BOOK V (continued 2)

But Katherine, still anxious to repair any defect in her recognition and greeting, and still with that same effect of playful self-depreciation, spoke first.

"I had been reviewing many things, with the help of blessed Thomas à Kempis here, before I became so drowsy. The dear man lays his finger smartly upon all the weak places in one's fancied armour of righteousness. It is sometimes not quite easy to be altogether grateful to him. For instance, he has pointed out to me conclusively that I grow reprehensibly selfish."

"Oh come, come!" Honoria answered, in loving raillery. "Thomas is acute to the point of lying if he has convinced you of that!"

"Unhappily, no," Katherine returned. "I know it, I fear, without any pointing of Thomas's finger. But I rather shirked admission of my knowledge—well, for the very bad reason that I wanted very badly to put off the day of amendment. Now the holy man has touched my witness and"—she turned her head against the pillows and looked full at the younger woman, while her under-lip quivered a little. "My dear, I have come to be very greedy of the comfort of your companionship. I have been tempted to consider not your advantage, but solely my own. The pointing finger of Thomas has brought it home to me that Brockhurst and I are feeding upon your generosity of time, and helpfulness, to an unconscionable extent. We are devouring the best days of your life, and hindering you alike from work and from pleasure. It must not be. And so, my dear, I beg you go forth, once more, to all your many friends and to society. You are too young, and too gifted, to remain here in this sluggish backwater, alongside a derelict like me. It is not right. You must make for the open stream again and let the free wind and the strong current bear you gladly on your appointed course. And my gratitude and my blessing will go with you always. But you must delay no longer. For me you have done enough."

For a little space Honoria held her friend's hand in silence.

"Are—are—you tired of me then?" she said.

"Ah, my dear!" Katherine exclaimed. And the exclamation was more reassuring, somehow, than any denial could have been.

"After all," Honoria went on, "I really don't see why you're to have a monopoly of faithfulness. There's selfishness now, if you like—to appropriate a virtue en bloc not leaving a rag, not the veriest scrappit of it for anybody else! And then, has it never occurred to you, that I may be just every bit as greedy of your companionship as you of mine—more so, I fancy, because—because——"

Honoria bowed her head and kissed the hand she held, once again.

"You see—I know it sounds as if I was rather a beast—perhaps I am—but I never cared for any one—really to care, I mean—till I cared for you."

"My dear!"—Katherine said again, wondering, shrinking somewhat, at once touched and almost repulsed. The younger woman's attitude was so far removed from her own experience.

"Does it displease you? Does it seem to you unnatural?" Honoria asked quickly.

"A little," Lady Calmady answered, smiling, yet very tenderly.

"All the same it's quite true. You opened a door, somehow, that had always been shut. I hardly believed in its existence. Of course I had read plenty about the—affections, shall we call them? And had heard women and girls, and men, too, for that matter, talk about them pretty freely. But it bored me a good deal. I thought it all rather silly, and rather nasty perhaps."—Honoria shook her head. "It didn't appeal to me in the least. But when you opened the door"—she paused, her face very grave, yet with a smile on it, as she looked away at the little figures anticking upon the hearth. "Oh, dear me, I own I was half scared," she said, "it let in such a lot of light!"

But, for this speech, Lady Calmady had no immediate answer. And so the quiet came back, settling down sensibly on the room again—even as, when at dawn the camp is struck, the secular quiet of the desert comes back and possesses its own again. And, in obedience to that quiet, Katherine's hand rested passively in the hand of her companion, while she gazed wonderingly at the delicate, half-averted face, serious, lit up by the eagerness of a vital enthusiasm. And, having a somewhat sorrowful fund of learning to draw upon in respect of the dangers all eccentricity, either of character or development, inevitably brings along with it, she trembled, divining that noble and strong and pure though it was, that face, and the temperament disclosed by it, might work sorrow, both to its possessor and to others, unless the enthusiasm animating it should find some issue at once large and simple enough to engage its whole aspiration and power of work.

But abruptly Honoria broke up the brooding quiet, laughing gently, yet with a catch in her throat.

"And when you had let in the light, Cousin Katherine, good heavens, how thankful I was I had never married. Picture finding out all that after one had bound oneself, after one had given oneself! What an awful prostitution."—Her tone changed and she stroked the elder woman's hand softly. "So you see you can't very well order me off, the pointing finger of Thomas notwithstanding. You have taught me——"

"Only half the lesson as yet," Katherine said. "The other half, and the doxology which closes it, neither I, nor any other woman, can teach you."

"You really believe that?"

"Ah! my dear," Katherine said, "I do more than believe. I know it."

The younger woman regarded her searchingly. Then she shook her charming head.

"It's no good to arrive at a place before you've got to it," she declared. "And I very certainly haven't got to the second half of the lesson, let alone the doxology, yet. And then I'm so blissfully content with the first half, that I've no disposition to hurry. No, dear Cousin Katherine, I am afraid you must resign yourself to put up with me for a little while longer. Your foes, unfortunately, are of your own household in this affair. Dr. Knott has just been holding forth to us—Julius March, and Mr. Quayle, and me—and swearing me over, not only to stay, but to make you eat and drink and come out of doors, and even to go away with me. Because—yes, in a sense your Thomas is right with his pointing finger, though he got a bit muddled, good man, not being quite up-to-date, and pointed to the wrong place——"

Honoria left her sentence unfinished. She knelt down—her tall, slender figure, angular, more like that of a youth, than like that of a maid, in her spare mud-stained habit and coat. Impulsively she put her hands on Lady Calmady's hips, laid her head in her lap.

"Have you but one blessing, oh! my more than mother?" she cried. "Do we count for nothing, all the rest of us—your household, and tenants rich and poor, and Julius the faithful, and Ludovic the bland, and that queer lump of sagacity and ugliness, John Knott? Why will you kill yourself? Why will you die and leave us all, just because one person is perverse? That's hardly the way to make us—who love you—bear with and pity him and welcome him home.—Oh! I know I am treading on dangerous ground and venturing to approach very close. But I don't care—not a hang! We're at the end of our patience. We want you, and we mean to have you back."

Honoria raised herself, knelt bolt upright, her hands on the arms of Lady Calmady's chair, her expression full of appeal.

"Be kind to us, be kind," she said. "We only ask you, after all, to eat and drink—to let Clara take care of you at night, and I'll do so by day.—And then, when you are stronger, you must come away with me, up north, to Ormiston. You have not been there for years, and its gray towers are rather splendid overlooking that strong, uneasy, northern sea. It stirs the Viking blood in one, and makes that which was hard seem of less moment. Roger and Mary are there, too—will be all this summer. And you know it refreshed you to see them last year. And if we go pretty soon the boys will be at school, so they won't tire you with their racketing. They're jolly monkeys, though, in my opinion, Godfrey wants smacking. He comes the elder-brother a lot too much over poor little Dick.—But that's neither here nor there. Oh! it's for you to get out of the backwater into the stream, ten times more than for me. Dearest physician, heal thyself!"

But Katherine, though deeply touched by the loving ardour of the younger woman's appeal, and the revelation of tenderness and watchful care, constantly surrounding her, which that appeal brought along with it, could not rouse herself to any immediate response. Sternly, unremittingly, since the fair July night when Richard had left her nearly five years earlier, she had schooled herself into unmurmuring resignation and calm. In the prosecution of such a process there must be loss as well as gain. And Katherine had, in great measure, atrophied impulse, and, in eradicating personal desire, had come near destroying all spontaneity of emotion. She could still give, but the power of receiving was deadened in her. And she had come to be jealous of the quiet which surrounded her. It was her support and solace. She asked little more than not to have it broken up. She dreaded even affection, should that strive to draw her from the cloistered way of life. The world, and its many interests, had ceased to be of any moment to her. She asked to be left to contemplation of things eternal and to the tragedy of her own heart. And so, though it was beautiful to know herself to be thus cherished and held in high esteem, that beauty came to her as something unrelated, as sweet words good to hear, yet spoken of some person other than herself, or of a self she had ceased to be. All privilege implies a corresponding obligation, and to the meeting of fresh obligations Katherine felt herself not only unequal, but indisposed. And so, she smiled now upon Honoria St. Quentin, leaning back against the rose-silk and muslin-covered pillows, with a lovely indulgence, yet rather hopelessly unmoved and remote.

"Ah! my dear, I am beyond all wish to be healed after the fashion you, in your urgent loving-kindness, would have me," she said. "I look forward to the final healing, when my many mistakes and shortcomings shall be forgiven and the smart of them removed. And I am very tired. I do not think it can be required of me to go back."

"I know, I know," Honoria replied.—She rose to her feet and moved across to the fireplace, her straight eyebrows drawn together, her expression one of perplexity. "I must seem a brute for trying to drag you back. When Dr. Knott, and the other two men, asked me to come and reason with you, I was on the edge of refusing. I hardly had the heart to worry you. And yet," she added wistfully, "after all, in a way, it is just simply your own, dear fault. For if you will be a sort of little kingdom of heaven to us, you see, it's inevitable that, when you threaten to slip away from us, we should play the part of the violent and do our best to take our kingdom by force and keep it in spite of itself."

"You overrate the heavenliness of the poor little kingdom," Katherine said. "Its soil has become barren, its proud cities are laid waste. It's an unprofitable place, believe me, dearest child. Let it be. Seek your fortune in some kingdom from which the glory has not departed and whose motto is not Ichabod."

"Unfortunately, I can't do that," the younger woman answered. "I've explained why already. Where my heart is, there, you see, my kingdom is also."

"Ah! my dear, my dear," Katherine said, touched, yet somewhat weary.

