Front matter (continued 2)

But if the yard seemed vast, how much vaster appeared the upper portions of the house! Sometimes when work was over Mr. Fawcus would let Mary accompany him on his tour of inspection round the deserted premises. She was allowed to climb up ladders and read the names of books stacked away on the highest shelves, dusty books with titles that sounded most uninteresting, although the recitation of them evidently gave great pleasure to Uncle William. And then one day in an attic she discovered hundreds of picture books, nearly all fairy stories. When she announced her discovery, Uncle William shook his head and muttered, "Old stock! Old stock!"

"But, Uncle William, they're not old. They're quite new. Really they are—quite bright and not a bit torn. I found The Three Bears and a story about a mother pig who frightened away a wolf when he came to gobble up her little pigs. And how do you think she did it? You'll never guess, Uncle William. Why, she rolled down the hill in a churn. What is a churn, Uncle William?"

This was exactly the kind of question dear to the heart of Mr. Fawcus, and before Mary went to bed that night she had been given an exhaustive discourse on dairy-farming, so that if she had listened as attentively as her aunt kept bidding her listen, she would have learned the difference between curds and whey, and all about rennet, and all about Stilton cheeses and Devonshire cream, and why butter won't come sometimes ... but alas! Mary did not listen, because her mind was far away upstairs in that attic.

It happened that the very next day she was sent on a message to one of the offices and that the gentleman to whom she gave the message, a dried-up gentleman with bright shining spectacles, asked her if she would like a penny to buy some lollipops.

"No, thank you, sir," said Mary, curtseying. "I'd like to go upstairs and look at those picture books at the top of the house."

Whereupon the dried-up gentleman mysteriously muttered, "Old stock! Old stock!" just like Uncle William yesterday.

"Why, you may go there whenever you like, my little maid," he told her.

"Fancy that!" exclaimed Mrs. Fawcus when she was informed of this by Mary. "Well, did you ever? I'm sure I never did. I never did know such an old-fashioned child in my life, Uncle William. Never! Fancy her asking such a thing of Mr. Bristowe."

"It's old stock," said Mr. Fawcus.

And Mary when she had been given leave by her uncle and aunt to avail herself of Mr. Bristowe's kind offer whispered "old stock" when she opened the door of that dusty attic, for she felt that it was an enchanted phrase like Open Sesame. The attic window looked down into the backyard of the basement, and Mary could not resist opening the window, for although she felt sure that she ought not to lean out of a window, inasmuch as she lived in a basement she had never actually been forbidden to lean out of windows. Yes, there were her flowers, such tiny specks of color, down below, and there was the dustbin looking more than ever like a knight in armor, and there was her thrush's cage. Hark! he was singing. She could hear his song above the thunder of the London streets. The attic window had a window-seat where Mary spent long lovely mornings in April reading those dusty picture books one after another, face to face with the clouds while the golden cross upon the dome of St. Paul's glittered in the sun. On the sill were the remains of a battered window-box still half full of earth. In this Mary sowed nasturtium seeds which grew miraculously, so that soon when Mary was in the yard she could look up and see the orange and yellow flowers waving in the wind against the dingy bricks of the warehouse.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel," she called. "Let down your golden hair."

"What are you talking about?" Mrs. Fawcus exclaimed.

"I'm being the witch," Mary told her.

"Which what?"

"The witch. The witch who climbed up to the tower by Rapunzel's golden hair."

"Did anybody ever hear anything like it?"

And when Mrs. Fawcus came out into the yard at Mary's invitation and looking up saw the nasturtiums, she was more exclamatory than ever.

"Well, it give me quite a turn," she vowed to Uncle William. "The like of that child was never known."

Nearly all the clerks in the office came up to look at Mary's nasturtiums; and Mr. Bristowe was so much delighted that he gave her a small red watering-can.

"It's a wonder the sparrows don't peck them to pieces," said Mr. Fawcus, when Mary's triumph was being discussed in the basement.

"If they did, they'd burn their tongues," said Mary.

"Well, now, did you ever hear a more old-fashioned remark?"

"Passer deliciæ meæ puellæ," boomed Mr. Fawcus.

