In the persistent drizzle of a Paris winter morning Susy Lansing walked back alone from the school at which she had just deposited the four eldest Fulmers to the little house in Passy where, for the last two months, she had been living with them.

She had on ready-made boots, an old waterproof and a last year’s hat; but none of these facts disturbed her, though she took no particular pride in them. The truth was that she was too busy to think much about them. Since she had assumed the charge of the Fulmer children, in the absence of both their parents in Italy, she had had to pass through such an arduous apprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her waking hours was packed with things to do at once, and other things to remember to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but at times they were like an army with banners, and their power of self-multiplication was equalled only by the manner in which they could dwindle, vanish, grow mute, and become as it were a single tumbled brown head bent over a book in some corner of the house in which nobody would ever have thought of hunting for them—and which, of course, were it the bonne’s room in the attic, or the subterranean closet where the trunks were kept, had been singled out by them for that very reason.

These changes from ubiquity to invisibility would have seemed to Susy, a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of many characteristics not calculated to promote repose. But now she felt differently. She had grown interested in her charges, and the search for a clue to their methods, whether tribal or individual, was as exciting to her as the development of a detective story.

What interested her most in the whole stirring business was the discovery that they had a method. These little creatures, pitched upward into experience on the tossing waves of their parents’ agitated lives, had managed to establish a rough-and-ready system of self-government. Junie, the eldest (the one who already chose her mother’s hats, and tried to put order in her wardrobe) was the recognized head of the state. At twelve she knew lots of things which her mother had never thoroughly learned, and Susy, her temporary mother, had never even guessed at: she spoke with authority on all vital subjects, from castor-oil to flannel under-clothes, from the fair sharing of stamps or marbles to the number of helpings of rice-pudding or jam which each child was entitled to.

There was hardly any appeal from her verdict; yet each of her subjects revolved in his or her own orbit of independence, according to laws which Junie acknowledged and respected; and the interpreting of this mysterious charter of rights and privileges had not been without difficulty for Susy.

Besides this, there were material difficulties to deal with. The six of them, and the breathless bonne who cooked and slaved for them all, had but a slim budget to live on; and, as Junie remarked, you’d have thought the boys ate their shoes, the way they vanished. They ate, certainly, a great deal else, and mostly of a nourishing and expensive kind. They had definite views about the amount and quality of their food, and were capable of concerted rebellion when Susy’s catering fell beneath their standard. All this made her life a hurried and harassing business, but never—what she had most feared it would be a dull or depressing one.

It was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the Fulmer children had roused in her any abstract passion for the human young. She knew—had known since Nick’s first kiss—how she would love any child of his and hers; and she had cherished poor little Clarissa Vanderlyn with a shrinking and wistful solicitude. But in these rough young Fulmers she took a positive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clear to her. It was because, in the first place, they were all intelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only on things worth caring for. However inadequate Grace Fulmer’s bringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard in her company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books and good talk had been their daily food, and if at times they stamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed by such privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetry and spoke with the voice of wisdom.

That had been Susy’s discovery: for the first time she was among awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty. From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and Nat Fulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations, shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the great images of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures that stood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households.

No, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susy no sense of a missed vocation: “mothering” on a large scale would never, she perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, in odd ways, the sense of being herself mothered, of taking her first steps in the life of immaterial values which had begun to seem so much more substantial than any she had known.

On the day when she had gone to Grace Fulmer for counsel and comfort she had little guessed that they would come to her in this form. She had found her friend, more than ever distracted and yet buoyant, riding the large untidy waves of her life with the splashed ease of an amphibian. Grace was probably the only person among Susy’s friends who could have understood why she could not make up her mind to marry Altringham; but at the moment Grace was too much absorbed in her own problems to pay much attention to her friend’s, and, according to her wont, she immediately “unpacked” her difficulties.

Nat was not getting what she had hoped out of his European opportunity. Oh, she was enough of an artist herself to know that there must be fallow periods—that the impact of new impressions seldom produced immediate results. She had allowed for all that. But her past experience of Nat’s moods had taught her to know just when he was assimilating, when impressions were fructifying in him. And now they were not, and he knew it as well as she did. There had been too much rushing about, too much excitement and sterile flattery... Mrs. Melrose? Well, yes, for a while... the trip to Spain had been a love-journey, no doubt. Grace spoke calmly, but the lines of her face sharpened: she had suffered, oh horribly, at his going to Spain without her. Yet she couldn’t, for the children’s sake, afford to miss the big sum that Ursula Gillow had given her for her fortnight at Ruan. And her playing had struck people, and led, on the way back, to two or three profitable engagements in private houses in London. Fashionable society had made “a little fuss” about her, and it had surprised and pleased Nat, and given her a new importance in his eyes. “He was beginning to forget that I wasn’t only a nursery-maid, and it’s been a good thing for him to be reminded... but the great thing is that with what I’ve earned he and I can go off to southern Italy and Sicily for three months. You know I know how to manage... and, alone with me, Nat will settle down to work: to observing, feeling, soaking things in. It’s the only way. Mrs. Melrose wants to take him, to pay all the expenses again—well she shan’t. I’ll pay them.” Her worn cheek flushed with triumph. “And you’ll see what wonders will come of it.... Only there’s the problem of the children. Junie quite agrees that we can’t take them....”

Thereupon she had unfolded her idea. If Susy was at a loose end, and hard up, why shouldn’t she take charge of the children while their parents were in Italy? For three months at most—Grace could promise it shouldn’t be longer. They couldn’t pay her much, of course, but at least she would be lodged and fed. “And, you know, it will end by interesting you—I’m sure it will,” the mother concluded, her irrepressible hopefulness rising even to this height, while Susy stood before her with a hesitating smile.

Take care of five Fulmers for three months! The prospect cowed her. If there had been only Junie and Geordie, the oldest and youngest of the band, she might have felt less hesitation. But there was Nat, the second in age, whose motor-horn had driven her and Nick out to the hill-side on their fatal day at the Fulmers’ and there were the twins, Jack and Peggy, of whom she had kept memories almost equally disquieting. To rule this uproarious tribe would be a sterner business than trying to beguile Clarissa Vanderlyn’s ladylike leisure; and she would have refused on the spot, as she had refused once before, if the only possible alternatives had not come to seem so much less bearable, and if Junie, called in for advice, and standing there, small, plain and competent, had not said in her quiet grown-up voice: “Oh, yes, I’m sure Mrs. Lansing and I can manage while you’re away—especially if she reads aloud well.”

Reads aloud well! The stipulation had enchanted Susy. She had never before known children who cared to be read aloud to; she remembered with a shiver her attempts to interest Clarissa in anything but gossip and the fashions, and the tone in which the child had said, showing Strefford’s trinket to her father: “Because I said I’d rather have it than a book.”

And here were children who consented to be left for three months by their parents, but on condition that a good reader was provided for them!

“Very well—I will! But what shall I be expected to read to you?” she had gaily questioned; and Junie had answered, after one of her sober pauses of reflection: “The little ones like nearly everything; but Nat and I want poetry particularly, because if we read it to ourselves we so often pronounce the puzzling words wrong, and then it sounds so horrid.”

“Oh, I hope I shall pronounce them right,” Susy murmured, stricken with self-distrust and humility.

Apparently she did; for her reading was a success, and even the twins and Geordie, once they had grown used to her, seemed to prefer a ringing page of Henry V, or the fairy scenes from the Midsummer Night’s Dream, to their own more specialized literature, though that had also at times to be provided.

There were, in fact, no lulls in her life with the Fulmers; but its commotions seemed to Susy less meaningless, and therefore less fatiguing, than those that punctuated the existence of people like Altringham, Ursula Gillow, Ellie Vanderlyn and their train; and the noisy uncomfortable little house at Passy was beginning to greet her with the eyes of home when she returned there after her tramps to and from the children’s classes. At any rate she had the sense of doing something useful and even necessary, and of earning her own keep, though on so modest a scale; and when the children were in their quiet mood, and demanded books or music (or, even, on one occasion, at the surprising Junie’s instigation, a collective visit to the Louvre, where they recognized the most unlikely pictures, and the two elders emitted startling technical judgments, and called their companion’s attention to details she had not observed); on these occasions, Susy had a surprised sense of being drawn back into her brief life with Nick, or even still farther and deeper, into those visions of Nick’s own childhood on which the trivial later years had heaped their dust.

It was curious to think that if he and she had remained together, and she had had a child—the vision used to come to her, in her sleepless hours, when she looked at little Geordie, in his cot by her bed—their life together might have been very much like the life she was now leading, a small obscure business to the outer world, but to themselves how wide and deep and crowded!

She could not bear, at that moment, the thought of giving up this mystic relation to the life she had missed. In spite of the hurry and fatigue of her days, the shabbiness and discomfort of everything, and the hours when the children were as “horrid” as any other children, and turned a conspiracy of hostile faces to all her appeals; in spite of all this she did not want to give them up, and had decided, when their parents returned, to ask to go back to America with them. Perhaps, if Nat’s success continued, and Grace was able to work at her music, they would need a kind of governess-companion. At any rate, she could picture no future less distasteful.