"And after all it is not wholly for our own sakes we make this fight to keep you."—Miss St. Quentin's voice sank. She spoke slowly and as though with reluctance. "We do it for the sake of the person you love best in the world. I don't say we love him very much, but that is beside the mark. We owe him a certain duty—I, because I am living in his house, the others because they are his friends. When he comes home—as come he surely will—they all say that, even while they blame him—would it not be an almost too cruel punishment if he found Brockhurst empty of your presence? You would not wish that. It's not a question of me, of course. I don't count. But you gone, no one—not even the old servants, I believe—would stay. Blame would be turned into something awkwardly near to hatred."

Lady Calmady's serenity did not desert her, but a touch of her old loftiness of manner was apparent. And Miss St. Quentin was very glad. Anything, even anger, would be welcome if it dissipated that unnatural, paralysing calm.

"You forget Julius, I think," she said. "He will be faithful to the very end, faithful unto death. And so will another friend of happier days, poor, blind, old Camp."

A sudden inspiration came to Honoria St. Quentin.

"You must only count on Julius, I am afraid, Cousin Katherine—not on Camp."

And to her immense relief she perceived Lady Calmady's serenity give a little. It was as though she came nearer. Her sweet face was troubled, her eyes full of questioning.

"Camp grew a little too tired of waiting about three weeks ago. You did not ask for him——"

"Didn't I?" Katherine said, smitten by self-reproach.

"Never once—and so we did not tell you, fearing to distress you."

Miss St. Quentin came over and sat down on the end of the sofa again. She rested her hands on her knees. Her feet were rather far apart. She fixed her eyes upon the small prophets and patriarchs anticking upon the hearth.

"But it wasn't really so very bad," she said reflectively. "And we did all we could to smooth his passage, poor, dear beast, to the place where all good dogs go. We had the vet out from Westchurch two or three times, but there was nothing much he could do. And I thought him a bit rough. Nervousness, I fancy. You see the dog did not like being handled by a stranger, and made it rather hot for him once or twice. I could not let him be worried, poor old man, and so Julius March, and Winter, and I, took turn and turn about with him."

"Where did he die?"

"In the Gun-Room, on the tiger-skin."—Honoria did not look round. Her voice grew perceptibly husky. "Chifney and I sat up with him that last night."

"You and Chifney?" Lady Calmady exclaimed, almost in protest.

"Yes. Of course the men would have been as kind as kind could be. Only I had a feeling you would be glad to know I was there, later, when we told you. You see Chifney's as good as any vet, and I had to have somebody. The dog was rather queer. I did not quite know how to manage him alone."

Lady Calmady put out her hand. Honoria took it silently, and fell to stroking it once more. It was a declaration of peace, she felt, on the part of the obstinate well-beloved—possibly a declaration of something over and above peace.

"Winter saw to our creature comforts," the young lady continued. "Oh, we weren't starved, I promise you! And Chifney was excellent company."

She hesitated a moment.

"He told me endless yarns about horses—about Doncaster and Newmarket, and Goodwood. I was greatly flattered at being regarded sufficiently of the equestrian order to hear all that.—And he told me stories about Richard, when he was quite a little boy—and about his father also."

Honoria had a conviction the tears were running down Lady Calmady's cheeks, but she would not look round. She only stroked the hand she held softly, and talked on.

"They were fine," she said, "some of those stories. I am glad to have heard them. They went home to me. When all is said and done, there is nothing like breeding and pluck, and the courtesy which goes along with them. But after midnight Camp grew very restless. He had his blanket in the big armchair—you know the one I mean—as usual. But he wouldn't stay there. We had to lift him down. You see his hindquarters were paralysed, and he couldn't help himself much. It was pathetic. I can't forget the asking look in his half-blind eyes. But we couldn't make out what he wanted. At last he dragged himself as far as the door, and we set it open and watched him, poor, dear beast. He got across the lobby to the bottom of the little staircase——"

The speaker's breath caught.

"Then we made out what it was. He wanted to get up here, to come to you.—Well, I could understand that! I should want just that myself, shall want it, when it comes to the last. He whimpered when Chifney carried him back into the Gun-Room."

Honoria turned her head and looked Lady Calmady in the face. Her own was more than commonly white and very gentle in expression.

"He died in the gray of the morning, with his great head on my lap. I fancy it eased him to have something human, and—rather pitiful—close against him. Julius had just come in to see how we were getting on, I won't declare he did not say a prayer—I think he did. But I wasn't quite as steady as I might have been just then."

She turned her head, looking back at the figures upon the hearth. She was satisfied. Lady Calmady's long-sustained calm had given way, and she wept.

"We buried him, in his blanket, under the big Portugal-laurel, where the nightingale sings, at the corner of the troco-ground, close to Camp the First and Old Camp. The upper servants came, and Chaplin and Hariburt from the house-stables, and Chifney and the head-lad—and some of the gardeners. Poor, old Wenham drove up in his donkey-chair from the west lodge. Julius was there, of course. We did all things decently and in order."

Honoria's voice ceased. She sat stroking the dear hand she held and smiling to herself, notwithstanding a chokiness in her throat, for she had a comfortable belief the situation was saved.

Then Clara entered, prepared to encounter remonstrance, bearing a tray.

"It's all right, Clara," Miss St. Quentin said. "Lady Calmady is quite ready for something to eat. I've been telling her about Camp."

And Katherine, sitting upright, with great docility and a certain gentle shame, accepted food and drink.

"Since you wish it, dearest," she said, "and since Julius must not be left alone in a quite empty house."

"Our kingdom of heaven stays with us then?" Honoria exclaimed joyously.

"Such as it is—poor thing—it will do its best to stay. I thought I had cried my eyes dry forever, long ago. But it seems not. You and Camp have broken up the drought."

"I have not hurt you?" Honoria said, in sudden penitence.

"No, no—you have given me relief. I was ceasing to be human. The blessed Thomas was right—I grew very selfish."

"But you're not displeased with me?" Honoria insisted. Lady Calmady's playfulness had returned, but with a new complexion.

"Ah! it is a little soon to ask that!" she said. "Still I will go north with you a fortnight hence—go to Ormiston. And by then, perhaps, you may be forgiven. Open the casement, dearest, and let in the wind. The air of this room is curiously dead. Give my love to Julius and Ludovic. Tell them I will come into the Chapel-Room after dinner to-night.—What—my child, are you so very glad?—Kiss me.—God keep you.—Now I will rest."

CHAPTER VI

IN WHICH M. PAUL DESTOURNELLE HAS THE BAD TASTE TO THREATEN TO UPSET THE APPLE-CART

Helen de Vallorbes rose from her knees and slipped out from under the greasy and frayed half-curtain of the confessional box. The atmosphere of that penitential spot had been such as to make her feel faint and dizzy. She needed to recover herself. And so she stood, for a minute or more, in the clear, cool brightness of the nave of the great basilica, her highly-civilised figure covered by a chequer-work of morning sunshine streaming down through the round-headed windows of the lofty clere-storey. As the sense of physical discomfort left her she instinctively arranged her veil, and adjusted her bracelets over the wrists of her long gloves. Yet, notwithstanding this trivial and mundane occupation, her countenance retained an expression of devout circumspection, of the relief of one who has accomplished a serious and somewhat distasteful duty. Her sensations were increasingly agreeable. She had rid herself of an oppressive burden. She was at peace with herself and with—almost—all man and womankind.

Yet, it must be admitted, the measure had been mainly precautionary. Helen had gone to confession, on the present occasion, in much the same spirit as an experienced traveler visits his dentist before starting on a protracted journey. She regarded it as a disagreeable, but politic, insurance against possible accident. Her distaste had been increased by the fact that there really were some rather risky matters to be confessed. She had even feared a course of penance might have been enforced before the granting of absolution—this certainly would have been the case had she been dealing with that firm disciplinarian and very astute man of the world, the Jesuit father who acted as her spiritual adviser in Paris. But here in Naples, happily, it was different. The fat, sleepy, easy-going, old canon—whose person exuded so strong an odour of snuff that, at the solemnest moment of the confiteor, she had been unable to suppress a convulsive sneeze—asked her but few inconvenient questions. Pretty fine-ladies will get into little difficulties of this nature. He had listened to very much the same story not infrequently before, and took the position amiably, almost humorously, for granted. It was very wicked, a deadly sin, but the flesh—specially such delicately bred, delicately fed, feminine flesh—is admittedly weak, and the wiles of Satan are many. Is it not an historic fact that our first mother did not escape?—Was Helen's repentance sincere, that was the point? And of that Helen could honestly assure him there was no smallest doubt. Indeed, at this moment, she abhorred, not only her sin, but her co-sinner, in the liveliest and most comprehensive manner. Return to him? Sooner the dog return to its vomit! She recognised the iniquity, the shame, the detestable folly, of her late proceedings far too clearly. Temptation in that direction had ceased to be possible.

Then followed the mysterious and merciful words of absolution. And Helen rose from her knees and slipped out from beneath the frayed and greasy curtain a free woman, the guilt of her adultery wiped off by those awful words, as, with a wet cloth, one would wipe writing off a slate leaving the surface of it clean in every part. Precisely how far she literally believed in the efficacy of that most solemn rite she would not have found it easy to declare. Scepticism warred with expediency. But that appeared to her beside the mark. It was really none of her business. Let her teachers look to all that. To her it was sufficient that she could regard it from the practical standpoint of an insurance against possible accident—the accident of sin proving actually sinful and actually punishable by a narrow-minded deity, the accident of the veritable existence of heaven and hell, and of Holy Church veritably having the keys of both these in her keeping, the accident—more immediately probable and consequently worth guarding against—that, during wakeful hours, some night, the half-forgotten lessons of the convent school would come back on her, and, as did sometimes happen, would prove too much for her usually victorious audacity.

