Chapter 3

THREE HUMAN HEARTS

I

And now I was twenty-six.

Everyone who knows Jove knows the poignant and delicious day when the lovers, undeclared, but sure of mutual passion, await the magic moment of avowal, with all its changeful consequences. I resume my fragmentary narrative at such a day in my life. As for me, I waited for the avowal as for an earthquake. I felt as though I were the captain of a ship on fire, and the only person aware that the flames were creeping towards a powder magazine. And my love shone fiercely in my heart, like a southern star; it held me, hypnotized, in a thrilling and exquisite entrancement, so that if my secret, silent lover was away from me, as on that fatal night in my drawing-room, my friends were but phantom presences in a shadowy world. This is not an exaggerated figure, but the truth, for when I have loved I have loved much....

My drawing-room in Bedford Court, that night on which the violent drama of my life recommenced, indicated fairly the sorts of success which I had achieved, and the direction of my tastes. The victim of Diaz had gradually passed away, and a new creature had replaced her--a creature rapidly developed, and somewhat brazened in the process under the sun of an extraordinary double prosperity in London. I had soon learnt that my face had a magic to win for me what wealth cannot buy. My books had given me fame and money. And I could not prevent the world from worshipping the woman whom it deemed the gods had greatly favoured. I could not have prevented it, even had I wished, and I did not wish, I knew well that no merit and no virtue, but merely the accident of facial curves, and the accident of a convolution of the brain, had brought me this ascendancy, and at first I reminded myself of the duty of humility. But when homage is reiterated, when the pleasure of obeying a command and satisfying a caprice is begged for, when roses are strewn, and even necks put down in the path, one forgets to be humble; one forgets that in meekness alone lies the sole good; one confuses deserts with the hazards of heredity.

However, in the end fate has no favourites. A woman who has beauty wants to frame it in beauty. The eye is a sensualist, and its appetites, once aroused, grow. A beautiful woman takes the same pleasure in the sight of another beautiful woman as a man does; only jealousy or fear prevents her from admitting the pleasure. I collected beautiful women.... Elegance is a form of beauty. It not only enhances beauty, but it is the one thing which will console the eye for the absence of beauty. The first rule which I made for my home was that in it my eye should not be offended. I lost much, doubtless, by adhering to it, but not more than I gained. And since elegance is impossible without good manners, and good manners are a convention, though a supremely good one, the society by which I surrounded myself was conventional; superficially, of course, for it is the business of a convention to be not more than superficial. Some persons after knowing my drawing-room were astounded by my books, others after reading my books were astounded by my drawing-room; but these persons lacked perception. Given elegance, with or without beauty itself, I had naturally sought, in my friends, intellectual courage, honest thinking, kindness of heart, creative talent, distinction, wit. My search had not been unfortunate.... You see Heaven had been so kind to me!

That night in my drawing-room (far too full of bric-a-brac of all climes and ages), beneath the blaze of the two Empire chandeliers, which Vicary, the musical composer, had found for me in Chartres, there were perhaps a dozen guests assembled.

Vicary had just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the usual quaint Vicary details--such as the solemn warning whisper of an equerry in Vicary's ear as he walked backwards, '_Mind the edge of the carpet';_ and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little hysterically--all save Vicary, whose foible was never to laugh. But immediately afterwards there was a pause, one of those disconcerting, involuntary pauses which at a social gathering are like a chill hint of autumn in late summer, and which accuse the hostess. It was over in an instant; the broken current was resumed; everybody pretended that everything was as usual at my receptions. But that pause was the beginning of the downfall.

With a fierce effort I tried to escape from my entrancement, to be interested in these unreal shadows whose voices seemed to come to me from a distance, and to make my glance forget the door, where the one reality in the world for me, my unspoken lover, should have appeared long since. I joined unskilfully in a conversation which Vicary and Mrs. Sardis and her daughter Jocelyn were conducting quite well without my assistance. The rest were chattering now, in one or two groups, except Lord Francis Alcar, who, I suddenly noticed, sat alone on a settee behind the piano. Here was another unfortunate result of my preoccupation. By what negligence had I allowed him to be thus forsaken? I rose and went across to him, penitent, and glad to leave the others.

There are only two fundamental differences in the world--the difference between sex and sex, and the difference between youth and age. Lord Francis Alcar was sixty years older than me. His life was over before mine had commenced. It seemed incredible; but I had acquired the whole of my mundane experience, while he was merely waiting for death. At seventy, men begin to be separated from their fellow-creatures. At eighty, they are like islets sticking out of a sea. At eighty-five, with their trembling and deliberate speech, they are the abstract voice of human wisdom. They gather wisdom with amazing rapidity in the latter years, and even their folly is wise then. Lord Francis was eighty-six; his faculties enfeebled but intact after a career devoted to the three most costly of all luxuries--pretty women, fine pictures, and rare books; a tall, spare man, quietly proud of his age, his ability to go out in the evening unattended, his amorous past, and his contributions to the history of English printing.

As I approached him, he leaned forward into his favourite attitude, elbows on knees and fingertips lightly touching, and he looked up at me. And his eyes, sunken and fatigued and yet audacious, seemed to flash out. He opened his thin lips to speak. When old men speak, they have the air of rousing themselves from an eternal contemplation in order to do so, and what they say becomes accordingly oracular.

'Pallor suits you,' he piped gallantly, and then added: 'But do not carry it to extremes.'

'Am I so pale, then?' I faltered, trying to smile naturally.

I sat down beside him, and smoothed out my black lace dress; he examined it like a connoisseur.

'Yes,' he said at length. 'What is the matter?'

Lord Francis charged this apparently simple and naïve question with a strange intimate meaning. The men who surround a woman such as I, living as I lived, are always demanding, with a secret thirst, 'Does she really live without love? What does she conceal?' I have read this interrogation in the eyes of scores of men; but no one, save Lord Francis, would have had the right to put it into the tones of his voice. We were so mutually foreign and disinterested, so at the opposite ends of life, that he had nothing to gain and I nothing to lose, and I could have permitted to this sage ruin of a male almost a confessor's freedom. Moreover, we had an affectionate regard for each other.

I said nothing, and he repeated in his treble:

'What is the matter?'

'Love is the matter!' I might have passionately cried out to him, had we been alone. But I merely responded to his tone with my eyes. I thanked him with my eyes for his bold and flattering curiosity, senile, but thoroughly masculine to the last. And I said:

'I am only a little exhausted. I finished my novel yesterday.'

It was my sixth novel in five years.

'With you,' he said, 'work is simply a drug.'

'Lord Francis,' I expostulated, 'how do you know that?'

'And it has got such a hold of you that you cannot do without it,' he proceeded, with slow, faint shrillness. 'Some women take to morphia, others take to work.'

'On the contrary,' I said, 'I have quite determined to do no more work for twelve months.'

'Seriously?'

'Seriously.'

He faced me, vivacious, and leaned against the back of the settee.

'Then you mean to give yourself time to love?' he murmured, as it were with a kind malice, and every crease in his veined and yellow features was intensified by an enigmatic smile.

'Why not?' I laughed encouragingly. 'Why not? What do you advise?'

'I advise it,' he said positively. 'I advise it. You have already wasted the best years.'

'The best?'

'One can never afterwards love as one loves at twenty. But there! You have nothing to learn about love!'

He gave me one of those disrobing glances of which men who have dedicated their existence to women alone have the secret. I shrank under the ordeal; I tried to clutch my clothes about me.

The chatter from the other end of the room grew louder. Vicary was gazing critically at his chandeliers.

'Does love bring happiness?' I asked Lord Francis, carefully ignoring his remark.

'For forty years,' he quavered, 'I made love to every pretty woman I met, in the search for happiness. I may have got five per cent. return on my outlay, which is perhaps not bad in these hard times; but I certainly did not get even that in happiness. I got it in--other ways.'

'And if you had to begin afresh?'

He stood up, turned his back on the room, and looked down at me from his bent height. His knotted hands were shaking, as they always shook.

'I would do the same again,' he whispered.

'Would you?' I said, looking up at him. 'Truly?'

'Yes. Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through this world. Nothing is so interesting as love and grief, and the one involves the other. Ah! would I not do the same again!'

He spoke gravely, wistfully, and vehemently, as if employing the last spark of divine fire that was left in his decrepit frame. This undaunted confession of a faith which had survived twenty years of inactive meditation, this banner waved by an expiring arm in the face of the eternity that mocks at the transience of human things, filled me with admiration. My eyes moistened, but I continued to look up at him.

'What is the title of the new book?' he demanded casually, sinking into a chair.

'_Burning Sappho_,' I answered. 'But the title is very misleading.'

'Bright star!' he exclaimed, taking my hand. 'With such a title you will surely beat the record of the Good Dame.'

'Hsh!' I enjoined him.

Jocelyn Sardis was coming towards us.

The Good Dame was the sobriquet which Lord Francis had invented to conceal--or to display--his courteous disdain of the ideals represented by Mrs. Sardis, that pillar long established, that stately dowager, that impeccable _doyenne_ of serious English fiction. Mrs. Sardis had captured two continents. Her novels, dealing with all the profound problems of the age, were read by philosophers and politicians, and one of them had reached a circulation of a quarter of a million copies. Her dignified and indefatigable pen furnished her with an income of fifteen thousand pounds a year.

Jocelyn Sardis was just entering her mother's world, and she had apparently not yet recovered from the surprise of the discovery that she was a woman; a simple and lovable young creature with brains amply sufficient for the making of apple-pies. As she greeted Lord Francis in her clear, innocent voice, I wondered sadly why her mother should be so anxious to embroider the work of Nature. I thought if Jocelyn could just be left alone to fall in love with some average, kindly stockbroker, how much more nearly the eternal purpose might be fulfilled....

'Yes, I remember,' Lord Francis was saying. 'It was at St. Malo. And what did you think of the Breton peasant?'

'Oh,' said Jocelyn, 'mamma has not yet allowed us to study the condition of the lower classes in France. We are all so busy with the new Settlement.'

'It must be very exhausting, my dear child,' said Lord Francis.

I rose.

'I came to ask you to play something,' the child appealed to me. 'I have never heard you play, and everyone says--'

'Jocelyn, my pet,' the precise, prim utterance of Mrs. Sardis floated across the room.

'What, mamma?'

'You are not to trouble Miss Peel. Perhaps she does not feel equal to playing.'

My blood rose in an instant. I cannot tell why, unless it was that I resented from Mrs. Sardis even the slightest allusion to the fact that I was not entirely myself. The latent antagonism between us became violently active in my heart. I believe I blushed. I know that I felt murderous towards Mrs. Sardis. I gave her my most adorable smile, and I said, with sugar in my voice:

'But I shall be delighted to play for Jocelyn.'

It was an act of bravado on my part to attempt to play the piano in the mood in which I found myself; and that I should have begun the opening phrase of Chopin's first Ballade, that composition so laden with formidable memories--begun it without thinking and without apprehension--showed how far I had lost my self-control. Not that the silver sounds which shimmered from the Broadwood under my feverish hands filled me with sentimental regrets for an irrecoverable past. No! But I saw the victim of Diaz as though I had never been she. She was for me one of those ladies that have loved and are dead. The simplicity of her mind and her situation, compared with my mind and my situation, seemed unbearably piteous to me. Why, I knew not. The pathos of that brief and vanished idyll overcame me like some sad story of an antique princess. And then, magically, I saw the pathos of my present position in it as in a truth-revealing mirror. My fame, and my knowledge and my experience, my trained imagination, my skill, my social splendour, my wealth, were stripped away from me as inessential, and I was merely a woman in love, to whom love could not fail to bring calamity and grief; a woman expecting her lover, and yet to whom his coming could only be disastrous; a woman with a heart divided between tremulous joy and dull sorrow; who was at once in heaven and in hell; the victim of love. How often have I called my dead Carlotta the victim of Diaz! Let me be less unjust, and say that he, too, was the victim of love. What was Diaz but the instrument of the god?

Jocelyn stood near me by the piano. I glanced at her as I played, and smiled. She answered my smile; her eyes glistened with tears; I bent my gaze suddenly to the keyboard. 'You too!' I thought sadly, 'You too!... One day! One day even you will know what life is, and the look in those innocent eyes will never be innocent again!'

Then there was a sharp crack at the other end of the room; the handle of the door turned, and the door began to open. My heart bounded and stopped. It must be he, at last! I perceived the fearful intensity of my longing for his presence. But it was only a servant with a tray. My fingers stammered and stumbled. For a few instants I forced them to obey me; my pride was equal to the strain, though I felt sick and fainting. And then I became aware that my guests were staring at me with alarmed and anxious faces. Mrs. Sardis had started from her chair. I dropped my hands. It was useless to fight further; the battle was lost.

'I will not play any more,' I said quickly. 'I ought not to have tried to play from memory. Excuse me.'

And I left the piano as calmly as I could. I knew that by an effort I could walk steadily and in a straight line across the room to Vicary and the others, and I succeeded. They should not learn my secret.