She had not sent to Mr. Spearman Nick’s answer to her letter. In the interval between writing to him and receiving his reply she had broken with Strefford; she had therefore no object in seeking her freedom. If Nick wanted his, he knew he had only to ask for it; and his silence, as the weeks passed, woke a faint hope in her. The hope flamed high when she read one day in the newspapers a vague but evidently “inspired” allusion to the possibility of an alliance between his Serene Highness the reigning Prince of Teutoburg-Waldhain and Miss Coral Hicks of Apex City; it sank to ashes when, a few days later, her eye lit on a paragraph wherein Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Hicks “requested to state” that there was no truth in the report.

On the foundation of these two statements Susy raised one watch-tower of hope after another, feverish edifices demolished or rebuilt by every chance hint from the outer world wherein Nick’s name figured with the Hickses’. And still, as the days passed and she heard nothing, either from him or from her lawyer, her flag continued to fly from the quaking structures.

Apart from the custody of the children there was indeed little to distract her mind from these persistent broodings. She winced sometimes at the thought of the ease with which her fashionable friends had let her drop out of sight. In the perpetual purposeless rush of their days, the feverish making of winter plans, hurrying off to the Riviera or St. Moritz, Egypt or New York, there was no time to hunt up the vanished or to wait for the laggard. Had they learned that she had broken her “engagement” (how she hated the word!) to Strefford, and had the fact gone about that she was once more only a poor hanger-on, to be taken up when it was convenient, and ignored in the intervals? She did not know; though she fancied Strefford’s newly-developed pride would prevent his revealing to any one what had passed between them. For several days after her abrupt flight he had made no sign; and though she longed to write and ask his forgiveness she could not find the words. Finally it was he who wrote: a short note, from Altringham, typical of all that was best in the old Strefford. He had gone down to Altringham, he told her, to think quietly over their last talk, and try to understand what she had been driving at. He had to own that he couldn’t; but that, he supposed, was the very head and front of his offending. Whatever he had done to displease her, he was sorry for; but he asked, in view of his invincible ignorance, to be allowed not to regard his offence as a cause for a final break. The possibility of that, he found, would make him even more unhappy than he had foreseen; as she knew, his own happiness had always been his first object in life, and he therefore begged her to suspend her decision a little longer. He expected to be in Paris within another two months, and before arriving he would write again, and ask her to see him.

The letter moved her but did not make her waver. She simply wrote that she was touched by his kindness, and would willingly see him if he came to Paris later; though she was bound to tell him that she had not yet changed her mind, and did not believe it would promote his happiness to have her try to do so.

He did not reply to this, and there was nothing further to keep her thoughts from revolving endlessly about her inmost hopes and fears.

On the rainy afternoon in question, tramping home from the “cours” (to which she was to return at six), she had said to herself that it was two months that very day since Nick had known she was ready to release him—and that after such a delay he was not likely to take any further steps. The thought filled her with a vague ecstasy. She had had to fix an arbitrary date as the term of her anguish, and she had fixed that one; and behold she was justified. For what could his silence mean but that he too....

On the hall-table lay a typed envelope with the Paris postage-mark. She opened it carelessly, and saw that the letter-head bore Mr. Spearman’s office address. The words beneath spun round before her eyes.... “Has notified us that he is at your disposal... carry out your wishes... arriving in Paris... fix an appointment with his lawyers....”

Nick—it was Nick the words were talking of! It was the fact of Nick’s return to Paris that was being described in those preposterous terms! She sank down on the bench beside the dripping umbrella-stand and stared vacantly before her. It had fallen at last—this blow in which she now saw that she had never really believed! And yet she had imagined she was prepared for it, had expected it, was already planning her future life in view of it—an effaced impersonal life in the service of somebody else’s children—when, in reality, under that thin surface of abnegation and acceptance, all the old hopes had been smouldering red-hot in their ashes! What was the use of any self-discipline, any philosophy, any experience, if the lawless self underneath could in an instant consume them like tinder?

She tried to collect herself—to understand what had happened. Nick was coming to Paris—coming not to see her but to consult his lawyer! It meant, of course, that he had definitely resolved to claim his freedom; and that, if he had made up his mind to this final step, after more than six months of inaction and seeming indifference, it could be only because something unforeseen and decisive had happened to him. Feverishly, she put together again the stray scraps of gossip and the newspaper paragraphs that had reached her in the last months. It was evident that Miss Hicks’s projected marriage with the Prince of Teutoburg-Waldhain had been broken off at the last moment; and broken off because she intended to marry Nick. The announcement of his arrival in Paris and the publication of Mr. and Mrs. Hicks’s formal denial of their daughter’s betrothal coincided too closely to admit of any other inference. Susy tried to grasp the reality of these assembled facts, to picture to herself their actual tangible results. She thought of Coral Hicks bearing the name of Mrs. Nick Lansing—her name, Susy’s own!—and entering drawing-rooms with Nick in her wake, gaily welcomed by the very people who, a few months before, had welcomed Susy with the same warmth. In spite of Nick’s growing dislike of society, and Coral’s attitude of intellectual superiority, their wealth would fatally draw them back into the world to which Nick was attached by all his habits and associations. And no doubt it would amuse him to re-enter that world as a dispenser of hospitality, to play the part of host where he had so long been a guest; just as Susy had once fancied it would amuse her to re-enter it as Lady Altringham.... But, try as she would, now that the reality was so close on her, she could not visualize it or relate it to herself. The mere juxtaposition of the two names—Coral, Nick—which in old times she had so often laughingly coupled, now produced a blur in her brain.

She continued to sit helplessly beside the hall-table, the tears running down her cheeks. The appearance of the bonne aroused her. Her youngest charge, Geordie, had been feverish for a day or two; he was better, but still confined to the nursery, and he had heard Susy unlock the house-door, and could not imagine why she had not come straight up to him. He now began to manifest his indignation in a series of racking howls, and Susy, shaken out of her trance, dropped her cloak and umbrella and hurried up.

“Oh, that child!” she groaned.

Under the Fulmer roof there was little time or space for the indulgence of private sorrows. From morning till night there was always some immediate practical demand on one’s attention; and Susy was beginning to see how, in contracted households, children may play a part less romantic but not less useful than that assigned to them in fiction, through the mere fact of giving their parents no leisure to dwell on irremediable grievances. Though her own apprenticeship to family life had been so short, she had already acquired the knack of rapid mental readjustment, and as she hurried up to the nursery her private cares were dispelled by a dozen problems of temperature, diet and medicine.

Such readjustment was of course only momentary; yet each time it happened it seemed to give her more firmness and flexibility of temper. “What a child I was myself six months ago!” she thought, wondering that Nick’s influence, and the tragedy of their parting, should have done less to mature and steady her than these few weeks in a house full of children.

Pacifying Geordie was not easy, for he had long since learned to use his grievances as a pretext for keeping the offender at his beck with a continuous supply of stories, songs and games. “You’d better be careful never to put yourself in the wrong with Geordie,” the astute Junie had warned Susy at the outset, “because he’s got such a memory, and he won’t make it up with you till you’ve told him every fairy-tale he’s ever heard before.”

But on this occasion, as soon as he saw her, Geordie’s indignation melted. She was still in the doorway, compunctious, abject and racking her dazed brain for his favourite stories, when she saw, by the smoothing out of his mouth and the sudden serenity of his eyes, that he was going to give her the delicious but not wholly reassuring shock of being a good boy.

Thoughtfully he examined her face as she knelt down beside the cot; then he poked out a finger and pressed it on her tearful cheek.

“Poor Susy got a pain too,” he said, putting his arms about her; and as she hugged him close, he added philosophically: “Tell Geordie a new story, darling, and you’ll forget all about it.”

XXVI.

Nick Lansing arrived in Paris two days after his lawyer had announced his coming to Mr. Spearman.

He had left Rome with the definite purpose of freeing himself and Susy; and though he was not pledged to Coral Hicks he had not concealed from her the object of his journey. In vain had he tried to rouse in himself any sense of interest in his own future. Beyond the need of reaching a definite point in his relation to Susy his imagination could not travel. But he had been moved by Coral’s confession, and his reason told him that he and she would probably be happy together, with the temperate happiness based on a community of tastes and an enlargement of opportunities. He meant, on his return to Rome, to ask her to marry him; and he knew that she knew it. Indeed, if he had not spoken before leaving it was with no idea of evading his fate, or keeping her longer in suspense, but simply because of the strange apathy that had fallen on him since he had received Susy’s letter. In his incessant self-communings he dressed up this apathy as a discretion which forbade his engaging Coral’s future till his own was assured. But in truth he knew that Coral’s future was already engaged, and his with it: in Rome the fact had seemed natural and even inevitable.

In Paris, it instantly became the thinnest of unrealities. Not because Paris was not Rome, nor because it was Paris; but because hidden away somewhere in that vast unheeding labyrinth was the half-forgotten part of himself that was Susy.... For weeks, for months past, his mind had been saturated with Susy: she had never seemed more insistently near him than as their separation lengthened, and the chance of reunion became less probable. It was as if a sickness long smouldering in him had broken out and become acute, enveloping him in the Nessus-shirt of his memories. There were moments when, to his memory, their actual embraces seemed perfunctory, accidental, compared with this deep deliberate imprint of her soul on his.