But, it should be added that another and more creditable instinct did much to dictate Madame de Vallorbes' action at this juncture. As the days went by the attraction exercised over her by Richard Calmady suffered increase rather than diminution. And this attraction affected her morally, producing in her modesties, reticencies of speech, even of thought, and prickings of unflattering self-criticism unknown to her heretofore. Her ultimate purpose might not be virtuous. But undeniably, such is the complexity—not to say hypocrisy—of the human heart, the prosecution of that purpose developed in her a surprising sensibility of conscience. Many episodes in her career, hitherto regarded as entertaining, she ceased to view with toleration, let alone complacency. The remembrance of them made her nervous. What if Richard came to hear of them? The effect might be disastrous. Not that he was any saint, but that she perceived that, with the fine inconsistency common to most well-bred Englishmen, he demanded from the women of his family quite other standards of conduct to those which he himself obeyed. Other women might do as they pleased. Their lapses from the stricter social code were no concern of his. He might, indeed, be not wholly averse to profiting by such lapses. But in respect of the women of his own rank and blood the case was quite otherwise. He was alarmingly capable of disgust. And, not a little to her own surprise, fear of provoking, however slightly, that disgust had become a reigning power with her. Never had she felt as she now felt. Her own sensations at once captivated and astonished her. This had ceased to be an adventure dictated by merry devilry, undertaken out of lightness of heart, inspired by a mischievous desire to see dust whirl and straws fly, or undertaken even out of necessity to support self-satisfaction by ranging herself with cynical audacity on the side of the Eternal Laughter. This was serious. It was desperate—the crisis, as she told herself, of her life and fate. The result was singular. Never had she been more vividly, more electrically, alive. Never had she been more diffident and self-distrustful.

And this complexity of sensation served to press home on her the high desirability of insurance against accident, of washing clean, as far as might be possible, the surface of the slate. So it followed that now, standing in the chequer-work of sunshine within the great basilica, self-congratulation awoke in her. The lately concluded ceremony, some of the details of which had really been most distasteful, might or might not be of vital efficacy, but, in any case, she had courageously done her part. Therefore, if Holy Church spoke truly, her first innocence was restored. Helen hugged the idea with almost childish satisfaction. Now she could go back to the Villa Vallorbes in peace, and take what measure——

She left the sentence unfinished. Even in thought it is often an error to define. Let the future and her intentions regarding it remain in the vague! She signed to Zélie Forestier—seated on the steps of a side-chapel, yellow-paper-covered novel in hand—to follow her. And, after making a genuflexion before the altar of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, gathered up her turquoise-coloured skirts—the yellow-tufa quarries were not superabundantly clean—and pursued her way towards the great main door. The benevolent priest, charmed by her grace of movement, watched her from his place in the confessional, although another penitent now kneeled within the greasy curtain. Verily the delinquencies of so delectable a piece of womanhood were easily comprehensible! Neither God nor man, in such a case, would be extreme to mark what was done amiss.—Moreover, had she not promised generous gifts alike to church and poor? The sin which in an ugly woman is clearly mortal, in a pretty one becomes little more than venial. Making which reflection a kindly, fat chuckle shook his big paunch, and, crossing himself, he turned his attention to the voice murmuring from behind the wooden lattice at his side.

Yet it would appear that abstract justice judged less leniently of the position. For, passing out on to the portico—about the base of whose enormous columns half-naked beggars clustered, exposing sores and mutilations, shrilly clamouring for alms—the dazzling glare of the empty, sun-scorched piazza behind him, Helen came face to face with no less a personage than M. Paul Destournelle.

It was as though some one had struck her. The scene reeled before her eyes. Then her temper rose as in resentment of insult. To avoid all chance of such a meeting she had selected this church in an unfashionable quarter of the town. Here, at least, she had reckoned herself safe from molestation. And, that precisely in the hour of peace, the hour of politic insurance against accident, this accident of all others should befall her, was maddening! But anger did not lessen her perspicacity. How to inflict the maximum of discomfort upon M. Destournelle with the minimum of risk to herself was the question. An interview was inevitable. She wanted, very certainly, to get her claws into him, but, for safety's sake, that should be done not in attack, but in defense. Therefore he should speak first, and in his words, whatever those words might be, she promised herself to discover legitimate cause of offense. So, leisurely, and with studied ignorance of his presence, she flung largesse of centissimi to right and left, and, while the chorus of blessing and entreaty was yet loud, walked calmly past M. Destournelle down the wide, shallow steps, from the solid shadow of the portico to the burning sun-glare of the piazza.

The young man's countenance went livid.

"Do you dare to pretend not to recognise me?" he literally gasped.

"On the contrary I recognise you perfectly."

"I have written to you repeatedly."

"You have—written to me with a ridiculous and odious persistence."

Madame de Vallorbes picked her steps. The pavement was uneven, the heat great. Destournelle's hands twitched with agitation, yet he contrived not only to replace his Panama hat, but opened his white umbrella as a precaution against sunstroke. And this diverted, even while exasperating, Helen. Measures to ensure personal safety were so characteristic of Destournelle.

"And with what fault, I ask you, can you reproach me, save that of a too absorbing, a too generous, adoration?"

"That fault in itself is very sufficient."

"Do you not reckon, then, in any degree, with the crime you are in process of committing? Have you no sense of gratitude, of obligation? Have you no regret for your own loss in leaving me?"

Helen drew aside to let a herd of goats pass. They jostled one another impudently, carrying their inquisitive heads and short tails erect, at right angles to the horizontal line of their narrow backs. They bleated, as in impish mischief. Their little beards wagged. Their little hoofs pattered on the stone, and the musky odour of them hung in the burning air. Madame de Vallorbes put her handkerchief up to her face, and over the edge of it she contemplated Paul Destournelle. Every detail of his appearance was not only familiar, but associated in her mind with some incident of his and her common past. Now the said details asserted themselves, so it seemed to her, with an impertinence of premeditated provocation.—The high, domed skull, the smooth, prematurely-thin hair parted in the middle and waved over the ears. The slightly raised eyebrows, and fatigued, red-lidded, and vain, though handsome eyes. The straight, thin nose, and winged, open nostrils, so perpetually a-quiver. The soft, sparse, forked beard which closely followed the line of the lower jaw and pointed chin. The moustache, lightly shading the upper lip, while wholly exposing the fretful and rather sensuous mouth. The long, effeminate, and restless hands. The tall, slight figure. The clothes, of a material and pattern fondly supposed by their wearer to present the last word of English fashion in relation to foreign travel, the colour of them accurately matched to the pale, brown hair and beard.—So much for the detail of the young man's appearance. As a whole, that appearance was elegant as only French youth ventures to be elegant. Refinement enveloped Paul Destournelle—refinement, over-sensitised and under-vitalised, as that of a rare exotic forced into precocious blossoming by application of some artificial horticultural process. And all this—elaborately effective and seductive as long as one should happen to think so, elaborately nauseous when one had ceased so to think—had long been familiar to Helen to the point of satiety. She turned wicked, satiety transmuting itself into active vindictiveness. How gladly would she have torn this emasculated creature limb from limb, and flung the lot of it among the refuse of the Neapolitan gutter!

But, from beneath the shade of his umbrella, the young man recommenced his plaint.

"It is inconceivable that, knowing my cruel capacity for suffering, you should be indifferent to my present situation," he asserted, half violently, half fretfully. "The whole range of history would fail to offer a case of parallel callousness. You, whose personality has penetrated the recesses of my being! You, who are acquainted with the infinite intricacy of my mental and emotional organisation! A touch will endanger the harmony of that exquisite mechanism. The interpenetration of the component parts of my being is too complete. I exist, I receive sensations, I suffer, I rejoice, as a whole. And this lays me open to universal, to incalculable, pain. Now my nerves are shattered—intellectual, moral, physical anguish permeate in every part. I rally my self-reverence, my nobility of soul. I make efforts. By day I visit spots of natural beauty and objects of art. But these refuse to gratify me. My thought is too turgid to receive the impress of them. Concentration is impossible to me. Feverish agitation perverts my imagination. My ideas are fugitive. I endure a chronic delirium. This by day," he extended one hand with a despairing gesture, "but by night——"

"Oh, I implore you," Helen interrupted, "spare me the description of your nights! The subject is a hardly modest one. And then, at various times, I have already heard so very much about them, those nights!"

