The Reef...............................................................................................................................................................1

Edith Wharton ..........................................................................................................................................1

BOOK I ....................................................................................................................................................2

I................................................................................................................................................................2

II ...............................................................................................................................................................6

III ............................................................................................................................................................10

IV...........................................................................................................................................................14

V .............................................................................................................................................................20

VI...........................................................................................................................................................25

VII ..........................................................................................................................................................28

VIII .........................................................................................................................................................32

BOOK II .................................................................................................................................................34

IX...........................................................................................................................................................34

X .............................................................................................................................................................39

XI...........................................................................................................................................................44

XII ..........................................................................................................................................................49

XIII .........................................................................................................................................................53

XIV........................................................................................................................................................56

XV ..........................................................................................................................................................60

XVI........................................................................................................................................................65

BOOK III...............................................................................................................................................69

XVII.......................................................................................................................................................69

XVIII ......................................................................................................................................................74

XIX........................................................................................................................................................80

XX ..........................................................................................................................................................84

XXI........................................................................................................................................................89

XXII.......................................................................................................................................................94

BOOK IV ...............................................................................................................................................99

XXIII ......................................................................................................................................................99

XXIV ....................................................................................................................................................104

XXV .....................................................................................................................................................108

XXVI ....................................................................................................................................................111

XXVII..................................................................................................................................................116

XXVIII .................................................................................................................................................120

XXIX ....................................................................................................................................................125

BOOK V..............................................................................................................................................130

XXX .....................................................................................................................................................130

XXXI ....................................................................................................................................................132

XXXII..................................................................................................................................................135

XXXIII .................................................................................................................................................138

XXXIV .................................................................................................................................................141

XXXV ..................................................................................................................................................144

XXXVI .................................................................................................................................................146

XXXVII...............................................................................................................................................149

XXXVIII ..............................................................................................................................................152

XXXIX .................................................................................................................................................156

All the way from Charing Cross to Dover the train had hammered the words of the telegram into George

Darrow's ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace syllables: rattling them out like a discharge

of musketry, letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing

them like the dice in some game of the gods of malice; and now, as he emerged from his compartment at the

pier, and stood facing the wind swept platform and the angry sea beyond, they leapt out at him as if from the

She had put him off at the very last moment, and for the second time: put him off with all her sweet

reasonableness, and for one of her usual "good" reasonshe was certain that this reason, like the other, (the

visit of her husband's uncle's widow) would be "good"! But it was that very certainty which chilled him. The

fact of her dealing so reasonably with their case shed an ironic light on the idea that there had been any

exceptional warmth in the greeting she had given him after their twelve years apart.

They had found each other again, in London, some three months previously, at a dinner at the American

Embassy, and when she had caught sight of him her smile had been like a red rose pinned on her widow's

mourning. He still felt the throb of surprise with which, among the stereotyped faces of the season's diners, he

had come upon her unexpected face, with the dark hair banded above grave eyes; eyes in which he had

recognized every little curve and shadow as he would have recognized, after half a lifetime, the details of a

room he had played in as a child. And as, in the plumed starred crowd, she had stood out for him, slender,

secluded and different, so he had felt, the instant their glances met, that he as sharply detached himself for

her. All that and more her smile had said; had said not merely "I remember," but "I remember just what you

remember"; almost, indeed, as though her memory had aided his, her glance flung back on their recaptured

moment its morning brightness. Certainly, when their distracted Ambassadresswith the cry: "Oh, you

know Mrs. Leath? That's perfect, for General Farnham has failed me"had waved them together for the

march to the diningroom, Darrow had felt a slight pressure of the arm on his, a pressure faintly but

unmistakably emphasizing the exclamation: "Isn't it wonderful?In Londonin the seasonin a mob?"

Little enough, on the part of most women; but it was a sign of Mrs. Leath's quality that every movement,

every syllable, told with her. Even in the old days, as an intent grave eyed girl, she had seldom misplaced

her light strokes; and Darrow, on meeting her again, had immediately felt how much finer and surer an

Their evening together had been a long confirmation of this feeling. She had talked to him, shyly yet frankly,

of what had happened to her during the years when they had so strangely failed to meet. She had told him of

her marriage to Fraser Leath, and of her subsequent life in France, where her husband's mother, left a widow

in his youth, had been remarried to the Marquis de Chantelle, and where, partly in consequence of this

second union, the son had permanently settled himself. She had spoken also, with an intense eagerness of

affection, of her little girl Effie, who was now nine years old, and, in a strain hardly less tender, of Owen

Leath, the charming clever young stepson whom her husband's death had left to her care...

A porter, stumbling against Darrow's bags, roused him to the fact that he still obstructed the platform, inert

Was he crossing? He really didn't know; but for lack of any more compelling impulse he followed the porter

to the luggage van, singled out his property, and turned to march behind it down the gangway. As the fierce

wind shouldered him, building up a crystal wall against his efforts, he felt anew the derision of his case.

"Nasty weather to cross, sir," the porter threw back at him as they beat their way down the narrow walk to the

pier. Nasty weather, indeed; but luckily, as it had turned out, there was no earthly reason why Darrow should

While he pushed on in the wake of his luggage his thoughts slipped back into the old groove. He had once or

twice run across the man whom Anna Summers had preferred to him, and since he had met her again he had

been exercising his imagination on the picture of what her married life must have been. Her husband had

struck him as a characteristic specimen of the kind of American as to whom one is not quite clear whether he

lives in Europe in order to cultivate an art, or cultivates an art as a pretext for living in Europe. Mr. Leath's art

was watercolour painting, but he practised it furtively, almost clandestinely, with the disdain of a man of the

world for anything bordering on the professional, while he devoted himself more openly, and with religious

seriousness, to the collection of enamelled snuffboxes. He was blond and welldressed, with the physical

distinction that comes from having a straight figure, a thin nose, and the habit of looking slightly

disgustedas who should not, in a world where authentic snuffboxes were growing daily harder to find,

Darrow had often wondered what possibilities of communion there could have been between Mr. Leath and

his wife. Now he concluded that there had probably been none. Mrs. Leath's words gave no hint of her

husband's having failed to justify her choice; but her very reticence betrayed her. She spoke of him with a

kind of impersonal seriousness, as if he had been a character in a novel or a figure in history; and what she

said sounded as though it had been learned by heart and slightly dulled by repetition. This fact immensely

increased Darrow's impression that his meeting with her had annihilated the intervening years. She, who was

always so elusive and inaccessible, had grown suddenly communicative and kind: had opened the doors of

her past, and tacitly left him to draw his own conclusions. As a result, he had taken leave of her with the

sense that he was a being singled out and privileged, to whom she had entrusted something precious to keep.

It was her happiness in their meeting that she had given him, had frankly left him to do with as he willed; and

Their next meeting had prolonged and deepened the impression. They had found each other again, a few days

later, in an old country house full of books and pictures, in the soft landscape of southern England. The

presence of a large party, with all its aimless and agitated displacements, had served only to isolate the pair

and give them (at least to the young man's fancy) a deeper feeling of communion, and their days there had

been like some musical prelude, where the instruments, breathing low, seem to hold back the waves of sound

Mrs. Leath, on this occasion, was no less kind than before; but she contrived to make him understand that

what was so inevitably coming was not to come too soon. It was not that she showed any hesitation as to the

issue, but rather that she seemed to wish not to miss any stage in the gradual reflowering of their intimacy.

Darrow, for his part, was content to wait if she wished it. He remembered that once, in America, when she

was a girl, and he had gone to stay with her family in the country, she had been out when he arrived, and her

mother had told him to look for her in the garden. She was not in the garden, but beyond it he had seen her

approaching down a long shady path. Without hastening her step she had smiled and signed to him to wait;

and charmed by the lights and shadows that played upon her as she moved, and by the pleasure of watching

her slow advance toward him, he had obeyed her and stood still. And so she seemed now to be walking to

him down the years, the light and shade of old memories and new hopes playing variously on her, and each

step giving him the vision of a different grace. She did not waver or turn aside; he knew she would come

straight to where he stood; but something in her eyes said "Wait", and again he obeyed and waited.

On the fourth day an unexpected event threw out his calculations. Summoned to town by the arrival in

England of her husband's mother, she left without giving Darrow the chance he had counted on, and he

cursed himself for a dilatory blunderer. Still, his disappointment was tempered by the certainty of being with

her again before she left for France; and they did in fact see each other in London. There, however, the

atmosphere had changed with the conditions. He could not say that she avoided him, or even that she was a

shade less glad to see him; but she was beset by family duties and, as he thought, a little too readily resigned

The Marquise de Chantelle, as Darrow soon perceived, had the same mild formidableness as the late Mr.

Leath: a sort of insistent selfeffacement before which every one about her gave way. It was perhaps the

shadow of this lady's presencepervasive even during her actual brief eclipses that subdued and silenced

Mrs. Leath. The latter was, moreover, preoccupied about her stepson, who, soon after receiving his degree at

Harvard, had been rescued from a stormy loveaffair, and finally, after some months of troubled drifting, had

yielded to his stepmother's counsel and gone up to Oxford for a year of supplementary study. Thither Mrs.

Leath went once or twice to visit him, and her remaining days were packed with family obligations: getting,

as she phrased it, "frocks and governesses" for her little girl, who had been left in France, and having to

devote the remaining hours to long shopping expeditions with her motherinlaw. Nevertheless, during her

brief escapes from duty, Darrow had had time to feel her safe in the custody of his devotion, set apart for

some inevitable hour; and the last evening, at the theatre, between the overshadowing Marquise and the

Now, in the rattle of the wind about his ears, Darrow continued to hear the mocking echo of her message:

"Unexpected obstacle." In such an existence as Mrs. Leath's, at once so ordered and so exposed, he knew how

small a complication might assume the magnitude of an "obstacle;" yet, even allowing as impartially as his

state of mind permitted for the fact that, with her motherinlaw always, and her stepson intermittently,

under her roof, her lot involved a hundred small accommodations generally foreign to the freedom of

widowhoodeven so, he could not but think that the very ingenuity bred of such conditions might have

helped her to find a way out of them. No, her "reason", whatever it was, could, in this case, be nothing but a

pretext; unless he leaned to the less flattering alternative that any reason seemed good enough for postponing

him! Certainly, if her welcome had meant what he imagined, she could not, for the second time within a few

weeks, have submitted so tamely to the disarrangement of their plans; a disarrangement whichhis official

duties consideredmight, for all she knew, result in his not being able to go to her for months.

"Please don't come till thirtieth." The thirtiethand it was now the fifteenth! She flung back the fortnight on

his hands as if he had been an idler indifferent to dates, instead of an active young diplomatist who, to

respond to her call, had had to hew his way through a very jungle of engagements! "Please don't come till

thirtieth." That was all. Not the shadow of an excuse or a regret; not even the perfunctory "have written" with

which it is usual to soften such blows. She didn't want him, and had taken the shortest way to tell him so.

Even in his first moment of exasperation it struck him as characteristic that she should not have padded her

"If I asked her to marry me, she'd have refused in the same language. But thank heaven I haven't!" he

These considerations, which had been with him every yard of the way from London, reached a climax of

irony as he was drawn into the crowd on the pier. It did not soften his feelings to remember that, but for her

lack of forethought, he might, at this harsh end of the stormy May day, have been sitting before his club fire

in London instead of shivering in the damp human herd on the pier. Admitting the sex's traditional right to

change, she might at least have advised him of hers by telegraphing directly to his rooms. But in spite of their

exchange of letters she had apparently failed to note his address, and a breathless emissary had rushed from

the Embassy to pitch her telegram into his compartment as the train was moving from the station.

Yes, he had given her chance enough to learn where he lived; and this minor proof of her indifference

became, as he jammed his way through the crowd, the main point of his grievance against her and of his

derision of himself. Half way down the pier the prod of an umbrella increased his exasperation by rousing

him to the fact that it was raining. Instantly the narrow ledge became a battleground of thrusting, slanting,

parrying domes. The wind rose with the rain, and the harried wretches exposed to this double assault wreaked

Darrow, whose healthy enjoyment of life made him in general a good traveller, tolerant of agglutinated

humanity, felt himself obscurely outraged by these promiscuous contacts. It was as though all the people

about him had taken his measure and known his plight; as though they were contemptuously bumping and

shoving him like the inconsiderable thing he had become. "She doesn't want you, doesn't want you, doesn't

He had rashly vowed, when the telegram was flung into his window: "At any rate I won't turn back"as

though it might cause the sender a malicious joy to have him retrace his steps rather than keep on to Paris!

Now he perceived the absurdity of the vow, and thanked his stars that he need not plunge, to no purpose, into

With this thought in his mind he turned back to look for his porter; but the contiguity of dripping umbrellas

made signalling impossible and, perceiving that he had lost sight of the man, he scrambled up again to the

platform. As he reached it, a descending umbrella caught him in the collar bone; and the next moment, bent

sideways by the wind, it turned inside out and soared up, kitewise, at the end of a helpless female arm.

Darrow caught the umbrella, lowered its inverted ribs, and looked up at the face it exposed to him.

As he spoke, a surge of the crowd drove the owner of the umbrella abruptly down on him. Darrow steadied

her with extended arms, and regaining her footing she cried out: "Oh, dear, oh, dear! It's in ribbons!"

Her lifted face, fresh and flushed in the driving rain, woke in him a memory of having seen it at a distant time

and in a vaguely unsympathetic setting; but it was no moment to follow up such clues, and the face was

Its possessor had dropped her bag and bundles to clutch at the tattered umbrella. "I bought it only yesterday at

Darrow smiled at the intensity of her distress. It was food for the moralist that, side by side with such

catastrophes as his, human nature was still agitating itself over its microscopic woes!

"Here's mine if you want it!" he shouted back at her through the shouting of the gale.

The offer caused the young lady to look at him more intently. "Why, it's Mr. Darrow!" she exclaimed; and

She knew him, then; and he knew her; but how and where had they met? He put aside the problem for

subsequent solution, and drawing her into a more sheltered corner, bade her wait till he could find his porter.

When, a few minutes later, he came back with his recovered property, and the news that the boat would not

Ordinarily Darrow would have felt little disposed to involve himself in the adventure of a young female who

had lost her trunk; but at the moment he was glad of any pretext for activity. Even should he decide to take

the next up train from Dover he still had a yawning hour to fill; and the obvious remedy was to devote it to

It pleased him that she did not return the conventional "Oh, WOULD you?" Instead, she corrected him with a

laughNot a trunk, but my trunk; I've no other" and then added briskly: "You'd better first see to getting

This made him answer, as if to give substance to his plans by discussing them: "I don't actually know that I'm

"Well...perhaps not by this boat." Again he felt a stealing indecision. "I may probably have to go back to

London. I'mI'm waiting...expecting a letter...(She'll think me a defaulter," he reflected.) "But meanwhile

He picked up his companion's bundles, and offered her an arm which enabled her to press her slight person

more closely under his umbrella; and as, thus linked, they beat their way back to the platform, pulled together

and apart like marionettes on the wires of the wind, he continued to wonder where he could have seen her. He

had immediately classed her as a compatriot; her small nose, her clear tints, a kind of sketchy delicacy in her

face, as though she had been brightly but lightly washed in with watercolour, all confirmed the evidence of

her high sweet voice and of her quick incessant gestures.She was clearly an American, but with the loose

native quality strained through a closer woof of manners: the composite product of an enquiring and

adaptable race. All this, however, did not help him to fit a name to her, for just such instances were

perpetually pouring through the London Embassy, and the etched and angular American was becoming rarer

More puzzling than the fact of his being unable to identify her was the persistent sense connecting her with

something uncomfortable and distasteful. So pleasant a vision as that gleaming up at him between wet brown

hair and wet brown boa should have evoked only associations as pleasing; but each effort to fit her image into

Don't you remember me nowat Mrs. Murrett's?" She threw the question at Darrow across a table of the

quiet coffeeroom to which, after a vainly prolonged quest for her trunk, he had suggested taking her for a

In this musty retreat she had removed her dripping hat, hung it on the fender to dry, and stretched herself on

tiptoe in front of the round eaglecrowned mirror, above the mantel vases of dyed immortelles, while she ran

her fingers comb wise through her hair. The gesture had acted on Darrow's numb feelings as the glow of the

fire acted on his circulation; and when he had asked: "Aren't your feet wet, too?" and, after frank inspection

of a stoutshod sole, she had answered cheerfully: "Noluckily I had on my new boots," he began to feel

that human intercourse would still be tolerable if it were always as free from formality.

The removal of his companion's hat, besides provoking this reflection, gave him his first full sight of her face;

and this was so favourable that the name she now pronounced fell on him with a quite disproportionate shock

He remembered her now, of course: remembered her as one of the shadowy sidling presences in the

background of that awful house in Chelsea, one of the dumb appendages of the shrieking unescapable Mrs.

Murrett, into whose talons he had fallen in the course of his headlong pursuit of Lady Ulrica Crispin. Oh,

Yes: he had seen her slip byhe recalled it nowas he dashed up to the drawingroom in quest of Lady

Ulrica. The thought made him steal a longer look. How could such a face have been merged in the Murrett

mob? Its fugitive slanting lines, that lent themselves to all manner of tender tilts and foreshortenings, had the

freakish grace of some young head of the Italian comedy. The hair stood up from her forehead in a boyish

elflock, and its colour matched her auburn eyes flecked with black, and the little brown spot on her cheek,

between the ear that was meant to have a rose behind it and the chin that should have rested on a ruff. When

she smiled, the left corner of her mouth went up a little higher than the right; and her smile began in her eyes

and ran down to her lips in two lines of light. He had dashed past that to reach Lady Ulrica Crispin!

"But of course you wouldn't remember me," she was saying. "My name is VinerSophy Viner."

Not remember her? But of course he DID! He was genuinely sure of it now. "You're Mrs. Murrett's niece," he

Miss Viner enjoyed his wonder. "Dear, no! But I wrote notes, and made up the visitingbook, and walked the

"That I can well believe. I'm glad to hear," he added, "that you put it all in the past tense."

She seemed to droop a little at the allusion; then she lifted her chin with a jerk of defiance. "Yes. All is at an

"Ever since you used to come there to see Lady Ulrica? Does it seem to you so awfully long ago?"

The unexpectedness of the thrustas well as its doubtful tastechilled his growing enjoyment of her

chatter. He had really been getting to like herhad recovered, under the candid approval of her eye, his

usual sense of being a personable young man, with all the privileges pertaining to the state, instead of the

anonymous rag of humanity he had felt himself in the crowd on the pier. It annoyed him, at that particular

She seemed to guess his thought. "You don't like my saying that you came for Lady Ulrica?" she asked,

He liked her quickness, at any rate. "It's better," he laughed, "than your thinking I came for Mrs. Murrett!"

"Oh, we never thought anybody came for Mrs. Murrett! It was always for something else: the music, or the

cookwhen there was a good oneor the other people; generally ONE of the other people."

She was amusing, and that, in his present mood, was more to his purpose than the exact shade of her taste. It

was odd, too, to discover suddenly that the blurred tapestry of Mrs. Murrett's background had all the while

been alive and full of eyes. Now, with a pair of them looking into his, he was conscious of a queer reversal of

"There were a good many of us." She smiled. "Let me see who was there in your time? Mrs. Boltand

Mademoiselleand Professor Didymus and the Polish Countess. Don't you remember the Polish Countess?

She crystalgazed, and played accompaniments, and Mrs. Murrett chucked her because Mrs. Didymus

accused her of hypnotizing the Professor. But of course you don't remember. We were all invisible to you;

"Well, Mrs. Bolt and Mademoiselle and the Countess naturally thought it was SHE; but Professor Didymus

She exclaimed in wonder: "You WERE absorbednot to remember Jimmy Brance! He must have been right

about you, after all." She let her amused scrutiny dwell on him. "But how could you? She was false from

"False?" In spite of time and satiety, the male instinct of ownership rose up and repudiated the charge.

Miss Viner caught his look and laughed. "Oh, I only meant externally! You see, she often used to come to my

room after tennis, or to touch up in the evenings, when they were going on; and I assure you she took apart

like a puzzle. In fact I used to say to Jimmyjust to make him wild:'I'll bet you anything you like there's

nothing wrong, because I know she'd never dare un'" She broke the word in two, and her quick blush made

The situation was saved, for Darrow, by an abrupt rush of memories, and he gave way to a mirth which she as

frankly echoed. "Of course," she gasped through her laughter, "I only said it to tease Jimmy"

Her amusement obscurely annoyed him. "Oh, you're all alike!" he exclaimed, moved by an unaccountable

She caught him up in a flashshe didn't miss things! "You say that because you think I'm spiteful and

envious? YesI was envious of Lady Ulrica...Oh, not on account of you or Jimmy Brance! Simply because

she had almost all the things I've always wanted: clothes and fun and motors, and admiration and yachting

and Pariswhy, Paris alone would be enough!And how do you suppose a girl can see that sort of thing

about her day after day, and never wonder why some women, who don't seem to have any more right to it,

have it all tumbled into their laps, while others are writing dinner invitations, and straightening out accounts,

and copying visiting lists, and finishing golfstockings, and matching ribbons, and seeing that the dogs get

She launched the closing words at him on a cry that lifted them above the petulance of vanity; but his sense of

her words was lost in the surprise of her face. Under the flying clouds of her excitement it was no longer a

shallow flowercup but a darkening gleaming mirror that might give back strange depths of feeling. The girl

"That's the kind of education I got at Mrs. Murrett'sand I never had any other," she said with a shrug.

"Five years. I stuck it out longer than any of the others." She spoke as though it were something to be proud

Again a just perceptible shadow crossed her face. "YesI'm out of it now fast enough."

She brooded a moment behind drooped lids; then, with a touch of hauteur: "I'm going to Paris: to study for

"The stage?" Darrow stared at her, dismayed. All his confused contradictory impressions assumed a new

aspect at this announcement; and to hide his surprise he added lightly: "Ahthen you will have Paris, after

"It's not, indeed." Real compassion prompted him to continue: "Have you anyany influence you can count

She gave a somewhat flippant little laugh. "None but my own. I've never had any other to count on."

He passed over the obvious reply. "But have you any idea how the profession is overcrowded? I know I'm

"Of course not. But since, as you say, you'd stuck it out longer than any of the others, couldn't you at least

She made no reply for a moment; then she turned a listless glance to the rainbeaten window. "Oughtn't we

be starting?" she asked, with a lofty assumption of indifference that might have been Lady Ulrica's.

Darrow, surprised by the change, but accepting her rebuff as a phase of what he guessed to be a confused and

tormented mood, rose from his seat and lifted her jacket from the chairback on which she had hung it to dry.

"The truth is, we quarrelled," she broke out, "and I left last night without my dinnerand without my

"Ah" he groaned, with a sharp perception of all the sordid dangers that might attend such a break with Mrs.

"And without a character!" she added, as she slipped her arms into the jacket. "And without a trunk, as it

appears but didn't you say that, before going, there'd be time for another look at the station?"

There was time for another look at the station; but the look again resulted in disappointment, since her trunk

was nowhere to be found in the huge heap disgorged by the newly arrived London express. The fact caused

Miss Viner a moment's perturbation; but she promptly adjusted herself to the necessity of proceeding on her

journey, and her decision confirmed Darrow's vague resolve to go to Paris instead of retracing his way to

Miss Viner seemed cheered at the prospect of his company, and sustained by his offer to telegraph to Charing

Cross for the missing trunk; and he left her to wait in the fly while he hastened back to the telegraph office.

The enquiry despatched, he was turning away from the desk when another thought struck him and he went

back and indited a message to his servant in London: "If any letters with French postmark received since

Almost as soon as the train left Calais her head had dropped back into the corner, and she had fallen asleep.

Sitting opposite, in the compartment from which he had contrived to have other travellers excluded, Darrow

looked at her curiously. He had never seen a face that changed so quickly. A moment since it had danced like

a field of daisies in a summer breeze; now, under the pallid oscillating light of the lamp overhead, it wore the

hard stamp of experience, as of a soft thing chilled into shape before its curves had rounded: and it moved

The story she had imparted to him in the wheezing shaking cabin, and at the Calais buffetwhere he had

insisted on offering her the dinner she had missed at Mrs. Murrett's had given a distincter outline to her

figure. From the moment of entering the New York boardingschool to which a preoccupied guardian had

hastily consigned her after the death of her parents, she had found herself alone in a busy and indifferent

world. Her youthful history might, in fact, have been summed up in the statement that everybody had been

too busy to look after her. Her guardian, a drudge in a big banking house, was absorbed by "the office"; the

guardian's wife, by her health and her religion; and an elder sister, Laura, married, unmarried, remarried, and

pursuing, through all these alternating phases, some vaguely "artistic" ideal on which the guardian and his

wife looked askance, had (as Darrow conjectured) taken their disapproval as a pretext for not troubling

herself about poor Sophy, to whomperhaps for this reasonshe had remained the incarnation of remote

In the course of time a sudden "stroke" of the guardian's had thrown his personal affairs into a state of

confusion from whichafter his widely lamented deathit became evident that it would not be possible to

extricate his ward's inheritance. No one deplored this more sincerely than his widow, who saw in it one more

proof of her husband's life having been sacrificed to the innumerable duties imposed on him, and who could

hardlybut for the counsels of religionhave brought herself to pardon the young girl for her indirect share

in hastening his end. Sophy did not resent this point of view. She was really much sorrier for her guardian's

death than for the loss of her insignificant fortune. The latter had represented only the means of holding her in

bondage, and its disappearance was the occasion of her immediate plunge into the wide bright sea of life

surrounding the islandof her captivity. She had first landedthanks to the intervention of the ladies who

had directed her educationin a Fifth Avenue schoolroom where, for a few months, she acted as a buffer

between three autocratic infants and their bodyguard of nurses and teachers. The toopressing attentions of

their father's valet had caused her to fly this sheltered spot, against the express advice of her educational

superiors, who implied that, in their own case, refinement and selfrespect had always sufficed to keep the

most ungovernable passions at bay. The experience of the guardian's widow having been precisely similar,

and the deplorable precedent of Laura's career being present to all their minds, none of these ladies felt any

obligation to intervene farther in Sophy's affairs; and she was accordingly left to her own resources.

A schoolmate from the Rocky Mountains, who was taking her father and mother to Europe, had suggested

Sophy's accompanying them, and "going round" with her while her progenitors, in the care of the courier,

nursed their ailments at a fashionable bath. Darrow gathered that the "going round" with Mamie Hoke was a

varied and diverting process; but this relatively brilliant phase of Sophy's career was cut short by the

elopement of the inconsiderate Mamie with a "matinee idol" who had followed her from New York, and by

the precipitate return of her parents to negotiate for the repurchase of their child.

It was thenafter an interval of repose with compassionate but impecunious American friends in Paristhat

Miss Viner had been drawn into the turbid current of Mrs. Murrett's career. The impecunious compatriots had

found Mrs. Murrett for her, and it was partly on their account (because they were such dears, and so

unconscious, poor confiding things, of what they were letting her in for) that Sophy had stuck it out so long in

the dreadful house in Chelsea. The Farlows, she explained to Darrow, were the best friends she had ever had

(and the only ones who had ever "been decent" about Laura, whom they had seen once, and intensely

admired); but even after twenty years of Paris they were the most incorrigibly inexperienced angels, and quite

persuaded that Mrs. Murrett was a woman of great intellectual eminence, and the house at Chelsea "the last of

the salons" Darrow knew what she meant? And she hadn't liked to undeceive them, knowing that to do so

would be virtually to throw herself back on their hands, and feeling, moreover, after her previous

experiences, the urgent need of gaining, at any cost, a name for stability; besides whichshe threw it off

with a slight laughno other chance, in all these years, had happened to come to her.

She had brushed in this outline of her career with light rapid strokes, and in a tone of fatalism oddly untinged

by bitterness. Darrow perceived that she classified people according to their greater or less "luck" in life, but

she appeared to harbour no resentment against the undefined power which dispensed the gift in such unequal

measure. Things came one's way or they didn't; and meanwhile one could only look on, and make the most of

small compensations, such as watching "the show" at Mrs. Murrett's, and talking over the Lady Ulricas and

other footlight figures. And at any moment, of course, a turn of the kaleidoscope might suddenly toss a bright

This lighthearted philosophy was not without charm to a young man accustomed to more traditional views.

George Darrow had had a fairly varied experience of feminine types, but the women he had frequented had

either been pronouncedly "ladies" or they had not. Grateful to both for ministering to the more complex

masculine nature, and disposed to assume that they had been evolved, if not designed, to that end, he had

instinctively kept the two groups apart in his mind, avoiding that intermediate society which attempts to

conciliate both theories of life. "Bohemianism" seemed to him a cheaper convention than the other two, and

he liked, above all, people who went as far as they could in their own lineliked his "ladies" and their rivals

to be equally unashamed of showing for exactly what they were. He had not indeedthe fact of Lady Ulrica

was there to remind him been without his experience of a third type; but that experience had left him with

a contemptuous distaste for the woman who uses the privileges of one class to shelter the customs of another.

As to young girls, he had never thought much about them since his early love for the girl who had become

Mrs. Leath. That episode seemed, as he looked back on it, to bear no more relation to reality than a pale

decorative design to the confused richness of a summer landscape. He no longer understood the violent

impulses and dreamy pauses of his own young heart, or the inscrutable abandonments and reluctances of

hers. He had known a moment of anguish at losing herthe mad plunge of youthful instincts against the

barrier of fate; but the first wave of stronger sensation had swept away all but the outline of their story, and

the memory of Anna Summers had made the image of the young girl sacred, but the class uninteresting.

Such generalisations belonged, however, to an earlier stage of his experience. The more he saw of life the

more incalculable he found it; and he had learned to yield to his impressions without feeling the youthful

need of relating them to others. It was the girl in the opposite seat who had roused in him the dormant habit

of comparison. She was distinguished from the daughters of wealth by her avowed acquaintance with the real

business of living, a familiarity as different as possible from their theoretical proficiency; yet it seemed to

Darrow that her experience had made her free without hardness and selfassured without assertiveness.

The rush into Amiens, and the flash of the station lights into their compartment, broke Miss Viner's sleep, and

without changing her position she lifted her lids and looked at Darrow. There was neither surprise nor

bewilderment in the look. She seemed instantly conscious, not so much of where she was, as of the fact that

she was with him; and that fact seemed enough to reassure her. She did not even turn her head to look out;

her eyes continued to rest on him with a vague smile which appeared to light her face from within, while her

Shouts and the hurried tread of travellers came to them through the confusing crosslights of the platform. A

head appeared at the window, and Darrow threw himself forward to defend their solitude; but the intruder

was only a train hand going his round of inspection. He passed on, and the lights and cries of the station

dropped away, merged in a wider haze and a hollower resonance, as the train gathered itself up with a long

Miss Viner's head sank back against the cushion, pushing out a dusky wave of hair above her forehead. The

swaying of the train loosened a lock over her ear, and she shook it back with a movement like a boy's, while

"We shall be in before midnight. We're very nearly on time." He verified the statement by holding up his

She nodded dreamily. "It's all right. I telegraphed Mrs. Farlow that they mustn't think of coming to the

She nodded again, and her eyes closed. It was very pleasant to Darrow that she made no effort to talk or to

dissemble her sleepiness. He sat watching her till the upper lashes met and mingled with the lower, and their

blent shadow lay on her cheek; then he stood up and drew the curtain over the lamp, drowning the

As he sank back into his seat he thought how differently Anna Summersor even Anna Leathwould have

behaved. She would not have talked too much; she would not have been either restless or embarrassed; but

her adaptability, her appropriateness, would not have been nature but "tact." The oddness of the situation

would have made sleep impossible, or, if weariness had overcome her for a moment, she would have waked

with a start, wondering where she was, and how she had come there, and if her hair were tidy; and nothing

The reflection set him wondering whether the "sheltered" girl's bringingup might not unfit her for all

subsequent contact with life. How much nearer to it had Mrs. Leath been brought by marriage and

motherhood, and the passage of fourteen years? What were all her reticences and evasions but the result of

the deadening process of forming a "lady"? The freshness he had marvelled at was like the unnatural

As he looked back at their few days together he saw that their intercourse had been marked, on her part, by

the same hesitations and reserves which had chilled their earlier intimacy. Once more they had had their hour

together and she had wasted it. As in her girlhood, her eyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to

keep. She was still afraid of life, of its ruthlessness, its danger and mystery. She was still the petted little girl

who cannot be left alone in the dark...His memory flew back to their youthful story, and longforgotten

details took shape before him. How frail and faint the picture was! They seemed, he and she, like the ghostly

lovers of the Grecian Urn, forever pursuing without ever clasping each other. To this day he did not quite

know what had parted them: the break had been as fortuitous as the fluttering apart of two seedvessels on a

The very slightness, vagueness, of the memory gave it an added poignancy. He felt the mystic pang of the

parent for a child which has just breathed and died. Why had it happened thus, when the least shifting of

influences might have made it all so different? If she had been given to him then he would have put warmth

in her veins and light in her eyes: would have made her a woman through and through. Musing thus, he had

the sense of waste that is the bitterest harvest of experience. A love like his might have given her the divine

gift of selfrenewal; and now he saw her fated to wane into old age repeating the same gestures, echoing the

words she had always heard, and perhaps never guessing that, just outside her glazed and curtained

consciousness, life rolled away, a vast blackness starred with lights, like the night landscape beyond the

The engine lowered its speed for the passage through a sleeping station. In the light of the platform lamp

Darrow looked across at his companion. Her head had dropped toward one shoulder, and her lips were just

far enough apart for the reflection of the upper one to deepen the colour of the other. The jolting of the train

had again shaken loose the lock above her ear. It danced on her cheek like the flit of a brown wing over

flowers, and Darrow felt an intense desire to lean forward and put it back behind her ear.

As their motorcab, on the way from the Gare du Nord, turned into the central glitter of the Boulevard,

Above the doorway, an arch of flame flashed out the name of a great actress, whose closing performances in

a play of unusual originality had been the theme of long articles in the Paris papers which Darrow had tossed

The girl followed his gesture eagerly. She was all awake and alive now, as if the heady rumours of the streets,

"Cerdine? Is that where she acts?" She put her head out of the window, straining back for a glimpse of the

sacred threshold. As they flew past it she sank into her seat with a satisfied sigh.

"It's delicious enough just to KNOW she's there! I've never seen her, you know. When I was here with Mamie

Hoke we never went anywhere but to the music halls, because she couldn't understand any French; and when

I came back afterward to the Farlows' I was dead broke, and couldn't afford the play, and neither could they;

so the only chance we had was when friends of theirs invited usand once it was to see a tragedy by a

Darrow laughed. "You must do better than that now. 'Le Vertige' is a fine thing, and Cerdine gets some

wonderful effects out of it. You must come with me tomorrow evening to see itwith your friends, of

The flash of a street lamp lit up her radiant face. "Oh, will you really take us? What fun to think that it's

It was wonderfully pleasant to be able to give such pleasure. Darrow was not rich, but it was almost

impossible for him to picture the state of persons with tastes and perceptions like his own, to whom an

evening at the theatre was an unattainable indulgence. There floated through his mind an answer of Mrs.

Leath's to his enquiry whether she had seen the play in question. "No. I meant to, of course, but one is so

overwhelmed with things in Paris. And then I'm rather sick of Cerdineone is always being dragged to see

That, among the people he frequented, was the usual attitude toward such opportunities. There were too

many, they were a nuisance, one had to defend one's self! He even remembered wondering, at the moment,

whether to a really fine taste the exceptional thing could ever become indifferent through habit; whether the

appetite for beauty was so soon dulled that it could be kept alive only by privation. Here, at any rate, was a

fine chance to experiment with such a hunger: he almost wished he might stay on in Paris long enough to take

She was still dwelling on his promise, "It's too beautiful of you! Oh, don't you THINK you'll be able to get

seats?" And then, after a pause of brimming appreciation: "I wonder if you'll think me horrid?but it may be

my only chance; and if you can't get places for us all, wouldn't you perhaps just take ME? After all, the

He had not, of course, thought her horrid, but only the more engaging, for being so natural, and so unashamed

of showing the frank greed of her famished youth. "Oh, you shall go somehow!" he had gaily promised her;

and she had dropped back with a sigh of pleasure as their cab passed into the dimlylit streets of the Farlows'

This little passage came back to him the next morning, as he opened his hotel window on the early roar of the

The girl was there, in the room next to him. That had been the first point in his waking consciousness. The

second was a sense of relief at the obligation imposed on him by this unexpected turn of everts. To wake to

the necessity of action, to postpone perforce the fruitless contemplation of his private grievance, was cause

enough for gratitude, even if the small adventure in which he found himself involved had not, on its own

When he and his companion, the night before, had reached the Farlows' door in the rue de la Chaise, it was

only to find, after repeated assaults on its panels, that the Farlows were no longer there. They had moved

away the week before, not only from their apartment but from Paris; and Miss Viner's breach with Mrs.

Murrett had been too sudden to permit her letter and telegram to overtake them. Both communications, no

doubt, still reposed in a pigeonhole of the loge; but its custodian, when drawn from his lair, sulkily declined

to let Miss Viner verify the fact, and only flung out, in return for Darrow's bribe, the statement that the

To pursue them there at that hour was manifestly impossible, and Miss Viner, disturbed but not disconcerted

by this new obstacle, had quite simply acceded to Darrow's suggestion that she should return for what

The drive back through the dark hush before dawn, with the nocturnal blaze of the Boulevard fading around

them like the false lights of a magician's palace, had so played on her impressionability that she seemed to

give no farther thought to her own predicament. Darrow noticed that she did not feel the beauty and mystery

of the spectacle as much as its pressure of human significance, all its hidden implications of emotion and

adventure. As they passed the shadowy colonnade of the Francais, remote and templelike in the paling

lights, he felt a clutch on his arm, and heard the cry: "There are things THERE that I want so desperately to

see!" and all the way back to the hotel she continued to question him, with shrewd precision and an artless

thirst for detail, about the theatrical life of Paris. He was struck afresh, as he listened, by the way in which her

naturalness eased the situation of constraint, leaving to it only a pleasant savour of good fellowship. It was

the kind of episode that one might, in advance, have characterized as "awkward", yet that was proving, in the

event, as much outside such definitions as a sunrise stroll with a dryad in a dewdrenched forest; and Darrow

reflected that mankind would never have needed to invent tact if it had not first invented social

It had been understood, with his goodnight to Miss Viner, that the next morning he was to look up the

Joigny trains, and see her safely to the station; but, while he breakfasted and waited for a timetable, he

recalled again her cry of joy at the prospect of seeing Cerdine. It was certainly a pity, since that most elusive

and incalculable of artists was leaving the next week for South America, to miss what might be a last sight of

her in her greatest part; and Darrow, having dressed and made the requisite excerpts from the timetable,

It instantly opened at his knock, and she came forth looking as if she had been plunged into some sparkling

element which had curled up all her drooping tendrils and wrapped her in a shimmer of fresh leaves.

"Well, what do you think of me?" she cried; and with a hand at her waist she spun about as if to show off

"I adore it! I always adore new dresseswhy, you don't mean to say it's NOT a new one?"

"No, no, no! My trunk hasn't come, and this is only my old rag of yesterdaybut I never knew the trick to

fail!" And, as he stared: "You see," she joyously explained, "I've always had to dress in all kinds of dreary

leftovers, and sometimes, when everybody else was smart and new, it used to make me awfully miserable.

So one day, when Mrs. Murrett dragged me down unexpectedly to fill a place at dinner, I suddenly thought

I'd try spinning around like that, and say to every one: 'WELL, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF ME?' And, do

you know, they were all taken in, including Mrs. Murrett, who didn't recognize my old turned and dyed rags,

and told me afterward it was awfully bad form to dress as if I were somebody that people would expect to

know! And ever since, whenever I've particularly wanted to look nice, I've just asked people what they

She dramatized her explanation so vividly that Darrow felt as if his point were gained.

"Ah, but this confirms your vocationof course," he cried, "you must see Cerdine!" and, seeing her face fall

at this reminder of the change in her prospects, he hastened to set forth his plan. As he did so, he saw how

easy it was to explain things to her. She would either accept his suggestion, or she would not: but at least she

would waste no time in protestations and objections, or any vain sacrifice to the idols of conformity. The

conviction that one could, on any given point, almost predicate this of her, gave him the sense of having

advanced far enough in her intimacy to urge his arguments against a hasty pursuit of her friends.

Yes, it would certainly be foolishshe at once agreedin the case of such dear indefinite angels as the

Farlows, to dash off after them without more positive proof that they were established at Joigny, and so

established that they could take her in. She owned it was but too probable that they had gone there to "cut

down", and might be doing so in quarters too contracted to receive her; and it would be unfair, on that

chance, to impose herself on them unannounced. The simplest way of getting farther light on the question

would be to go back to the rue de la Chaise, where, at that more conversable hour, the concierge might be less

chary of detail; and she could decide on her next step in the light of such facts as he imparted.

Point by point, she fell in with the suggestion, recognizing, in the light of their unexplained flight, that the

Farlows might indeed be in a situation on which one could not too rashly intrude. Her concern for her friends

seemed to have effaced all thought of herself, and this little indication of character gave Darrow a quite

disproportionate pleasure. She agreed that it would be well to go at once to the rue de la Chaise, but met his

proposal that they should drive by the declaration that it was a "waste" not to walk in Paris; so they set off on

The walk was long enough for him to learn many things about her. The storm of the previous night had

cleared the air, and Paris shone in morning beauty under a sky that was all broad wet washes of white and

blue; but Darrow again noticed that her visual sensitiveness was less keen than her feeling for what he was

sure the good Farlowswhom he already seemed to knowwould have called "the human interest." She

seemed hardly conscious of sensations of form and colour, or of any imaginative suggestion, and the

spectacle before themalways, in its scenic splendour, so moving to her companionbroke up, under her

scrutiny, into a thousand minor points: the things in the shops, the types of character and manner of

occupation shown in the passing faces, the street signs, the names of the hotels they passed, the motley

brightness of the flowercarts, the identity of the churches and public buildings that caught her eye. But what

she liked best, he divined, was the mere fact of being free to walk abroad in the bright air, her tongue rattling

on as it pleased, while her feet kept time to the mighty orchestration of the city's sounds. Her delight in the

fresh air, in the freedom, light and sparkle of the morning, gave him a sudden insight into her stifled past; nor

was it indifferent to him to perceive how much his presence evidently added to her enjoyment. If only as a

sympathetic ear, he guessed what he must be worth to her. The girl had been dying for some one to talk to,

some one before whom she could unfold and shake out to the light her poor little shutaway emotions. Years

of repression were revealed in her sudden burst of confidence; and the pity she inspired made Darrow long to

She had the gift of rapid definition, and his questions as to the life she had led with the Farlows, during the

interregnum between the Hoke and Murrett eras, called up before him a queer little corner of Parisian

existence. The Farlows themselveshe a painter, she a "magazine writer" rose before him in all their

incorruptible simplicity: an elderly New England couple, with vague yearnings for enfranchisement, who

lived in Paris as if it were a Massachusetts suburb, and dwelt hopefully on the "higher side" of the Gallic

nature. With equal vividness she set before him the component figures of the circle from which Mrs. Farlow

drew the "Inner Glimpses of French Life" appearing over her name in a leading New England journal: the

Roumanian lady who had sent them tickets for her tragedy, an elderly French gentleman who, on the strength

of a week's stay at Folkestone, translated English fiction for the provincial press, a lady from Wichita,

Kansas, who advocated free love and the abolition of the corset, a clergyman's widow from Torquay who had

written an "English Ladies' Guide to Foreign Galleries" and a Russian sculptor who lived on nuts and was

"almost certainly" an anarchist. It was this nucleus, and its outer ring of musical, architectural and other

American students, which posed successively to Mrs. Farlow's versatile fancy as a centre of "University

Life", a "Salon of the Faubourg St. Germain", a group of Parisian "Intellectuals" or a "Crosssection of

Montmartre"; but even her faculty for extracting from it the most varied literary effects had not sufficed to

create a permanent demand for the "Inner Glimpses", and there were days whenMr. Farlow's landscapes

being equally unmarketablea temporary withdrawal to the country (subsequently utilized as "Peeps into

Five years of Mrs. Murrett's world, while increasing Sophy's tenderness for the Farlows, had left her with few

illusions as to their power of advancing her fortunes; and she did not conceal from Darrow that her theatrical

projects were of the vaguest. They hung mainly on the problematical goodwill of an ancient comedienne,

with whom Mrs. Farlow had a slight acquaintance (extensively utilized in "Stars of the French Footlights"

and "Behind the Scenes at the Francais"), and who had once, with signs of approval, heard Miss Viner recite

"But of course I know how much that's worth," the girl broke off, with one of her flashes of shrewdness.

"And besides, it isn't likely that a poor old fossil like Mme. Dolle could get anybody to listen to her now,

even if she really thought I had talent. But she might introduce me to people; or at least give me a few tips. If

I could manage to earn enough to pay for lessons I'd go straight to some of the big people and work with

them. I'm rather hoping the Farlows may find me a chance of that kindan engagement with some American

family in Paris who would want to be 'gone round' with like the Hokes, and who'd leave me time enough to

In the rue de la Chaise they learned little except the exact address of the Farlows, and the fact that they had

sublet their flat before leaving. This information obtained, Darrow proposed to Miss Viner that they should

stroll along the quays to a little restaurant looking out on the Seine, and there, over the plat du jour, consider

the next step to be taken. The long walk had given her cheeks a glow indicative of wholesome hunger, and

she made no difficulty about satisfying it in Darrow's company. Regaining the river they walked on in the

direction of Notre Dame, delayed now and again by the young man's irresistible tendency to linger over the

bookstalls, and by his everfresh response to the shifting beauties of the scene. For two years his eyes had

been subdued to the atmospheric effects of London, to the mysterious fusion of darklypiled city and

lowlying bituminous sky; and the transparency of the French air, which left the green gardens and silvery

stones so classically clear yet so softly harmonized, struck him as having a kind of conscious intelligence.

