wait for days, perhaps, before saying to her: “But, after all, it’s for their sakes, too, Nancy dear. See what Roger says.” Mrs. Averil would cast up her hands and cry “That woman!”—but, perhaps, with as much admiration as repudiation, and Meg, if she were summoned to the scene of confusion, would say, “So she’s got hold of Roger, too.” Funnily enough it was the dear March Hare, he felt sure, who would be the first one to stretch out a hand towards the tarnished freedom. “After all, you know,” he could hear her murmuring, “it would be much nicer for Barney and Nancy to be married, wouldn’t it? And Adrienne wasn’t a Christian, you know, so probably the first marriage doesn’t really count. We mustn’t be conventional, Monica.” Yes, perhaps it would go like that at Coldbrooks. But at Somer’s Place Lydia would sit among her fans and glass and wish that they had never seen Adrienne Toner.

He paced up and down before the windows and he had never been so lonely in his life. He was so lonely that he became aware at last that his mere negative state was passing into a positive and that grief at the severance of old ties had become fear of losing Adrienne. The fear and the loneliness seemed actualized when, at five, the waiter appeared bearing the tea-tray on his shoulder. He had never had tea alone before in this strange, foreign room. Adrienne always made a complicated and charming ritual of the occasion, boiling the water on their own little spirit-kettle and measuring the tea from her own caddy—the very same kettle and caddy, she told him, that had accompanied herself and her mother on all their travels. And to see the cups and bread and butter and not to have her there, added a poignant taste of abandonment to his loneliness.

She kept the kettle in her room and when the boy was gone he softly opened the door and went in. It would keep his heart up to have the water boiling in readiness for her arrival. He recognized, as he stood, then, and looked about him, that his instinct had also been that of taking refuge. In her room he could more closely recover the sense of her presence.

She had finished all the essentials of her packing and her box stood with its lid open ready for the last disposals. Yet the room seemed still full of her personality. He noted it all gazing around him with eyes almost those of a solemn little boy permitted to glance in at a Christmas-tree.

Her dressing-table, improvised from the mantelpiece, was neatly laid out with small, worn, costly, and immaculate appurtenances. He moved forward and looked at them, not touching. The initials intertwined on the backs of the ivory brushes were her girlish ones: A. T. She had discarded, long since, no doubt, her wedding toilet set.

If he became her husband, the thought crossed his mind and quickened his heart, he might brush her hair for her, that wonderful golden hair, before many months were over.

Near the ivory hand-glass stood two photographs in a folding frame of faded blue leather. He stooped to look and saw that one was of Mrs. and the other certainly of Mr. Toner, in their early days. Remote, mysterious and alien, their formally directed eyes looked back at him and in the father’s ingenuous young countenance, surmounted by a roll of hair that was provincial without being exactly rural, the chin resting upon a large, peculiar collar, he could strangely retrace Adrienne’s wide brow and steadfast light-filled eyes. Mrs. Toner wore a ruffled dress and of her face little remained distinct but the dark gaze—forceful and ambiguously gentle.

The room was full of the fragrance that was not a fragrance and that had, long ago, reminded him of Fuller’s earth. A pair of small blue satin mules stood under a chair near the bed.

Only after he had withdrawn, gently closing the door behind him, did he realize that he had forgotten the kettle and then he felt that he could not go back again. A moment after the boy returned with a note, sent, by hand, he was informed, from the Croix Rousse.

“I am so dreadfully sorry, so disappointed,” he read. “Our last afternoon, but I can’t get away yet. Don’t wait dinner for me, if I should be late, even for that. I won’t be very late, I promise, and we will have our evening.”

The note had no address. He rushed forth and down to find the messenger gone. Had he only known where to seek her in the vast, high, melancholy district of the Croix Rousse he would have gone to join her. His sense of loneliness was almost a panic.

Of course, he tried to fix his mind on that realization, as he went back to the salon, her rapatriÉs had no doubt preoccupied her mind, from the first, quite as much as their own situation. She had spoken to him in especial of this family and of their sorrows. One child they had left dead at Evian and the mother, on the eve of their return to their Northern home, had become too desperately ill to travel. “Such dear, good, gentle people,” he recalled her saying. No; he must not repine. After all he had only the one thing to say to her; and the evening would be long enough for that.