Calmly she resumed her walk. The amazing vanity of the young man's speech appeased her, in a measure, since it fed her contempt. Let him sink himself beyond all hope of recovery, that was best. Let him go down, down, in exposition of fatuous self-conceit. When he was low enough, then she would kick him! Meanwhile her eyes, ever greedy of incident and colour, registered the scene immediately submitted to them. In the centre of the piazza, women—saffron and poppy-coloured handkerchiefs tied round their dark heads—washed, with a fine impartiality, soiled linen and vegetables in an iron trough, grated for a third of its length, before a fountain of debased and flamboyant design. Their voices were alternately shrill and gutteral. It was perhaps as well not to understand too clearly all which they said. On the left came a break in the high, painted house-fronts, off which in places the plaster scaled, and from the windows of which protruded miscellaneous samples of wearing apparel and bedding soliciting much-needed purification by means of air and light. In the said break was a low wall where coarse plants rooted, and atop of which lay some half-dozen ragged youths, outstretched upon their stomachs, playing cards. The least decrepit of the beggars, armed with Helen's largesse of copper coin, had joined them from beneath the portico. Gambling, seasoned by shouts, imprecations, blows, grew fast and furious. In the steep roadway on the right a dray, loaded with barrels, creaked and jolted upward. The wheels of it were solid discs of wood. The great, mild-eyed, cream-coloured oxen strained, with slowly swinging heads, under the heavy yoke. Scarlet, woolen bands and tassels adorned their broad foreheads and wide-sweeping, black-tipped horns, and here and there a scarlet drop their flanks, where the goad had pricked them too shrewdly. And upon it all the unrelenting southern sun looked down, and Helen de Vallorbes' unrelenting eyes looked forth. One of those quick realisations of the inexhaustible excitement of living came to her. She looked at the elegant young man walking beside her, apprised, measured, him. She thought of Richard Calmady, self-imprisoned in the luxurious villa, and of the possibilities of her, so far platonic, relation to him. She glanced down at her own rustling skirts and daintily-shod feet traveling over the hot stones, then at the noisy gamblers, then at the women washing, with that consummate disregard of sanitation, food and raiment together in the rusty iron trough by the fountain. The violent contrasts, the violent lights and shadows, the violent diversities of purpose and emotion, of rank, of health, of fortune and misfortune, went to her head. Whatever the risks or dangers that excitement remained inexhaustible. Nay, those very dangers and risks ministered to its perpetual upflowing. It struck her she had been over-scrupulous, weakly conscientious, in making confession and seeking absolution. Such timid moralities do not really shape destiny, control or determine human fate. The shouting, fighting youths there, with their filthy pack of cards and few centissimi, sprawling in the unstinted sunshine, were nearer the essential truth. They were the profound, because the practical philosophers! Therefore let us gamble, gamble, gamble, be the stake small or great, as long as the merest flicker of life, or fraction of uttermost farthing, is left! And so, when Destournelle took up his lament again, she listened to him, for the moment, with remarkable lightness of heart.

"I appeal to you in the name of my as yet unwritten poems, my masterpieces for which France, for which the whole brotherhood of letters, so anxiously waits, to put a term to this appalling chastisement!"

"Delicious!" said Helen, under her breath.

"Your classicism is the natural complement of my mediævalism. The elasticity, the concreteness, of your temperament fertilised the too-brooding introspectiveness of my own. It lightened the reverence which I experience in the contemplation of my own nature. It induced in me the hint of frivolity which is necessary to procure action. Our union was as that of high-noon and impenetrable night. I anticipated extraordinary consequences."

"Marriage of a butterfly and a bat? Yes, the progeny should be surprising, little animals certainly," commented Madame de Vallorbes.

"In deserting me you have rendered me impotent. That is a crime. It is an atrocity. You assassinate my genius."

"Then, indeed, I have reason to congratulate myself on my ingenuity," she returned, "since I succeeded in the assassination of the non-existent!"

"You, who have praised it a thousand times—you deny the existence of my genius?" almost shrieked M. Destournelle. He was very much in earnest, and in a very sorry case. His limbs twitched. He appeared on the verge of an hysteric seizure. To plague him thus was a charmingly pretty sport, but one safest carried on with closed doors—not in so public a spot.

"I do not deny the existence of anything, save your right to make a scene and render me ridiculous as you repeatedly did at Pisa."

"Then you must return to me."

"Oh! la, la!" cried Helen.

"That you should leave me and live in your cousin's house constitutes an intolerable insult."

"And where, pray, would you have me live?" she retorted, her temper rising, to the detriment of diplomacy. "In the street?"

"It appears to me the two localities are synonymous—morally."

Madame de Vallorbes drew up. Rage almost choked her. M. Destournelle's words stung the more fiercely because the insinuation they contained was not justified by fact. They brought home to her her non-success in a certain direction. They called up visions of that unknown rival, to whom—ah, how she hated the woman!—Richard Calmady's affections were, as she feared, still wholly given. That her relation to him was innocent, filled her with humiliation. First she turned to Zélie Forestier, who had followed at a discreet distance across the piazza.

"Go on," she said, "down the street. Find a cab, a clean one. Wait in it for me at the bottom of the hill."

Then she turned upon M. Destournelle.

"Your mind is so corrupt that you cannot conceive of an honest friendship, even between near relations. You fill me with repulsion—I measured the depth of your degeneracy at Pisa. That is why I left you. I wanted to breathe in an uninfected atmosphere. My cousin is a person of remarkable intellectual powers, of chivalrous ideals, and of superior character. He has had great troubles. He is far from well. I am watching over and nursing him."

The last statement trenched boldly on fiction. As she made it Madame de Vallorbes moved forward, intending to follow the retreating Zélie down the steep, narrow street. For a minute M. Destournelle paused to recollect his ideas. Then he went quickly after her.

"Stay, I implore you," he said. "Yes, I own at Pisa I lost myself. The agitation of composition was too much for me. My mind seethed with ideas. I became irritable. I comprehend I was in fault. But it is so easy to recommence, and to range oneself. I accept your assurances regarding your cousin. It is all so simple. You shall not return to me. You shall continue your admirable work. But I will return to you. I will join you at the villa. My society cannot fail to be of pleasure to your cousin, if he is such a person as you describe. In a milieu removed from care and trivialities I will continue my poem. I may even dedicate it to your cousin. I may make his name immortal. If he is a person of taste and ideals, he cannot fail to appreciate so magnificent a compliment. You will place this before him. You will explain to him how necessary to me is your presence. He will be glad to cooperate in procuring it for me. He will understand that in making these propositions I offer him a unique opportunity, I behave towards him with signal generosity. And if, at first, the intrusion of a stranger into his household should appear inconvenient, let him but pause a little. He will find his reward in the development of my genius and in the spectacle of our mutual felicity."

Destournelle spoke with great rapidity. The street which they had now entered, from the far end of the piazza, was narrow. It was encumbered by a string of laden mules, by a stream of foot passengers. Interruption of his monologue, short of raising her voice to screaming pitch, was impossible to Madame de Vallorbes. But when he ceased she addressed him, and her lips were drawn away from her pretty teeth viciously.

"Oh! you unspeakable idiot!" she said. "Have you no remnant of decency?"

"Do you mean to imply that Sir Richard Calmady would have the insolence, is so much the victim of insular prejudice as, to object to our intimacy?"

Madame de Vallorbes clapped her hands together in a sort of frenzy.

"Idiot, idiot," she repeated. "I wish I could kill you."

Suddenly M. Paul Destournelle had all his wits about him.

"Ah!" he said, with a short laugh, curiously resembling in its malice the bleating of the little goats, "I perceive that which constitutes the obstacle to our union. It shall be removed."

He lifted his Panama hat with studied elegance, and turning down a break-neck, side alley, called, over his shoulder:—

"Abientôt très chère madame."

CHAPTER VII

SPLENDIDE MENDAX

Unpunctuality could not be cited as among Madame de Vallorbes' offenses. Yet, on the morning in question, she was certainly very late for the twelve o'clock breakfast. Richard Calmady—awaiting her coming beneath the glistering dome of the airy pavilion, set in the angle of the terminal wall of the high-lying garden—had time to become conscious of slight irritation. It was not merely that he was constitutionally impatient of delay, but that his nerves were tiresomely on edge just now. Trifles had power to endanger his somewhat stoic equanimity. But when at length Helen emerged from the house irritation was forgotten. Moving through the vivid lights and shadows of the ilex and cypress grove, her appearance had a charm of unwonted simplicity. At first sight her graceful person had the effect of being clothed in a religious habit. Richard's youthful delight in seeing a woman walk beautifully remained to him. It received satisfaction now. Helen advanced without haste, a certain grandeur in her demeanour, a certain gloom, even as one who takes serious counsel of himself, indifferent to external things, at once actor in, and spectator of, some drama playing itself out in the theatre of his own soul. And this effect of dignity, of self-recollection, was curiously heightened by her dress—of a very soft and fine, woolen material, of spotless white, the lines of it at once flowing and statuesque. While as head-gear, in place of some startling construction of contemporary, Parisian millinery, she wore, after the modest Italian fashion, a black lace mantilla over her bright hair.

Arrived, she greeted Richard curtly, and without apology for delay accepted the contents of the first dish offered to her by the waiting men-servants, ate as though determinedly and putting a force upon herself, and—that which was unusual with her before sundown—drank wine. And, watching her, involuntarily Richard's thought traveled back to a certain luncheon party at Brockhurst, graced by the presence of genial, puzzle-headed Lord Fallowfeild and members of his numerous family, when Helen had swept in, even as now, had been self-absorbed, even as now. Of the drive to Newlands, all in the sad November afternoon, following on that luncheon, he also thought, of communications made by Helen during that drive, and of the long course of event and action directly or indirectly consequent on those communications. He thought of the fog, too, enveloping and almost choking him, when in the early morning driven by furies, still virgin in body as in heart, he had ridden out into a blank and sightless world hoping the chill of it would allay the fever in his blood,—and of the fog again, in the afternoon, from out which the branches of the great trees, like famine-stricken arms in tattered draperies, seemed to pluck evilly at the carriage, as he walked the smoking horses up and down the Newlands' drive, waiting for Helen to rejoin him. And now, somehow, that fog seemed to come up between him and the well-furnished breakfast-table, between him and the radiant expanse of the vivacious, capricious, half-classic, half-modern, mercantile city outstretched there, teeming, breeding, fermenting, in the fecundating heat of the noonday sun. The chill of the fog struck cold into his vitals now, giving him the strangest physical sensation. Richard straightened himself in his chair, passed his hands across his eyes impatiently. Brockhurst, and all the old life of it, was a subject of which he forbade himself remembrance. He had divorced himself from all that, cut himself adrift from it long ago. By an act of will, he tried to put it out of his mind now. But the fog remained—an actual clouding of his physical vision, blurring all he looked upon. It was horribly uncomfortable. He wished he was alone. Then he might have slipped down from his chair and, according to his poor capacity of locomotion, sought relief in movement.