Yet now it had become suddenly different. Now that he was in the same place with her, and might at any moment run across her, meet her eyes, hear her voice, avoid her hand—now that penetrating ghost of her with which he had been living was sucked back into the shadows, and he seemed, for the first time since their parting, to be again in her actual presence. He woke to the fact on the morning of his arrival, staring down from his hotel window on a street she would perhaps walk through that very day, and over a limitless huddle of roofs, one of which covered her at that hour. The abruptness of the transition startled him; he had not known that her mere geographical nearness would take him by the throat in that way. What would it be, then, if she were to walk into the room?

Thank heaven that need never happen! He was sufficiently informed as to French divorce proceedings to know that they would not necessitate a confrontation with his wife; and with ordinary luck, and some precautions, he might escape even a distant glimpse of her. He did not mean to remain in Paris more than a few days; and during that time it would be easy—knowing, as he did, her tastes and Altringham’s—to avoid the places where she was likely to be met. He did not know where she was living, but imagined her to be staying with Mrs. Melrose, or some other rich friend, or else lodged, in prospective affluence, at the Nouveau Luxe, or in a pretty flat of her own. Trust Susy—ah, the pang of it—to “manage”!

His first visit was to his lawyer’s; and as he walked through the familiar streets each approaching face, each distant figure seemed hers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last, of course; but meanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitive in a nightmare, who feels himself the only creature visible in a ghostly and besetting multitude. The eye of the metropolis seemed fixed on him in an immense unblinking stare.

At the lawyer’s he was told that, as a first step to freedom, he must secure a domicile in Paris. He had of course known of this necessity: he had seen too many friends through the Divorce Court, in one country or another, not to be fairly familiar with the procedure. But the fact presented a different aspect as soon as he tried to relate it to himself and Susy: it was as though Susy’s personality were a medium through which events still took on a transfiguring colour. He found the “domicile” that very day: a tawdrily furnished rez-de-chaussee, obviously destined to far different uses. And as he sat there, after the concierge had discreetly withdrawn with the first quarter’s payment in her pocket, and stared about him at the vulgar plushy place, he burst out laughing at what it was about to figure in the eyes of the law: a Home, and a Home desecrated by his own act! The Home in which he and Susy had reared their precarious bliss, and seen it crumble at the brutal touch of his unfaithfulness and his cruelty—for he had been told that he must be cruel to her as well as unfaithful! He looked at the walls hung with sentimental photogravures, at the shiny bronze “nudes,” the moth-eaten animal-skins and the bedizened bed—and once more the unreality, the impossibility, of all that was happening to him entered like a drug into his veins.

To rouse himself he stood up, turned the key on the hideous place, and returned to his lawyer’s. He knew that in the hard dry atmosphere of the office the act of giving the address of the flat would restore some kind of reality to the phantasmal transaction. And with wonder he watched the lawyer, as a matter of course, pencil the street and the number on one of the papers enclosed in a folder on which his own name was elaborately engrossed.

As he took leave it occurred to him to ask where Susy was living. At least he imagined that it had just occurred to him, and that he was making the enquiry merely as a measure of precaution, in order to know what quarter of Paris to avoid; but in reality the question had been on his lips since he had first entered the office, and lurking in his mind since he had emerged from the railway station that morning. The fact of not knowing where she lived made the whole of Paris a meaningless unintelligible place, as useless to him as the face of a huge clock that has lost its hour hand.

The address in Passy surprised him: he had imagined that she would be somewhere in the neighborhood of the Champs Elysees or the Place de l’Etoile. But probably either Mrs. Melrose or Ellie Vanderlyn had taken a house at Passy. Well—it was something of a relief to know that she was so far off. No business called him to that almost suburban region beyond the Trocadero, and there was much less chance of meeting her than if she had been in the centre of Paris.

All day he wandered, avoiding the fashionable quarters, the streets in which private motors glittered five deep, and furred and feathered silhouettes glided from them into tea-rooms, picture-galleries and jewellers’ shops. In some such scenes Susy was no doubt figuring: slenderer, finer, vivider, than the other images of clay, but imitating their gestures, chattering their jargon, winding her hand among the same pearls and sables. He struck away across the Seine, along the quays to the Cite, the net-work of old Paris, the great grey vaults of St. Eustache, the swarming streets of the Marais. He gazed at monuments dawdled before shop-windows, sat in squares and on quays, watching people bargain, argue, philander, quarrel, work-girls stroll past in linked bands, beggars whine on the bridges, derelicts doze in the pale winter sun, mothers in mourning hasten by taking children to school, and street-walkers beat their weary rounds before the cafes.

The day drifted on. Toward evening he began to grow afraid of his solitude, and to think of dining at the Nouveau Luxe, or some other fashionable restaurant where he would be fairly sure to meet acquaintances, and be carried off to a theatre, a boite or a dancing-hall. Anything, anything now, to get away from the maddening round of his thoughts. He felt the same blank fear of solitude as months ago in Genoa.... Even if he were to run across Susy and Altringham, what of it? Better get the job over. People had long since ceased to take on tragedy airs about divorce: dividing couples dined together to the last, and met afterward in each other’s houses, happy in the consciousness that their respective remarriages had provided two new centres of entertainment. Yet most of the couples who took their re-matings so philosophically had doubtless had their hour of enchantment, of belief in the immortality of loving; whereas he and Susy had simply and frankly entered into a business contract for their mutual advantage. The fact gave the last touch of incongruity to his agonies and exaltations, and made him appear to himself as grotesque and superannuated as the hero of a romantic novel.

He stood up from a bench on which he had been lounging in the Luxembourg gardens, and hailed a taxi. Dusk had fallen, and he meant to go back to his hotel, take a rest, and then go out to dine. But instead, he threw Susy’s address to the driver, and settled down in the cab, resting both hands on the knob of his umbrella and staring straight ahead of him as if he were accomplishing some tiresome duty that had to be got through with before he could turn his mind to more important things.

“It’s the easiest way,” he heard himself say.

At the street-corner—her street-corner—he stopped the cab, and stood motionless while it rattled away. It was a short vague street, much farther off than he had expected, and fading away at the farther end in a dusky blur of hoardings overhung by trees. A thin rain was beginning to fall, and it was already night in this inadequately lit suburban quarter. Lansing walked down the empty street. The houses stood a few yards apart, with bare-twigged shrubs between, and gates and railings dividing them from the pavement. He could not, at first, distinguish their numbers; but presently, coming abreast of a street-lamp, he discovered that the small shabby facade it illuminated was precisely the one he sought. The discovery surprised him. He had imagined that, as frequently happened in the outlying quarters of Passy and La Muette, the mean street would lead to a stately private hotel, built upon some bowery fragment of an old country-place. It was the latest whim of the wealthy to establish themselves on these outskirts of Paris, where there was still space for verdure; and he had pictured Susy behind some pillared house-front, with lights pouring across glossy turf to sculptured gateposts. Instead, he saw a six-windowed house, huddled among neighbours of its kind, with the family wash fluttering between meagre bushes. The arc-light beat ironically on its front, which had the worn look of a tired work-woman’s face; and Lansing, as he leaned against the opposite railing, vainly tried to fit his vision of Susy into so humble a setting.

The probable explanation was that his lawyer had given him the wrong address; not only the wrong number but the wrong street. He pulled out the slip of paper, and was crossing over to decipher it under the lamp, when an errand-boy appeared out of the obscurity, and approached the house. Nick drew back, and the boy, unlatching the gate, ran up the steps and gave the bell a pull.

Almost immediately the door opened; and there stood Susy, the light full upon her, and upon a red-checked child against her shoulder. The space behind them was dark, or so dimly lit that it formed a black background to her vivid figure. She looked at the errand-boy without surprise, took his parcel, and after he had turned away, lingered a moment in the door, glancing down the empty street.

That moment, to her watcher, seemed quicker than a flash yet as long as a life-time. There she was, a stone’s throw away, but utterly unconscious of his presence: his Susy, the old Susy, and yet a new Susy, curiously transformed, transfigured almost, by the new attitude in which he beheld her.

In the first shock of the vision he forgot his surprise at her being in such a place, forgot to wonder whose house she was in, or whose was the sleepy child in her arms. For an instant she stood out from the blackness behind her, and through the veil of the winter night, a thing apart, an unconditioned vision, the eternal image of the woman and the child; and in that instant everything within him was changed and renewed. His eyes were still absorbing her, finding again the familiar curves of her light body, noting the thinness of the lifted arm that upheld the little boy, the droop of the shoulder he weighed on, the brooding way in which her cheek leaned to his even while she looked away; then she drew back, the door closed, and the street-lamp again shone on blankness.

“But she’s mine!” Nick cried, in a fierce triumph of recovery...

His eyes were so full of her that he shut them to hold in the crowding vision.