Every line of the architecture, every arch of the bridges, the very sweep of the strong bright river between

them, while contributing to this effect, sent forth each a separate appeal to some sensitive memory; so that,

for Darrow, a walk through the Paris streets was always like the unrolling of a vast tapestry from which

It was a proof of the richness and multiplicity of the spectacle that it served, without incongruity, for so

different a purpose as the background of Miss Viner's enjoyment. As a mere dropscene for her personal

adventure it was just as much in its place as in the evocation of great perspectives of feeling. For her, as he

again perceived when they were seated at their table in a low window above the Seine, Paris was "Paris" by

virtue of all its entertaining details, its endless ingenuities of pleasantness. Where else, for instance, could one

find the dear little dishes of hors d'oeuvre, the symmetrically laid anchovies and radishes, the thin golden

shells of butter, or the wood strawberries and brown jars of cream that gave to their repast the last refinement

of rusticity? Hadn't he noticed, she asked, that cooking always expressed the national character, and that

French food was clever and amusing just because the people were? And in private houses, everywhere, how

the dishes always resembled the talkhow the very same platitudes seemed to go into people's mouths and

come out of them? Couldn't he see just what kind of menu it would make, if a fairy waved a wand and

suddenly turned the conversation at a London dinner into joints and puddings? She always thought it a good

sign when people liked Irish stew; it meant that they enjoyed changes and surprises, and taking life as it

came; and such a beautiful Parisian version of the dish as the navarin that was just being set before them was

like the very best kind of talkthe kind when one could never tell beforehand just what was going to be

Darrow, as he watched her enjoyment of their innocent feast, wondered if her vividness and vivacity were

signs of her calling. She was the kind of girl in whom certain people would instantly have recognized the

histrionic gift. But experience had led him to think that, except at the creative moment, the divine flame burns

low in its possessors. The one or two really intelligent actresses he had known had struck him, in

conversation, as either bovine or primitively "jolly". He had a notion that, save in the mind of genius, the

creative process absorbs too much of the whole stuff of being to leave much surplus for personal expression;

and the girl before him, with her changing face and flexible fancies, seemed destined to work in life itself

The coffee and liqueurs were already on the table when her mind suddenly sprang back to the Farlows. She

jumped up with one of her subversive movements and declared that she must telegraph at once. Darrow

called for writing materials and room was made at her elbow for the parched inkbottle and saturated blotter

of the Parisian restaurant; but the mere sight of these jaded implements seemed to paralyze Miss Viner's

faculties. She hung over the telegraphform with anxiouslydrawn brow, the tip of the penhandle pressed

Darrow looked at his watch. "You could hardly get an answer to your telegram in time to take a train to

She mused for a moment, tapping her lip with the pen. "But I must let them know I'm here. I must find out as

soon as possible if they CAN, have me." She laid the pen down despairingly. "I never COULD write a

This suggestion produced immediate relief, and she gave an energetic dab at the inkbottle; but after another

interval of uncertain scratching she paused again."Oh, it's fearful! I don't know what on earth to say. I

Darrow did not think it necessary to answer. It was no business of his, after all. He lit a cigar and leaned back

in his seat, letting his eyes take their fill of indolent pleasure. In the throes of invention she had pushed back

her hat, loosening the stray lock which had invited his touch the night before. After looking at it for a while

"I don't want to worry themI'm so certain they've got bothers of their own." The faltering scratches ceased

again. "I wish I weren't such an idiot about writing: all the words get frightened and scurry away when I try to

catch them." He glanced back at her with a smile as she bent above her task like a schoolgirl struggling with

a "composition." Her flushed cheek and frowning brow showed that her difficulty was genuine and not an

artless device to draw him to her side. She was really powerless to put her thoughts in writing, and the

inability seemed characteristic of her quick impressionable mind, and of the incessant comeandgo of her

sensations. He thought of Anna Leath's letters, or rather of the few he had received, years ago, from the girl

who had been Anna Summers. He saw the slender firm strokes of the pen, recalled the clear structure of the

phrases, and, by an abrupt association of ideas, remembered that, at that very hour, just such a document

What if it were there, indeed, and had brought him a complete explanation of her telegram? The revulsion of

feeling produced by this thought made him look at the girl with sudden impatience. She struck him as

positively stupid, and he wondered how he could have wasted half his day with her, when all the while Mrs.

Leath's letter might be lying on his table. At that moment, if he could have chosen, he would have left his

companion on the spot; but he had her on his hands, and must accept the consequences.

Some odd intuition seemed to make her conscious of his change of mood, for she sprang from her seat,

"I'm too stupid; but I won't keep you any longer. I'll go back to the hotel and write there."

Her colour deepened, and for the first time, as their eyes met, he noticed a faint embarrassment in hers. Could

it be that his nearness was, after all, the cause of her confusion? The thought turned his vague impatience

with her into a definite resentment toward himself. There was really no excuse for his having blundered into

such an adventure. Why had he not shipped the girl off to Joigny by the evening train, instead of urging her to

delay, and using Cerdine as a pretext? Paris was full of people he knew, and his annoyance was increased by

the thought that some friend of Mrs. Leath's might see him at the play, and report his presence there with a

suspiciously goodlooking companion. The idea was distinctly disagreeable: he did not want the woman he

adored to think he could forget her for a moment. And by this time he had fully persuaded himself that a

letter from her was awaiting him, and had even gone so far as to imagine that its contents might annul the

At the porter's desk a brief "Pas de lettres" fell destructively on the fabric of these hopes. Mrs. Leath had not

writtenshe had not taken the trouble to explain her telegram. Darrow turned away with a sharp pang of

humiliation. Her frugal silence mocked his prodigality of hopes and fears. He had put his question to the

porter once before, on returning to the hotel after luncheon; and now, coming back again in the late afternoon,

he was met by the same denial. The second post was in, and had brought him nothing.

A glance at his watch showed that he had barely time to dress before taking Miss Viner out to dine; but as he

turned to the lift a new thought struck him, and hurrying back into the hall he dashed off another telegram to

his servant: "Have you forwarded any letter with French postmark today? Telegraph answer Terminus."

Some kind of reply would be certain to reach him on his return from the theatre, and he would then know

definitely whether Mrs. Leath meant to write or not. He hastened up to his room and dressed with a lighter

Miss Viner's vagrant trunk had finally found its way to its owner; and, clad in such modest splendour as it

furnished, she shone at Darrow across their restaurant table. In the reaction of his wounded vanity he found

her prettier and more interesting than before. Her dress, sloping away from the throat, showed the graceful set

of her head on its slender neck, and the wide brim of her hat arched above her hair like a dusky halo. Pleasure

danced in her eyes and on her lips, and as she shone on him between the candleshades Darrow felt that he

should not be at all sorry to be seen with her in public. He even sent a careless glance about him in the vague

At the theatre her vivacity sank into a breathless hush, and she sat intent in her corner of their baignoire, with

the gaze of a neophyte about to be initiated into the sacred mysteries. Darrow placed himself behind her, that

he might catch her profile between himself and the stage. He was touched by the youthful seriousness of her

expression. In spite of the experiences she must have had, and of the twentyfour years to which she owned,

she struck him as intrinsically young; and he wondered how so evanescent a quality could have been

preserved in the desiccating Murrett air. As the play progressed he noticed that her immobility was traversed

by swift flashes of perception. She was not missing anything, and her intensity of attention when Cerdine was

After the first act she remained for a few minutes rapt and motionless; then she turned to her companion with

a quick patter of questions. He gathered from them that she had been less interested in following the general

drift of the play than in observing the details of its interpretation. Every gesture and inflection of the great

actress's had been marked and analyzed; and Darrow felt a secret gratification in being appealed to as an

authority on the histrionic art. His interest in it had hitherto been merely that of the cultivated young man

curious of all forms of artistic expression; but in reply to her questions he found things to say about it which

evidently struck his listener as impressive and original, and with which he himself was not, on the whole,

dissatisfied. Miss Viner was much more concerned to hear his views than to express her own, and the

deference with which she received his comments called from him more ideas about the theatre than he had

With the second act she began to give more attention to the development of the play, though her interest was

excited rather by what she called "the story" than by the conflict of character producing it. Oddly combined

with her sharp apprehension of things theatrical, her knowledge of technical "dodges" and greenroom

precedents, her glibness about "lines" and "curtains", was the primitive simplicity of her attitude toward the

tale itself, as toward something that was "really happening" and at which one assisted as at a streetaccident

or a quarrel overheard in the next room. She wanted to know if Darrow thought the lovers "really would" be

involved in the catastrophe that threatened them, and when he reminded her that his predictions were

disqualified by his having already seen the play, she exclaimed: "Oh, then, please don't tell me what's going

to happen!" and the next moment was questioning him about Cerdine's theatrical situation and her private

history. On the latter point some of her enquiries were of a kind that it is not in the habit of young girls to

make, or even to know how to make; but her apparent unconsciousness of the fact seemed rather to reflect on

When the second act was over, Darrow suggested their taking a turn in the foyer; and seated on one of its

cramped red velvet sofas they watched the crowd surge up and down in a glare of lights and gilding. Then, as

she complained of the heat, he led her through the press to the congested cafe at the foot of the stairs, where

orangeades were thrust at them between the shoulders of packed consommateurs and Darrow, lighting a

cigarette while she sucked her straw, knew the primitive complacency of the man at whose companion other

On a corner of their table lay a smeared copy of a theatrical journal. It caught Sophy's eye and after poring

'They're giving Oedipe tomorrow afternoon at the Francais! I suppose you've seen it heaps and heaps of

She sighed at his suggestion, but without discarding it. "How can I? The last train for Joigny leaves at four."

"I shall know tomorrow early. I asked Mrs. Farlow to telegraph as soon as she got my letter." A twinge of

compunction shot through Darrow. Her words recalled to him that on their return to the hotel after luncheon

she had given him her letter to post, and that he had never thought of it again. No doubt it was still in the

pocket of the coat he had taken off when he dressed for dinner. In his perturbation he pushed back his chair,

"Nothing. Onlyyou know I don't fancy that letter can have caught this afternoon's post."

"Why, I'm afraid it will have been too late." He bent his head to light another cigarette.

She struck her hands together with a gesture which, to his amusement, he noticed she had caught from

"Oh, dear, I hadn't thought of that! But surely it will reach them in the morning?"

"Some time in the morning, I suppose. You know the French provincial post is never in a hurry. I don't

believe your letter would have been delivered this evening in any case." As this idea occurred to him he felt

The bell announcing the close of the entr'acte shrilled through the cafe, and she sprang to her feet.

Instantly forgetful of the Farlows, she slipped her arm through his and turned to push her way back to the

As soon as the curtain went up she as promptly forgot her companion. Watching her from the corner to which

he had returned, Darrow saw that great waves of sensation were beating deliciously against her brain. It was

as though every starved sensibility were throwing out feelers to the mounting tide; as though everything she

was seeing, hearing, imagining, rushed in to fill the void of all she had always been denied.

Darrow, as he observed her, again felt a detached enjoyment in her pleasure. She was an extraordinary

conductor of sensation: she seemed to transmit it physically, in emanations that set the blood dancing in his

veins. He had not often had the opportunity of studying the effects of a perfectly fresh impression on so

responsive a temperament, and he felt a fleeting desire to make its chords vibrate for his own amusement.

At the end of the next act she discovered with dismay that in their transit to the cafe she had lost the beautiful

pictured programme he had bought for her. She wanted to go back and hunt for it, but Darrow assured her

that he would have no trouble in getting her another. When he went out in quest of it she followed him

protestingly to the door of the box, and he saw that she was distressed at the thought of his having to spend an

additional franc for her. This frugality smote Darrow by its contrast to her natural bright profusion; and again

When he returned to the box she was still standing in the doorway, and he noticed that his were not the only

eyes attracted to her. Then another impression sharply diverted his attention. Above the fagged faces of the

Parisian crowd he had caught the fresh fair countenance of Owen Leath signalling a joyful recognition. The

young man, slim and eager, had detached himself from two companions of his own type, and was seeking to

push through the press to his step mother's friend. The encounter, to Darrow, could hardly have been more

inopportune; it woke in him a confusion of feelings of which only the uppermost was allayed by seeing

Sophy Viner, as if instinctively warned, melt back into the shadow of their box.

A minute later Owen Leath was at his side. "I was sure it was you! Such luck to run across you! Won't you

come off with us to supper after it's over? Montmartre, or wherever else you please. Those two chaps over

there are friends of mine, at the Beaux Arts; both of them rather good fellows and we'd be so glad"

For half a second Darrow read in his hospitable eye the termination "if you'd bring the lady too"; then it

Darrow, excusing himself with thanks, lingered on for a few minutes' chat, in which every word, and every

tone of his companion's voice, was like a sharp light flashed into aching eyes. He was glad when the bell

called the audience to their seats, and young Leath left him with the friendly question: "We'll see you at Givre

When he rejoined Miss Viner, Darrow's first care was to find out, by a rapid inspection of the house, whether

Owen Leath's seat had given him a view of their box. But the young man was not visible from it, and Darrow

concluded that he had been recognized in the corridor and not at his companion's side. He scarcely knew why

it seemed to him so important that this point should be settled; certainly his sense of reassurance was less due

to regard for Miss Viner than to the persistent vision of grave offended eyes...

During the drive back to the hotel this vision was persistently kept before him by the thought that the evening

post might have brought a letter from Mrs. Leath. Even if no letter had yet come, his servant might have

telegraphed to say that one was on its way; and at the thought his interest in the girl at his side again cooled to

the fraternal, the almost fatherly. She was no more to him, after all, than an appealing young creature to

whom it was mildly agreeable to have offered an evening's diversion; and when, as they rolled into the

illuminated court of the hotel, she turned with a quick movement which brought her happy face close to his,

At the desk the night porter, after a vain search through the pigeonholes, was disposed to think that a letter

or telegram had in fact been sent up for the gentleman; and Darrow, at the announcement, could hardly wait

to ascend to his room. Upstairs, he and his companion had the long dimlylit corridor to themselves, and

Sophy paused on her threshold, gathering up in one hand the pale folds of her cloak, while she held the other

"If the telegram comes early I shall be off by the first train; so I suppose this is goodbye," she said, her eyes

Darrow, with a renewed start of contrition, perceived that he had again forgotten her letter; and as their hands

met he vowed to himself that the moment she had left him he would dash down stairs to post it.

A tremor of pleasure crossed her face as he stood before her, smiling a little uncertainly.

He felt in her hand the same tremor he had seen in her face. "But it's YOU, on the contrary" he began,

As he dropped it, and their eyes met, something passed through hers that was like a light carried rapidly

"Good night; you must be awfully tired," he said with a friendly abruptness, turning away without even

waiting to see her pass into her room. He unlocked his door, and stumbling over the threshold groped in the

darkness for the electric button. The light showed him a telegram on the table, and he forgot everything else

It fell from Darrow's hand to the floor, and he dropped into a chair by the table and sat gazing at the dingy

drab and olive pattern of the carpet. She had not written, then; she had not written, and it was manifest now

that she did not mean to write. If she had had any intention of explaining her telegram she would certainly,

within twentyfour hours, have followed it up by a letter. But she evidently did not intend to explain it, and

her silence could mean only that she had no explanation to give, or else that she was too indifferent to be

Darrow, face to face with these alternatives, felt a recrudescence of boyish misery. It was no longer his hurt

vanity that cried out. He told himself that he could have borne an equal amount of pain, if only it had left

Mrs. Leath's image untouched; but he could not bear to think of her as trivial or insincere. The thought was so

intolerable that he felt a blind desire to punish some one else for the pain it caused him.

As he sat moodily staring at the carpet its silly intricacies melted into a blur from which the eyes of Mrs.

Leath again looked out at him. He saw the fine sweep of her brows, and the deep look beneath them as she

had turned from him on their last evening in London. "This will be good bye, then," she had said; and it

At the thought he jumped to his feet and took down from its hook the coat in which he had left Miss Viner's

letter. The clock marked the third quarter after midnight, and he knew it would make no difference if he went

down to the postbox now or early the next morning; but he wanted to clear his conscience, and having found

A sound in the next room made him pause. He had become conscious again that, a few feet off, on the other

side of a thin partition, a small keen flame of life was quivering and agitating the air. Sophy's face came hack

to him insistently. It was as vivid now as Mrs. Leath's had been a moment earlier. He recalled with a faint

smile of retrospective pleasure the girl's enjoyment of her evening, and the innumerable fine feelers of

It gave him a curiously close sense of her presence to think that at that moment she was living over her

enjoyment as intensely as he was living over his unhappiness. His own case was irremediable, but it was easy

enough to give her a few more hours of pleasure. And did she not perhaps secretly expect it of him? After all,

if she had been very anxious to join her friends she would have telegraphed them on reaching Paris, instead

of writing. He wondered now that he had not been struck at the moment by so artless a device to gain more

time. The fact of her having practised it did not make him think less well of her; it merely strengthened the

impulse to use his opportunity. She was starving, poor child, for a little amusement, a little personal

lifewhy not give her the chance of another day in Paris? If he did so, should he not be merely falling in

At the thought his sympathy for her revived. She became of absorbing interest to him as an escape from

himself and an object about which his thwarted activities could cluster. He felt less drearily alone because of

her being there, on the other side of the door, and in his gratitude to her for giving him this relief he began,

with indolent amusement, to plan new ways of detaining her. He dropped back into his chair, lit a cigar, and

smiled a little at the image of her smiling face. He tried to imagine what incident of the day she was likely to

be recalling at that particular moment, and what part he probably played in it. That it was not a small part he

Now and then a sound from her room brought before him more vividly the reality of the situation and the

strangeness of the vast swarming solitude in which he and she were momentarily isolated, amid long lines of

rooms each holding its separate secret. The nearness of all these other mysteries enclosing theirs gave Darrow

a more intimate sense of the girl's presence, and through the fumes of his cigar his imagination continued to

follow her to and fro, traced the curve of her slim young arms as she raised them to undo her hair, pictured

the sliding down of her dress to the waist and then to the knees, and the whiteness of her feet as she slipped

He stood up and shook himself with a yawn, throwing away the end of his cigar. His glance, in following it,

lit on the telegram which had dropped to the floor. The sounds in the next room had ceased, and once more he

Opening the window, he folded his arms on the sill and looked out on the vast lightspangled mass of the

At the Theatre Francais, the next afternoon, Darrow yawned and fidgeted in his seat.

The day was warm, the theatre crowded and airless, and the performance, it seemed to him, intolerably bad.

He stole a glance at his companion, wondering if she shared his feelings. Her rapt profile betrayed no unrest,

but politeness might have caused her to feign an interest that she did not feel. He leaned back impatiently,

stifling another yawn, and trying to fix his attention on the stage. Great things were going forward there, and

he was not insensible to the stern beauties of the ancient drama. But the interpretation of the play seemed to

him as airless and lifeless as the atmosphere of the theatre. The players were the same whom he had often

applauded in those very parts, and perhaps that fact added to the impression of staleness and conventionality

produced by their performance. Surely it was time to infuse new blood into the veins of the moribund art. He

had the impression that the ghosts of actors were giving a spectral performance on the shores of Styx.

Certainly it was not the most profitable way for a young man with a pretty companion to pass the golden

hours of a spring afternoon. The freshness of the face at his side, reflecting the freshness of the season,

suggested dapplings of sunlight through new leaves, the sound of a brook in the grass, the ripple of

When at length the fateful march of the cothurns was stayed by the single pause in the play, and Darrow had

led Miss Viner out on the balcony overhanging the square before the theatre, he turned to see if she shared his

feelings. But the rapturous look she gave him checked the depreciation on his lips.

"Oh, why did you bring me out here? One ought to creep away and sit in the dark till it begins again!"

"Didn't they YOU?...As if the gods were there all the while, just behind them, pulling the strings?" Her hands

were pressed against the railing, her face shining and darkening under the wingbeats of successive

Darrow smiled in enjoyment of her pleasure. After all, he had felt all that, long ago; perhaps it was his own

fault, rather than that of the actors, that the poetry of the play seemed to have evaporated...But no, he had

been right in judging the performance to be dull and stale: it was simply his companion's inexperience, her

"BORED?" She made a little aggrieved grimace. "You mean you thought me too ignorant and stupid to

"No; not that." The hand nearest him still lay on the railing of the balcony, and he covered it for a moment

"Tell me just what you think," he said, bending his head a little, and only halfaware of his words.

She did not turn her face to his, but began to talk rapidly, trying to convey something of what she felt. But

she was evidently unused to analyzing her aesthetic emotions, and the tumultuous rush of the drama seemed

to have left her in a state of panting wonder, as though it had been a storm or some other natural cataclysm.

She had no literary or historic associations to which to attach her impressions: her education had evidently

not comprised a course in Greek literature. But she felt what would probably have been unperceived by many

a young lady who had taken a first in classics: the ineluctable fatality of the tale, the dread sway in it of the

same mysterious "luck" which pulled the threads of her own small destiny. It was not literature to her, it was

fact: as actual, as near by, as what was happening to her at the moment and what the next hour held in store.

Seen in this light, the play regained for Darrow its supreme and poignant reality. He pierced to the heart of its

significance through all the artificial accretions with which his theories of art and the conventions of the stage

After this there could be no question of flight, and he took her back to the theatre, content to receive his own

sensations through the medium of hers. But with the continuation of the play, and the oppression of the heavy

air, his attention again began to wander, straying back over the incidents of the morning.

He had been with Sophy Viner all day, and he was surprised to find how quickly the time had gone. She had

hardly attempted, as the hours passed, to conceal her satisfaction on finding that no telegram came from the

Farlows. "They'll have written," she had simply said; and her mind had at once flown on to the golden

prospect of an afternoon at the theatre. The intervening hours had been disposed of in a stroll through the

lively streets, and a repast, luxuriously lingered over, under the chestnutboughs of a restaurant in the

Champs Elysees. Everything entertained and interested her, and Darrow remarked, with an amused

detachment, that she was not insensible to the impression her charms produced. Yet there was no hard edge

of vanity in her sense of her prettiness: she seemed simply to be aware of it as a note in the general harmony,

After luncheon, as they sat over their coffee, she had again asked an immense number of questions and

delivered herself of a remarkable variety of opinions. Her questions testified to a wholesome and

comprehensive human curiosity, and her comments showed, like her face and her whole attitude, an odd

mingling of precocious wisdom and disarming ignorance. When she talked to him about "life"the word

was often on her lipsshe seemed to him like a child playing with a tiger's cub; and he said to himself that

some day the child would grow upand so would the tiger. Meanwhile, such expertness qualified by such

candour made it impossible to guess the extent of her personal experience, or to estimate its effect on her

character. She might be any one of a dozen definable types, or she mightmore disconcertingly to her

companion and more perilously to herselfbe a shifting and uncrystallized mixture of them all.

Her talk, as usual, had promptly reverted to the stage. She was eager to learn about every form of dramatic

expression which the metropolis of things theatrical had to offer, and her curiosity ranged from the official

temples of the art to its less hallowed haunts. Her searching enquiries about a play whose production, on one

of the latter scenes, had provoked a considerable amount of scandal, led Darrow to throw out laughingly: "To

see THAT you'll have to wait till you're married!" and his answer had sent her off at a tangent.

"Yes; from girls who've only got to choose!" Her eyes had grown suddenly almost old. "I'd like you to see the

only men who've ever wanted to marry me! One was the doctor on the steamer, when I came abroad with the

Hokes: he'd been cashiered from the navy for drunkenness. The other was a deaf widower with three

grownup daughters, who kept a clockshop in Bayswater!Besides," she rambled on, "I'm not so sure that

I believe in marriage. You see I'm all for selfdevelopment and the chance to live one's life. I'm awfully

It was just when she proclaimed herself most awfully modern that she struck him as most helplessly

backward; yet the moment after, without any bravado, or apparent desire to assume an attitude, she would

propound some social axiom which could have been gathered only in the bitter soil of experience.

All these things came back to him as he sat beside her in the theatre and watched her ingenuous absorption. It

was on "the story" that her mind was fixed, and in life also, he suspected, it would always be "the story",

rather than its remoter imaginative issues, that would hold her. He did not believe there were ever any echoes

There was no question, however, that what she felt was felt with intensity: to the actual, the immediate, she

spread vibrating strings. When the play was over, and they came out once more into the sunlight, Darrow

She made no answer. Her dark gaze seemed to rest on him without seeing him. Her cheeks and lips were pale,

and the loose hair under her hatbrim clung to her forehead in damp rings. She looked like a young priestess

"Come," he went on, putting his hand on her arm, "let's jump into a taxi and get some air and sunshine. Look,

He pointed over their heads, to where a white moon hung in the misty blue above the roofs of the rue de

She made no answer, and he signed to a motorcab, calling out to the driver: "To the Bois!"

As the carriage turned toward the Tuileries she roused herself. "I must go first to the hotel. There may be a

Darrow saw that the reality of the situation had suddenly forced itself upon her. "I MUST decide on

He would have liked to postpone the return, to persuade her to drive directly to the Bois for dinner. It would

have been easy enough to remind her that she could not start for Joigny that evening, and that therefore it was

of no moment whether she received the Farlows' answer then or a few hours later; but for some reason he

hesitated to use this argument, which had come so naturally to him the day before. After all, he knew she

The porter, interrogated, was not sure. He himself had received nothing for the lady, but in his absence his

Darrow and Sophy mounted together in the lift, and the young man, while she went into her room, unlocked

his own door and glanced at the empty table. For him at least no message had come; and on her threshold, a

He feigned an unregretful surprise. "So much the better! And now, shall we drive out somewhere? Or would

you rather take a boat to Bellevue? Have you ever dined there, on the terrace, by moonlight? It's not at all

"But when I wrote yesterday I asked them to telegraph. I suppose they're horribly hard up, the poor dears, and

they thought a letter would do as well as a telegram." The colour had risen to her face. "That's why I wrote

Nothing she could have said could have filled her listener with a deeper contrition. He felt the red in his own

face as he recalled the motive with which he had credited her in his midnight musings. But that motive, after

all, had simply been trumped up to justify his own disloyalty: he had never really believed in it. The

reflection deepened his confusion, and he would have liked to take her hand in his and confess the injustice

She may have interpreted his change of colour as an involuntary protest at being initiated into such shabby

details, for she went on with a laugh: "I suppose you can hardly understand what it means to have to stop and

think whether one can afford a telegram? But I've always had to consider such things. And I mustn't stay here

any longer nowI must try to get a night train for Joigny. Even if the Farlows can't take me in, I can go to

the hotel: it will cost less than staying here." She paused again and then exclaimed: "I ought to have thought

of that sooner; I ought to have telegraphed yesterday! But I was sure I should hear from them today; and I

wantedoh, I DID so awfully want to stay!" She threw a troubled look at Darrow. "Do you happen to

Darrow was still standing on her threshold. As she put the question he entered the room and closed the door

His heart was beating a little faster than usual and he had no clear idea of what he was about to do or say,

beyond the definite conviction that, whatever passing impulse of expiation moved him, he would not be fool

enough to tell her that he had not sent her letter. He knew that most wrongdoing works, on the whole, less

mischief than its useless confession; and this was clearly a case where a passing folly might be turned, by

"I'm so sorryso sorry; but you must let me help you...You will let me help you?" he said.

He took her hands and pressed them together between his, counting on a friendly touch to help out the

insufficiency of words. He felt her yield slightly to his clasp, and hurried on without giving her time to

"Isn't it a pity to spoil our good time together by regretting anything you might have done to prevent our

She drew back, freeing her hands. Her face, losing its look of appealing confidence, was suddenly sharpened

Darrow stood before her, constrained and ashamed, and ever more keenly aware that the betrayal of his

Her face instantly melted to laughter. "Well, thenI WON'T be sorry; I won't regret anything except that our

The words were so unexpected that they routed all his resolves. If she had gone on doubting him he could

probably have gone on deceiving her; but her unhesitating acceptance of his word made him hate the part he

was playing. At the same moment a doubt shot up its serpenthead in his own bosom. Was it not he rather than

she who was childishly trustful? Was she not almost too ready to take his word, and dismiss once for all the

tiresome question of the letter? Considering what her experiences must have been, such trustfulness seemed

open to suspicion. But the moment his eyes fell on her he was ashamed of the thought, and knew it for what it

"Why should our good time be over?" he asked. "Why shouldn't it last a little longer?"

She looked up, her lips parted in surprise; but before she could speak he went on: "I want you to stay with

meI want you, just for a few days, to have all the things you've never had. It's not always May and

Pariswhy not make the most of them now? You know mewe're not strangerswhy shouldn't you treat

While he spoke she had drawn away a little, but her hand still lay in his. She was pale, and her eyes were

fixed on him in a gaze in which there was neither distrust or resentment, but only an ingenuous wonder. He

"Oh, do! You must. Listen: to prove that I'm sincere I'll tell you...I'll tell you I didn't post your letter...I didn't

post it because I wanted so much to give you a few good hours...and because I couldn't bear to have you go."

He had the feeling that the words were being uttered in spite of him by some malicious witness of the scene,

The girl had listened to him in silence. She remained motionless for a moment after he had ceased to speak;

"You didn't post my letter? You kept it back on purpose? And you tell me so NOW, to prove to me that I'd

better put myself under your protection?" She burst into a laugh that had in it all the piercing echoes of her

Murrett past, and her face, at the same moment, underwent the same change, shrinking into a small

malevolent white mask in which the eyes burned black. "Thank youthank you most awfully for telling me!

And for all your other kind intentions! The plan's delightfulreally quite delightful, and I'm extremely

She dropped into a seat beside her dressingtable, resting her chin on her lifted hands, and laughing out at

Her outburst did not offend the young man; its immediate effect was that of allaying his agitation. The

theatrical touch in her manner made his offense seem more venial than he had thought it a moment before.

He drew up a chair and sat down beside her. "After all," he said, in a tone of goodhumoured protest, "I

needn't have told you I'd kept back your letter; and my telling you seems rather strong proof that I hadn't any

She met this with a shrug, but he did not give her time to answer. "My designs," he continued with a smile,

"were not nefarious. I saw you'd been through a bad time with Mrs. Murrett, and that there didn't seem to be

much fun ahead for you; and I didn't seeand I don't yet seethe harm of trying to give you a few hours of

amusement between a depressing past and a not particularly cheerful future." He paused again, and then went

on, in the same tone of friendly reasonableness: "The mistake I made was not to tell you this at oncenot to

ask you straight out to give me a day or two, and let me try to make you forget all the things that are troubling

you. I was a fool not to see that if I'd put it to you in that way you'd have accepted or refused, as you chose;

but that at least you wouldn't have mistaken my intentions.Intentions!" He stood up, walked the length of

the room, and turned back to where she still sat motionless, her elbows propped on the dressingtable, her

chin on her hands. "What rubbish we talk about intentions! The truth is I hadn't any: I just liked being with

you. Perhaps you don't know how extraordinarily one can like being with you...I was depressed and adrift

myself; and you made me forget my bothers; and when I found you were goingand going back to

dreariness, as I wasI didn't see why we shouldn't have a few hours together first; so I left your letter in my

He saw her face melt as she listened, and suddenly she unclasped her hands and leaned to him.

"But are YOU unhappy too? Oh, I never understoodI never dreamed it! I thought you'd always had

Darrow broke into a laugh at this ingenuous picture of his state. He was ashamed of trying to better his case

by an appeal to her pity, and annoyed with himself for alluding to a subject he would rather have kept out of

his thoughts. But her look of sympathy had disarmed him; his heart was bitter and distracted; she was near

She stood up with a smiling headshake. "Oh, it's not so often that people try to give me any pleasuremuch

less two whole days of it! I sha'n't forget how kind you've been. I shall have plenty of time to remember. But

She hung her head in meditation. "But I can't stay.How CAN I stay?" she broke out, as if arguing with

She looked up, and their eyes exchanged meanings for a rapid minute. Her gaze was as clear as a boy's. "Oh,

it's not THAT," she exclaimed, almost impatiently; "it's not people I'm afraid of! They've never put

He liked her directness as he had never liked it before. "Well, then, what is it? Not ME, I hope?"

"No, not you: I like you. It's the money! With me that's always the root of the matter. I could never yet afford

Is THAT all?" He laughed, relieved by her naturalness. "Look here; since we re talking as man to mancan't

"Trust you? How do you mean? You'd better not trust ME!" she laughed back sharply. "I might never be able

His gesture brushed aside the allusion. "Money may be the root of the matter; it can't be the whole of it,

between friends. Don't you think one friend may accept a small service from another without looking too far

ahead or weighing too many chances? The question turns entirely on what you think of me. If you like me

well enough to be willing to take a few days' holiday with me, just for the pleasure of the thing, and the

pleasure you'll be giving me, let's shake hands on it. If you don't like me well enough we'll shake hands too;

"Oh, but I shall be sorry too!" Her face, as she lifted it to his, looked so small and young that Darrow felt a

"Well, then?" He stood looking down on her, his eyes persuading her. He was now intensely aware that his

nearness was having an effect which made it less and less necessary for him to choose his words, and he went

on, more mindful of the inflections of his voice than of what he was actually saying: "Why on earth should

we say goodbye if we're both sorry to? Won't you tell me your reason? It's not a bit like you to let anything

stand in the way of your saying just what you feel. You mustn't mind offending me, you know!"

She hung before him like a leaf on the meeting of cross currents, that the next ripple may sweep forward or

whirl back. Then she flung up her head with the odd boyish movement habitual to her in moments of

excitement. "What I feel? Do you want to know what I feel? That you're giving me the only chance I've ever

She turned about on her heel and, dropping into the nearest chair, sank forward, her face hidden against the

Under the folds of her thin summer dress the modelling of her back and of her lifted arms, and the slight

hollow between her shoulderblades, recalled the faint curves of a terracotta statuette, some young image of

grace hardly more than sketched in the clay. Darrow, as he stood looking at her, reflected that her character,

for all its seeming firmness, its flashing edges of "opinion", was probably no less immature. He had not

expected her to yield so suddenly to his suggestion, or to confess her yielding in that way. At first he was

slightly disconcerted; then he saw how her attitude simplified his own. Her behaviour had all the indecision

and awkwardness of inexperience. It showed that she was a child after all; and all he could doall he had

For a moment he fancied she was crying; but the next she was on her feet and had swept round on him a face

For a while they shone on each other without speaking; then she sprang to him and held out both hands.

He felt like answering: "You're the very creature to whom it was bound to happen"; but the words had a

double sense that made him wince, and instead he caught her proffered hands and stood looking at her across

the length of her arms, without attempting to bend them or to draw her closer. He wanted her to know how

her words had moved him; but his thoughts were blurred by the rush of the same emotion that possessed her,

He ended by giving her back a laugh as frank as her own, and declaring, as he dropped her hands: "All that

All day, since the late reluctant dawn, the rain had come down in torrents. It streamed against Darrow's

highperched windows, reduced their vast prospect of roofs and chimneys to a black oily huddle, and filled

The streams descended with the regularity of a third day's rain, when trimming and shuffling are over, and the

weather has settled down to do its worst. There were no variations of rhythm, no lyrical ups and downs: the

grey lines streaking the panes were as dense and uniform as a page of unparagraphed narrative.

George Darrow had drawn his armchair to the fire. The time table he had been studying lay on the floor, and

he sat staring with dull acquiescence into the boundless blur of rain, which affected him like a vast projection

It was exactly ten days since his hurried unpacking had strewn it with the contents of his portmanteaux. His

brushes and razors were spread out on the blotched marble of the chest of drawers. A stack of newspapers

had accumulated on the centre table under the "electrolier", and half a dozen paper novels lay on the

mantelpiece among cigarcases and toilet bottles; but these traces of his passage had made no mark on the

featureless dulness of the room, its look of being the makeshift setting of innumerable transient collocations.

There was something sardonic, almost sinister, in its appearance of having deliberately "made up" for its

anonymous part, all in noncommittal drabs and browns, with a carpet and paper that nobody would

Darrow picked up the timetable and tossed it on to the table. Then he rose to his feet, lit a cigar and went to

the window. Through the rain he could just discover the face of a clock in a tall building beyond the railway

roofs. He pulled out his watch, compared the two timepieces, and started the hands of his with such a rush

that they flew past the hour and he had to make them repeat the circuit more deliberately. He felt a quite

disproportionate irritation at the trifling blunder. When he had corrected it he went back to his chair and

threw himself down, leaning back his head against his hands. Presently his cigar went out, and he got up,

The room was getting on his nerves. During the first few days, while the skies were clear, he had not noticed

it, or had felt for it only the contemptuous indifference of the traveller toward a provisional shelter. But now

that he was leaving it, was looking at it for the last time, it seemed to have taken complete possession of his

mind, to be soaking itself into him like an ugly indelible blot. Every detail pressed itself on his notice with the

familiarity of an accidental confidant: whichever way he turned, he felt the nudge of a transient intimacy...

The one fixed point in his immediate future was that his leave was over and that he must be back at his post

in London the next morning. Within twentyfour hours he would again be in a daylight world of recognized

activities, himself a busy, responsible, relatively necessary factor in the big whirring social and official

machine. That fixed obligation was the fact he could think of with the least discomfort, yet for some

unaccountable reason it was the one on which he found it most difficult to fix his thoughts. Whenever he did

so, the room jerked him back into the circle of its insistent associations. It was extraordinary with what a

microscopic minuteness of loathing he hated it all: the grimy carpet and wallpaper, the black marble mantel

piece, the clock with a gilt allegory under a dusty bell, the highbolstered browncounterpaned bed, the

framed card of printed rules under the electric light switch, and the door of communication with the next

At the outset, he had felt no special sense of responsibility. He was satisfied that he had struck the right note,

and convinced of his power of sustaining it. The whole incident had somehow seemed, in spite of its vulgar

setting and its inevitable prosaic propinquities, to be enacting itself in some unmapped region outside the pale

of the usual. It was not like anything that had ever happened to him before, or in which he had ever pictured

himself as likely to be involved; but that, at first, had seemed no argument against his fitness to deal with it.

Perhaps but for the three days' rain he might have got away without a doubt as to his adequacy. The rain had

made all the difference. It had thrown the whole picture out of perspective, blotted out the mystery of the

remoter planes and the enchantment of the middle distance, and thrust into prominence every commonplace

fact of the foreground. It was the kind of situation that was not helped by being thought over; and by the

perversity of circumstance he had been forced into the unwilling contemplation of its every aspect...

His cigar had gone out again, and he threw it into the fire and vaguely meditated getting up to find another.

But the mere act of leaving his chair seemed to call for a greater exertion of the will than he was capable of,

and he leaned his head back with closed eyes and listened to the drumming of the rain.

A different noise aroused him. It was the opening and closing of the door leading from the corridor into the

adjoining room. He sat motionless, without opening his eyes; but now another sight forced itself under his

lowered lids. It was the precise photographic picture of that other room. Everything in it rose before him and

pressed itself upon his vision with the same acuity of distinctness as the objects surrounding him. A step

sounded on the floor, and he knew which way the step was directed, what pieces of furniture it had to skirt,

where it would probably pause, and what was likely to arrest it. He heard another sound, and recognized it as

that of a wet umbrella placed in the black marble jamb of the chimneypiece, against the hearth. He caught

the creak of a hinge, and instantly differentiated it as that of the wardrobe against the opposite wall. Then he

heard the mouselike squeal of a reluctant drawer, and knew it was the upper one in the chest of drawers

beside the bed: the clatter which followed was caused by the mahogany toiletglass jumping on its loosened

The step crossed the floor again. It was strange how much better he knew it than the person to whom it

belonged! Now it was drawing near the door of communication between the two rooms. He opened his eyes

and looked. The step had ceased and for a moment there was silence. Then he heard a low knock. He made

no response, and after an interval he saw that the door handle was being tentatively turned. He closed his eyes

The door opened, and the step was in the room, coming cautiously toward him. He kept his eyes shut,

relaxing his body to feign sleep. There was another pause, then a wavering soft advance, the rustle of a dress

behind his chair, the warmth of two hands pressed for a moment on his lids. The palms of the hands had the

lingering scent of some stuff that he had bought on the Boulevard...He looked up and saw a letter falling over

The letter, before he could catch it, had slipped between his knees to the floor. It lay there, address upward, at

his feet, and while he sat staring down at the strong slender characters on the bluegray envelope an arm

"Oh, don'tDON'T" broke from him, and he bent over and caught the arm. The face above it was close to

He dropped the arm and stooped down. His grasp closed over the letter, he fingered its thickness and weight

Suddenly he felt the pressure of the hand on his shoulder, and became aware that the face was still leaning

He bent forward first and threw the unopened letter into the middle of the fire.

The light of the October afternoon lay on an old highroofed house which enclosed in its long expanse of

brick and yellowish stone the breadth of a grassy court filled with the shadow and sound of limes.

From the escutcheoned piers at the entrance of the court a level drive, also shaded by limes, extended to a

white barred gate beyond which an equally level avenue of grass, cut through a wood, dwindled to a

In the court, halfway between house and drive, a lady stood. She held a parasol above her head, and looked

now at the housefront, with its double flight of steps meeting before a glazed door under sculptured

trophies, now down the drive toward the grassy cutting through the wood. Her air was less of expectancy than

of contemplation: she seemed not so much to be watching for any one, or listening for an approaching sound,

as letting the whole aspect of the place sink into her while she held herself open to its influence. Yet it was no

less apparent that the scene was not new to her. There was no eagerness of investigation in her survey: she

seemed rather to be looking about her with eyes to which, for some intimate inward reason, details long since

This was in fact the exact sensation of which Mrs. Leath was conscious as she came forth from the house and

descended into the sunlit court. She had come to meet her stepson, who was likely to be returning at that

hour from an afternoon's shooting in one of the more distant plantations, and she carried in her hand the letter

which had sent her in search of him; but with her first step out of the house all thought of him had been

The scene about her was known to satiety. She had seen Givre at all seasons of the year, and for the greater

part of every year, since the faroff day of her marriage; the day when, ostensibly driving through its gates at

her husband's side, she had actually been carried there on a cloud of iriswinged visions.

The possibilities which the place had then represented were still vividly present to her. The mere phrase "a

French chateau" had called up to her youthful fancy a throng of romantic associations, poetic, pictorial and

emotional; and the serene face of the old house seated in its park among the poplarbordered meadows of

middle France, had seemed, on her first sight of it, to hold out to her a fate as noble and dignified as its own

Though she could still call up that phase of feeling it had long since passed, and the house had for a time

become to her the very symbol of narrowness and monotony. Then, with the passing of years, it had gradually

acquired a less inimical character, had become, not again a castle of dreams, evoker of fair images and

romantic legend, but the shell of a life slowly adjusted to its dwelling: the place one came back to, the place

where one had one's duties, one's habits and one's books, the place one would naturally live in till one died: a

dull house, an inconvenient house, of which one knew all the defects, the shabbinesses, the discomforts, but

to which one was so used that one could hardly, after so long a time, think one's self away from it without

Now, as it lay before her in the autumn mildness, its mistress was surprised at her own insensibility. She had

been trying to see the house through the eyes of an old friend who, the next morning, would be driving up to

it for the first time; and in so doing she seemed to be opening her own eyes upon it after a long interval of

The court was very still, yet full of a latent life: the wheeling and rustling of pigeons about the rectangular

yews and across the sunny gravel; the sweep of rooks above the lustrous greyishpurple slates of the roof,

and the stir of the treetops as they met the breeze which every day, at that hour, came punctually up from

Just such a latent animation glowed in Anna Leath. In every nerve and vein she was conscious of that

equipoise of bliss which the fearful human heart scarce dares acknowledge. She was not used to strong or full

emotions; but she had always known that she should not be afraid of them. She was not afraid now; but she

The immediate effect of the feeling had been to send her forth in quest of her stepson. She wanted to stroll

back with him and have a quiet talk before they reentered the house. It was always easy to talk to him, and

at this moment he was the one person to whom she could have spoken without fear of disturbing her inner

stillness. She was glad, for all sorts of reasons, that Madame de Chantelle and Effie were still at Ouchy with

the governess, and that she and Owen had the house to themselves. And she was glad that even he was not yet

in sight. She wanted to be alone a little longer; not to think, but to let the long slow waves of joy break over

She walked out of the court and sat down on one of the benches that bordered the drive. From her seat she

had a diagonal view of the long housefront and of the domed chapel terminating one of the wings. Beyond a

gate in the courtyard wall the flowergarden drew its darkgreen squares and raised its statues against the

yellowing background of the park. In the borders only a few late pinks and crimsons smouldered, but a

peacock strutting in the sun seemed to have gathered into his outspread fan all the summer glories of the

In Mrs. Leath's hand was the letter which had opened her eyes to these things, and a smile rose to her lips at

the mere feeling of the paper between her fingers. The thrill it sent through her gave a keener edge to every

sense. She felt, saw, breathed the shining world as though a thin impenetrable veil had suddenly been

Just such a veil, she now perceived, had always hung between herself and life. It had been like the stage

gauze which gives an illusive air of reality to the painted scene behind it, yet proves it, after all, to be no more

She had been hardly aware, in her girlhood, of differing from others in this respect. In the wellregulated

wellfed Summers world the unusual was regarded as either immoral or illbred, and people with emotions

were not visited. Sometimes, with a sense of groping in a topsyturvy universe, Anna had wondered why

everybody about her seemed to ignore all the passions and sensations which formed the stuff of great poetry

and memorable action. In a community composed entirely of people like her parents and her parents' friends

she did not see how the magnificent things one read about could ever have happened. She was sure that if

anything of the kind had occurred in her immediate circle her mother would have consulted the family

clergyman, and her father perhaps even have rung up the police; and her sense of humour compelled her to

own that, in the given conditions, these precautions might not have been unjustified.

Little by little the conditions conquered her, and she learned to regard the substance of life as a mere canvas

for the embroideries of poet and painter, and its little swept and fenced and tended surface as its actual

substance. It was in the visioned region of action and emotion that her fullest hours were spent; but it hardly

occurred to her that they might be translated into experience, or connected with anything likely to happen to a

She perceived, indeed, that other girls, leading outwardly the same life as herself, and seemingly unaware of

her world of hidden beauty, were yet possessed of some vital secret which escaped her. There seemed to be a

kind of freemasonry between them; they were wider awake than she, more alert, and surer of their wants if

not of their opinions. She supposed they were "cleverer", and accepted her inferiority goodhumouredly, half

aware, within herself, of a reserve of unused power which the others gave no sign of possessing.

This partly consoled her for missing so much of what made their "good time"; but the resulting sense of

exclusion, of being somehow laughingly but firmly debarred from a share of their privileges, threw her back

on herself and deepened the reserve which made envious mothers cite her as a model of ladylike repression.

Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this spell of unreality. She was persuaded that the

sublime passion was the key to the enigma; but it was difficult to relate her conception of love to the forms it

wore in her experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for their superior acquaintance with the arts

of life had contracted, in the course of time, what were variously described as "romantic" or "foolish"

marriages; one even made a runaway match, and languished for a while under a cloud of social reprobation.

Here, then, was passion in action, romance converted to reality; yet the heroines of these exploits returned

from them untransfigured, and their husbands were as dull as ever when one had to sit next to them at dinner.