Meanwhile, silently, mechanically, Helen de Vallorbes continued her breakfast. And as she so continued, in addition to his singular physical sensations of blurred vision and clinging chill, he became aware of a growing embarrassment and constraint between himself and his companion. So far, his and her intercourse had been easy and spontaneous, because superficial. Since that first interview on the terrace a tacit agreement had existed to avoid the personal note. Now, for cause unknown, that intercourse threatened entering upon a new phase. It was as though the concentration, the tension, which he observed in her, and of which he was sensible in himself, must of necessity eventuate in some unbosoming, some act—almost involuntary—of self-revelation. This unaccustomed silence and restraint seemed to Richard charged with consequences which, in his present condition of defective volition, he was powerless to prevent. And this displeased him, mastery of surrounding influences being very dear to him.

At last, coffee having been served, the men-servants withdrew to the house, but the constraint was not thereby lessened. Helen sat upright, her chin resting upon the back of her left hand, her eyes, under their drooping lids, looking out with a veiled fierceness upon the fair and glittering prospect. Richard saw her face in profile. The black mantilla draped her shoulders and bust with a certain austerity of effect. It was evident that—by something—she had been stirred to the extinction of her habitual vivacity and desire to shine. And Richard, for all his coolness of head and rather cynical maturity of outlook, had a restless suspicion of going forth—even as on that foggy morning at Brockhurst—into a blank and sightless world, full of hazardous possibility, where the safe way was difficult of discovery and where masked dangers might lurk. Solicitous to dissipate his discomfort he spoke a little at random.

"You must forgive me for being such an abominably bad host," he said courteously. "I am not quite the thing this morning, somehow. I had a little go of fever last night. My brain is like so much pulp."

Helen dropped her hand upon the table as though putting a term to an importunate train of thought.

"I have always understood the villa to be remarkably free from malaria," she remarked abstractedly.

"So it is. I quite believe that. The servants certainly keep well enough. But so, unfortunately, is not the port."

Helen turned her head. A vertical line was observable between her arched eyebrows.

"The port?" she repeated.

Richard swallowed his black coffee. Perhaps it might steady him and clear his head. The numbness of his faculties and senses alike exasperated him, filling him with a persuasion he would say precisely those things wisdom would counsel to leave unsaid.

"Yes—you know I generally go down and sleep on board the yacht."

There was a momentary pause. Madame de Vallorbes' lips parted in a soundless exclamation. Then she pushed back the modest folds of the mantilla, leaving her neck free. The action of her hands was very graceful as she did this, and she looked fixedly at Richard Calmady.

"I did not know that," she said slowly. Then added, as though reasoning out her own thought:—"And Naples harbour is admittedly one of the most pestilential holes on the face of the earth. Are you not tempting providence in the matter of disease, Richard? Are you not rather wantonly indiscreet?"

"On the contrary," he answered, and something of mockery touched his expression, "I see it quite otherwise. I have been congratulating myself on the praiseworthy abundance of my discretion."

And the words were no sooner out of his mouth than Richard cursed himself for a bungler, and a slightly vulgar one at that. But upon his hearer those same words worked a remarkable change. Her gloom, her abstraction, departed, leaving only a pretty pensiveness. She smiled with chastened sweetness upon Richard Calmady—a smile nicely attuned to the semi-religious simplicity of her dress.

"Ah! perhaps we are both a trifle out of sorts this morning!" she said. "I, too, have had my little turn of sickness—sickness of heart. And that seems unfair, since I rose in the best disposition of spirit. Quite early I went to confession."

"Confession?" Richard repeated. "I did not know your submission to the Church carried you to such practical lengths."

"Evidently we are each fated to make small discoveries regarding the habits of the other, to-day," she rejoined. "Possibly confession is to me just what those nights spent on board the yacht, lying in that malodorous harbour, are to you!"

Helen's smile broadened to a dainty naughtiness, infinitely provoking. But pensiveness speedily supervened. She folded her hands upon the edge of the table and looked down at them meditatively.

"I relieved my conscience. Not that there was much to relieve it of, thank heaven! We have lived austerely enough most of us, this winter in France. Only it becomes a matter of moral, personal cleanliness, after a time, all that—exaggerated, but very comfortable. Just as one takes one's bath twice daily, not that it is necessary but that it is a luxury of physical purity and self-respect, so one comes to go to confession. That is a luxury of moral purification. It is as a bath to the soul, ministering to the perfection of its cleanliness and health."

She looked up at Richard smiling, that same dainty naughtiness very present.

"You observe I am eminently candid. I tell you exactly how my religion affects me. I can only reach high-thinking through acts which are external and concrete. In short, I am a born sacramentalist."

And Richard listened, interested and entertained. Yet, since that strange blurring of fog still confused his vision and his judgment, vaguely suspicious that he missed the main intent of her speech. Suspicious as one who, listening to the clever patter of a conjurer, detects in it the effort to distract attention from some difficult feat of legerdemain, until that feat has passed from attempt merely into accomplished fact.

"And, indirectly, that is where my heart-sickness comes in," she continued, with a return to something of her former abstraction and gloom. "I was coming away, coming back here—and I was very happy. It is not often one can say that. And then—pouf—-like that," she brought her hands smartly together, "the charming bubble burst! For, upon the very church steps, I met a man whom I have every cause to hate."

As she spoke, the fog seemed to draw away, burnt up by the great, flaming sun-god there. Richard's brain grew clear—clearer, indeed, than in perfect health—and his still face grew more still than was, even to it, quite natural.

"Well?" he asked, almost harshly.

And Helen, whose faith in her own diplomacy had momentarily suffered eclipse, rejoiced. For the tone of his voice betrayed not disgust, but anxiety. It stirred her as a foretaste of victory. And victory had become a maddening necessity to her. Destournelle had forced her hand. His natural infirmity of purpose relieved her of the fear he could work her any great mischief. Yet his ingenuity, inspired by wounded vanity, might prove beyond her calculations. It is not always safe to forecast the future by experience of the past in relation to such a being as Destournelle! Therefore it became of supreme importance, before that gentleman had time further to obtrude himself, to bind Richard Calmady by some speech, some act, from which there was no going back. And more than just that. The sight of her ex-lover, though she now loathed him—possibly just because she so loathed him—provoked passion in her. It was as though only in a new intrigue could she rid herself of the remembrance of the old intrigue which was now so detestable to her. She craved to do him that deepest, most ultimate, despite. And passion cried out in her. The sight of him, though she loathed him, had made her utterly weary of chastity. All of which emotions—but held as hounds in a leash, ready to be slipped when the psychological moment arrived, and by no means to be slipped until the arrival of it—dictated the tenor of her next speech.

"Well," she answered, with an air of half-angry sincerity altogether convincing, "I really don't know that I am particularly proud of the episode. I know I was careless, that I laid myself open to the invidious comment, which is usually the reward of all disinterested action. One learns to accept it as a matter of course. And you see Paul Destournelle——"

"Oh, Destournelle!" Richard exclaimed.

"You have read him?"

"Every one has read him."

"And what do you think of him?"

"That his technique is as amazingly clever as his thought is amazingly rotten."

"I know—I know," she said eagerly. "And that is just what induced me to do all I could for him. If one could cut the canker away, give him backbone and decency, while retaining that wonderful technique, one would have a second and a greater Théophile Gautier."

Richard was looking full at her. His face had more colour, more animation, than usual.

"If—yes—if," he returned. "But that same if bulks mighty big to my mind."

"I know," she repeated. "Yet it seemed to me worth the attempt. And then, you understand,—who better?—that if one's own affairs are not conspicuously happy, one has all the more longing the affairs of others should be crowned with success. And this winter specially, among the sordid miseries, disgraces, deprivations, of the siege, one was liable to take refuge in an over-exalted altruism. It was difficult in so mad a world not to indulge in personal eccentricity—to the neglect of due worship of the great goddess Conventionality. With death in visible form at every street corner, one's sense of humour, let alone one's higher faculties, rebelled against the futility of such worship. So many detestable sights and sounds were perpetually presented to one—not to mention broth of abominable things daily for dinner—that one turned, with thanksgiving, to beautiful form in art, to perfectly felicitous words and phrases. The meaning of them mattered but little just then. They freed one from the tyranny of more or less disgusting fact. They satisfied eye and ear. One asked nothing more just then—luckily, you will say, since the animal Destournelle has very surely nothing more to give."

In speaking, Helen pushed her chair back, turning it sideways to the table. Her speech was alive with varied and telling inflections. Her smallest gesture had in it something descriptive and eloquent.

"And so I fell to encouraging the animal," she continued, almost plaintively, yet with a note of veiled laughter in her voice. "Reversing the order of Circe—Naples inclines one to classic illustration, sometimes a little hackneyed—by the way, speaking of Naples, look at the glory of it all just now, Richard!—I tried to turn, not men to swine, but swine to men. And I failed, of course. The gods know best. They never attempt metamorphosis on the ascending scale! I let Destournelle come to see me frequently. The world advised itself to talk. But, being rather bitterly secure of myself, I disregarded that. If one is aware that one's heart was finally and long ago disposed of, one ceases to think seriously of that side of things. You must know all that well enough—witness the sea-born furnishings of my bedroom up-stairs!"

For half a minute she paused. Richard made no comment.

"Hard words break no bones," she added lightly. "And so, to show how much I despised all such censorious cackle, I allowed Destournelle to travel south with me when I left Paris."

"You pushed neglect of the worship of conventionality rather far," Richard said.