It was nearly seven when he heard her quick footstep outside. When she entered, the brim of her little hat, in the electric light, cast a sharp shadow over her eyes, but he saw at once that she had been crying.

She came in so quickly that he had not time to rise and, going to him, behind his chair, she put her hands on his shoulders and pressed him down, saying: “I’m so sorry to have left you all alone.”

It was astonishingly comforting to have her put these fraternal hands upon him like this. She had never done it before. Yet there was a salty smart in her words to him. What else did she intend to do but leave him all alone for always?

“I’m dreadfully lonely, I confess,” he said, “and I see that you’re dreadfully tired.”

She went round to the other side of the table and sat down, not looking at him and said, in a low voice: “Oh—the seas—the seas of misery.”

“You are completely worn out,” he said. He was not thinking so much of the seas of misery as of his few remaining hours. Were they to be spoiled by her fatigue?

“No; not worn out. Not at all worn out,” said Adrienne, stretching her arms along the table in front of her as she sat, and though she had wept he could see something of ardour, of a strength renewed, in the lines of her pallid lips. “I’ve sat quite still all afternoon. I’ve been with him. She died soon after I got there. At the end she was talking about the little girl’s grave at Evian. I was able to comfort her about that. She was so afraid it would not be tended. That it would have no flowers. JosÉphine will go to Evian afterwards and see about it. There are always dear nuns to do those things. There was a nun with her to-day. That was the greatest comfort of all; and the priest who came. But I was with the father and the five poor little children; so frightened and miserable. I could not leave them, you see. He talked and talked and talked. It helped him to talk and tell me about their home and how they had had everything so nice and bright. Linen, a garden, a goat and fowls. Oh, if only she could have seen her home again! That was what he kept saying and saying. They were full of hope when they got to Evian. He told me how the children sang at dawn when the train panted up the mountain among the golden trees. Like birds, he said, and Vive la France! They all believed they were to be safe and happy. Et, Madame, c’Était notre calvaire qui commencait alors seulement.”

She spoke, not really thinking of him, he saw, absorbed still in the suffering she had just left, measuring her power against such problems and the worse ones to which she was travelling to-morrow.

“JosÉphine will be with them, I hope,” she went on presently, “in three or four days. She will help them to get home and then she will come back and go to see about the grave at Evian. JosÉphine is a tower of strength for me.”

Her eyes were raised to him now, and, as they rested, he saw the compunction, the solicitude, with which they had met him on her entrance, return to them. “I’m not so very late, am I?” she said, rising. “I’ll take off my hat and be ready in a moment.”

“Don’t hurry,” said Oldmeadow.

She was tired, more tired than she knew. During dinner she hardly spoke, and, finding the resolve suddenly, he said, as they came back to their salon: “Do you know what you must do now. Go and lie down and rest for an hour. Until nine. It’s not unselfishness. I’d rather have half of you to talk to for our last talk, than none of you at all.”

“How dear of you,” she said. She looked at him with gratitude and, still, with the compunction. “It would be a great rest. It would be better for our talk. I can go to sleep at once, you know. Like Napoleon,” she added with a flicker of her playfulness.

When she had gone into her room Oldmeadow went out and walked along the quai. The night was dark and dimmed with fog, but there was a moon and as he walked he watched it glimmer on the windows of St. Jean. He seemed to see the august form of the cathedral through a watery element and the grey and silver patterns of the glass were like the scales of some vast fish. A sort of whale waiting to swallow up the Jonah that was himself, he reflected, and, leaning his elbows on the parapet of the quai, the analogy carried him further and he saw the cathedral like a symbol of Adrienne’s life—her “big, big” life—looming there before him, becoming, as the moon rose higher, more and more visible in its austere and menacing majesty. What was his love to measure itself against such a vocation?—for that was what it came to, as she had said. She was as involved, as harnessed, as passionately preoccupied as a Saint Theresa. How could he be fitted in with Serbia and all the hordes of human need and wretchedness that he saw her sailing forward to succour? He knew a discouragement deeper than any he had felt, for he was not a doctor and his physical strength was crippled by his wounds; and, shaking his shoulders in the chilly November air, he turned his back on the cathedral and leaned against the parapet to look up through leafless branches where the plane tassels still hung, at the lighted windows of the hotel; their hotel, where the room, still theirs, waited for them. He felt himself take refuge in the banal lights. After all, she wasn’t really a Saint Theresa. There was human misery everywhere to succour. Couldn’t she, after a winter in Serbia, found crÊches and visit slums in London? The masculine scepticism she had detected in him had its justification. Women weren’t meant to go on, once the world’s crisis past, doing feats of heroism; they weren’t meant for austere careers that gave no leisure and no home. The trivial yet radiant vision of intimacy rose again before him. She slept there above him and he was guarding her slumber. He would always watch over her and guard her. He would follow her round the world, if need be, and brush her hair for her in Serbia or California.