Until Mary discovered that new world in the roof, her chief pleasure apart from the backyard had been a cellar in front of the basement which was lighted from a square of opaque glass set in the pavement of the street. She was willing to spend hours here, sitting on an old footstool, surrounded by her dolls and pretending to be a sea-nymph. A wet day, and it was chiefly on wet days that Mary frequented this cellar, heightened the illusion of being under the sea, because the skylight, if such an aperture may be called a skylight, when blurred with rain was more than usually aqueous, and the shadows of people passing overhead were more than usually like fish. Mrs. Fawcus, when she first heard of Mary's pastime, was moved to utter dark interpretations of it.

"Depend upon it, Uncle William, that child's life is going to be mixed up with deep water. Mark my words, she'll cross the sea many a time before she goes down to the grave."

"Do not vaticinate, my dear," her husband commanded. "Absit omen!"

"I don't know what you're talking about, but when any one thinks of that night ten years ago and when any one sees that dear innocent sitting out there and staring up at the fishes, as she calls them, well, any one may be forgiven for doing what any one's told by their husband they mustn't do."

"Ten years ago," Mr. Fawcus repeated. "So it is. I wish you'd keep your thoughts to yourself sometimes, Aunt Lucy. Ten years ago!"

She shuddered, for he was thinking of those fresh proposals to be made in ten years.

"Here's the money from the lawyers," said Mrs. Fawcus one morning in March, handing her husband the familiar envelope which had arrived regularly every quarter-day.

Mr. Fawcus, on whose countenance a decade of looking after the stock of Messrs. Holland and Brown had not left a mark, became suddenly old and flabby when he read through that letter. In that moment even his Latinity deserted him. The dreadful fact could not be evaded like so many other facts in his life by ponderous rhetoric and polysyllabic euphemisms.

"We've got to give her up," he groaned.

His wife snatched the letter from him.

"Where's Mary?" she asked, quickly looking round before she said anything Mary ought not to hear.

"She's gone up to her attic to sow the seeds I bought her yesterday. She wanted to try sweet sultans this year. She's up in the attic sowing sweet sultans."

Mr. Fawcus buried his face in his hands and bent low in unutterable despair, while his wife read the lawyer's letter.

151 Lamb's Conduit Street, W.C., March 24, 1870.

Dear Sir,

We are instructed by our Client, Lady Flower of Barton Hall, Barton Flowers, to say that she has decided to receive into her house her granddaughter, Miss Mary Flower. We beg to enclose in addition to the usual quarterly allowance of £25 a check for £50, in order that Miss Mary Flower may be suitably equipped for the journey to Paris, where Lady Flower is now living and where she wishes her granddaughter to join her. If you will give us a call at your earliest convenience, we shall be happy to provide you with any advice you may require in respect of the journey. Lady Flower desires us to thank you for the care you have taken of Miss Mary Flower and begs that if you have not already explained to her the peculiar circumstances in which you took charge of her you will do so now.

In case you may not be acquainted with the facts, we may add that a year after Mr. Edward Flower lost his life in the wreck of the Wizard Queen, his elder brother, Mr. John Flower, was killed in the hunting-field. By the death of Sir Richard Flower, which occurred last November, Lady Flower inherited the whole of his property and she is no doubt anxious to provide suitably for the youngest and only surviving member of the family.

Yours faithfully, Hepper and Philcox.

Mrs. Fawcus went across to where her husband was still sitting with bowed head.

"William!" she murmured. It was the first time in thirty-five years of married life that she had dared to call him simply that.

"William!" she repeated more confidently, for the outward semblance of things had not been changed by her daring address. "You must write them a letter."

"It would be useless, my dear," he muttered without raising his head. "Useless, utterly and completely useless. A labor of Sisyphus, my love."

Nevertheless, Mr. Fawcus was persuaded to try, and he composed the following letter to Messrs. Hepper and Philcox:

c/o Messrs. Holland and Brown, Publishers, 95 Paternoster Row, London, E.C., March 25, 1870. Dear Sirs,

Your communication of the 24th inst. with kind enclosures was duly received. For the moment I am too much disturbed by the situation thus created to express worthily my repugnance to the notion of losing Miss Mary Flower. I should esteem it a favor if you would, so far as the emotions of a suppositious father can be suitably conveyed through the medium of legal phraseology, convey to Her Ladyship that my good wife and myself are most anxious not to part with the child whom we literally snatched from the angry deep. With all respect I venture to observe that until this moment none of her relatives has shown the slightest concern for the child's welfare beyond the quarterly allowance of £25 sterling. Mrs. Fawcus and myself on the other hand have never felt anything but the profoundest affection for her, and I can assure you that we would have left ourselves with nothing more than the bare necessities of life rather than that she should have wanted for the least thing.