Helen rose to her feet. Excitement gained on her, as always during one of her delightful improvisations, her talented viva voce improvements on dry-as-dust fact. She laughed softly, biting her lip. More than one hound had been slipped by now. They made good running. She stood by Richard Calmady, looking down at him, covering him, so to speak, with her eyes. The black mantilla no longer veiled her bright head. It had fallen to the ground, and lay a dark blot upon the mellow fairness of the tesselated pavement. White-robed, statuesque—yet not with the severe grace of marble, but with that softer, more humanly seductive grace of some figure of cunningly tinted ivory—she appeared, just then, to gather up in herself all the poetry, the intense and vivid light, the victorious vitality, of the clear, burning, southern noon.

"Ah, well, conventionality proved perfectly competent to avenge herself!" she exclaimed. "The animal Destournelle took the average, the banal view, as might have been anticipated. He had the insane presumption to suppose it was himself, not his art, in which I was interested. I explained his error, and departed. I recovered my equanimity. That took time. I felt soiled, degraded. And then to-day I meet him again, unashamed, actually claiming recognition. I repeated my explanation with uncompromising lucidity——"

Richard moved restlessly in his chair, looking up almost sharply at her.

"Waste of breath," he said. "No explanation is lucid if the hearer is unwilling to accept it."

And then the two cousins, as though they had reached unexpectedly some parting of the ways, calling for instant decision in respect of the future direction of their journey, gazed upon one another strangely—each half defiant of the other, each diligent to hide his own and read the other's thought, each sensible of a crisis, each at once hurried and arrested by suspicion of impending catastrophe, unless this way be chosen that declined—though it seemed, in good truth, not in their keeping, but in that of blind chance only that both selection and rejection actually resided. And, in this strait, neither habit of society, fine sword-play of diplomacy and tact, availed to help them. For suddenly they had outpaced all that, and brought up amongst ancient and secular springs of action and emotion before which civilisation is powerless and the ready tongue of fashion dumb.

But even while he so gazed, in fateful suspense and indecision, the fog came up again, chilling Richard Calmady's blood, oppressing his brain as with an uprising of foul miasma, blurring his vision, so that Helen's fair, downward-gazing face was distorted, rendered illusive and vague. And, along with this, distressing restlessness took him, compelling him to seek relief in change of posture and of place. He could not stop to reckon with how that which he proposed to do might strike an onlooker. His immediate sensations filled his whole horizon. Silently he slipped down from his chair, stood a moment, supporting himself with one hand on the edge of the table, and then moved forward to that side of the pavilion which gave upon the garden. Here the sunshine was hot upon the pavement, and upon the outer half of each pale, slender column. Richard leant his shoulder against one of these, grateful for the genial heat.

Since her first and somewhat inauspicious meeting with him in childhood, Helen had never, close at hand, seen Richard Calmady walk thus far. She stared, fascinated by that cruel spectacle. For the instant transformation of the apparently tall, and conspicuously well-favoured, courtly gentleman, just now sitting at table with her, into the shuffling, long-armed, dwarfed and crippled creature was, at first utterly incredible, then portentous, then, by virtue of its very monstrosity, absorbing and, to her, adorable, whetting appetite as veritable famine might. Chastity became to her more than ever absurd, a culpable waste of her own loveliness, of sensation, of emotion, a sin against those vernal influences working in this generous nature surrounding her and working in her own blood. All the primitive instinct of her womanhood called aloud in her that she must wed—must wed. And the strident voice of the great, painted city coming up to her, urgent, incessant, carried the same message, as did the radiant sea, whose white lips kissed the indented coast-line as though pale and hungry with love. While the man before her, by his very abnormality and a certain secretness inevitable in that, heightened her passion. He was to her of all living men most desirable, so that she must win him and hold him, must see and know.

In a few steps, light as those of the little, rose-crowned dancer of long ago, she followed him across the shining floor. There was a point of north in the wind, adding exhilaration to the firm sunshine as ice to rare wine. The scent of narcissus, magnolia, and lemon blossom was everywhere. The cypresses yielded an aromatic, myrrh-like sweetness. The uprising waters of the fountain, set in the central alley, swerved southward, falling in a jeweled rain. Helen, in her spotless raiment, came close and Richard Calmady turned to her. But his eyes no longer questioned hers. They were as windows opening back on to empty space, seeing all, yet telling nothing. His face had become still again and inscrutable, lightened only by that flickering, mocking smile. It seemed as though the psychological moment were passed and social sense, ordinary fashions of civilised intercourse, had not only come back but come to stay.

"I think we will omit Destournelle from our talk in future," he said. "As a subject of conversation I find he disagrees with me, notwithstanding his felicity of style and his admirable technique. I will give orders which, I hope, may help to protect you from annoyance in future. In this delightful land, by wise exercise of just a little bribery and corruption, it is still possible to make the unwelcome alien prefer to seek health and entertainment elsewhere. Now, will you like to go back to the house?"

The approach to the pavilion from the lower level of the garden was by a carefully graded slope of Roman brick, set edgewise. At regular intervals of about eighteen inches this was crossed—on the principle of a gang-plank—by raised marble treads. Without waiting for his cousin's reply, Richard started slowly down the slope. At the best of times this descent for him demanded caution. Now his vision was again so queerly blurred that he miscalculated the distance between the two lowest treads, slipped and stumbled, lunging forward. Quick as a cat, Madame de Vallorbes was behind him, her right hand grasping his right elbow, her left hand under his left armpit.

"Ah! Dickie, Dickie, don't fall!" she cried, a sudden terror in her voice.

Her muscles hardened like steel. It needed all her strength to support him, for he was heavy, his body inert as that of one fainting. For a moment his head rested against her bosom; and her breath came short, sighing against his neck and cheek.

By sheer force of will Richard recovered his footing, disengaging himself from her support, shuffling aside from her.

"A thousand thanks, Helen," he said.

Then he looked full at her, and she—untender though she was—perceived that the perspective of space on which, as windows might, his eyes seemed to open back, was not empty. It was peopled, crowded—even as those steep, teeming byways of Naples—by undying, unforgetable misery, humiliation, revolt.

"Yes, it is rather unpardonable to be—as I am—isn't it?" he said. Adding hastily, yet with a certain courteous dignity:—"I am ashamed to trouble you, to ask you—of all people—to run messages for me—but would you go on to the house——"

"Dickie, why may not I help you?" she interrupted.

"Ah!" he said, "the answer to that lies away back in the beginning of things. Even unlucky devils, such as myself, are not without a certain respect for that which is fitting, for seemliness and etiquette. Send one of my men please. I shall be very grateful to you—thanks."

And Helen de Vallorbes, her passion baulked and therefore more than ever at white heat, swept up the paved alley, amid the sweet scents of the garden, beneath the jeweled rain of the fountain, that point of north in the wind dallying with her as in laughing challenge, making her the more mad to have her way with Richard Calmady, yet knowing that of the two—he and she—he was the stronger as yet.

CHAPTER VIII

IN WHICH HELEN DE VALLORBES LEARNS HER RIVAL'S NAME

"I hear Morabita sings, in Ernani, at the San Carlo on Friday night. Do you care to go, Helen?"

The question, though asked casually, had, to the listener, the effect of falling with a splash, as of a stone into a well, awakening unexpected echoes, disturbing, rather harshly, the constrained silence which had reigned during the earlier part of dinner.

All the long, hot afternoon, Madame de Vallorbes had been alone—Richard invisible, shut persistently away in those rooms of the entresol into which, as yet, she had never succeeded in penetrating. Richard had not proposed to her to do so. And it was part of that praiseworthy discretion which she had agreed with herself to practise—in her character of scrupulously unexacting guest—only to accept invitations, never to issue them. How her cousin might occupy himself, whom even he might receive, during the time spent in those rooms, she did not know. And it was idle to inquire. Neither of her servants, though skilful enough, as a rule, in the acquisition of information, could, in this case, acquire any. And so it came about that during those many still bright hours, following on her rather agitated parting with Richard at midday, while she paced the noble rooms of the first floor—once more taking note of their costly furnishings and fine pictures, meeting her own restless image again and again in their many mirrors—and later, near sundown, when she walked the dry, brown pathways of the ilex and cypress grove, the wildest suspicions of his possible doings assailed her. For she was constrained to admit that, though she had spent a full week now under his roof, it was but the veriest fringe, after all, of the young man's habits and thought with which she was actually acquainted. And this not only desperately intrigued her curiosity, but the apartness, behind which he entrenched himself and his doings, was as a slight put upon her and consequent source of sharp mortification. So to-day she ranged all permitted spaces of the villa and its grounds softly, yet lithe, watchful, fierce as a she-panther—her ears strained to hear, her eyes to see, driven the while by jealousy of that nameless rival, to remembrance of whom all the whole place was dedicated, and by baffled passion, as with whips.

Nor did superstition fail to add its word of ill-omen at this juncture. A carrion crow, long-legged, heavy of beak, alighting on the clustered curls of the marble bust of Homer, startled her with vociferous croakings. A long, narrow, many-jointed, blue-black, evil-looking beetle crawled from among the rusty, fibrous, cypress roots across her path. A funeral procession, priest and acolytes, with lighted tapers, sitting within the glass-sided hearse at head and foot of the flower-strewn coffin, wound slowly along the dusty, white road—bordered by queer growth of prickly-pear and ragged, stunted palm-trees—far below. She crossed herself, turning hurriedly away. Yet, for an instant, Death, triumphant, hideous, inevitable, and all the spiritual terror and physical disgust of it, grinned at her, its fleshless face, as it seemed, close against her own. And alongside Death—by some malign association of ideas and ugly antic of profanity—she saw the bel tête de Jesu of M. Paul Destournelle as she had seen it this morning, he looking back, hat in hand, as he plunged down the break-neck, Neapolitan side-street, with that impish, bleating, goatlike laugh.