CHAPTER IX

THE gilt clock on the mantelpiece pointed to nine, but when he went to Adrienne’s door and listened there was no sound within her room, and his heart sank as he wondered if she might not sleep on, in her fatigue, sleep past all possible hour for their colloquy. Yet he did not feel that he could go in and wake her. The analogy of the cathedral loomed before him. It would be like waking Saint Theresa.

He walked up and down the empty, glittering salon; walked and walked until the clock struck ten. Desperation nerved him then and he went again to her door and knocked.

With hardly a pause her voice answered him; yet he knew that he had awakened her and it echoed for him with the pathos of so many past scenes of emergency when it must so have answered a summons from oblivion: “Coming, coming.” Among bombings, he reflected; and sudden terrible influxes of dying men from the front.

“Coming,” he heard her repeat, on a note of dismay. She had sprung up, turned on her light and seen the hour.

He was reminded vividly, as he saw her enter—and it was as if a great interval of time had separated them—of his first meeting with her. She was so changed; but now as then she was more composed than anyone he had ever met.

But it was of much more than the first meeting that the pale, still face reminded him. His dreams were in it; the dream where she had come to him along the terrace, lifting her hand in the moonlight; and the dream of horror when he had again and again pushed it down to drown.

“I’m so ashamed,” she said, and he saw that it was with an effort she smiled. The traces of her weeping were now, after her sleep, far more visible, ageing her, yet making her, too, look younger; like a child with swollen lids and lips. “I didn’t know I was so tired. I slept and slept. I didn’t stir until I heard your knock. Never mind. We’ll talk till midnight.”

She was very sorry for him.

She sat down at the table and under the electric chandelier her braided hair showed itself all ruffled and disarranged. She had on her dark travelling dress and she had thrust her feet into the pale blue satin mules. The disparity of costume in one so accurate, her air of readiness for the morrow, made him feel her transitoriness almost more than her presence, though his sense of that pressed upon him with a stifling imminence. Even though she sat there the room kept its look of desolate, glittering emptiness and more than their shared life in it he remembered the far places from which she had come and to which she was going. It was as if she had just arrived and were pausing for the night en route.

As he had seen them years ago, so he saw again the monster engines crossing the prairies at night and flying illumined pennons of smoke against the sky as they bore her away from blue seas, golden sands, a land where the good and gifted lurked behind every bush; and before her stretched the shining rails, miles and miles of them, running through ruin and desolation, that were to bear her ever onwards into the darkness. This was what life had brought her to. She had been only a sojourner among them at Coldbrooks. The linked life of order and family affection had cast her forth and he saw her, for ever now, unless he could rescue her, with only hotels to live in and only the chaos she was to mould, to live for. She seemed already, as she sat there under the light with her ruffled hair, to be sitting in the train that was to bear her from him.

“I think you owe me till midnight, at least,” he said. He had not sat down. He stood at some little distance from her leaning, his arms folded, against a gilded and inlaid console. “We’ve lots of things to talk about.”

“Have we?” Adrienne asked, smiling gently, but as if she humoured an extravagance. “We’ll be together, certainly, even if we don’t talk much. But I have some things to say, too.”

She had dropped her eyes to her hands which lay, lightly crossed, on the table before her, and she seemed to reflect how best to begin. “It’s about Nancy and Barney,” she said. “I wanted, before we part, to talk to you a little about them. There are things that trouble me and you are the only person with whom I can keep in touch. You will know how I shall be longing to hear, everything. You’ll let me know at once, won’t you?”

“At once,” said Oldmeadow.

“There might be delays and difficulties,” Adrienne went on. “I shall be very troubled until all that is clear. And then the money. You know about the money? Barney isn’t well off and he was worse off after I’d come and gone. I tried to arrange that as best I could. Palgrave understood and entered into all my feelings.”