'Poor thing!' murmured Mrs. Sardis sympathetically. 'Do sit down, dear.'

'Won't you have something to drink?' said Vicary.

'I am perfectly all right,' I said. 'I'm only sorry that my memory is not what it used to be.' And I persisted in standing for a few moments by the mantelpiece. In the glass I caught one glimpse of a face as white as milk, Jocelyn remained at her post by the piano, frightened by she knew not what, like a young child.

'Our friend finished a new work only yesterday,' said Lord Francis shakily. He had followed me. 'She has wisely decided to take a long holiday. Good-bye, my dear.'

These were the last words he ever spoke to me, though I saw him again. We shook hands in silence, and he left. Nor would the others stay. I had ruined the night. We were all self-conscious, diffident, suspicious. Even Vicary was affected. How thankful I was that my silent lover had not come! My secret was my own--and his. And no one should surprise it unless we chose. I cared nothing what they thought, or what they guessed, as they filed out of the door, a brilliant procession of which I had the right to be proud; they could not guess my secret. I was sufficiently woman of the world to baffle them as long as I wished to baffle them.

Then I noticed that Mrs. Sardis had stayed behind; she was examining some lustre ware in the further drawing-room.

'I'm afraid Jocelyn has gone without her mother,' I said, approaching her.

'I have told Jocelyn to go home alone,' replied Mrs. Sardis. 'The carriage will return for me. Dear friend, I want to have a little talk with you. Do you permit?'

'I shall be delighted,' I said.

'You are sure you are well enough?'

'There is nothing whatever the matter with me,' I answered slowly and distinctly. 'Come to the fire, and let us be comfortable. And I told Emmeline Palmer, my companion and secretary, who just then appeared, that she might retire to bed.

Mrs. Sardis was nervous, and this condition, so singular in Mrs. Sardis, naturally made me curious as to the cause of it. But my eyes still furtively wandered to the door.

'My dear co-worker,' she began, and hesitated.

'Yes,' I encouraged her.

She put her matron's lips together:

'You know how proud I am of your calling, and how jealous I am of its honour and its good name, and what a great mission I think we novelists have in the work of regenerating the world.'

I nodded. That kind of eloquence always makes me mute. It leaves nothing to be said.

'I wonder,' Mrs. Sardis continued, 'if you have ever realized what a power _you_ are in England and America to-day.'

'Power!' I echoed. 'I have done nothing but try to write as honestly and as well as I could what I felt I wanted to write.'

'No one can doubt your sincerity, my dear friend,' Mrs. Sardis said. 'And I needn't tell you that I am a warm admirer of your talent, and that I rejoice in your success. But the tendency of your work--'

'Surely,' I interrupted her coldly, 'you are not taking the trouble to tell me that my books are doing harm to the great and righteous Anglo-Saxon public!'

'Do not let us poke fun at our public, my dear,' she protested. 'I personally do not believe that your books are harmful, though their originality is certainly daring, and their realism startling; but there exists a considerable body of opinion, as you know, that strongly objects to your books. It may be reactionary opinion, bigoted opinion, ignorant opinion, what you like, but it exists, and it is not afraid to employ the word "immoral."'

'What, then?'

'I speak as one old enough to be your mother, and I speak after all to a motherless young girl who happens to have genius with, perhaps, some of the disadvantages of genius, when I urge you so to arrange your personal life that this body of quite respectable adverse opinion shall not find in it a handle to use against the fair fame of our calling.'

'Mrs. Sardis!' I cried. 'What do you mean?'

I felt my nostrils dilate in anger as I gazed, astounded, at this incarnation of mediocrity who had dared to affront me on my own hearth; and by virtue of my youth and my beauty, and all the homage I had received, and the clear sincerity of my vision of life, I despised and detested the mother of a family who had never taken one step beyond the conventions in which she was born. Had she not even the wit to perceive that I was accustomed to be addressed as queens are addressed?... Then, as suddenly as it had flamed, my anger cooled, for I could see the painful earnestness in her face. And Mrs. Sardis and I--what were we but two groups of vital instincts, groping our respective ways out of one mystery into another? Had we made ourselves? Had we chosen our characters? Mrs. Sardis was fulfilling herself, as I was. She was a natural force, as I was. As well be angry with a hurricane, or the heat of the sun.

'What do you mean?' I repeated quietly. 'Tell me exactly what you mean.'

I thought she was aiming at the company which I sometimes kept, or the freedom of my diversions on the English Sabbath. I thought what trifles were these compared to the dilemma in which, possibly within a few hours, I should find myself.

'To put it in as few words as possible,' said she, 'I mean your relations with a married man. Forgive my bluntness, dear girl.'

'My--'

Then my secret was not my secret! We were chattered about, he and I. We had not hidden our feeling, our passions. And I had been imagining myself a woman of the world equal to sustaining a difficult part in the masque of existence. With an abandoned gesture I hid my face in my hands for a moment, and then I dropped my hands, and leaned forward and looked steadily at Mrs. Sardis. Her eyes were kind enough.

'You won't affect not to understand?' she said.

I assented with a motion of the head.

'Many persons say there is a--a liaison between you,' she said.

'And do you think that?' I asked quickly.

'If I had thought so, my daughter would not have been here to-night,' she said solemnly. 'No, no; I do not believe it for an instant, and I brought Jocelyn specially to prove to the world that I do not. I only heard the gossip a few days ago; and to-night, as I sat here, it was borne in upon me that I must speak to you to-night. And I have done so. Not everyone would have done so, dear girl. Most of your friends are content to talk among themselves.'

'About me? Oh!' It was the expression of an almost physical pain.

'What can you expect them to do?' asked Mrs. Sardis mildly.

'True,' I agreed.

'You see, the circumstances are so extremely peculiar. Your friendship with her--'

'Let me tell you'--I stopped her--'that not a single word has ever passed between me and--and the man you mean, that everybody might not hear. Not a single word!'

'Dearest girl,' she exclaimed; 'how glad I am! How glad I am! Now I can take measures to--.

'But--' I resumed.

'But what?'

In a flash I saw the futility of attempting to explain to a woman like Mrs. Sardis, who had no doubts about the utter righteousness of her own code, whose rules had no exceptions, whose principles could apply to every conceivable case, and who was the very embodiment of the vast stolid London that hemmed me in--of attempting to explain to such an excellent, blind creature why, and in obedience to what ideal, I would not answer for the future. I knew that I might as well talk to a church steeple.

'Nothing,' I said, rising, 'except that I thank you. Be sure that I am grateful. You have had a task which must have been very unpleasant to you.'

She smiled, virtuously happy.

'You made it easy,' she murmured.

I perceived that she wanted to kiss me; but I avoided the caress. How I hated kissing women!

'No more need be said,' she almost whispered, as I put my hand on the knob of the front-door. I had escorted her myself to the hall.

'Only remember your great mission, the influence you wield, and the fair fame of our calling.'

My impulse was to shriek. But I merely smiled as decently as I could; and I opened the door.

And there, on the landing, just emerging from the lift, was Ispenlove, haggard, pale, his necktie astray. He and Mrs. Sardis exchanged a brief stare; she gave me a look of profound pain and passed in dignified silence down the stairs; Ispenlove came into the flat.

'Nothing will convince her now that I am not a liar,' I reflected.

It was my last thought as I sank, exquisitely drowning, in the sea of sensations caused by Ispenlove's presence.

II

Without a word, we passed together into the drawing-room, and I closed the door. Ispenlove stood leaning against the piano, as though intensely fatigued; he crushed his gibus with an almost savage movement, and then bent his large, lustrous black eyes absently on the flat top of it. His thin face was whiter even than usual, and his black hair, beard, and moustache all dishevelled; the collar of his overcoat was twisted, and his dinner-jacket rose an inch above it at the back of the neck.

I wanted to greet him, but I could not trust my lips. And I saw that he, too, was trying in vain to speak.

At length I said, with that banality which too often surprises us in supreme moments:

'What is it? Do you know that your tie is under your ear?'

And as I uttered these words, my voice, breaking of itself and in defiance of me, descended into a tone which sounded harsh and inimical.

'Ah!' he murmured, lifting his eyes to mine, 'if you turn against me to-night, I shall--'

'Turn against you!' I cried, shocked. 'Let me help you with your overcoat!'

And I went near him, meaning to take his overcoat.

'It's finished between Mary and me,' he said, holding me with his gaze. 'It's finished. I've no one but you now; and I've come--I've come--'

He stopped. We read one another's eyes at arm's length, and all the sorrow and pity and love that were in each of us rose to our eyes and shone there. I shivered with pleasure when I saw his arms move, and then he clutched and dragged me to him, and I hid my glowing face on his shoulder, in the dear folds of his overcoat, and I felt his lips on my neck. And then, since neither of us was a coward, we lifted our heads, and our mouths met honestly and fairly, and, so united, we shut our eyes for an eternal moment, and the world was not.

Such was the avowal.

I gave up my soul to him in that long kiss; all that was me, all that was most secret and precious in me, ascended and poured itself out through my tense lips, and was received by him. I kissed him with myself, with the entire passionate energy of my being--not merely with my mouth. And if I sighed, it was because I tried to give him more--more than I had--and failed. Ah! The sensation of his nearness, the warmth of his face, the titillation of his hair, the slow, luxurious intake of our breaths, the sweet cruelty of his desperate clutch on my shoulders, the glimpses of his skin through my eyelashes when I raised ever so little my eyelids! Pain and joy of life, you were mingled then!

I remembered that I was a woman, and disengaged myself and withdrew from him. I hated to do it; but I did it. We became self-conscious. The brilliant and empty drawing-room scanned us unfavourably with all its globes and mirrors. How difficult it is to be natural in a great crisis! Our spirits clamoured for expression, beating vainly against a thousand barred doors of speech. There was so much to say, to explain, to define, and everything was so confused and dizzily revolving, that we knew not which door to open first. And then I think we both felt, but I more than he, that explanations and statements were futile, that even if all the doors were thrown open together, they would be inadequate. The deliciousness of silence, of wonder, of timidity, of things guessed at and hidden....

'It makes me afraid,' he murmured at length.

'What?'

'To be loved like that.... Your kiss ... you don't know.'

I smiled almost sadly. As if I did not know what my kiss had done! As if I did not know that my kiss had created between us the happiness which brings ruin!

'You _do_ love me?' he demanded.

I nodded, and sat down.

'Say it, say it!' he pleaded.

'More than I can ever show you,' I said proudly.

'Honestly,' he said, 'I can't imagine what you have been able to see in me. I'm nothing--I'm nobody--'

'Foolish boy!' I exclaimed. 'You are you.'

The profound significance of that age-worn phrase struck me for the first time.

He rushed to me at the word 'boy,' and, standing over me, took my hand in his hot hand. I let it lie, inert.

'But you haven't always loved me. I have always loved _you_, from the moment when I drove with you, that first day, from the office to your hotel. But you haven't always loved me.'

'No,' I admitted.

'Then when did you--? Tell me.'

'I was dull at first--I could not see. But when you told me that the end of _Fate and Friendship_ was not as good as I could make it--do you remember, that afternoon in the office?--and how reluctant you were to tell me, how afraid you were to tell me?--your throat went dry, and you stroked your forehead as you always do when you are nervous--There! you are doing it now, foolish boy!'

I seized his left arm, and gently pulled it down from his face. Oh, exquisite moment!

'It was brave of you to tell me--very brave! I loved you for telling me. You were quite wrong about the end of that book. You didn't see the fine point of it, and you never would have seen it--and I liked you, somehow, for not seeing it, because it was so feminine--but I altered the book to please you, and when I had altered it, against my conscience, I loved you more.'

'It's incredible! incredible!' he muttered, half to himself. 'I never hoped till lately that you would care for me. I never dared to think of such a thing. I knew you oughtn't to! It passes comprehension.'

'That is just what love does,' I said.

'No, no,' he went on quickly; 'you don't understand; you can't understand my feelings when I began to suspect, about two months ago, that, after all, the incredible had happened. I'm nothing but your publisher. I can't talk. I can't write. I can't play. I can't do anything. And look at the men you have here! I've sometimes wondered how often you've been besieged--'

'None of them was like you,' I said. 'Perhaps that is why I have always kept them off.'

I raised my eyes and lips, and he stooped and kissed me. He wanted to take me in his arms again, but I would not yield myself.

'Be reasonable,' I urged him. 'Ought we not to think of our situation?'

He loosed me, stammering apologies, abasing himself.

'I ought to leave you, I ought never to see you again.' He spoke roughly. 'What am I doing to you? You who are so innocent and pure!'

'I entreat you not to talk like that,' I gasped, reddening.

'But I must talk like that,' he insisted. 'I must talk like that. You had everything that a woman can desire, and I come into your life and offer you--what?'

'I _have_ everything a woman can desire,' I corrected him softly.