By the time the dinner-hour drew near she found her outlook in radical need of reconstruction, and to that end bade Zélie dress her in the crocus-yellow brocade, reserved for some emergency such as the present. It was a gown, surely, to restore self-confidence and induce self-respect! Fashioned fancifully, according to a picturesque, seventeenth-century, Venetian model, the full sleeves and the long-waisted bodice of it—this cut low, generously displaying her shoulders and swell of her bosom—were draped with superb guipure de Flandres à brides frisées and strings of seed pearls. All trace of ascetic simplicity had very certainly departed. Helen was resplendent—strings of seed pearls twisted in her honey-coloured hair, a clear red in her cheeks and hard brilliance in her eyes, bred of eager jealous excitement. She had, indeed, reached a stage of feeling in which the sight of Richard Calmady, the fact of his presence, worked upon her to the extent of dangerous emotion. And now this statement of his, and the question following it, caused the flame of the inward fires tormenting her to leap high.

"Ah! Morabita!" she exclaimed. "What an age it is since I have heard her sing, or thought about her! How is her voice lasting, Richard?"

"I really don't know," he answered, "and that is why I am rather curious to hear her. There was literally nothing but a voice in her case—no dramatic sense, nothing in the way of intelligence to fall back on. On that account it interested me to watch her. She and her voice had no essential relation to one another. Her talent was stuck into her, as you might stick a pin into a cushion. She produced glorious effects without a notion how she produced them, and gave expression—and perfectly just expression—to emotions she had never dreamed of. At the best of times singers are a feeble folk intellectually, but, of all singers I have known, she was mentally the very feeblest."

"No, perhaps she was not very wise," Helen put in, but quite mildly, quite kindly.

"And so if the voice went, everything went. And that made one reflect agreeably upon the remarkably haphazard methods employed by that which we politely call Almighty God in His construction of our unhappy selves. Design?—There's not a trace of design in the whole show. Bodies, souls, gifts, superfluities, deficiencies, just pitched together anyhow. The most bungling of human artists would blush to turn out such work."

Richard spoke rapidly. He had refused course after course. And now the food on his plate remained untasted. Seen in the soft light of the shaded candles his face had a strange look of distraction upon it, as though he too was restless with an intimate, deep-seated restlessness. His skin was less colourless than usual, his manner less colourless also. And this conferred a certain youthfulness on him, making him seem nearer—so Helen thought—to the boy she had known at Brockhurst, than to the man, whom lately, she had been so signally conscious that she failed to know.

"No, I hope Morabita's voice remains to her," he continued. "Her absolute nullity minus it is disagreeable to think of. And much as I relish collecting telling examples of the fatuity of the Creator—she, voiceless, would offer a supreme one—I would spare her that, poor dear. For she was really rather charming to me at one time."

"So it was commonly reported," Helen remarked.

"Was it?" Richard said absently.

Though as a rule conspicuously abstemious, he had drunk rather freely to-night, and that with an odd haste of thirst. Now he touched his champagne tumbler, intimating to Bates, the house-steward—sometime the Brockhurst under butler—that it should be refilled.

"I can't have seen Morabita for nearly three years," he went on. "And my last recollections of her are unfortunate. She had sent me a box, in Vienna it was I think, for the Traviata. She was fat then, or rather, fatter. Stage furniture leaves something to desire in the way of solidity. In the death scene the middle of the bed collapsed. Her swan-song ceased abruptly. Her head and heels were in the air, and the very largest rest of her upon the floor, bed and bedclothes standing out in a frill all around. It was a sight discouraging to sentiment. I judged it kinder not to go to supper with her after the performance that night."

Richard paused, again drained his glass.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "what atrocious nonsense I am talking!"

"I think I rather enjoy it," Madame de Vallorbes answered. She looked at the young man sideways, from under her delicate eyelids. He was perfectly sober—of that there was no question. Yet he was less inaccessible, somehow, than usual. She inclined to experiment.—"Only I am sorry for Morabita in more ways than one, poor wretch. But then perhaps I am just a little sorry for all those women whom you reject, Richard."

"The women whom I reject?" he said harshly.

"Yes, whom you reject," Helen repeated.—Then she busied herself with a small black fig, splitting it deftly open, disclosing the purple, and rose, and clear living greens of the flesh and innumerable seeds of it, colours rich as those of a tropic sky at sunset.—"And there are so many of those women it seems to me! I am coming to have a quite pathetic fellowship for them." She buried her white teeth in the softness of the fig.—"Not without reason, perhaps. It is idle to deny that you are a pastmaster in the ungentle art of rejection. What have you to say in self-defense, Dickie?"

"That talking nonsense appears to be highly infectious—and that it is a disagreeably oppressive evening."

Helen de Vallorbes smiled upon him, glanced quickly over her shoulder to assure herself the servants were no longer present—then spoke, leaning across the corner of the table towards him, while her eyes searched his with a certain daring provocation.

"Yes, I admit I have finished my fig. Dinner is over. And it is my place to disappear according to custom."—She laid her rosy finger-tips together, her elbows resting on the table. "But I am disinclined to disappear. I have a number of things to say. Take that question of going to the opera, for instance. Half Naples will be there, and I know more than half Naples, and more than half Naples knows me. I do not crave to run incontinently into the arms of any of de Vallorbes' many relations. They were not conspicuously kind to me when I was here as a girl and stood very much in need of kindness. So the question of going to the San Carlo, you see, requires reflection. And then,"—her tone softened to a most persuasive gentleness,—"then, the evenings are a trifle long when one is alone and has nothing very satisfactory to think about. And I have been worried to-day, detestably worried."—She looked down at her finger-tips. Her expression became almost sombre. "In any case I shall not plague you very much longer, Richard," she said rather grandly. "I have determined to remove myself bag and baggage. It is best, more dignified to do so. Reluctantly I own that. Here have I no abiding city. I wish I had, perhaps, but I haven't. Therefore it is useless, and worse than useless, to play at having one. One must just face the truth."

She looked full at the young man, smiling at him, as though somehow forgiving him a slight, an unkindness, a neglect.

"And so, just because to you it all matters so uncommonly little, let us talk rather longer this evening."

She rose.

"I'll go on into the long drawing-room," she said. "The windows were still open there when I came in to dinner. The room will be pleasantly cool. You will come?"

And she moved away quietly, thoughtfully, opened the high double-doors, left them open, and that without once looking back. Yet her hearing was strained to catch the smallest sound above that which accompanied her, namely, the rustling of her dress. Then a queer shiver ran all down her spine and she set her teeth, for she perceived that halting, shuffling footsteps had begun to follow those light and graceful footsteps of her own.

"Ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute," she said to herself. "I have no fear for the rest."

Yet, crossing the near half of the great room, she sank down on a sofa, thankful there was no farther to go. In the last few minutes she had put forth more will-power, felt more deeply, than she had supposed. Her knees gave under her. It was a relief to sit down.

The many candles in the cut-glass chandeliers, hanging from along the centre of the painted ceiling, were lighted, filling the length and breadth of the room with a bland, diffused radiance. It touched picture and statue, tall mirror, rich curtain, polished woodwork of chair and table, gleaming ebony and ivory cabinet. It touched Helen de Vallorbes' bright head and the strings of pearls twisted in her hair, her white neck, the swell of her bosom, and all that delicate wonder of needlework—the Flanders' lace—trimming her bodice. It lay on her lap, too, as she leaned back in the corner of the sofa, her hands pressed down on either side her thighs—lay there bringing the pattern of her brocaded dress into high relief. This was a design of pomegranates—leaves, flowers, and fruit—and of trailing, peacock feathers, a couple of shades lighter than the crocus-yellow ground. The light took the over-threads and stayed in them.

The window stood wide open on to the balcony, the elaborately wrought-ironwork of which—scroll and vase, plunging dolphin and rampant sea-horse—detached itself from the opaque background of the night. And in at the window came luscious scents from the garden below, a chime of falling water, the music, faint and distant, in rising and falling cadence of a marching military band. In at it also, and rising superior to all these in imperativeness and purpose, came the voice of Naples itself—no longer that of a city of toil and commerce, but that of a city of pleasure, a city of licence, until such time as the dawn should once again break, and the sun arise, driving back man and beast alike to labour, the one from merry sinning, the other from hard-earned sleep. And once again, but in clearer, more urgent, accents, the voice of the city repeated its message to Helen de Vallorbes, calling aloud to her to do even as it was doing, namely, to wed—to wed. And, hearing it, understanding that message, for a little space shame took her, in face both of its and her own shamelessness, so that she closed her eyes, unable for the moment to look at Richard Calmady as he crossed the great room in that bland and yet generous light. But, almost immediately, his voice, cold and measured in tone, there close beside her, claimed her attention.

"That which you said at dinner rather distresses me, Helen."

Then, shame or no shame, Madame de Vallorbes, of necessity, opened her eyes. And, so doing, it needed all her self-control to repress a cry. She forced her open hands down very hard on the mattress of the sofa. For Richard leaned his back against the jamb of the open window, and she saw his face and all his poor figure in profile. His left hand hung straight at his side, the tips of his fingers only just not touching the floor. And again, as at midday the spectacle of his deformity worked upon her strangely.

"What of all that which I said at dinner distresses you?" she asked gently, with sudden solicitude.

"You showed me that I have been a wretchedly negligent host."—In speaking, the young man turned his head and looked at her, paused a moment, almost startled by her resplendent aspect. Then he looked down at his own stunted and defective limbs. His expression became very grim. He raised his shoulders just perceptibly. "I reproach myself with having allowed you to be so much alone. It must have been awfully dull for you."

"It was a little dull," Helen said, still gently.