“Yes; I’d heard. You arranged it all very cleverly,” said Oldmeadow.

He moved away now and, at the other end of the room, his back to her, came to a standstill, while his eyes dwelt on a large gilt-framed engraving that hung there; some former Salon triumph; a festive, spring-tide scene where young women in bustles and bonnets offered sugar to race-horses in a meadow, admired by young men in silk hats.

“Do you think this may make a difficulty?” Adrienne asked. “Make him more reluctant to take what is to come to him? It’s Mrs. Chadwick’s now, you know.”

“You’ve arranged it all so well,” said Oldmeadow, noting the gardenias in the young men’s button-holes, “that I don’t think they can get away from it.”

“But will they hate it dreadfully?” she insisted, and he felt that her voice in its added urgency protested, though unconsciously, against his distance; “I seem to see that they might. If they can’t take it as a sign of accepted love, won’t they hate it?”

“Well,” said Oldmeadow, trying to reflect, though his mind was far from Barney and Nancy, “dear Eleanor Chadwick doesn’t mind taking it, whatever it’s a sign of. And since it will come to Barney through her, I don’t think there’ll be enough personality left hanging about it to hurt much.”

“I wish they could take it as a sign of accepted love,” Adrienne murmured.

“Perhaps they will,” he said. “I’ll do my best that they shall, I promise you.”

It was one thing to promise it and another to know his hope that it might be a promise never to be redeemed. The cross-currents in his own thought made him light-headed as he stood there, his back to her, and examined the glossy creatures in the meadow. “Do you think it will all take a long time?” Adrienne added, after a little pause. “Will they be able to marry in six or eight months, say?”

“It depends on how soon Barney takes action. Say about a year,” he suggested. “They’d wait a little first, wouldn’t they?”

“I hope not. They’ve waited so long already. I hope it will be as soon as possible. I shall feel so much more peaceful when I hear they’re married. Could you, perhaps, make them see that, too?”

And again he promised. “I’ll make them see everything I can.”

He turned to her at last. She sat, her face still downcast in its shadow, while the light glittered on her wreaths of hair. Her hands still lay before her on the table, and the light fell on her wedding-ring. Perhaps she was looking at the ring.

“It all depends on something else,” he heard himself say suddenly.

She turned her head and looked round at him. His attitude, his distance from her, drew her attention rather than his words, for she repeated mildly: “On something else?”

“Whether I can keep those promises, you know,” said Oldmeadow. “Yes, it all depends on something else. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

He hardly knew what he was saying as he approached the table and pushed the brocaded chair, companion to the one in which she sat, a little from its place. He leaned on its back and looked down at her hands and Adrienne kept her eyes on him, attentive rather than perplexed.

“May I talk to you about it now?” he asked. “It’s something quite different.”

“Oh, do,” said Adrienne. She drew her hands into her lap and sat upright, in readiness. And, suddenly, as he was silent, she added: “About yourself? I’ve been forgetting that, haven’t I? I’ve only been thinking of my side. You have quite other plans, perhaps. Perhaps you’re not going back to England for ever so long. Is it an appointment?”

“No; not an appointment,” he muttered, still looking down, at the table now, since her hands were no longer there. “But perhaps I shan’t be going back for a long time. I hope not.”

“Oh,” she murmured. And now he had perplexed her. After what he had just promised her, his hope must perplex and even trouble her. “Do tell me,” she said.

“It’s something I want to ask you,” said Oldmeadow—“And it will astonish you. You may find it hard to forgive; because I’ve meant to ask it from the beginning; from our deciding to go away together. As far back as the time in the hospital.”

“But you may ask anything. Anything at all,” she almost urged upon him. “After what I’ve asked you—you have every right. If there’s anything I can do in the wide, wide world for you—oh! you know how glad and proud I should be. As for forgiveness”—he heard the smile in her voice, she was troubled, yet tranquil, too—“you’re forgiven in advance.”