Her own case, of course, would be different. Some day she would find the magic bridge between West

Fiftyfifth Street and life; once or twice she had even fancied that the clue was in her hand. The first time

was when she had met young Darrow. She recalled even now the stir of the encounter. But his passion swept

over her like a wind that shakes the roof of the forest without reaching its still glades or rippling its hidden

pools. He was extraordinarily intelligent and agreeable, and her heart beat faster when he was with her. He

had a tall fair easy presence and a mind in which the lights of irony played pleasantly through the shades of

feeling. She liked to hear his voice almost as much as to listen to what he was saying, and to listen to what he

was saying almost as much as to feel that he was looking at her; but he wanted to kiss her, and she wanted to

talk to him about books and pictures, and have him insinuate the eternal theme of their love into every subject

Whenever they were apart a reaction set in. She wondered how she could have been so cold, called herself a

prude and an idiot, questioned if any man could really care for her, and got up in the dead of night to try new

ways of doing her hair. But as soon as he reappeared her head straightened itself on her slim neck and she

sped her little shafts of irony, or flew her little kites of erudition, while hot and cold waves swept over her,

and the things she really wanted to say choked in her throat and burned the palms of her hands.

Often she told herself that any silly girl who had waltzed through a season would know better than she how to

attract a man and hold him; but when she said "a man" she did not really mean George Darrow.

Then one day, at a dinner, she saw him sitting next to one of the silly girls in question: the heroine of the

elopement which had shaken West Fiftyfifth Street to its base. The young lady had come back from her

adventure no less silly than when she went; and across the table the partner of her flight, a fat young man

with eyeglasses, sat stolidly eating terrapin and talking about polo and investments.

The young woman was undoubtedly as silly as ever; yet after watching her for a few minutes Miss Summers

perceived that she had somehow grown luminous, perilous, obscurely menacing to nice girls and the young

men they intended eventually to accept. Suddenly, at the sight, a rage of possessorship awoke in her. She

must save Darrow, assert her right to him at any price. Pride and reticence went down in a hurricane of

jealousy. She heard him laugh, and there was something new in his laugh...She watched him talking,

talking...He sat slightly sideways, a faint smile beneath his lids, lowering his voice as he lowered it when he

talked to her. She caught the same inflections, but his eyes were different. It would have offended her once if

he had looked at her like that. Now her one thought was that none but she had a right to be so looked at. And

that girl of all others! What illusions could he have about a girl who, hardly a year ago, had made a fool of

herself over the fat young man stolidly eating terrapin across the table? If that was where romance and

All night she lay awake and wondered: "What was she saying to him? How shall I learn to say such things?"

and she decided that her heart would tell herthat the next time they were alone together the irresistible

word would spring to her lips. He came the next day, and they were alone, and all she found was: "I didn't

He answered with indifference that he didn't know it either, and in the reaction of relief she declared: "She's

"She's rather good fun," he admitted, as though he had not noticed her other advantages; and suddenly Anna

She felt as if he were leagues and leagues away from her. All her hopes dissolved, and she was conscious of

sitting rigidly, with high head and straight lips, while the irresistible word fled with a last wingbeat into the

She was still quivering with the pain and bewilderment of this adventure when Fraser Leath appeared. She

met him first in Italy, where she was travelling with her parents; and the following winter he came to New

York. In Italy he had seemed interesting: in New York he became remarkable. He seldom spoke of his life in

Europe, and let drop but the most incidental allusions to the friends, the tastes, the pursuits which filled his

cosmopolitan days; but in the atmosphere of West Fiftyfifth Street he seemed the embodiment of a storied

past. He presented Miss Summers with a prettilybound anthology of the old French poets and, when she

showed a discriminating pleasure in the gift, observed with his grave smile: "I didn't suppose I should find

any one here who would feel about these things as I do." On another occasion he asked her acceptance of a

half effaced eighteenth century pastel which he had surprisingly picked up in a New York auctionroom. "I

He permitted himself no other comments, but these conveyed with sufficient directness that he thought her

worthy of a different setting. That she should be so regarded by a man living in an atmosphere of art and

beauty, and esteeming them the vital elements of life, made her feel for the first time that she was understood.

Here was some one whose scale of values was the same as hers, and who thought her opinion worth hearing

on the very matters which they both considered of supreme importance. The discovery restored her self

confidence, and she revealed herself to Mr. Leath as she had never known how to reveal herself to Darrow.

As the courtship progressed, and they grew more confidential, her suitor surprised and delighted her by little

explosions of revolutionary sentiment. He said: "Shall you mind, I wonder, if I tell you that you live in a

dreadfully conventional atmosphere?" and, seeing that she manifestly did not mind: "Of course I shall say

things now and then that will horrify your dear delightful parentsI shall shock them awfully, I warn you."

In confirmation of this warning he permitted himself an occasional playful fling at the regular churchgoing

of Mr. and Mrs. Summers, at the innocuous character of the literature in their library, and at their guileless

appreciations in art. He even ventured to banter Mrs. Summers on her refusal to receive the irrepressible Kitty

Mayne who, after a rapid passage with George Darrow, was now involved in another and more flagrant

"In Europe, you know, the husband is regarded as the only judge in such matters. As long as he accepts the

situation " Mr. Leath explained to Anna, who took his view the more emphatically in order to convince

herself that, personally, she had none but the most tolerant sentiments toward the lady.

The subversiveness of Mr. Leath's opinions was enhanced by the distinction of his appearance and the reserve

of his manners. He was like the anarchist with a gardenia in his buttonhole who figures in the higher

melodrama. Every word, every allusion, every note of his agreeablymodulated voice, gave Anna a glimpse

of a society at once freer and finer, which observed the traditional forms but had discarded the underlying

prejudices; whereas the world she knew had discarded many of the forms and kept almost all the prejudices.

In such an atmosphere as his an eager young woman, curious as to all the manifestations of life, yet

instinctively desiring that they should come to her in terms of beauty and fine feeling, must surely find the

largest scope for self expression. Study, travel, the contact of the world, the comradeship of a polished and

enlightened mind, would combine to enrich her days and form her character; and it was only in the rare

moments when Mr. Leath's symmetrical blond mask bent over hers, and his kiss dropped on her like a cold

There had been a time when the walls on which her gaze now rested had shed a glare of irony on these early

dreams. In the first years of her marriage the sober symmetry of Givre had suggested only her husband's

neatlybalanced mind. It was a mind, she soon learned, contentedly absorbed in formulating the conventions

of the unconventional. West Fiftyfifth Street was no more conscientiously concerned than Givre with the

momentous question of "what people did"; it was only the type of deed investigated that was different. Mr.

Leath collected his social instances with the same seriousness and patience as his snuffboxes. He exacted a

rigid conformity to his rules of nonconformity and his scepticism had the absolute accent of a dogma. He

even cherished certain exceptions to his rules as the book collector prizes a "defective" first edition. The

Protestant churchgoing of Anna's parents had provoked his gentle sarcasm; but he prided himself on his

mother's devoutness, because Madame de Chantelle, in embracing her second husband's creed, had become

Anna, in fact, had discovered in her amiable and elegant motherinlaw an unexpected embodiment of the

West Fifty fifth Street ideal. Mrs. Summers and Madame de Chantelle, however strongly they would have

disagreed as to the authorized source of Christian dogma, would have found themselves completely in accord

on all the momentous minutiae of drawingroom conduct; yet Mr. Leath treated his mother's foibles with a

respect which Anna's experience of him forbade her to attribute wholly to filial affection.

In the early days, when she was still questioning the Sphinx instead of trying to find an answer to it, she

"You say your mother won't like it if I call on that amusing little woman who came here the other day, and

was let in by mistake; but Madame de Chantelle tells me she lives with her husband, and when mother

Mr. Leath's smile arrested her. "My dear child, I don't pretend to apply the principles of logic to my poor

"There are prejudices and prejudices. My mother, of course, got hers from Monsieur de Chantelle, and they

seem to me as much in their place in this house as the potpourri in your hawthorn jar. They preserve a social

tradition of which I should be sorry to lose the least perfume. Of course I don't expect you, just at first, to feel

the difference, to see the nuance. In the case of little Madame de Vireville, for instance: you point out that

she's still under her husband's roof. Very true; and if she were merely a Paris acquaintanceespecially if you

had met her, as one still might, in the RIGHT KIND of house in ParisI should be the last to object to your

visiting her. But in the country it's different. Even the best provincial society is what you would call narrow: I

don't deny it; and if some of our friends met Madame de Vireville at Givre well, it would produce a bad

impression. You're inclined to ridicule such considerations, but gradually you'll come to see their importance;

and meanwhile, do trust me when I ask you to be guided by my mother. It is always well for a stranger in an

old society to err a little on the side of what you call its prejudices but I should rather describe as its

After that she no longer tried to laugh or argue her husband out of his convictions. They WERE convictions,

and therefore unassailable. Nor was any insincerity implied in the fact that they sometimes seemed to

coincide with hers. There were occasions when he really did look at things as she did; but for reasons so

different as to make the distance between them all the greater. Life, to Mr. Leath, was like a walk through a

carefully classified museum, where, in moments of doubt, one had only to look at the number and refer to

one's catalogue; to his wife it was like groping about in a huge dark lumberroom where the exploring ray of

In the first bewilderment of her new state these discoveries had had the effect of dropping another layer of

gauze between herself and reality. She seemed farther than ever removed from the strong joys and pangs for

which she felt herself made. She did not adopt her husband's views, but insensibly she began to live his life.

She tried to throw a compensating ardour into the secret excursions of her spirit, and thus the old vicious

distinction between romance and reality was reestablished for her, and she resigned herself again to the

The birth of her little girl swept away this delusion. At last she felt herself in contact with the actual business

Everything but the irreducible crude fact of childbearing assumed, in the Leath household, the same ghostly

tinge of unreality. Her husband, at the time, was all that his own ideal of a husband required. He was

attentive, and even suitably moved: but as he sat by her bedside, and thoughtfully proffered to her the list of

people who had "called to enquire", she looked first at him, and then at the child between them, and

With the exception of the little girl herself, everything connected with that time had grown curiously remote

and unimportant. The days that had moved so slowly as they passed seemed now to have plunged down

headlong steeps of time; and as she sat in the autumn sun, with Darrow's letter in her hand, the history of

Anna Leath appeared to its heroine like some grey shadowy tale that she might have read in an old book, one

Two brown blurs emerging from the farther end of the wood vista gradually defined themselves as her

stepson and an attendant gamekeeper. They grew slowly upon the bluish background, with occasional

delays and reeffacements, and she sat still, waiting till they should reach the gate at the end of the drive,

where the keeper would turn off to his cottage and Owen continue on to the house.

She watched his approach with a smile. From the first days of her marriage she had been drawn to the boy,

but it was not until after Effie's birth that she had really begun to know him. The eager observation of her

own child had shown her how much she had still to learn about the slight fair boy whom the holidays

periodically restored to Givre. Owen, even then, both physically and morally, furnished her with the oddest of

commentaries on his father's mien and mind. He would never, the family sighingly recognized, be nearly as

handsome as Mr. Leath; but his rather charmingly unbalanced face, with its brooding forehead and petulant

boyish smile, suggested to Anna what his father's countenance might have been could one have pictured its

neat features disordered by a rattling breeze. She even pushed the analogy farther, and descried in her

stepson's mind a quaintlytwisted reflection of her husband's. With his bursts of doorslamming activity,

his fits of bookish indolence, his crude revolutionary dogmatizing and his flashes of precocious irony, the boy

was not unlike a boisterous embodiment of his father's theories. It was as though Fraser Leath's ideas,

accustomed to hang like marionettes on their pegs, should suddenly come down and walk. There were

moments, indeed, when Owen's humours must have suggested to his progenitor the gambols of an infant

Frankenstein; but to Anna they were the voice of her secret rebellions, and her tenderness to her stepson was

partly based on her severity toward herself. As he had the courage she had lacked, so she meant him to have

the chances she had missed; and every effort she made for him helped to keep her own hopes alive.

Her interest in Owen led her to think more often of his mother, and sometimes she would slip away and stand

alone before her predecessor's portrait. Since her arrival at Givre the picturea "fulllength" by a once

fashionable artisthad undergone the successive displacements of an exiled consort removed farther and

farther from the throne; and Anna could not help noting that these stages coincided with the gradual decline

of the artist's fame. She had a fancy that if his credit had been in the ascendant the first Mrs. Leath might have

continued to throne over the drawing room mantel piece, even to the exclusion of her successor's effigy.

Instead of this, her peregrinations had finally landed her in the shrouded solitude of the billiardroom, an

apartment which no one ever entered, but where it was understood that "the light was better," or might have

Here the poor lady, elegantly dressed, and seated in the middle of a large lonely canvas, in the blank

contemplation of a gilt console, had always seemed to Anna to be waiting for visitors who never came.

"Of course they never came, you poor thing! I wonder how long it took you to find out that they never

would?" Anna had more than once apostrophized her, with a derision addressed rather to herself than to the

dead; but it was only after Effie's birth that it occurred to her to study more closely the face in the picture, and

"She certainly doesn't look as if they would have been the same kind as mine: but there's no telling, from a

portrait that was so obviously done 'to please the family', and that leaves Owen so unaccounted for. Well,

they never came, the visitors; they never came; and she died of it. She died of it long before they buried her:

I'm certain of that. Those are stonedead eyes in the picture...The loneliness must have been awful, if even

Owen couldn't keep her from dying of it. And to feel it so she must have HAD feelings real live ones, the

kind that twitch and tug. And all she had to look at all her life was a gilt consoleyes, that's it, a gilt console

She did not mean, if she could help it, that either Effie or Owen should know that loneliness, or let her know

it again. They were three, now, to keep each other warm, and she embraced both children in the same passion

of motherhood, as though one were not enough to shield her from her predecessor's fate.

Sometimes she fancied that Owen Leath's response was warmer than that of her own child. But then Effie

was still hardly more than a baby, and Owen, from the first, had been almost "old enough to understand":

certainly DID understand now, in a tacit way that yet perpetually spoke to her. This sense of his

understanding was the deepest element in their feeling for each other. There were so many things between

them that were never spoken of, or even indirectly alluded to, yet that, even in their occasional discussions

Musing on this, she continued to watch his approach; and her heart began to beat a little faster at the thought

of what she had to say to him. But when he reached the gate she saw him pause, and after a moment he turned

She started up and waved her sunshade, but he did not see her. No doubt he meant to go back with the

gamekeeper, perhaps to the kennels, to see a retriever who had hurt his leg. Suddenly she was seized by the

whim to overtake him. She threw down the parasol, thrust her letter into her bodice, and catching up her

She was slight and light, with a natural ease and quickness of gait, but she could not recall having run a yard

since she had romped with Owen in his schooldays; nor did she know what impulse moved her now. She

only knew that run she must, that no other motion, short of flight, would have been buoyant enough for her

humour. She seemed to be keeping pace with some inward rhythm, seeking to give bodily expression to the

lyric rush of her thoughts. The earth always felt elastic under her, and she had a conscious joy in treading it;

but never had it been as soft and springy as today. It seemed actually to rise and meet her as she went, so that

she had the feeling, which sometimes came to her in dreams, of skimming miraculously over short bright

waves. The air, too, seemed to break in waves against her, sweeping by on its current all the slanted lights

and moist sharp perfumes of the failing day. She panted to herself: "This is nonsense!" her blood hummed

back: "But it's glorious!" and she sped on till she saw that Owen had caught sight of her and was striding back

Then she stopped and waited, flushed and laughing, her hands clasped against the letter in her breast.

"No, I'm not mad," she called out; "but there's something in the air todaydon't you feel it?And I wanted

to have a little talk with you," she added as he came up to her, smiling at him and linking her arm in his.

He smiled back, but above the smile she saw the shade of anxiety which, for the last two months, had kept its

He laughed. "You said that exactly like Effie. What do you want me to do? To race with you as I do Effie?

But I shouldn't have a show!" he protested, still with the little frown between his eyes.

"To the kennels. But there's not the least need. The vet has seen Garry and he's all right. If there's anything

"Did I say there was? I just came out to meet youI wanted to know if you'd had good sport."

The shadow dropped on him again. "None at all. The fact is I didn't try. Jean and I have just been knocking

They walked on with the same light gait, so nearly of a height that keeping step came as naturally to them as

"You DID say there was something you wanted to tell me," her stepson began after a pause.

"Well, there is." She slackened her pace involuntarily, and they came to a pause and stood facing each other

She seldom blushed, but at the question a sudden heat suffused her. She held her head high.

"Yes: he's coming. I've just heard. He arrives tomorrow. But that's not" She saw her blunder and tried

to rectify it. "Or rather, yes, in a way it is my reason for wanting to speak to you"

He looked at her kindly, halfhumourously, an almost fraternal wisdom in his smile.

"About? No, no: I meant that I wanted to speak today because it's our last day alone together."

"Oh, I see." He had slipped his hands into the pockets of his tweed shooting jacket and lounged along at her

side, his eyes bent on the moist ruts of the drive, as though the matter had lost all interest for him.

He did not yield. "Well, thenanything on earth that even YOU can say." "You don't in the least know what

She gave him this point, but only to make another. "Yes; but this is particularly. I want to say...Owen, you've

He broke into a laugh in which the odd elderbrotherly note was once more perceptible.

"Oh, and so have you to HER!" His voice broke down to boyishness. "I've never lost sight of that for a

"On the whole, I suppose it has. Well" she summed up with a laugh, "aren't you all the better pleased to

"Oh, you know, I've not done it for you," he tossed back at her, without the least note of hostility in the

"Haven't you, though, perhapsthe least bit? Because, after all, you knew I understood?"

She laughed. "You don't believe me? You must remember I had your grandmother to consider."

"Yes: and my fatherand Effie, I supposeand the outraged shades of Givre!" He paused, as if to lay more

stress on the boyish sneer: "Do you likewise include the late Monsieur de Chantelle?"

His stepmother did not appear to resent the thrust. She went on, in the same tone of affectionate persuasion:

"Yes: I must have seemed to you too subject to Givre. Perhaps I have been. But you know that was not my

real object in asking you to wait, to say nothing to your grandmother before her return."

"I mean that when your grandmother gets back from Ouchy I shall speak to her" "You'll speak to

The allusion touched a spring of mirth in both their minds, and they exchanged a laughing look.

"Only you must promise not to rush things. You must give me time to prepare Adelaide too," Mrs. Leath

"Prepare her too?" He drew away for a better look at her. "Prepare her for what?"

"Why, to prepare your grandmother! For your marriage. Yes, that's what I mean. I'm going to see you

His feint of indifference broke down and he caught her hand. "Oh, you dear divine thing! I didn't

"I know you didn't." She dropped her gaze and began to walk on slowly. "I can't say you've convinced me of

the wisdom of the step. Only I seem to see that other things matter moreand that not missing things matters

most. Perhaps I've changedor YOUR not changing has convinced me. I'm certain now that you won't

"Oh, as to not budgingI told you so months ago: you might have been sure of that! And how can you be

"Not at Givre!" he laughed, and shot a halfironic look at her. "But you haven't really BEEN at Givre

"Poor empty Givre! With so many rooms full and yet not a soul in itexcept of course my grandmother,

They had reached the gateway of the court and stood looking with a common accord at the long softhued

facade on which the autumn light was dying. "It looks so made to be happy in" she murmured.

"Yestoday, today!" He pressed her arm a little. "Oh, you darlingto have given it that look for me!" He

paused, and then went on in a lower voice: "Don't you feel we owe it to the poor old place to do what we can

to give it that look? You, too, I mean? Come, let's make it grin from wing to wing! I've such a mad desire to

say outrageous things to it haven't you? After all, in old times there must have been living people here!"

Loosening her arm from his she continued to gaze up at the housefront, which seemed, in the plaintive

"A beautiful memory! Quite perfect to take out and turn over when I'm grinding at the law in New York, and

you're" He broke off and looked at her with a questioning smile. "Come! Tell me. You and I don't have

to say things to talk to each other. When you turn suddenly absentminded and mysterious I always feel like

He wavered, as if for the first time uncertain how far he might go. "I don't know Darrow as much as you

"Was I speaking? I thought it was your eyes" He caught her by both elbows and spun her halfway

round, so that the late sun shed a betraying gleam on her face. "They're such awfully conversational eyes!

Don't you suppose they told me long ago why it's just today you've made up your mind that people have got

"This is the south terrace," Anna said. "Should you like to walk down to the river?"

She seemed to listen to herself speaking from a faroff airy height, and yet to be wholly gathered into the

circle of consciousness which drew its glowing ring about herself and Darrow. To the aerial listener her

words sounded flat and colourless, but to the self within the ring each one beat with a separate heart.

It was the day after Darrow's arrival, and he had come down early, drawn by the sweetness of the light on the

lawns and gardens below his window. Anna had heard the echo of his step on the stairs, his pause in the

stone flagged hall, his voice as he asked a servant where to find her. She was at the end of the house, in the

brownpanelled sittingroom which she frequented at that season because it caught the sunlight first and kept

it longest. She stood near the window, in the pale band of brightness, arranging some salmonpink geraniums

in a shallow porcelain bowl. Every sensation of touch and sight was thricealive in her. The grey green fur

of the geranium leaves caressed her fingers and the sunlight wavering across the irregular surface of the old

Darrow stood framed in the doorway of the farthest drawing room, a lightgrey figure against the black

and white flagging of the hall; then he began to move toward her down the empty palepanelled vista,

crossing one after another the long reflections which a projecting cabinet or screen cast here and there upon

As he drew nearer, his figure was suddenly displaced by that of her husband, whom, from the same point, she

had so often seen advancing down the same perspective. Straight, spare, erect, looking to right and left with

quick precise turns of the head, and stopping now and then to straighten a chair or alter the position of a vase,

Fraser Leath used to march toward her through the double file of furniture like a general reviewing a

regiment drawn up for his inspection. At a certain point, midway across the second room, he always stopped

before the mantelpiece of pinkishyellow marble and looked at himself in the tall garlanded glass that

surmounted it. She could not remember that he had ever found anything to straighten or alter in his own

studied attire, but she had never known him to omit the inspection when he passed that particular mirror.

When it was over he continued more briskly on his way, and the resulting expression of satisfaction was still

The spectral projection of this little daily scene hung but for a moment before Anna, but in that moment she

had time to fling a wondering glance across the distance between her past and present. Then the footsteps of

the present came close, and she had to drop the geraniums to give her hand to Darrow...

They had neither of them, as yet, found much to say to each other. Darrow had arrived late on the previous

afternoon, and during the evening they had had between them Owen Leath and their own thoughts. Now they

were alone for the first time and the fact was enough in itself. Yet Anna was intensely aware that as soon as

they began to talk more intimately they would feel that they knew each other less well.

They passed out onto the terrace and down the steps to the gravel walk below. The delicate frosting of dew

gave the grass a bluish shimmer, and the sunlight, sliding in emerald streaks along the treeboles, gathered

itself into great luminous blurs at the end of the woodwalks, and hung above the fields a watery glory like

They took a turn to the left and stopped for a moment to look back at the long pink housefront, plainer,

friendlier, less adorned than on the side toward the court. So prolonged yet delicate had been the friction of

time upon its bricks that certain expanses had the bloom and texture of old red velvet, and the patches of gold

lichen spreading over them looked like the last traces of a dim embroidery. The dome of the chapel, with its

gilded cross, rose above one wing, and the other ended in a conical pigeonhouse, above which the birds

were flying, lustrous and slatey, their breasts merged in the blue of the roof when they dropped down on it.

They turned away and began to walk down a long tunnel of yellowing trees. Benches with mossy feet stood

against the mossy edges of the path, and at its farther end it widened into a circle about a basin rimmed with

stone, in which the opaque water strewn with leaves looked like a slab of gold flecked agate. The path,

growing narrower, wound on circuitously through the woods, between slender serried trunks twined with ivy.

Patches of blue appeared above them through the dwindling leaves, and presently the trees drew back and

They walked on across the fields to the towpath. In a curve of the wall some steps led up to a crumbling

pavilion with openings choked with ivy. Anna and Darrow seated themselves on the bench projecting from

the inner wall of the pavilion and looked across the river at the slopes divided into blocks of green and

fawncolour, and at the chalktinted village lifting its squat churchtower and grey roofs against the

precisely drawn lines of the landscape. Anna sat silent, so intensely aware of Darrow's nearness that there

was no surprise in the touch he laid on her hand. They looked at each other, and he smiled and said: "There

"Don't you remember the wording of the telegram that turned me back last May? 'Unforeseen obstacle': that

was it. What was the earthshaking problem, by the way? Finding a governess for Effie, wasn't it?"

"But I gave you my reason: the reason why it was an obstacle. I wrote you fully about it."

"Yes, I know you did." He lifted her hand and kissed it. "How far off it all seems, and how little it all matters

She looked at him quickly. "Do you feel that? I suppose I'm different. I want to draw all those wasted months

"But they are, to me. You reach back and take everything back to the first days of all."

She frowned a little, as if struggling with an inarticulate perplexity. "It's curious how, in those first days, too,

"Oh, in those days we neither of us understood, did we? It's part of what's called the bliss of being young."

"Yes, I thought that, too: thought it, I mean, in looking back. But it couldn't, even then, have been as true of

"Now," he said, "the only thing that matters is that we're sitting here together."

He dismissed the rest with a lightness that might have seemed conclusive evidence of her power over him.

But she took no pride in such triumphs. It seemed to her that she wanted his allegiance and his adoration not

so much for herself as for their mutual love, and that in treating lightly any past phase of their relation he took

"Of course!" She felt the unperceiving sweetness of his smile. "That's why," he went on, "'everything,' for me,

She caught at the phrase. "That's what I meant: it's here and now; we can't get away from it."

Her heart was beating unsteadily. Something in her, fitfully and with reluctance, struggled to free itself, but

the warmth of his nearness penetrated every sense as the sunlight steeped the landscape. Then, suddenly, she

She paused, the tremor in her of Psyche holding up the lamp. But in the interrogative light of her pause her

"The last time? Last spring? But it was you whofor the best of reasons, as you've told meturned me back

She saw that he was goodhumouredly ready to "thresh out," for her sentimental satisfaction, a question

which, for his own, Time had so conclusively dealt with; and the sense of his readiness reassured her.

"I wrote as soon as I could," she rejoined. "I explained the delay and asked you to come. And you never even

"Your letter was a long time coming. I had waited a week ten days. I had some excuse for thinking, when

He turned on her with a quick look of wonder. "God knows if you can ask me that!"

He stood up abruptly and stood facing her, blocking the view over the river and the checkered slopes.

"No, no: we must neither of us have any reason for saying it again." She looked at him gravely. "Surely you

and I needn't arrange the lights before we show ourselves to each other. I want you to see me just as I am,

He came back to his seat beside her. "Never mind the old ones. They were justifiedI'm willing to admit it.

With the governess having suddenly to be packed off, and Effie on your hands, and your motherinlaw ill, I

see the impossibility of your letting me come. I even see that, at the moment, it was difficult to write and

explain. But what does all that matter now? The new scruples are the ones I want to tackle."

Again her heart trembled. She felt her happiness so near, so sure, that to strain it closer might be like a child's

crushing a pet bird in its caress. But her very security urged her on. For so long her doubts had been

knifeedged: now they had turned into bright harmless toys that she could toss and catch without peril!

"You didn't come, and you didn't answer my letter; and after waiting four months I wrote another." "And I

"Yes." She held his eyes. "But in my last letter I repeated exactly what I'd said in the firstthe one I wrote

you last June. I told you then that I was ready to give you the answer to what you'd asked me in London; and

"You ignored that letter. All summer you made no sign. And all I ask now is, that you should frankly tell me

"I can only repeat what I've just said. I was hurt and unhappy and I doubted you. I suppose if I'd cared less I

should have been more confident. I cared so much that I couldn't risk another failure. For you'd made me feel

that I'd miserably failed. So I shut my eyes and set my teeth and turned my back. There's the whole

"Oh, if it's the WHOLE truth!" She let him clasp her. "There's my torment, you see. I thought that was

what your silence meant till I made you break it. Now I want to be sure that I was right."

"You can let me tell YOU everything first." She drew away, but without taking her hands from him. "Owen

She looked at him and he faced her steadily. The light was full on his pleasantlybrowned face, his grey eyes,

his frank white forehead. She noticed for the first time a sealring in a setting of twisted silver on the hand he

"He came back and told me. I think you talked to him a moment in a theatre. I asked if you'd spoken of my

having put you offor if you'd sent me any message. He didn't remember that you had."

"It was absurd of me! But Owen and I have always been on odd kind of brotherandsister terms. I think he

guessed about us when he saw you with me in London. So he teased me a little and tried to make me curious

about you; and when he saw he'd succeeded he told me he hadn't had time to say much to you because you

He still held her hands, but she felt no tremor in his, and the blood did not stir in his brown cheek. He seemed

"Oh, not much, except that she was awfully pretty. When I asked him to describe her he said you had her

tucked away in a baignoire and he hadn't actually seen her; but he saw the tail of her cloak, and somehow

knew from that that she was pretty. One DOES, you know...I think he said the cloak was pink."

Darrow broke into a laugh. "Of course it wasthey always are! So that was at the bottom of your doubts?"

"Not at first. I only laughed. But afterward, when I wrote you and you didn't answerOh, you DO see?"

"It's not as if this were a light thing between us. I want you to know me as I am. If I thought that at that

"But do you?" Her look followed him. "I'm not a goose of a girl. I know...of course I KNOW...but there are

things a woman feels...when what she knows doesn't make any difference. It's not that I want you to

explainI mean about that particular evening. It's only that I want you to have the whole of my feeling. I

didn't know what it was till I saw you again. I never dreamed I should say such things to you!"

"I never dreamed I should be here to hear you say them!" He turned back and lifting a floating end of her

scarf put his lips to it. "But now that you have, I knowI know," he smiled down at her.

"That this is no light thing between us. Now you may ask me anything you please! That was all I wanted to

For a long moment they looked at each other without speaking. She saw the dancing spirit in his eyes turn

grave and darken to a passionate sternness. He stooped and kissed her, and she sat as if folded in wings.

It was in the natural order of things that, on the way back to the house, their talk should have turned to the

Anna was not eager to define it. She had an extraordinary sensitiveness to the impalpable elements of

happiness, and as she walked at Darrow's side her imagination flew back and forth, spinning luminous webs

of feeling between herself and the scene about her. Every heightening of emotion produced for her a new

effusion of beauty in visible things, and with it the sense that such moments should be lingered over and

absorbed like some unrenewable miracle. She understood Darrow's impatience to see their plans take shape.

She knew it must be so, she would not have had it otherwise; but to reach a point where she could fix her

mind on his appeal for dates and decisions was like trying to break her way through the silver tangle of an

Darrow wished to use his diplomatic opportunities as a means of studying certain economic and social

problems with which he presently hoped to deal in print; and with this in view he had asked for, and obtained,

a South American appointment. Anna was ready to follow where he led, and not reluctant to put new sights as

well as new thoughts between herself and her past. She had, in a direct way, only Effie and Effie's education

to consider; and there seemed, after due reflection, no reason why the most anxious regard for these should

not be conciliated with the demands of Darrow's career. Effie, it was evident, could be left to Madame de

Chantelle's care till the couple should have organized their life; and she might even, as long as her future

step father's work retained him in distant posts, continue to divide her year between Givre and the antipodes.

As for Owen, who had reached his legal majority two years before, and was soon to attain the age fixed for

the taking over of his paternal inheritance, the arrival of this date would reduce his stepmother's

responsibility to a friendly concern for his welfare. This made for the prompt realization of Darrow's wishes,

and there seemed no reason why the marriage should not take place within the six weeks that remained of his

They passed out of the woodwalk into the open brightness of the garden. The noon sunlight sheeted with

gold the bronze flanks of the polygonal yews. Chrysanthemums, russet, saffron and orange, glowed like the

efflorescence of an enchanted forest; belts of red begonia purpling to wine colour ran like smouldering

flame among the borders; and above this outspread tapestry the house extended its harmonious length, the

Darrow stood still, and Anna felt that his glance was travelling from her to the scene about them and then

"You're sure you're prepared to give up Givre? You look so made for each other!"

"Oh, Givre" She broke off suddenly, feeling as if her too careless tone had delivered all her past into his

hands; and with one of her instinctive movements of recoil she added: "When Owen marries I shall have to

"When Owen marries? That's looking some distance ahead! I want to be told that meanwhile you'll have no

She hesitated. Why did he press her to uncover to him her poor starved past? A vague feeling of loyalty, a

desire to spare what could no longer harm her, made her answer evasively: "There will probably be no

She had not meant to touch on the subject, for her stepson had sworn her to provisional secrecy; but since

the shortness of Darrow's leave necessitated a prompt adjustment of their own plans, it was, after all,

"Owen marry? Why, he always seems like a faun in flannels! I hope he's found a dryad. There might easily be

"I can't tell you yet where he found his dryad, but she IS one, I believe: at any rate she'll become the Givre

She hesitated. "Owen, at any rate, has made up his mind to overcome them; and I've promised to see him

She went on, after a moment's consideration, to explain that her stepson's choice was, for various reasons,

not likely to commend itself to his grandmother. "She must be prepared for it, and I've promised to do the

preparing. You know I always HAVE seen him through things, and he rather counts on me now."

She fancied that Darrow's exclamation had in it a faint note of annoyance, and wondered if he again

"But once Owen's future is settled, you won't, surely, for the sake of what you call seeing him through, ask

that I should go away again without you?" He drew her closer as they walked. "Owen will understand, if you

don't. Since he's in the same case himself I'll throw myself on his mercy. He'll see that I have the first claim

"Owen sees everything: I'm not afraid of that. But his future isn't settled. He's very young to marrytoo

young, his grandmother is sure to thinkand the marriage he wants to make is not likely to convince her to

"Oh, no! But it's not what Madame de Chantelle would call a good match; it's not even what I call a wise

"Yet I'm backing him up." She paused. "I wonder if you'll understand? What I've most wanted for him, and

shall want for Effie, is that they shall always feel free to make their own mistakes, and never, if possible, be

persuaded to make other people's. Even if Owen's marriage is a mistake, and has to be paid for, I believe he'll

learn and grow in the paying. Of course I can't make Madame de Chantelle see this; but I can remind her that,

with his characterhis big rushes of impulse, his odd intervals of ebb and apathyshe may drive him into

"As soon as I see my way to it. She knows the girl and likes her: that's our hope. And yet it may, in the end,

prove our danger, make it harder for us all, when she learns the truth, than if Owen had chosen a stranger. I

can't tell you more till I've told her: I've promised Owen not to tell any one. All I ask you is to give me time,

to give me a few days at any rate She's been wonderfully 'nice,' as she would call it, about you, and about the

fact of my having soon to leave Givre; but that, again, may make it harder for Owen. At any rate, you can see,

can't you, how it makes me want to stand by him? You see, I couldn't bear it if the least fraction of my

happiness seemed to be stolen from hisas if it were a little scrap of happiness that had to be pieced out with

other people's!" She clasped her hands on Darrow's arm. "I want our life to be like a house with all the

She ended with an inward tremor. All through her exposition and her appeal she had told herself that the

moment could hardly have been less well chosen. In Darrow's place she would have felt, as he doubtless did,

that her carefully developed argument was only the disguise of an habitual indecision. It was the hour of all

others when she would have liked to affirm herself by brushing aside every obstacle to his wishes; yet it was

only by opposing them that she could show the strength of character she wanted him to feel in her.

But as she talked she began to see that Darrow's face gave back no reflection of her words, that he continued

to wear the abstracted look of a man who is not listening to what is said to him. It caused her a slight pang to

discover that his thoughts could wander at such a moment; then, with a flush of joy she perceived the reason.

In some undefinable way she had become aware, without turning her head, that he was steeped in the sense of

her nearness, absorbed in contemplating the details of her face and dress; and the discovery made the words

throng to her lips. She felt herself speak with ease, authority, conviction. She said to herself: "He doesn't care

what I sayit's enough that I say iteven if it's stupid he'll like me better for it..." She knew that every

inflexion of her voice, every gesture, every characteristic of her personits very defects, the fact that her

forehead was too high, that her eyes were not large enough, that her hands, though slender, were not small,

and that the fingers did not tapershe knew that these deficiencies were so many channels through which

her influence streamed to him; that she pleased him in spite of them, perhaps because of them; that he wanted

her as she was, and not as she would have liked to be; and for the first time she felt in her veins the security

They reached the court and walked under the limes toward the house. The hall door stood wide, and through

the windows opening on the terrace the sun slanted across the black and white floor, the faded tapestry chairs,

and Darrow's travelling coat and cap, which lay among the cloaks and rugs piled on a bench against the wall.

The sight of these garments, lying among her own wraps, gave her a sense of homely intimacy. It was as if

her happiness came down from the skies and took on the plain dress of daily things. At last she seemed to

As they entered the hall her eye lit on an unstamped note conspicuously placed on the table.

She felt a secret stir of pleasure at the immediate inference that she and Darrow would probably lunch alone.

"Dear," Owen wrote, "after what you said yesterday I can't wait another hour, and I'm off to Francheuil, to

catch the Dijon express and travel back with them. Don't be frightened; I won't speak unless it's safe to. Trust

"He's gone to Dijon to meet his grandmother. Oh, I hope I haven't made a mistake!"

She hesitated. "The day before yesterday I told him, for the first time, that I meant to see him through, no

matter what happened. And I'm afraid he's lost his head, and will be imprudent and spoil things. You see, I

hadn't meant to say a word to him till I'd had time to prepare Madame de Chantelle."

She felt that Darrow was looking at her and reading her thoughts, and the colour flew to her face. "Yes: it was

when I heard you were coming that I told him. I wanted him to feel as I felt...it seemed too unkind to make

him wait!" Her hand was in his, and his arm rested for a moment on her shoulder.

They moved side by side toward the stairs. Through the haze of bliss enveloping her, Owen's affairs seemed

curiously unimportant and remote. Nothing really mattered but this torrent of light in her veins. She put her

foot on the lowest step, saying: "It's nearly luncheon timeI must take off my hat..." and as she started up

the stairs Darrow stood below in the hall and watched her. But the distance between them did not make him

seem less near: it was as if his thoughts moved with her and touched her like endearing hands.

In her bedroom she shut the door and stood still, looking about her in a fit of dreamy wonder. Her feelings

were unlike any she had ever known: richer, deeper, more complete. For the first time everything in her, from

She took off her hat and went to the dressingtable to smooth her hair. The pressure of the hat had flattened

the dark strands on her forehead; her face was paler than usual, with shadows about the eyes. She felt a pang

of regret for the wasted years. "If I look like this today," she said to herself, "what will he think of me when

I'm ill or worried?" She began to run her fingers through her hair, rejoicing in its thickness; then she desisted

Deeper than the deepest fibre of her vanity was the triumphant sense that AS SHE WAS, with her flattened

hair, her tired pallor, her thin sleeves a little tumbled by the weight of her jacket, he would like her even

better, feel her nearer, dearer, more desirable, than in all the splendours she might put on for him. In the light

of this discovery she studied her face with a new intentness, seeing its defects as she had never seen them, yet

seeing them through a kind of radiance, as though love were a luminous medium into which she had been

She was glad now that she had confessed her doubts and her jealousy. She divined that a man in love may be

flattered by such involuntary betrayals, that there are moments when respect for his liberty appeals to him

less than the inability to respect it: moments so propitious that a woman's very mistakes and indiscretions

may help to establish her dominion. The sense of power she had been aware of in talking to Darrow came

back with tenfold force. She felt like testing him by the most fantastic exactions, and at the same moment

she longed to humble herself before him, to make herself the shadow and echo of his mood. She wanted to

linger with him in a world of fancy and yet to walk at his side in the world of fact. She wanted him to feel her

power and yet to love her for her ignorance and humility. She felt like a slave, and a goddess, and a girl in her

Darrow, late that evening, threw himself into an armchair before his fire and mused.

The room was propitious to meditation. The redveiled lamp, the corners of shadow, the splashes of firelight

on the curves of old fullbodied wardrobes and cabinets, gave it an air of intimacy increased by its faded

hangings, its slightly frayed and threadbare rugs. Everything in it was harmoniously shabby, with a subtle

soughtfor shabbiness in which Darrow fancied he discerned the touch of Fraser Leath. But Fraser Leath had

grown so unimportant a factor in the scheme of things that these marks of his presence caused the young man

After a moment of concern over her stepson's departure, Anna had surrendered herself to her happiness with

an impetuosity that Darrow had never suspected in her. Early in the afternoon they had gone out in the motor,

traversing miles of sobertinted landscape in which, here and there, a scarlet vineyard flamed, clattering

through the streets of stony villages, coming out on low slopes above the river, or winding through the pale

gold of narrow woodroads with the blue of clearcut hills at their end. Over everything lay a faint sunshine

that seemed dissolved in the still air, and the smell of wet roots and decaying leaves was merged in the

pungent scent of burning underbrush. Once, at the turn of a wall, they stopped the motor before a ruined

gateway and, stumbling along a road full of ruts, stood before a little old deserted house, fantastically carved

and chimneyed, which lay in a moat under the shade of ancient trees. They paced the paths between the trees,

found a mouldy Temple of Love on an islet among reeds and plantains, and, sitting on a bench in the

stableyard, watched the pigeons circling against the sunset over their cot of patterned brick. Then the motor

When they came in they sat beside the fire in the oak drawingroom, and Darrow noticed how delicately her

head stood out against the sombre panelling, and mused on the enjoyment there would always be in the mere

They dined late, and facing her across the table, with its low lights and flowers, he felt an extraordinary

pleasure in seeing her again in evening dress, and in letting his eyes dwell on the proud shy set of her head,

the way her dark hair clasped it, and the girlish thinness of her neck above the slight swell of the breast. His

imagination was struck by the quality of reticence in her beauty. She suggested a fine portrait kept down to a

After dinner they went out on the terrace for a look at the moonmisted park. Through the crepuscular

whiteness the trees hung in blotted masses. Below the terrace, the garden drew its dark diagrams between

statues that stood like muffled conspirators on the edge of the shadow. Farther off, the meadows unrolled a

silvershot tissue to the mantling of mist above the river; and the autumn stars trembled overhead like their

He lit his cigar, and they walked slowly up and down the flags in the languid air, till he put an arm about her,

saying: "You mustn't stay till you're chilled"; then they went back into the room and drew up their chairs to

It seemed only a moment later that she said: "It must be after eleven," and stood up and looked down on him,

smiling faintly. He sat still, absorbing the look, and thinking: "There'll be evenings and evenings"till she

"Good night," he answered, and held her fast; and they gave each other a long kiss of promise and

The memory of it glowed in him still as he sat over his crumbling fire; but beneath his physical exultation he

felt a certain gravity of mood. His happiness was in some sort the rallyingpoint of many scattered purposes.

He summed it up vaguely by saying to himself that to be loved by a woman like that made "all the

difference"...He was a little tired of experimenting on life; he wanted to "take a line", to follow things up, to

centralize and concentrate, and produce results. Two or three more years of diplomacywith her beside

him!and then their real life would begin: study, travel and bookmaking for him, and for herwell, the

joy, at any rate, of getting out of an atmosphere of bricabrac and cardleaving into the open air of

The desire for change had for some time been latent in him, and his meeting with Mrs. Leath the previous

spring had given it a definite direction. With such a comrade to focus and stimulate his energies he felt

modestly but agreeably sure of "doing something". And under this assurance was the lurking sense that he

was somehow worthy of his opportunity. His life, on the whole, had been a creditable affair. Out of modest

chances and middling talents he had built himself a fairly marked personality, known some exceptional

people, done a number of interesting and a few rather difficult things, and found himself, at thirtyseven,

possessed of an intellectual ambition sufficient to occupy the passage to a robust and energetic old age. As for

the private and personal side of his life, it had come up to the current standards, and if it had dropped, now

and then, below a more ideal measure, even these declines had been brief, parenthetic, incidental. In the

recognized essentials he had always remained strictly within the limit of his scruples.

From this reassuring survey of his case he came back to the contemplation of its crowning felicity. His mind

turned again to his first meeting with Anna Summers and took up one by one the threads of their faintly

sketched romance. He dwelt with pardonable pride on the fact that fate had so early marked him for the high

privilege of possessing her: it seemed to mean that they had really, in the truest sense of the illused phrase,

Deeper still than all these satisfactions was the mere elemental sense of wellbeing in her presence. That,

after all, was what proved her to be the woman for him: the pleasure he took in the set of her head, the way

her hair grew on her forehead and at the nape, her steady gaze when he spoke, the grave freedom of her gait

and gestures. He recalled every detail of her face, the fine veinings of the temples, the bluishbrown shadows

in her upper lids, and the way the reflections of two stars seemed to form and break up in her eyes when he

If he had had any doubt as to the nature of her feeling for him those dissolving stars would have allayed it.

She was reserved, she was shy even, was what the shallow and effusive would call "cold". She was like a

picture so hung that it can be seen only at a certain angle: an angle known to no one but its possessor. The

thought flattered his sense of possessorship...He felt that the smile on his lips would have been fatuous had it

had a witness. He was thinking of her look when she had questioned him about his meeting with Owen at the

theatre: less of her words than of her look, and of the effort the question cost her: the reddening of her cheek,

the deepening of the strained line between her brows, the way her eyes sought shelter and then turned and

drew on him. Pride and passion were in the conflictmagnificent qualities in a wife! The sight almost made

up for his momentary embarrassment at the rousing of a memory which had no place in his present picture of

Yes! It was worth a good deal to watch that fight between her instinct and her intelligence, and know one's

Mingled with these sensations were considerations of another order. He reflected with satisfaction that she

was the kind of woman with whom one would like to be seen in public. It would be distinctly agreeable to

follow her into drawing rooms, to walk after her down the aisle of a theatre, to get in and out of trains with

her, to say "my wife" of her to all sorts of people. He draped these details in the handsome phrase "She's a

woman to be proud of", and felt that this fact somehow justified and ennobled his instinctive boyish

He stood up, rambled across the room and leaned out for a while into the starry night. Then he dropped again

"Oh, hang it," he suddenly exclaimed, "it's the best thing that's ever happened to me, anyhow!"

The next day was even better. He felt, and knew she felt, that they had reached a clearer understanding of

each other. It was as if, after a swim through bright opposing waves, with a dazzle of sun in their eyes, they

had gained an inlet in the shades of a cliff, where they could float on the still surface and gaze far down into

Now and then, as they walked and talked, he felt a thrill of youthful wonder at the coincidence of their views

and their experiences, at the way their minds leapt to the same point in the same instant.

"The old delusion, I suppose," he smiled to himself. "Will Nature never tire of the trick?"