'Angel!' he breathed. 'If I bring you disaster, you will forgive me, won't you?'

'My happiness will only cease with your love,' I said.

'Happiness!' he repeated. 'I have never been so happy as I am now; but such happiness is terrible. It seems to me impossible that such happiness can last.'

'Faint heart!' I chided him.

'It is for you I tremble,' he said. 'If--if--' He stopped. 'My darling, forgive me!'

How I pitied him! How I enveloped him in an effluent sympathy that rushed warm from my heart! He accused himself of having disturbed my existence. Whereas, was it not I who had disturbed his? He had fought against me, I knew well, but fate had ordained his defeat. He had been swept away; he had been captured; he had been caught in a snare of the high gods. And he was begging forgiveness, he who alone had made my life worth living! I wanted to kneel before him, to worship him, to dry his tears with my hair. I swear that my feelings were as much those of a mother as of a lover. He was ten years older than me, and yet he seemed boyish, and I an aged woman full of experience, as he sat there opposite to me with his wide, melancholy eyes and restless mouth.

'Wonderful, is it not,' he said, 'that we should be talking like this to-night, and only yesterday we were Mr. and Miss to each other?'

'Wonderful!' I responded. 'But yesterday we talked with our eyes, and our eyes did not say Mr. or Miss. Our eyes said--Ah, what they said can never be translated into words!'

My gaze brooded on him like a caress, explored him with the unappeasable curiosity of love, and blinded him like the sun. Could it be true that Heaven had made that fine creature--noble and modest, nervous and full of courage, impetuous and self-controlled, but, above all things, fine and delicate--could it be true that Heaven had made him and then given him to me, with his enchanting imperfections that themselves constituted perfection? Oh, wonder, wonder! Oh, miraculous bounty which I had not deserved! This thing had happened to me, of all women! How it showed, by comparison, the sterility of my success and my fame and my worldly splendour! I had hungered and thirsted for years; I had travelled interminably through the hot desert of my brilliant career, until I had almost ceased to hope that I should reach, one evening, the pool of water and the palm. And now I might eat and drink and rest in the shade. Wonderful!

'Why were you so late to-night?' I asked abruptly.

'Late?' he replied absently. 'Is it late?'

We both looked at the clock. It was yet half an hour from midnight.

'Of course it isn't--not _very_,' I said. I was forgetting that. Everybody left so early.'

'Why was that?'

I told him, in a confusion that was sweet to me, how I had suffered by reason of his failure to appear. He glanced at me with tender amaze.

'But I am fortunate to-day,' I exclaimed. 'Was it not lucky they left when they did? Suppose you had arrived, in that state, dearest man, and burst into a room full of people? What would they have thought? Where should I have looked?'

'Angel!' he cried. 'I'm so sorry. I forgot it was your evening. I must have forgotten. I forgot everything, except that I was bound to see you at once, instantly, with all speed.'

Poor boy! He was like a bird fluttering in my hand. Millions of women must have so pictured to themselves the men who loved them, and whom they loved.

'But still, you _were_ rather late, you know,' I smiled.

'Do not ask me why,' he begged, with an expression of deep pain on his face. 'I have had a scene with Mary. It would humiliate me to tell you--to tell even you--what passed between us. But it is over. Our relations in the future can never, in any case, be more than formal.'

A spasm of fierce jealousy shot through me--jealousy of Mary, my friend Mary, who knew him with such profound intimacy that they could go through a scene together which was 'humiliating.' I saw that my own intimacy with him was still crude with the crudity of newness, and that only years could mellow it. Mary, the good, sentimental Mary, had wasted the years of their marriage--had never understood the value of the treasure in her keeping. Why had they always been sad in their house? What was the origin of that resigned and even cheerful gloom which had pervaded their domestic life, and which I had remarked on my first visit to Bloomsbury Square? Were these, too, mysteries that I must not ask my lover to reveal? Resentment filled me. I came near to hating Mary, not because she had made him unhappy--oh no!--but because she had had the priority in his regard, and because there was nothing about him, however secret and recondite, that I could be absolutely sure of the sole knowledge of. She had been in the depths with him. I desired fervently that I also might descend with him, and even deeper. Oh, that I might have the joy and privilege of humiliation with him!

'I shall ask you nothing, dearest,' I murmured.

I had risen from my seat and gone to him, and was lightly touching his hair with my fingers. He did not move, but sat staring into the fire. Somehow, I adored him because he made no response to the fondling of my hand. His strange acceptance of the caress as a matter of course gave me the illusion that I was his wife, and that the years had mellowed our intimacy.

'Carlotta!'

He spoke my name slowly and distinctly, savouring it.

'Yes,' I answered softly and obediently.

'Carlotta! Listen! Our two lives are in our hands at this moment--this moment while we talk here.'

His rapt eyes had not stirred from the fire.

'I feel it,' I said.

'What are we to do? What shall we decide to do?'

He slowly turned towards me. I lowered my glance.

'I don't know,' I said.

'Yes, you do, Carlotta,' he insisted. 'You do know.'

His voice trembled.

'Mary and I are such good friends,' I said. 'That is what makes it so--'

'No, no, no!' he objected loudly. His nervousness had suddenly increased. 'Don't, for God's sake, begin to argue in that way! You are above feminine logic. Mary is your friend. Good. You respect her; she respects you. Good. Is that any reason why our lives should be ruined? Will that benefit Mary? Do I not tell you that everything has ceased between us?'

'The idea of being false to Mary--'

'There's no question of being false. And if there was, would you be false to love rather than to friendship? Between you and me there is love; between Mary and me there is not love. It isn't her fault, nor mine, least of all yours. It is the fault of the secret essence of existence. Have you not yourself written that the only sacred thing is instinct? Are we, or are we not, to be true to ourselves?'

'You see,' I said, 'your wife is so sentimental. She would be incapable of looking at the affair as--as we do; as I should in her place.'

I knew that my protests were insincere, and that all my heart and brain were with him, but I could not admit this frankly. Ah! And I knew also that the sole avenue to peace and serenity, not to happiness, was the path of renunciation and of obedience to the conventions of society, and that this was precisely the path which we should never take. And on the horizon of our joy I saw a dark cloud. It had always been there, but I had refused to see it. I looked at it now steadily.

'Of course,' he groaned, 'if we are to be governed by Mary's sentimentality--'

'Dear love,' I whispered, 'what do you want me to do?'

'The only possible, honest, just thing. I want you to go away with me, so that Mary can get a divorce.'

He spoke sternly, as it were relentlessly.

'Does she guess--about me?' I asked, biting my lip, and looking away from him.

'Not yet. Hasn't the slightest notion, I'm sure. But I'll tell her, straight and fair.'

'Dearest friend,' I said, after a silence. 'Perhaps I know more of the world than you think. Perhaps I'm a girl only in years and situation. Forgive me if I speak plainly. Mary may prove unfaithfulness, but she cannot get a decree unless she can prove other things as well.'

He stroked his forehead. As for me, I shuddered with agitation. He walked across the room and back.

'Angel!' he said, putting his white face close to mine like an actor. 'I will prove whether your love for me is great enough. I have struck her. I struck her to-night in the presence of a servant. And I did it purposely, in cold blood, so that she might be able to prove cruelty. Ah! Have I not thought it all out? Have I not?'

A sob, painfully escaping, shook my whole frame.

'And this was before you had--had spoken to me!' I said bitterly.

Not myself, but some strange and frigid force within me uttered those words.

'That is what love will do. That is the sort of thing love drives one to,' he cried despairingly. 'Oh! I was not sure of you--I was not sure of you. I struck her, on the off chance.'

And he sank on the sofa and wept passionately, unashamed, like a child.

I could not bear it. My heart would have broken if I had watched, without assuaging, my boy's grief an instant longer than I did. I sprang to him. I took him to my breast. I kissed his eyes until the tears ceased to flow. Whatever it was or might be, I must share his dishonour.

'My poor girl!' he said at length. 'If you had refused me, if you had even judged me, I intended to warn you plainly that it meant my death; and if that failed, I should have gone to the office and shot myself.'

'Do not say such things,' I entreated him.

'But it is true. The revolver is in my pocket. Ah! I have made you cry! You're frightened! But I'm not a brute; I'm only a little beside myself. Pardon me, angel!'

He kissed me, smiling sadly with a trace of humour. He did not understand me. He did not suspect the risk he had run. If I had hesitated to surrender, and he had sought to move me by threatening suicide, I should never have surrendered. I knew myself well enough to know that. I had a conscience that was incapable of yielding to panic. A threat would have parted us, perhaps for ever. Oh, the blindness of man! But I forgave him. Nay, I cherished him the more for his childlike, savage simplicity.

'Carlotta,' he said, 'we shall leave everything. You grasp it?--everything.'

'Yes,' I replied. 'Of all the things we have now, we shall have nothing but ourselves.'

'If I thought it was a sacrifice for you, I would go out and never see you again.'

Noble fellow, proud now in the certainty that he sufficed for me! He meant what he said.

'It is no sacrifice for me,' I murmured. 'The sacrifice would be not to give up all in exchange for you.'

'We shall be exiles,' he went on, 'until the divorce business is over. And then perhaps we shall creep back--shall we?--and try to find out how many of our friends are our equals in moral courage.'

'Yes,' I said. 'We shall come back. They all do.'

'What do you mean?' he demanded.

'Thousands have done what we are going to do,' I said. 'And all of them have thought that their own case was different from the other cases.'

'Ah!'

'And a few have been happy. A few have not regretted the price. A few have retained the illusion.'

'Illusion? Dearest girl, why do you talk like this?'

I could see that my heart's treasure was ruffled. He clasped my hand tenaciously.

'I must not hide from you the kind of woman you have chosen,' I answered quietly, and as I spoke a hush fell upon my amorous passion. 'In me there are two beings--myself and the observer of myself. It is the novelist's disease, this duplication of personality. When I said illusion, I meant the supreme illusion of love. Is it not an illusion? I have seen it in others, and in exactly the same way I see it in myself and I see it in you. Will it last?--who knows? None can tell.'

'Angel!' he expostulated.

'No one can foresee the end of love,' I said, with an exquisite gentle sorrow. 'But when the illusion is as intense as mine, as yours, even if its hour is brief, that hour is worth all the terrible years of disillusion which it will cost. Darling, this precious night alone would not be too dear if I paid for it with the rest of my life.'

He thanked me with a marvellous smile of confident adoration, and his disengaged hand played with the gold chain which hung loosely round my neck.

'Call it illusion if you like,' he said. 'Words are nothing. I only know that for me it will be eternal. I only know that my one desire is to be with you always, never to leave you, not to miss a moment of you; to have you for mine, openly, securely. Carlotta, where shall we go?'

'We must travel, mustn't we?'

'Travel?' he repeated, with an air of discontent. 'Yes. But where to?'

'Travel,' I said. 'See things. See the world.'

'I had thought we might find some quiet little place,' he said wistfully, and as if apologetically, where we could be alone, undisturbed, some spot where we could have ourselves wholly to ourselves, and go walks into mountains and return for dinner; and then the long, calm evenings! Dearest, our honeymoon!'

Our honeymoon! I had not, in the pursuit of my calling, studied human nature and collected documents for nothing. With how many brides had I not talked! How many loves did I not know to have been paralyzed and killed by a surfeit in the frail early stages of their existence! Inexperienced as I was, my learning in humanity was wiser than the experience of my impulsive, generous, magnanimous lover, to whom the very thought of calculation would have been abhorrent. But I saw, I felt, I lived through in a few seconds the interminable and monotonous length of those calm days, and especially those calm evenings succeeding each other with a formidable sameness. I had watched great loves faint and die. And I knew that our love--miraculously sweet as it was--probably was not greater than many great ones that had not stood the test. You perceive the cold observer in me. I knew that when love lasted, the credit of the survival was due far more often to the woman than to the man. The woman must husband herself, dole herself out, economize herself so that she might be splendidly wasteful when need was. The woman must plan, scheme, devise, invent, reconnoitre, take precautions; and do all this sincerely and lovingly in the name and honour of love. A passion, for her, is a campaign; and her deadliest enemy is satiety. Looking into my own heart, and into his, I saw nothing but hope for the future of our love. But the beautiful plant must not be exposed to hazard. Suppose it sickened, such a love as ours--what then? The misery of hell, the torture of the damned! Only its rich and ample continuance could justify us.

'My dear,' I said submissively, 'I shall leave everything to you. The idea of travelling occurred to me; that was all. I have never travelled further than Cannes. Still, we have all our lives before us.'

'We will travel,' he said unselfishly. 'We'll go round the world--slowly. I'll get the tickets at Cook's to-morrow.'

'But, dearest, if you would rather--'

'No, no! In any case we shall always have our evenings.'

'Of course we shall. Dearest, how good you are!'

'I wish I was,' he murmured.

I was glad, then, that I had never allowed my portrait to appear in a periodical. We could not prevent the appearance in American newspapers of heralding paragraphs, but the likelihood of our being recognised was sensibly lessened.