“Am I? Wait and see.” He, too, tried to smile, as he used the tag; but it was a mechanical smile and he felt his heart knocking against the chair-back as he went on: “Because I haven’t done what you asked me to do as you asked me to do it. I haven’t done it from the motive you supposed. It’s been for Barney and for Nancy and for you; but it’s been most of all for myself.” He screwed his glass into his eye as he spoke with a gesture as mechanical as the smile had been and he looked at her at last, thus brought nearer. “I want you not to go on to-morrow.” It was the first, the evident, the most palpable desire that rose to his lips. “I want you never to go on again, alone. If you can’t stay with me, I want you to let me follow you. When the time comes I want you to marry me. I love you.”

The light as it fell on her seemed suddenly strange, almost portentous in its brilliancy. Or was it her stillness, as she sat and gazed at him after he had spoken the words, that was strange and portentous? It was as if they arrested the currents of her being and she sat tranced, frozen into the fixed shape of an astonishment too deep for emotion. Her eyes did not alter in their gentleness; but the gentleness became tragic and pitiful, like the inappropriate calm on the mask of a dead face at Pompeii, fixed in an eternal unreadiness by the engulfing lava.

She put up her hand at last and pushed back her hair. With her forehead bared she became more like the photograph of her father. When she spoke her voice was slow and feeble, like the voice of a person dangerously ill. “I don’t understand you.”

“Try to,” said Oldmeadow. “You must begin far back.”

She still kept her hand pressed upon her hair. “You don’t mean that it’s the conventionally honourable thing to do? Oh, no; you don’t mean that?” Her face in its effort to understand was appalled.

“No; I don’t mean anything conventional,” he returned. “I’m thinking only of you. Of my love. I’ll come with you to Serbia to-morrow—if you’ll let me. I could kneel and worship you as you sit there.”

“Oh,” she more feebly murmured. She sank back in her chair.

“My darling, my saint,” said Oldmeadow, gazing at her; “if you must leave me, you’ll take that with you; that the man who destroyed you is your lover; that you are dearer to him than anything on earth.”

“Oh,” she murmured again, and she put her hands before her face. Her eyes were hidden; she had spoken no word of reproach and he could not keep himself from her. He knelt beside her, grasping the chair across, behind her. She was so near that he could have laid his head upon her breast. “Don’t leave me,” he heard his pleading voice, but she seemed so much nearer than his own voice; “or let me come. Everything shall be as you wish and when you wish. Tell me that you care, too; or that you can come to care. Tell me that you can think of me as your husband.”

She was there, with her hidden eyes, within his arms, and inevitably they closed around her, and though he heard her murmur, “Please, please, please,” he could not relinquish her. She was free and he was free. They had cut themselves off from the world. They were alone in the strange city; in the strange, bright, hallucinated room; and he knew from the ache and rapture of her nearness how he had craved it.

But, gently, he heard her say again, “Please,” and gently she put him from her and he saw her face, and her eyes full of grief and gentleness. “Forgive me,” she said.

“My darling. For what?” he almost groaned. “Don’t say you’re going to break my heart.”

She kept her hand on his breast, holding him from her while she looked into his eyes. “It is so beautiful to be loved,” she said, and her voice was still the slow, feeble voice of exhaustion. “Even when one has no right to be. Don’t misunderstand. Even when one may not love back; not in that way. Forgive me; not in that way; my dearest friend.”

“Why mayn’t you love back? Why not in that way? If it’s beautiful, why mayn’t you?”

“Sit there, will you? Yes; keep my hand. How weak I’ve been, and cruel. It can’t be. Don’t you know? Haven’t you seen? It has always been for him. He must be free; but I can never be free.”

“Oh, no. No. That’s impossible,” Oldmeadow said, leaning towards her across the table and keeping her hand in both of his. “I can’t stand that. I could stand your work, your vocation, better. But not Barney, who loves another woman. That’s impossible.”

“But it is so,” she said, softly, looking at him. “Really it is so.”

“No, no,” Oldmeadow repeated, and he raised her hand to his lips and kept it there, a talisman against the menace of her words. “He lost you. He’s gone. I’ve found you and you care for me. You can’t hide from me that you care for me. Just now. For those moments. You were mine.”

“No,” she repeated. “I was weak and cruel, but I was not yours.”

She had been incredibly near so short a time ago before. Now, looking at him, with her difficult breaths and gentle, inflexible eyes, she was incredibly remote. “I am his, only his,” she said. “I love him and I shall always love him. It makes no difference. He loves Nancy, but it makes no difference. He is my husband. The father of my baby.”