It remained with him, at first, as a complete picture; then gradually it broke up into its component parts, the child vanished, the strange house vanished, and Susy alone stood before him, his own Susy, only his Susy, yet changed, worn, tempered—older, even—with sharper shadows under the cheek-bones, the brows drawn, the joint of the slim wrist more prominent. It was not thus that his memory had evoked her, and he recalled, with a remorseful pang, the fact that something in her look, her dress, her tired and drooping attitude, suggested poverty, dependence, seemed to make her after all a part of the shabby house in which, at first sight, her presence had seemed so incongruous.

“But she looks poor!” he thought, his heart tightening. And instantly it occurred to him that these must be the Fulmer children whom she was living with while their parents travelled in Italy. Rumours of Nat Fulmer’s sudden ascension had reached him, and he had heard that the couple had lately been seen in Naples and Palermo. No one had mentioned Susy’s name in connection with them, and he could hardly tell why he had arrived at this conclusion, except perhaps because it seemed natural that, if Susy were in trouble, she should turn to her old friend Grace.

But why in trouble? What trouble? What could have happened to check her triumphant career?

“That’s what I mean to find out!” he exclaimed.

His heart was beating with a tumult of new hopes and old memories. The sight of his wife, so remote in mien and manner from the world in which he had imagined her to be re-absorbed, changed in a flash his own relation to life, and flung a mist of unreality over all that he had been trying to think most solid and tangible. Nothing now was substantial to him but the stones of the street in which he stood, the front of the house which hid her, the bell-handle he already felt in his grasp. He started forward, and was halfway to the threshold when a private motor turned the corner, the twin glitter of its lamps carpeting the wet street with gold to Susy’s door.

Lansing drew back into the shadow as the motor swept up to the house. A man jumped out, and the light fell on Strefford’s shambling figure, its lazy disjointed movements so unmistakably the same under his fur coat, and in the new setting of prosperity.

Lansing stood motionless, staring at the door. Strefford rang, and waited. Would Susy appear again? Perhaps she had done so before only because she had been on the watch....

But no: after a slight delay a bonne appeared—the breathless maid-of-all-work of a busy household—and at once effaced herself, letting the visitor in. Lansing was sure that not a word passed between the two, of enquiry on Lord Altringham’s part, or of acquiescence on the servant’s. There could be no doubt that he was expected.

The door closed on him, and a light appeared behind the blind of the adjoining window. The maid had shown the visitor into the sitting-room and lit the lamp. Upstairs, meanwhile, Susy was no doubt running skilful fingers through her tumbled hair and daubing her pale lips with red. Ah, how Lansing knew every movement of that familiar rite, even to the pucker of the brow and the pouting thrust-out of the lower lip! He was seized with a sense of physical sickness as the succession of remembered gestures pressed upon his eyes.... And the other man? The other man, inside the house, was perhaps at that very instant smiling over the remembrance of the same scene!

At the thought, Lansing plunged away into the night.

XXVII.

Susy and Lord Altringham sat in the little drawing-room, divided from each other by a table carrying a smoky lamp and heaped with tattered school-books.

In another half hour the bonne, despatched to fetch the children from their classes, would be back with her flock; and at any moment Geordie’s imperious cries might summon his slave up to the nursery. In the scant time allotted them, the two sat, and visibly wondered what to say.

Strefford, on entering, had glanced about the dreary room, with its piano laden with tattered music, the children’s toys littering the lame sofa, the bunches of dyed grass and impaled butterflies flanking the cast-bronze clock. Then he had turned to Susy and asked simply: “Why on earth are you here?”

She had not tried to explain; from the first, she had understood the impossibility of doing so. And she would not betray her secret longing to return to Nick, now that she knew that Nick had taken definite steps for his release. In dread lest Strefford should have heard of this, and should announce it to her, coupling it with the news of Nick’s projected marriage, and lest, hearing her fears thus substantiated, she should lose her self-control, she had preferred to say, in a voice that she tried to make indifferent: “The ‘proceedings,’ or whatever the lawyers call them, have begun. While they’re going on I like to stay quite by myself.... I don’t know why....”

Strefford, at that, had looked at her keenly. “Ah,” he murmured; and his lips were twisted into their old mocking smile. “Speaking of proceedings,” he went on carelessly, “what stage have Ellie’s reached, I wonder? I saw her and Vanderlyn and Bockheimer all lunching cheerfully together to-day at Larue’s.”

The blood rushed to Susy’s forehead. She remembered her tragic evening with Nelson Vanderlyn, only two months earlier, and thought to herself. “In time, then, I suppose, Nick and I....”

Aloud she said: “I can’t imagine how Nelson and Ellie can ever want to see each other again. And in a restaurant, of all places!”

Strefford continued to smile. “My dear, you’re incorrigibly old-fashioned. Why should two people who’ve done each other the best turn they could by getting out of each other’s way at the right moment behave like sworn enemies ever afterward? It’s too absurd; the humbug’s too flagrant. Whatever our generation has failed to do, it’s got rid of humbug; and that’s enough to immortalize it. I daresay Nelson and Ellie never liked each other better than they do to-day. Twenty years ago, they’d have been afraid to confess it; but why shouldn’t they now?”

Susy looked at Strefford, conscious that under his words was the ache of the disappointment she had caused him; and yet conscious also that that very ache was not the overwhelming penetrating emotion he perhaps wished it to be, but a pang on a par with a dozen others; and that even while he felt it he foresaw the day when he should cease to feel it. And she thought to herself that this certainty of oblivion must be bitterer than any certainty of pain.

A silence had fallen between them. He broke it by rising from his seat, and saying with a shrug: “You’ll end by driving me to marry Joan Senechal.”

Susy smiled. “Well, why not? She’s lovely.”

“Yes; but she’ll bore me.”

“Poor Streff! So should I—”

“Perhaps. But nothing like as soon—” He grinned sardonically. “There’d be more margin.” He appeared to wait for her to speak. “And what else on earth are you going to do?” he concluded, as she still remained silent.

“Oh, Streff, I couldn’t marry you for a reason like that!” she murmured at length.

“Then marry me, and find your reason afterward.”

Her lips made a movement of denial, and still in silence she held out her hand for good-bye. He clasped it, and then turned away; but on the threshold he paused, his screwed-up eyes fixed on her wistfully.

The look moved her, and she added hurriedly: “The only reason I can find is one for not marrying you. It’s because I can’t yet feel unmarried enough.”

“Unmarried enough? But I thought Nick was doing his best to make you feel that.”

“Yes. But even when he has—sometimes I think even that won’t make any difference.”

He still scrutinized her hesitatingly, with the gravest eyes she had ever seen in his careless face.

“My dear, that’s rather the way I feel about you,” he said simply as he turned to go.

That evening after the children had gone to bed Susy sat up late in the cheerless sitting-room. She was not thinking of Strefford but of Nick. He was coming to Paris—perhaps he had already arrived. The idea that he might be in the same place with her at that very moment, and without her knowing it, was so strange and painful that she felt a violent revolt of all her strong and joy-loving youth. Why should she go on suffering so unbearably, so abjectly, so miserably? If only she could see him, hear his voice, even hear him say again such cruel and humiliating words as he had spoken on that dreadful day in Venice when that would be better than this blankness, this utter and final exclusion from his life! He had been cruel to her, unimaginably cruel: hard, arrogant, unjust; and had been so, perhaps, deliberately, because he already wanted to be free. But she was ready to face even that possibility, to humble herself still farther than he had humbled her—she was ready to do anything, if only she might see him once again.

She leaned her aching head on her hands and pondered. Do anything? But what could she do? Nothing that should hurt him, interfere with his liberty, be false to the spirit of their pact: on that she was more than ever resolved. She had made a bargain, and she meant to stick to it, not for any abstract reason, but simply because she happened to love him in that way. Yes—but to see him again, only once!

Suddenly she remembered what Strefford had said about Nelson Vanderlyn and his wife. “Why should two people who’ve just done each other the best turn they could behave like sworn enemies ever after?” If in offering Nick his freedom she had indeed done him such a service as that, perhaps he no longer hated her, would no longer be unwilling to see her.... At any rate, why should she not write to him on that assumption, write in a spirit of simple friendliness, suggesting that they should meet and “settle things”? The business-like word “settle” (how she hated it) would prove to him that she had no secret designs upon his liberty; and besides he was too unprejudiced, too modern, too free from what Strefford called humbug, not to understand and accept such a suggestion. After all, perhaps Strefford was right; it was something to have rid human relations of hypocrisy, even if, in the process, so many exquisite things seemed somehow to have been torn away with it....

She ran up to her room, scribbled a note, and hurried with it through the rain and darkness to the post-box at the corner. As she returned through the empty street she had an odd feeling that it was not empty—that perhaps Nick was already there, somewhere near her in the night, about to follow her to the door, enter the house, go up with her to her bedroom in the old way. It was strange how close he had been brought by the mere fact of her having written that little note to him!

In the bedroom, Geordie lay in his crib in ruddy slumber, and she blew out the candle and undressed softly for fear of waking him.

Nick Lansing, the next day, received Susy’s letter, transmitted to his hotel from the lawyer’s office.

He read it carefully, two or three times over, weighing and scrutinizing the guarded words. She proposed that they should meet to “settle things.” What things? And why should he accede to such a request? What secret purpose had prompted her? It was horrible that nowadays, in thinking of Susy, he should always suspect ulterior motives, be meanly on the watch for some hidden tortuousness. What on earth was she trying to “manage” now, he wondered.

