DAMIER, three days afterward, stood in his sitting-room in a Paris hotel, looking with a certain astonishment at the small sheet of notepaper he held, upon which was written in a firm, flowing hand—a hand that seemed, though so gracefully, to contradict any impression of a cry for help:

It was like the evocation of a ghost to see this reality, emerged suddenly out of the dream-world where, for so long, he had thought of her, the young girl leaning on the chair-back in her flowing dress of silk. She was alive, and he was to see her that afternoon. Damier felt a chill overtake his eagerness. Was he not about to shatter a charming experience—one of the sweetest, most tender, most dearly absurd of his life? Would he not find in the real, middle-aged Clara Vicaud a hard, uninteresting woman? He had a vision of stoutly corseted robustness in jetted black cashmere; of a curve of heavy throat under the chin; of cold eyes looking with wonder, with suspicion even, upon his romantic quest. He could almost have felt it in him to draw back at the eleventh hour were he not ashamed to face in himself such cowardice. He took out the photograph and looked at it, and the eyes of Clara Chanfrey seemed to smile at him with something of tender irony. “Do not be afraid of me; I will never disappoint you,” they said. After all, what could the mere passage of years mean to such a face as that? What could the bitter experiences of a sorrowful life hold in them to tarnish ever the spirit that looked from it? The reluctance was only superficial, a ripple of reaction upon the deep tide of his impulse.

At four that afternoon he drove to a long, narrow street near the Boulevard St. Germain—a street of large, bleak houses showing a sort of dismantled stateliness. At one of the largest, stateliest, bleakest of these the fiacre stopped, and Damier, after asking the way of a grimly respectable concierge with a small knitted shawl of black wool folded tightly about her shoulders, mounted a wide, uncarpeted stone staircase to the highest floor, feeling, as he stood outside the door, that, despite the long ascent, the thick beating of his heart was due more to emotional than to physical causes.

He rang, and as he stood waiting he heard suddenly within a woman’s voice singing. The voice was beautiful, and the song was Schumann’s “Im wunderschÖnen Monat Mai.” Its pathos, its simplicity, its tenderness, mingled with Damier’s almost tremulous mood, and pierced his very soul. It was like an awakening in Paradise; there was the remembered sadness of a long, long past; the strange, melancholy rapture of something dawning, something unknown and wonderful. Could any music more fitly usher in the coming meeting?

A middle-aged servant came to the door, conventual in the demure quiet of her dress and demeanor, and ushered Damier into a bare and spacious room where the light from scantily curtained windows shone broadly across the polished floor. A woman rose and came forward from the piano. Damier’s first impression, after the breathless moment in which he saw that it was not she, was one of dazzling beauty.

“I am Mademoiselle Vicaud—Claire Vicaud,” this young woman said, “and you are Mr. Damier. My mother is expecting you; she will be here directly.”

Perhaps he felt, as she smiled gravely upon him, it was the power in her face, rather than its beauty, that had dazzled him. Already he discovered something almost repellent in its enchantment. Her eyes were dark, with a still, an impenetrable darkness; a small mole emphasized the scarlet curve of her upper lip; the lines of cheek and brow were wonderfully beautiful. It was, indefinably, in the soft spreading of the nostrils, in the deeply sunk corners of the mouth, that one felt a plebeian touch. There was nothing, however, of this quality in the carriage of her head, with its heavy tiara of dark-red hair, nor in the dignity and grace of her figure; and nothing in her, except some vague suggestion in this grace and dignity, reminded him of the photograph; and he was at once deeply glad of this, glad that Mademoiselle Vicaud resembled her father—he felt sure she did—and not her mother.

She seated herself, indicating to him a chair near her, and observed him with the same grave smile, and in an unembarrassed silence, while he spoke of his pleasure at being in Paris, at finding them there. Damier himself was not unembarrassed; found it difficult to talk trivialities to this Hebe while thrilling with expectation; and Mademoiselle Vicaud, unable otherwise to interpret it, may well have seen in her own radiant apparition the cause of his slight disturbance.

“But you are not old,” she said to him.

“Did you expect that?” he inquired.

“Then you are not a friend of Mamma’s—a friend of her youth, I mean? I don’t think that she was quite sure who you were.”

“It is only through an old friend of hers that—I hope to become another,” Damier finished, smiling.

“Well, pour commencer, you may be our young friend—we have time, you and I, before we need think of being old ones. I get tired of old things, myself.”

“Even of old friends?” Damier asked, amused at her air of placid familiarity.

“Ah, that depends.”

He observed that Mademoiselle Vicaud, though speaking English with fluent ease, had in her voice and manner some most un-English qualities. Her voice was soft, deep, and a little guttural. She had a way, he noticed later on, of saying “Ah” when one talked to her, a placid little ejaculation that was curiously characteristic and curiously foreign.

But at the moment further observations were arrested. The door opened, and rising, as a swift footfall entered the room, Damier found himself face to face with his lady of the photograph.

He blushed. His emotion showed itself very evidently on his handsome, sensitive face, so evidently that the strangeness of the meeting made itself felt as a palpable atmosphere, and made conventional greetings an effort and something of an absurdity. Madame Vicaud, however, dared the absurdity, and so successfully that the formal sweetness of her smile, the vague geniality of her voice, as she said right things to him, seemed effortless. Damier, through all the tumult of his hurrying impressions, comparisons, wonders, yet found time to feel that she was a woman who could make many efforts and seem to make none. Her manner slid past the stress of the moment; her wonder, if she felt any, was not visible. All that she showed to her sudden visitor, introducing himself through a past that must have been long dead to her, was the smile, the geniality, vague and formal, of the woman of the world.