But he knew it was more than that. There were moments in their talk when he felt, distinctly and

unmistakably, the solid ground of friendship underneath the whirling dance of his sensations. "How I should

like her if I didn't love her!" he summed it up, wondering at the miracle of such a union.

In the course of the morning a telegram had come from Owen Leath, announcing that he, his grandmother

and Effie would arrive from Dijon that afternoon at four. The station of the main line was eight or ten miles

from Givre, and Anna, soon after three, left in the motor to meet the travellers.

When she had gone Darrow started for a walk, planning to get back late, in order that the reunited family

might have the end of the afternoon to themselves. He roamed the country side till long after dark, and the

stableclock of Givre was striking seven as he walked up the avenue to the court.

In the hall, coming down the stairs, he encountered Anna. Her face was serene, and his first glance showed

him that Owen had kept his word and that none of her forebodings had been fulfilled.

She had just come down from the schoolroom, where Effie and the governess were having supper; the little

girl, she told him, looked immensely better for her Swiss holiday, but was dropping with sleep after the

journey, and too tired to make her habitual appearance in the drawingroom before being put to bed.

Madame de Chantelle was resting, but would be down for dinner; and as for Owen, Anna supposed he was

off somewhere in the parkhe had a passion for prowling about the park at nightfall...

Darrow followed her into the brown room, where the teatable had been left for him. He declined her offer of

tea, but she lingered a moment to tell him that Owen had in fact kept his word, and that Madame de Chantelle

had come back in the best of humours, and unsuspicious of the blow about to fall.

"She has enjoyed her month at Ouchy, and it has given her a lot to talk abouther symptoms, and the rival

doctors, and the people at the hotel. It seems she met your Ambassadress there, and Lady Wantley, and some

other London friends of yours, and she's heard what she calls 'delightful things' about you: she told me to tell

you so. She attaches great importance to the fact that your grandmother was an Everard of Albany. She's

prepared to open her arms to you. I don't know whether it won't make it harder for poor Owen...the contrast, I

mean...There are no Ambassadresses or Everards to vouch for HIS choice! But you'll help me, won't you?

You'll help me to help him? Tomorrow I'll tell you the rest. Now I must rush up and tuck in Effie..."

"Oh, you'll see, we'll pull it off for him!" he assured her; "together, we can't fail to pull it off."

He stood and watched her with a smile as she fled down the halflit vista to the hall.

If Darrow, on entering the drawingroom before dinner, examined its new occupant with unusual interest, it

Anna's hints had roused his interest in the lad's love affair, and he wondered what manner of girl the heroine

of the coming conflict might be. He had guessed that Owen's rebellion symbolized for his stepmother her

own long struggle against the Leath conventions, and he understood that if Anna so passionately abetted him

it was partly because, as she owned, she wanted his liberation to coincide with hers.

The lady who was to represent, in the impending struggle, the forces of order and tradition was seated by the

fire when Darrow entered. Among the flowers and old furniture of the large palepanelled room, Madame de

Chantelle had the inanimate elegance of a figure introduced into a "still life" to give the scale. And this,

Darrow reflected, was exactly what she doubtless regarded as her chief obligation: he was sure she thought a

great deal of "measure", and approved of most things only up to a certain point. She was a woman of sixty,

with a figure at once young and oldfashioned. Her fair faded tints, her quaint corseting, the passementerie

on her tightwaisted dress, the velvet band on her tapering arm, made her resemble a "carte de visite"

photograph of the middle sixties. One saw her, younger but no less invincibly ladylike, leaning on a chair

with a fringed back, a curl in her neck, a locket on her tuckered bosom, toward the end of an embossed

She received her daughterinlaw's suitor with an affability which implied her knowledge and approval of

his suit. Darrow had already guessed her to be a person who would instinctively oppose any suggested

changes, and then, after one had exhausted one's main arguments, unexpectedly yield to some small

incidental reason, and adhere doggedly to her new position. She boasted of her oldfashioned prejudices,

talked a good deal of being a grandmother, and made a show of reaching up to tap Owen's shoulder, though

She was full of a small pale prattle about the people she had seen at Ouchy, as to whom she had the minute

statistical information of a gazetteer, without any apparent sense of personal differences. She said to Darrow:

"They tell me things are very much changed in America...Of course in my youth there WAS a Society"...She

had no desire to return there she was sure the standards must be so different. "There are charming people

everywhere...and one must always look on the best side...but when one has lived among Traditions it's

difficult to adapt one's self to the new ideas...These dreadful views of marriage...it's so hard to explain them

to my French relations...I'm thankful to say I don't pretend to understand them myself! But YOU'RE an

She wandered off to the cooking and the service of the hotel at Ouchy. She attached great importance to

gastronomic details and to the manners of hotel servants. There, too, there was a falling off, she said. "I don t

know, of course; but people say it's owing to the Americans. Certainly my waiter had a way of slapping down

the dishes...they tell me that many of them are Anarchists...belong to Unions, you know." She appealed to

Darrow's reported knowledge of economic conditions to confirm this ominous rumour.

After dinner Owen Leath wandered into the next room, where the piano stood, and began to play among the

shadows. His stepmother presently joined him, and Darrow sat alone with Madame de Chantelle.

She took up the thread of her mild chat and carried it on at the same pace as her knitting. Her conversation

resembled the large loosestranded web between her fingers: now and then she dropped a stitch, and went on

Darrow listened with a lazy sense of wellbeing. In the mental lull of the afterdinner hour, with harmonious

memories murmuring through his mind, and the soft tints and shadowy spaces of the fine old room charming

his eyes to indolence, Madame de Chantelle's discourse seemed not out of place. He could understand that, in

the long run, the atmosphere of Givre might be suffocating; but in his present mood its very limitations had a

Presently he found the chance to say a word in his own behalf; and thereupon measured the advantage, never

before particularly apparent to him, of being related to the Everards of Albany. Madame de Chantelle's

conception of her native countryto which she had not returned since her twentieth yearreminded him of

an ancient geographer's map of the Hyperborean regions. It was all a foggy blank, from which only one or

two fixed outlines emerged; and one of these belonged to the Everards of Albany.

The fact that they offered such firm footingformed, so to speak, a friendly territory on which the opposing

powers could meet and treathelped him through the task of explaining and justifying himself as the

successor of Fraser Leath. Madame de Chantelle could not resist such incontestable claims. She seemed to

feel her son's hovering and discriminating presence, and she gave Darrow the sense that he was being tested

She also made him aware of the immense advantage he possessed in belonging to the diplomatic profession.

She spoke of this humdrum calling as a Career, and gave Darrow to understand that she supposed him to have

been seducing Duchesses when he was not negotiating Treaties. He heard again quaint phrases which

romantic old ladies had used in his youth: "Brilliant diplomatic society...social advantages...the entree

everywhere...nothing else FORMS a young man in the same way..." and she sighingly added that she could

Darrow prudently suppressed his own view of the profession, as well as the fact that he had adopted it

provisionally, and for reasons less social than sociological; and the talk presently passed on to the subject of

Here again, Madame de Chantelle's awe of the Career made her admit the necessity of Anna's consenting to

an early marriage. The fact that Darrow was "ordered" to South America seemed to put him in the romantic

light of a young soldier charged to lead a forlorn hope: she sighed and said: "At such moments a wife's duty

The problem of Effie's future might have disturbed her, she added; but since Anna, for a time, consented to

leave the little girl with her, that problem was at any rate deferred. She spoke plaintively of the responsibility

of looking after her granddaughter, but Darrow divined that she enjoyed the flavour of the word more than

"Effie's a perfect child. She's more like my son, perhaps, than dear Owen. She'll never intentionally give me

the least trouble. But of course the responsibility will be great...I'm not sure I should dare to undertake it if it

were not for her having such a treasure of a governess. Has Anna told you about our little governess? After

all the worry we had last year, with one impossible creature after another, it seems providential, just now, to

have found her. At first we were afraid she was too young; but now we've the greatest confidence in her. So

clever and amusingand SUCH a lady! I don't say her education's all it might be...no drawing or

Madame de Chantelle's fond insistence on the likeness between Effie Leath and her father, if not particularly

gratifying to Darrow, had at least increased his desire to see the little girl. It gave him an odd feeling of

discomfort to think that she should have any of the characteristics of the late Fraser Leath: he had, somehow,

fantastically pictured her as the mystical offspring of the early tenderness between himself and Anna

His encounter with Effie took place the next morning, on the lawn below the terrace, where he found her, in

the early sunshine, knocking about golf balls with her brother. Almost at once, and with infinite relief, he saw

that the resemblance of which Madame de Chantelle boasted was mainly external. Even that discovery was

slightly distasteful, though Darrow was forced to own that Fraser Leath's straightfeatured fairness had lent

itself to the production of a peculiarly finished image of childish purity. But it was evident that other

elements had also gone to the making of Effie, and that another spirit sat in her eyes. Her serious handshake,

her "pretty" greeting, were worthy of the Leath tradition, and he guessed her to be more malleable than

Owen, more subject to the influences of Givre; but the shout with which she returned to her romp had in it the

He had begged a holiday for her, and when Mrs. Leath appeared he and she and the little girl went off for a

ramble. Anna wished her daughter to have time to make friends with Darrow before learning in what relation

he was to stand to her; and the three roamed the woods and fields till the distant chime of the stableclock

Effie, who was attended by a shaggy terrier, had picked up two or three subordinate dogs at the stable; and as

she trotted on ahead with her yapping escort, Anna hung back to throw a look at Darrow.

"Yes," he answered it, "she's exquisite...Oh, I see what I'm asking of you! But she'll be quite happy here,

Anna sighed her acquiescence. "Oh, she'll be happy here. It's her nature to be happy. She'll apply herself to it,

conscientiously, as she does to her lessons, and to what she calls 'being good'...In a way, you see, that's just

what worries me. Her idea of 'being good' is to please the person she's withshe puts her whole dear little

"But surely there's no danger of that just now? Madame de Chantelle tells me that you've at last put your hand

"It's lucky, at any rate," Darrow continued, "that Madame de Chantelle thinks her so."

"Yes. She's just the person for Effie. Only, of course, one never knows...She's young, and she might take it

into her head to leave us..." After a pause she added: "I'm naturally anxious to know what you think of her."

When they entered the house the hands of the hall clock stood within a few minutes of the luncheon hour.

Anna led Effie off to have her hair smoothed and Darrow wandered into the oak sittingroom, which he

found untenanted. The sun lay pleasantly on its brown walls, on the scattered books and the flowers in old

porcelain vases. In his eyes lingered the vision of the darkhaired mother mounting the stairs with her little

fair daughter. The contrast between them seemed a last touch of grace in the complex harmony of things. He

stood in the window, looking out at the park, and brooding inwardly upon his happiness...

He was roused by Effie's voice and the scamper of her feet down the long floors behind him.

He turned and stooped to her with a smile, and as she caught his hand he perceived that she was trying to

draw him toward some one who had paused behind her in the doorway, and whom he supposed to be her

The figure in the doorway came forward and Darrow, looking up, found himself face to face with Sophy

Viner. They stood still, a yard or two apart, and looked at each other without speaking.

As they paused there, a shadow fell across one of the terrace windows, and Owen Leath stepped whistling

into the room. In his rough shooting clothes, with the glow of exercise under his fair skin, he looked

extraordinarily lighthearted and happy. Darrow, with a quick sideglance, noticed this, and perceived also

that the glow on the youth's cheek had deepened suddenly to red. He too stopped short, and the three stood

there motionless for a barely perceptible beat of time. During its lapse, Darrow's eyes had turned back from

Owen's face to that of the girl between them. He had the sense that, whatever was done, it was he who must

do it, and that it must be done immediately. He went forward and held out his hand.

She answered: "How do you do?" in a voice that sounded clear and natural; and the next moment he again

To his strained senses there seemed to be another just measurable pause before Anna said, looking gaily

about the little group: "Has Owen introduced you? This is Effie's friend, Miss Viner."

Effie, still hanging on her governess's arm, pressed herself closer with a little gesture of appropriation; and

"How charming! Then we're all friends. But luncheon must be ready," said Mrs. Leath.

She turned back to the door, and the little procession moved down the two long drawingrooms, with Effie

Madame de Chantelle and Anna had planned, for the afternoon, a visit to a remotely situated acquaintance

whom the introduction of the motor had transformed into a neighbour. Effie was to pay for her morning's

holiday by an hour or two in the schoolroom, and Owen suggested that he and Darrow should betake

Darrow was not an ardent sportsman, but any pretext for physical activity would have been acceptable at the

moment; and he was glad both to get away from the house and not to be left to himself.

When he came downstairs the motor was at the door, and Anna stood before the hall mirror, swathing her hat

in veils. She turned at the sound of his step and smiled at him for a long full moment.

"I'd no idea you knew Miss Viner," she said, as he helped her into her long coat.

"It came back to me, luckily, that I'd seen her two or three times in London, several years ago. She was

secretary, or something of the sort, in the background of a house where I used to dine."

He loathed the slighting indifference of the phrase, but he had uttered it deliberately, had been secretly

practising it all through the interminable hour at the luncheontable. Now that it was spoken, he shivered at

its note of condescension. In such cases one was almost sure to overdo...But Anna seemed to notice nothing

"Was she really? You must tell me all about ittell me exactly how she struck you. I'm so glad it turns out

Madame de Chantelle and Owen appeared together as he spoke, and Anna, gathering up her wraps, said:

As he tramped through the woods at his young host's side, Darrow felt the partial relief from thought

produced by exercise and the obligation to talk. Little as he cared for shooting, he had the habit of

concentration which makes it natural for a man to throw himself wholly into whatever business he has in

hand, and there were moments of the afternoon when a sudden whirr in the undergrowth, a vivider gleam

against the hazy browns and greys of the woods, was enough to fill the foreground of his attention. But all the

while, behind these voluntarily emphasized sensations, his secret consciousness continued to revolve on a

loud wheel of thought. For a time it seemed to be sweeping him through deep gulfs of darkness. His

sensations were too swift and swarming to be disentangled. He had an almost physical sense of struggling for

air, of battling helplessly with material obstructions, as though the russet covert through which he trudged

Snatches of his companion's talk drifted to him intermittently through the confusion of his thoughts. He

caught eager selfrevealing phrases, and understood that Owen was saying things about himself, perhaps

hinting indirectly at the hopes for which Darrow had been prepared by Anna's confidences. He had already

become aware that the lad liked him, and had meant to take the first opportunity of showing that he

reciprocated the feeling. But the effort of fixing his attention on Owen's words was so great that it left no

Young Leath, it appeared, felt that he had reached a turningpoint in his career, a height from which he could

impartially survey his past progress and projected endeavour. At one time he had had musical and literary

yearnings, visions of desultory artistic indulgence; but these had of late been superseded by the resolute

"I don't want, you see," Darrow heard him explaining, "to drift into what my grandmother, poor dear, is

trying to make of me: an adjunct of Givre. I don't wanthang it all!to slip into collecting sensations as my

father collected snuffboxes. I want Effie to have Givreit's my grandmother's, you know, to do as she likes

with; and I've understood lately that if it belonged to me it would gradually gobble me up. I want to get out of

it, into a life that's big and ugly and struggling. If I can extract beauty out of THAT, so much the better: that'll

prove my vocation. But I want to MAKE beauty, not be drowned in the readymade, like a bee in a pot of

Darrow knew that he was being appealed to for corroboration of these views and for encouragement in the

course to which they pointed. To his own ears his answers sounded now curt, now irrelevant: at one moment

he seemed chillingly indifferent, at another he heard himself launching out on a flood of hazy discursiveness.

He dared not look at Owen, for fear of detecting the lad's surprise at these senseless transitions. And through

the confusion of his inward struggles and outward loquacity he heard the ceaseless trip hammer beat of the

To get back to the house before Anna's return seemed his most pressing necessity. He did not clearly know

why: he simply felt that he ought to be there. At one moment it occurred to him that Miss Viner might want

to speak to him aloneand again, in the same flash, that it would probably be the last thing she would

want...At any rate, he felt he ought to try to speak to HER; or at least be prepared to do so, if the chance

Finally, toward four, he told his companion that he had some letters on his mind and must get back to the

house and despatch them before the ladies returned. He left Owen with the beater and walked on to the edge

of the covert. At the park gates he struck obliquely through the trees, following a grass avenue at the end of

which he had caught a glimpse of the roof of the chapel. A grey haze had blotted out the sun and the still air

clung about him tepidly. At length the housefront raised before him its expanse of damp silvered brick,

and he was struck afresh by the high decorum of its calm lines and soberly massed surfaces. It made him feel,

in the turbid coil of his fears and passions, like a muddy tramp forcing his way into some pure sequestered

By and bye, he knew, he should have to think the complex horror out, slowly, systematically, bit by bit; but

for the moment it was whirling him about so fast that he could just clutch at its sharp spikes and be tossed off

again. Only one definite immediate fact stuck in his quivering grasp. He must give the girl every

"I was coming out to meet youyou and Owen. Miss Viner was coming, too, and then she couldn't because

she's got such a headache. I'm afraid I gave it to her because I did my division so disgracefully. It's too bad,

isn't it? But won't you walk back with me? Nurse won't mind the least bit; she'd so much rather go in to tea."

Darrow excused himself laughingly, on the plea that he had letters to write, which was much worse than

"Oh, then you can go and write them in Owen's study. That's where gentlemen always write their letters."

She flew on with her dog and Darrow pursued his way to the house. Effie's suggestion struck him as useful.

He had pictured himself as vaguely drifting about the drawing rooms, and had perceived the difficulty of

Miss Viner's having to seek him there; but the study, a small room on the right of the hall, was in easy sight

from the staircase, and so situated that there would be nothing marked in his being found there in talk with

He went in, leaving the door open, and sat down at the writingtable. The room was a friendly heterogeneous

place, the one repository, in the wellordered and amplyservanted house, of all its unclassified odds and

ends: Effie's croquetbox and fishing rods, Owen's guns and golfsticks and racquets, his stepmother's

flowerbaskets and gardening implements, even Madame de Chantelle's embroidery frame, and the back

numbers of the Catholic Weekly. The early twilight had begun to fall, and presently a slanting ray across the

desk showed Darrow that a servant was coming across the hall with a lamp. He pulled out a sheet of

notepaper and began to write at random, while the man, entering, put the lamp at his elbow and vaguely

"straightened" the heap of newspapers tossed on the divan. Then his steps died away and Darrow sat leaning

Presently another step sounded on the stairs, wavered a moment and then moved past the threshold of the

study. Darrow got up and walked into the hall, which was still unlighted. In the dimness he saw Sophy Viner

standing by the hall door in her hat and jacket. She stopped at sight of him, her hand on the doorbolt, and

Darrow spoke as naturally as he could, but his voice sounded to his own ears like an amateur actor's in a

Miss Viner, without answering, drew back the bolt. He watched her in silence as the door swung open; then

She stood irresolute, and he added: "I was writing in there won't you come and have a little talk? Every

The last words struck him as not wellchosen, but there was no time to choose. She paused a second longer

and then crossed the threshold of the study. At luncheon she had sat with her back to the window, and beyond

noting that she had grown a little thinner, and had less colour and vivacity, he had seen no change in her; but

She did not seem to see it, or, if she did, she deliberately chose another seat. He came back to his own chair

and leaned his elbows on the blotter. She faced him from the farther side of the table.

"You promised to let me hear from you now and then," he began awkwardly, and with a sharp sense of his

A faint smile made her face more tragic. "Did I? There was nothing to tell. I've had no historylike the

"Why do you say 'was'? You're surely not thinking of going? There can't be kinder people anywhere."

Darrow hardly knew what he was saying; but her answer came to him with deadly definiteness.

"On me?" He stared at her across Owen's scattered papers. "Good God! What can you think of me, to say

The mockery of the question flashed back at him from her wretched face. She stood up, wandered away, and

leaned an instant in the darkening windowframe. From there she turned to fling back at him: "Don't imagine

He steadied his elbows on the table and hid his face in his hands. It was harder, oh, damnably harder, than he

had expected! Arguments, expedients, palliations, evasions, all seemed to be slipping away from him: he was

left face to face with the mere graceless fact of his inferiority. He lifted his head to ask at random: "You've

"Since June; yes. It turned out that the Farlows were hunting for meall the whilefor this."

She stood facing him, her back to the window, evidently impatient to be gone, yet with something still to say,

or that she expected to hear him say. The sense of her expectancy benumbed him. What in heaven's name

"Oh, the theatre!" She gave a little laugh. "I couldn't wait for the theatre. I had to take the first thing that

He pushed on haltingly: "I'm gladextremely gladyou're happy here...I'd counted on your letting me

know if there was anything I could do...The theatre, nowif you still regret itif you're not contented

here...I know people in that line in LondonI'm certain I can manage it for you when I get back"

She moved up to the table and leaned over it to ask, in a voice that was hardly above a whisper: "Then you

He dropped his arms with a groan. "Good heavens! How can you think such things? At the time, you know, I

begged you to let me do what I could, but you wouldn't hear of it...and ever since I've been wanting to be of

She heard him through, motionless, without a quiver of the clasped hands she rested on the edge of the table.

"If you want to help me, thenyou can help me to stay here," she brought out with lowtoned intensity.

Through the stillness of the pause which followed, the bray of a motorhorn sounded far down the drive.

Instantly she turned, with a last white look at him, and fled from the room and up the stairs. He stood

motionless, benumbed by the shock of her last words. She was afraid, thenafraid of himsick with fear of

The motorhorn sounded again, close at hand, and he turned and went up to his room. His letterwriting was

a sufficient pretext for not immediately joining the party about the teatable, and he wanted to be alone and

Upstairs, the room held out the intimate welcome of its lamp and fire. Everything in it exhaled the same sense

of peace and stability which, two evenings before, had lulled him to complacent meditation. His armchair

again invited him from the hearth, but he was too agitated to sit still, and with sunk head and hands clasped

His five minutes with Sophy Viner had flashed strange lights into the shadowy corners of his consciousness.

The girl's absolute candour, her hard ardent honesty, was for the moment the vividest point in his thoughts.

He wondered anew, as he had wondered before, at the way in which the harsh discipline of life had stripped

her of false sentiment without laying the least touch on her pride. When they had parted, five months before,

she had quietly but decidedly rejected all his offers of help, even to the suggestion of his trying to further her

theatrical aims: she had made it clear that she wished their brief alliance to leave no trace on their lives save

that of its own smiling memory. But now that they were unexpectedly confronted in a situation which

seemed, to her terrified fancy, to put her at his mercy, her first impulse was to defend her right to the place

she had won, and to learn as quickly as possible if he meant to dispute it. While he had pictured her as

shrinking away from him in a tremor of selfeffacement she had watched his movements, made sure of her

opportunity, and come straight down to "have it out" with him. He was so struck by the frankness and energy

of the proceeding that for a moment he lost sight of the view of his own character implied in it.

"Poor thing...poor thing!" he could only go on saying; and with the repetition of the words the picture of

He understood then, for the first time, how vague, in comparison with hers, had been his own vision of the

part he had played in the brief episode of their relation. The incident had left in him a sense of exasperation

and self contempt, but that, as he now perceived, was chiefly, if not altogether, as it bore on his

preconceived ideal of his attitude toward another woman. He had fallen below his own standard of

sentimental loyalty, and if he thought of Sophy Viner it was mainly as the chance instrument of his lapse.

These considerations were not agreeable to his pride, but they were forced on him by the example of her

valiant commonsense. If he had cut a sorry figure in the business, he owed it to her not to close his eyes to

But when he opened them, what did he see? The situation, detestable at best, would yet have been relatively

simple if protecting Sophy Viner had been the only duty involved in it. The fact that that duty was paramount

did not do away with the contingent obligations. It was Darrow's instinct, in difficult moments, to go straight

to the bottom of the difficulty; but he had never before had to take so dark a dive as this, and for the minute

he shivered on the brink...Well, his first duty, at any rate, was to the girl: he must let her see that he meant to

fulfill it to the last jot, and then try to find out how to square the fulfillment with the other problems already

In the oak room he found Mrs. Leath, her motherinlaw and Effie. The group, as he came toward it down

the long drawingrooms, composed itself prettily about the teatable. The lamps and the fire crossed their

gleams on silver and porcelain, on the bright haze of Effie's hair and on the whiteness of Anna's forehead, as

She did not move at Darrow's approach, but lifted to him a deep gaze of peace and confidence. The look

seemed to throw about him the spell of a divine security: he felt the joy of a convalescent suddenly waking to

Madame de Chantelle, across her knitting, discoursed of their afternoon's excursion, with occasional pauses

induced by the hypnotic effect of the fresh air; and Effie, kneeling, on the hearth, softly but insistently sought

to implant in her terrier's mind some notion of the relation between a vertical attitude and sugar.

Darrow took a chair behind the little girl, so that he might look across at her mother. It was almost a necessity

for him, at the moment, to let his eyes rest on Anna's face, and to meet, now and then, the proud shyness of

Madame de Chantelle presently enquired what had become of Owen, and a moment later the window behind

her opened, and her grandson, gun in hand, came in from the terrace. As he stood there in the lamplight,

with dead leaves and bits of bramble clinging to his mudspattered clothes, the scent of the night about him

and its chill on his pale bright face, he really had the look of a young faun strayed in from the forest.

Effie abandoned the terrier to fly to him. "Oh, Owen, where in the world have you been? I walked miles and

miles with Nurse and couldn't find you, and we met Jean and he said he didn't know where you'd gone."

"Nobody knows where I go, or what I see when I get there that's the beauty of it!" he laughed back at her.

"Oh, now, Owen, now! I don't really believe I'll ever be much better than I am now."

"Let Owen have his tea first," her mother suggested; but the young man, declining the offer, propped his gun

against the wall, and, lighting a cigarette, began to pace up and down the room in a way that reminded

Darrow of his own caged wanderings. Effie pursued him with her blandishments, and for a while he poured

out to her a lowvoiced stream of nonsense; then he sat down beside his stepmother and leaned over to help

"Where's Miss Viner?" he asked, as Effie climbed up on him. "Why isn't she here to chain up this

"Poor Miss Viner has a headache. Effie says she went to her room as soon as lessons were over, and sent

"Ah," said Owen, abruptly setting down his cup. He stood up, lit another cigarette, and wandered away to the

From the twilight where he sat a lonely music, borne on fantastic chords, floated to the group about the

teatable. Under its influence Madame de Chantelle's meditative pauses increased in length and frequency,

and Effie stretched herself on the hearth, her drowsy head against the dog. Presently her nurse appeared, and

Anna rose at the same time. "Stop a minute in my sittingroom on your way up," she paused to say to Darrow

A few hours earlier, her request would have brought him instantly to his feet. She had given him, on the day

of his arrival, an inviting glimpse of the spacious booklined room above stairs in which she had gathered

together all the tokens of her personal tastes: the retreat in which, as one might fancy, Anna Leath had hidden

the restless ghost of Anna Summers; and the thought of a talk with her there had been in his mind ever since.

But now he sat motionless, as if spellbound by the play of Madame de Chantelle's needles and the

"She will want to ask me about the girl," he repeated to himself, with a fresh sense of the insidious taint that

embittered all his thoughts; the hand of the slender columned clock on the mantelpiece had spanned a

From her writingtable, where she sat over a pile of letters, Anna lifted her happy smile. The impulse to press

his lips to it made him come close and draw her upward. She threw her head back, as if surprised at the

abruptness of the gesture; then her face leaned to his with the slow droop of a flower. He felt again the sweep

She sat down in the sofacorner by the fire and he drew an armchair close to her. His gaze roamed peacefully

"It's a good place to be alone inI don't think I've ever before cared to talk with any one here."

"Yes; but we must save it up till later. There are things I want to say to you now."

He thought she seemed surprised at his surprise. "It's important, naturally," she explained, "that I should find

"Every apparent reason. We all like her. Effie's very fond of her, and she seems to have a delightful influence

on the child. But we know so little, after allabout her antecedents, I mean, and her past history. That's why

I want you to try and recall everything you heard about her when you used to see her in London."

"Oh, on that score I'm afraid I sha'n't be of much use. As I told you, she was a mere shadow in the

"Yes; an appalling woman who runs a roaring dinnerfactory that used now and then to catch me in its

wheels. I escaped from them long ago; but in my time there used to be half a dozen fagged 'hands' to tend the

machine, and Miss Viner was one of them. I'm glad she's out of it, poor girl!" "Then you never really saw

"I never had the chance. Mrs. Murrett discouraged any competition on the part of her subordinates."

"Especially such pretty ones, I suppose?" Darrow made no comment, and she continued: "And Mrs. Murrett's

"Only in so far as her disapproval would, on general principles, have been a good mark for Miss Viner. But

surely," he went on after a pause, "you could have found out about her from the people through whom you

Anna smiled. "Oh, we heard of her through Adelaide Painter ;" and in reply to his glance of interrogation

she explained that the lady in question was a spinster of South Braintree, Massachusetts, who, having come to

Paris some thirty years earlier, to nurse a brother through an illness, had ever since protestingly and

provisionally camped there in a state of contemptuous protestation oddly manifested by her never taking the

slipcovers off her drawingroom chairs. Her long residence on Gallic soil had not mitigated her hostility

toward the creed and customs of the race, but though she always referred to the Catholic Church as the

Scarlet Woman and took the darkest views of French private life, Madame de Chantelle placed great reliance

on her judgment and experience, and in every domestic crisis the irreducible Adelaide was immediately

"It's all the odder because my motherinlaw, since her second marriage, has lived so much in the country

that she's practically lost sight of all her other American friends. Besides which, you can see how completely

she has identified herself with Monsieur de Chantelle's nationality and adopted French habits and prejudices.

Yet when anything goes wrong she always sends for Adelaide Painter, who's more American than the Stars

and Stripes, and might have left South Braintree yesterday, if she hadn't, rather, brought it over with her in

"Oh, but only indirectly. When we had that odious adventure with Mademoiselle Grumeau, who'd been so

highly recommended by Monsieur de Chantelle's aunt, the Chanoinesse, Adelaide was of course sent for, and

she said at once: 'I'm not the least bit surprised. I've always told you that what you wanted for Effie was a

sweet American girl, and not one of these nasty foreigners.' Unluckily she couldn't, at the moment, put her

hand on a sweet American; but she presently heard of Miss Viner through the Farlows, an excellent couple

who live in the Quartier Latin and write about French life for the American papers. I was only too thankful to

find anyone who was vouched for by decent people; and so far I've had no cause to regret my choice. But I

know, after all, very little about Miss Viner; and there are all kinds of reasons why I want, as soon as

"Since you've got to leave Effie I understand your feeling in that way. But is there, in such a case, any

"No; and it's been so favourable that I was ready to accept it as conclusive. Only, naturally, when I found

you'd known her in London I was in hopes you'd give me some more specific reasons for liking her as much

"I'm afraid I can give you nothing more specific than my general vague impression that she seems very

"To the contrary? How should I? I'm not conscious of ever having heard any one say two words about her. I

only infer that she must have pluck and character to have stuck it out so long at Mrs. Murrett's."

"Yes, poor thing! She has pluck, certainly; and pride, too; which must have made it all the harder." Anna rose

to her feet. "You don't know how glad I am that your impression's on the whole so good. I particularly

He drew her to him with a smile. "On that condition I'm prepared to love even Adelaide Painter."

"I almost hope you wont have the chance topoor Adelaide! Her appearance here always coincides with a

"Oh, then I must manage to meet her elsewhere." He held Anna closer, saying to himself, as he smoothed

back the hair from her forehead: "What does anything matter but just THIS? Must I go now?" he added

She answered absently: "It must be time to dress"; then she drew back a little and laid her hands on his

It came to him that they were the first words of endearment he had heard her speak, and their rareness gave

them a magic quality of reassurance, as though no danger could strike through such a shield.

A knock on the door made them draw apart. Anna lifted her hand to her hair and Darrow stooped to examine

"I'm so sorry; but Effie has mislaid her Latin grammar, and I thought she might have left it here. I need it to

"Wait a minute, please, Miss Viner," Anna said; and as the girl turned back, she went on with her quiet smile:

"Effie told us you'd gone to your room with a headache. You mustn't sit up over tomorrow's lessons if you

Sophy's blush deepened. "But you see I have to. Latin's one of my weak points, and there's generally only one

page of this book between me and Effie." She threw the words off with a halfironic smile. "Do excuse my

"You didn't disturb me," Anna answered. Darrow perceived that she was looking intently at the girl, as

though struck by something tense and tremulous in her face, her voice, her whole mien and attitude. "You

DO look tired. You'd much better go straight to bed. Effie won't be sorry to skip her Latin."

"Thank youbut I'm really all right," murmured Sophy Viner. Her glance, making a swift circuit of the

room, dwelt for an appreciable instant on the intimate propinquity of armchair and sofacorner; then she

At dinner that evening Madame de Chantelle's slender monologue was thrown out over gulfs of silence.

Owen was still in the same state of moody abstraction as when Darrow had left him at the piano; and even

Anna's face, to her friend's vigilant eye, revealed not, perhaps, a personal preoccupation, but a vague sense of

She smiled, she bore a part in the talk, her eyes dwelt on Darrow's with their usual deep reliance; but beneath

He was sufficiently selfpossessed to tell himself that it was doubtless due to causes with which he was not

directly concerned. He knew the question of Owen's marriage was soon to be raised, and the abrupt alteration

in the young man's mood made it seem probable that he was himself the centre of the atmospheric

disturbance, For a moment it occurred to Darrow that Anna might have employed her afternoon in preparing

Madame de Chantelle for her grandson's impending announcement; but a glance at the elder lady's unclouded

brow showed that he must seek elsewhere the clue to Owen's taciturnity and his stepmother's concern.

Possibly Anna had found reason to change her own attitude in the matter, and had made the change known to

Owen. But this, again, was negatived by the fact that, during the afternoon's shooting, young Leath had been

in a mood of almost extravagant expansiveness, and that, from the moment of his late return to the house till

just before dinner, there had been, to Darrow's certain knowledge, no possibility of a private talk between

This obscured, if it narrowed, the field of conjecture; and Darrow's gropings threw him back on the

conclusion that he was probably reading too much significance into the moods of a lad he hardly knew, and

who had been described to him as subject to sudden changes of humour. As to Anna's fancied perturbation, it

might simply be due to the fact that she had decided to plead Owen's cause the next day, and had perhaps

already had a glimpse of the difficulties awaiting her. But Darrow knew that he was too deep in his own

perplexities to judge the mental state of those about him. It might be, after all, that the variations he felt in the

Such, at any rate, was the conclusion he had reached when, shortly after the two ladies left the

drawingroom, he bade Owen goodnight and went up to his room. Ever since the rapid selfcolloquy which

had followed on his first sight of Sophy Viner, he had known there were other questions to be faced behind

the one immediately confronting him. On the score of that one, at least, his mind, if not easy, was relieved.

He had done what was possible to reassure the girl, and she had apparently recognized the sincerity of his

intention. He had patched up as decent a conclusion as he could to an incident that should obviously have had

no sequel; but he had known all along that with the securing of Miss Viner's peace of mind only a part of his

obligation was discharged, and that with that part his remaining duty was in conflict. It had been his first

business to convince the girl that their secret was safe with him; but it was far from easy to square this with

the equally urgent obligation of safeguarding Anna's responsibility toward her child. Darrow was not much

afraid of accidental disclosures. Both he and Sophy Viner had too much at stake not to be on their guard. The

fear that beset him was of another kind, and had a profounder source. He wanted to do all he could for the

girl, but the fact of having had to urge Anna to confide Effie to her was peculiarly repugnant to him. His own

ideas about Sophy Viner were too mixed and indeterminate for him not to feel the risk of such an experiment;

yet he found himself in the intolerable position of appearing to press it on the woman he desired above all

Till late in the night his thoughts revolved in a turmoil of indecision. His pride was humbled by the

discrepancy between what Sophy Viner had been to him and what he had thought of her. This discrepancy,

which at the time had seemed to simplify the incident, now turned out to be its most galling complication.

The bare truth, indeed, was that he had hardly thought of her at all, either at the time or since, and that he was

The essential cheapness of the whole affairas far as his share in it was concernedcame home to him with

humiliating distinctness. He would have liked to be able to feel that, at the time at least, he had staked

something more on it, and had somehow, in the sequel, had a more palpable loss to show. But the plain fact

was that he hadn't spent a penny on it; which was no doubt the reason of the prodigious score it had since

been rolling up. At any rate, beat about the case as he would, it was clear that he owed it to Annaand

incidentally to his own peace of mindto find some way of securing Sophy Viner's future without leaving

The night brought no aid to the solving of this problem; but it gave him, at any rate, the clear conviction that

no time was to be lost. His first step must be to obtain from Miss Viner the chance of another and calmer talk;

He had gathered that Effie's lessons were preceded by an early scamper in the park, and conjecturing that her

governess might be with her he betook himself the next morning to the terrace, whence he wandered on to the

The atmosphere was still and pale. The muffled sunlight gleamed like gold tissue through grey gauze, and the

beech alleys tapered away to a blue haze blent of sky and forest. It was one of those elusive days when the

The stillness was presently broken by joyful barks, and Darrow, tracking the sound, overtook Effie flying

down one of the long alleys at the head of her pack. Beyond her he saw Miss Viner seated near the

stonerimmed basin beside which he and Anna had paused on their first walk to the river.

The girl, coming forward at his approach, returned his greeting almost gaily. His first glance showed him that

she had regained her composure, and the change in her appearance gave him the measure of her fears. For the

first time he saw in her again the sidelong grace that had charmed his eyes in Paris; but he saw it now as in a

The girl looked away from him. "I'm afraid there's not much time; we must be back at lessons at halfpast

"But it's barely ten minutes past. Let's at least walk a little way toward the river."

She glanced down the long walk ahead of them and then back in the direction of the house. "If you like," she

said in a low voice, with one of her quick fluctuations of colour; but instead of taking the way he proposed

Darrow was struck, and vaguely troubled, by the change in her look and tone. There was in them an

undefinable appeal, whether for help or forbearance he could not tell. Then it occurred to him that there might

have been something misleading in his so pointedly seeking her, and he felt a momentary constraint. To ease

"I came out to look for you because our talk of yesterday was so unsatisfactory. I want to hear more about

youabout your plans and prospects. I've been wondering ever since why you've so completely given up the

Her face instantly sharpened to distrust. "I had to live," she said in an offhand tone.

"I understand perfectly that you should like it herefor a time." His glance strayed down the goldroofed

windings ahead of them. "It's delightful: you couldn't be better placed. Only I wonder a little at your having

She waited for a moment before answering: "I suppose I'm less restless than I used to be."

"It's certainly natural that you should be less restless here than at Mrs. Murrett's; yet somehow I don't seem to

"WhatexactlyDO you seem to see me permanently given up to? You know you warned me rather

emphatically against the theatre." She threw off the statement without impatience, as though they were

discussing together the fate of a third person in whom both were benevolently interested. Darrow considered

his reply. "If I did, it was because you so emphatically refused to let me help you to a start."

Darrow felt the blood in his cheek. He could not understand her attitudeif indeed she had consciously

taken one, and her changes of tone did not merely reflect the involuntary alternations of her mood. It humbled

him to perceive once more how little he had to guide him in his judgment of her. He said to himself: "If I'd

ever cared a straw for her I should know how to avoid hurting her now"and his insensibility struck him as

no better than a vulgar obtuseness. But he had a fixed purpose ahead and could only push on to it.

"I hope, at any rate, you'll listen to my reasons. There's been time, on both sides, to think them over

since" He caught himself back and hung helpless on the "since": whatever words he chose, he seemed

She walked on beside him, her eyes on the ground. "Then I'm to understanddefinitelythat you DO renew

She raised a hand, as though to check him. "It's extremely friendly of youI DO believe you mean it as a

friend but I don't quite understand why, finding me, as you say, so well placed here, you should show more

anxiety about my future than at a time when I was actually, and rather desperately, adrift."

"If you show any at all, it must, at any rate, be for different reasons.In fact, it can only be," she went on,

with one of her disconcerting flashes of astuteness, "for one of two reasons; either because you feel you ought

to help me, or because, for some reason, you think you owe it to Mrs. Leath to let her know what you know

Darrow stood still in the path. Behind him he heard Effie's call, and at the child's voice he saw Sophy turn her

head with the alertness of one who is obscurely on the watch. The look was so fugitive that he could not have

said wherein it differed from her normal professional air of having her pupil on her mind.

"What you suggest about Mrs. Leath is hardly worth answering. As to my reasons for wanting to help you, a

good deal depends on the words one uses to define rather indefinite things. It's true enough that I want to help

you; but the wish isn't due to...to any past kindness on your part, but simply to my own interest in you. Why

not put it that our friendship gives me the right to intervene for what I believe to be your benefit?"

She took a few hesitating steps and then paused again. Darrow noticed that she had grown pale and that there

"Then you might naturally feel yourself justified in telling her that you don't think I'm the right person for

Effie." He uttered a sound of protest, but she disregarded it. "I don't say you'd LIKE to do it. You wouldn't:

you'd hate it. And the natural alternative would be to try to persuade me that I'd be better off somewhere else

than here. But supposing that failed, and you saw I was determined to stay? THEN you might think it your

She laid the case before him with a cold lucidity. "I should, in your place, I believe," she ended with a little

"I shouldn't feel justified in telling her, behind your back, if I thought you unsuited for the place; but I should

certainly feel justified," he rejoined after a pause, "in telling YOU if I thought the place unsuited to you."

"I've already implied them in advising you not to give up all idea of the theatre. You're too various, too gifted,

too personal, to tie yourself down, at your age, to the dismal drudgery of teaching."

She rushed the question out at him as if she expected to trip him up over it. He was moved by the simplicity

"And whatexactlydo you mean by 'nothing'? You and she were talking about me when I came into her

He uttered a protesting exclamation, and his flush reflected itself in the girl's cheek.

"Oh, I beg your pardon! I didn't mean to ask you that." She halted, and again cast a rapid glance behind and

ahead of her. Then she held out her hand. "Well, then, thank you and let me relieve your fears. I sha'n't be

At the announcement, Darrow tried to merge his look of relief into the expression of friendly interest with

which he grasped her hand. "You really do agree with me, then? And you'll give me a chance to talk things

She shook her head with a faint smile. "I'm not thinking of the stage. I've had another offer: that's all."

The relief was hardly less great. After all, his personal responsibility ceased with her departure from Givre.

Her smile flickered up. "Oh, you'll hear about it soon...I must catch Effie now and drag her back to the

She walked on for a few yards, and then paused again and confronted him. "I've been odious to youand not

"I mean, in seeming not to trust you. It's come over me again as we talked that, at heart, I've always KNOWN

Her colour rose in a bright wave, and her eyes clung to his for a swift instant of reminder and appeal. For the

same space of time the past surged up in him confusedly; then a veil dropped between them.

He turned and saw the little girl trotting back to them, her hand in Owen Leath's. Even through the stir of his

subsiding excitement Darrow was at once aware of the change effected by the young man's approach. For a

moment Sophy Viner's cheeks burned redder; then they faded to the paleness of white petals. She lost,

however, nothing of the bright bravery which it was her way to turn on the unexpected. Perhaps no one less

familiar with her face than Darrow would have discerned the tension of the smile she transferred from

himself to Owen Leath, or have remarked that her eyes had hardened from misty grey to a shining darkness.

But her observer was less struck by this than by the corresponding change in Owen Leath. The latter, when he

came in sight, had been laughing and talking unconcernedly with Effie; but as his eye fell on Miss Viner his

The change, for Darrow, was less definable; but, perhaps for that reason, it struck him as more sharply

significant. Onlyjust what did it signify? Owen, like Sophy Viner, had the kind of face which seems less

the stage on which emotions move than the very stuff they work in. In moments of excitement his odd

irregular features seemed to grow fluid, to unmake and remake themselves like the shadows of clouds on a

stream. Darrow, through the rapid flight of the shadows, could not seize on any specific indication of feeling:

he merely perceived that the young man was unaccountably surprised at finding him with Miss Viner, and

Darrow's first idea was that Owen, if he suspected that the conversation was not the result of an accidental

encounter, might wonder at his stepmother's suitor being engaged, at such an hour, in private talk with her

little girl's governess. The thought was so disturbing that, as the three turned back to the house, he was on the

point of saying to Owen: "I came out to look for your mother." But, in the contingency he feared, even so

simple a phrase might seem like an awkward attempt at explanation; and he walked on in silence at Miss

Viner's side. Presently he was struck by the fact that Owen Leath and the girl were silent also; and this gave a

new turn to his thoughts. Silence may be as variously shaded as speech; and that which enfolded Darrow and

his two companions seemed to his watchful perceptions to be quivering with crossthreads of

communication. At first he was aware only of those that centred in his own troubled consciousness; then it

occurred to him that an equal activity of intercourse was going on outside of it. Something was in fact passing

mutely and rapidly between young Leath and Sophy Viner; but what it was, and whither it tended, Darrow,

She looked down on them, as they advanced across the garden, from the serene height of her unassailable

happiness. There they were, coming toward her in the mild morning light, her child, her stepson, her

promised husband: the three beings who filled her life. She smiled a little at the happy picture they presented,

Effie's gambols encircling it in a moving frame within which the two men came slowly forward in the silence

of friendly understanding. It seemed part of the deep intimacy of the scene that they should not be talking to

each other, and it did not till afterward strike her as odd that neither of them apparently felt it necessary to

Anna herself, at the moment, was floating in the midcurrent of felicity, on a tide so bright and buoyant that

she seemed to be one with its warm waves. The first rush of bliss had stunned and dazzled her; but now that,

each morning, she woke to the calm certainty of its recurrence, she was growing used to the sense of security

"I feel as if I could trust my happiness to carry me; as if it had grown out of me like wings." So she phrased it

to Darrow, as, later in the morning, they paced the garden paths together. His answering look gave her the

same assurance of safety. The evening before he had seemed preoccupied, and the shadow of his mood had

faintly encroached on the great golden orb of their blessedness; but now it was uneclipsed again, and hung

Upstairs in her sittingroom, that afternoon, she was thinking of these things. The morning mists had turned

to rain, compelling the postponement of an excursion in which the whole party were to have joined. Effie,

with her governess, had been despatched in the motor to do some shopping at Francheuil; and Anna had

promised Darrow to join him, later in the afternoon, for a quick walk in the rain.