She tried to speak on steadily while she thus gave him the truth that ended all his hope; but the desperate emotion with which he received it made real and overpowering to her her outlived yet living sorrow. With all that she must relinquish laid bare to her in the passion of his eyes she could measure all that she had lost, as she had, perhaps, till then, never measured it. “Don’t you know?” she said. “Don’t you see? My heart is broken, broken, broken.”

She put her head down on her arms as she said the words and he heard her bitter weeping.

He knew, as he listened, that it was all over with him. Dimly, in the terrible suffering that wrenched at him, he received his further revelation of the nature already nearer him than any in the world. Her strength would be in all she did and felt. She had loved Barney and she would always love him. Her marriage had been to her an ultimate and indissoluble experience. That was why she had been so blind. She could not have thought of herself as a woman to be again loved and wooed.

Her hair lay against his hands, still holding hers, and he found himself stroking it, without tenderness or solicitude it seemed. It seemed to be only automatically that his fingers passed across it, while he noted its warmth and fineness and bright, lovely colour, remembering that he had thought it at the first her one indubitable beauty.

They sat there thus for a long time. The gilt clock paused, choked, then in a voice of hurrying, hoarsened silver rang out eleven strokes. Footsteps passed and faded up the corridor; doors closed. A tramway on the quai clashed and clanged, came to a noisy standstill, and moved on again with a rattling of cables and raucous blasts from a horn; and in the profound silence that followed he seemed to hear the deep old river flowing.

“Really, you see, it’s broken,” said Adrienne. She had ceased to weep, but she still leaned forward, her head upon her folded arms. “You saw it happen,” she said. “That night when you found me in the rain.”

“I’ve seen everything happen to you, haven’t I?” said Oldmeadow.

“Yes,” she assented. “Everything. And I’ve made you suffer, too. Isn’t that strange; everybody who comes near me I make suffer.”

“Well, in different ways,” he said. “Some because you are near and others because you won’t be.”

His voice was colourless. His hand still passed across her hair.

“Don’t you see,” she said, after a moment, “that it couldn’t have been. Try to see that and to accept it. Not you and me. Not Barney’s friend and Barney’s wife. In every way it couldn’t have done, really. It makes no difference for me. I’m a dÉracinÉe, as I said. A wanderer. But what would have become of you, all full of roots as you are? You can live it down without me. You never could have with. And how could you have wandered with me? For that must be my life.”

“You know, it’s no good trying to comfort me,” said Oldmeadow. “What I feel is that any roots I have are in you.”

“They will grow again. The others will grow again.”

“I don’t want others, darling,” said Oldmeadow. “You see, my heart is broken, too.”

She lifted her head at last and he saw her marred and ravaged face.

“It can’t be helped,” he tried to smile at her. “You weren’t there to be recognized when I first met you and now that you are there, I’ve come too late. I believe that if I’d come before Barney, you’d have loved me. It’s my only comfort.”

“Who can say,” said Adrienne. Her gaze, as she looked at him, was deep with the mystery of her acceptance. “Perhaps. It seems to me all this was needed to bring us where we are—enmity and bitterness and grief. And my love for Barney, too. Let me tell you. It’s in the past that I think of him. As if he were dead. It’s something over; done with for ever; yet something always there. How can one be a mother and forget? Even when he is Nancy’s husband and when she is a mother, I shall not cease to feel myself his wife. Perhaps you think that strange, after Meg and what I believed right for her. But it is quite clear to me, and simple. It isn’t a thing of laws and commandments; only of our own hearts. If we can love again, we may. But for me it would be impossible. With me everything was involved. I couldn’t, ever, be twice a wife.”

Silence fell between them.

“I’ll see about the little girl’s grave,” said Oldmeadow suddenly. He did not know what had made him think of it. Perhaps something that had gone on echoing in him after she had spoken of her maternity. “I’ll go to Evian to-morrow. It will spare JosÉphine the journey and give me something to do. You’ll tell me the name and give me the directions before you go.”

Tears filled her eyes as she looked at him; but they did not fall. They could need no controlling. The springs of weeping must be nearly drained. “Thank you,” she said, and she looked away, seeming to think intently.

It was now too late for the tramways. They had ceased to crash and rattle by, but a sound of belated singing passed along the quais, melancholy in its induced and extravagant mirth.