A few hours ago, at the sight of her, all his hardness had melted, and he had charged himself with cruelty, with injustice, with every sin of pride against himself and her; but the appearance of Strefford, arriving at that late hour, and so evidently expected and welcomed, had driven back the rising tide of tenderness.

Yet, after all, what was there to wonder at? Nothing was changed in their respective situations. He had left his wife, deliberately, and for reasons which no subsequent experience had caused him to modify. She had apparently acquiesced in his decision, and had utilized it, as she was justified in doing, to assure her own future.

In all this, what was there to wail or knock the breast between two people who prided themselves on looking facts in the face, and making their grim best of them, without vain repinings? He had been right in thinking their marriage an act of madness. Her charms had overruled his judgment, and they had had their year... their mad year... or at least all but two or three months of it. But his first intuition had been right; and now they must both pay for their madness. The Fates seldom forget the bargains made with them, or fail to ask for compound interest. Why not, then, now that the time had come, pay up gallantly, and remember of the episode only what had made it seem so supremely worth the cost?

He sent a pneumatic telegram to Mrs. Nicholas Lansing to say that he would call on her that afternoon at four. “That ought to give us time,” he reflected drily, “to ‘settle things,’ as she calls it, without interfering with Strefford’s afternoon visit.”

XXVIII.

Her husband’s note had briefly said:

“To-day at four o’clock. N.L.”

All day she pored over the words in an agony of longing, trying to read into them regret, emotion, memories, some echo of the tumult in her own bosom. But she had signed “Susy,” and he signed “N.L.” That seemed to put an abyss between them. After all, she was free and he was not. Perhaps, in view of his situation, she had only increased the distance between them by her unconventional request for a meeting.

She sat in the little drawing-room, and the cast-bronze clock ticked out the minutes. She would not look out of the window: it might bring bad luck to watch for him. And it seemed to her that a thousand invisible spirits, hidden demons of good and evil, pressed about her, spying out her thoughts, counting her heart-beats, ready to pounce upon the least symptom of over-confidence and turn it deftly to derision. Oh, for an altar on which to pour out propitiatory offerings! But what sweeter could they have than her smothered heart-beats, her choked-back tears?

The bell rang, and she stood up as if a spring had jerked her to her feet. In the mirror between the dried grasses her face looked long pale inanimate. Ah, if he should find her too changed—! If there were but time to dash upstairs and put on a touch of red....

The door opened; it shut on him; he was there.

He said: “You wanted to see me?”

She answered: “Yes.” And her heart seemed to stop beating.

At first she could not make out what mysterious change had come over him, and why it was that in looking at him she seemed to be looking at a stranger; then she perceived that his voice sounded as it used to sound when he was talking to other people; and she said to herself, with a sick shiver of understanding, that she had become an “other person” to him.

There was a deathly pause; then she faltered out, not knowing what she said: “Nick—you’ll sit down?”

He said: “Thanks,” but did not seem to have heard her, for he continued to stand motionless, half the room between them. And slowly the uselessness, the hopelessness of his being there overcame her. A wall of granite seemed to have built itself up between them. She felt as if it hid her from him, as if with those remote new eyes of his he were staring into the wall and not at her. Suddenly she said to herself: “He’s suffering more than I am, because he pities me, and is afraid to tell me that he is going to be married.”

The thought stung her pride, and she lifted her head and met his eyes with a smile.

“Don’t you think,” she said, “it’s more sensible—with everything so changed in our lives—that we should meet as friends, in this way? I wanted to tell you that you needn’t feel—feel in the least unhappy about me.”

A deep flush rose to his forehead. “Oh, I know—I know that—” he declared hastily; and added, with a factitious animation: “But thank you for telling me.”

“There’s nothing, is there,” she continued, “to make our meeting in this way in the least embarrassing or painful to either of us, when both have found....” She broke off, and held her hand out to him. “I’ve heard about you and Coral,” she ended.

He just touched her hand with cold fingers, and let it drop. “Thank you,” he said for the third time.

“You won’t sit down?”

He sat down.

“Don’t you think,” she continued, “that the new way of... of meeting as friends... and talking things over without ill-will... is much pleasanter and more sensible, after all?”

He smiled. “It’s immensely kind of you to feel that.”

“Oh, I do feel it!” She stopped short, and wondered what on earth she had meant to say next, and why she had so abruptly lost the thread of her discourse.

In the pause she heard him cough slightly and clear his throat. “Let me say, then,” he began, “that I’m glad too—immensely glad that your own future is so satisfactorily settled.”

She lifted her glance again to his walled face, in which not a muscle stirred.

“Yes: it—it makes everything easier for you, doesn’t it?”

“For you too, I hope.” He paused, and then went on: “I want also to tell you that I perfectly understand—”

“Oh,” she interrupted, “so do I; your point of view, I mean.”

They were again silent.

“Nick, why can’t we be friends real friends? Won’t it be easier?” she broke out at last with twitching lips.

“Easier—?”

“I mean, about talking things over—arrangements. There are arrangements to be made, I suppose?”

“I suppose so.” He hesitated. “I’m doing what I’m told—simply following out instructions. The business is easy enough, apparently. I’m taking the necessary steps—”

She reddened a little, and drew a gasping breath. “The necessary steps: what are they? Everything the lawyers tell one is so confusing.... I don’t yet understand—how it’s done.”

“My share, you mean? Oh, it’s very simple.” He paused, and added in a tone of laboured ease: “I’m going down to Fontainebleau to-morrow—”

She stared, not understanding. “To Fontainebleau—?”

Her bewilderment drew from him his first frank smile. “Well—I chose Fontainebleau—I don’t know why... except that we’ve never been there together.”

At that she suddenly understood, and the blood rushed to her forehead. She stood up without knowing what she was doing, her heart in her throat. “How grotesque—how utterly disgusting!”

He gave a slight shrug. “I didn’t make the laws....”

“But isn’t it too stupid and degrading that such things should be necessary when two people want to part—?” She broke off again, silenced by the echo of that fatal “want to part.”...

He seemed to prefer not to dwell farther on the legal obligations involved.

“You haven’t yet told me,” he suggested, “how you happen to be living here.”

“Here—with the Fulmer children?” She roused herself, trying to catch his easier note. “Oh, I’ve simply been governessing them for a few weeks, while Nat and Grace are in Sicily.” She did not say: “It’s because I’ve parted with Strefford.” Somehow it helped her wounded pride a little to keep from him the secret of her precarious independence.

He looked his wonder. “All alone with that bewildered bonne? But how many of them are there? Five? Good Lord!” He contemplated the clock with unseeing eyes, and then turned them again on her face.

“I should have thought a lot of children would rather get on your nerves.”

“Oh, not these children. They’re so good to me.”

“Ah, well, I suppose it won’t be for long.”

He sent his eyes again about the room, which his absent-minded gaze seemed to reduce to its dismal constituent elements, and added, with an obvious effort at small talk: “I hear the Fulmers are not hitting it off very well since his success. Is it true that he’s going to marry Violet Melrose?”

The blood rose to Susy’s face. “Oh, never, never! He and Grace are travelling together now.”

“Oh, I didn’t know. People say things....” He was visibly embarrassed with the subject, and sorry that he had broached it.

“Some of the things that people say are true. But Grace doesn’t mind. She says she and Nat belong to each other. They can’t help it, she thinks, after having been through such a lot together.”

“Dear old Grace!”

He had risen from his chair, and this time she made no effort to detain him. He seemed to have recovered his self-composure, and it struck her painfully, humiliatingly almost, that he should have spoken in that light way of the expedition to Fontainebleau on the morrow.... Well, men were different, she supposed; she remembered having felt that once before about Nick.

It was on the tip of her tongue to cry out: “But wait—wait! I’m not going to marry Strefford after all!”—but to do so would seem like an appeal to his compassion, to his indulgence; and that was not what she wanted. She could never forget that he had left her because he had not been able to forgive her for “managing”—and not for the world would she have him think that this meeting had been planned for such a purpose.

“If he doesn’t see that I am different, in spite of appearances... and that I never was what he said I was that day—if in all these months it hasn’t come over him, what’s the use of trying to make him see it now?” she mused. And then, her thoughts hurrying on: “Perhaps he’s suffering too—I believe he is suffering—at any rate, he’s suffering for me, if not for himself. But if he’s pledged to Coral, what can he do? What would he think of me if I tried to make him break his word to her?”

There he stood—the man who was “going to Fontainebleau to-morrow”; who called it “taking the necessary steps!” Who could smile as he made the careless statement! A world seemed to divide them already: it was as if their parting were already over. All the words, cries, arguments beating loud wings in her dropped back into silence. The only thought left was: “How much longer does he mean to go on standing there?”

He may have read the question in her face, for turning back from an absorbed contemplation of the window curtains he said: “There’s nothing else?”

“Nothing else?”

“I mean: you spoke of things to be settled—”

She flushed, suddenly remembering the pretext she had used to summon him.

“Oh,” she faltered, “I didn’t know... I thought there might be.... But the lawyers, I suppose....”