'Can you start soon?' he asked. 'Can you be ready?'

'Any time. The sooner the better, now that it is decided.'

'You do not regret? We have decided so quickly. Ah! you are the merest girl, and I have taken advantage--'

I put my hand over his mouth. He seized it, and kept it there and kissed it, and his ardent breath ran through my fingers.

'What about your business?' I said.

'I shall confide it to old Tate--tell him some story--he knows quite as much about it as I do. To-morrow I will see to all that. The day after, shall we start? No; to-morrow night. To-morrow night, eh? I'll run in to-morrow and tell you what I've arranged. I must see you to-morrow, early.'

'No,' I said. 'Do not come before lunch.'

'Not before lunch! Why?'

He was surprised. But I had been my own mistress for five years, with my own habits, rules, privacies. I had never seen anyone before lunch. And to-morrow, of all days, I should have so much to do and to arrange. Was this man to come like an invader and disturb my morning? So felt the celibate in me, instinctively, thoughtlessly. That deep-seated objection to the intrusion of even the most loved male at certain times is common, I think, to all women. Women are capable of putting love aside, like a rich dress, and donning the _peignoir_ of matter-of-fact dailiness, in a way which is an eternal enigma to men.... Then I saw, in a sudden flash, that I had renounced my individual existence, that I had forfeited my habits and rules, and privacies, that I was a man's woman. And the passionate lover in me gloried in this.

'Come as soon as you like, dearest friend,' I said.

'Nobody except Mary will know anything till we are actually gone,' he remarked. 'And I shall not tell her till the last thing. Afterwards, won't they chatter! God! Let 'em.'

'They are already chattering,' I said. And I told him about Mrs. Sardis. 'When she met you on the landing,' I added, 'she drew her own conclusions, my poor, poor boy!'

He was furious. I could see he wanted to take me in his arms and protect me masculinely from the rising storm.

'All that is nothing,' I soothed him. 'Nothing. Against it, we have our self-respect. We can scorn all that.' And I gave a short, contemptuous laugh.

'Darling!' he murmured. 'You are more than a woman.'

'I hope not.' And I laughed again, but unnaturally.

He had risen; I leaned back in a large cushioned chair; we looked at each other in silence--a silence that throbbed with the heavy pulse of an unutterable and complex emotion--pleasure, pain, apprehension, even terror. What had I done? Why had I, with a word--nay, without a word, with merely a gesture and a glance--thrown my whole life into the crucible of passion? Why did I exult in the tremendous and impetuous act, like a martyr, and also like a girl? Was I playing with my existence as an infant plays with a precious bibelot that a careless touch may shatter? Why was I so fiercely, madly, drunkenly happy when I gazed into those eyes?

'I suppose I must go,' he said disconsolately.

I nodded, and the next instant the clock struck.

'Yes,' he urged himself, 'I must go.'

He bent down, put his hands on the arms of the chair, and kissed me violently, twice. The fire that consumes the world ran scorchingly through me. Every muscle was suddenly strained into tension, and then fell slack. My face flushed; I let my head slip sideways, so that my left cheek was against the back of the chair. Through my drooping eyelashes I could see the snake-like glitter of his eyes as he stood over me. I shuddered and sighed. I was like someone fighting in vain against the sweet seduction of an overwhelming and fatal drug. I wanted to entreat him to go away, to rid me of the exquisite and sinister enchantment. But I could not speak. I shut my eyes. This was love.

The next moment I heard the soft sound of his feet on the carpet. I opened my eyes. He had stepped back. When our glances met he averted his face, and went briskly for his overcoat, which lay on the floor by the piano. I rose freed, re-established in my self-control. I arranged his collar, straightened his necktie with a few touches, picked up his hat, pushed back the crown, which flew up with a noise like a small explosion, and gave it into his hands.

'Thank you,' he said. 'To-morrow morning, eh? I shall get to know everything necessary before I come. And then we will fix things up.'

'Yes,' I said.

'I can let myself out,' he said.

I made a vague gesture, intended to signify that I could not think of permitting him to let himself out. We left the drawing-room, and passed, with precautions of silence, to the front-door, which I gently opened.

'Good-night, then,' he whispered formally, almost coldly.

I nodded. We neither of us even smiled.

We were grave, stern, and stiff in our immense self-consciousness.

'Too late for the lift,' I murmured out there with him in the vast, glittering silence of the many-angled staircase, which disappeared above us and below us into the mysterious unseen.

He nodded as I had nodded, and began to descend the broad, carpeted steps, firmly, carefully, and neither quick nor slow. I leaned over the baluster. When the turns of the staircase brought him opposite and below me, he stopped and raised his hat, and we exchanged a smile. Then he resolutely dropped his eyes and resumed the descent. From time to time I had glimpses of parts of his figure as he passed story after story. Then I heard his tread on the tessellated pavement of the main hall, the distant clatter of double doors, and a shrill cab-whistle.

This was love, at last--the reality of love! He would have killed himself had he failed to win me--killed himself! With the novelist's habit, I ran off into a series of imagined scenes--the dead body, with the hole in the temples and the awkward attitude of death; the discovery, the rush for the police, the search for a motive, the inquest, the rapid-speaking coroner, who spent his whole life at inquests; myself, cold and impassive, giving evidence, and Mary listening to what I said.... But he lived, with his delicate physical charm, his frail distinction, his spiritual grace; and he had won me. The sense of mutual possession was inexpressibly sweet to me. And it was all I had in the world now. When my mind moved from that rock, all else seemed shifting, uncertain, perilous, bodeful, and steeped in woe. The air was thick with disasters, and injustice, and strange griefs immediately I loosed my hold on the immense fact that he was mine.

'How calm I am!' I thought.

It was not till I had been in bed some three hours that I fully realized the seismic upheaval which my soul had experienced.

III

I woke up from one of those dozes which, after a sleepless night, give the brief illusion of complete rest, all my senses sharpened, and my mind factitiously active. And I began at once to anticipate Frank's coming, and to arrange rapidly my plans for closing the flat. I had determined that it should be closed. Then someone knocked at the door, and it occurred to me that there must have been a previous knock, which had, in fact, wakened me. Save on special occasions, I was never wakened, and Emmeline and my maid had injunctions not to come to me until I rang. My thoughts ran instantly to Frank. He had arrived thus early, merely because he could not keep away.

'How extremely indiscreet of him!' I thought. 'What detestable prevarications with Emmeline this will lead to! I cannot possibly be ready in time if he is to be in and out all day.'

Nevertheless, the prospect of seeing him quickly, and the idea of his splendid impatience, drenched me with joy.

'What is it?' I called out.

Emmeline entered in that terrible mauve dressing-gown which I had been powerless to persuade her to discard.

'So sorry to disturb you,' said Emmeline, feeling her loose golden hair with one hand, 'but Mrs. Ispenlove has called, and wants to see you at once. I'm afraid something has happened.'

'_Mrs_. Ispenlove?'

My voice shook.

'Yes. Yvonne came to my room and told me that Mrs. Ispenlove was here, and was either mad or very unwell, and would I go to her? So I got up at once. What shall I do? Perhaps it's something very serious. Not half-past eight, and calling like this!'

'Let her come in here immediately,' I said, turning my head on the pillow, so that Emmeline should not see the blush which had spread over my face and my neck.

It was inevitable that a terrible and desolating scene must pass between Mary Ispenlove and myself. I could not foresee how I should emerge from it, but I desperately resolved that I would suffer the worst without a moment's delay, and that no conceivable appeal should induce me to abandon Frank. I was, as I waited for Mrs. Ispenlove to appear, nothing but an embodied and fierce instinct to guard what I had won. No consideration of mercy could have touched me.

She entered with a strange, hysterical cry:

'Carlotta!'

I had asked her long ago to use my Christian name--long before I ever imagined what would come to pass between her husband and me; but I always called her Mrs. Ispenlove. The difference in our ages justified me. And that morning the difference seemed to be increased. I realized, with a cruel justice of perception quite new in my estimate of her, that she was old--an old woman. She had never been beautiful, but she was tall and graceful, and her face had been attractive by the sweetness of the mouth and the gray beneficence of the eyes; and now that sweetness and that beneficence appeared suddenly to have been swallowed up in the fatal despair of a woman who discovers that she has lived too long. Gray hair, wrinkles, crow's-feet, tired eyes, drawn mouth, and the terrible tell-tale hollow under the chin--these were what I saw in Mary Ispenlove. She had learnt that the only thing worth having in life is youth. I possessed everything that she lacked. Surely the struggle was unequal. Fate might have chosen a less piteous victim. I felt profoundly sorry for Mary Ispenlove, and this sorrow was stronger in me even than the uneasiness, the false shame (for it was not a real shame) which I experienced in her presence. I put out my hands towards her, as it were, involuntarily. She sprang to me, took them, and kissed me as I lay in bed.

'How beautiful you look--like that!' she exclaimed wildly, and with a hopeless and acute envy in her tone.

'But why--' I began to protest, astounded.

'What will you think of me, disturbing you like this? What will you think?' she moaned. And then her voice rose: 'I could not help it; I couldn't, really. Oh, Carlotta! you are my friend, aren't you?'

One thing grew swiftly clear to me: that she was as yet perfectly unaware of the relations between Frank and myself. My brain searched hurriedly for an explanation of the visit. I was conscious of an extraordinary relief.

'You are my friend, aren't you?' she repeated insistently.

Her tears were dropping on my bosom. But could I answer that I was her friend? I did not wish to be her enemy; she and Frank and I were dolls in the great hands of fate, irresponsible, guiltless, meet for an understanding sympathy. Why was I not still her friend? Did not my heart bleed for her? Yet such is the power of convention over honourableness that I could not bring myself to reply directly, 'Yes, I am your friend.'

'We have known each other a long time,' I ventured.

'There was no one else I could come to,' she said.

Her whole frame was shaking. I sat up, and asked her to pass my dressing-gown, which I put round my shoulders. Then I rang the bell.

'What are you going to do?' she demanded fearfully.

'I am going to have the gas-stove lighted and some tea brought in, and then we will talk.

Take your hat off, dear, and sit down in that chair. You'll be more yourself after a cup of tea.'

How young I was then! I remember my naïve satisfaction in this exhibition of tact. I was young and hard, as youth is apt to be--hard in spite of the compassion, too intellectual and arrogant, which I conceived for her. And even while I forbade her to talk until she had drunk some tea, I regretted the delay, and I suffered by it. Surely, I thought, she will read in my demeanour something which she ought not to read there. But she did not. She was one of the simplest of women. In ten thousand women one is born without either claws or second-sight. She was that one, defenceless as a rabbit.

'You are very kind to me,' she said, putting her cup on the mantelpiece with a nervous rattle; 'and I need it.'

'Tell me,' I murmured. 'Tell me--what I can do.'

I had remained in bed; she was by the fireplace. A distance between us seemed necessary.

'You can't do anything, my dear,' she said. 'Only I was obliged to talk to someone, after all the night. It's about Frank.'

'Mr. Ispenlove!' I ejaculated, acting as well as I could, but not very well.

'Yes. He has left me.'

'But why? What is the matter?'

Even to recall my share in this interview with Mary Ispenlove humiliates me. But perhaps I have learned the value of humiliation. Still, could I have behaved differently?

'You won't understand unless I begin a long time ago,' said Mary Ispenlove. 'Carlotta, my married life has been awful--awful--a tragedy. It has been a tragedy both for him and for me. But no one has suspected it; we have hidden it.'

I nodded. I, however, had suspected it.

'It's just twenty years--yes, twenty--since I fell in love,' she proceeded, gazing at me with her soft, moist eyes.

'With--Frank,' I assumed. I lay back in bed.

'No,' she said. 'With another man. That was in Brixton, when I was a girl living with my father; my mother was dead. He was a barrister--I mean the man I was in love with. He had only just been called to the Bar. I think everybody knew that I had fallen in love with him. Certainly he did; he could not help seeing it. I could not conceal it. Of course I can understand now that it flattered him. Naturally it did. Any man is flattered when a woman falls in love with him. And my father was rich, and so on, and so on. We saw each other a lot. I hoped, and I kept on hoping. Some people even said it was a match, and that I was throwing myself away. Fancy--throwing myself away--me!--who have never been good for anything! My father did not care much for the man; said he was selfish and grasping. Possibly he was; but I was in love with him all the same. Then I met Frank, and Frank fell in love with me. You know how obstinate Frank is when he has once set his mind on a thing. Frank determined to have me; and my father was on his side. I would not listen. I didn't give him so much as a chance to propose to me. And this state of things lasted for quite a long time. It wasn't my fault; it wasn't anybody's fault.'

'Just so,' I agreed, raising my head on one elbow, and listening intently. It was the first sincere word I had spoken, and I was glad to utter it.