The horrible sense of human suffering that had beaten in upon him at the hospital, pressed again upon his heart. He saw himself departing next day to find the abandoned grave and he saw himself standing beside her train and measuring along the shining rails the vast distances that were to bear her away for ever.

“That’s the worst,” he said. “You’re suffering too. I must see you go away and know that you are unhappy. I must think of you as unhappy. With a broken heart.”

Her eyes, after she had thanked him, had been fixed in the intent reverie. She, too, perhaps, had been seeing those tides of misery, the sea of which she had spoken, breaking in tragic waves for ever; so unchanged by all the alleviations that love or mercy could bring; and it was perhaps with despair that she saw herself as one with it. Her eyes as she turned them on him were full of distance and of depth and, with sickening grief, he felt that a woman with a broken heart could do nothing more for herself or for him.

But her thought, whatever the voids of darkness it had visited, drew nearer and nearer to his need as she looked at him. Something of her own strong vigilance was in the look, bringing the seagull to his mind. The seagull caught and battered by the waves, with sodden wings, half dragged down, yet summoning its strength to rise from the submerging sea.

“But you can be happy with a broken heart,” she said. Their hands had fallen apart long since. She stretched out hers now and took his in her small, firm grasp.

“Can you?” he asked.

“You mustn’t think of me like this,” she said, and it was as if she read his thoughts and their imagery. “I went down, I know; like drowning. Sometimes the waves break over you and pull you down, and there seems nothing else in all the world but yourself and what you’ve suffered. But it doesn’t last. Something brings you up again.”

Something had brought her up again now. His darkness. His misery. It was as if he saw her spread her wings and saw her eyes measuring, for them both, the spaces of sea and sky.

He remembered a picture in a book he had loved as a little boy: little Diamond held to the breast of the North Wind as she flies forth in her streaming hair against a sky of stars. So he felt himself lying on her breast and lifted with her.

“I’ve told you how happy I can be. It’s all true,” she said. “It’s all there. The light, the peace, the strength. I shall find them. And so will you.”

“Shall I?” he questioned gently. “Without you?”

“Yes. Without me. You will find them. But you won’t be without me,” said Adrienne.

Already she was finding them. He knew that, for, as she looked at him, he felt an influence passing from her to him like the laying of her hand upon his brow. But it was closer than that. It was to her breast that her eyes held him while, in a long silence, the compulsion of her faith flowed into him. First quietness; then peace; then a lifting radiance.

“Promise me,” he heard her say.

He did not know what it was he must promise, but he seemed to feel it all without knowing and he said: “I promise.”

She rose and stood above him. “You mustn’t regret. You mustn’t want.”

She laid her hands upon his shoulders as she spoke and looked down at him, so austere, so radiant. “Anything else would have spoiled it. We were only meant to find each other like this and then to part.”

“I’ll be good,” said Oldmeadow. It was like saying one’s prayers at one’s mother’s knees and his lips found the child-like formula.

“We must part,” said Adrienne. “I have my life and you have yours and they take different ways. But you won’t be without me, I won’t be without you. How can we be, when we will never, never forget each other and our love?”

He looked up at her. He had put out his hands and they grasped her dress as a donor in a votive altarpiece grasps the Madonna’s healing garment. It was not, he knew, to keep her. It was rather in an accepting relinquishment that he held her thus for their last communion, receiving through touch and sight and hearing her final benison.

“I will think of you every day, until I die,” she said. “I will pray for you every day. Dear friend—dearest friend—God bless and keep you.”

She had stooped to him and for a transcending moment he was taken into her strong, life-giving embrace. The climax of his life was come as he felt her arms close round him and her kiss upon his forehead. And as she held him thus he believed all that she had said and all for which she could have found no words. That he should find the light and more and more feel their unity in it: that the thought of her would be strength to him always; as the thought of him and of his love would be strength to her.

After she had gone, he sat for a long time bathed in the sense of her life, and tasting, for that span of time, her own security of eternal goodness.

THE END

Typographical error was corrected by the etext transcriber:

“Adriennes mustn’t fail,” said Mrs. Averil dryly. “The only justification for Adriennes is to be in the right. => “Adrienne mustn’t fail,” said Mrs. Averil dryly. “The only justification for Adrienne is to be in the right. {pg 241}