He had gone to his room after luncheon to get some belated letters off his conscience; and when he had left

her she had continued to sit in the same place, her hands crossed on her knees, her head slightly bent, in an

attitude of brooding retrospection. As she looked back at her past life, it seemed to her to have consisted of

one ceaseless effort to pack into each hour enough to fill out its slack folds; but now each moment was like a

She was roused by the sound of Owen's step in the gallery outside her room. It paused at her door and in

As the door closed behind him she was struck by his look of pale excitement, and an impulse of compunction

made her say: "You've come to ask me why I haven't spoken to your grandmother!" He sent about him a

glance vaguely reminding her of the strange look with which Sophy Viner had swept the room the night

Anna's first feeling was one of annoyance. There was really something comically incongruous in this boyish

surrender to impulse on the part of a young man so eager to assume the responsibilities of life. She looked at

"You asked me to help you and I promised you I would. It was hardly worth while to work out such an

elaborate plan of action if you intended to take the matter out of my hands without telling me."

"That tone? What tone?" She stared at his quivering face. "I might," she pursued, still halflaughing, "more

"I meant that I HAD to speakthat's all. You don't give me a chance to explain..."

"Owen! Don't I always want to give you every chance? It's because I DO that I wanted to talk to your

"The right moment? So was I. That's why I've spoken." His voice rose again and took the sharp edge it had in

His stepmother turned away and seated herself in her sofa corner. "Oh, my dear, it's not a privilege to

quarrel over! You've taken a load off my shoulders. Sit down and tell me all about it."

His immediate response was to throw himself into the armchair at her side, where he lounged for a moment

without speaking, his legs stretched out, his arms locked behind his thrownback head. Anna, her eyes on his

"All the heavy batteries were brought up: my father, Givre, Monsieur de Chantelle, the throne and the altar.

Even my poor mother was dragged out of oblivion and armed with imaginary protests."

"I thought I was, till I began to hear her say it. Then it sounded so incredibly silly that I told her so."

"And you've mortally offended her, I suppose? That's exactly what I wanted to prevent." She laid a hand on

He moved slightly away, so that her hand slipped from its place. "You don't understand," he said, frowning.

"I don't see how I can, till you explain. If you thought the time had come to tell your grandmother, why not

have asked me to do it? I had my reasons for waiting; but if you'd told me to speak I should have done so,

Anna did not immediately answer. Her stepson's eyes were on her face, and under his gaze she felt a faint

She delayed again for a just perceptible instant. "Why, simply of OUR side of the case."

"But you told me you were, the other day, when we talked it over before they came back from Ouchy."

"Oh, my dearif you think that, in such a complicated matter, every day, every hour, doesn't more or less

She made a slight gesture of impatience. "What does it matter, now the thing's done? I don't know that I could

He got to his feet and stood looking down on her with a tormented brow. "But it's absolutely necessary that

At his tone her impatience flared up. "It's not necessary that I should give you any explanation whatever,

since you've taken the matter out of my hands. All I can say is that I was trying to help you: that no other

thought ever entered my mind." She paused a moment and then added: "If you doubted it, you were right to

"Oh, I never doubted YOU!" he retorted, with a fugitive stress on the pronoun. His face had cleared to its old

look of trust. "Don't be offended if I've seemed to," he went on. "I can't quite explain myself, either...it's all a

kind of tangle, isn't it? That's why I thought I'd better speak at once; or rather why I didn't think at all, but just

Anna gave him back his look of conciliation. "Well, the how and why don't much matter now. The point is

The name drew a faint note of mirth from him and relaxed both their faces to a smile.

Owen shrugged his shoulders. "It's too preposterous and humiliating. Dragging that woman into our

He had moved to the hearth, where he stood pushing about the small ornaments on the mantelshelf; but at

She paused for his reply, and as it did not come she continued: "If Adelaide Painter's to be told there's no

possible reason why I shouldn't tell Mr. Darrow." Owen abruptly set down the little statuette between his

She smiled a little at his overemphasis, and was about to meet it with a word of banter when he continued,

"I've told him nothing, except what the discussion of our own planshis and mineobliged me to: that you

were thinking of marrying, and that I wasn't willing to leave France till I'd done what I could to see you

At her first words the colour had rushed to his forehead; but as she continued she saw his face compose itself

"Yes; yesI know." His face had clouded again. "And that's allpositively allyou've ever said to him?"

He had a moment's embarrassed hesitation. "It was understood, wasn't it, that my grandmother was to be the

"And you're sure that nothing you've said to Darrow could possibly have given him a hint?"

"Some one else? Who else?" She rose to her feet. "What on earth, my dear boy, can you be driving at?"

She laughed at his obstinate insistence. "To test my veracity, I suppose?" At the sound of a step in the gallery

She met Darrow's knock with an invitation to enter, and he came into the room and paused between herself

and Owen. She was struck, as he stood there, by the contrast between his happy careless goodlooks and her

"No; I was just going to get ready." She continued to linger between the two, looking slowly from one to the

other. "But there's something we want to tell you first: Owen is engaged to Miss Viner."

The sense of an indefinable interrogation in Owen's mind made her, as she spoke, fix her eyes steadily on

He had paused just opposite the window, so that, even in the rainy afternoon light, his face was clearly open

to her scrutiny. For a second, immense surprise was alone visible on it: so visible that she half turned to her

stepson, with a faint smile for his refuted suspicions. Why, she wondered, should Owen have thought that

Darrow had already guessed his secret, and what, after all, could be so disturbing to him in this not

improbable contingency? At any rate, his doubt must have been dispelled: there was nothing feigned about

Darrow's astonishment. When her eyes turned back to him he was already crossing to Owen with outstretched

hand, and she had, through an unaccountable faint flutter of misgiving, a mere confused sense of their

exchanging the customary phrases. Her next perception was of Owen's tranquillized look, and of his smiling

return of Darrow's congratulatory grasp. She had the eerie feeling of having been overswept by a shadow

A moment later Owen had left the room and she and Darrow were alone. He had turned away to the window

"You see now why I wanted so much to find out what you knew about her." He made no comment, and she

He moved back into the room and went up to her. His face was serious, with a slight shade of annoyance.

"What on earth should there be? As I told you, I've never in my life heard any one say two words about Miss

Anna made no answer and they continued to face each other without moving. For the moment she had ceased

to think about Sophy Viner and Owen: the only thought in her mind was that Darrow was alone with her,

He glanced back doubtfully at the window. "It's pouring. Perhaps you'd rather not go out?"

She hesitated, as if waiting for him to urge her. "I suppose I'd better not. I ought to go at once to my mother

"Ah." Darrow hazarded a smile. "That accounts for my having, on my way up, heard some one telephoning

At the allusion they laughed together, vaguely, and Anna moved toward the door. He held it open for her and

He left her at the door of Madame de Chantelle's sitting room, and plunged out alone into the rain.

The wind flung about the stripped treetops of the avenue and dashed the stinging streams into his face. He

walked to the gate and then turned into the highroad and strode along in the open, buffeted by slanting

gusts. The evenly ridged fields were a blurred waste of mud, and the russet coverts which he and Owen had

Darrow walked on and on, indifferent to the direction he was taking. His thoughts were tossing like the

treetops. Anna's announcement had not come to him as a complete surprise: that morning, as he strolled

back to the house with Owen Leath and Miss Viner, he had had a momentary intuition of the truth. But it had

been no more than an intuition, the merest faint cloudpuff of surmise; and now it was an attested fact,

In respect of his own attitude, he saw at once that the discovery made no appreciable change. If he had been

bound to silence before, he was no less bound to it now; the only difference lay in the fact that what he had

just learned had rendered his bondage more intolerable. Hitherto he had felt for Sophy Viner's defenseless

state a sympathy profoundly tinged with compunction. But now he was halfconscious of an obscure

indignation against her. Superior as he had fancied himself to readymade judgments, he was aware of

cherishing the common doubt as to the disinterestedness of the woman who tries to rise above her past. No

wonder she had been sick with fear on meeting him! It was in his power to do her more harm than he had

Assuredly he did not want to harm her; but he did desperately want to prevent her marrying Owen Leath. He

tried to get away from the feeling, to isolate and exteriorize it sufficiently to see what motives it was made of;

but it remained a mere blind motion of his blood, the instinctive recoil from the thing that no amount of

arguing can make "straight." His tramp, prolonged as it was, carried him no nearer to enlightenment; and

after trudging through two or three sallow mudstained villages he turned about and wearily made his way

back to Givre. As he walked up the black avenue, making for the lights that twinkled through its pitching

branches, he had a sudden realisation of his utter helplessness. He might think and combine as he would; but

He dropped his wet coat in the vestibule and began to mount the stairs to his room. But on the landing he was

overtaken by a soberfaced maid who, in tones discreetly lowered, begged him to be so kind as to step, for a

moment, into the Marquise's sittingroom. Somewhat disconcerted by the summons, he followed its bearer to

the door at which, a couple of hours earlier, he had taken leave of Mrs. Leath. It opened to admit him to a

large lamplit room which he immediately perceived to be empty; and the fact gave him time to note, even

through his disturbance of mind, the interesting degree to which Madame de Chantelle's apartment "dated"

and completed her. Its looped and corded curtains, its purple satin upholstery, the Sevres jardinieres, the

rosewood firescreen, the little velvet tables edged with lace and crowded with silver knickknacks and

simpering miniatures, reconstituted an almost perfect setting for the blonde beauty of the 'sixties. Darrow

wondered that Fraser Leath's filial respect should have prevailed over his aesthetic scruples to the extent of

permitting such an anachronism among the eighteenth century graces of Givre; but a moment's reflection

made it clear that, to its late owner, the attitude would have seemed exactly in the traditions of the place.

Madame de Chantelle's emergence from an inner room snatched Darrow from these irrelevant musings. She

was already beaded and bugled for the evening, and, save for a slight pinkness of the eyelids, her elaborate

appearance revealed no mark of agitation; but Darrow noticed that, in recognition of the solemnity of the

She plunged at once into the centre of the difficulty, appealing to him, in the name of all the Everards, to

descend there with her to the rescue of her darling. She wasn't, she was sure, addressing herself in vain to one

whose person, whose "tone," whose traditions so brilliantly declared his indebtedness to the principles she

besought him to defend. Her own reception of Darrow, the confidence she had at once accorded him, must

have shown him that she had instinctively felt their unanimity of sentiment on these fundamental questions.

She had in fact recognized in him the one person whom, without pain to her maternal piety, she could

welcome as her son's successor; and it was almost as to Owen's father that she now appealed to Darrow to aid

"Don't think, please, that I'm casting the least reflection on Anna, or showing any want of sympathy for her,

when I say that I consider her partly responsible for what's happened. Anna is 'modern'I believe that's what

it's called when you read unsettling books and admire hideous pictures. Indeed," Madame de Chantelle

continued, leaning confidentially forward, "I myself have always more or less lived in that atmosphere: my

son, you know, was very revolutionary. Only he didn't, of course, apply his ideas: they were purely

intellectual. That's what dear Anna has always failed to understand. And I'm afraid she's created the same

kind of confusion in Owen's mindled him to mix up things you read about with things you do...You know,

Developing at length upon this theme, she finally narrowed down to the point of Darrow's intervention. "My

grandson, Mr. Darrow, calls me illogical and uncharitable because my feelings toward Miss Viner have

changed since I've heard this news. Well! You've known her, it appears, for some years: Anna tells me you

used to see her when she was a companion, or secretary or something, to a dreadfully vulgar Mrs. Murrett.

And I ask you as a friend, I ask you as one of US, to tell me if you think a girl who has had to knock about

the world in that kind of position, and at the orders of all kinds of people, is fitted to be Owen's wife I'm not

implying anything against her! I LIKED the girl, Mr. Darrow...But what's that got to do with it? I don't want

her to marry my grandson. If I'd been looking for a wife for Owen, I shouldn't have applied to the Farlows to

find me one. That's what Anna won't understand; and what you must help me to make her see."

Darrow, to this appeal, could oppose only the repeated assurance of his inability to interfere. He tried to make

Madame de Chantelle see that the very position he hoped to take in the household made his intervention the

more hazardous. He brought up the usual arguments, and sounded the expected note of sympathy; but

Madame de Chantelle's alarm had dispelled her habitual imprecision, and, though she had not many reasons

to advance, her argument clung to its point like a frightened sharpclawed animal.

"Well, then," she summed up, in response to his repeated assertions that he saw no way of helping her, "you

can, at least, even if you won't say a word to the others, tell me frankly and fairlyand quite between

ourselvesyour personal opinion of Miss Viner, since you've known her so much longer than we have."

He protested that, if he had known her longer, he had known her much less well, and that he had already, on

Madame de Chantelle drew a deep sigh of intelligence. "Your opinion of Mrs. Murrett is enough! I don't

suppose you pretend to conceal THAT? And heaven knows what other unspeakable people she's been mixed

up with. The only friends she can produce are called Hoke...Don't try to reason with me, Mr. Darrow. There

are feelings that go deeper than facts...And I KNOW she thought of studying for the stage..." Madame de

Chantelle raised the corner of her lace handkerchief to her eyes. "I'm oldfashionedlike my furniture," she

When Darrow, that night, regained his room, he reflected with a flash of irony that each time he entered it he

brought a fresh troop of perplexities to trouble its serene seclusion. Since the day after his arrival, only forty

eight hours before, when he had set his window open to the night, and his hopes had seemed as many as its

stars, each evening had brought its new problem and its renewed distress. But nothing, as yet, had approached

the blank misery of mind with which he now set himself to face the fresh questions confronting him.

Sophy Viner had not shown herself at dinner, so that he had had no glimpse of her in her new character, and

no means of divining the real nature of the tie between herself and Owen Leath. One thing, however, was

clear: whatever her real feelings were, and however much or little she had at stake, if she had made up her

mind to marry Owen she had more than enough skill and tenacity to defeat any arts that poor Madame de

Darrow himself was in fact the only person who might possibly turn her from her purpose: Madame de

Chantelle, at haphazard, had hit on the surest means of saving Owenif to prevent his marriage were to save

him! Darrow, on this point, did not pretend to any fixed opinion; one feeling alone was clear and insistent in

How he was to prevent it he did not know: to his tormented imagination every issue seemed closed. For a

fantastic instant he was moved to follow Madame de Chantelle's suggestion and urge Anna to withdraw her

approval. If his reticence, his efforts to avoid the subject, had not escaped her, she had doubtless set them

down to the fact of his knowing more, and thinking less, of Sophy Viner than he had been willing to admit;

and he might take advantage of this to turn her mind gradually from the project. Yet how do so without

betraying his insincerity? If he had had nothing to hide he could easily have said: "It's one thing to know

nothing against the girl, it's another to pretend that I think her a good match for Owen." But could he say even

so much without betraying more? It was not Anna's questions, or his answers to them, that he feared, but

what might cry aloud in the intervals between them. He understood now that ever since Sophy Viner's arrival

at Givre he had felt in Anna the lurking sense of something unexpressed, and perhaps inexpressible, between

the girl and himself...When at last he fell asleep he had fatalistically committed his next step to the chances of

The first that offered itself was an encounter with Mrs. Leath as he descended the stairs the next morning. She

had come down already hatted and shod for a dash to the park lodge, where one of the gatekeeper's children

had had an accident. In her compact dark dress she looked more than usually straight and slim, and her face

wore the pale glow it took on at any call on her energy: a kind of warrior brightness that made her small head,

It was their first moment alone since she had left him, the afternoon before, at her motherinlaw's door; and

after a few words about the injured child their talk inevitably reverted to Owen.

Anna spoke with a smile of her "scene" with Madame de Chantelle, who belonged, poor dear, to a generation

when "scenes" (in the ladylike and lachrymal sense of the term) were the tribute which sensibility was

expected to pay to the unusual. Their conversation had been, in every detail, so exactly what Anna had

foreseen that it had clearly not made much impression on her; but she was eager to know the result of

"She told me she'd sent for you: she always 'sends for' people in emergencies. That again, I suppose, is de

l'epoque. And failing Adelaide Painter, who can't get here till this afternoon, there was no one but poor you to

She put it all lightly, with a lightness that seemed to his tightstrung nerves slightly, undefinably overdone.

But he was so aware of his own tension that he wondered, the next moment, whether anything would ever

again seem to him quite usual and insignificant and in the common order of things.

As they hastened on through the drizzle in which the storm of the night was weeping itself out, Anna drew

close under his umbrella, and at the pressure of her arm against his he recalled his walk up the Dover pier

with Sophy Viner. The memory gave him a startled vision of the inevitable occasions of contact, confidence,

familiarity, which his future relationship to the girl would entail, and the countless chances of betrayal that

"Do tell me just what you said," he heard Anna pleading; and with sudden resolution he affirmed: "I quite

The words, when uttered, seemed a good deal less significant than they had sounded to his inner ear; and

Anna replied without surprise: "Of course. It's inevitable that she should. But we shall bring her round in

time." Under the dripping dome she raised her face to his. "Don't you remember what you said the day before

yesterday? 'Together we can't fail to pull it off for him!' I've told Owen that, so you're pledged and there's no

The day before yesterday! Was it possible that, no longer ago, life had seemed a sufficiently simple business

She stopped short to face him. "Why? But surely I've explained to youor rather I've hardly had to, you

The words were out with a spring and he felt a clearer air in his brain. But her logic hemmed him in.

"Against Miss Viner?" The name, once uttered, sounded on and on in his ears. "Of course not. But that

Anna made no immediate answer. When she spoke it was to question: "Why don't you think her a good

"WellMadame de Chantelle's reasons seem to me not quite as negligible as you think."

"You mean the fact that she's been Mrs. Murrett's secretary, and that the people who employed her before

were called Hoke? For, as far as Owen and I can make out, these are the gravest charges against her."

"Still, one can understand that the match is not what Madame de Chantelle had dreamed of."

"Oh, perfectlyif that's all you mean." The lodge was in sight, and she hastened her step. He strode on

beside her in silence, but at the gate she checked him with the question: "Is it really all you mean?"

"Oh, then I think I shall convince youeven if I can't, like Madame de Chantelle, summon all the Everards

to my aid!" She lifted to him the look of happy laughter that sometimes brushed her with a gleam of spring.

Darrow watched her hasten along the path between the dripping chrysanthemums and enter the lodge. After

she had gone in he paced up and down outside in the drizzle, waiting to learn if she had any message to send

The child, she said, was badly, though not dangerously, hurt, and the village doctor, who was already on

hand, had asked that the surgeon, already summoned from Francheuil, should be told to bring with him

certain needful appliances. Owen had started by motor to fetch the surgeon, but there was still time to

communicate with the latter by telephone. The doctor furthermore begged for an immediate provision of such

bandages and disinfectants as Givre itself could furnish, and Anna bade Darrow address himself to Miss

Viner, who would know where to find the necessary things, and would direct one of the servants to bicycle

Darrow, as he hurried off on this errand, had at once perceived the opportunity it offered of a word with

Sophy Viner. What that word was to be he did not know; but now, if ever, was the moment to make it urgent

and conclusive. It was unlikely that he would again have such a chance of unobserved talk with her.

He had supposed he should find her with her pupil in the schoolroom; but he learned from a servant that

Effie had gone to Francheuil with her stepbrother, and that Miss Viner was still in her room. Darrow sent

her word that he was the bearer of a message from the lodge, and a moment later he heard her coming down

For a second, as she approached him, the quick tremor of her glance showed her all intent on the same

thought as himself. He transmitted his instructions with mechanical precision, and she answered in the same

tone, repeating his words with the intensity of attention of a child not quite sure of understanding. Then she

Darrow lingered on in the hall, not knowing if she meant to return, yet inwardly sure she would. At length he

saw her coming down in her hat and jacket. The rain still streaked the window panes, and, in order to say

"I've sent one of the men ahead with the things; but I thought Mrs. Leath might need me."

"She didn't ask for you," he returned, wondering how he could detain her; but she answered decidedly: "I'd

He held open the door, picked up his umbrella and followed her out. As they went down the steps she glanced

She had no umbrella, and he opened his and held it out to her. She rejected it with a murmur of thanks and

walked on through the thin drizzle, and he kept the umbrella over his own head, without offering to shelter

Rapidly and in silence they crossed the court and began to walk down the avenue. They had traversed a third

of its length before Darrow said abruptly: "Wouldn't it have been fairer, when we talked together yesterday,

"If I'd known that your future was already settled I should have spared you my gratuitous suggestions."

She walked on, more slowly, for a yard or two. "I couldn't speak yesterday. I meant to have told you today."

"Oh, I'm not reproaching you for your lack of confidence. Only, if you HAD told me, I should have been

She did not ask him to what he referred, and he saw that her parting words to him lived as vividly in her

"Not to you, naturally," he returned with involuntary asperity. It was incredible, yet it was a fact, that for the

moment his immediate purpose in seeking to speak to her was lost under a rush of resentment at counting for

so little in her fate. Of what stuff, then, was his feeling for her made? A few hours earlier she had touched his

thoughts as little as his senses; but now he felt old sleeping instincts stir in him... A rush of rain dashed

against his face, and, catching Sophy's hat, strained it back from her loosened hair. She put her hands to her

At the lodge he waited while she went in. The rain continued to stream down on him and he shivered in the

dampness and stamped his feet on the flags. It seemed to him that a long time elapsed before the door opened

and she reappeared. He glanced into the house for a glimpse of Anna, but obtained none; yet the mere sense

The child, Sophy told him, was doing well; but Mrs. Leath had decided to wait till the surgeon came. Darrow,

as they turned away, looked through the gates, and saw the doctor's oldfashioned carriage by the roadside.

"Let me tell the doctor's boy to drive you back," he suggested; but Sophy answered: "No; I'll walk," and he

moved on toward the house at her side. She expressed no surprise at his not remaining at the lodge, and again

they walked on in silence through the rain. She had accepted the shelter of his umbrella, but she kept herself

at such a carefully measured distance that even the slight swaying movements produced by their quick pace

did not once bring her arm in touch with his; and, noticing this, he perceived that every drop of her blood

"What I meant just now," he began, "was that you ought to have been sure of my good wishes."

She paused perceptibly, and when she spoke it was in so low a tone that he had to bend his head to catch her

"It's not easy to say here, at any rate. And indoors I sha'n't know where to say it." He glanced about him in the

To the right of the drive, under a clump of trees, a little stucco pavilion crowned by a balustrade rose on

arches of mouldering brick over a flight of steps that led down to a spring. Other steps curved up to a door

above. Darrow mounted these, and opening the door entered a small circular room hung with loosened strips

of painted paper whereon spectrally faded Mandarins executed elongated gestures. Some black and gold

chairs with straw seats and an unsteady table of cracked lacquer stood on the floor of redglazed tile.

Sophy had followed him without comment. He closed the door after her, and she stood motionless, as though

"Now we can talk quietly," he said, looking at her with a smile into which he tried to put an intention of the

Her voice had lost the note of halfwistful confidence on which their talk of the previous day had closed, and

she looked at him with a kind of pale hostility. Her tone made it evident that his task would be difficult, but it

did not shake his resolve to go on. He sat down, and mechanically she followed his example. The table was

between them and she rested her arms on its cracked edge and her chin on her interlocked hands. He looked

A faint smile lifted, in the remembered way, the left corner of her narrowed lips.

She continued to consider him between halfdrawn lids. "What can I say that Mrs. Leath has not already told

He flushed at the retort, but steadied himself and rejoined: "The essential point to me is, of course, that you

She sat silent, with lowered lashes. At length she stretched out her arm and took up from the table a little

threadbare Chinese handscreen. She turned its ebony stem once or twice between her fingers, and as she did

so Darrow was whimsically struck by the way in which their evanescent slight romance was symbolized by

"Do you think my engagement to Mr. Leath not really best for me?" she asked at length.

Darrow, before answering, waited long enough to get his words into the tersest shapenot without a sense,

as he did so, of his likeness to the surgeon deliberately poising his lancet for a clean incision. "I'm not sure,"

She took the stroke steadily, but a faint red swept her face like the reflection of a blush. She continued to keep

He brought the answer out abruptly, his eyes on her face. It had grown extremely pale, but as the meaning of

his words shaped itself in her mind he saw a curious inner light dawn through her set look. She lifted her lids

just far enough for a veiled glance at him, and a smile slipped through them to her trembling lips. For a

moment the change merely bewildered him; then it pulled him up with a sharp jerk of apprehension.

"I don't think him a good match for you," he stammered, groping for the lost thread of his words.

She threw a vague look about the chilly raindimmed room. "And you've brought me here to tell me why?"

The question roused him to the sense that their minutes were numbered, and that if he did not immediately

"My chief reason is that I believe he's too young and inexperienced to give you the kind of support you need."

At his words her face changed again, freezing to a tragic coldness. She stared straight ahead of her,

perceptibly struggling with the tremor of her muscles; and when she had controlled it she flung out a

"He's a boy," Darrow pushed on, "a charming, wonderful boy; but with no more notion than a boy how to

deal with the inevitable daily problems...the trivial stupid unimportant things that life is chiefly made up of."

She shot a challenging glance at him. "You must have some special reason for saying so."

Darrow hesitated. "You must know better than I," he returned at length, "that the way won't be made easy to

He paused again, not sure how far it was prudent to reveal himself in the confidence of the household. Then,

to avoid involving Anna, he answered: "Madame de Chantelle sent for me yesterday."

"Sent for youto talk to you about me?" The colour rose to her forehead and her eyes burned black under

lowered brows. "By what right, I should like to know? What have you to do with me, or with anything in the

Darrow instantly perceived what dread suspicion again possessed her, and the sense that it was not wholly

unjustified caused him a passing pang of shame. But it did not turn him from his purpose.

"I'm an old friend of Mrs. Leath's. It's not unnatural that Madame de Chantelle should talk to me."

She dropped the screen on the table and stood up, turning on him the same small mask of wrath and scorn

which had glared at him, in Paris, when he had confessed to his suppression of her letter. She walked away a

"To say nothing...nothing whatever..." Her strained look threw a haggard light along the pause.

As she spoke, the whole odiousness of the scene rushed over him. "Of course I shall say nothing...you know

that..." He leaned to her and laid his hand on hers. "You know I wouldn't for the world..."

She drew back and hid her face with a sob. Then she sank again into her seat, stretched her arms across the

table and laid her face upon them. He sat still, overwhelmed with compunction. After a long interval, in

which he had painfully measured the seconds by her harddrawn breathing, she looked up at him with a face

The cry struck him down to a lower depth of selfabasement. "My poor child," he felt like answering, "the

shame of it is that I've never thought of you at all!" But he could only uselessly repeat: "I'll do anything I can

She sat silent, drumming the table with her hand. He saw that her doubt of him was allayed, and the

perception made him more ashamed, as if her trust had first revealed to him how near he had come to not

"That you'd rather I didn't marry any friend of yours." She brought it out deliberately, not as a question, but as

Darrow in turn stood up and wandered away helplessly to the window. He stood staring out through its small

"I'll tell you exactly what I meant. You'll be wretched if you marry a man you're not in love with."

He knew the risk of misapprehension that he ran, but he estimated his chances of success as precisely in

proportion to his peril. If certain signs meant what he thought they did, he might yetat what cost he would

The girl, at his words, had lifted her head with a movement of surprise. Her eyes slowly reached his face and

rested there in a gaze of deep interrogation. He held the look for a moment; then his own eyes dropped and he

"In thinking what you think. I'm as happy as if I deserved it!" she suddenly proclaimed with a laugh.

She stood up and moved toward the door. "NOW are you satisfied?" she asked, turning her vividest face to

Down the avenue there came to them, with the opening of the door, the voice of Owen's motor. It was the

signal which had interrupted their first talk, and again, instinctively, they drew apart at the sound. Without a

word Darrow turned back into the room, while Sophy Viner went down the steps and walked back alone

At luncheon the presence of the surgeon, and the non appearance of Madame de Chantellewho had

excused herself on the plea of a headachecombined to shift the conversational centre of gravity; and

Darrow, under shelter of the necessarily impersonal talk, had time to adjust his disguise and to perceive that

the others were engaged in the same rearrangement. It was the first time that he had seen young Leath and

Sophy Viner together since he had learned of their engagement; but neither revealed more emotion than

befitted the occasion. It was evident that Owen was deeply under the girl's charm, and that at the least sign

from her his bliss would have broken bounds; but her reticence was justified by the tacitly recognized fact of

Madame de Chantelle's disapproval. This also visibly weighed on Anna's mind, making her manner to Sophy,

if no less kind, yet a trifle more constrained than if the moment of final understanding had been reached. So

Darrow interpreted the tension perceptible under the fluent exchange of commonplaces in which he was

diligently sharing. But he was more and more aware of his inability to test the moral atmosphere about him:

After luncheon Anna, who was to motor the surgeon home, suggested to Darrow that he should accompany

them. Effie was also of the party; and Darrow inferred that Anna wished to give her stepson a chance to be

alone with his betrothed. On the way back, after the surgeon had been left at his door, the little girl sat

between her mother and Darrow, and her presence kept their talk from taking a personal turn. Darrow knew

that Mrs. Leath had not yet told Effie of the relation in which he was to stand to her. The premature divulging

of Owen's plans had thrown their own into the background, and by common consent they continued, in the

The sky had cleared after luncheon, and to prolong their excursion they returned by way of the ivymantled

ruin which was to have been the scene of the projected picnic. This circuit brought them back to the park

gates not long before sunset, and as Anna wished to stop at the lodge for news of the injured child Darrow

left her there with Effie and walked on alone to the house. He had the impression that she was slightly

surprised at his not waiting for her; but his inner restlessness vented itself in an intense desire for bodily

movement. He would have liked to walk himself into a state of torpor; to tramp on for hours through the

moist winds and the healing darkness and come back staggering with fatigue and sleep. But he had no pretext

for such a flight, and he feared that, at such a moment, his prolonged absence might seem singular to Anna.

As he approached the house, the thought of her nearness produced a swift reaction of mood. It was as if an

intenser vision of her had scattered his perplexities like morning mists. At this moment, wherever she was, he

knew he was safely shut away in her thoughts, and the knowledge made every other fact dwindle away to a

shadow. He and she loved each other, and their love arched over them open and ample as the day: in all its

sunlit spaces there was no cranny for a fear to lurk. In a few minutes he would be in her presence and would

read his reassurance in her eyes. And presently, before dinner, she would contrive that they should have an

hour by themselves in her sittingroom, and he would sit by the hearth and watch her quiet movements, and

the way the bluish lustre on her hair purpled a little as she bent above the fire.

A carriage drove out of the court as he entered it, and in the hall his vision was dispelled by the exceedingly

substantial presence of a lady in a waterproof and a tweed hat, who stood firmly planted in the centre of a pile

of luggage, as to which she was giving involved but lucid directions to the footman who had just admitted

her. She went on with these directions regardless of Darrow's entrance, merely fixing her small pale eyes on

him while she proceeded, in a deep contralto voice, and a fluent French pronounced with the purest Boston

accent, to specify the destination of her bags; and this enabled Darrow to give her back a gaze protracted

enough to take in all the details of her plain thickset person, from the square sallow face beneath bands of

She submitted to this scrutiny with no more evidence of surprise than a monument examined by a tourist; but

when the fate of her luggage had been settled she turned suddenly to Darrow and, dropping her eyes from his

face to his feet, asked in trenchant accents: "What sort of boots have you got on?"

Before he could summon his wits to the consideration of this question she continued in a tone of suppressed

indignation: "Until Americans get used to the fact that France is under water for half the year they're

perpetually risking their lives by not being properly protected. I suppose you've been tramping through all

Darrow, with a laugh, affirmed his previous experience of French dampness, and the degree to which he was

on his guard against it; but the lady, with a contemptuous snort, rejoined: "You young men are all

alike"; to which she appended, after another hard look at him: "I suppose you're George Darrow? I used

to know one of your mother's cousins, who married a Tunstall of Mount Vernon Street. My name is Adelaide

Painter. Have you been in Boston lately? No? I'm sorry for that. I hear there have been several new houses

built at the lower end of Commonwealth Avenue and I hoped you could tell me about them. I haven't been

Miss Painter's arrival at Givre produced the same effect as the wind's hauling around to the north after days of

languid weather. When Darrow joined the group about the teatable she had already given a tingle to the air.

Madame de Chantelle still remained invisible above stairs; but Darrow had the impression that even through

Anna was in her usual seat behind the teatray, and Sophy Viner presently led in her pupil. Owen was also

there, seated, as usual, a little apart from the others, and following Miss Painter's massive movements and

equally substantial utterances with a smile of secret intelligence which gave Darrow the idea of his having

been in clandestine parley with the enemy. Darrow further took note that the girl and her suitor perceptibly

avoided each other; but this might be a natural result of the tension Miss Painter had been summoned to

Sophy Viner would evidently permit no recognition of the situation save that which it lay with Madame de

Chantelle to accord; but meanwhile Miss Painter had proclaimed her tacit sense of it by summoning the girl

Darrow, as he continued to observe the newcomer, who was perched on her armchair like a granite image

on the edge of a cliff, was aware that, in a more detached frame of mind, he would have found an extreme

interest in studying and classifying Miss Painter. It was not that she said anything remarkable, or betrayed

any of those unspoken perceptions which give significance to the most commonplace utterances. She talked

of the lateness of her train, of an impending crisis in international politics, of the difficulty of buying English

tea in Paris and of the enormities of which French servants were capable; and her views on these subjects

were enunciated with a uniformity of emphasis implying complete unconsciousness of any difference in their

interest and importance. She always applied to the French race the distant epithet of "those people", but she

betrayed an intimate acquaintance with many of its members, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the

domestic habits, financial difficulties and private complications of various persons of social importance. Yet,

as she evidently felt no incongruity in her attitude, so she revealed no desire to parade her familiarity with the

fashionable, or indeed any sense of it as a fact to be paraded. It was evident that the titled ladies whom she

spoke of as Mimi or Simone or Odette were as much "those people" to her as the bonne who tampered with

her tea and steamed the stamps off her letters ("when, by a miracle, I don't put them in the box myself.") Her

whole attitude was of a vast grim tolerance of thingsastheycame, as though she had been some wonderful

automatic machine which recorded facts but had not yet been perfected to the point of sorting or labelling

All this, as Darrow was aware, still fell short of accounting for the influence she obviously exerted on the

persons in contact with her. It brought a slight relief to his state of tension to go on wondering, while he

watched and listened, just where the mystery lurked. Perhaps, after all, it was in the fact of her blank

insensibility, an insensibility so devoid of egotism that it had no hardness and no grimaces, but rather the

freshness of a simpler mental state. After living, as he had, as they all had, for the last few days, in an

atmosphere perpetually tremulous with echoes and implications, it was restful and fortifying merely to walk

into the big blank area of Miss Painter's mind, so vacuous for all its accumulated items, so echoless for all its

His hope of a word with Anna before dinner was dispelled by her rising to take Miss Painter up to Madame

de Chantelle; and he wandered away to his own room, leaving Owen and Miss Viner engaged in working out

Madame de Chantellepossibly as the result of her friend's ministrationswas able to appear at the

dinnertable, rather pale and pinknosed, and casting tenderly reproachful glances at her grandson, who

faced them with impervious serenity; and the situation was relieved by the fact that Miss Viner, as usual, had

Darrow conjectured that the real clash of arms would not take place till the morrow; and wishing to leave the

field open to the contestants he set out early on a solitary walk. It was nearly luncheontime when he

returned from it and came upon Anna just emerging from the house. She had on her hat and jacket and was

apparently coming forth to seek him, for she said at once: "Madame de Chantelle wants you to go up to her."

"That's the message she sent. She appears to rely on you to do something." She added with a smile:

Darrow, through his rising sense of apprehension, wondered why, instead of merely going for a walk, he had

not jumped into the first train and got out of the way till Owen's affairs were finally settled.

"But what in the name of goodness can I do?" he protested, following Anna back into the hall.

This did not seem to Darrow to simplify his case as much as she appeared to think; and once more he had a

movement of recoil. "There's no possible reason for my being mixed up in this affair!"

Anna gave him a reproachful glance. "Not the fact that I am?" she reminded him; but even this only stiffened

The question made her pause. She glanced about the hall, as if to be sure they had it to themselves; and then,

in a lowered voice: "I don't know," she suddenly confessed; "but, somehow, if THEY'RE not happy I feel as

"Oh, well" Darrow acquiesced, in the tone of the man who perforce yields to so lovely an

unreasonableness. Escape was, after all, impossible, and he could only resign himself to being led to Madame

Within, among the bricabrac and furbelows, he found Miss Painter seated in a redundant purple armchair

with the incongruous air of a horseman bestriding a heavy mount. Madame de Chantelle sat opposite, still a

little wan and disordered under her elaborate hair, and clasping the handkerchief whose visibility symbolized

her distress. On the young man's entrance she sighed out a plaintive welcome, to which she immediately

The directness of the challenge made it easier for Darrow to protest, and he reiterated his inability to give an

He could not restrain a smile at this faint flaw in an impartiality so scrupulous. Every evidence of feminine

inconsequence in Anna seemed to attest her deeper subjection to the most inconsequent of passions. He had

He met Madame de Chantelle's appeal by replying: "If there were anything I could possibly say I should want

"As far as facts go, I don't see how I can make it either for or against her. I've already said that I know

"As if that weren't enoughweren't all there OUGHT to be!" Miss Painter put in impatiently. She seemed to

"Madame de Chantelle seems to imagine," she pursued, "that a young American girl ought to have a

dossiera police record, or whatever you call it: what those awful women in the streets have here. In our

country it's enough to know that a young girl's pure and lovely: people don't immediately ask her to show her

Madame de Chantelle looked plaintively at her sturdy monitress. "You don't expect me not to ask if she's got

"No; nor to think the worse of her if she hasn't. The fact that she's an orphan ought, with your ideas, to be a

"Lucretia Mary," the other returnedand Darrow spared an instant's amusement to the quaint incongruity of

the name "you know you sent for Mr. Darrow to refute me; and how can he, till he knows what I think?"

"You think it's perfectly simple to let Owen marry a girl we know nothing about?"

The shrewdness of the answer increased Darrow's interest in Miss Painter. She had not hitherto struck him as

being a person of much penetration, but he now felt sure that her gimlet gaze might bore to the heart of any

"I haven't a word to say against Miss Viner; but she's knocked about so, as it's called, that she must have been

mixed up with some rather dreadful people. If only Owen could be made to see thatif one could get at a

few facts, I mean. She says, for instance, that she has a sister; but it seems she doesn't even know her

"If she does, she may not want to give it to you. I daresay the sister's one of the dreadful people. I've no doubt

that with a little time you could rake up dozens of them: have her 'traced', as they call it in detective stories. I

don't think you'd frighten Owen, but you might: it's natural enough he should have been corrupted by those

foreign ideas. You might even manage to part him from the girl; but you couldn't keep him from being in

love with her. I saw that when I looked them over last evening. I said to myself: 'It's a real oldfashioned

American case, as sweet and sound as homemade bread.' Well, if you take his loaf away from him, what are

you going to feed him with instead? Which of your nasty Paris poisons do you think he'll turn to? Supposing

you succeed in keeping him out of a really bad messand, knowing the young man as I do, I rather think

that, at this crisis, the only way to do it would be to marry him slap off to somebody elsewell, then, who,

may I ask, would you pick out? One of your sweet French ingenues, I suppose? With as much mind as a

minnow and as much snap as a softboiled egg. You might hustle him into that kind of marriage; I daresay

you couldbut if I know Owen, the natural thing would happen before the first baby was weaned."

"Do you think it would be odious of him to return to his real love when he'd been forcibly parted from her?

At any rate, it's what your French friends do, every one of them! Only they don't generally have the grace to

Madame de Chantelle looked at her with a mixture of awe and exultation. "Of course you realize, Adelaide,

that in suggesting this you're insinuating the most shocking things against Miss Viner?"

"When I say that if you part two young things who are dying to be happy in the lawful way it's ten to one

they'll come together in an unlawful one? I'm insinuating shocking things against YOU, Lucretia Mary, in

suggesting for a moment that you'll care to assume such a responsibility before your Maker. And you

wouldn't, if you talked things straight out with him, instead of merely sending him messages through a

Darrow expected this assault on her adopted creed to provoke in Madame de Chantelle an explosion of pious

indignation; but to his surprise she merely murmured: "I don't know what Mr. Darrow'll think of you!"

"Mr. Darrow probably knows his Bible as well as I do," Miss Painter calmly rejoined; adding a moment later,

without the least perceptible change of voice or expression: "I suppose you've heard that Gisele de

Folembray's husband accuses her of being mixed up with the Duc d'Arcachon in that business of trying to sell

a lot of imitation pearls to Mrs. Homer Pond, the Chicago woman the Duke's engaged to? It seems the

jeweller says Gisele brought Mrs. Pond there, and got twentyfive per centwhich of course she passed on

to d'Arcachon. The poor old Duchess is in a fearful stateso afraid her son'll lose Mrs. Pond! When I think

that Gisele is old Bradford Wagstaff's granddaughter, I'm thankful he's safe in Mount Auburn!"

It was not until late that afternoon that Darrow could claim his postponed hour with Anna. When at last he

found her alone in her sittingroom it was with a sense of liberation so great that he sought no logical

justification of it. He simply felt that all their destinies were in Miss Painter's grasp, and that, resistance being

Anna herself seemed as happy, and for more explicable reasons. She had assisted, after luncheon, at another

debate between Madame de Chantelle and her confidant, and had surmised, when she withdrew from it, that

"I don't know how she does it, unless it's by the dead weight of her convictions. She detests the French so that

she'd back up Owen even if she knew nothingor knew too muchof Miss Viner. She somehow regards

the match as a protest against the corruption of European morals. I told Owen that was his great chance, and

"What a tactician you are! You make me feel that I hardly know the rudiments of diplomacy," Darrow smiled

She gave him back his smile. "I'm afraid I think nothing short of my own happiness is worth wasting any

"That's why I mean to resign from the service of my country," he rejoined with a laugh of deep content.

The feeling that both resistance and apprehension were vain was working like wine in his veins. He had done

what he could to deflect the course of events: now he could only stand aside and take his chance of safety.

Underneath this fatalistic feeling was the deep sense of relief that he had, after all, said and done nothing that

could in the least degree affect the welfare of Sophy Viner. That fact took a millstone off his neck.

Meanwhile he gave himself up once more to the joy of Anna's presence. They had not been alone together for

two long days, and he had the lover's sense that he had forgotten, or at least underestimated, the strength of

the spell she cast. Once more her eyes and her smile seemed to bound his world. He felt that their light would

The next day his sense of security was increased by a decisive incident. It became known to the expectant

household that Madame de Chantelle had yielded to the tremendous impact of Miss Painter's determination

At luncheon, Owen's radiant countenance proclaimed the happy sequel, and Darrow, when the party had

moved back to the oakroom for coffee, deemed it discreet to wander out alone to the terrace with his cigar.

The conclusion of Owen's romance brought his own plans once more to the front. Anna had promised that

she would consider dates and settle details as soon as Madame de Chantelle and her grandson had been

reconciled, and Darrow was eager to go into the question at once, since it was necessary that the preparations

for his marriage should go forward as rapidly as possible. Anna, he knew, would not seek any farther pretext

for delay; and he strolled up and down contentedly in the sunshine, certain that she would come out and

reassure him as soon as the reunited family had claimed its due share of her attention.

"I want to thank you for what you've done for Owen," she began, with her happiest smile.

"Perhaps I ought to say for ME," she corrected herself. "You've been even more of a help to us than

"You've managed to hide from Madame de Chantelle that you don't really like poor Sophy."

Darrow felt the pallour in his cheek. "Not like her? What put such an idea into your head?"

"Oh, it's more than an ideait's a feeling. But what difference does it make, after all? You saw her in such a

different setting that it's natural you should be a little doubtful. But when you know her better I'm sure you'll

He gave her back in the same tone of banter: "Agreed: if you ll agree to feel as I do about the pressing

"I want to talk to you about that too. You don't know what a weight is off my mind! With Sophy here for

good, I shall feel so differently about leaving Effie. I've seen much more accomplished governessesto my

cost!but I've never seen a young thing more gay and kind and human. You must have noticed, though

you've seen them so little together, how Effie expands when she's with her. And that, you know, is what I

want. Madame de Chantelle will provide the necessary restraint." She clasped her hands on his arm. "Yes, I'm

ready to go with you now. But first of allthis very moment!you must come with me to Effie. She knows,

of course, nothing of what's been happening; and I want her to be told first about YOU."

Effie, sought throughout the house, was presently traced to the schoolroom, and thither Darrow mounted

with Anna. He had never seen her so alight with happiness, and he had caught her buoyancy of mood. He

kept repeating to himself: "It's overit's over," as if some monstrous midnight hallucination had been routed

As they approached the schoolroom door the terrier's barks came to them through laughing remonstrances.

"I meanshe'd rather have you tell her first. I'll wait for you both downstairs."

He was aware that she glanced at him intently. "As you please. I'll bring her down at once."

She opened the door, and as she went in he heard her say: "No, Sophy, don't go! I want you both."

The rest of Darrow's day was a succession of empty and agitating scenes. On his way down to Givre, before

he had seen Effie Leath, he had pictured somewhat sentimentally the joy of the moment when he should take

her in his arms and receive her first filial kiss. Everything in him that egotistically craved for rest, stability, a

comfortably organized middleage, all the homebuilding instincts of the man who has sufficiently wooed

and wandered, combined to throw a charm about the figure of the child who mightwho shouldhave been

his. Effie came to him trailing the cloud of glory of his first romance, giving him back the magic hour he had

missed and mourned. And how different the realization of his dream had been! The child's radiant welcome,

her unquestioning acceptance of, this new figure in the family group, had been all that he had hoped and

fancied. If Mother was so awfully happy about it, and Owen and Granny, too, how nice and cosy and

comfortable it was going to be for all of them, her beaming look seemed to say; and then, suddenly, the small

pink fingers he had been kissing were laid on the one flaw in the circle, on the one point which must be

settled before Effie could, with complete unqualified assurance, admit the newcomer to full equality with

"And is Sophy awfully happy about it too?" she had asked, loosening her hold on Darrow's neck to tilt back

"Why, dearest, didn't you see she was?" Anna had exclaimed, leaning to the group with radiant eyes.