"I ought to have begged you to ask some of the people you know in Naples to come here. It was stupid of me not to think of it. I need not have seen them, neither need they have seen me."

He looked at her steadily again, as though trying to fix her image in his memory.

"Yes, it was stupid of me," he repeated absently. "But I have got into churlish, bachelor habits—that can hardly be helped, living alone, or on board ship, as I do—and I have pretty well forgotten how to provide adequately for the entertainment of a guest."

"Oh! I have had that which I wanted, that which I came for," Helen answered, very charmingly,—"had it in part, at all events. Though I could have put up with just a little more of it, Dickie, perhaps."

"I warned you, if you remember, that opportunities of amusement—as that word is generally understood—would be limited."

"Amusement?" she exclaimed, with an almost tragic inflection of contempt.

"Oh yes!" he said, "amusement is not to be despised. I'd give all I am worth, half my time, to be amused—but that again, like hospitality, is rather a lost art with me. You remember, I warned you life at the villa in these days was not precisely hilarious."

Helen clapped her hands together.

"Ah! you are wilfully obtuse, you are wilfully, cruelly pigheaded!" she cried. "Pardon me, dear Richard, but your attitude is enough to exasperate a saint. And I am no saint as yet. I am still human—radically, for my own peace of mind lamentably, human. I am only too capable of being grieved, humiliated, hurt. But there, it is folly to say such things to you! You are hopelessly insensible to all that. So I take refuge in quoting your own words of this morning against you—that no explanation is lucid if the hearer refuses to accept it."

"I am dull, no doubt, but honestly I fail to see how that remark of mine can be held to apply in the present case."

"It applies quite desolatingly well!" Helen declared, with spirit. Then her manner softened into a seductiveness of forgiveness once again.—"And so, dear Richard, I am glad that I had already determined to leave here to-morrow. It would have been a little too wretched to arrive at that determination after this conversation. You must go alone to hear your old flame, Morabita, sing. Only, if her voice is still as sympathetic as of old, if it moves you from your present insensibility, you may read remembrance of some aspects of my visit into the witchery of it if you like. It may occur to you what those aspects really meant."

Helen smiled upon him, leaning a little forward. Her eyes shone, as though looking out through unshed tears.

"It's not exactly flattering to one's vanity to be compelled to depute to another woman the making of such things clear. But it is too evident I waste my time in attempting to make them clear myself. No explanation is lucid, et cætera——"

Helen shook back her head with an extraordinary charm of half-defiant, half-tearful laughter. She was playing a game, her whole intelligence bent on the playing of it skilfully. Yet she was genuinely touched. She was swayed by her very real emotion. She spoke from her heart, though every word, every passing action, subserved her ultimate purpose in regard to Richard Calmady.

"And, after all, one must retain some remnant of self-respect with which to cover the nakedness of one's—— Oh yes! decidedly, Morabita's voice had best do the rest."

Richard had moved from his station in the window. He stood at the far end of the sofa, resting his hands on the gilded and carven arm of it. Now the ungainliness of his deformity was hidden, and his height was greater than that of his companion, obliging her to look up at him.

"I gave you my word, Helen," he said, "I have no notion what you are driving at."

"Driving at, driving at?" she cried. "Why, the self-evident truth that you are forcing me rather brutally to pay the full price of my weakness in coming here, in permitting myself the indulgence of seeing you again. You told me directly I arrived, with rather cynical frankness, that I had not changed. That is quite true. What I was at Brockhurst, four years ago, what I then felt, that I am and that I feel still. Oh! you have nothing to reproach yourself with in defect of plain speaking, or excess of amiable subterfuge! You hit out very straight from the shoulder! Directly I arrived you also told me how you had devoted this place—with which, after all, I am not wholly unconnected—to the cult, to the ideal worship, of a woman whom you loved."

"So I have devoted it," Richard said.

"And yet I was weak enough to remain!"

The young man's face relaxed, but its expression remained enigmatic.

"And why not?" he asked.

"Because, in remaining, I have laid myself open to misconstruction, to all manner of pains and penalties, not easy to be endured, to the odious certainty of appearing contemptible in your estimation as well as in my own."

Helen patted her pretty foot upon the floor in a small frenzy of irritation.

"How can I hope to escape, since even the precious being whom you affect to worship you keep sternly at arm's length, that is among the other pleasing things you confided to me immediately on my arrival—lest, seen at close quarters, she should fall below your requirements and so you should suffer disillusion. Ah! you are frightfully cold-blooded, repulsively inhuman. Whether you judge others by yourself, reckoning them equally devoid of natural feeling, or whether you find a vindictive relish in rejecting the friendship and affection so lavishly offered you——"

"Is it offered lavishly? That comes as news to me," he put in.

"Ah! but it is. And I leave you to picture the pleasing entertainment afforded the offerer in seeing you ignore the offering, or, worse still, take it, examine it, and throw it aside like a dirty rag! In one case you underline your rejection almost to the point of insult."

"This is very instructive. I am learning a whole lot about myself," Richard said coolly.

"But look," Madame de Vallorbes cried, "do you not prefer exposing yourself to the probability of serious illness rather than remain under the same roof with me? The inference hits one in the face. To you the pestilential exhalations, the unspeakable abominations, of Naples harbour appear less dangerous than my near neighbourhood."

"You put it more strongly than I should," he answered, smiling. "Yet, from a certain standpoint, that may very well be true."

For an instant Helen hesitated. Her intelligence, for all its alertness, was strained exactly to appraise the value of his words, neither over, nor under, rating it. And her eyes searched his with a certain boldness and imperiousness of gaze. Richard, meanwhile, folding his arms upon the carven and gilt frame of the sofa, looked back at her, smiling still, at once ironically and very sadly. Then swift assurance came to her of the brazen card she had best play. But, playing it, she was constrained to avert her eyes and set her glance pensively upon the light-visited surface of her crocus-yellow, silken lap.

"I will do my best possible to accept your nightly journeys as a compliment in disguise, then," she said, quite softly. "For truly, when I come to think of it, were she, herself, here—she, the woman you so religiously admire that you take elaborate pains to avoid having anything on earth to do with her—were she herself here you could hardly take more extensive measures to secure yourself against risk of disappointment, hardly exercise a greater rage of caution!"

"Perhaps that's just it. Perhaps you have arrived at it all at last. Perhaps she is here," he said.

And he turned away, steadying himself with one hand against the jamb of the window, and shuffled out slowly, laboriously, onto the balcony into the night.

For a quite perceptible length of time Helen de Vallorbes continued to contemplate the light-visited surface of her crocus-yellow, silken lap. She followed the lines of the rich pattern—pomegranate, fruit and blossom, trailing peacock's feather. For by such mechanical employment alone could she keep the immensity of her excitement and of her triumph in check. To shout aloud, to dance, to run wildly to and fro, would have been only too possible to her just then. All that for which she had schemed, had ruled herself discreetly, had ridden a waiting race, had been hers, in fact, from the first—the prize adjudged before ever she left the starting-post. She held this man in the hollow of her hand, and that by no result of cunning artifice, but by right divine of beauty and wit and the manifold seductions of her richly-endowed personality. And, thinking of that, she clenched her dainty fists, opened them again, and again clenched them, upon the yielding mattress of the sofa, given over to an ecstasy of physical enjoyment, weaving even as, with clawed and padded paws, her prototype the she-panther might. Slowly she raised her downcast eyes and looked after Richard Calmady, his figure a blackness, as of vacancy, against the elaborate wrought-ironwork of the balcony. And so doing, an adorable sensation moved her, at once of hungry tenderness and of fear—fear of something unknown, in a way fundamental, incalculable, the like of which she had never experienced before. Ah! indeed, of all her many loves, here was the crown and climax! Yet, in the midst of her very vital rapture, she could still find time for remembrance of the little, crescent-shaped scar upon her temple, and for remembrance of Katherine Calmady, who had, unwittingly, fixed that blemish upon her and had also more than once frustrated her designs. This time frustration was not possible. She was about to revenge the infliction of that little scar! And, at the same time the intellectual part of her was agreeably intrigued, trying to disentangle the why and wherefore of Richard's late action and utterances. While self-love was gratified to the highest height of its ambition by the knowledge that not only in his heart had she long reigned, but that he had dedicated time and wealth and refined ingenuity to the idea of her, to her worship, to the making of this, her former dwelling-place, into a temple for her honour, a splendid witness to her victorious charm, a shrine not unfitting to contain the idol of his imagination.

For a little space she rested in all this, savouring the sweetness of it as some odour of costly sacrifice. For whatever her sins and lapses, Helen de Vallorbes had the fine æsthetic appreciations, as well as the inevitable animality, of the great courtesan. The artist was at least as present in her as the whore. And it was not, therefore, until realisation of her present felicity was complete, until it had soaked into her, so to speak, to the extent of a delicious familiarity, that she was disposed to seek change of posture or of place. Then, at last, softly, languidly, for indeed she was somewhat spent by the manifold emotions of the day, she rose and followed Richard into the starless, low-lying night. Her first words were very simple, yet to herself charged with far-reaching meaning—as a little key may give access to a treasure-chest containing riches of fabulous worth.

"Richard, is it really true, that which you have told me?"

"What conceivable object could I have in lying?"

"Then why have you delayed?—why wasted the precious days—the precious months and years, if it comes to that?"

"How in honour and decency could I do otherwise—circumstances being such as they are, I being that which I am?"

The two voices were in notable contrast. Both were low, both were penetrated by feeling. But the man's was hoarse and rasping, the woman's smooth and soft as milk.

"Ah! it is the old story!" she said. "Will you never comprehend, Dickie, that what is to you hateful in yourself, may to some one else be the last word of attraction, of seduction, even?"