She saw the relief on his contracted face. “Exactly. I’ve always thought it was best to leave it to them. I assure you”—again for a moment the smile strained his lips—“I shall do nothing to interfere with a quick settlement.”

She stood motionless, feeling herself turn to stone. He appeared already a long way off, like a figure vanishing down a remote perspective.

“Then—good-bye,” she heard him say from its farther end.

“Oh,—good-bye,” she faltered, as if she had not had the word ready, and was relieved to have him supply it.

He stopped again on the threshold, looked back at her, began to speak. “I’ve—” he said; then he repeated “Good-bye,” as though to make sure he had not forgotten to say it; and the door closed on him.

It was over; she had had her last chance and missed it. Now, whatever happened, the one thing she had lived and longed for would never be. He had come, and she had let him go again....

How had it come about? Would she ever be able to explain it to herself? How was it that she, so fertile in strategy, so practiced in feminine arts, had stood there before him, helpless, inarticulate, like a school-girl a-choke with her first love-longing? If he was gone, and gone never to return, it was her own fault, and none but hers. What had she done to move him, detain him, make his heart beat and his head swim as hers were beating and swimming? She stood aghast at her own inadequacy, her stony inexpressiveness....

And suddenly she lifted her hands to her throbbing forehead and cried out: “But this is love! This must be love!”

She had loved him before, she supposed; for what else was she to call the impulse that had drawn her to him, taught her how to overcome his scruples, and whirled him away with her on their mad adventure? Well, if that was love, this was something so much larger and deeper that the other feeling seemed the mere dancing of her blood in tune with his....

But, no! Real love, great love, the love that poets sang, and privileged and tortured beings lived and died of, that love had its own superior expressiveness, and the sure command of its means. The petty arts of coquetry were no farther from it than the numbness of the untaught girl. Great love was wise, strong, powerful, like genius, like any other dominant form of human power. It knew itself, and what it wanted, and how to attain its ends.

Not great love, then... but just the common humble average of human love was hers. And it had come to her so newly, so overwhelmingly, with a face so grave, a touch so startling, that she had stood there petrified, humbled at the first look of its eyes, recognizing that what she had once taken for love was merely pleasure and spring-time, and the flavour of youth.

“But how was I to know? And now it’s too late!” she wailed.

XXIX.

The inhabitants of the little house in Passy were of necessity early risers; but when Susy jumped out of bed the next morning no one else was astir, and it lacked nearly an hour of the call of the bonne’s alarm-clock.

For a moment Susy leaned out of her dark room into the darker night. A cold drizzle fell on her face, and she shivered and drew back. Then, lighting a candle, and shading it, as her habit was, from the sleeping child, she slipped on her dressing-gown and opened the door. On the threshold she paused to look at her watch. Only half-past five! She thought with compunction of the unkindness of breaking in on Junie Fulmer’s slumbers; but such scruples did not weigh an ounce in the balance of her purpose. Poor Junie would have to oversleep herself on Sunday, that was all.

Susy stole into the passage, opened a door, and cast her light on the girl’s face.

“Junie! Dearest Junie, you must wake up!”

Junie lay in the abandonment of youthful sleep; but at the sound of her name she sat up with the promptness of a grown person on whom domestic burdens have long weighed.

“Which one of them is it?” she asked, one foot already out of bed.

“Oh, Junie dear, no... it’s nothing wrong with the children... or with anybody,” Susy stammered, on her knees by the bed.

In the candlelight, she saw Junie’s anxious brow darken reproachfully.

“Oh, Susy, then why—? I was just dreaming we were all driving about Rome in a great big motor-car with father and mother!”

“I’m so sorry, dear. What a lovely dream! I’m a brute to have interrupted it—”

She felt the little girl’s awakening scrutiny. “If there’s nothing wrong with anybody, why are you crying, Susy? Is it you there’s something wrong with? What has happened?”

“Am I crying?” Susy rose from her knees and sat down on the counterpane. “Yes, it is me. And I had to disturb you.”

“Oh, Susy, darling, what is it?” Junie’s arms were about her in a flash, and Susy grasped them in burning fingers.

“Junie, listen! I’ve got to go away at once—to leave you all for the whole day. I may not be back till late this evening; late to-night; I can’t tell. I promised your mother I’d never leave you; but I’ve got to—I’ve got to.”

Junie considered her agitated face with fully awakened eyes. “Oh, I won’t tell, you know, you old brick,” she said with simplicity.

Susy hugged her. “Junie, Junie, you darling! But that wasn’t what I meant. Of course you may tell—you must tell. I shall write to your mother myself. But what worries me is the idea of having to go away—away from Paris—for the whole day, with Geordie still coughing a little, and no one but that silly Angele to stay with him while you’re out—and no one but you to take yourself and the others to school. But Junie, Junie, I’ve got to do it!” she sobbed out, clutching the child tighter.

Junie Fulmer, with her strangely mature perception of the case, and seemingly of every case that fate might call on her to deal with, sat for a moment motionless in Susy’s hold. Then she freed her wrists with an adroit twist, and leaning back against the pillows said judiciously: “You’ll never in the world bring up a family of your own if you take on like this over other people’s children.”

Through all her turmoil of spirit the observation drew a laugh from Susy. “Oh, a family of my own—I don’t deserve one, the way I’m behaving to your—”

Junie still considered her. “My dear, a change will do you good: you need it,” she pronounced.

Susy rose with a laughing sigh. “I’m not at all sure it will! But I’ve got to have it, all the same. Only I do feel anxious—and I can’t even leave you my address!”

Junie still seemed to examine the case.

“Can’t you even tell me where you’re going?” she ventured, as if not quite sure of the delicacy of asking.

“Well—no, I don’t think I can; not till I get back. Besides, even if I could it wouldn’t be much use, because I couldn’t give you my address there. I don’t know what it will be.”

“But what does it matter, if you’re coming back to-night?”

“Of course I’m coming back! How could you possibly imagine I should think of leaving you for more than a day?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t be afraid—not much, that is, with the poker, and Nat’s water-pistol,” emended Junie, still judicious.

Susy again enfolded her vehemently, and then turned to more practical matters. She explained that she wished if possible to catch an eight-thirty train from the Gare de Lyon, and that there was not a moment to lose if the children were to be dressed and fed, and full instructions written out for Junie and Angele, before she rushed for the underground.

While she bathed Geordie, and then hurried into her own clothes, she could not help wondering at her own extreme solicitude for her charges. She remembered, with a pang, how often she had deserted Clarissa Vanderlyn for the whole day, and even for two or three in succession—poor little Clarissa, whom she knew to be so unprotected, so exposed to evil influences. She had been too much absorbed in her own greedy bliss to be more than intermittently aware of the child; but now, she felt, no sorrow however ravaging, no happiness however absorbing, would ever again isolate her from her kind.

And then these children were so different! The exquisite Clarissa was already the predestined victim of her surroundings: her budding soul was divided from Susy’s by the same barrier of incomprehension that separated the latter from Mrs. Vanderlyn. Clarissa had nothing to teach Susy but the horror of her own hard little appetites; whereas the company of the noisy argumentative Fulmers had been a school of wisdom and abnegation.

As she applied the brush to Geordie’s shining head and the handkerchief to his snuffling nose, the sense of what she owed him was so borne in on Susy that she interrupted the process to catch him to her bosom.

“I’ll have such a story to tell you when I get back to-night, if you’ll promise me to be good all day,” she bargained with him; and Geordie, always astute, bargained back: “Before I promise, I’d like to know what story.”

At length all was in order. Junie had been enlightened, and Angele stunned, by the minuteness of Susy’s instructions; and the latter, waterproofed and stoutly shod, descended the doorstep, and paused to wave at the pyramid of heads yearning to her from an upper window.

It was hardly light, and still raining, when she turned into the dismal street. As usual, it was empty; but at the corner she perceived a hesitating taxi, with luggage piled beside the driver. Perhaps it was some early traveller, just arriving, who would release the carriage in time for her to catch it, and thus avoid the walk to the metro, and the subsequent strap-hanging; for it was the work-people’s hour. Susy raced toward the vehicle, which, overcoming its hesitation, was beginning to move in her direction. Observing this, she stopped to see where it would discharge its load. Thereupon the taxi stopped also, and the load discharged itself in front of her in the shape of Nick Lansing.

The two stood staring at each other through the rain till Nick broke out: “Where are you going? I came to get you.”

“To get me? To get me?” she repeated. Beside the driver she had suddenly remarked the old suit-case from which her husband had obliged her to extract Strefford’s cigars as they were leaving Como; and everything that had happened since seemed to fall away and vanish in the pang and rapture of that memory.

“To get you; yes. Of course.” He spoke the words peremptorily, almost as if they were an order. “Where were you going?” he repeated.

Without answering, she turned toward the house. He followed her, and the laden taxi closed the procession.

“Why are you out in such weather without an umbrella?” he continued, in the same severe tone, drawing her under the shelter of his.

“Oh, because Junie’s umbrella is in tatters, and I had to leave her mine, as I was going away for the whole day.” She spoke the words like a person in a trance.

“For the whole day? At this hour? Where?”