"I think I should like to ask her," the child rejoined, after a minute's shy consideration; and as Darrow set her

down her mother laughed: "Do, darling, do! Run off at once, and tell her we expect her to be awfully happy

The scene had been succeeded by others less poignant but almost as trying. Darrow cursed his luck in having,

at such a moment, to run the gauntlet of a houseful of interested observers. The state of being "engaged", in

itself an absurd enough predicament, even to a man only intermittently exposed, became intolerable under the

continuous scrutiny of a small circle quivering with participation. Darrow was furthermore aware that, though

the case of the other couple ought to have made his own less conspicuous, it was rather they who found a

refuge in the shadow of his prominence. Madame de Chantelle, though she had consented to Owen's

engagement and formally welcomed his betrothed, was nevertheless not sorry to show, by her reception of

Darrow, of what finelyshaded degrees of cordiality she was capable. Miss Painter, having won the day for

Owen, was also free to turn her attention to the newer candidate for her sympathy; and Darrow and Anna

It was a relief to Darrow that he was under a positive obligation to end his visit within the next fortyeight

hours. When he left London, his Ambassador had accorded him a ten days' leave. His fate being definitely

settled and openly published he had no reason for asking to have the time prolonged, and when it was over he

was to return to his post till the time fixed for taking up his new duties. Anna and he had therefore decided to

be married, in Paris, a day or two before the departure of the steamer which was to take them to South

America; and Anna, shortly after his return to England, was to go up to Paris and begin her own preparations.

In honour of the double betrothal Effie and Miss Viner were to appear that evening at dinner; and Darrow, on

leaving his room, met the little girl springing down the stairs, her white ruffles and coralcoloured bows

making her look like a daisy with her yellow hair for its centre. Sophy Viner was behind her pupil, and as she

came into the light Darrow noticed a change in her appearance and wondered vaguely why she looked

suddenly younger, more vivid, more like the little luminous ghost of his Paris memories. Then it occurred to

him that it was the first time she had appeared at dinner since his arrival at Givre, and the first time,

consequently, that he had seen her in evening dress. She was still at the age when the least adornment

embellishes; and no doubt the mere uncovering of her young throat and neck had given her back her former

brightness. But a second glance showed a more precise reason for his impression. Vaguely though he retained

such details, he felt sure she was wearing the dress he had seen her in every evening in Paris. It was a simple

enough dress, black, and transparent on the arms and shoulders, and he would probably not have recognized

it if she had not called his attention to it in Paris by confessing that she hadn't any other. "The same dress?

That proves that she's forgotten!" was his first halfironic thought; but the next moment, with a pang of

compunction, he said to himself that she had probably put it on for the same reason as before: simply because

He looked at her in silence, and for an instant, above Effie's bobbing head, she gave him back his look in a

"Oh, there's Owen!" Effie cried, and whirled away down the gallery to the door from which her stepbrother

was emerging. As Owen bent to catch her, Sophy Viner turned abruptly back to Darrow.

"You, too?" she said with a quick laugh. "I didn't know " And as Owen came up to them she added, in a

tone that might have been meant to reach his ear: "I wish you all the luck that we can spare!"

About the dinnertable, which Effie, with Miss Viner's aid, had lavishly garlanded, the little party had an air

of somewhat selfconscious festivity. In spite of flowers, champagne and a unanimous attempt at ease, there

were frequent lapses in the talk, and moments of nervous groping for new subjects. Miss Painter alone

seemed not only unaffected by the general perturbation but as tightly sealed up in her unconsciousness of it as

a diver in his bell. To Darrow's strained attention even Owen's gusts of gaiety seemed to betray an inward

sense of insecurity. After dinner, however, at the piano, he broke into a mood of extravagant hilarity and

Darrow, sunk in a sofa corner in the lee of Miss Painter's granite bulk, smoked and listened in silence, his

eyes moving from one figure to another. Madame de Chantelle, in her armchair near the fire, clasped her little

granddaughter to her with the gesture of a drawingroom Niobe, and Anna, seated near them, had fallen into

one of the attitudes of vivid calm which seemed to Darrow to express her inmost quality. Sophy Viner, after

moving uncertainly about the room, had placed herself beyond Mrs. Leath, in a chair near the piano, where

she sat with head thrown back and eyes attached to the musician, in the same rapt fixity of attention with

which she had followed the players at the Francais. The accident of her having fallen into the same attitude,

and of her wearing the same dress, gave Darrow, as he watched her, a strange sense of double consciousness.

To escape from it, his glance turned back to Anna; but from the point at which he was placed his eyes could

not take in the one face without the other, and that renewed the disturbing duality of the impression. Suddenly

Behind the uncurtained window a low golden orb hung like a ripe fruit against the glass.

"Yeslet's go out and listen," Anna answered. Owen threw open the window, and with his gesture a fold of

the heavy starsprinkled sky seemed to droop into the room like a drawnin curtain. The air that entered with

Darrow said: "You must have one too," and started toward the door; but Sophy, following her pupil, cried

Owen had followed her, and in a moment the three reappeared, and the party went out on the terrace. The

deep blue purity of the night was unveiled by mist, and the moonlight rimmed the edges of the trees with a

silver blur and blanched to unnatural whiteness the statues against their walls of shade.

Darrow and Anna, with Effie between them, strolled to the farther corner of the terrace. Below them, between

the fringes of the park, the lawn sloped dimly to the fields above the river. For a few minutes they stood

silently side by side, touched to peace beneath the trembling beauty of the sky. When they turned back,

Darrow saw that Owen and Sophy Viner, who had gone down the steps to the garden, were also walking in

the direction of the house. As they advanced, Sophy paused in a patch of moonlight, between the sharp

shadows of the yews, and Darrow noticed that she had thrown over her shoulders a long cloak of some light

colour, which suddenly evoked her image as she had entered the restaurant at his side on the night of their

first dinner in Paris. A moment later they were all together again on the terrace, and when they reentered the

Effie, emboldened by the privileges of the evening, was for coaxing Owen to round it off with a game of

forfeits or some such reckless climax; but Sophy, resuming her professional role, sounded the summons to

bed. In her pupil's wake she made her round of goodnights; but when she proffered her hand to Anna, the

The next day was Darrow's last at Givre and, foreseeing that the afternoon and evening would have to be

given to the family, he had asked Anna to devote an early hour to the final consideration of their plans. He

was to meet her in the brown sittingroom at ten, and they were to walk down to the river and talk over their

It was just a week since his arrival at Givre, and Anna wished, before he left, to return to the place where they

had sat on their first afternoon together. Her sensitiveness to the appeal of inanimate things, to the colour and

texture of whatever wove itself into the substance of her emotion, made her want to hear Darrow's voice, and

to feel his eyes on her, in the spot where bliss had first flowed into her heart.

That bliss, in the interval, had wound itself into every fold of her being. Passing, in the first days, from a high

shy tenderness to the rush of a secret surrender, it had gradually widened and deepened, to flow on in

redoubled beauty. She thought she now knew exactly how and why she loved Darrow, and she could see her

Early the next day, in her sittingroom, she was glancing through the letters which it was Effie's morning

privilege to carry up to her. Effie meanwhile circled inquisitively about the room, where there was always

something new to engage her infant fancy; and Anna, looking up, saw her suddenly arrested before a

photograph of Darrow which, the day before, had taken its place on the writingtable.

"Oh, most awfully, dearest," Effie, against her breast, leaned back to assure her with a limpid look. "And so

do Granny and Owenand I DO think Sophy does too," she added, after a moment's earnest pondering.

"I hope so," Anna laughed. She checked the impulse to continue: "Has she talked to you about him, that

you're so sure?" She did not know what had made the question spring to her lips, but she was glad she had

closed them before pronouncing it. Nothing could have been more distasteful to her than to clear up such

obscurities by turning on them the tiny flame of her daughter's observation. And what, after all, now that

Owen's happiness was secured, did it matter if there were certain reserves in Darrow's approval of his

A knock on the door made Anna glance at the clock. "There's Nurse to carry you off."

"It's Sophy's knock," the little girl answered, jumping down to open the door; and Miss Viner in fact stood on

"May Effie go out for a turn with Nurse?" the girl asked. "I should like to speak to you a moment."

"Of course. This ought to be YOUR holiday, as yesterday was Effie's. Run off, dear," she added, stooping to

When the door had closed she turned back to Sophy Viner with a look that sought her confidence. "I'm so

glad you came, my dear. We've got so many things to talk about, just you and I together."

The confused intercourse of the last days had, in fact, left little time for any speech with Sophy but such as

related to her marriage and the means of overcoming Madame de Chantelle's opposition to it. Anna had

exacted of Owen that no one, not even Sophy Viner, should be given a hint of her own projects till all

contingent questions had been disposed of. She had felt, from the outset, a secret reluctance to intrude her

From the sofacorner to which she had dropped back she pointed to Darrow's chair. "Come and sit by me,

dear. I wanted to see you alone. There's so much to say that I hardly know where to begin."

She leaned forward, her hands clasped on the arms of the sofa, her eyes bent smilingly on Sophy's. As she did

so, she noticed that the girl's unusual pallour was partly due to the slight veil of powder on her face. The

discovery was distinctly disagreeable. Anna had never before noticed, on Sophy's part, any recourse to

cosmetics, and, much as she wished to think herself exempt from oldfashioned prejudices, she suddenly

became aware that she did not like her daughter's governess to have a powdered face. Then she reflected that

the girl who sat opposite her was no longer Effie's governess, but her own future daughterinlaw; and she

wondered whether Miss Viner had chosen this odd way of celebrating her independence, and whether, as

Mrs. Owen Leath, she would present to the world a bedizened countenance. This idea was scarcely less

distasteful than the other, and for a moment Anna continued to consider her without speaking. Then, in a

flash, the truth came to her: Miss Viner had powdered her face because Miss Viner had been crying.

Anna leaned forward impulsively. "My dear child, what's the matter?" She saw the girl's blood rush up under

the white mask, and hastened on: "Please don't be afraid to tell me. I do so want you to feel that you can trust

me as Owen does. And you know you mustn't mind if, just at first, Madame de Chantelle occasionally

She spoke eagerly, persuasively, almost on a note of pleading. She had, in truth, so many reasons for wanting

Sophy to like her: her love for Owen, her solicitude for Effie, and her own sense of the girl's fine mettle. She

had always felt a romantic and almost humble admiration for those members of her sex who, from force of

will, or the constraint of circumstances, had plunged into the conflict from which fate had so persistently

excluded her. There were even moments when she fancied herself vaguely to blame for her immunity, and

felt that she ought somehow to have affronted the perils and hardships which refused to come to her. And

now, as she sat looking at Sophy Viner, so small, so slight, so visibly defenceless and undone, she still felt,

through all the superiority of her worldly advantages and her seeming maturity, the same odd sense of

ignorance and inexperience. She could not have said what there was in the girl's manner and expression to

give her this feeling, but she was reminded, as she looked at Sophy Viner, of the other girls she had known in

her youth, the girls who seemed possessed of a secret she had missed. Yes, Sophy Viner had their

lookalmost the obscurely menacing look of Kitty Mayne...Anna, with an inward smile, brushed aside the

image of this forgotten rival. But she had felt, deep down, a twinge of the old pain, and she was sorry that,

even for the flash of a thought, Owen's betrothed should have reminded her of so different a woman...

She laid her hand on the girl's. "When his grandmother sees how happy Owen is she'll be quite happy herself.

Sophy Viner, with an almost imperceptible recoil of her whole slight person, had drawn her hand from under

"Of course! We've all so many plans to makeand to fit into each other's. Please let's begin with yours."

The girl paused a moment, her hands clasped on the arms of her chair, her lids dropped under Anna's gaze;

"NoI should like to go away...my friends the Farlows would let me go to them..." Her voice grew firmer

and she lifted her eyes to add: "I should like to leave today, if you don't mind."

"You want to leave Givre at once?" She gave the idea a moment's swift consideration. "You prefer to be with

your friends till your marriage? I understand thatbut surely you needn't rush off today? There are so many

"Yes, I know." The girl was evidently trying to steady her voice. "But I should like to wait a few daysto

Anna continued to consider her kindly. It was evident that she did not care to say why she wished to leave

Givre so suddenly, but her disturbed face and shaken voice betrayed a more pressing motive than the natural

desire to spend the weeks before her marriage under her old friends' roof. Since she had made no response to

the allusion to Madame de Chantelle, Anna could but conjecture that she had had a passing disagreement

with Owen; and if this were so, random interference might do more harm than good.

"My dear child, if you really want to go at once I sha'n't, of course, urge you to stay. I suppose you have

"I wanted to tell you first. I thought I ought to, on account of Effie." Her look cleared as she put forth this

"Oh, Effie!" Anna's smile brushed away the scruple. "Owen has a right to ask that you should consider him

before you think of his sister...Of course you shall do just as you wish," she went on, after another thoughtful

Anna rose also, vaguely seeking for some word that should break down the girl's resistance. "You'll tell Owen

Miss Viner, instead of replying, stood before her in manifest uncertainty, and as she did so there was a light

Anna's first glance told her that his face was unclouded. He met her greeting with his happiest smile and

turned to lift Sophy's hand to his lips. The perception that he was utterly unconscious of any cause for Miss

"Darrow's looking for you," he said to her. "He asked me to remind you that you'd promised to go for a walk

Anna glanced at the clock. "I'll go down presently." She waited and looked again at Sophy Viner, whose

troubled eyes seemed to commit their message to her. "You'd better tell Owen, my dear."

Anna summoned a laugh to ease the vague tension of the moment. "Don't look so startled! Nothing, except

Owen's brow cleared. "I was afraid she'd run off before long." He glanced at Anna. "Do please keep her here

"Today? Why on earth should you go today?" Owen dropped back a step or two, flushing and paling under

his bewildered frown. His eyes seemed to search the girl more closely. "Something's happened." He too

Anna was struck by the suddenness and vehemence of his appeal. It was as though some smouldering

"She's told me nothing except that she wishes to be with her friends. It's quite natural that she should want to

Owen visibly controlled himself. "Of coursequite natural." He spoke to Sophy. "But why didn't you tell me

Anna intervened with her calm smile. "That seems to me quite natural, too. Sophy was considerate enough to

He weighed it. "Very well, then: that's quite natural, as you say. And of course she must do exactly as she

pleases." He still kept his eyes on the girl. "Tomorrow," he abruptly announced, "I shall go up to Paris to see

Under the influence of his agitation Anna felt a vague tightening of the heart. She seemed to herself like some

"If it's anything that Sophy wishes to tell you, no doubt she'll do so. I'm going down now, and I'll leave you

As she moved to the door the girl caught up with her. "But there's nothing to tell: why should there be? I've

explained that I simply want to be quiet." Her look seemed to detain Mrs. Leath.

"In how many days?" "Owen!" his stepmother interposed; but he seemed no longer aware of her. "If you go

away today, the day that our engagement's made known, it's only fair," he persisted, "that you should tell me

Sophy's eyes wavered between the two and dropped down wearily. "It's you who are not fairwhen I've said

"But why should my coming disturb you? I'm not asking now to come tomorrow. I only ask you not to leave

"You don't understand my asking for some explanation, some assurance, when I'm left in this way, without a

Anna turned back to Sophy Viner, who stood straight and tremulous between the two.

He turned from Sophy to his stepmother. "I only want her to say what she means: that she's going to write to

Anna felt the contagion of his excitement. She looked at Sophy, who stood motionless, her lips set, her whole

Both instinctively addressed themselves to Anna, who stood, nearly as shaken as themselves, between the

double shock of their struggle. She looked again from Sophy's inscrutable eyes to Owen's stormy features;

then she said: "What can I do, when there's clearly something between you that I don't know about?"

"Oh, if it WERE between us! Can't you see it's outside of usoutside of her, dragging at her, dragging her

Anna turned from him to the girl. "Is it true that you want to break your engagement? If you do, you ought to

Owen burst into a laugh. "She doesn't dare toshe's afraid I'll guess the reason!"

A faint sound escaped from Sophy's lips, but she kept them close on whatever answer she had ready.

"If she doesn't wish to marry you, why should she be afraid to have you know the reason?"

Anna stood looking from one to the other. It had become apparent to her in a flash that Owen's retort, though

it startled Sophy, did not take her by surprise; and the discovery shot its light along dark distances of fear.

The immediate inference was that Owen had guessed the reason of Darrow's disapproval of his marriage, or

that, at least, he suspected Sophy Viner of knowing and dreading it. This confirmation of her own obscure

doubt sent a tremor of alarm through Anna. For a moment she felt like exclaiming: "All this is really no

business of mine, and I refuse to have you mix me up in it" but her secret fear held her fast.

"I should like to go now," she said in a low voice, taking a few steps toward the door.

Her tone woke Anna to the sense of her own share in the situation. "I quite agree with you, my dear, that it's

useless to carry on this discussion. But since Mr. Darrow's name has been brought into it, for reasons which I

fail to guess, I want to tell you that you're both mistaken if you think he's not in sympathy with your

She spoke the words deliberately and incisively, as if hoping that the sound of their utterance would stifle the

Sophy's only answer was a vague murmur, and a movement that brought her nearer to the door; but before

"I don't mean to imply what you think," he said, addressing his stepmother but keeping his eyes on the girl.

"I don't say Darrow doesn't like our marriage; I say it's Sophy who's hated it since Darrow's been here!"

He brought out the charge in a tone of forced composure, but his lips were white and he grasped the doorknob

Anna's anger surged up with her fears. "You're absurd, Owen! I don't know why I listen to you. Why should

Sophy dislike Mr. Darrow, and if she does, why should that have anything to do with her wishing to break

"I don't say she dislikes him! I don't say she likes him; I don't know what it is they say to each other when

"Shut up together alone?" Anna stared. Owen seemed like a man in delirium; such an exhibition was

"Yesthe first evening she came, in the study; the next morning, early, in the park; yesterday, again, in the

springhouse, when you were at the lodge with the doctor...I don't know what they say to each other, but

they've taken every chance they could to say it...and to say it when they thought that no one saw them."

Anna longed to silence him, but no words came to her. It was as though all her confused apprehensions had

suddenly taken definite shape. There was "something"yes, there was "something"...Darrow's reticences

The next instant brought a recoil of pride. She turned indignantly on her stepson.

"I don't half understand what you've been saying; but what you seem to hint is so preposterous, and so

insulting both to Sophy and to me, that I see no reason why we should listen to you any longer."

Though her tone steadied Owen, she perceived at once that it would not deflect him from his purpose. He

"How can it be preposterous, since it's true? Or insulting, since I don't know, any more than YOU, the

meaning of what I've been seeing? If you'll be patient with me I'll try to put it quietly. What I mean is that

Sophy has completely changed since she met Darrow here, and that, having noticed the change, I'm hardly to

Anna made an effort to answer him with the same composure. "You're to blame, at any rate, for so recklessly

assuming that you HAVE found it out. You seem to forget that, till they met here, Sophy and Mr. Darrow

He turned his haggard face to her. "Can I help it, if I've seen and known what I wasn't meant to? For God's

sake give me a reasonany reason I can decently make out with! Is it my fault if, the day after you arrived,

when I came back late through the garden, the curtains of the study hadn't been drawn, and I saw you there

Anna laughed impatiently. "Really, Owen, if you make it a grievance that two people who are staying in the

"No; but I could see. HE was sitting at my desk, with his face in his hands. SHE was standing in the window,

He waited, as if for Sophy Viner's answer; but still she neither stirred nor spoke.

"That was the first time," he went on; "and the second was the next morning in the park. It was natural

enough, their meeting there. Sophy had gone out with Effie, and Effie ran back to look for me. She told me

she'd left Sophy and Darrow in the path that leads to the river, and presently we saw them ahead of us. They

didn't see us at first, because they were standing looking at each other; and this time they were not speaking

either. We came up close before they heard us, and all that time they never spoke, or stopped looking at each

"Oh, Owen!" "Oh, I only had to wait. Yesterday, when I motored you and the doctor back from the lodge, I

saw Sophy coming out of the springhouse. I supposed she'd taken shelter from the rain, and when you got

out of the motor I strolled back down the avenue to meet her. But she'd disappearedshe must have taken a

short cut and come into the house by the side door. I don't know why I went on to the springhouse; I

suppose it was what you'd call spying. I went up the steps and found the room empty; but two chairs had been

moved out from the wall and were standing near the table; and one of the Chinese screens that lie on it had

Anna sounded a faint note of irony. "Really? Sophy'd gone there for shelter, and she dropped a screen and

"Simply of the fact that Darrow'd been there with her. As I looked out of the window I saw him close by,

walking away. He must have turned the corner of the springhouse just as I got to the door."

There was another silence, during which Anna paused, not only to collect her own words but to wait for

"I've absolutely nothing to say to all this; but perhaps you'd like me to wait and hear your answer?"

Sophy raised her head with a quick flash of colour. "I've no answer eitherexcept that Owen must be mad."

In the interval since she had last spoken she seemed to have regained her selfcontrol, and her voice rang

Anna looked at her stepson. He had grown extremely pale, and his hand fell from the door with a

"I didn't suppose it was necessary to give you or any one else a reason for talking with a friend of Mrs.

"I won't ask for one, then. I'll only ask you to give me your assurance that your talks with Darrow have had

She hesitated, not so much with the air of weighing her answer as of questioning his right to exact any. "I

Anna drew back, her eyes on her stepson. He had left the threshold and was advancing toward Sophy Viner

with a motion of desperate appeal; but as he did so there was a knock on the door. A moment's silence fell on

Darrow came into the room. Seeing the three together, he looked rapidly from one to the other; then he turned

His look, his voice, the simple sense of his presence, restored Anna's shaken balance. By Owen's side he

looked so strong, so urbane, so experienced, that the lad's passionate charges dwindled to mere boyish

vapourings. A moment ago she had dreaded Darrow's coming; now she was glad that he was there.

She turned to him with sudden decision. "Come in, please; I want you to hear what Owen has been saying."

She caught a murmur from Sophy Viner, but disregarded it. An illuminating impulse urged her on. She,

habitually so aware of her own lack of penetration, her small skill in reading hidden motives and detecting

secret signals, now felt herself mysteriously inspired. She addressed herself to Sophy Viner. "It's much better

for you both that this absurd question should be cleared up now " Then, turning to Darrow, she continued:

"For some reason that I don't pretend to guess, Owen has taken it into his head that you've influenced Miss

She spoke slowly and deliberately, because she wished to give time and to gain it; time for Darrow and

Sophy to receive the full impact of what she was saying, and time to observe its full effect on them. She had

said to herself: "If there's nothing between them, they'll look at each other; if there IS something, they won't;"

Sophy, after a start of protest, remained motionless, her gaze on the ground. Darrow, his face grown grave,

glanced slowly from Owen Leath to Anna. With his eyes on the latter he asked: "Has Miss Viner broken her

A moment's silence followed his question; then the girl looked up and said: "Yes!"

Owen, as she spoke, uttered a smothered exclamation and walked out of the room. She continued to stand in

the same place, without appearing to notice his departure, and without vouchsafing an additional word of

explanation; then, before Anna could find a cry to detain her, she too turned and went out.

"For God's sake, what's happened?" Darrow asked; but Anna, with a drop of the heart, was saying to herself

Anna stood in the middle of the room, her eyes on the door. Darrow's questioning gaze was still on her, and

she said to herself with a quickdrawn breath: "If only he doesn't come near me!"

It seemed to her that she had been suddenly endowed with the fatal gift of reading the secret sense of every

seemingly spontaneous look and movement, and that in his least gesture of affection she would detect a cold

For a moment longer he continued to look at her enquiringly; then he turned away and took up his habitual

"I can't explain: I don't know. I didn't even knowtill she told youthat she really meant to break her

engagement. All I know is that she came to me just now and said she wished to leave Givre today; and that

Owen, when he heard of itfor she hadn't told himat once accused her of going away with the secret

"And you think it's a definite break?" She perceived, as she spoke, that his brow had cleared.

"I?" She fancied his face clouded again, but he did not move from his tranquil attitude.

"As I told you," she went on, "Owen has worked himself up to imagining that for some mysterious reason

Darrow still visibly wondered. "It must indeed be a mysterious reason! He knows how slightly I know Miss

"No: he admits he doesn't know your reason. He simply says that Sophy's manner to him has changed since

she came back to Givre and that he's seen you together several timesin the park, the springhouse, I don't

know wheretalking alone in a way that seemed confidentialalmost secret; and he draws the preposterous

Darrow again seemed to turn over the facts she gave him. His face remained grave, but without the least trace

"She says it's perfectly natural that she should occasionally talk to my friends when she's under my roof

"Some reason for her sudden decision to break her engagement. I can understand Owen's feeling, sorry as I

am for his way of showing it. The girl owes him some sort of explanation, and as long as she refuses to give

"I don't defend Owen's tonebut she knew what it was before she accepted him. She knows he's excitable

"Well, she's been disciplining him a littleprobably the best thing that could happen. Why not let the matter

He met the question with his easy smile. "Oh, as to that leave him with any idea of me he chooses! But

"Simply let things be. You've surely done all you could for him and Miss Viner. If they don't hit it off it's

their own affair. What possible motive can you have for trying to interfere now?"

"I don't care a straw what he says of me! In such a situation a boy in love will snatch at the most farfetched

reason rather than face the mortifying fact that the lady may simply be tired of him."

"You don t quite understand Owen. Things go deep with him, and last long. It took him a long time to recover

from his other unlucky love affair. He's romantic and extravagant: he can't live on the interest of his feelings.

He worships Sophy and she seemed to be fond of him. If she's changed it's been very sudden. And if they part

like this, angrily and inarticulately, it will hurt him horriblyhurt his very soul. But that, as you say, is

between the two. What concerns me is his associating you with their quarrel. Owen's like my own sonif

you'd seen him when I first came here you'd know why. We were like two prisoners who talk to each other by

tapping on the wall. He's never forgotten it, nor I. Whether he breaks with Sophy, or whether they make it up,

She raised her eyes entreatingly to Darrow's, and read in them the forbearance of the man resigned to the

His smile seemed to charge her with inconsequence, and the prick to her pride made her continue: "After all,

it's not so unnatural that Owen, knowing you and Sophy to be almost strangers, should wonder what you were

She felt a warning tremor as she spoke, as though some instinct deeper than reason surged up in defense of its

treasure. But Darrow's face was unstirred save by the flit of his halfamused smile.

"Well, my dearand couldn't you have told him?" "I?" she faltered out through her blush.

"You seem to forget, one and all of you, the position you put me in when I came down here: your appeal to

me to see Owen through, your assurance to him that I would, Madame de Chantelle's attempt to win me over;

and most of all, my own sense of the fact you've just recalled to me: the importance, for both of us, that Owen

should like me. It seemed to me that the first thing to do was to get as much light as I could on the whole

situation; and the obvious way of doing it was to try to know Miss Viner better. Of course I've talked with her

aloneI've talked with her as often as I could. I've tried my best to find out if you were right in encouraging

She listened with a growing sense of reassurance, struggling to separate the abstract sense of his words from

"You must see, also, that I could hardly say this to Owen without offending him still more, and perhaps

increasing the breach between Miss Viner and himself. What sort of figure should I cut if I told him I'd been

trying to find out if he'd made a proper choice? In any case, it's none of my business to offer an explanation

of what she justly says doesn't need one. If she declines to speak, it's obviously on the ground that Owen's

"Yes, yes! I see," Anna repeated. "But I don't want you to explain anything to Owen."

She hesitated, conscious of the difficulty of justifying her request; then: "I want you to speak to Sophy," she

Darrow broke into an incredulous laugh. "Considering what my previous attempts have resulted in!"

She raised her eyes quickly. "They haven't, at least, resulted in your liking her less, in your thinking less well

"I want to be sureI owe it to Owen. Won't you tell me the exact impression she's produced on you?"

Again he betrayed a restrained impatience. "How can I answer that without knowing her reasons for breaking

"Because, whatever grievance she has against Owen, she can certainly have none against me. She can't want

to have Owen connect me in his mind with this wretched quarrel; and she must see that he will until he's

Darrow's elbow dropped from the mantelpiece and he took a restless step or two across the room. Then he

He eyed her intently, and she pressed on: "You must have guessed that Owen's jealous of you."

"Blind with itwhat else would drive him to this folly? And I can't have her think me jealous too! I've said

all I could, short of making her think so; and she's refused a word more to either of us. Our only chance now

is that she should listen to youthat you should make her see the harm her silence may do."

Darrow uttered a protesting exclamation. "It's all too preposterouswhat you suggest! I can't, at any rate,

Anna laid her hand on his arm. "Appeal to her on the ground that I'm almost Owen's mother, and that any

estrangement between you and him would kill me. She knows what he is she'll understand. Tell her to say

anything, do anything, she wishes; but not to go away without speaking, not to leave THAT between us when

She drew back a step and lifted her face to his, trying to look into his eyes more deeply than she had ever

looked; but before she could discern what they expressed he had taken hold of her hands and bent his head to

"You'll see her? You'll see her?" she entreated; and he answered: "I'll do anything in the world you want me

No place could have been more distasteful as the scene of the talk that lay before him; but he had acceded to

Anna's suggestion that it would seem more natural for her to summon Sophy Viner than for him to go in

search of her. As his troubled pacings carried him back and forth a relentless hand seemed to be tearing away

all the tender fibres of association that bound him to the peaceful room. Here, in this very place, he had drunk

his deepest draughts of happiness, had had his lips at the fountainhead of its overflowing rivers; but now

For a moment he felt an actual physical anguish; then his nerves hardened for the coming struggle. He had no

notion of what awaited him; but after the first instinctive recoil he had seen in a flash the urgent need of

another word with Sophy Viner. He had been insincere in letting Anna think that he had consented to speak

because she asked it. In reality he had been feverishly casting about for the pretext she had given him; and for

some reason this trivial hypocrisy weighed on him more than all his heavy burden of deceit.

At length he heard a step behind him and Sophy Viner entered. When she saw him she paused on the

"Mrs. Leath DID send for you. She'll be here presently; but I asked her to let me see you first."

He spoke very gently, and there was no insincerity in his gentleness. He was profoundly moved by the

change in the girl's appearance. At sight of him she had forced a smile; but it lit up her wretchedness like a

She made no reply, and Darrow went on: "You must understand my wanting to speak to you, after what I was

She interposed, with a gesture of protest: "I'm not responsible for Owen's ravings!"

"Of course". He broke off and they stood facing each other. She lifted a hand and pushed back her loose

lock with the gesture that was burnt into his memory; then she looked about her and dropped into the nearest

"Why do you say that's what I wanted? All I wished, from the beginning, was to advise you, to help you as

"That's what you've done," she rejoined. "You've convinced me that it's best I shouldn't marry him."

Darrow broke into a despairing laugh. "At the very moment when you'd convinced me to the contrary!"

"Had I?" Her smile flickered up. "Well, I really believed it till you showed me...warned me..."

She made no answer, and Darrow started up and walked away to the other end of the room. He stopped

before the writing table, where his photograph, welldressed, handsome, self sufficientthe portrait of a

man of the world, confident of his ability to deal adequately with the most delicate situationsoffered its

huge fatuity to his gaze. He turned back to her. "It's rather hard on Owen, isn't it, that you should have waited

"Knew that I could never live here with him." She looked about the room, as though the very walls must

For a moment Darrow continued to search her face perplexedly; then their eyes met in a long disastrous gaze.

Below the window they heard Effie whistling for her dogs, and then, from the terrace, her mother calling her.

"You couldn't tell. We neither of us could." She seemed to turn the problem over critically. "After all, it

He took another distracted turn about the room and coming back to her sat down in a chair at her side. A

mocking hand seemed to dash the words from his lips. There was nothing on earth that he could say to her

He flushed to the forehead. "I meant, try to give Owen more time; to give him a chance. He's madly in love

with you; all the good that's in him is in your hands. His stepmother felt that from the first. And she

"Now...? I don't say now. But later? Time modifies...rubs out...more quickly than you think...Go away, but let

him hope...I'm going tooWE'RE going" he stumbled on the plural"in a very few weeks: going for a

long time, probably. What you're thinking of now may never happen. We may not all be here together again

She heard him out in silence, her hands clasped on her knee, her eyes bent on them. "For me," she said,

"You don't understand. I don't want anything to change. I don't want to forgetto rub out. At first I imagined

I did; but that was a foolish mistake. As soon as I saw you again I knew it...It's not being here with you that

I'm afraid ofin the sense you think. It's being here, or anywhere, with Owen." She stood up and bent her

The only words that came to him were futile denunciations of his folly; but the sense of their futility checked

them on his lips. "Poor childyou poor child!" he heard himself vainly repeating.

Suddenly he felt the strong reaction of reality and its impetus brought him to his feet. "Whatever happens, I

intend to goto go for good," he exclaimed. "I want you to understand that. Oh, don't be afraidI'll find a

She uttered a protesting cry. "Go away? You? Don't you see that that would tell everythingdrag everybody

He found no answer, and her voice dropped back to its calmer note. "What good would your going do? Do

you suppose it would change anything for me?" She looked at him with a musing wistfulness. "I wonder what

your feeling for me was? It seems queer that I've never really knownI suppose we DON'T know much

about that kind of feeling. Is it like taking a drink when you're thirsty?...I used to feel as if all of me was in

He bowed his humbled head, but she went on almost exultantly: "Don't for a minute think I'm sorry! It was

worth every penny it cost. My mistake was in being ashamed, just at first, of its having cost such a lot. I tried

to carry it off as a joketo talk of it to myself as an 'adventure'. I'd always wanted adventures, and you'd

given me one, and I tried to take your attitude about it, to 'play the game' and convince myself that I hadn't

risked any more on it than you. Then, when I met you again, I suddenly saw that I HAD risked more, but that

I'd won more, toosuch worlds! I'd been trying all the while to put everything I could between us; now I

want to sweep everything away. I'd been trying to forget how you looked; now I want to remember you

always. I'd been trying not to hear your voice; now I never want to hear any other. I've made my

choicethat's all: I've had you and I mean to keep you." Her face was shining like her eyes. "To keep you

After she had left him, Darrow continued to sit motionless, staring back into their past. Hitherto it had

lingered on the edge of his mind in a vague pink blur, like one of the little roseleaf clouds that a setting sun

drops from its disk. Now it was a huge looming darkness, through which his eyes vainly strained. The whole

episode was still obscure to him, save where here and there, as they talked, some phrase or gesture or

She had said: "I wonder what your feeling for me was?" and he found himself wondering too...He

remembered distinctly enough that he had not meant the perilous passioneven in its most transient

formto play a part in their relation. In that respect his attitude had been above reproach. She was an

unusually original and attractive creature, to whom he had wanted to give a few days of harmless pleasuring,

and who was alert and expert enough to understand his intention and spare him the boredom of hesitations

and misinterpretations. That had been his first impression, and her subsequent demeanour had justified it. She

had been, from the outset, just the frank and easy comrade he had expected to find her. Was it he, then, who,

in the sequel, had grown impatient of the bounds he had set himself? Was it his wounded vanity that, seeking

balm for its hurt, yearned to dip deeper into the healing pool of her compassion? In his confused memory of

the situation he seemed not to have been guiltless of such yearnings...Yet for the first few days the

experiment had been perfectly successful. Her enjoyment had been unclouded and his pleasure in it

undisturbed. It was very graduallyhe seemed to seethat a shade of lassitude had crept over their

intercourse. Perhaps it was because, when her light chatter about people failed, he found she had no other

fund to draw on, or perhaps simply because of the sweetness of her laugh, or of the charm of the gesture with

which, one day in the woods of Marly, she had tossed off her hat and tilted back her head at the call of a

cuckoo; or because, whenever he looked at her unexpectedly, he found that she was looking at him and did

not want him to know it; or perhaps, in varying degrees, because of all these things, that there had come a

moment when no word seemed to fly high enough or dive deep enough to utter the sense of wellbeing each

The kiss, at all events, had come at the precise moment to save their venture from disaster. They had reached

the point when her amazing reminiscences had begun to flag, when her future had been exhaustively

discussed, her theatrical prospects minutely studied, her quarrel with Mrs. Murrett retold with the last

amplification of detail, and when, perhaps conscious of her exhausted resources and his dwindling interest,

she had committed the fatal error of saying that she could see he was unhappy, and entreating him to tell her

From the brink of estranging confidences, and from the risk of unfavourable comparisons, his gesture had

snatched her back to safety; and as soon as he had kissed her he felt that she would never bore him again. She

was one of the elemental creatures whose emotion is all in their pulses, and who become inexpressive or

sentimental when they try to turn sensation into speech. His caress had restored her to her natural place in the

scheme of things, and Darrow felt as if he had clasped a tree and a nymph had bloomed from it...

The mere fact of not having to listen to her any longer added immensely to her charm. She continued, of

course, to talk to him, but it didn't matter, because he no longer made any effort to follow her words, but let

She hadn't a drop of poetry in her, but she had some of the qualities that create it in others; and in moments of

Lying beside her in the shade, Darrow felt her presence as a part of the charmed stillness of the summer

woods, as the element of vague wellbeing that suffused his senses and lulled to sleep the ache of wounded

pride. All he asked of her, as yet, was a touch on the hand or on the lipsand that she should let him go on

lying there through the long warm hours, while a blackbird's song throbbed like a fountain, and the summer

wind stirred in the trees, and close by, between the nearest branches and the brim of his tilted hat, a slight

He recalled, too, having noticed, as he lay staring at a break in the treetops, a stream of mares'tails coming

up the sky. He had said to himself: "It will rain tomorrow," and the thought had made the air seem warmer

and the sun more vivid on her hair...Perhaps if the mares'tails had not come up the sky their adventure might

have had no sequel. But the cloud brought rain, and next morning he looked out of his window into a cold

grey blur. They had planned an allday excursion down the Seine, to the two Andelys and Rouen, and now,

with the long hours on their hands, they were both a little at a loss...There was the Louvre, of course, and the

Luxembourg; but he had tried looking at pictures with her, she had first so persistently admired the worst

things, and then so frankly lapsed into indifference, that he had no wish to repeat the experiment. So they

went out, aimlessly, and took a cold wet walk, turning at length into the deserted arcades of the Palais Royal,

and finally drifting into one of its equally deserted restaurants, where they lunched alone and somewhat

dolefully, served by a wan old waiter with the look of a castaway who has given up watching for a sail...It

Perhaps but for the rain it might never have happened; but what was the use of thinking of that now? He tried

to turn his thoughts to more urgent issues; but, by a strange perversity of association, every detail of the day

was forcing itself on his mind with an insistence from which there was no escape. Reluctantly he relived the

long wet walk back to the hotel, after a tedious hour at a cinematograph show on the Boulevard. It was still

raining when they withdrew from this stale spectacle, but she had obstinately refused to take a cab, had even,

on the way, insisted on loitering under the dripping awnings of shop windows and poking into draughty

passages, and finally, when they had nearly reached their destination, had gone so far as to suggest that they

should turn back to hunt up some show she had heard of in a theatre at the Batignolles. But at that he had

somewhat irritably protested: he remembered that, for the first time, they were both rather irritable, and

vaguely disposed to resist one another's suggestions. His feet were wet, and he was tired of walking, and sick

of the smell of stuffy unaired theatres, and he had said he must really get back to write some lettersand so

Darrow had no idea how long he had sat there when he heard Anna's hand on the door. The effort of rising,

and of composing his face to meet her, gave him a factitious sense of selfcontrol. He said to himself: "I must

decide on something" and that lifted him a hair's breadth above the whirling waters.

She came in with a lighter step, and he instantly perceived that something unforeseen and reassuring had

"She's been with me. She came and found me on the terrace. We've had a long talk and she's explained

"It's natural, isn't it, that she should have felt a little sore at the kind of inspection she's been subjected to? Oh,

not from youI don't mean that! But Madame de Chantelle's oppositionand her sending for Adelaide

Painter! She told me frankly she didn't care to owe her husband to Adelaide Painter...She thinks now that her

annoyance at feeling herself so talked over and scrutinized may have shown itself in her manner to Owen,

and set him imagining the insane things he did...I understand all she must have felt, and I agree with her that

it's best she should go away for a while. She's made me," Anna summed up, "feel as if I'd been dreadfully

"Yes. As if I'd treated her like the bricabrac that used to be sent down here 'on approval,' to see if it would

look well with the other pieces." She added, with a sudden flush of enthusiasm: "I'm glad she's got it in her to

She seemed to wait for Darrow to agree with her, or to put some other question, and he finally found voice to

"I hope notI've never hoped it more! I had a word with Owen, too, after I left her, and I think he

understands that he must let her go without insisting on any positive promise. She's excited...he must let her

"She'll help me toshe's to see him, of course, before she goes. She starts immediately, by the way, with

Adelaide Painter, who is motoring over to Francheuil to catch the one o'clock expressand who, of course,

knows nothing of all this, and is simply to be told that Sophy has been sent for by the Farlows."

Darrow mutely signed his comprehension, and she went on: "Owen is particularly anxious that neither

Adelaide nor his grandmother should have the least inkling of what's happened. The need of shielding Sophy

will help him to control himself. He's coming to his senses, poor boy; he's ashamed of his wild talk already.

Darrow made a movement of protest. "Oh, as to thatthe thing's not worth another word."

"Or another thought, either?" She brightened. "Promise me you won't even think of itpromise me you

He was finding it easier to smile back at her. "Why should you think it necessary to ask my indulgence for

She hesitated a moment, her eyes wandering from him. Then they came back with a smile. "Perhaps because

"I mean, because I understand better how one can torture one's self over unrealities."

As Darrow listened, the tension of his nerves began to relax. Her gaze, so grave and yet so sweet, was like a

deep pool into which he could plunge and hide himself from the hard glare of his misery. As this ecstatic

sense enveloped him he found it more and more difficult to follow her words and to frame an answer; but

what did anything matter, except that her voice should go on, and the syllables fall like soft touches on his

"Don't you know," she continued, "the bliss of waking from a bad dream in one's own quiet room, and going

slowly over all the horror without being afraid of it any more? That's what I'm doing now. And that's why I

understand Owen..." She broke off, and he felt her touch on his arm. "BECAUSE I'D DREAMED THE

"Forgive me! And let me tell you!...It will help you to understand Owen...There WERE little things...little

signs...once I had begun to watch for them: your reluctance to speak about her...her reserve with you...a sort

She laughed up at him, and with her hands in his he contrived to say: "NOW you understand why?"

"Oh, I understand; of course I understand; and I want you to laugh at mewith me! Because there were

other things too...crazier things still...There was evenlast night on the terraceher pink cloak..."

"You've forgotten about the cloak? The pink cloak that Owen saw you with at the play in Paris? Yes...yes...I

was mad enough for that!...It does me good to laugh about it now! But you ought to know that I'm going to be

a jealous woman...a ridiculously jealous woman...you ought to be warned of it in time..."

He had dropped her hands, and she leaned close and lifted her arms to his neck with one of her rare gestures

Her lips were parted in a noiseless laugh and the tremor of her lashes made their shadow move on her cheek.

He looked at her through a mist of pain and saw all her offered beauty held up like a cup to his lips; but as he

stooped to it a darkness seemed to fall between them, her arms slipped from his shoulders and she drew away

"But she WAS with you, then?" she exclaimed; and then, as he stared at her: "Oh, don't say no! Only go and

He stood speechless, and she pressed on: "Don't deny itoh, don't deny it! What will be left for me to

imagine if you do? Don't you see how every single thing cries it out? Owen sees ithe saw it again just now!

When I told him she'd relented, and would see him, he said: 'Is that Darrow's doing too?'"

Darrow took the onslaught in silence. He might have spoken, have summoned up the usual phrases of banter

and denial; he was not even certain that they might not, for the moment, have served their purpose if he could

have uttered them without being seen. But he was as conscious of what had happened to his face as if he had

obeyed Anna's bidding and looked at himself in the glass. He knew he could no more hide from her what was

written there than he could efface from his soul the fiery record of what he had just lived through. There

before him, staring him in the eyes, and reflecting itself in all his lineaments, was the overwhelming fact of

Anna was talking again, hurriedly, feverishly, and his soul was wrung by the anguish in her voice. "Do speak

at last you must speak! I don't want to ask you to harm the girl; but you must see that your silence is doing

her more harm than your answering my questions could. You're leaving me only the worst things to think of

her...she'd see that herself if she were here. What worse injury can you do her than to make me hate herto

"Oh, not that!" Darrow heard his own voice before he was aware that he meant to speak. "Yes; I did see her

in Paris," he went on after a pause; "but I was bound to respect her reason for not wanting it known."

"She had quarrelled with Mrs. Murrett and come over suddenly to Paris, and she didn't want the Farlows to

hear of it. I came across her by accident, and she asked me not to speak of having seen her."

"Oh, no. There was nothing for her to be ashamed of. But the Farlows had found the place for her, and she

didn't want them to know how suddenly she'd had to leave, and how badly Mrs. Murrett had behaved. She

was in a terrible plightthe woman had even kept back her month's salary. She knew the Farlows would be

Darrow heard himself speak as though the words had proceeded from other lips. His explanation sounded

plausible enough, and he halffancied Anna's look grew lighter. She waited a moment, as though to be sure

he had no more to add; then she said: "But the Farlows DID know; they told me all about it when they sent

He flushed as if she had laid a deliberate trap for him. "They may know NOW; they didn't then"

"Then I'll go and ask her for one myself." She turned and took a few steps toward the door.

She stood before him straight and pale, but under her rigid face he saw the tumult of her doubt and misery.

"I don't want to be ungenerous; I don't want to pry into her secrets. But things can't be left like this. Wouldn't

it be better for me to go to her? Surely she'll understandshe'll explain...It may be some mere trifle she's

concealing: something that would horrify the Farlows, but that I shouldn't see any harm in..." She paused, her

eyes searching his face. "A love affair, I suppose...that's it? You met her with some man at the theatreand

she was frightened and begged you to fib about it? Those poor young things that have to go about among us

She stared. "Let her gogo for good, you mean? Is that the best you can say for her?"

"And you and meand Effie, if Owen marries her, and I leave my child with them! Don't you see the

"Then there IS somethingsomething really bad? She WAS with some one when you met her? Some one

with whom she was" She broke off, and he saw her struggling with new thoughts. "If it's THAT, of

course...Oh, don't you see," she desperately appealed to him, "that I must find out, and that it's too late now

for you not to speak? Don't be afraid that I'll betray you...I'll never, never let a soul suspect. But I must know

Darrow waited a moment; then he said slowly: "What you imagine's mere madness. She was at the theatre

"With you?" He saw a tremor pass through her, but she controlled it instantly and faced him straight and

motionless as a wounded creature in the moment before it feels its wound. "Why should you both have made

"I've told you the idea was not mine." He cast about. "She may have been afraid that Owen"

"But that was not a reason for her asking you to tell me that you hardly knew herthat you hadn't even seen

her for years." She broke off and the blood rose to her face and forehead. "Even if SHE had other reasons,

there could be only one reason for your obeying her" Silence fell between them, a silence in which the

room seemed to become suddenly resonant with voices. Darrow's gaze wandered to the window and he

noticed that the gale of two days before had nearly stripped the tops of the lime trees in the court. Anna had

moved away and was resting her elbows against the mantelpiece, her head in her hands. As she stood there

he took in with a new intensity of vision little details of her appearance that his eyes had often cherished: the

branching blue veins in the backs of her hands, the warm shadow that her hair cast on her ear, and the colour

of the hair itself, dull black with a tawny undersurface, like the wings of certain birds. He felt it to be useless

After a while she lifted her head and said: "I shall not see her again before she goes."