In the hope of shortly receiving from you a favorable reply to my request,

I am, Gentlemen, Your obedient servant, William Axworthy Fawcus.

It was settled not to say anything to Mary until the lawyers wrote again:

151 Lamb's Conduit Street, W.C. April 3, 1870. Dear Sir,

We have to say in answer to your letter of the 25th ult. that we have communicated the substance of your request to Lady Flower, and that she is unable to agree to your suggestion that Miss Mary Flower should remain in your care. We take this opportunity to point out that when in March, 1860, the late Sir Richard Flower invited you to look after his granddaughter he made it clear that such an arrangement was for ten years, at the end of which time he gave you to understand the future of the child would once more come up for discussion.

Hoping that we shall hear from you in the course of a day or two, appointing a time to call upon us,

We are, Yours faithfully, Hepper and Philcox.

"Who's to tell Mary?" Mrs. Fawcus asked with fear in her voice.

"Well, I had thought of your telling her," Mr. Fawcus admitted. "But perhaps the most equitable way would be for us both to tell her."

The worst of it was that, when they did brace themselves to tell her and were prepared at whatever cost to themselves to alleviate in every possible way her grief, Mary herself jumped for joy at the notion of visiting her grandmother in France.

"She doesn't mean to be cruel," said Mrs. Fawcus, patting her husband's arm reassuringly.

"No, no, certainly not," he agreed. "It's just the heedlessness of youth."

Mrs. Fawcus sighed.

"We were young once ourselves, Mr. Fawcus." The imminent departure of Mary made "Uncle William" sound ridiculous now, and Mrs. Fawcus went back to her time-honored mode of address.

"Many years ago, my love," he said, shaking his head. "And I'm afraid that you've had much to put up with since then. I have wasted my opportunities sadly. I ought to have been in a superb position by now."

"I'm sure I don't wish for anything better than what we've got," Mrs. Fawcus declared, trying to sound cheerful. "I'm sure as basements go, one couldn't wish for a nicer basement. It's so lovely and light for one thing."

"If I were to die, my dear, I'm convinced that Holland and Brown would offer you the refusal of my post."

"Oh, don't talk like that, Mr. Fawcus. Die? What ever next, to be sure?"

"Tempora, mutantur nos et mutamur in illis. It won't be the same without our Mary."

"You're going to make me cry if you keep on keeping on so." Mrs. Fawcus uttered a few warning sniffles.

At that moment she, who by her reception of the news had added the last bitterness to the separation, came dancing back from her dolls to whom as a great secret she had been telling about her departure.

"Do you think my granny will be like a fairy god-mother?" Mary asked. "Because if she is I shall ask her to wave her magic wand and bring my dear Uncle William and my dear Aunt Lucy to France."

"Will you, Mary, will you? But I'm too old and fat to be waved by fairy godmothers," said Mr. Fawcus sadly.

Mary began to understand at last that her going away was a grief to her kind guardians, and as she had often done before, when it seemed advisable to propitiate Uncle William, or when Uncle William came downstairs very angry over some new task that Holland and Brown had laid upon him, she asked him a question.

"How big is France, Uncle William?" And folding her hands across her clean pinafore she composed herself to listen more attentively to a long account of France than she had ever listened to any of Uncle William's exegetical discourses before.

But Uncle William did not answer, and Mary, horrified at his silence, began to cry.

"For goodness' sake, child, don't wipe your eyes on your clean pinafore," Mrs. Fawcus sharply adjured her. It was like Mrs. Fawcus to have put Mary into a clean pinafore just to learn that she was to be taken from them.

A shaft of sunlight, the first of the year to reach the basement, came glancing through the geraniums in the window and lit up the cosy kitchen; but it was a cruel shaft, for it lit up also the weary lines and the baggy eyes of Mr. Fawcus: it lit up the crows-feet and the wrinkles of his wife; and most cruelly of all it lit up Mary's auburn hair, reminding the old couple that, though the sun might shine all the summer through, here it would never shine again upon that auburn hair.

The next fortnight went by for Mary in such a whirl of exciting new experiences as no child of ten could be expected not to enjoy, and she was hardly to be blamed if she did appear hard-hearted in her behavior on the verge of parting with her guardians. She could hardly be blamed for not realizing how unlikely it was that she would ever see either of them again, and in justice to the old couple it must be said that neither of them tried to gratify their emotion at Mary's expense. Once the first shock had passed, they did their best to prepare her for a worthy entrance upon the new scene, at whatever cost to themselves. A number of dresses were bought, each one more outrageous than the last, and each one seeming as much more beautiful to Mary.