'The man I had fallen in love with came nearer. He was decidedly tempted. I began to feel sure of him. All I wanted was to marry him, whether he loved me a great deal or only a little tiny bit. I was in that state. Then he drew away. He scarcely ever came to the house, and I seemed never to be able to meet him. And then one day my father showed me something in the _Morning Post_. It was a paragraph saying that the man I was in love with was going to marry a woman of title, a widow and the daughter of a peer. I soon found out she was nearly twice his age. He had done it to get on. He was getting on very well by himself, but I suppose that wasn't fast enough for him. Carlotta, it nearly killed me. And I felt so sorry for him. You can't guess how sorry I felt for him. I felt that he didn't know what he had missed. Oh, how happy I should have made him! I should have lived for him. I should have done everything for him. I should have ... You don't mind me telling you all this?'

I made an imploring gesture.

'What a shame!' I burst out.

'Ah, my dear!' she said, 'he didn't love me. One can't blame him.'

'And then?' I questioned, with an eagerness that I tried to overcome.

'Frank was so persevering. And--and--I _did_ admire his character. A woman couldn't help admiring his character, could she? And, besides, I honestly thought I had got over the other affair, and that I was in love with him. I refused him once, and then I married him. He was as mad for me as I had been for the other one. Yes, I married him, and we both imagined we were going to be happy.'

'And why haven't you been?' I asked.

'This is my shame,' she said. 'I could not forget the other one. We soon found that out.'

'Did you _talk_ about it, you--and Frank?' I put in, amazed.

'Oh _no_!' she said. 'It was never mentioned--never once during fifteen years. But he knew; and I knew that he knew. The other one was always between us--always, always, always! The other one was always in my heart. We did our best, both of us; but it was useless. The passion of my life was--it was invincible. I _tried_ to love Frank. I could only like him. Fancy his position! And we were helpless. Because, you know, Frank and I are not the sort of people that go and make a scandal--at least, that was what I thought,' she sighed. 'I know different now. Well, he died the day before yesterday.'

'Who?'

'Crettell. He had just been made a judge. He was the youngest judge on the bench--only forty-six.'

'Was _that_ the man?' I exclaimed; for Crettell's character was well known in London.

'That was the man. Frank came in yesterday afternoon, and after he had glanced at the paper, he said: "By the way, Crettell's dead." I did not grasp it at first. He repeated: "Crettell--he's dead." I burst into tears. I couldn't help it. And, besides, I forgot. Frank asked me very roughly what I was crying for. You know, Frank has much changed these last few months. He is not as nice as he used to be. Excuse me talking like this, my dear. Something must be worrying him. Well, I said as well as I could while I was crying that the news was a shock to me. I tried to stop crying, but I couldn't. I sobbed. Frank threw down the paper and stamped on it, and he swore. He said: "I know you've always been in love with the brute, but you needn't make such a damn fuss about it." Oh, my dear, how can I tell you these things? That angered me. This was the first time in our married life that Crettell had been even referred to, and it seemed to me that Frank put all the hatred of fifteen years into that single sentence. Why was I angry? I didn't know. We had a scene. Frank lost his temper, for the first time that I remember, and then he recovered it. He said quietly he couldn't stand living with me any more; and that he had long since wanted to leave me. He said he would never see me again. And then one of the servants came in, and--'

'What?'

'Nothing. I sent her out. And--and--Fran didn't come home last night.'

There was a silence. I could find nothing to say, and Mary had hidden her face. I utterly forgot myself and my own state in this extraordinary hazard of matrimony. I could only think of Mary's grief--a grief which, nevertheless, I did not too well comprehend.

'Then you love him now?' I ventured at length.

She made no reply.

'You love him--is that so?' I pursued. 'Tell me honestly.'

I spoke as gently as it was in me to speak.

'Honestly!' she cried, looking up. 'Honestly! No! If I loved him, could I have been so upset about Crettell? But we have been together so long. We are husband and wife, Carlotta. We are so used to each other. And generally he is so good. We've got on very well, considering. And now he's left me. Think of the scandal! It will be terrible! terrible! A separation at my age! Carlotta, it's unthinkable! He's mad--that's the only explanation. Haven't I tried to be a good wife to him? He's never found fault with me--never! And I'm sure, as regards him, I've had nothing to complain of.'

'He will come back,' I said. 'He'll think things over and see reason.'

And it was just as though I heard some other person saying these words.

'But he didn't come _home_ last night,' Mary insisted. 'What the servants are thinking I shouldn't like to guess.'

'What does it matter what the servants think?' I said brusquely.

'But it _does_ matter. He didn't come _home_. He must have slept at a hotel. Fancy, sleeping at a hotel, and his home waiting for him! Oh, Carlotta, you're too young to understand what I feel! You're very clever, and you're very sympathetic; but you can't see things as I see them. Wait till you've been married fifteen years. The scandal! The shame! And me only too anxious to be a good wife, and to keep our home as it should be, and to help him as much as I can with my stupid brains in his business!'

'I can understand perfectly,' I asserted. 'I can understand perfectly.'

And I could. The futility of arguing with Mary, of attempting to free her ever so little from the coils of convention which had always bound her, was only too plainly apparent. She was--and naturally, sincerely, instinctively--the very incarnation and mouthpiece of the conventionality of society, as she cowered there in her grief and her quiet resentment. But this did not impair the authenticity of her grief and her resentment. Her grief appealed to me powerfully, and her resentment, almost angelic in its quality, seemed sufficiently justified. I knew that my own position was in practice untenable, that logic must always be inferior to emotion. I am intensely proud of my ability to see, then, that no sentiment can be false which is sincere, and that Mary Ispenlove's attitude towards marriage was exactly as natural, exactly as free from artificiality, as my own. Can you go outside Nature? Is not the polity of Londoners in London as much a part of Nature as the polity of bees in a hive?

'Not a word for fifteen years, and then an explosion like that!' she murmured, incessantly recurring to the core of her grievance. 'I did wrong to marry him, I know. But I _did_ marry him--I _did_ marry him! We are husband and wife. And he goes off and sleeps at a hotel! Carlotta, I wish I had never been born! What will people say? I shall never be able to look anyone in the face again.'

'He will come back,' I said again.

'Do you think so?'

This time she caught at the straw.

'Yes,' I said. 'And you will settle down gradually; and everything will be forgotten.'

I said that because it was the one thing I could say. I repeat that I had ceased to think of myself. I had become a spectator.

'It can never be the same between us again,' Mary breathed sadly.

At that moment Emmeline Palmer plunged, rather than came, into my bedroom.

'Oh, Miss Peel--' she began, and then stopped, seeing Mrs. Ispenlove by the fireplace, though she knew that Mrs. Ispenlove was with me.

'Anything wrong?' I asked, affecting a complete calm.

It was evident that the good creature had lost her head, as she sometimes did, when I gave her too much to copy, or when the unusual occurred in no matter what form. The excellent Emmeline was one of my mistakes.

'Mr. Ispenlove is here,' she whispered.

None of us spoke for a few seconds. Mary Ispenlove stared at me, but whether in terror or astonishment, I could not guess. This was one of the most dramatic moments of my life.

'Tell Mr. Ispenlove that I can see nobody,' I said, glancing at the wall.

She turned to go.

'And, Emmeline,' I stopped her. 'Do not tell him anything else.'

Surely the fact that Frank had called to see me before nine o'clock in the morning, surely my uneasy demeanour, must at length arouse suspicion even in the simple, trusting mind of his wife!

'How does he know that I am here?' Mary asked, lowering her voice, when Emmeline had shut the door; 'I said nothing to the servants.'

I was saved. Her own swift explanation of his coming was, of course, the most natural in the world. I seized on it.

'Never mind how,' I answered. 'Perhaps he was watching outside your house, and followed you. The important thing is that he has come. It proves,' I went on, inventing rapidly, 'that he has changed his mind and recognises his mistake. Had you not better go back home as quickly as you can? It would have been rather awkward for you to see him here, wouldn't it?'

'Yes, yes,' she said, her eyes softening and gleaming with joy. 'I will go. Oh, Carlotta! how can I thank you? You are my best friend.'

'I have done nothing,' I protested. But I had.

'You are a dear!' she exclaimed, coming impulsively to the bed.

I sat up. She kissed me fervently. I rang the bell.

'Has Mr. Ispenlove gone?' I asked Emmeline.

'Yes,' said Emmeline.

In another minute his wife, too, had departed, timorously optimistic, already denying in her heart that it could never be the same between them again. She assuredly would not find Frank at home. But that was nothing. I had escaped! I had escaped!

'Will you mind getting dressed at once?' I said to Emmeline. 'I should like you to go out with a letter and a manuscript as soon as possible.'

I got a notebook and began to write to Frank. I told him all that had happened, in full detail, writing hurriedly, in gusts, and abandoning that regard for literary form which the professional author is apt to preserve even in his least formal correspondence.

'After this,' I said, 'we must give up what we decided last night. I have no good reason to offer you. The situation itself has not been changed by what I have learnt from your wife. I have not even discovered that she loves you, though in spite of what she says, which I have faithfully told you, I fancy she does--at any rate, I think she is beginning to. My ideas about the rights of love are not changed. My feelings towards you are not changed. Nothing is changed. But she and I have been through that interview, and so, after all, everything is changed; we must give it all up. You will say I am illogical. I am--perhaps. It was a mere chance that your wife came to me. I don't know why she did. If she had not come, I should have given myself to you. Supposing she had written--I should still have given myself to you. But I have been in her presence. I have been with her. And then the thought that you struck her, for my sake! She said nothing about that. That was the one thing she concealed. I could have cried when she passed it over. After all, I don't know whether it is sympathy for your wife that makes me change, or my self-respect--say my self-pride; I'm a proud woman. I lied to her through all that interview.

'Oh, if I had only had the courage to begin by telling her outright and bluntly that you and I had settled that I should take her place! That would have stopped her. But I hadn't. And, besides, how could I foresee what she would say to me and how she would affect me? No; I lied to her at every point. My whole attitude was a lie. Supposing you and I had gone off together before I had seen her, and then I had met her afterwards, I could have looked her in the face--sorrowfully, with a heart bleeding--but I could have looked her in the face. But after this interview--no; it would be impossible for me to face her with you at my side! Don't I put things crudely, horribly! I know everything that you will say. You could not bring a single argument that I have not thought of.

'However, arguments are nothing. It is how I feel. Fate is against us. Possibly I have ruined your life and mine without having done anything to improve hers; and possibly I have saved us all three from terrible misery. Possibly fate is with us. No one can say. I don't know what will happen in the immediate future; I won't think about it. If you do as I wish, if you have any desire to show me that I have any influence over you, you will go back to live with your wife. Where did you sleep last night? Or did you walk the streets? You must not answer this letter at present. Write to me later. Do not try to see me. I won't see you. We _mustn't_ meet. I am going away at once. I don't think I could stand another scene with your wife, and she would be sure to come again to me.

'Try to resume your old existence. You can do it if you try. Remember that your wife is no more to blame than you are, or than I am. Remember that you loved her once. And remember that I act as I am acting because there is no other way for me. _C'est plus fort que moi,_ I am going to Torquay. I let you know this--I hate concealment; and anyway you would find out. But I shall trust you not to follow me. I shall trust you. You are saying that this is a very different woman from last night. It is. I haven't yet realized what my feelings are. I expect I shall realize them in a few days. I send with this a manuscript. It is nothing. I send it merely to put Emmeline off the scent, so that she shall think that it is purely business. Now I shall _trust_ you.--C. P.'

I commenced the letter without even a 'Dear Frank,' and I ended it without an affectionate word.

'I should like you to take these down to Mr. Ispenlove's office,' I said to Emmeline. 'Ask for him and give them to him yourself. There's no answer. He's pretty sure to be in. But if he isn't, bring them back. I'm going to Torquay by that eleven-thirty express--isn't it?'

'Eleven-thirty-five,' Emmeline corrected me coldly.

When she returned, she said she had seen Mr. Ispenlove and given him the letter and the parcel.