He made no answer, and turning to him she added: "That is why she's going, I suppose? Because she loves

Darrow waited. The paltriness of conventional denial was so apparent to him that even if it could have

delayed discovery he could no longer have resorted to it. Under all his other fears was the dread of

When he had gone out of the room Anna stood where he had left her. "I must believe him! I must believe

A moment before, at the moment when she had lifted her arms to his neck, she had been wrapped in a sense

of complete security. All the spirits of doubt had been exorcised, and her love was once more the clear

habitation in which every thought and feeling could move in blissful freedom. And then, as she raised her

face to Darrow's and met his eyes, she had seemed to look into the very ruins of his soul. That was the only

way she could express it. It was as though he and she had been looking at two sides of the same thing, and the

She didn't now recall who had spoken first, or even, very clearly, what had been said. It seemed to her only a

moment later that she had found herself standing at the other end of the roomthe room which had suddenly

grown so small that, even with its length between them, she felt as if he touched hercrying out to him "It IS

That was his secret, then, THEIR secret: he had met the girl in Paris and helped her in her straitslent her

money, Anna vaguely conjecturedand she had fallen in love with him, and on meeting him again had been

suddenly overmastered by her passion. Anna, dropping back into her sofacorner, sat staring these facts in

The girl had been in a desperate plightfrightened, penniless, outraged by what had happened, and not

knowing (with a woman like Mrs. Murrett) what fresh injury might impend; and Darrow, meeting her in this

distracted hour, had pitied, counselled, been kind to her, with the fatal, the inevitable result. There were the

facts as Anna made them out: that, at least, was their external aspect, was as much of them as she had been

suffered to see; and into the secret intricacies they might cover she dared not yet project her thoughts.

"I must believe him...I must believe him..." She kept on repeating the words like a talisman. It was natural,

after all, that he should have behaved as he had: defended the girl's piteous secret to the last. She too began to

feel the contagion of his pitythe stir, in her breast, of feelings deeper and more native to her than the pains

of jealousy. From the security of her blessedness she longed to lean over with compassionate hands...But

Owen? What was Owen's part to be? She owed herself first to himshe was bound to protect him not only

from all knowledge of the secret she had surprised, but alsoand chiefly!from its consequences. Yes: the

girl must gothere could be no doubt of itDarrow himself had seen it from the first; and at the thought

she had a wild revulsion of relief, as though she had been trying to create in her heart the delusion of a

The one fact on which she could stay her mind was that Sophy was leaving immediately; would be out of the

house within an hour. Once she was gone, it would be easier to bring Owen to the point of understanding that

the break was final; if necessary, to work upon the girl to make him see it. But that, Anna was sure, would not

be necessary. It was clear that Sophy Viner was leaving Givre with no thought of ever seeing it again...

Suddenly, as she tried to put some order in her thoughts, she heard Owen's call at the door: "Mother!" a

name he seldom gave her. There was a new note in his voice: the note of a joyous impatience. It made her

turn hastily to the glass to see what face she was about to show him; but before she had had time to compose

"It's all right! It's all right! And it's all your doing! I want to do the worst kind of penancebell and candle

and the rest. I've been through it with HER, and now she hands me on to you, and you're to call me any

names you please." He freed her with his happy laugh. "I'm to be stood in the corner till next week, and then

"To me?" It was the first phrase she found to clutch at as she tried to steady herself in the eddies of his joy.

"Yes: you were so patient, and so dear to her; and you saw at once what a damned ass I'd been!" She tried a

smile, and it seemed to pass muster with him, for he sent it back in a broad beam. "That's not so difficult to

see? No, I admit it doesn't take a microscope. But you were so wise and wonderfulyou always are. I've

been mad these last days, simply madyou and she might well have washed your hands of me! And instead,

She drew back a little, trying to keep the smile on her lips and not let him get the least glimpse of what it hid.

"I'm so glad, dear; so glad. If only you'll always feel like that about me..." She stopped, hardly knowing what

she said, and aghast at the idea that her own hands should have retied the knot she imagined to be broken. But

she saw he had something more to say; something hard to get out, but absolutely necessary to express. He

caught her hands, pulled her close, and, with his forehead drawn into its whimsical smiling wrinkles, "Look

here," he cried, "if Darrow wants to call me a damned ass too you're not to stop him!"

It brought her back to a sharper sense of her central peril: of the secret to be kept from him at whatever cost to

"Oh, you know, he doesn't always wait for orders!" On the whole it sounded better than she'd feared.

"You mean he's called me one already?" He accepted the fact with his gayest laugh. "Well, that saves a lot of

trouble; now we can pass to the order of the day" he broke off and glanced at the clock"which is, you

know, dear, that she's starting in about an hour; she and Adelaide must already be snatching a hasty

There had, in fact, grown upon her while he spoke the urgency of seeing Sophy Viner again before she left.

The thought was deeply distasteful: Anna shrank from encountering the girl till she had cleared a way

through her own perplexities. But it was obvious that since they had separated, barely an hour earlier, the

situation had taken a new shape. Sophy Viner had apparently reconsidered her decision to break amicably but

definitely with Owen, and stood again in their path, a menace and a mystery; and confused impulses of

resistance stirred in Anna's mind. She felt Owen's touch on her arm. "Are you coming?"

"I don't know: startledsurprised " She read what her look must be by its sudden reflection in his face.

He held to his point. "You're more excited now that there's no cause for it. What on earth has happened since

He looked about the room, as if seeking the clue to her agitation, and in her dread of what he might guess she

answered: "What has happened is simply that I'm rather tired. Will you ask Sophy to come up and see me

While she waited she tried to think what she should say when the girl appeared; but she had never been more

conscious of her inability to deal with the oblique and the tortuous. She had lacked the hard teachings of

experience, and an instinctive disdain for whatever was less clear and open than her own conscience had kept

her from learning anything of the intricacies and contradictions of other hearts. She said to herself: "I must

find out" yet everything in her recoiled from the means by which she felt it must be done...

Sophy Viner appeared almost immediately, dressed for departure, her little bag on her arm. She was still pale

to the point of haggardness, but with a light upon her that struck Anna with surprise. Or was it, perhaps, that

she was looking at the girl with new eyes: seeing her, for the first time, not as Effie's governess, not as

Owen's bride, but as the embodiment of that unknown peril lurking in the background of every woman's

thoughts about her lover? Anna, at any rate, with a sudden sense of estrangement, noted in her graces and

snares never before perceived. It was only the flash of a primitive instinct, but it lasted long enough to make

She signed to Sophy to sit down on the sofa beside her. "I asked you to come up to me because I wanted to

say goodbye quietly," she explained, feeling her lips tremble, but trying to speak in a tone of friendly

The girl's only answer was a faint smile of acquiescence, and Anna, disconcerted by her silence, went on:

Sophy Viner raised her head with a look of surprise. Evidently the question, thus abruptly put, must have

sounded strangely on the lips of so ardent a partisan as Mrs. Leath! "I thought that was what you wished," she

"What I wished?" Anna's heart shook against her side. "I wish, of course, whatever seems best for Owen...It's

natural, you must understand, that that consideration should come first with me..."

Sophy was looking at her steadily. "I supposed it was the only one that counted with you."

The curtness of retort roused Anna's latent antagonism. "It is," she said, in a hard voice that startled her as she

heard it. Had she ever spoken so to any one before? She felt frightened, as though her very nature had

changed without her knowing it...Feeling the girl's astonished gaze still on her, she continued: "The

suddenness of the change has naturally surprised me. When I left you it was understood that you were to

"And now?" Anna waited for a reply that did not come. She did not understand the girl's attitude, the

edge of irony in her short syllables, the plainly premeditated determination to lay the burden of proof on her

interlocutor. Anna felt the sudden need to lift their intercourse above this mean level of defiance and distrust.

"Isn't it best that we should speak quite frankly? It's this change on your part that perplexes me. You can

hardly be surprised at that. It's true, I asked you not to break with Owen too abruptlyand I asked it, believe

me, as much for your sake as for his: I wanted you to take time to think over the difficulty that seems to have

arisen between you. The fact that you felt it required thinking over seemed to show you wouldn't take the

final step lightlywouldn't, I mean, accept of Owen more than you could give him. But your change of mind

obliges me to ask the question I thought you would have asked yourself. Is there any reason why you

She stopped a little breathlessly, her eyes on Sophy Viner's burning face. "Any reason? What do you

Sophy's first look was one of wonder and a faint relief; then she gave back the other's scrutiny in a glance of

"Till I'd gone: till I was out of the house. You might have known...you might have guessed..." She turned her

eyes again on Anna. "I only meant to let him hope a little longer, so that he shouldn't suspect anything; of

Anna stood motionless, silenced by the shock of the avowal. She too was trembling, less with anger than with

a confused compassion. But the feeling was so blent with others, less generous and more obscure, that she

found no words to express it, and the two women faced each other without speaking.

The words roused in Anna a latent impulse of compunction. The girl looked so young, so exposed and

desolate! And what thoughts must she be hiding in her heart! It was impossible that they should part in such a

Sophy looked at her. "You mean that Mr. Darrow didn't tell you? Of course not: do you suppose I thought he

did? You found it out, that's allI knew you would. In your place I should have guessed it sooner."

The words were spoken simply, without irony or emphasis; but they went through Anna like a sword. Yes,

the girl would have had divinations, promptings that she had not had! She felt half envious of such a sad

"Oh" it broke in a cry from Effie's mother. "Not like thisyou mustn't! I feelyou make me feel too

horribly: as if I were driving you away..." The words had rushed up from the depths of her bewildered pity.

There was another silence, during which passionate impulses of magnanimity warred in Anna with her doubts

and dreads. At length, her eyes on Sophy's face: "Yes, you must go now," she began; "but later on...after a

while, when all this is over...if there's no reason why you shouldn't marry Owen " she paused a moment

"You?" Sophy flushed again, and then grew pale. She seemed to try to speak, but no words came. "Yes! It

was not true when I said just now that I was thinking only of Owen. I'm sorryoh, so sorry!for you too.

Your lifeI know how hard it's been; and mine...mine's so full...Happy women understand best!" Anna drew

near and touched the girl's hand; then she began again, pouring all her soul into the broken phrases: "It's

terrible now...you see no future; but if, by and bye...you know best...but you're so young...and at your age

things DO pass. If there's no reason, no real reason, why you shouldn't marry Owen, I WANT him to hope,

With the urgency of her pleading her clasp tightened on Sophy's hand, but it warmed to no responsive tremor:

the girl seemed numb, and Anna was frightened by the stony silence of her look. "I suppose I'm not more

than half a woman," she mused, "for I don't want my happiness to hurt her;" and aloud she repeated: "If only

The girl did not speak; but suddenly, like a snapped branch, she bent, stooped down to the hand that clasped

her, and laid her lips upon it in a stream of weeping. She cried silently, continuously, abundantly, as though

Anna's touch had released the waters of some deep spring of pain; then, as Anna, moved and half afraid,

"You're going, thenfor goodlike this?" Anna moved toward her and stopped. Sophy stopped too, with

The girl walked across the room and paused again in the doorway. From there she flung back: "I wanted itI

Her first thought was: "He's going too in a few hoursI needn't see him again before he leaves..." At that

moment the possibility of having to look in Darrow's face and hear him speak seemed to her more

unendurable than anything else she could imagine. Then, on the next wave of feeling, came the desire to

confront him at once and wring from him she knew not what: avowal, denial, justification, anything that

She had told Owen she was tired, and this seemed a sufficient reason for remaining upstairs when the motor

came to the door and Miss Painter and Sophy Viner were borne off in it; sufficient also for sending word to

Madame de Chantelle that she would not come down till after luncheon. Having despatched her maid with

She had been unhappy before, and the vision of old miseries flocked like hungry ghosts about her fresh pain:

she recalled her youthful disappointment, the failure of her marriage, the wasted years that followed; but

those were negative sorrows, denials and postponements of life. She seemed in no way related to their

shadowy victim, she who was stretched on this fiery rack of the irreparable. She had suffered beforeyes,

but lucidly, reflectively, elegiacally: now she was suffering as a hurt animal must, blindly, furiously, with the

She heard her maid knock, and she hid her face and made no answer. The knocking continued, and the

discipline of habit at length made her lift her head, compose her face and hold out her hand to the note the

woman brought her. It was a word from Darrow"May I see you?"and she said at once, in a voice that

The maid enquired if she wished to have her hair smoothed first, and she answered that it didn't matter; but

when the door had closed, the instinct of pride drew her to her feet and she looked at herself in the glass

above the mantelpiece and passed her hands over her hair. Her eyes were burning and her face looked tired

and thinner; otherwise she could see no change in her appearance, and she wondered that at such a moment

her body should seem as unrelated to the self that writhed within her as if it had been a statue or a picture.

The maid reopened the door to show in Darrow, and he paused a moment on the threshold, as if waiting for

Anna to speak. He was extremely pale, but he looked neither ashamed nor uncertain, and she said to herself,

At the direct affirmation he turned even paler, and his eyes, which he kept resolutely fixed on her, confessed

"That there's nothing more to be said?" He waited for her to answer, and then went on: "I don't even know

"Oh, I don't know what more there is! I know enough. I implored her to deny it, and she couldn't...What can

you and I have to say to each other?" Her voice broke into a sob. The animal anguish was upon her

Darrow kept his head high and his eyes steady. "It must be as you wish; and yet it's not like you to be afraid."

"All I ask is to face itbut with you." Once more he paused. "Won't you tell me what Miss Viner told you?"

"Oh, she's generousto the utmost!" The pain caught her like a physical throe. It suddenly came to her how

the girl must have loved him to be so generouswhat memories there must be between them!

"Oh, go, please go. It's too horrible. Why should I have to see you?" she stammered, lifting her hands to her

With her face hidden she waited to hear him move away, to hear the door open and close again, as, a few

hours earlier, it had opened and closed on Sophy Viner. But Darrow made no sound or movement: he too was

waiting. Anna felt a thrill of resentment: his presence was an outrage on her sorrow, a humiliation to her

"You want me to leave Givre?" he asked at length. She made no answer, and he went on: "Of course I'll do as

"but I won't," he continued, "remind you of that, or of anything or any one but Owen."

She had dropped her hands and turned her startled eyes on him. It seemed to her an age since she had thought

She interrupted: "Yes, I see" and there was a long silence between them. At length she said, very low: "I

"Owen knows I meant to leave tomorrow," Darrow went on. "Any sudden change of plan may make him

Oh, she saw his inevitable logic: the horror of it was on every side of her! It had seemed possible to control

her grief and face Darrow calmly while she was upheld by the belief that this was their last hour together, that

after he had passed out of the room there would be no fear of seeing him again, no fear that his nearness, his

look, his voice, and all the unseen influences that flowed from him, would dissolve her soul to weakness. But

her courage failed at the idea of having to conspire with him to shield Owen, of keeping up with him, for

Owen's sake, a feint of union and felicity. To live at Darrow's side in seeming intimacy and harmony for

another twentyfour hours seemed harder than to live without him for all the rest of her days. Her strength

failed her, and she threw herself down and buried her sobs in the cushions where she had so often hidden a

"Anna" His voice was close to her. "Let me talk to you quietly. It's not worthy of either of us to be

Words of endearment would have offended her; but her heart rose at the call to her courage.

"I've no defense to make," he went on. "The facts are miserable enough; but at least I want you to see them as

The name sent the blood to Anna's forehead. She raised her head and faced him. "Why should I know more

"It's because you feel about her in that way that I ask you in the name of common charityto let me give

"I've told you I don't think uncharitably of her. I don't want to think of her at all!"

"Yes. You've always said you wanted, above all, to look at life, at the human problem, as it is, without fear

and without hypocrisy; and it's not always a pleasant thing to look at." He broke off, and then began again:

"Don't think this a plea for myself! I don't want to say a word to lessen my offense. I don't want to talk of

myself at all. Even if I did, I probably couldn't make you understandI don't, myself, as I look back. Be just

"Yes: you've made it clear to me that I'm free. But there's nothing I can do for her that will help her half as

"It must have been what she expected...relied on..."He was silent, and she broke out: "Or what is she? What

are you? It's too horrible! On your way here...to ME..." She felt the tears in her throat and stopped.

"I was on my way to youafter repeated delays and postponements of your own making. At the very last

you turned me back with a mere wordand without explanation. I waited for a letter; and none came. I'm not

saying this to justify myself. I'm simply trying to make you understand. I felt hurt and bitter and bewildered. I

thought you meant to give me up. And suddenly, in my way, I found some one to be sorry for, to be of use to.

That, I swear to you, was the way it began. The rest was a moment's folly...a flash of madness...as such things

"Yes, if you measure her by conventional standardswhich is what you always declare you never do."

"Conventional standards? A girl who" She was checked by a sudden rush of almost physical

"You mean that she professes to act on the new theories? The stuff that awful women rave about on

"She had the excuse of her loneliness, her unhappinessof miseries and humiliations that a woman like you

can't even guess. She had nothing to look back to but indifference or unkindnessnothing to look forward to

but anxiety. She saw I was sorry for her and it touched her. She made too much of itshe exaggerated it. I

ought to have seen the danger, but I didn't. There's no possible excuse for what I did."

Anna listened to him in speechless misery. Every word he spoke threw back a disintegrating light on their

own past. He had come to her with an open face and a clear conscience come to her from this! If his

security was the security of falsehood it was horrible; if it meant that he had forgotten, it was worse. She

would have liked to stop her ears, to close her eyes, to shut out every sight and sound and suggestion of a

world in which such things could be; and at the same time she was tormented by the desire to know more, to

understand better, to feel herself less ignorant and inexpert in matters which made so much of the stuff of

human experience. What did he mean by "a moment's folly, a flash of madness"? How did people enter on

such adventures, how pass out of them without more visible traces of their havoc? Her imagination recoiled

from the vision of a sudden debasing familiarity: it seemed to her that her thoughts would never again be

"I swear to you," she heard Darrow saying, "it was simply that, and nothing more."

She wondered at his composure, his competence, at his knowing so exactly what to say. No doubt men often

had to make such explanations: they had the formulas by heart...A leaden lassitude descended on her. She

passed from flame and torment into a colourless cold world where everything surrounding her seemed

She became aware that Darrow was waiting for her to speak, and she made an effort to represent to herself

the meaning of what he had just said; but her mind was as blank as a blurred mirror. Finally she brought out:

"No; you don't understand," he returned with sudden bitterness; and on his lips the charge of

He answered almost harshly: "Don't be afraid...you never will..." and for an instant they faced each other like

He paused, as if conscious of the futility of going on with whatever he had meant to say, and again, for a

short space, they confronted each other, no longer as enemiesso it seemed to herbut as beings of

different language who had forgotten the few words they had learned of each other's speech.

Darrow broke the silence. "It's best, on all accounts, that I should stay till tomorrow; but I needn't intrude on

you; we needn't meet again alone. I only want to be sure I know your wishes." He spoke the short sentences

in a level voice, as though he were summing up the results of a business conference.

"It's not likely they will. What I meant was, that it depends on you to spare him..."

She answered steadily: "He shall never know," and after another interval Darrow said: "This is goodbye,

At the word she seemed to understand for the first time whither the flying moments had been leading them.

Resentment and indignation died down, and all her consciousness resolved itself into the mere visual sense

that he was there before her, near enough for her to lift her hand and touch him, and that in another instant the

She felt a mortal weakness, a craven impulse to cry out to him to stay, a longing to throw herself into his

arms, and take refuge there from the unendurable anguish he had caused her. Then the vision called up

another thought: "I shall never know what that girl has known..." and the recoil of pride flung her back on the

"Goodbye," she said, in dread lest he should read her face; and she stood motionless, her head high, while

Anna Leath, three days later, sat in Miss Painter's drawing room in the rue de Matignon.

Coming up precipitately that morning from the country, she had reached Paris at one o'clock and Miss

Painter's landing some ten minutes later. Miss Painter's mouldy little man servant, dissembling a napkin

under his arm, had mildly attempted to oppose her entrance; but Anna, insisting, had gone straight to the

diningroom and surprised her friend who ate as furtively as certain animalsover a strange meal of cold

mutton and lemonade. Ignoring the embarrassment she caused, she had set forth the object of her journey,

and Miss Painter, always hatted and booted for action, had immediately hastened out, leaving her to the

solitude of the bare fireless drawingroom with its eternal slipcovers and "bowed" shutters.

In this inhospitable obscurity Anna had sat alone for close upon two hours. Both obscurity and solitude were

acceptable to her, and impatient as she was to hear the result of the errand on which she had despatched her

hostess, she desired still more to be alone. During her long meditation in a whiteswathed chair before the

muffled hearth she had been able for the first time to clear a way through the darkness and confusion of her

thoughts. The way did not go far, and her attempt to trace it was as weak and spasmodic as a convalescent's

first efforts to pick up the thread of living. She seemed to herself like some one struggling to rise from a long

sickness of which it would have been so much easier to die. At Givre she had fallen into a kind of torpor, a

deadness of soul traversed by wild flashes of pain; but whether she suffered or whether she was numb, she

It was only the discoverythat very morningof Owen's unannounced departure for Paris that had caught

her out of her dream and forced her back to action. The dread of what this flight might imply, and of the

consequences that might result from it, had roused her to the sense of her responsibility, and from the

moment when she had resolved to follow her stepson, and had made her rapid preparations for pursuit, her

mind had begun to work again, feverishly, fitfully, but still with something of its normal order. In the train

she had been too agitated, too preoccupied with what might next await her, to give her thoughts to anything

but the turning over of dread alternatives; but Miss Painter's imperviousness had steadied her, and while she

With respect to her outward course she could at least tell herself that she had held to her purpose. She had, as

people said, "kept up" during the twentyfour hours preceding George Darrow's departure; had gone with a

calm face about her usual business, and even contrived not too obviously to avoid him. Then, the next day

before dawn, from behind the closed shutters where she had kept for half the night her dryeyed vigil, she

had heard him drive off to the train which brought its passengers to Paris in time for the Calais express.

The fact of his taking that train, of his travelling so straight and far away from her, gave to what had

happened the implacable outline of reality. He was gone; he would not come back; and her life had ended just

as she had dreamed it was beginning. She had no doubt, at first, as to the absolute inevitability of this

conclusion. The man who had driven away from her house in the autumn dawn was not the man she had

loved; he was a stranger with whom she had not a single thought in common. It was terrible, indeed, that he

wore the face and spoke in the voice of her friend, and that, as long as he was under one roof with her, the

mere way in which he moved and looked could bridge at a stroke the gulf between them. That, no doubt, was

the fault of her exaggerated sensibility to outward things: she was frightened to see how it enslaved her. A

day or two before she had supposed the sense of honour was her deepest sentiment: if she had smiled at the

conventions of others it was because they were too trivial, not because they were too grave. There were

certain dishonours with which she had never dreamed that any pact could be made: she had had an

She had supposed that, once Darrow was gone, once she was safe from the danger of seeing and hearing him,

this high devotion would sustain her. She had believed it would be possible to separate the image of the man

she had thought him from that of the man he was. She had even foreseen the hour when she might raise a

mournful shrine to the memory of the Darrow she had loved, without fear that his double's shadow would

desecrate it. But now she had begun to understand that the two men were really one. The Darrow she

worshipped was inseparable from the Darrow she abhorred; and the inevitable conclusion was that both must

But if the future was thus void, the present was all too full. Never had blow more complex repercussions; and

to remember Owen was to cease to think of herself. What impulse, what apprehension, had sent him suddenly

to Paris? And why had he thought it needful to conceal his going from her? When Sophy Viner had left, it

had been with the understanding that he was to await her summons; and it seemed improbable that he would

break his pledge, and seek her without leave, unless his lover's intuition had warned him of some fresh

danger. Anna recalled how quickly he had read the alarm in her face when he had rushed back to her

sittingroom with the news that Miss Viner had promised to see him again in Paris. To be so promptly

roused, his suspicions must have been but halfasleep; and since then, no doubt, if she and Darrow had

dissembled, so had he. To her proud directness it was degrading to think that they had been living together

like enemies who spy upon each other's movements: she felt a desperate longing for the days which had

seemed so dull and narrow, but in which she had walked with her head high and her eyes unguarded.

She had come up to Paris hardly knowing what peril she feared, and still less how she could avert it. If Owen

meant to see Miss Vinerand what other object could he have?they must already be together, and it was

too late to interfere. It had indeed occurred to Anna that Paris might not be his objective point: that his real

purpose in leaving Givre without her knowledge had been to follow Darrow to London and exact the truth of

him. But even to her alarmed imagination this seemed improbable. She and Darrow, to the last, had kept up

so complete a feint of harmony that, whatever Owen had surmised, he could scarcely have risked acting on

his suspicions. If he still felt the need of an explanation, it was almost certainly of Sophy Viner that he would

ask it; and it was in quest of Sophy Viner that Anna had despatched Miss Painter.

She had found a blessed refuge from her perplexities in the stolid Adelaide's unawareness. One could so

absolutely count on Miss Painter's guessing no more than one chose, and yet acting astutely on such hints as

one vouchsafed her! She was like a welltrained retriever whose interest in his prey ceases when he lays it at

his master's feet. Anna, on arriving, had explained that Owen's unannounced flight had made her fear some

fresh misunderstanding between himself and Miss Viner. In the interests of peace she had thought it best to

follow him; but she hastily added that she did not wish to see Sophy, but only, if possible, to learn from her

where Owen was. With these brief instructions Miss Painter had started out; but she was a woman of many

occupations, and had given her visitor to understand that before returning she should have to call on a friend

who had just arrived from Boston, and afterward despatch to another exiled compatriot a supply of

cranberries and brandied peaches from the American grocery in the Champs Elysees.

Gradually, as the moments passed, Anna began to feel the reaction which, in moments of extreme nervous

tension, follows on any effort of the will. She seemed to have gone as far as her courage would carry her, and

she shrank more and more from the thought of Miss Painter's return, since whatever information the latter

brought would necessitate some fresh decision. What should she say to Owen if she found him? What could

she say that should not betray the one thing she would give her life to hide from him? "Give her life"how

the phrase derided her! It was a gift she would not have bestowed on her worst enemy. She would not have

had Sophy Viner live the hours she was living now... She tried again to look steadily and calmly at the picture

that the image of the girl evoked. She had an idea that she ought to accustom herself to its contemplation. If

life was like that, why the sooner one got used to it the better...But no! Life was not like that. Her adventure

was a hideous accident. She dreaded above all the temptation to generalise from her own case, to doubt the

high things she had lived by and seek a cheap solace in belittling what fate had refused her. There was such

love as she had dreamed, and she meant to go on believing in it, and cherishing the thought that she was

worthy of it. What had happened to her was grotesque and mean and miserable; but she herself was none of

these things, and never, never would she make of herself the mock that fate had made of her...

She could not, as yet, bear to think deliberately of Darrow; but she kept on repeating to herself "By and bye

that will come too." Even now she was determined not to let his image be distorted by her suffering. As soon

as she could, she would try to single out for remembrance the individual things she had liked in him before

she had loved him altogether. No "spiritual exercise" devised by the discipline of piety could have been more

torturing; but its very cruelty attracted her. She wanted to wear herself out with new pains...

The sound of Miss Painter's latchkey made her start. She was still a bundle of quivering fears to whom each

There was a slight interval, and a sound of voices in the hall; then Miss Painter's vigorous hand was on the

"She drove back with me," Miss Painter continued in the tone of impartial narrative. "The cabman was

"Oh, I can't" broke from Anna; but she collected herself, remembering that to betray her unwillingness to

"She thought you might be too tired to see her: she wouldn't come in till I'd found out."

Anna drew a quick breath. An instant's thought had told her that Sophy Viner would hardly have taken such a

step unless something more important had happened. "Ask her to come, please," she said.

Miss Painter, from the threshold, turned back to announce her intention of going immediately to the police

station to report the cabman's delinquency; then she passed out, and Sophy Viner entered.

The look in the girl's face showed that she had indeed come unwillingly; yet she seemed animated by an

eager resoluteness that made Anna ashamed of her tremors. For a moment they looked at each other in

silence, as if the thoughts between them were packed too thick for speech; then Anna said, in a voice from

which she strove to take the edge of hardness: "You know where Owen is, Miss Painter tells me."

"Yes; that was my reason for asking you to see me." Sophy spoke simply, without constraint or hesitation.

"Thank you." Anna went on tentatively: "He left Givre this morning without a word. I followed him because I

She broke off again and the girl took up her phrase. "You were afraid he'd guessed? He HAS..."

"That you know something he doesn't...something that made you glad to have me go."

"Oh" Anna moaned. If she had wanted more pain she had it now. "He's told you this?" she faltered.

"He hasn't told me, because I haven't seen him. I kept him offI made Mrs. Farlow get rid of him. But he's

"Oh, poor Owen!" broke from Anna. Through all the intricacies of her suffering she felt the separate pang of

"And I want to ask you," the girl continued, "to let me see him; for of course," she added in the same strange

"To see him?" Anna tried to gather together her startled thoughts. "What use would it be? What could you tell

The two women looked at each other, and a burning blush rose to Anna's forehead. "I don't understand," she

Sophy waited a moment; then she lowered her voice to say: "I don't want him to think worse of me than he

"Yesto think such things as you're thinking now...I want him to know exactly what happened...then I want

Anna tried to clear a way through her own wonder and confusion. She felt herself obscurely moved.

At the sound of the name Anna lifted her head quickly. "I've only my stepson to consider!"

The girl threw a startled look at her. "You don't mean you're not going to give him up?"

"Oh, I know! It's my fault for not knowing how to say what I want you to hear. Your words are different; you

know how to choose them. Mine offend you...and the dread of it makes me blunder. That's why, the other

day, I couldn't say anything...couldn't make things clear to you. But now MUST, even if you hate it!" She

drew a step nearer, her slender figure swayed forward in a passion of entreaty. "Do listen to me! What you've

said is dreadful. How can you speak of him in that voice? Don't you see that I went away so that he shouldn't

Anna looked at her coldly. "Are you speaking of Mr. Darrow? I don't know why you think your going or

"You mean that you HAVE given him upbecause of me? Oh, how could you? You can't really love

him!And yet," the girl suddenly added, "you must, or you'd be more sorry for me!"

"I'm very sorry for you," Anna said, feeling as if the iron band about her heart pressed on it a little less

"Then why won't you hear me? Why won't you try to understand? It's all so different from what you

Sophy Viner seemed not to hear her. "He's never loved any one else. Even those few days...I knew it all the

"I know it must seem strange to you that I should say so much. I shock you, I offend you: you think me a

creature without shame. So I ambut not in the sense you think! I'm not ashamed of having loved him; no;

and I'm not ashamed of telling you so. It's that that justifies meand him too...Oh, let me tell you how it

happened! He was sorry for me: he saw I cared. I KNEW that was all he ever felt. I could see he was thinking

of some one else. I knew it was only for a week...He never said a word to mislead me...I wanted to be happy

Anna could not speak. She hardly knew, as yet, what the girl's words conveyed to her, save the sense of their

tragic fervour; but she was conscious of being in the presence of an intenser passion than she had ever felt.

"I am sorry for you." She paused. "But why do you say this to me?" After another interval she exclaimed:

"No; that was wrong. At least what's happened since has made it so. If things had been different I think I

could have made Owen happy. You were all so good to meI wanted so to stay with you! I suppose you'll

say that makes it worse: my daring to dream I had the right...But all that doesn't matter now. I won't see

Owen unless you're willing. I should have liked to tell him what I've tried to tell you; but you must know

better; you feel things in a finer way. Only you'll have to help him if I can't. He cares a great deal...it's going

"You can go straight back to Givrenow, at once! So that Owen shall never know you've followed him."

Sophy's clasped hands reached out urgently. "And you can send for Mr. Darrowbring him back. Owen

must be convinced that he's mistaken, and nothing else will convince him. Afterward I'll find a pretextoh, I

Anna stood motionless, subdued and dominated. The girl's ardour swept her like a wind.

"Oh, can't I move you? Some day you'll know!" Sophy pleaded, her eyes full of tears.

Anna saw them, and felt a fullness in her throat. Again the band about her heart seemed loosened. She wanted

to find a word, but could not: all within her was too dark and violent. She gave the girl a speechless look.

"I do believe you," she said suddenly; then she turned and walked out of the room.

She drove from Miss Painter's to her own apartment. The maidservant who had it in charge had been

apprised of her coming, and had opened one or two of the rooms, and prepared a fire in her bedroom. Anna

shut herself in, refusing the woman's ministrations. She felt cold and faint, and after she had taken off her hat

In one respect, at least, it was clear to her that she would do well to follow Sophy Viner's counsel. It had been

an act of folly to follow Owen, and her first business was to get back to Givre before him. But the only train

leaving that evening was a slow one, which did not reach Francheuil till midnight, and she knew that her

taking it would excite Madame de Chantelle's wonder and lead to interminable talk. She had come up to Paris

on the pretext of finding a new governess for Effie, and the natural thing was to defer her return till the next

morning. She knew Owen well enough to be sure that he would make another attempt to see Miss Viner, and

failing that, would write again and await her answer: so that there was no likelihood of his reaching Givre till

Her sense of relief at not having to start out at once showed her for the first time how tired she was. The

bonne had suggested a cup of tea, but the dread of having any one about her had made Anna refuse, and she

had eaten nothing since morning but a sandwich bought at a buffet. She was too tired to get up, but stretching

out her arm she drew toward her the armchair which stood beside the hearth and rested her head against its

cushions. Gradually the warmth of the fire stole into her veins and her heaviness of soul was replaced by a

dreamy buoyancy. She seemed to be seated on the hearth in her sittingroom at Givre, and Darrow was

beside her, in the chair against which she leaned. He put his arms about her shoulders and drawing her head

back looked into her eyes. "Of all the ways you do your hair, that's the way I like best," he said...

A log dropped, and she sat up with a start. There was a warmth in her heart, and she was smiling. Then she

looked about her, and saw where she was, and the glory fell. She hid her face and sobbed.

Presently she perceived that it was growing dark, and getting up stiffly she began to undo the things in her

bag and spread them on the dressingtable. She shrank from lighting the lights, and groped her way about,

trying to find what she needed. She seemed immeasurably far off from every one, and most of all from

herself. It was as if her consciousness had been transmitted to some stranger whose thoughts and gestures

Suddenly she heard a shrill tinkle, and with a beating heart she stood still in the middle of the room. It was

the telephone in her dressingrooma call, no doubt, from Adelaide Painter. Or could Owen have learned

she was in town? The thought alarmed her and she opened the door and stumbled across the unlit room to the

instrument. She held it to her ear, and heard Darrow's voice pronounce her name.

"Will you let me see you? I've come backI had to come. Miss Painter told me you were here."

She began to tremble, and feared that he would guess it from her voice. She did not know what she answered:

she heard him say: "I can't hear." She called "Yes!" and laid the telephone down, and caught it up againbut

She sat in her chair and listened. Why had she said that she would see him? What did she mean to say to him

when he came? Now and then, as she sat there, the sense of his presence enveloped her as in her dream, and

she shut her eyes and felt his arms about her. Then she woke to reality and shivered. A long time elapsed, and

The doorbell rang as she said it, and she stood up, cold and trembling. She thought: "Can he imagine there's

any use in coming?" and moved forward to bid the servant say she could not see him.

The door opened and she saw him standing in the drawing room. The room was cold and fireless, and a hard

glare fell from the walllights on the shrouded furniture and the white slips covering the curtains. He looked

pale and stern, with a frown of fatigue between his eyes; and she remembered that in three days he had

travelled from Givre to London and back. It seemed incredible that all that had befallen her should have been

He came toward her and took her in his arms. She struggled a little, afraid of yielding, but he pressed her to

him, not bending to her but holding her fast, as though he had found her after a long search: she heard his

hurried breathing. It seemed to come from her own breast, so close he held her; and it was she who, at last,

She freed herself and went and sat on a sofa at the other end of the room. A mirror between the shrouded

window curtains showed her crumpled travelling dress and the white face under her disordered hair

She found her voice, and asked him how he had been able to leave London. He answered that he had

Her mind had flown back to Sophy Viner's plea that she should let Darrow return to Givre in order that Owen

might be persuaded of the folly of his suspicions. The suggestion was absurd, of course. She could not ask

Darrow to lend himself to such a fraud, even had she had the inhuman courage to play her part in it. She was

suddenly overwhelmed by the futility of every attempt to reconstruct her ruined world. No, it was useless;

"I've come to talk of myself, not of Owen," she heard him saying. "When you sent me away the other day I

understood that it couldn't be otherwisethen. But it's not possible that you and I should part like that. If I'm

"Yes: a deeper one. One that means a fundamental disaccord between us. This one doesn'tin spite of

everything it doesn't. That's what I want you to see, and have the courage to acknowledge."

"But I don't see it," she continued sadly. "So it's useless, isn't it?and so cruel..." He was about to speak, but

"On my part, you mean?" He faced her resolutely. "Yes, it was: to my shame...What I meant was that when

you've lived a little longer you'll see what complex blunderers we all are: how we're struck blind sometimes,

and mad sometimesand then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have to set to work, and

build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious things we'd smashed to atoms without knowing it. Life's just a

He stood up, interrupting her with a gesture. "Oh, don't don't say what you're going to! Men don't give

their lives away like that. If you won't have mine, it's at least my own, to do the best I can with."

"The best you canthat's what I mean! How can there be a 'best' for you that's made of some one else's

He sat down again with a groan. "I don't know! It seemed such a slight thingall on the surfaceand I've

gone aground on it because it was on the surface. I see the horror of it just as you do. But I see, a little more

clearly, the extent, and the limits, of my wrong. It's not as black as you imagine."

She lowered her voice to say: "I suppose I shall never understand; but she seems to love you..."

"There's my shame! That I didn't guess it, didn't fly from it. You say you'll never understand: but why

shouldn't you? Is it anything to be proud of, to know so little of the strings that pull us? If you knew a little

more, I could tell you how such things happen without offending you; and perhaps you'd listen without

"I don't condemn you." She was dizzy with struggling impulses. She longed to cry out: "I DO understand!

I've understood ever since you've been here!" For she was aware, in her own bosom, of sensations so separate

from her romantic thoughts of him that she saw her body and soul divided against themselves. She recalled

having read somewhere that in ancient Rome the slaves were not allowed to wear a distinctive dress lest they

should recognize each other and learn their numbers and their power. So, in herself, she discerned for the first

time instincts and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in the dim passages of her mind,

"Oh, I don't know what to think!" she broke out. "You say you didn't know she loved you. But you know it

"Can you seriously think it would be doing so to marry one woman while I care for another?"

"Oh, I don't know...I don't know..." The sense of her weakness made her try to harden herself against his

"You do know! We've often talked of such things: of the monstrousness of useless sacrifices. If I'm to

expiate, it's not in that way." He added abruptly: "It's in having to say this to you now..."

Through the silent apartment they heard the sudden peal of the doorbell, and she rose to her feet. "Owen!"

"Yes...no..." She moved to the diningroom door, with the halfformed purpose of making him pass out, and

They heard the outer door open, and a moment later Owen walked into the room. He was pale, with excited

eyes: as they fell on Darrow, Anna saw his start of wonder. He made a slight sign of recognition, and then

"You furtive person! I ran across the omniscient Adelaide and heard from her that you'd rushed up suddenly

and secretly " He stood between Anna and Darrow, strained, questioning, dangerously on edge.

"I came up to meet Mr. Darrow," Anna answered. "His leave's been prolongedhe's going back with me."

The words seemed to have uttered themselves without her will, yet she felt a great sense of freedom as she

The hard tension of Owen's face changed to incredulous surprise. He looked at Darrow. "The merest luck...a

colleague whose wife was ill...I came straight back," she heard the latter tranquilly explaining. His

"We'll all go back together tomorrow morning," she said as she slipped her arm through his.

Owen Leath did not go back with his stepmother to Givre. In reply to her suggestion he announced his

Anna left alone by the first train the next morning. Darrow was to follow in the afternoon. When Owen had

left them the evening before, Darrow waited a moment for her to speak; then, as she said nothing, he asked

her if she really wished him to return to Givre. She made a mute sign of assent, and he added: "For you know

that, much as I'm ready to do for Owen, I can't do that for himI can't go back to be sent away again."

He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him. All her fears seemed to fall from her as he held her.

It was a different feeling from any she had known before: confused and turbid, as if secret shames and

rancours stirred in it, yet richer, deeper, more enslaving. She leaned her head back and shut her eyes beneath

Nevertheless she asked him, the next morning, to let her go back alone to Givre. She wanted time to think.

She was convinced that what had happened was inevitable, that she and Darrow belonged to each other, and

that he was right in saying no past folly could ever put them asunder. If there was a shade of difference in her

feeling for him it was that of an added intensity. She felt restless, insecure out of his sight: she had a sense of

incompleteness, of passionate dependence, that was somehow at variance with her own conception of her

It was partly the consciousness of this change in herself that made her want to be alone. The solitude of her

inner life had given her the habit of these hours of self examination, and she needed them as she needed her

During the journey she tried to review what had happened in the light of her new decision and of her sudden

relief from pain. She seemed to herself to have passed through some fiery initiation from which she had

emerged seared and quivering, but clutching to her breast a magic talisman. Sophy Viner had cried out to her:

"Some day you'll know!" and Darrow had used the same words. They meant, she supposed, that when she

had explored the intricacies and darknesses of her own heart her judgment of others would be less absolute.

Well, she knew nowknew weaknesses and strengths she had not dreamed of, and the deep discord and still

Her mind turned anxiously to Owen. At least the blow that was to fall on him would not seem to have been

inflicted by her hand. He would be left with the impression that his breach with Sophy Viner was due to one

of the ordinary causes of such disruptions: though he must lose her, his memory of her would not be

poisoned. Anna never for a moment permitted herself the delusion that she had renewed her promise to

Darrow in order to spare her stepson this last refinement of misery. She knew she had been prompted by the

irresistible impulse to hold fast to what was most precious to her, and that Owen's arrival on the scene had

been the pretext for her decision, and not its cause; yet she felt herself fortified by the thought of what she

had spared him. It was as though a star she had been used to follow had shed its familiar ray on ways

All through these meditations ran the undercurrent of an absolute trust in Sophy Viner. She thought of the girl

with a mingling of antipathy and confidence. It was humiliating to her pride to recognize kindred impulses in

a character which she would have liked to feel completely alien to her. But what indeed was the girl really

like? She seemed to have no scruples and a thousand delicacies. She had given herself to Darrow, and

concealed the episode from Owen Leath, with no more apparent sense of debasement than the vulgarest of

adventuresses; yet she had instantly obeyed the voice of her heart when it bade her part from the one and

Anna tried to picture what the girl's life must have been: what experiences, what initiations, had formed her.

But her own training had been too different: there were veils she could not lift. She looked back at her

married life, and its colourless uniformity took on an air of high restraint and order. Was it because she had

been so incurious that it had worn that look to her? It struck her with amazement that she had never given a

thought to her husband's past, or wondered what he did and where he went when he was away from her. If

she had been asked what she supposed he thought about when they were apart, she would instantly have

answered: his snuffboxes. It had never occurred to her that he might have passions, interests, preoccupations

of which she was absolutely ignorant. Yet he went up to Paris rather regularly: ostensibly to attend sales and

exhibitions, or to confer with dealers and collectors. She tried to picture him, straight, trim, beautifully

brushed and varnished, walking furtively down a quiet street, and looking about him before he slipped into a

doorway. She understood now that she had been cold to him: what more likely than that he had sought

compensations? All men were like that, she supposedno doubt her simplicity had amused him.

In the act of transposing Fraser Leath into a Don Juan she was pulled up by the ironic perception that she was

simply trying to justify Darrow. She wanted to think that all men were "like that" because Darrow was "like

that": she wanted to justify her acceptance of the fact by persuading herself that only through such

concessions could women like herself hope to keep what they could not give up. And suddenly she was filled

with anger at her blindness, and then at her disastrous attempt to see. Why had she forced the truth out of

Darrow? If only she had held her tongue nothing need ever have been known. Sophy Viner would have

broken her engagement, Owen would have been sent around the world, and her own dream would have been

unshattered. But she had probed, insisted, crossexamined, not rested till she had dragged the secret to the

light. She was one of the luckless women who always have the wrong audacities, and who always know it...

Was it she, Anna Leath, who was picturing herself to herself in that way? She recoiled from her thoughts as if

with a sense of demoniac possession, and there flashed through her the longing to return to her old state of

fearless ignorance. If at that moment she could have kept Darrow from following her to Givre she would have

But he came; and with the sight of him the turmoil fell and she felt herself reassured, rehabilitated. He arrived

toward dusk, and she motored to Francheuil to meet him. She wanted to see him as soon as possible, for she

had divined, through the new insight that was in her, that only his presence could restore her to a normal view

of things. In the motor, as they left the town and turned into the high road, he lifted her hand and kissed it,

and she leaned against him, and felt the currents flow between them. She was grateful to him for not saying

anything, and for not expecting her to speak. She said to herself: "He never makes a mistakehe always

knows what to do"; and then she thought with a start that it was doubtless because he had so often been in

such situations. The idea that his tact was a kind of professional expertness filled her with repugnance, and

insensibly she drew away from him. He made no motion to bring her nearer, and she instantly thought that

that was calculated too. She sat beside him in frozen misery, wondering whether, henceforth, she would

measure in this way his every look and gesture. Neither of them spoke again till the motor turned under the

dark arch of the avenue, and they saw the lights of Givre twinkling at its end. Then Darrow laid his hand on

hers and said: "I know, dear" and the hardness in her melted. "He's suffering as I am," she thought; and for

a moment the baleful fact between them seemed to draw them closer instead of walling them up in their

It was wonderful to be once more reentering the doors of Givre with him, and as the old house received

them into its mellow silence she had again the sense of passing out of a dreadful dream into the reassurance

of kindly and familiar things. It did not seem possible that these quiet rooms, so full of the slowlydistilled

accumulations of a fastidious taste, should have been the scene of tragic dissensions. The memory of them

At the teatable in the oakroom they found Madame de Chantelle and Effie. The little girl, catching sight of

Darrow, raced down the drawingrooms to meet him, and returned in triumph on his shoulder. Anna looked

at them with a smile. Effie, for all her graces, was chary of such favours, and her mother knew that in

according them to Darrow she had admitted him to the circle where Owen had hitherto ruled.