"I feel like Cinderella going to the ball," she told Mrs. Fawcus.

"Ah, my dear, you'll find that life isn't quite such a fairy story as you think it is now," replied Mrs. Fawcus.

And this was as near as she got to a hint of cynicism in her advice to the little girl.

For the visit to the lawyers Mr. Fawcus arrayed himself in a black suit he had not worn for eleven years, in fact, not since the annual prize-giving at the last school he owned. It had been packed in the bottom of a large trunk to go to Australia, where it was intended to be worn at the ceremonious welcomes that Mr. Fawcus hoped to receive in his new country. By good fortune this trunk had missed being put on board the Wizard Queen, and both Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus had been able to live for ten years on the clothes it had contained.

Mr. Hepper and Mr. Philcox were even more desiccated than Mr. Bristowe of Holland and Brown's. Both their waistcoats were dusty with snuff, so dusty that if Mr. Philcox had not happened to prick his finger while he was talking to Mary and displayed on the tip of it an infinitesimal but withal definitely recognizable drop of blood Mary might have thought that they were stuffed with sawdust like her own dolls.

"And what arrangements have you made for conveying Miss Flower to her grandmother?" asked Mr. Hepper.

"Mrs. Fawcus will conduct her to Paris," said Mr. Fawcus. "I should have taken her myself if I had not recorded a solemn vow on Dover Quay ten years ago never to cross the sea again."

"Ah, that would be after you were wrecked, no doubt," said Mr. Philcox. "Yes—um—ah! I've never been wrecked myself, Mr. Fawcus."

"It is an experience which happily falls to the lot of few," said Mr. Fawcus.

"Yes—um—ah! Then I may take it as definite that this young lady will leave by the Dover packet on Wednesday next. How is the glass, Mr. Hepper?"

"The glass is steady, Mr. Philcox."

"The glass augurs well for the voyage across, Mr. Fawcus. You hear what Mr. Hepper says."

"Is there anything more you wish to tell me?" Mr. Fawcus inquired, bowing to each of the partners in turn.

Mr. Hepper looked at Mr. Philcox, who shook his head.

"Nothing more, thank you, Mr. Fawcus," they declared in unison.

Mr. Fawcus was about to take his leave, when Mr. Philcox held up his hand.

"But wait a minute. Dear me, we have forgotten something. Yes—um—ah! Lady Flower instructed us that if on inquiries we should find that you had suitably performed your duty towards her granddaughter we should offer you this handsome token of appreciation."

Mr. Philcox flourished an envelope.

"I am happy to say, Mr. Fawcus, that our inquiries have proved perfectly satisfactory, and so perhaps you will take a little peep inside and also, I think, Mr. Hepper, it might be more in order if Mr. Fawcus were to sign this little receipt."

"Please thank her ladyship from me," said Mr. Fawcus grandly, putting the envelope down on the lawyer's table. "But the only token of her appreciation that I or Mrs. Fawcus should esteem would be an occasional communication from her lawyers if she does not care to write herself letting us know that—er—this young lady is well and happy. I wish you a very good morning, gentlemen." Mr. Fawcus made a bow, and left the office with Mary.

A few days later Mr. Fawcus, from the gliding shore, was waving farewell to the little girl.

"Don't forget to water my sweet sultans, Uncle William," Mary cried above the turmoil of the paddles.

"The less you say about water to poor Uncle William," Mrs. Fawcus commented almost sharply, "the better. It must have been just here that he carried you ashore in his arms ten years ago."

The steamer backed and brought poor Uncle William within earshot again.

"I was telling Mary that just about here you carried her ashore," Mrs. Fawcus called to her husband.

"Sunt lacrimæ rerum," he chanted, and, when this time the paddles churned up the water in earnest, Mr. Fawcus buried his face in a bandana handkerchief and waved a limp glove from the receding shore, a limp glove that pathetically expressed the condition of mind and body to which its owner was by now reduced.

The journey was too full of excitement for Mary to be long saddened by the vision of Mr. Fawcus on the quay. Most children remember their first Channel crossing; but this great event in Mary's case was made doubly noteworthy from its being the only adventure of any importance she had ever known, so placid had been her life in that Paternoster Row basement.