By contrast to this atmosphere of rule and reticence, the few words he had exchanged with the daughter seemed suddenly intimate—seemed to make a bond where the mother’s made a barrier. But above all barriers, all reticences, was the one fact—the wonderful fact—that she was she, changed so much, yet so much the same that the change was only a deepening, a subtilizing of her charm.

“Yes, I remember Mrs. Mostyn so well,” said Madame Vicaud, “and it is many years ago now. She must be old. Does she look old? Is she well? Will she come to Paris one day, do you think? Ah, as for my going to England to see her, that is a great temptation, a sufficient one were the possibility only as great. My daughter has been much in England; she really, now, knows it better than I do.”

Mademoiselle Vicaud did not meet her mother’s glance as it rested upon her; her eyes were fixed, with their dark placidity, upon Damier, as she sat sidewise in her chair, her hands—they were large, white, beautifully formed—loosely interlaced on the chair-back.

“Yes; I know England well,” she said—“educational England. I went to school there. I associate England with all that is formative and improving; I have been run through the mold so many times.”

“Run through?” Damier asked, smiling. “Have you never taken the form, then?” He was not interested in Mademoiselle Vicaud, although he felt intimate with her; but her mother’s glance brought her between them, placed her there; one was forced to look at her and to talk to her.

“Do you think I have?” Mademoiselle Vicaud asked, with her smile, that was not gay, a slumberous, indulgent smile. “I hope not,” she added, “physically, at least. I don’t like your English outline, as far as that is concerned.” Damier could but observe that hers was not English. She was supple, curved—slender, yet robust; one saw her soft breathing; her waist bent with a lovely flexibility. But the contemplation of these facts, to which she seemed, with the indifference of perfect assurance, to draw his attention, emphasized that sense of intimacy in a way that rather irritated him; Mademoiselle Vicaud, her outline and her exquisite gowning of it, slightly jarred upon him. He hardly knew how to word his appreciation of her difference, and after saying that he was glad she had escaped the more unbecoming influences of his country, added: “I hope that there were some things you cared to adopt.”

“They adopted me. I was quite passive, quite fluid,” said Mademoiselle Vicaud.

Her mother, while they interchanged these slight pleasantries, continued to look at her daughter.

“You rather exaggerate, do you not, Claire, the coercive nature of your English experience?” she said. “It was not all school; there was play, too.”

“Play like the kindergarten kind, with a meaning in it. My mother has always been anxious for me to take the right impressions,” said Mademoiselle Vicaud, her eyes still on Damier; “she has always chosen them for me.”

There was a momentary silence after this—a silence that might, Damier fancied, have held something of irritation for the mother, though none showed itself in the calm intelligence of her glance as it rested on her daughter.

Looking from her before the pause could become significant of anything like argument or antagonism, she asked Damier for how long he expected to remain in Paris, and the talk floated easily into cheerful and familiar channels—concerts, the play, books, and pictures.

She was so much more like the photograph than he had expected, and yet so different! The figure was the same, almost girlish, more girlish, really, than Mademoiselle Claire’s, though the fall in the line of her shoulders, the erect poise with which she sat, recalled a girlishness of another epoch, another tradition.

There was that in the folds of her long silk skirt,—a worn, shining silk, yet in its antiquity replete with elegance,—in the position of her narrow foot pointing from beneath its folds, in the way she lightly folded her arms while she talked to him, that suggested deportment, a manner trained, and as much a part of her as putting on her shoes was. She was very mannered and very unaffected; the manner was like the graceful garment of her perfect ease and naturalness—their protection, perhaps, and their ornament. As for her face, Damier, looking at it while they talked, felt its enchantment growing on him, like the gradual tuning of exquisite instruments preparing him for perfect music. Still, the face of the photograph, so unchanged that it was startling to feel how much older it was. The abundant hair was dressed in the same fashion, but its black was now of an odd grayness that made one just aware that it was no longer black. The heart-shaped oval was emphasized; the cheeks were thin, the chin sharply delicate, the lips compressed when she did not smile—but she frequently smiled—into a line of endurance, of a patience almost bitter. There were tones of pale mauve in the faint roses of her lips and cheeks, but Damier felt that this charming tint must always have been theirs—went with the snow and ebony of her type. Although her face was little lined,—emotion with her had been repressed, not demonstrated,—it had a look more aging than lines—a look of bleakness, of a cold impassivity. The texture of her skin was like a white rose-petal just fading. And in this faded whiteness her dark eyes gazed, more stern, more tragic than in youth. There was in them, and in the straight line of her black brows above them, a somberness and almost a menace. Damier wondered over the strange contrast to her frequent smile. He saw that where Mademoiselle Vicaud was still and grave her mother was light and gay, but the gaiety and lightness—he traced the impression further—were part of the manner, the protecting, ornamental manner; were something that had once been real, and were now put on, like her shoes, again. The daughter showed herself, or seemed to show herself, imperturbably: the mother was hidden, masked; her eyes, with their contrasting smile, made him think of Tragedy glancing among garlands of roses.

Before he went, that day, Damier told Madame Vicaud that his stay in Paris was to be indefinite; had even let her see, if she wished to, that she counted among his reasons for staying. He was sure that he was to go far, but he knew that he must go with discretion. One thing discretion evidently required of him—to include Mademoiselle Claire with her mother; her mother constantly included her. It was necessary to invite them both to drive in the Bois next day. It was then that he learned that Madame Vicaud and her daughter both gave lessons, mademoiselle in singing,—she had studied with the best masters,—madame in the harp and piano. Damier cast a glance upon the harp; the same, no doubt. Hours of engagements had to be consulted. They could both, however, be free next day at four.