Over the teatable Darrow gave Madame de Chantelle the explanation of his sudden return from England. On

reaching London, he told her, he had found that the secretary he was to have replaced was detained there by

the illness of his wife. The Ambassador, knowing Darrow's urgent reasons for wishing to be in France, had

immediately proposed his going back, and awaiting at Givre the summons to relieve his colleague; and he

had jumped into the first train, without even waiting to telegraph the news of his release. He spoke naturally,

easily, in his usual quiet voice, taking his tea from Effie, helping himself to the toast she handed, and

stooping now and then to stroke the dozing terrier. And suddenly, as Anna listened to his explanation, she

The question, of course, was absurd. There was no possible reason why he should invent a false account of

his return, and every probability that the version he gave was the real one. But he had looked and spoken in

the same way when he had answered her probing questions about Sophy Viner, and she reflected with a chill

of fear that she would never again know if he were speaking the truth or not. She was sure he loved her, and

she did not fear his insincerity as much as her own distrust of him. For a moment it seemed to her that this

must corrupt the very source of love; then she said to herself: "By and bye, when I am altogether his, we shall

be so near each other that there will be no room for any doubts between us." But the doubts were there now,

one moment lulled to quiescence, the next more torturingly alert. When the nurse appeared to summon Effie,

the little girl, after kissing her grandmother, entrenched herself on Darrow's knee with the imperious demand

to be carried up to bed; and Anna, while she laughingly protested, said to herself with a pang: "Can I give her

The thought of Effie, and of what she owed to Effie, had been the fundamental reason for her delays and

hesitations when she and Darrow had come together again in England. Her own feeling was so clear that but

for that scruple she would have put her hand in his at once. But till she had seen him again she had never

considered the possibility of re marriage, and when it suddenly confronted her it seemed, for the moment, to

disorganize the life she had planned for herself and her child. She had not spoken of this to Darrow because it

appeared to her a subject to be debated within her own conscience. The question, then, was not as to his

fitness to become the guide and guardian of her child; nor did she fear that her love for him would deprive

Effie of the least fraction of her tenderness, since she did not think of love as something measured and

exhaustible but as a treasure perpetually renewed. What she questioned was her right to introduce into her life

any interests and duties which might rob Effie of a part of her time, or lessen the closeness of their daily

She had decided this question as it was inevitable that she should; but now another was before her. Assuredly,

at her age, there was no possible reason why she should cloister herself to bring up her daughter; but there

was every reason for not marrying a man in whom her own faith was not complete...

When she woke the next morning she felt a great lightness of heart. She recalled her last awakening at Givre,

three days before, when it had seemed as though all her life had gone down in darkness. Now Darrow was

once more under the same roof with her, and once more his nearness sufficed to make the looming horror

drop away. She could almost have smiled at her scruples of the night before: as she looked back on them they

seemed to belong to the old ignorant timorous time when she had feared to look life in the face, and had been

blind to the mysteries and contradictions of the human heart because her own had not been revealed to her.

Darrow had said: "You were made to feel everything"; and to feel was surely better than to judge.

When she came downstairs he was already in the oakroom with Effie and Madame de Chantelle, and the

sense of reassurance which his presence gave her was merged in the relief of not being able to speak of what

was between them. But there it was, inevitably, and whenever they looked at each other they saw it. In her

dread of giving it a more tangible shape she tried to devise means of keeping the little girl with her, and,

when the latter had been called away by the nurse, found an excuse for following Madame de Chantelle

upstairs to the purple sittingroom. But a confidential talk with Madame de Chantelle implied the detailed

discussion of plans of which Anna could hardly yet bear to consider the vaguest outline: the date of her

marriage, the relative advantages of sailing from London or Lisbon, the possibility of hiring a habitable house

at their new post; and, when these problems were exhausted, the application of the same method to the

His grandmother, having no suspicion of the real reason of Sophy Viner's departure, had thought it

"extremely suitable" of the young girl to withdraw to the shelter of her old friends' roof in the hour of bridal

preparation. This maidenly retreat had in fact impressed Madame de Chantelle so favourably that she was

disposed for the first time to talk over Owen's projects; and as every human event translated itself for her into

terms of social and domestic detail, Anna had perforce to travel the same round again. She felt a momentary

relief when Darrow presently joined them; but his coming served only to draw the conversation back to the

question of their own future, and Anna felt a new pang as she heard him calmly and lucidly discussing it. Did

such selfpossession imply indifference or insincerity? In that problem her mind perpetually revolved; and

She was resolved to keep on her course as though nothing had happened: to marry Darrow and never let the

consciousness of the past intrude itself between them; but she was beginning to feel that the only way of

attaining to this state of detachment from the irreparable was once for all to turn back with him to its

contemplation. As soon as this desire had germinated it became so strong in her that she regretted having

promised Effie to take her out for the afternoon. But she could think of no pretext for disappointing the little

girl, and soon after luncheon the three set forth in the motor to show Darrow a chateau famous in the annals

of the region. During their excursion Anna found it impossible to guess from his demeanour if Effie's

presence between them was as much of a strain to his composure as to hers. He remained imperturbably

goodhumoured and appreciative while they went the round of the monument, and she remarked only that

when he thought himself unnoticed his face grew grave and his answers came less promptly.

On the way back, two or three miles from Givre, she suddenly proposed that they should walk home through

the forest which skirted that side of the park. Darrow acquiesced, and they got out and sent Effie on in the

motor. Their way led through a bit of sober French woodland, flat as a faded tapestry, but with gleams of live

emerald lingering here and there among its browns and ochres. The luminous grey air gave vividness to its

dying colours, and veiled the distant glimpses of the landscape in soft uncertainty. In such a solitude Anna

had fancied it would be easier to speak; but as she walked beside Darrow over the deep soundless flooring of

brown moss the words on her lips took flight again. It seemed impossible to break the spell of quiet joy which

his presence laid on her, and when he began to talk of the place they had just visited she answered his

questions and then waited for what he should say next...No, decidedly she could not speak; she no longer

The same experience repeated itself several times that day and the next. When she and Darrow were apart she

exhausted herself in appeal and interrogation, she formulated with a fervent lucidity every point in her

imaginary argument. But as soon as she was alone with him something deeper than reason and subtler than

shyness laid its benumbing touch upon her, and the desire to speak became merely a dim disquietude, through

which his looks, his words, his touch, reached her as through a mist of bodily pain. Yet this inertia was torn

by wild flashes of resistance, and when they were apart she began to prepare again what she meant to say to

She knew he could not be with her without being aware of this inner turmoil, and she hoped he would break

the spell by some releasing word. But she presently understood that he recognized the futility of words, and

was resolutely bent on holding her to her own purpose of behaving as if nothing had happened. Once more

she inwardly accused him of insensibility, and her imagination was beset by tormenting visions of his

past...Had such things happened to him before? If the episode had been an isolated accident"a moment of

folly and madness", as he had called itshe could understand, or at least begin to understand (for at a certain

point her imagination always turned back); but if it were a mere link in a chain of similar experiments, the

Effie, in the interregnum between governesses, had been given leave to dine downstairs; and Anna, on the

evening of Darrow's return, kept the little girl with her till long after the nurse had signalled from the

drawingroom door. When at length she had been carried off, Anna proposed a game of cards, and after this

diversion had drawn to its languid close she said goodnight to Darrow and followed Madame de Chantelle

upstairs. But Madame de Chantelle never sat up late, and the second evening, with the amiably implied

intention of leaving Anna and Darrow to themselves, she took an earlier leave of them than usual.

Anna sat silent, listening to her small stiff steps as they minced down the hall and died out in the distance.

Madame de Chantelle had broken her wooden embroidery frame, and Darrow, having offered to repair it, had

drawn his chair up to a table that held a lamp. Anna watched him as he sat with bent head and knitted brows,

trying to fit together the disjoined pieces. The sight of him, so tranquilly absorbed in this trifling business,

seemed to give to the quiet room a perfume of intimacy, to fill it with a sense of sweet familiar habit; and it

came over her again that she knew nothing of the inner thoughts of this man who was sitting by her as a

husband might. The lamplight fell on his white forehead, on the healthy brown of his cheek, the backs of his

thin sunburnt hands. As she watched the hands her sense of them became as vivid as a touch, and she said to

herself: "That other woman has sat and watched him as I am doing. She has known him as I have never

known him...Perhaps he is thinking of that now. Or perhaps he has forgotten it all as completely as I have

He looked young, active, stored with strength and energy; not the man for vain repinings or long memories.

She wondered what she had to hold or satisfy him. He loved her now; she had no doubt of that; but how

could she hope to keep him? They were so nearly of an age that already she felt herself his senior. As yet the

difference was not visible; outwardly at least they were matched; but ill health or unhappiness would soon

do away with this equality. She thought with a pang of bitterness: "He won't grow any older because he

And when she ceased to please him, what then? Had he the tradition of faith to the spoken vow, or the deeper

piety of the unspoken dedication? What was his theory, what his inner conviction in such matters? But what

did she care for his convictions or his theories? No doubt he loved her now, and believed he would always go

on loving her, and was persuaded that, if he ceased to, his loyalty would be proof against the change. What

she wanted to know was not what he thought about it in advance, but what would impel or restrain him at the

crucial hour. She put no faith in her own arts: she was too sure of having none! And if some beneficent

enchanter had bestowed them on her, she knew now that she would have rejected the gift. She could hardly

conceive of wanting the kind of love that was a state one could be cozened into...

Darrow, putting away the frame, walked across the room and sat down beside her; and she felt he had

She made no answer, and he continued: "You'll tell me before I go what day I'm to come back and get you?"

It was the first time since his return to Givre that he had made any direct allusion to the date of their

marriage; and instead of answering him she broke out: "There's something I've been wanting you to know.

"No; she heard from Adelaide that I was in Paris and she came. She came because she wanted to urge me to

Darrow stood up. "I'm glad you've told me." He spoke with a visible effort at composure. Her eyes followed

"It's what she'd already asked me." His voice showed her how deeply he was moved, and a throb of jealousy

"Oh, it was for your sake, I know!" He made no answer, and she added: "She's been exceedingly

She had lowered her head, but through her dropped lids she seemed to be watching the crowded scene of his

"Speaking of her, then, I mean. It seems to me that if I could talk to you about her I should know better"

She broke off, confused, and he questioned: "What is it you want to know better?"

The colour rose to her forehead. How could she tell him what she scarcely dared own to herself? There was

nothing she did not want to know, no fold or cranny of his secret that her awakened imagination did not strain

to penetrate; but she could not expose Sophy Viner to the base fingerings of a retrospective jealousy, nor

Darrow to the temptation of belittling her in the effort to better his own case. The girl had been magnificent,

and the only worthy return that Anna could make was to take Darrow from her without a question if she took

She lifted her eyes to his face. "I think I only wanted to speak her name. It's not right that we should seem so

afraid of it. If I were really afraid of it I should have to give you up," she said.

He bent over her and caught her to him. "Ah, you can't give me up now!" he exclaimed.

She suffered him to hold her fast without speaking; but the old dread was between them again, and it was on

The next morning the dread was still there, and she understood that she must snatch herself out of the torpor

of the will into which she had been gradually sinking, and tell Darrow that she could not be his wife.

The knowledge came to her in the watches of a sleepless night, when, through the tears of disenchanted

passion, she stared back upon her past. There it lay before her, her sole romance, in all its paltry poverty, the

cheapest of cheap adventures, the most pitiful of sentimental blunders. She looked about her room, the room

where, for so many years, if her heart had been quiescent her thoughts had been alive, and pictured herself

henceforth cowering before a throng of mean suspicions, of unavowed compromises and concessions. In that

moment of selfsearching she saw that Sophy Viner had chosen the better part, and that certain renunciations

Passionate reactions of instinct fought against these efforts of her will. Why should past or future coerce her,

when the present was so securely hers? Why insanely surrender what the other would after all never have?

Her sense of irony whispered that if she sent away Darrow it would not be to Sophy Viner, but to the first

woman who crossed his pathas, in a similar hour, Sophy Viner herself had crossed it...But the mere fact

that she could think such things of him sent her shuddering back to the opposite pole. She pictured herself

gradually subdued to such a conception of life and love, she pictured Effie growing up under the influence of

the woman she saw herself becomingand she hid her eyes from the humiliation of the picture...

They were at luncheon when the summons that Darrow expected was brought to him. He handed the telegram

to Anna, and she learned that his Ambassador, on the way to a German cure, was to be in Paris the next

evening and wished to confer with him there before he went back to London. The idea that the decisive

moment was at hand was so agitating to her that when luncheon was over she slipped away to the terrace and

thence went down alone to the garden. The day was grey but mild, with the heaviness of decay in the air. She

rambled on aimlessly, following under the denuded boughs the path she and Darrow had taken on their first

walk to the river. She was sure he would not try to overtake her: sure he would guess why she wished to be

alone. There were moments when it seemed to double her loneliness to be so certain of his reading her heart

She wandered on for more than an hour, and when she returned to the house she saw, as she entered the hall,

that Darrow was seated at the desk in Owen's study. He heard her step, and looking up turned in his chair

without rising. Their eyes met, and she saw that his were clear and smiling. He had a heap of papers at his

elbow and was evidently engaged in some official correspondence. She wondered that he could address

himself so composedly to his task, and then ironically reflected that such detachment was a sign of his

superiority. She crossed the threshold and went toward him; but as she advanced she had a sudden vision of

Owen, standing outside in the cold autumn dusk and watching Darrow and Sophy Viner as they faced each

other across the lamplit desk...The evocation was so vivid that it caught her breath like a blow, and she sank

down helplessly on the divan among the piledup books. Distinctly, at the moment, she understood that the

Darrow, laying aside his pen, looked at her for a moment in silence; then he stood up and shut the door.

"I must go tomorrow early," he said, sitting down beside her. His voice was grave, with a slight tinge of

sadness. She said to herself: "He knows what I am feeling..." and now the thought made her feel less alone.

The expression of his face was stern and yet tender: for the first time she understood what he had suffered.

She had no doubt as to the necessity of giving him up, but it was impossible to tell him so then. She stood up

and said: "I'll leave you to your letters." He made no protest, but merely answered: "You'll come down

presently for a walk?" and it occurred to her at once that she would walk down to the river with him, and give

herself for the last time the tragic luxury of sitting at his side in the little pavilion. "Perhaps," she thought, "it

It did not, on the way home from their walk, become any easier to tell him; but her secret decision to do so

before he left gave her a kind of factitious calm and laid a melancholy ecstasy upon the hour. Still skirting the

subject that fanned their very faces with its flame, they clung persistently to other topics, and it seemed to

Anna that their minds had never been nearer together than in this hour when their hearts were so separate. In

the glow of interchanged love she had grown less conscious of that other glow of interchanged thought which

had once illumined her mind. She had forgotten how Darrow had widened her world and lengthened out all

her perspectives, and with a pang of double destitution she saw herself alone among her shrunken thoughts.

For the first time, then, she had a clear vision of what her life would be without him. She imagined herself

trying to take up the daily round, and all that had lightened and animated it seemed equally lifeless and vain.

She tried to think of herself as wholly absorbed in her daughter's development, like other mothers she had

seen; but she supposed those mothers must have had stored memories of happiness to nourish them. She had

When she went up to dress for dinner she said to herself: "I'll have my last evening with him, and then, before

This postponement did not seem unjustified. Darrow had shown her how he dreaded vain words, how

resolved he was to avoid all fruitless discussion. He must have been intensely aware of what had been going

on in her mind since his return, yet when she had attempted to reveal it to him he had turned from the

revelation. She was therefore merely following the line he had traced in behaving, till the final moment came,

That moment seemed at last to be at hand when, at her usual hour after dinner, Madame de Chantelle rose to

go upstairs. She lingered a little to bid goodbye to Darrow, whom she was not likely to see in the morning;

and her affable allusions to his prompt return sounded in Anna's ear like the note of destiny.

A cold rain had fallen all day, and for greater warmth and intimacy they had gone after dinner to the

oakroom, shutting out the chilly vista of the farther drawingrooms. The autumn wind, coming up from the

river, cried about the house with a voice of loss and separation; and Anna and Darrow sat silent, as if they

feared to break the hush that shut them in. The solitude, the firelight, the harmony of soft hangings and old

dim pictures, wove about them a spell of security through which Anna felt, far down in her heart, the muffled

beat of an inextinguishable bliss. How could she have thought that this last moment would be the moment to

speak to him, when it seemed to have gathered up into its flight all the scattered splendours of her dream?

Darrow continued to stand by the door after it had closed. Anna felt that he was looking at her, and sat still,

disdaining to seek refuge in any evasive word or movement. For the last time she wanted to let him take from

He crossed over and sat down on the sofa. For a moment neither of them spoke; then he said: "Tonight,

She straightened herself under the shock of his seeming to take the very words from her lips.

"I must be off by the early train. There won't be more than a moment in the morning."

He had taken her hand, and she said to herself that she must free it before she could go on with what she had

to say. Then she rejected this concession to a weakness she was resolved to defy. To the end she would leave

her hand in his hand, her eyes in his eyes: she would not, in their final hour together, be afraid of any part of

"You'll tell me tonight, dear," he insisted gently; and his insistence gave her the strength to speak.

"There's something I must ask you," she broke out, perceiving, as she heard her words, that they were not in

He sat still, waiting, and she pressed on: "Do such things happen to men often?"

The quiet room seemed to resound with the long reverberations of her question. She looked away from him,

She turned her eyes back to his face. She felt like a traveller on a giddy path between a cliff and a precipice:

She stopped. The room had grown profoundly still. A log dropped to the hearth and broke there in a hissing

She had the answer to her inmost doubtto her last shameful unavowed hope. She sat powerless under her

He walked to the fireplace and pushed back the broken log with his foot. A flame shot out of it, and in the

She made a slight sign with her head and he came slowly back to her. "Then is this to be goodbye?"

Again she signed a faint assent, and he made no effort to touch her or draw nearer. "You understand that I

He was looking at her, and she tried to return his look, but her eyes were blind with tears, and in dread of his

seeing them she got up and walked away. He did not follow her, and she stood with her back to him, staring

at a bowl of carnations on a little table strewn with books. Her tears magnified everything she looked at, and

the streaked petals of the carnations, their fringed edges and frail curled stamens, pressed upon her, huge and

vivid. She noticed among the books a volume of verse he had sent her from England, and tried to remember

She felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and at last she turned to him. "I shall see you tomorrow before

She moved toward the door and he held it open for her. She saw his hand on the door, and his seal ring in its

They walked down the drawingrooms, between the shadowy reflections of screens and cabinets, and

mounted the stairs side by side. At the end of the gallery, a lamp brought out turbid gleams in the smoky

On the landing Darrow stopped; his room was the nearest to the stairs. "Good night," he said, holding out his

As Anna gave him hers the springs of grief broke loose in her. She struggled with her sobs, and subdued

them; but her breath came unevenly, and to hide her agitation she leaned on him and pressed her face against

Her troubled breathing sounded loudly in the silence of the sleeping house. She pressed her lips tight, but

could not stop the nervous pulsations in her throat, and he put an arm about her and, opening his door, drew

her across the threshold of his room. The door shut behind her and she sat down on the lounge at the foot of

the bed. The pulsations in her throat had ceased, but she knew they would begin again if she tried to speak.

Darrow walked away and leaned against the mantelpiece. The redveiled lamp shone on his books and

papers, on the arm chair by the fire, and the scattered objects on his dressingtable. A log glimmered on the

hearth, and the room was warm and faintly smokescented. It was the first time she had ever been in a room

he lived in, among his personal possessions and the traces of his daily usage. Every object about her seemed

to contain a particle of himself: the whole air breathed of him, steeping her in the sense of his intimate

Suddenly she thought: "This is what Sophy Viner knew"...and with a torturing precision she pictured them

alone in such a scene...Had he taken the girl to an hotel...where did people go in such cases? Wherever they

were, the silence of night had been around them, and the things he used had been strewn about the

room...Anna, ashamed of dwelling on the detested vision, stood up with a confused impulse of flight; then a

Darrow had come forward as she rose, and she perceived that he was waiting for her to bid him good night. It

was clear that no other possibility had even brushed his mind; and the fact, for some dim reason, humiliated

her. "Why not...why not?" something whispered in her, as though his forbearance, his tacit recognition of her

She continued to stand in the same place, looking vaguely about the room. For once before they

partedsince part they mustshe longed to be to him all that Sophy Viner had been; but she remained

rooted to the floor, unable to find a word or imagine a gesture that should express her meaning. Exasperated

Her eye fell on a notecase she had given him. It was worn at the corners with the friction of his pocket and

distended with thickly packed papers. She wondered if he carried her letters in it, and she put her hand out

All that he and she had ever felt or seen, their close encounters of word and look, and the closer contact of

their silences, trembled through her at the touch. She remembered things he had said that had been like new

skies above her head: ways he had that seemed a part of the air she breathed. The faint warmth of her girlish

love came back to her, gathering heat as it passed through her thoughts; and her heart rocked like a boat on

the surge of its long long memories. "It's because I love him in too many ways," she thought; and slowly she

She was aware that Darrow was still silently watching her, but he neither stirred nor spoke till she had

"Not tonightdon't tell me tonight!" he whispered; and she leaned away from him, closing her eyes for an

Anna, when they entered it, had put herself in the farthest corner and placed her bag on the adjoining seat.

She had decided suddenly to accompany Darrow to Paris, had even persuaded him to wait for a later train in

order that they might travel together. She had an intense longing to be with him, an almost morbid terror of

losing sight of him for a moment: when he jumped out of the train and ran back along the platform to buy a

newspaper for her she felt as though she should never see him again, and shivered with the cold misery of her

last journey to Paris, when she had thought herself parted from him forever. Yet she wanted to keep him at a

distance, on the other side of the compartment, and as the train moved out of the station she drew from her

bag the letters she had thrust in it as she left the house, and began to glance over them so that her lowered lids

She was his now, his for life: there could never again be any question of sacrificing herself to Effie's welfare,

or to any other abstract conception of duty. Effie of course would not suffer; Anna would pay for her bliss as

a wife by redoubled devotion as a mother. Her scruples were not overcome; but for the time their voices were

As she opened her letters she was conscious that Darrow's gaze was fixed on her, and gradually it drew her

eyes upward, and she drank deep of the passionate tenderness in his. Then the blood rose to her face and she

felt again the desire to shield herself. She turned back to her letters and her glance lit on an envelope

Her heart began to beat oppressively: she was in a mood when the simplest things seemed ominous. What

could Owen have to say to her? Only the first page was covered, and it contained simply the announcement

that, in the company of a young compatriot who was studying at the Beaux Arts, he had planned to leave for

"He hasn't seen her, then!" was Anna's instant thought; and her feeling was a strange compound of

humiliation and relief. The girl had kept her word, lived up to the line of conduct she had set herself; and

Anna had failed in the same attempt. She did not reproach herself with her failure; but she would have been

happier if there had been less discrepancy between her words to Sophy Viner and the act which had followed

them. It irritated her obscurely that the girl should have been so much surer of her power to carry out her

Anna looked up and saw that Darrow's eyes were on the newspaper. He seemed calm and secure, almost

indifferent to her presence. "Will it become a matter of course to him so soon?" she wondered with a twinge

of jealousy. She sat motionless, her eyes fixed on him, trying to make him feel the attraction of her gaze as

she felt his. It surprised and shamed her to detect a new element in her love for him: a sort of suspicious

tyrannical tenderness that seemed to deprive it of all serenity. Finally he looked up, his smile enveloped her,

and she felt herself his in every fibre, his so completely and inseparably that she saw the vanity of imagining

To give herself a countenance she held out Owen's letter. He took it and glanced down the page, his face

"That's a good plan; the best thing that could happen," he said, a just perceptible shade of constraint in his

"Oh, yes," she hastily assented. She was aware of a faint current of relief silently circulating between them.

They were both glad that Owen was going, that for a while he would be out of their way; and it seemed to her

horrible that so much of the stuff of their happiness should be made of such unavowed feelings...

"I shall see him this evening," she said, wishing Darrow to feel that she was not afraid of meeting her

The words struck her as strangely obtuse. Darrow was to meet his Ambassador at the station on the latter's

arrival, and would in all probability have to spend the evening with him, and Anna knew he had been

concerned at the thought of having to leave her alone. But how could he speak in that careless tone of her

dining with Owen? She lowered her voice to say: "I'm afraid he's desperately unhappy."

He answered, with a tinge of impatience: "It's much the best thing that he should travel."

"Yesbut don't you feel..." She broke off. She knew how he disliked these idle returns on the irrevocable,

and her fear of doing or saying what he disliked was tinged by a new instinct of subserviency against which

her pride revolted. She thought to herself: "He will see the change, and grow indifferent to me as he did to

HER..." and for a moment it seemed to her that she was reliving the experience of Sophy Viner.

Darrow made no attempt to learn the end of her unfinished sentence. He handed back Owen's letter and

returned to his newspaper; and when he looked up from it a few minutes later it was with a clear brow and a

The train was just entering a station, and a moment later their compartment was invaded by a commonplace

couple preoccupied with the bestowal of bulging packages. Anna, at their approach, felt the possessive pride

of the woman in love when strangers are between herself and the man she loves. She asked Darrow to open

the window, to place her bag in the net, to roll her rug into a cushion for her feet; and while he was thus

busied with her she was conscious of a new devotion in his tone, in his way of bending over her and meeting

her eyes. He went back to his seat, and they looked at each other like lovers smiling at a happy secret.

Anna, before going back to Givre, had suggested Owen's moving into her apartment, but he had preferred to

remain at the hotel to which he had sent his luggage, and on arriving in Paris she decided to drive there at

once. She was impatient to have the meeting over, and glad that Darrow was obliged to leave her at the

station in order to look up a colleague at the Embassy. She dreaded his seeing Owen again, and yet dared not

tell him so, and to ensure his remaining away she mentioned an urgent engagement with her dressmaker and

"I shall see you tomorrow morning," she said; but he replied with a smile that he would certainly find time

to come to her for a moment on his way back from meeting the Ambassador; and when he had put her in a

She blushed like a girl, thinking, half vexed, half happy: "Yesterday he would not have done it..." and a dozen

scarcely definable differences in his look and manner seemed all at once to be summed up in the boyish act.

"After all, I'm engaged to him," she reflected, and then smiled at the absurdity of the word. The next instant,

with a pang of selfreproach, she remembered Sophy Viner's cry: "I knew all the while he didn't care..."

At Owen's hotel she waited in a tremor while the porter went in search of him. Word was presently brought

back that he was in his room and begged her to come up, and as she crossed the hall she caught sight of his

Owen sat at a table writing, his back to the door; and when he stood up the window was behind him, so that,

He pushed a chair forward, and they sat down, each waiting for the other to speak. Finally she put some

random question about his travellingcompanion, a slow shy meditative youth whom he had once or twice

brought down to Givre. She reflected that it was natural he should have given this uncommunicative comrade

the preference over his livelier acquaintances, and aloud she said: "I'm so glad Fred Rempson can go with

Owen answered in the same tone, and for a few minutes their talk dragged itself on over a dry waste of

commonplaces. Anna noticed that, though ready enough to impart his own plans, Owen studiously

abstained from putting any questions about hers. It was evident from his allusions that he meant to be away

for some time, and he presently asked her if she would give instructions about packing and sending after him

some winter clothes he had left at Givre. This gave her the opportunity to say that she expected to go back

within a day or two and would attend to the matter as soon as she returned. She added: "I came up this

morning with George, who is going on to London tomorrow," intending, by the use of Darrow's Christian

name, to give Owen the chance to speak of her marriage. But he made no comment, and she continued to hear

The room was almost dark, and she finally stood up and glanced about for the lightswitch, saying: "I can't

"Oh, don'tI hate the light!" Owen exclaimed, catching her by the wrist and pushing her back into her seat.

He gave a nervous laugh and added: "I'm halfblind with neuralgia. I suppose it's this beastly rain."

She asked if he had the remedies the doctor had given him for a previous attack, and on his replying that he

didn't know what he'd done with the stuff, she sprang up, offering to go to the chemist's. It was a relief to

have something to do for him, and she knew from his "Oh, thankswould you?" that it was a relief to him to

have a pretext for not detaining her. His natural impulse would have been to declare that he didn't want any

drugs, and would be all right in no time; and his acquiescence showed her how profoundly he felt the

uselessness of their trying to prolong their talk. His face was now no more than a white blur in the dusk, but

she felt its indistinctness as a veil drawn over aching intensities of expression. "He knows...he knows..." she

said to herself, and wondered whether the truth had been revealed to him by some corroborative fact or by the

He had risen also, and was clearly waiting for her to go, and she turned to the door, saying: "I'll be back in a

"Oh, don't come up again, please!" He paused, embarrassed. "I meanI may not be here. I've got to go and

pick up Rempson, and see about some final things with him." She stopped on the threshold with a sinking

heart. He meant this to be their leavetaking, thenand he had not even asked her when she was to be

married, or spoken of seeing her again before she set out for the other side of the world.

"How long? Oh, you see...that's rather vague...I hate definite dates, you know..."

He paused and she saw he did not mean to help her out. She tried to say: "You'll be here for my wedding?"

but could not bring the words to her lips. Instead she murmured: "In six weeks I shall be going too..." and he

rejoined, as if he had expected the announcement and prepared his answer: "Oh, by that time, very likely..."

"At any rate, I won't say goodbye," she stammered, feeling the tears beneath her veil.

"No, no; rather not!" he declared; but he made no movement, and she went up and threw her arms about him.

Her hands slipped down into his, and for a minute they held each other dumbly in the darkness; then he gave

a vague laugh and said: "It's really time to light up." He pressed the electric button with one hand while with

the other he opened the door; and she passed out without daring to turn back, lest the light on his face should

Anna drove to the chemist's for Owen's remedy. On the way she stopped her cab at a bookshop, and

emerged from it laden with literature. She knew what would interest Owen, and what he was likely to have

read, and she had made her choice among the newest publications with the promptness of a discriminating

reader. But on the way back to the hotel she was overcome by the irony of adding this mental panacea to the

other. There was something grotesque and almost mocking in the idea of offering a judicious selection of

literature to a man setting out on such a journey. "He knows...he knows..." she kept on repeating; and giving

the porter the parcel from the chemist's she drove away without leaving the books. She went to her apartment,

whither her maid had preceded her. There was a fire in the drawingroom and the teatable stood ready by

the hearth. The stormy rain beat against the uncurtained windows, and she thought of Owen, who would soon

be driving through it to the station, alone with his bitter thoughts. She had been proud of the fact that he had

always sought her help in difficult hours; and now, in the most difficult of all, she was the one being to whom

he could not turn. Between them, henceforth, there would always be the wall of an insurmountable

silence...She strained her aching thoughts to guess how the truth had come to him. Had he seen the girl, and

had she told him? Instinctively, Anna rejected this conjecture. But what need was there of assuming an

explicit statement, when every breath they had drawn for the last weeks had been charged with the immanent

secret? As she looked back over the days since Darrow's first arrival at Givre she perceived that at no time

had any one deliberately spoken, or anything been accidentally disclosed. The truth had come to light by the

force of its irresistible pressure; and the perception gave her a startled sense of hidden powers, of a chaos of

attractions and repulsions far beneath the ordered surfaces of intercourse. She looked back with melancholy

derision on her old conception of life, as a kind of welllit and well policed suburb to dark places one need

never know about. Here they were, these dark places, in her own bosom, and henceforth she would always

She was still sitting beside the untouched teatable when she heard Darrow's voice in the hall. She started up,

saying to herself: "I must tell him that Owen knows..." but when the door opened and she saw his face, still lit

by the same smile of boyish triumph, she felt anew the uselessness of speaking...Had he ever supposed that

Owen would not know? Probably, from the height of his greater experience, he had seen long since that all

that happened was inevitable; and the thought of it, at any rate, was clearly not weighing on him now.

He was already dressed for the evening, and as he came toward her he said: "The Ambassador's booked for an

Anna had pictured herself sitting alone all the evening with her wretched thoughts, and the fact of having to

put them out of her mind for the next few hours gave her an immediate sensation of relief. Already her pulses

were dancing to the tune of Darrow's, and as they smiled at each other she thought: "Nothing can ever change

"Where shall we dine?" he repeated gaily, and she named a wellknown restaurant for which she had once

heard him express a preference. But as she did so she fancied she saw a shadow on his face, and instantly she

"Oh, no, not there, after all!" she interrupted herself; and now she was sure his colour deepened.

She noticed that he did not ask the reason of her change, and this convinced her that she had guessed the

truth, and that he knew she had guessed it. "He will always know what I am thinking, and he will never dare

to ask me," she thought; and she saw between them the same insurmountable wall of silence as between

herself and Owen, a wall of glass through which they could watch each other's faintest motions but which no

They drove to a restaurant on the Boulevard, and there, in their intimate corner of the serried scene, the sense

of what was unspoken between them gradually ceased to oppress her. He looked so lighthearted and

handsome, so ingenuously proud of her, so openly happy at being with her, that no other fact could seem real

in his presence. He had learned that the Ambassador was to spend two days in Paris, and he had reason to

hope that in consequence his own departure for London would be deferred. He was exhilarated by the

prospect of being with Anna for a few hours longer, and she did not ask herself if his exhilaration were a sign

of insensibility, for she was too conscious of his power of swaying her moods not to be secretly proud of

They lingered for some time over the fruit and coffee, and when they rose to go Darrow suggested that, if she

felt disposed for the play, they were not too late for the second part of the programme at one of the smaller

His mention of the hour recalled Owen to her thoughts. She saw his train rushing southward through the

storm, and, in a corner of the swaying compartment, his face, white and indistinct as it had loomed on her in

the rainy twilight. It was horrible to be thus perpetually paying for her happiness!

Darrow had called for a theatrical journal, and he presently looked up from it to say: "I hear the second play

It was on Anna's lips to acquiesce; but as she was about to speak she wondered if it were not at the Athenee

that Owen had seen Darrow with Sophy Viner. She was not sure he had even mentioned the theatre, but the

mere possibility was enough to darken her sky. It was hateful to her to think of accompanying Darrow to

places where the girl had been with him. She tried to reason away this scruple, she even reminded herself

with a bitter irony that whenever she was in Darrow's arms she was where the girl had been before her but

she could not shake off her superstitious dread of being with him in any of the scenes of the Parisian episode.

She replied that she was too tired for the play, and they drove back to her apartment. At the foot of the stairs

she halfturned to wish him good night, but he appeared not to notice her gesture and followed her up to her

"This is ever so much better than the theatre," he said as they entered the drawingroom.

She had crossed the room and was bending over the hearth to light the fire. She knew he was approaching

her, and that in a moment he would have drawn the cloak from her shoulders and laid his lips on her neck,

just below the gatheredup hair. These privileges were his and, however deferently and tenderly he claimed

"After the theatre they came home like this," she thought; and at the same instant she felt his hands on her

"Don'toh, don't!" she cried, drawing her cloak about her. She saw from his astonished stare that her face

She had dropped into a chair, and sat there huddled, still holding her cloak about her shoulders.

Darrow did not dispute her assumption, and she noticed that he expressed no surprise. He sat down at a little

distance from her, turning about in his fingers the cigarcase he had drawn out as they came in. At length he

She shrank from the sound of the name. "No...I don't think so...I'm sure he hadn't..."

They remained silent, looking away from one another. Finally Darrow stood up and took a few steps across

"I think you ought to tell me what you mean to do." She raised her head and gave him back his look.

"No; but things can't go on like this." He paused, as if to measure his words. "I fill you with aversion," he

She lifted her hands as if to hide it, and turning away from him bowed her head upon the mantelshelf. She

felt that he was standing a little way behind her, but he made no attempt to touch her or come nearer.

"I know you've felt as I've felt," he said in a low voice" that we belong to each other and that nothing can

alter that. But other thoughts come, and you can't banish them. Whenever you see me you remember...you

associate me with things you abhor...You've been generousimmeasurably. You've given me all the chances

"Oh, no! I know...There've been moments..." He took her hand and raised it to his lips. "They'll be with me as

long as I live. But I can't see you paying such a price for them. I'm not worth what I'm costing you."

She continued to gaze at him through teardilated eyes; and suddenly she flung out the question: "Wasn't it

"Yes; I want to know now: to know everything. Perhaps that will make me forget. I ought to have made you

tell me before. Wherever we go, I imagine you've been there with her...I see you together. I want to know

how it began, where you went, why you left her...I can't go on in this darkness any longer!"

She did not know what had prompted her passionate outburst, but already she felt lighter, freer, as if at last

the evil spell were broken. "I want to know everything," she repeated. "It's the only way to make me forget."

After she had ceased speaking Darrow remained where he was, his arms folded, his eyes lowered,

"You see it's impossible," he went on. "I've done a thing I loathe, and to atone for it you ask me to do another.

What sort of satisfaction would that give you? It would put something irremediable between us."

She leaned her elbow against the mantelshelf and hid her face in her hands. She had the sense that she was

vainly throwing away her last hope of happiness, yet she could do nothing, think of nothing, to save it. The

conjecture flashed through her: "Should I be at peace if I gave him up?" and she remembered the desolation

of the days after she had sent him away, and understood that that hope was vain. The tears welled through her

She tried to raise her head, but the weight of her despair bowed it down. She said to herself: "This is the

end...he won't try to appeal to me again..." and she remained in a sort of tranced rigidity, perceiving without

feeling the fateful lapse of the seconds. Then the cords that bound her seemed to snap, and she lifted her head

"Why, he's minehe's mine! He's no one else's!" His face was turned to her and the look in his eyes swept

away all her terrors. She no longer understood what had prompted her senseless outcry; and the mortal

Darrow had been right in saying that their sacrifice would benefit no one; yet she seemed dimly to discern

that there were obligations not to be tested by that standard. She owed it, at any rate, as much to his pride as

to hers to abstain from the repetition of such scenes; and she had learned that it was beyond her power to do

so while they were together. Yet when he had given her the chance to free herself, everything had vanished

from her mind but the blind fear of losing him; and she saw that he and she were as profoundly and

inextricably bound together as two trees with interwoven roots. For a long time she brooded on her plight,

vaguely conscious that the only escape from it must come from some external chance. And slowly the

occasion shaped itself in her mind. It was Sophy Viner only who could save herSophy Viner only who

could give her back her lost serenity. She would seek the girl out and tell her that she had given Darrow up;

and that step once taken there would be no retracing it, and she would perforce have to go forward alone.

Any pretext for action was a kind of anodyne, and she despatched her maid to the Farlows' with a note asking

if Miss Viner would receive her. There was a long delay before the maid returned, and when at last she

appeared it was with a slip of paper on which an address was written, and a verbal message to the effect that

Miss Viner had left some days previously, and was staying with her sister in a hotel near the Place de l'Etoile.

The maid added that Mrs. Farlow, on the plea that Miss Viner's plans were uncertain, had at first made some

difficulty about giving this information; and Anna guessed that the girl had left her friends' roof, and

instructed them to withhold her address, with the object of avoiding Owen. "She's kept faith with herself and

Darrow had announced his intention of coming soon after luncheon, and the morning was already so far

advanced that Anna, still mistrustful of her strength, decided to drive immediately to the address Mrs. Farlow

had given. On the way there she tried to recall what she had heard of Sophy Viner's sister, but beyond the

girl's enthusiastic report of the absent Laura's loveliness she could remember only certain vague allusions of

Mrs. Farlow's to her artistic endowments and matrimonial vicissitudes. Darrow had mentioned her but once,

and in the briefest terms, as having apparently very little concern for Sophy's welfare, and being, at any rate,

too geographically remote to give her any practical support; and Anna wondered what chance had brought

her to her sister's side at this conjunction. Mrs. Farlow had spoken of her as a celebrity (in what line Anna

failed to recall); but Mrs. Farlow's celebrities were legion, and the name on the slip of paperMrs.

While Anna waited in the dingy vestibule of the Hotel Chicago she had so distinct a vision of what she meant

to say to Sophy Viner that the girl seemed already to be before her; and her heart dropped from all the height

of its courage when the porter, after a long delay, returned with the announcement that Miss Viner was no

longer in the hotel. Anna, doubtful if she understood, asked if he merely meant that the young lady was out at

the moment; but he replied that she had gone away the day before. Beyond this he had no information to

impart, and after a moment's hesitation Anna sent him back to enquire if Mrs. McTarvieBirch would receive

her. She reflected that Sophy had probably pledged her sister to the same secrecy as Mrs. Farlow, and that a

There was another long interval of suspense before the porter reappeared with an affirmative answer; and a

third while an exiguous and hesitating lift bore her up past a succession of shabby landings.

When the last was reached, and her guide had directed her down a winding passage that smelt of seagoing

luggage, she found herself before a door through which a strong odour of tobacco reached her simultaneously

with the sounds of a suppressed altercation. Her knock was followed by a silence, and after a minute or two

the door was opened by a handsome young man whose ruffled hair and general air of creased disorder led her

to conclude that he had just risen from a longlimbed sprawl on a sofa strewn with tumbled cushions. This

sofa, and a grand piano bearing a basket of faded roses, a biscuittin and a devastated breakfast tray, almost

filled the narrow sittingroom, in the remaining corner of which another man, short, swarthy and humble, sat

Anna paused in doubt; but on her naming Mrs. Birch the young man politely invited her to enter, at the same

The latter, raising his eyes, which were round and bulging, fixed them, not on the young man but on Anna,

whom, for a moment, he scrutinized as searchingly as the interior of his hat. Under his gaze she had the sense

of being minutely catalogued and valued; and the impression, when he finally rose and moved toward the

door, of having been accepted as a better guarantee than he had had any reason to hope for. On the threshold

his glance crossed that of the young man in an exchange of intelligence as full as it was rapid; and this brief

scene left Anna so oddly enlightened that she felt no surprise when her companion, pushing an armchair

forward, sociably asked her if she wouldn't have a cigarette. Her polite refusal provoked the remark that he

would, if she'd no objection; and while he groped for matches in his loose pockets, and behind the

photographs and letters crowding the narrow mantelshelf, she ventured another enquiry for Mrs. Birch.

"Just a minute," he smiled; "I think the masseur's with her." He spoke in a smooth denationalized English,

which, like the look in his longlashed eyes and the promptness of his charming smile, suggested a long

training in all the arts of expediency. Having finally discovered a matchbox on the floor beside the sofa, he

lit his cigarette and dropped back among the cushions; and on Anna's remarking that she was sorry to disturb

Mrs. Birch he replied that that was all right, and that she always kept everybody waiting.

After this, through the haze of his perpetually renewed cigarettes, they continued to chat for some time of

indifferent topics; but when at last Anna again suggested the possibility of her seeing Mrs. Birch he rose from

his corner with a slight shrug, and murmuring: "She's perfectly hopeless," lounged off through an inner door.

Anna was still wondering when and in what conjunction of circumstances the muchmarried Laura had

acquired a partner so conspicuous for his personal charms, when the young man returned to announce: "She

He drew aside to let Anna pass, and she found herself in a dim untidy scented room, with a pink curtain

pinned across its single window, and a lady with a great deal of fair hair and uncovered neck smiling at her

"You don't mind, do you? He costs such a frightful lot that I can't afford to send him off," Mrs. Birch

explained, extending a thicklyringed hand to Anna, and leaving her in doubt as to whether the person

alluded to were her masseur or her husband. Before a reply was possible there was a convulsive stir beneath

the pink expanse, and something that resembled another powderpuff hurled itself at Anna with a volley of

sounds like the popping of Lilliputian champagne corks. Mrs. Birch, flinging herself forward, gasped out: "If

you'd just give him a caramel...there, in that box on the dressingtable...it's the only earthly thing to stop

him..." and when Anna had proffered this sop to her assailant, and he had withdrawn with it beneath the

"Isn't he a beauty? The Prince gave him to me down at Nice the other daybut he's perfectly awful," she

confessed, beaming intimately on her visitor. In the roseate penumbra of the bedcurtains she presented to

Anna's startled gaze an odd chromolike resemblance to Sophy Viner, or a suggestion, rather, of what Sophy

Viner might, with the years and in spite of the powderpuff, become. Larger, blonder, heavier featured, she

yet had glances and movements that disturbingly suggested what was freshest and most engaging in the girl;

and as she stretched her bare plump arm across the bed she seemed to be pulling back the veil from dingy

"Do sit down, if there's a place to sit on," she cordially advised; adding, as Anna took the edge of a chair hung

with miscellaneous raiment: "My singing takes so much time that I don't get a chance to walk the fat

Anna murmured an assent. "I hope it hasn't inconvenienced you to see me; I told Mr. Birch"

"Mr. WHO?" the recumbent beauty asked; and then: "Oh, JIMMY!" she faintly laughed, as if more for her

The latter continued eagerly: "I understand from Mrs. Farlow that your sister was with you, and I ventured to

come up because I wanted to ask you when I should have a chance of finding her."

Mrs. McTarvieBirch threw back her head with a long stare. "Do you mean to say the idiot at the door didn't

"Last night?" Anna echoed. A sudden terror had possessed her. Could it be that the girl had tricked them all

and gone with Owen? The idea was incredible, yet it took such hold of her that she could hardly steady her

lips to say: "The porter did tell me, but I thought perhaps he was mistaken. Mrs. Farlow seemed to think that I

"It was all so sudden that I don't suppose she had time to let the Farlows know. She didn't get Mrs. Murrett's

"Why, yes. Sophy's gone to India with Mrs. Murrett; they're to meet at Brindisi," Sophy's sister said with a

Anna sat motionless, gazing at the disordered room, the pink bed, the trivial face among the pillows.

Mrs. McTarvieBirch pursued: "They had a fearful kickup last springI daresay you knew about itbut I

told Sophy she'd better lump it, as long as the old woman was willing to...As an artist, of course, it's perfectly

Through the confused pain of her thoughts she was hardly aware that Mrs. Birch's explanations were still

continuing. "Naturally I didn't altogether approve of her going back to that beast of a woman. I said all I

could...I told her she was a fool to chuck up such a place as yours. But Sophy's restlessalways wasand

Anna rose from her seat, groping for some formula of leave taking. The pushing back of her chair roused

the white dog's smouldering animosity, and he drowned his mistress's further confidences in another outburst

of hysterics. Through the tumult Anna signed an inaudible farewell, and Mrs. Birch, having momentarily

succeeded in suppressing her pet under a pillow, called out: "Do come again! I'd love to sing to you."

Anna murmured a word of thanks and turned to the door. As she opened it she heard her hostess crying after

her: "Jimmy! Do you hear me? Jimmy BRANCE!" and then, there being no response from the person