"Ah, you wouldn't be dancing about quite so gaily, Miss, if you could remember the first time you was on the sea," said Mrs. Fawcus. "Still, I'm bound to say you behaved very well then, all considering. Though why you didn't die of that perishing wind I'm sure I don't know, and that's a fact."

"Shall we be wrecked to-day, Aunt Lucy?"

"For the love of mercy, don't talk of such things," Mrs. Fawcus begged. "If you feel sick, chew a bit of lemon peel and let it come. Don't be afraid. Them as manages this boat have seen thousands of people sick. They don't consider it any more than blowing the nose, as you might say."

But Mary was not sick, and when Mrs. Fawcus came back to Paternoster Row she told her husband of this convincing indication of a mysterious bond between Mary and the sea.

"If I have a window-box in Paris," said Mary, when the chalk cliffs of England were become ghosts in the mist, "I shall plant sweet williams, because Uncle William is sweet, isn't he, Aunt Lucy?"

"Bless your heart, my little treasure," Mrs. Fawcus exclaimed as she clasped Mary to her heart. "It'll be meat and drink to poor Uncle William to hear that."

When the various difficulties of customs and porters and trains and cabs had been surmounted, and Mary holding tightly to the hand of Mrs. Fawcus was standing on the steps of her grandmother's house in the Avenue de Wagram, she felt a sudden desire to turn round and go back to the basement in Paternoster Row. So far it had all been a delightful adventure, but now she was tired of the adventure and was thinking about her thrush which always sang so sweetly in the month of April.

"Oh dear, I wish it was really a dream and that I was going to wake up now," she whispered to Mrs. Fawcus; but just then the door opened, and in a moment Mary was inside her grandmother's house.

She was vaguely aware, when she was stumping upstairs behind the footman, of tiger-skins and dark paneled walls and soft carpets; but before she had time to look round, two great doors had been flung open, and while Mrs. Fawcus drew back she had to walk over an immense slippery floor to where in a kind of inner room her grandmother was reading a yellow book by the fire. She heard from far away in that vast outer room the sharp whisper of Aunt Lucy: "Run along quick and give your grandmother a nice kiss." However, Mary did not dare to run, but stepped very carefully over the head first of a polar bear and then of a black bear until she stood before her grandmother's chair.

"I've come to see you, Grandmamma," she announced.

Lady Flower rose from her chair and looked critically at the little girl for a moment before she bent over and kissed her cheek.

"And is this good woman Mrs. Fawcus?" she asked.

"That's Aunt Lucy," said Mary.

Lady Flower frowned slightly.

"I expect you'll like a cup of tea after your journey, Mrs. Fawcus," she said, pulling a big purple bell-rope that hung before the fireplace.

"Oh, no, thank you, my lady. Nothing at all, thank you. I think I ought to be getting back to Mr. Fawcus as soon as possible."

"Is your husband waiting outside?" Lady Flower inquired.

"Oh, no, thank you, my lady. He sent many apologies for not coming too, but he's never been to sea since he was wrecked."

The footman came in at this moment, and Lady Flower told him to take Mrs. Fawcus downstairs for a cup of tea.

"Oh, no, thank you, my lady. Too kind of you, I'm sure, but I'd really rather be going, now that I've seen Mary safely here. I've arranged to go back to Calais and wait there the night. Mr. Fawcus thought he'd be less anxious that way than if I was to stay in Paris all by myself. We shall miss Mary most terribly, my lady. If I might just kiss her good-by and be off? I'm sure it's a pity Mr. Fawcus couldn't have come. He's much superior to me in every way."

"Well, if you insist on going back at once," said Lady Flower, who was beginning to think that after all she had nothing to say to Mrs. Fawcus, and who would have cut out her tongue rather than ask the one question she wanted to ask about the death of her son.

"Yes, indeed I think I will, my lady, and thank you kindly, I'm sure, for the offer of tea."

Mrs. Fawcus darted forward, kissed Mary passionately several times, and seemed to slide out of the room across the parquet and out of her life forever.

When Lady Flower was alone with her granddaughter she was more at ease. She was little changed by ten years; she was still the same delicately ivorine creature as when she banished this child's father from her heart with words of contempt for this child's mother. Not that she ever really did banish Edward; the death of her elder son with all his valor and renown did not touch her half so deeply as the loss of Edward. If it had not been for Sir Richard's determination to ignore Edward's offspring she might long ago have sent for Mary. Her husband's bitterness against Edward, drowned dead though he was by that time, was intensified when John was killed in the hunting-field. He declared fiercely to his wife that he was glad Edward had not left a son, for that he would rather the name and title of the Flowers should perish utterly than that the fruit of his son's disgraceful alliance with one of his own tenants should carry on both.