IV

I had acquaintances in Torquay, but I soon discovered that the place was impossible for me. Torquay is the chosen home of the proprieties, the respectabilities, and all the conventions. Nothing could dislodge them from its beautiful hills; the very sea, as it beats primly, or with a violence that never forgets to be discreet, on the indented shore, acknowledges their sway. Aphrodite never visits there; the human race is not continued there. People who have always lived within the conventions go there to die within the conventions. The young do not flourish there; they escape from the soft enervation. Since everybody is rich, there are no poor. There are only the rich, and the servitors, who get rich. These two classes never mix--even in the most modest villas they live on opposite sides of the house. The life of the town is a vast conspiracy on the part of the servitors to guard against any danger of the rich taking all their riches to heaven. You can, if you are keen enough, detect portions of this conspiracy in every shop. On the hills each abode stands in its own undulating grounds, is approached by a winding drive of at least ten yards, is wrapped about by the silence of elms, is flanked by greenhouses, and exudes an immaculate propriety from all its windows. In the morning the rich descend, the servitors ascend; the bosky and perfectly-kept streets on the hills are trodden with apologetic celerity by the emissaries of the servitors. The one interminable thoroughfare of the town is graciously invaded by the rich, who, if they have not walked down for the sake of exercise, step cautiously from their carriages, enunciate a string of orders ending with the name of a house, and cautiously regain their carriages. Each house has a name, and the pride of the true servitor is his ability to deduce instantly from the name of the house the name of its owner and the name of its street. In the afternoon a vast and complicated game of visiting cards is played. One does not begin to be serious till the evening; one eats then, solemnly and fully, to the faint accompaniment of appropriate conversation. And there is no relief, no surcease from utmost conventionality. It goes on night and day; it hushes one to sleep, and wakes one up. On all but the strongest minds it casts a narcotizing spell, so that thought is arrested, and originality, vivacity, individuality become a crime--a shame that must be hidden. Into this strange organism I took my wounded heart, imagining that an atmosphere of coma might help to heal it. But no! Within a week my state had become such that I could have cried out in mid Union Street at noon: 'Look at me with your dead eyes, you dead who have omitted to get buried, I am among you, and I am an adulteress in spirit! And my body has sinned the sin! And I am alive as only grief can be alive. I suffer the torture of vultures, but I would not exchange my lot with yours!'

And one morning, after a fortnight, I thought of Monte Carlo. And the vision of that place, which I had never seen, too voluptuously lovely to be really beautiful, where there are no commandments, where unconventionality and conventionality fight it out on even terms, where the adulteress swarms, and the sin is for ever sinned, and wounded hearts go about gaily, where it is impossible to distinguish between virtue and vice, and where Toleration in fine clothes is the supreme social goddess--the vision of Monte Carlo, as a place of refuge from the exacerbating and moribund and yet eternal demureness of Torquay, appealed to me so persuasively that I was on my way to the Riviera in two hours. In that crisis of my life my moods were excessively capricious. Let me say that I had not reached Exeter before I began to think kindly of Torquay. What was Torquay but an almost sublime example of what the human soul can accomplish in its unending quest of an ideal?

I left England on a calm, slate-coloured sea--sea that more than any other sort of sea produces the reflective melancholy which makes wonderful the faces of fishermen. How that brief voyage symbolized for me the mysterious movement of humanity! We converged from the four quarters of the universe, passed together an hour, helpless, in somewhat inimical curiosity concerning each other, and then, mutually forgotten, took wing, and spread out into the unknown. I think that as I stood near the hot funnel, breasting the wind, and vacantly staring at the smooth expanse that continually slipped from under us, I understood myself better than I had done before. My soul was at peace--the peace of ruin after a conflagration, but peace. Sometimes a little flame would dart out--flame of regret, revolt, desire--and I would ruthlessly extinguish it. I felt that I had nothing to live for, that no energy remained to me, no interest, no hope. I saw the forty years of probable existence in front of me flat and sterile as the sea itself. I was coldly glad that I had finished my novel, well knowing that it would be my last. And the immense disaster had been caused by a chance! Why had I been born with a vein of overweening honesty in me? Why should I have sacrificed everything to the pride of my conscience, seeing that consciences were the product of education merely? Useless to try to answer the unanswerable! What is, is. And circumstances are always at the mercy of character. I might have been wrong, I might have been right; no ethical argument could have bent my instinct. I did not sympathize with myself--I was too proud and stern--but I sympathized with Frank. I wished ardently that he might be consoled--that his agony might not be too terrible. I wondered where he was, what he was doing. I had received no letter from him, but then I had instructed that letters should not be forwarded to me. My compassion went out after him, followed him into the dark, found him (as I hoped), and surrounded him like an alleviating influence. I thought pityingly of the ravage that had been occasioned by our love. His home was wrecked. Our lives were equally wrecked. Our friends were grieved; they would think sadly of my closed flat. Even the serio-comic figure of Emmeline touched me; I had paid her three months' wages and dismissed her. Where would she go with her mauve _peignoir_? She was over thirty, and would not easily fall into another such situation. Imagine Emmeline struck down by a splinter from our passionate explosion! Only Yvonne was content at the prospect of revisiting France.

'_Ah! Qu'on est bien ici, madame_!' she said, when we had fixed ourselves in the long and glittering _train de grand luxe_ that awaited us at Calais. Once I had enjoyed luxury, but now the futility of all this luxurious cushioned arrogance, which at its best only corresponded with a railway director's dreams of paradise, seemed to me pathetic. Could it detain youth, which is for ever flying? Could it keep out sorrow? Could it breed hope? As the passengers, so correct in their travelling costumes, passed to and fro in the corridors with the subdued murmurs always adopted by English people when they wish to prove that they are not excited, I thought: 'Does it matter how you and I go southwards? The pride of the eye, and of the palate, and of the limbs, what can it help us that this should be sated? We cannot leave our souls behind.' The history of many of these men and women was written on their faces. I wondered if my history was written on mine, gazing into the mirrors which were everywhere, but seeing nothing save that which I had always seen. Then I smiled, and Yvonne smiled respectfully in response. Was I not part of the immense pretence that riches bring joy and that life is good? On every table in the restaurant-cars were bunches of fresh flowers that had been torn from the South, and would return there dead, having ministered to the illusion that riches bring joy and that life is good. I hated that. I could almost have wished that I was travelling southwards in a slow, slow train, third class, where sorrow at any rate does not wear a mask. Great grief is democratic, levelling--not downwards but upwards. It strips away the inessential, and makes brothers. It is impatient with all the unavailing inventions which obscure the brotherhood of mankind.

I descended from the train restlessly--there were ten minutes to elapse before the departure--and walked along the platform, glimpsing the faces in the long procession of windows, and then the flowers and napery in the two restaurant-cars: wistful all alike, I thought--flowers and faces! How fanciful, girlishly fanciful, I was! Opposite the door of the first car stood a gigantic negro in the sober blue and crimson livery of the International Sleeping Car Company. He wore white gloves, like all the servants on the train: it was to foster the illusion; it was part of what we paid for.

'When is luncheon served?' I asked him idly.

He looked massively down at me as I shivered slightly in my furs. He contemplated me for an instant. He seemed to add me up, antipathetically, as a product of Western civilization.

'Soon as the train starts, madam,' he replied suavely, in good American, and resumed nonchalantly his stare into the distance of the platform.

'Thank you!' I said.

I was glad that I had encountered him on that platform and not in the African bush. I speculated upon the chain of injustice and oppression that had warped his destiny from what it ought to have been to what it was. 'And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like me,' I mused. A few yards further on the engine-driver and stoker were busy with coal and grease. 'Five minutes hence, and our lives, and our correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,' I said to myself. Strange world, the world of the _train de grand luxe_! But a world of brothers! I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as the inhabitants of Torquay regained theirs.

Then the wondrous self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself up and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray landscapes of France. The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a long journey had commenced. We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon; and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway director had received their most luscious expression--and had then been modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy. The Southern flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly. As I was finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car towards me. She had evidently not recognised me.

'How do you do, Miss Kate?' I accosted her.

It was the younger of Vicary's two maiden sisters. I guessed that the other could not be far away.

She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had done.

'Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?' she said distantly, with a nervous simper; and she passed on.

This was my first communication, since my disappearance, with the world of my London friends and acquaintances. I perceived, of course, from Miss Kate's attitude that something must have occurred, or something must have been assumed, to my prejudice. Perhaps Frank had also vanished for a time, and the rumour ran that we were away together. I smiled frigidly. What matter? In case Miss Vicary should soon be following her sister, I left without delay and went back to my coupé; it would have been a pity to derange these dames. Me away with Frank! What folly to suppose it! Yet it might have been. I was in heart what these dames probably took me for. I read a little in the _Imitation of Christ_ which Aunt Constance had meant to give me, that book which will survive sciences and even Christianity itself. 'Think not that thou hast made any progress,' I read, 'unless thou feel thyself inferior to all ... Behold how far off thou art yet from true charity and humility: which knows not how to be angry or indignant, with any except one's self.'

Night fell. The long, illuminated train roared and flashed on its invisible way under a dome of stars. It shrieked by mysterious stations, dragging furiously its freight of luxury and light and human masks through placid and humble villages and towns, of which it ignored everything save their coloured signals of safety. Ages of oscillation seemed to pass. In traversing the corridors one saw interior after interior full of the signs of wearied humanity: magazines thrown aside, rugs in disorder, hair dishevelled, eyes heavy, cheeks flushed, limbs in the abandoned attitudes of fatigue--here and there a compartment with blinds discreetly drawn, suggesting the jealous seclusion of love, and here and there a group of animated tatlers or card-players whose nerves nothing could affect, and who were incapable of lassitude; on every train and every steamer a few such are to be found.

More ages passed, and yet the journey had but just begun. At length we thundered and resounded through canyons of tall houses, their façades occasionally bathed in the cold, blue radiance of arc-lights; and under streets and over canals. Paris! the city of the joy of life! We were to see the muddied skirts of that brilliant and sinister woman. We panted to a standstill in the vast echoing cavern of the Gare du Nord, stared haughtily and drowsily at its bustling confusion, and then drew back, to carry our luxury and our correctness through the lowest industrial quarters. Belleville, Menilmontant, and other names of like associations we read on the miserable, forlorn stations of the Ceinture, past which we trailed slowly our disgust.

We made a semicircle through the secret shames that beautiful Paris would fain hide, and, emerging, found ourselves in the deserted and stony magnificence of the Gare de Lyon, the gate of the South. Here, where we were not out of keeping, where our splendour was of a piece with the splendour of the proudest terminus in France, we rested long, fretted by the inexplicable leisureliness on the part of a _train de grand luxe_, while gilded officials paced to and fro beneath us on the platforms, guarding in their bureaucratic breasts the secret of the exact instant at which the great express would leave. I slept, and dreamed that the Misses Vicary had brought several pairs of white gloves in order to have me dismissed from the society of the train. A hand touched me. It was Yvonne's. I awoke to a renewal of the maddening vibration. We had quitted Paris long since. It was after seven o'clock. '_On dit que le diner est servi, madame_ said Yvonne. I told her to go, and I collected my wits to follow her. As I was emerging into the corridor, Miss Kate went by. I smiled faintly, perhaps timidly. She cut me completely. Then I went out into the corridor. A man was standing at the other end twirling his moustaches. He turned round.

It was Frank.

He came towards me, uncertainly swaying with the movement of the swaying train.

'Good God!' he muttered, and stopped within a yard of me.

I clung convulsively to the framework of the doorway. Our lives paused.

'Why have you followed me, Frank?' I asked gloomily, in a whisper.

I had meant to be severe, offended. I had not meant to put his name at the end of my question, much less to utter it tenderly, like an endearment. But I had little control over myself. I was almost breathless with a fatal surprise, shaken with terrible emotion.

'I've not followed you,' he said. 'I joined the train at Paris. I'd no idea you were on the train till I saw you in the corner asleep, through the window of the compartment. I've been waiting here till you came out.'

'Have you seen the Vicarys?'

'Yes,' he answered.

'Ah! You've been away from London all this time?'

'I couldn't stay. I couldn't. I've been in Belgium and Holland. Then I went to Paris. And now--you see me.'

'I'm going to Mentone,' I said. 'I had thought of Monte Carlo first, but I changed my mind. Where are you going to?'

'Mentone,' he said.

We talked in hard, strained tones, avoiding each other's eyes. A string of people passed along the car on their way to dinner. I withdrew into my compartment, and Frank flattened himself against a window.

'Come in here a minute,' I said, when they were gone.

He entered the compartment and sat down opposite to me and lifted his hand, perhaps unconsciously, to pull the door to.

'No,' I said; 'don't shut it. Leave it like that.'

He was dressed in a gray tourist suit. Never before had I seen him in any but the formal attire of London. I thought he looked singularly graceful and distinguished, even romantic, in that loose, soft clothing. But no matter what he wore, Frank satisfied the eye. We were both extremely nervous and excited and timid, fearing speech.

'Carlotta,' he said at last--I had perceived that he was struggling to a resolution--'this is the best thing that could have happened. Whatever we do, everybody will believe that we are running off together.'

'I think they have been believing that ever since we left London,' I said; and I told him about Miss Kate's treatment of me at lunch. 'But how can that affect us?' I demanded.

'Mary will believe it--does believe, I'm sure. Long before this, people will have enlightened her. And now the Vicarys have seen us, it's all over. Our hand is forced, isn't it?'

'Frank,' I said, 'didn't you think my letter was right?'

'I obeyed it,' he replied heavily. 'I haven't even written to you. I meant to when I got to Mentone.'

'But didn't you think I was right?'

'I don't know. Yes--I suppose it was.' His lower lip fell. 'Of course I don't want you to do anything that you--'

'Dinner, please,' said my negro, putting his head between us.

We both informed the man that we should not dine, and I asked him to tell Yvonne not to wait for me.