They were on the doorstep, and she fumbled automatically for her key, let herself in, and led the way to the sitting-room. It had not been tidied up since the night before. The children’s school books lay scattered on the table and sofa, and the empty fireplace was grey with ashes. She turned to Nick in the pallid light.

“I was going to see you,” she stammered, “I was going to follow you to Fontainebleau, if necessary, to tell you... to prevent you....”

He repeated in the same aggressive tone: “Tell me what? Prevent what?”

“Tell you that there must be some other way... some decent way... of our separating... without that horror, that horror of your going off with a woman....”

He stared, and then burst into a laugh. The blood rushed to her face. She had caught a familiar ring in his laugh, and it wounded her. What business had he, at such a time, to laugh in the old way?

“I’m sorry; but there is no other way, I’m afraid. No other way but one,” he corrected himself.

She raised her head sharply. “Well?”

“That you should be the woman.—Oh, my dear!” He had dropped his mocking smile, and was at her side, her hands in his. “Oh, my dear, don’t you see that we’ve both been feeling the same thing, and at the same hour? You lay awake thinking of it all night, didn’t you? So did I. Whenever the clock struck, I said to myself: ‘She’s hearing it too.’ And I was up before daylight, and packed my traps—for I never want to set foot again in that awful hotel where I’ve lived in hell for the last three days. And I swore to myself that I’d go off with a woman by the first train I could catch—and so I mean to, my dear.”

She stood before him numb. Yes, numb: that was the worst of it! The violence of the reaction had been too great, and she could hardly understand what he was saying. Instead, she noticed that the tassel of the window-blind was torn off again (oh, those children!), and vaguely wondered if his luggage were safe on the waiting taxi. One heard such stories....

His voice came back to her. “Susy! Listen!” he was entreating. “You must see yourself that it can’t be. We’re married—isn’t that all that matters? Oh, I know—I’ve behaved like a brute: a cursed arrogant ass! You couldn’t wish that ass a worse kicking than I’ve given him! But that’s not the point, you see. The point is that we’re married.... Married.... Doesn’t it mean something to you, something—inexorable? It does to me. I didn’t dream it would—in just that way. But all I can say is that I suppose the people who don’t feel it aren’t really married—and they’d better separate; much better. As for us—”

Through her tears she gasped out: “That’s what I felt... that’s what I said to Streff....”

He was upon her with a great embrace. “My darling! My darling! You have told him?”

“Yes,” she panted. “That’s why I’m living here.” She paused. “And you’ve told Coral?”

She felt his embrace relax. He drew away a little, still holding her, but with lowered head.

“No... I... haven’t.”

“Oh, Nick! But then—?”

He caught her to him again, resentfully. “Well—then what? What do you mean? What earthly difference does it make?”

“But if you’ve told her you were going to marry her—” (Try as she would, her voice was full of silver chimes.)

“Marry her? Marry her?” he echoed. “But how could I? What does marriage mean anyhow? If it means anything at all it means—you! And I can’t ask Coral Hicks just to come and live with me, can I?”

Between crying and laughing she lay on his breast, and his hand passed over her hair.

They were silent for a while; then he began again: “You said it yourself yesterday, you know.”

She strayed back from sunlit distances. “Yesterday?”

“Yes: that Grace Fulmer says you can’t separate two people who’ve been through a lot of things—”

“Ah, been through them together—it’s not the things, you see, it’s the togetherness,” she interrupted.

“The togetherness—that’s it!” He seized on the word as if it had just been coined to express their case, and his mind could rest in it without farther labour.

The door-bell rang, and they started. Through the window they saw the taxi-driver gesticulating enquiries as to the fate of the luggage.

“He wants to know if he’s to leave it here,” Susy laughed.

“No—no! You’re to come with me,” her husband declared.

“Come with you?” She laughed again at the absurdity of the suggestion.

“Of course: this very instant. What did you suppose? That I was going away without you? Run up and pack your things,” he commanded.

“My things? My things? But I can’t leave the children!”

He stared, between indignation and amusement. “Can’t leave the children? Nonsense! Why, you said yourself you were going to follow me to Fontainebleau—”

She reddened again, this time a little painfully “I didn’t know what I was doing.... I had to find you... but I should have come back this evening, no matter what happened.”

“No matter what?”

She nodded, and met his gaze resolutely.

“No; but really—”

“Really, I can’t leave the children till Nat and Grace come back. I promised I wouldn’t.”

“Yes; but you didn’t know then.... Why on earth can’t their nurse look after them?”

“There isn’t any nurse but me.”

“Good Lord!”

“But it’s only for two weeks more,” she pleaded. “Two weeks! Do you know how long I’ve been without you!” He seized her by both wrists, and drew them against his breast. “Come with me at least for two days—Susy!” he entreated her.

“Oh,” she cried, “that’s the very first time you’ve said my name!”

“Susy, Susy, then—my Susy—Susy! And you’ve only said mine once, you know.”

“Nick!” she sighed, at peace, as if the one syllable were a magic seed that hung out great branches to envelop them.

“Well, then, Susy, be reasonable. Come!”

“Reasonable—oh, reasonable!” she sobbed through laughter.

“Unreasonable, then! That’s even better.”

She freed herself, and drew back gently. “Nick, I swore I wouldn’t leave them; and I can’t. It’s not only my promise to their mother—it’s what they’ve been to me themselves. You don’t, know... You can’t imagine the things they’ve taught me. They’re awfully naughty at times, because they’re so clever; but when they’re good they’re the wisest people I know.” She paused, and a sudden inspiration illuminated her. “But why shouldn’t we take them with us?” she exclaimed.

Her husband’s arms fell away from her, and he stood dumfounded.

“Take them with us?”

“Why not?”

“All five of them?”

“Of course—I couldn’t possibly separate them. And Junie and Nat will help us to look after the young ones.”

“Help us!” he groaned.

“Oh, you’ll see; they won’t bother you. Just leave it to me; I’ll manage—” The word stopped her short, and an agony of crimson suffused her from brow to throat. Their eyes met; and without a word he stooped and laid his lips gently on the stain of red on her neck.

“Nick,” she breathed, her hands in his.

“But those children—”

Instead of answering, she questioned: “Where are we going?”

His face lit up.

“Anywhere, dearest, that you choose.”

“Well—I choose Fontainebleau!” she exulted.

“So do I! But we can’t take all those children to an hotel at Fontainebleau, can we?” he questioned weakly. “You see, dear, there’s the mere expense of it—”

Her eyes were already travelling far ahead of him. “The expense won’t amount to much. I’ve just remembered that Angele, the bonne, has a sister who is cook there in a nice old-fashioned pension which must be almost empty at this time of year. I’m sure I can ma—arrange easily,” she hurried on, nearly tripping again over the fatal word. “And just think of the treat it will be to them! This is Friday, and I can get them let off from their afternoon classes, and keep them in the country till Monday. Poor darlings, they haven’t been out of Paris for months! And I daresay the change will cure Geordie’s cough—Geordie’s the youngest,” she explained, surprised to find herself, even in the rapture of reunion, so absorbed in the welfare of the Fulmers.

She was conscious that her husband was surprised also; but instead of prolonging the argument he simply questioned: “Was Geordie the chap you had in your arms when you opened the front door the night before last?”

She echoed: “I opened the front door the night before last?”

“To a boy with a parcel.”

“Oh,” she sobbed, “you were there? You were watching?”

He held her to him, and the currents flowed between them warm and full as on the night of their moon over Como.

In a trice, after that, she had the matter in hand and her forces marshalled. The taxi was paid, Nick’s luggage deposited in the vestibule, and the children, just piling down to breakfast, were summoned in to hear the news.

It was apparent that, seasoned to surprises as they were, Nick’s presence took them aback. But when, between laughter and embraces, his identity, and his right to be where he was, had been made clear to them, Junie dismissed the matter by asking him in her practical way: “Then I suppose we may talk about you to Susy now?”—and thereafter all five addressed themselves to the vision of their imminent holiday.

From that moment the little house became the centre of a whirlwind. Treats so unforeseen, and of such magnitude, were rare in the young Fulmers’ experience, and had it not been for Junie’s steadying influence Susy’s charges would have got out of hand. But young Nat, appealed to by Nick on the ground of their common manhood, was induced to forego celebrating the event on his motor horn (the very same which had tortured the New Hampshire echoes), and to assert his authority over his juniors; and finally a plan began to emerge from the chaos, and each child to fit into it like a bit of a picture puzzle.

Susy, riding the whirlwind with her usual firmness, nevertheless felt an undercurrent of anxiety. There had been no time as yet, between her and Nick, to revert to money matters; and where there was so little money it could not, obviously, much matter. But that was the more reason for being secretly aghast at her intrepid resolve not to separate herself from her charges. A three days’ honey-moon with five children in the party—and children with the Fulmer appetite—could not but be a costly business; and while she settled details, packed them off to school, and routed out such nondescript receptacles as the house contained in the way of luggage, her thoughts remained fixed on the familiar financial problem.