'There's your maid, too,' said Frank. 'How are we going to get out of it? The thing's settled for us.'

'My dear, dear boy!' I exclaimed. 'Are we to outrage our consciences simply because people think we have outraged them?'

'It isn't my conscience--it's yours,' he said.

'Well, then--mine.'

I drew down my veil; I could scarcely keep dry eyes.

'Why are you so hard, Carlotta?' he cried. 'I can't understand you. I never could. But you'll kill me--that's what you'll do.'

Impulsively I leaned forward; and he seized my hand. Our antagonism melted in tears. Oh the cruel joy of that moment! Who will dare to say that the spirit cannot burn with pleasure while drowning in grief? Or that tragedy may not be the highest bliss? That instant of renunciation was our true marriage. I realize it now--a union that nothing can soil nor impair.

'I love you; you are fast and fast in my heart,' I murmured. 'But you must go back to Mary. There is nothing else.'

And I withdrew my hand.

He shook his head.

'You've no right, my dearest, to tell me to go back to Mary. I cannot.'

'Forgive me,' I said. 'I have only the right to ask you to leave me.'

'Then there is no hope?'

His lips trembled. Ah! those lips!

I made a sign that there was no hope. And we sat in silence, overcome.

A servant came to arrange the compartment for sleeping, and we were obliged to assume nonchalance and go into the corridor. All the windows of the corridor were covered with frost traceries. The train with its enclosed heat and its gleaming lamps was plunging through an ice-gripped night. I thought of the engine-driver, perched on his shaking, snorting, monstrous machine, facing the weather, with our lives and our loves in his hand.

'We'll leave each other now, Frank,' I said, 'before the people begin to come back from dinner. Go and eat something.'

'But you?'

'I shall be all right. Yvonne will get me some fruit. I shall stay in our compartment till we arrive.'

'Yes. And when we do arrive--what then? What are your wishes? You see, I can't leave the train before we get to Mentone because of my registered luggage.'

He spoke appealingly.

The dear thing, with his transparent pretexts!

'You can ignore us at the station, and then leave Mentone again during the day.'

'As you wish,' he said.

'Good-night!' I whispered. 'Good-bye!' And I turned to my compartment.

'Carlotta!' he cried despairingly.

But I shut the door and drew the blinds.

Yvonne was discretion itself when she returned. She had surely seen Frank. No doubt she anticipated piquant developments at Mentone.

All night I lay on my narrow bed, with Yvonne faintly snoring above me, and the harsh, metallic rattle of the swinging train beneath. I could catch the faint ticking of my watch under the thin pillow. The lamp burnt delicately within its green shade. I lay almost moveless, almost dead, shifting only at long intervals from side to side. Sometimes my brain would arouse itself, and I would live again through each scene of my relationship with Frank and Mary. I often thought of the engine-driver, outside, watching over us and unflinchingly dragging us on. I hoped that his existence had compensations.

V

Early on the second morning after that interview in the train I sat on my balcony in the Hôtel d'Écosse, full in the tremendous sun that had ascended over the Mediterranean. The shore road wound along beneath me by the blue water that never receded nor advanced, lopping always the same stones. A vivid yellow electric tram, like a toy, crept forward on my left from the direction of Vintimille and Italy, as it were swimming noiselessly on the smooth surface of the road among the palms of an intense green, against the bright blue background of the sea; and another tram advanced, a spot of orange, to meet it out of the variegated tangle of tinted houses composing the Old Town. High upon the summit of the Old Town rose the slim, rose-coloured cupola of the church in a sapphire sky. The regular smiting sound of a cracked bell, viciously rung, came from it. The eastern prospect was shut in by the last olive-clad spurs of the Alps, that tread violently and gigantically into the sea. The pathways of the hotel garden were being gently swept by a child of the sun, who could not have sacrificed his graceful dignity to haste; and many peaceful morning activities proceeded on the road, on the shore, and on the jetty. A procession of tawny fishing-boats passed from the harbour one after another straight into the eye of the sun, and were lost there. Smoke climbed up softly into the soft air from the houses and hotels on the level of the road. The trams met and parted, silently widening the distance between them which previously they had narrowed. And the sun rose and rose, bathing the blue sea and the rich verdure and the glaring white architecture in the very fluid of essential life. The whole azure coast basked in it like an immense cat, commencing the day with a voluptuous savouring of the fact that it was alive. The sun is the treacherous and tyrannical god of the South, and when he withdraws himself, arbitrary and cruel, the land and the people shiver and prepare to die.

It was such a morning as renders sharp and unmistakable the division between body and soul--if the soul suffers. The body exults; the body cries out that nothing on earth matters except climate. Nothing can damp the glorious ecstasy of the body baptized in that air, caressed by that incomparable sun. It laughs, and it laughs at the sorrow of the soul. It imperiously bids the soul to choose the path of pleasure; it shouts aloud that sacrifice is vain and honour an empty word, full of inconveniences, and that to exist amply and vehemently, to listen to the blood as it beats strongly through the veins, is the end of the eternal purpose. Ah! how easy it is to martyrize one's self by some fatal decision made grandly in the exultation of a supreme moment! And how difficult to endure the martyrdom without regret! I regretted my renunciation. My body rebelled against it, and even my soul rebelled. I scorned myself for a fool, for a sentimental weakling--yes, and for a moral coward. Every argument that presented itself damaged the justice of my decision. After all, we loved, and in my secret dreams had I not always put love first, as the most sacred? The reality was that I had been afraid of what Mary would think. True, my attitude had lied to her, but I could not have avoided that. Decency would have forbidden me to use any other attitude; and more than decency--kindness. Ought the course of lives to be changed at the bidding of mere hazard? It was a mere chance that Mary had called on me. I bled for her grief, but nothing that I could do would assuage it. I felt sure that, in the impossible case of me being able to state my position to her and argue in its defence, I could force her to see that in giving myself to Frank I was not being false to my own ideals. What else could count? What other consideration should guide the soul on its mysterious instinctive way? Frank and I had a right to possess each other. We had a right to be happy if we could. And the one thing that had robbed us of that right was my lack of courage, caused partly by my feminine mentality (do we not realize sometimes how ignobly feminine we are?), and partly by the painful spectacle of Mary's grief.... And her grief, her most intimate grief, sprang not from thwarted love, but from a base and narrow conventionality.

Thus I declaimed to myself in my heart, under the influence of the seductive temptations of that intoxicating atmosphere.

'Come down,' said a voice firmly and quietly underneath me in the orange-trees of the garden.

I started violently. It was Frank's voice. He was standing in the garden, his legs apart, and a broad, flat straw hat, which I did not admire, on his head. His pale face was puckered round about the eyes as he looked up at me, like the face of a person trying to look directly at the sun.

'Why,' I exclaimed foolishly, glancing down over the edge of the balcony, and shutting my white parasol with a nervous, hurried movement, 'have--have you come here?'

He had disobeyed my wish. He had not left Mentone at once.

'Come down,' he repeated persuasively, and yet commandingly.

I could feel my heart beating against the marble parapet of the balcony. I seemed to be caught, to be trapped. I could not argue with him in that position. I could not leave him shouting in the garden. So I nodded to pacify him, and disappeared quickly from the balcony, almost scurrying away. And in the comparative twilight of my room I stopped and gave a glance in the mirror, and patted my hair, and fearfully examined the woman that I saw in the glass, as if to discern what sort of woman she truly was, and what was the root of her character. I hesitated and snatched up my gloves. I wanted to collect my thoughts, and I could not. It was impossible to think clearly. I moved in the room, dazed. I stood by the tumbled bed, fingering the mosquito curtains. They might have been a veil behind which was obscured the magic word of enlightenment I needed. I opened the door, shut it suddenly, and held the knob tight, defying an imagined enemy outside. 'Oh!' I muttered at last, angry with myself, 'what is the use of all this? You know you must go down to him. He's waiting for you. Show a little common-sense and go without so much fuss.' And so I descended the stairs swiftly and guiltily, relieved that no one happened to see me. In any case, I decided, nothing could induce me to yield to him after my letter and after what had passed in the train. The affair was beyond argument. I felt that I could not yield, and that though it meant the ruin of happiness by obstinacy, I could not yield. I shrank from yielding in that moment as men shrink from public repentance.

He had not moved from his post in the garden. We shook hands. A band of Italian musicians wandered into the garden and began to sing Verdi to a vigorous thrumming of guitars. They sang as only Italians can sing--as naturally as they breathed, and with a rich and overflowing innocent joy in the art which Nature had taught them. They sang loudly, swingingly, glancing full of naive hope up at the windows of the vast, unresponsive hotel.

'So you are still in Mentone,' I ventured.

'Yes,' he said. 'Come for a walk.'

'But--'

'Come for a walk.'

'Very well,' I consented. 'As I am?'

'As you are. I saw you all in white on the balcony, and I was determined to fetch you out.'

'But could you see who it was from the road?'

'Of course I could. I knew in an instant.'

We descended, he a couple of paces in front of me, the narrow zigzag path leading down between two other hotels to the shore road.

'What will happen now?' I asked myself wildly. My head swam.

It seemed that nothing would happen. We turned eastwards, walking slowly, and I began to resume my self-control. Only the simple and the humble were abroad at that early hour: purveyors of food, in cheerfully rattling carts, or hauling barrows with the help of grave and formidable dogs; washers and cleaners at the doors of highly-decorated villas, amiably performing their tasks while the mighty slept; fishermen and fat fisher-girls, industriously repairing endless brown nets on the other side of the parapet of the road; a postman and a little policeman; a porcelain mender, who practised his trade under the shadow of the wall; a few loafers; some stable-boys exercising horses; and children with adorable dirty faces, shouting in their high treble as they played at hopscotch. I felt very closely akin to these meek ones as we walked along. They were so human, so wistful. They had the wonderful simplicity of animals, uncomplicated by the disease of self-consciousness; they were the vital stuff without the embroidery. They preserved the customs of their ancestors, rising with the sun, frankly and splendidly enjoying the sun, looking up to it as the most important thing in the world. They never attempted to understand what was beyond them; they troubled not with progress, ideals, righteousness, the claims of society. They accepted humbly and uninquiringly what they found. They lived the life of their instincts, sometimes violent, often kindly, and always natural. Why should I have felt so near to them?

A calm and gentle pleasure filled me, far from intense, but yet satisfying. I determined to enjoy the moment, or, perhaps, without determination, I gave myself up, gradually, to the moment. I forgot care and sorrow. I was well; I was with Frank; I was in the midst of enchanting natural beauty; the day was fair and fresh and virgin. I knew not where I was going. Shorewards a snowy mountain ridge rose above the long, wide slopes of olives, dotted with white dwellings. A single sail stood up seawards on the immense sheet of blue. The white sail appeared and disappeared in the green palm-trees as we passed eastwards. Presently we left the sea, and we lost the hills, and came into a street of poor little shops for simple folk, that naïvely exposed their cheap and tawdry goods to no matter what mightiness should saunter that way. And then we came to the end of the tram-line, and it was like the end of the world. And we saw in the distance abodes of famous persons, fabulously rich, defying the sea and the hills, and condescending from afar off to the humble. We crossed the railway, and a woman ran out from a cabin with a spoon in one hand and a soiled flag in the other, and waved the flag at a towering black engine that breathed stertorously in a cutting. Already we were climbing, and the road grew steeper, and then we came to custom-houses--unsightly, squalid, irregular, and mean--in front of which officials laughed and lounged and smoked.

We talked scarcely at all.

'You were up early this morning,' he said.

'Yes; I could not sleep.'

'It was the same with me.'

We recovered the sea; but now it was far below us, and the footprints of the wind were marked on it, and it was not one blue, but a thousand blues, and it faded imperceptibly into the sky. The sail, making Mentone, was much nearer, and had developed into a two-masted ship. It seemed to be pushed, rather than blown, along by the wind. It seemed to have rigidity in all its parts, and to be sliding unwillingly over a vast slate. The road lay through craggy rocks, shelving away unseen on one hand, and rising steeply against the burning sky on the other. We mounted steadily and slowly. I did not look much at Frank, but my eye was conscious of his figure, striding leisurely along. Now and then, when I turned to glance behind, I saw our shadows there diagonally on the road, and again I did not care for his hat. I had not seen him in a straw hat till that morning. We arrived at a second set of French custom-houses, deserted, and then we saw that the gigantic side of the mountain was cleft by a fissure from base to summit. And across the gorge had been thrown a tiny stone bridge to carry the road. At this point, by the bridge, the face of the rock had been carved smooth, and a great black triangle painted on it. And on the road was a common milestone, with 'France' on one side and 'Italia' on the other. And a very old man was harmlessly spreading a stock of picture postcards on the parapet of the bridge. My heart went out to that poor old man, whose white curls glinted in the sunlight. It seemed to me so pathetic that he should be just there, at that natural spot which the passions and the blood of men long dead had made artificial, tediously selling postcards in order to keep his worn and creaking body out of the grave.

'Do give him something,' I entreated Frank.

And while Frank went to him I leaned over the other parapet and listened for the delicate murmur of the stream far below. The split flank of the hill was covered with a large red blossom, and at the base, on the edge of the sea, were dolls' houses, each raising a slanted pencil of pale smoke.

Then we were in Italy, and still climbing. We saw a row of narrow, slattern cottages, their backs over the sea, and in front of them marched to and fro a magnificent soldier laced in gold, with chinking spurs and a rifle. Suddenly there ran out of a cottage two little girls, aged about four years and eight years, dirty, unkempt, delicious, shrill, their movements full of the ravishing grace of infancy. They attacked the laced soldier, chattering furiously, grumbling at him, intimidating him with the charming gestures of spoilt and pouting children. And he bent down stiffly in his superb uniform, and managed his long, heavy gun, and talked to them in a deep, vibrating voice. He reasoned with them till we could hear him no more. It was so touching, so exquisitely human!

We reached the top of the hill, having passed the Italian customs, equally vile with the French. The terraced grounds of an immense deserted castle came down to the roadside; and over the wall, escaped from the garden, there bloomed extravagantly a tangle of luscious yellow roses, just out of our reach. The road was still and deserted. We could see nothing but the road and the sea and the hills, all steeped, bewitched, and glorious under the sun. The ship had nearly slid to Mentone. The curving coastline of Italy wavered away into the shimmering horizon. And there were those huge roses, insolently blooming in the middle of winter, the symbol of the terrific forces of nature which slept quiescent under the universal calm. Perched as it were in a niche of the hills, we were part of that tremendous and ennobling scene. Long since the awkward self-consciousness caused by our plight had left us. We did not use speech, but we knew that we thought alike, and were suffering the same transcendent emotion. Was it joy or sadness? Rather than either, it was an admixture of both, originating in a poignant sense of the grandeur of life and of the earth.

'Oh, Frank,' I murmured, my spirit bursting, 'how beautiful it is!'

Our eyes met. He took me and kissed me impetuously, as though my utterance had broken a spell which enchained him. And as I kissed him I wept, blissfully. Nature had triumphed.

VI

We departed from Mentone that same day after lunch. I could not remove to his hotel; he could not remove to mine, for this was Mentone. We went to Monte Carlo by road, our luggage following. We chose Monte Carlo partly because it was the nearest place, and partly because it has some of the qualities--incurious, tolerant, unprovincial--of a capital city. If we encountered friends there, so much the better, in the end. The great adventure, the solemn and perilous enterprise had begun. I sent Yvonne for a holiday to her home in Laroche. Why? Ah, why? Perhaps for the simple reason that I had not the full courage of my convictions. We seldom have--_nous autres_. I felt that, if she had remained, Yvonne would have been too near me in the enterprise. I could not at first have been my natural self with her. I told the astonished and dissatisfied Yvonne that I would write to her as soon as I wanted her. Yet in other ways I had courage, and I found a delicious pleasure in my courage. When I was finally leaving the hotel I had Frank by my side. I behaved to him as to a husband. I publicly called him 'dear.' I asked his advice in trifles. He paid my bill. He even provided the money necessary for Yvonne. My joy in the possession of this male creature, whose part it now was to do for me a thousand things that hitherto I had been forced to do for myself, was almost naive. I could not hide it. I was at last a man's woman. I had a protector. Yes; I must not shrink from the equivocal significance of that word--I had a protector.

Frank was able to get three rooms at the Hotel de Paris at Monte Carlo. I had only to approve them. We met in our sitting-room at half-past three, ready to go out for a walk. It would be inexact to say that we were not nervous. But we were happy. He had not abandoned his straw hat.

'Don't wear that any more,' I said to him, smiling.

'But why? It's quite new.'

'It doesn't suit you,' I said.

'Oh, that doesn't matter,' he laughed, and he put it on.

'But I don't like to see you in it,' I persisted.

'Well, you'll stand it this afternoon, my angel, and I'll get another to-morrow.'

'Haven't you got another one here?' I asked, with discontent.

'No,' and he laughed again.

'But, dear--' I pouted.

He seemed suddenly to realize that as a fact I did not like the hat.

'Come here,' he said, charmingly grave; and he led me by the hand into his bedroom, which was littered with clothes, small parcels, boots, and brushes. One chair was overturned.

'Heavens!' I muttered, pretending to be shocked at the disorder.

He drew, me to a leather box of medium size.

'You can open it,' he said.

I opened it. The thing was rather a good contrivance, for a man. It held a silk hat, an opera hat, a bowler hat, some caps, and a soft Panama straw.

'And you said you had no others!' I grumbled at him.

'Well, which is it to be?' he demanded.

'This, of course,' I said, taking the bowler. I reached up, removed the straw hat from his head, and put the bowler in its place. 'There!' I exclaimed, satisfied, giving the bowler a pat--there!'

He laughed, immensely content, enraptured, foolishly blissful. We were indeed happy. Before opening the door leading to the corridor we stopped and kissed.

On the seaward terrace of the vast, pale, floriated Casino, so impressive in its glittering vulgarity, like the bride-cake of a stockbroker's wedding, we strolled about among a multifarious crowd, immersed in ourselves. We shared a contempt for the architecture, the glaring flower-beds, and the false distinction of the crowd, and an enthusiasm for the sunshine and the hills and the sea, and whatever else had escaped the hands of the Casino administration. We talked lightly and freely. Care seemed to be leaving us; we had no preoccupations save those which were connected with our passion. Then I saw, standing in an attitude of attention, the famous body-servant of Lord Francis Alcar, and I knew that Lord Francis could not be far away. We spoke to the valet; he pointed out his master, seated at the front of the terrace, and told us, in a discreet, pained, respectful voice, that our venerable friend had been mysteriously unwell at Monte Carlo, and was now taking the air for the first time in ten days. I determined that we should go boldly and speak to him.

'Lord Francis,' I said gently, after we had stood some seconds by his chair, unremarked.

He was staring fixedly at the distance of the sea. He looked amazingly older than when I had last talked with him. His figure was shrunken, and his face rose thin and white out of a heavy fur overcoat and a large blue muffler. In his eyes there was such a sadness, such an infinite regret, such a profound weariness as can only be seen in the eyes of the senile. He was utterly changed.

'Lord Francis,' I repeated, 'don't you know me?'

He started slightly and looked at me, and a faint gleam appeared in his eyes. Then he nodded, and took a thin, fragile alabaster hand out of the pocket of his overcoat. I shook it. It was like shaking hands with a dead, starved child. He carefully moved the skin and bone back into his pocket.

'Are you pretty well?' I said.

He nodded. Then the faint gleam faded out of his eyes; his head fell a little, and he resumed his tragic contemplation of the sea. The fact of my presence had dropped like a pebble into the strange depths of that aged mind, and the waters of the ferocious egotism of senility had closed over it, and it was forgotten. His rapt and yet meaningless gaze frightened me. It was as if there was more desolation and disillusion in that gaze than I had previously imagined the whole earth to contain. Useless for Frank to rouse him for the second time. Useless to explain ourselves. What was love to him, or the trivial conventions of a world which he was already quitting?

We walked away. From the edge of the terrace I could see a number of boats pulling to and fro in the water.

'It's the pigeon-shooting,' Frank explained. 'Come to the railings and you'll be able to see.'

I had already heard the sharp popping of rifles. I went to the railings, and saw a number of boxes arranged in a semicircle on a green, which was, as it were, suspended between the height of the terrace and the sea. Suddenly one of the boxes collapsed with a rattle, and a bird flew out of the ruin of it. There were two reports of a gun; the bird, its curving flight cut short, fell fluttering to the grass; a dog trotted out from the direction of the gun unseen beneath us, and disappeared again with the mass of ruffled feathers in its mouth. Then two men showed themselves, ran to the collapsed box, restored it, and put in it a fresh victim, and disappeared after the dog. I was horrified, but I could not remove my eyes from the green. Another box fell flat, and another bird flew out; a gun sounded; the bird soared far away, wavered, and sank on to the surface of the sea, and the boats converged towards it in furious haste. So the game proceeded. I saw a dozen deaths on the green; a few birds fell into the sea, and one escaped, settling ultimately on the roof of the Casino.

'So that is pigeon-shooting,' I said coldly, turning to Frank. 'I suppose it goes on all day?'

He nodded.

'It's just as cruel as plenty of other sports, and no more,' he said, as if apologizing for the entire male sex.

'I presume so,' I answered. 'But do you know, dear, if the idea once gets into my head that that is going on all day, I shan't be able to stop here. Let us have tea somewhere.'

Not until dinner did I recover from the obsession of that continual slaughter and destruction of beautiful life. It seemed to me that the Casino and its gorgeous gardens were veritably established on the mysterious arched hollow, within the high cliff, from which death shot out all day and every day. But I did recover perfectly. Only now do I completely perceive how violent, how capricious and contradictory were my emotions in those unique and unforgettable hours.

We dined late, because I had deprived myself of Yvonne. Already I was almost in a mind to send for her. The restaurant of the hotel was full, but we recognised no one as we walked through the room to our table.

'There is one advantage in travelling about with you,' said Frank.

'What is it?' I asked.

'No matter where one is, one can always be sure of being with the most beautiful woman in the place.'

I was content. I repaid him by being more than ever a man's woman. I knew that I was made for that. I understood why great sopranos have of their own accord given up even the stage on marriage. The career of literature seemed to me tedious and sordid in comparison with that of being a man's woman. In my rich black dress and my rings and bracelets I felt like an Eastern Empress; I felt that I could adequately reward homage with smiles, and love with fervid love. And I felt like a cat--idle, indolently graceful, voluptuously seeking warmth and caresses. I enveloped Frank with soft glances, I dazed him with glances. He ordered a wine which he said was fit for gods, and the waiter brought it reverently and filled our glasses, with a ritual of precautions. Later during the dinner Frank asked me if I would prefer champagne. I said, 'No, of course not.' But he said, 'I think you would,' and ordered some. 'Admit,' he said, 'that you prefer champagne.' 'Well, of course,' I replied. But I drank very little champagne, lest I should be too happy. Frank's wonderful face grew delicately flushed. The room resounded with discreet chatter, and the tinkle of glass and silver and porcelain. The upper part of it remained in shadow, but every table was a centre of rosy light, illuminating faces and jewels and napery. And in my sweet illusion I thought that every face had found the secret of joy, and that even the old had preserved it. Pleasure reigned. Pleasure was the sole goddess. And how satisfying then was the worship of her! Life had no inconveniences, no dark spots, no pitfalls. The gratification of the senses, the appeasing of appetites that instantly renewed themselves--this was the business of the soul. And as the wine sank lower in the bottles, and we cooled our tongues with ices, and the room began to empty, expectation gleamed and glittered in our eyes. At last, except a group of men smoking and talking in a corner, we were the only diners left.

'Shall we go?' Frank said, putting a veil of cigarette smoke between us.

I trembled. I was once more the young and timid girl. I could not speak. I nodded.

In the hall was Vicary, talking to the head-porter. He saw us and started.

'What! Vicary!' I murmured, suddenly cooled.

'I want to speak to you,' said Vicary. 'Where can we go?'

'This way,' Frank replied.

We went to our sitting-room, silent and apprehensive.

'Sit down,' said Vicary, shutting the door and standing against it.

He was wearing a tourist suit, with a gray overcoat, and his grizzled hair was tumbling over his hard, white face.

'What's the matter?' Frank asked. 'Anything wrong?'

'Look here, you two,' said Vicary, 'I don't want to discuss your position, and I'm the last person in this world to cast the first stone; but it falls to me to do it. I was coming down to Nice to stay with my sisters, and I've come a little further. My sisters wired me they had seen you. I've been to Mentone, and driven here from there. I hoped I should get here earlier than the newspapers, and I have done, it seems.'

'Earlier than the newspapers?' Frank repeated, standing up.

'Try to keep calm,' Vicary continued. 'Your wife's body was found in the Thames at seven o'clock last night. The doctors say it had been in the water for forty-eight hours. Your servants thought she had gone to you. But doubtless some thoughtful person had told her that you two were wandering about Europe together.'

'_My wife_' cried Frank.

And the strange and terrible emphasis he put on the word 'wife' proved to me in the fraction of a second that in his heart I was not his wife. A fearful tragedy had swept away the structure of argument in favour of the rights of love which he had built over the original conventionality of his mind. Poor fellow!

He fell back into his chair and covered his eyes.

'I thank God my mother didn't live to see this!' he cried.

And then he rushed to his bedroom and banged the door.

'My poor girl!' said Vicary, approaching me. 'What can I--I'm awfully--'

I waved him away.

'What's that?' he exclaimed, in a different voice, listening.

I ran to the bedroom, and saw Frank lifting a revolver.

'You've brought me to this, Carlotta!' he shouted.

I sprang towards him, but it was too late.