Yes—it was cruel to have it rear its hated head, even through the bursting boughs of her new spring; but there it was, the perpetual serpent in her Eden, to be bribed, fed, sent to sleep with such scraps as she could beg, borrow or steal for it. And she supposed it was the price that fate meant her to pay for her blessedness, and was surer than ever that the blessedness was worth it. Only, how was she to compound the business with her new principles?

With the children’s things to pack, luncheon to be got ready, and the Fontainebleau pension to be telephoned to, there was little time to waste on moral casuistry; and Susy asked herself with a certain irony if the chronic lack of time to deal with money difficulties had not been the chief cause of her previous lapses. There was no time to deal with this question either; no time, in short, to do anything but rush forward on a great gale of plans and preparations, in the course of which she whirled Nick forth to buy some charcuterie for luncheon, and telephone to Fontainebleau.

Once he was gone—and after watching him safely round the corner—she too got into her wraps, and transferring a small packet from her dressing-case to her pocket, hastened out in a different direction.

XXX.

It took two brimming taxi-cabs to carry the Nicholas Lansings to the station on their second honey-moon. In the first were Nick, Susy and the luggage of the whole party (little Nat’s motor horn included, as a last concession, and because he had hitherto forborne to play on it); and in the second, the five Fulmers, the bonne, who at the eleventh hour had refused to be left, a cage-full of canaries, and a foundling kitten who had murderous designs on them; all of which had to be taken because, if the bonne came, there would be nobody left to look after them.

At the corner Susy tore herself from Nick’s arms and held up the procession while she ran back to the second taxi to make sure that the bonne had brought the house-key. It was found of course that she hadn’t but that Junie had; whereupon the caravan got under way again, and reached the station just as the train was starting; and there, by some miracle of good nature on the part of the guard, they were all packed together into an empty compartment—no doubt, as Susy remarked, because train officials never failed to spot a newly-married couple, and treat them kindly.

The children, sentinelled by Junie, at first gave promise of superhuman goodness; but presently their feelings overflowed, and they were not to be quieted till it had been agreed that Nat should blow his motor-horn at each halt, while the twins called out the names of the stations, and Geordie, with the canaries and kitten, affected to change trains.

Luckily the halts were few; but the excitement of travel, combined with over-indulgence in the chocolates imprudently provided by Nick, overwhelmed Geordie with a sudden melancholy that could be appeased only by Susy’s telling him stories till they arrived at Fontainebleau.

The day was soft, with mild gleams of sunlight on decaying foliage; and after luggage and livestock had been dropped at the pension Susy confessed that she had promised the children a scamper in the forest, and buns in a tea-shop afterward. Nick placidly agreed, and darkness had long fallen, and a great many buns been consumed, when at length the procession turned down the street toward the pension, headed by Nick with the sleeping Geordie on his shoulder, while the others, speechless with fatigue and food, hung heavily on Susy.

It had been decided that, as the bonne was of the party, the children might be entrusted to her for the night, and Nick and Susy establish themselves in an adjacent hotel. Nick had flattered himself that they might remove their possessions there when they returned from the tea-room; but Susy, manifestly surprised at the idea, reminded him that her charges must first be given their supper and put to bed. She suggested that he should meanwhile take the bags to the hotel, and promised to join him as soon as Geordie was asleep.

She was a long time coming, but waiting for her was sweet, even in a deserted hotel reading-room insufficiently heated by a sulky stove; and after he had glanced through his morning’s mail, hurriedly thrust into his pocket as he left Paris, he sank into a state of drowsy beatitude. It was all the maddest business in the world, yet it did not give him the sense of unreality that had made their first adventure a mere golden dream; and he sat and waited with the security of one in whom dear habits have struck deep roots. In this mood of acquiescence even the presence of the five Fulmers seemed a natural and necessary consequence of all the rest; and when Susy at length appeared, a little pale and tired, with the brooding inward look that busy mothers bring from the nursery, that too seemed natural and necessary, and part of the new order of things.

They had wandered out to a cheap restaurant for dinner; now, in the damp December night, they were walking back to the hotel under a sky full of rain-clouds. They seemed to have said everything to each other, and yet barely to have begun what they had to tell; and at each step they took, their heavy feet dragged a great load of bliss.

In the hotel almost all the lights were already out; and they groped their way to the third floor room which was the only one that Susy had found cheap enough. A ray from a street-lamp struck up through the unshuttered windows; and after Nick had revived the fire they drew their chairs close to it, and sat quietly for a while in the dark.

Their silence was so sweet that Nick could not make up his mind to break it; not to do so gave his tossing spirit such a sense of permanence, of having at last unlimited time before him in which to taste his joy and let its sweetness stream through him. But at length he roused himself to say: “It’s queer how things coincide. I’ve had a little bit of good news in one of the letters I got this morning.”

Susy took the announcement serenely. “Well, you would, you know,” she commented, as if the day had been too obviously designed for bliss to escape the notice of its dispensers.

“Yes,” he continued with a thrill of pardonable pride. “During the cruise I did a couple of articles on Crete—oh, just travel-impressions, of course; they couldn’t be more. But the editor of the New Review has accepted them, and asks for others. And here’s his cheque, if you please! So you see you might have let me take the jolly room downstairs with the pink curtains. And it makes me awfully hopeful about my book.”

He had expected a rapturous outburst, and perhaps some reassertion of wifely faith in the glorious future that awaited The Pageant of Alexander; and deep down under the lover’s well-being the author felt a faint twinge of mortified vanity when Susy, leaping to her feet, cried out, ravenously and without preamble: “Oh, Nick, Nick—let me see how much they’ve given you!”

He flourished the cheque before her in the firelight. “A couple of hundred, you mercenary wretch!”

“Oh, oh—” she gasped, as if the good news had been almost too much for her tense nerves; and then surprised him by dropping to the ground, and burying her face against his knees.

“Susy, my Susy,” he whispered, his hand on her shaking shoulder. “Why, dear, what is it? You’re not crying?”

“Oh, Nick, Nick—two hundred? Two hundred dollars? Then I’ve got to tell you—oh now, at once!”

A faint chill ran over him, and involuntarily his hand drew back from her bowed figure.

“Now? Oh, why now?” he protested. “What on earth does it matter now—whatever it is?”

“But it does matter—it matters more than you can think!”

She straightened herself, still kneeling before him, and lifted her head so that the firelight behind her turned her hair into a ruddy halo. “Oh, Nick, the bracelet—Ellie’s bracelet.... I’ve never returned it to her,” she faltered out.

He felt himself recoiling under the hands with which she clutched his knees. For an instant he did not remember what she alluded to; it was the mere mention of Ellie Vanderlyn’s name that had fallen between them like an icy shadow. What an incorrigible fool he had been to think they could ever shake off such memories, or cease to be the slaves of such a past!

“The bracelet?—Oh, yes,” he said, suddenly understanding, and feeling the chill mount slowly to his lips.

“Yes, the bracelet... Oh, Nick, I meant to give it back at once; I did—I did; but the day you went away I forgot everything else. And when I found the thing, in the bottom of my bag, weeks afterward, I thought everything was over between you and me, and I had begun to see Ellie again, and she was kind to me and how could I?” To save his life he could have found no answer, and she pressed on: “And so this morning, when I saw you were frightened by the expense of bringing all the children with us, and when I felt I couldn’t leave them, and couldn’t leave you either, I remembered the bracelet; and I sent you off to telephone while I rushed round the corner to a little jeweller’s where I’d been before, and pawned it so that you shouldn’t have to pay for the children.... But now, darling, you see, if you’ve got all that money, I can get it out of pawn at once, can’t I, and send it back to her?”

She flung her arms about him, and he held her fast, wondering if the tears he felt were hers or his. Still he did not speak; but as he clasped her close she added, with an irrepressible flash of her old irony: “Not that Ellie will understand why I’ve done it. She’s never yet been able to make out why you returned her scarf-pin.”

For a long time she continued to lean against him, her head on his knees, as she had done on the terrace of Como on the last night of their honeymoon. She had ceased to talk, and he sat silent also, passing his hand quietly to and fro over her hair. The first rapture had been succeeded by soberer feelings. Her confession had broken up the frozen pride about his heart, and humbled him to the earth; but it had also roused forgotten things, memories and scruples swept aside in the first rush of their reunion. He and she belonged to each other for always: he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never again wholly let them go. Yet as he sat there he thought of Strefford, he thought of Coral Hicks. He had been a coward in regard to Coral, and Susy had been sincere and courageous in regard to Strefford. Yet his mind dwelt on Coral with tenderness, with compunction, with remorse; and he was almost sure that Susy had already put Strefford utterly out of her mind.

It was the old contrast between the two ways of loving, the man’s way and the woman’s; and after a moment it seemed to Nick natural enough that Susy, from the very moment of finding him again, should feel neither pity nor regret, and that Strefford should already be to her as if he had never been. After all, there was something Providential in such arrangements.

He stooped closer, pressed her dreaming head between his hands, and whispered: “Wake up; it’s bedtime.”

She rose; but as she moved away to turn on the light he caught her hand and drew her to the window. They leaned on the sill in the darkness, and through the clouds, from which a few drops were already falling, the moon, labouring upward, swam into a space of sky, cast her troubled glory on them, and was again hidden.