Mary was astonished to find how young her grandmother was. She had expected a very old lady—almost she had pictured her with a spinning-wheel and wearing a steeple-crowned hat—who would be bent double and talk in a high, cracked voice. Instead of that she found some one who looked much younger than Aunt Lucy.

"You'll have to go to school, you know," her grandmother was saying. "You'll have a great deal to learn. Let me look at your hands, child. Dear me, I believe you're going to have hands like mine. But your nails are a little grubby."

"That's because I've been gardening all last week."

"Gardening? Where did you garden in London?"

"In the attic. Mr. Bristowe let me garden there."

"No wonder your nails are grubby. And who is Mr. Bristowe?"

"He was the manager of Holland and Brown, where Uncle William was caretaker."

Lady Flower shuddered.

"Listen, Mary. I would rather you gave up calling Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus uncle and aunt. They are not any relation to you, and now that you are getting older you must learn to speak of them as Mr. Fawcus and Mrs. Fawcus."

"But I always called them Uncle William and Aunt Lucy."

Lady Flower tapped her foot impatiently.

"I know that, and that is why I want you to break yourself of the habit of calling them uncle and aunt. They are good and worthy people, but you are going to lead quite a different kind of life nowadays, and it wouldn't do...."

Lady Flower hesitated. Worldly woman though she was, she hesitated almost shamefacedly to tell this child gazing up at her with astonished eyes that Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus were common. She decided to let her granddaughter learn gradually to be ashamed of the lowly couple who had watched over her from infancy to girlhood.

"You have my hands, and you have your father's eyes," said Lady Flower, changing the subject.

"And my mother's hair, Aunt Lucy said."

"Yes, and now I think you'd better go and take off your things. We'll go shopping to-morrow, and when you're equipped I'll take you myself to the school where you're going to learn...." Once again Lady Flower broke off. She had been on the point of saying: "To forget all about your life in London." Perhaps if she had known that Mary had lived in a basement she would not have been able to refrain, for life in a basement would have seemed to Lady Flower unimaginably squalid.

"Go shopping again?" echoed Mary in amazement. "Why, all these last days I've been shopping with Aunt Lucy."

"Yes, I did not want you to arrive in rags."

Mary found that there were many other things her grandmother did not want before she had been long in her new home. Accustomed to have her ordinary behavior regarded with admiration and approval by Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus, she could not understand that to her grandmother her manners appeared uncouth, her habit of speech common. She was continually being reproved for the way she held her knife and fork, or for using a spoon naturally, that is by putting the narrow end into her mouth first.

"But if I drink my soup sideways I make a noise," she expostulated. "And Aunt Lucy—I mean Mrs. Fawcus told me not to make a noise."

"I do not make a noise, do I?" Grandmamma asked with raised eyebrows.

Mary longed to tell her that she did make a noise sometimes and that, when she was drinking, in the silence of the large dining-room it sounded like pigeons cooing far away.

"And don't keep pulling up your stockings like that," Grandmamma would say.

"But one of them keeps coming down."

"In that case go to Adèle and ask her to tighten your garter."

"But it's too tight already," Mary objected. "When I undress you can see all crinkles where it was round my leg."

"And don't argue with people older than yourself," Grandmamma would conclude.

At first Mary had rather enjoyed the ceremoniousness with which she was treated by Lady Flower's servants, enjoyed being called Mademoiselle and having doors flung open for her and never having to get up in the middle of dinner and fetch clean plates. She felt like one of her own fairy heroines who had sprung from goose-girl to princess in a night. But all too soon grandeur began to be wearisome, and when she saw the maids disappearing into what Lady Flower called "the lower regions" she felt that she would like to disappear too.

A warm and cosy smell sometimes penetrated "the upper regions" from the open door at the head of the staircase leading down to the kitchens, and this emphasized the frigidity above. At first Mary liked her new frocks and sashes and ribbons, but she never liked having her hair brushed and combed by Adèle. And soon she grew to dislike her new frocks, because they became associated with endless afternoons in the salon, when numbers of ladies chattered French, ladies who either smelled very strongly of scent or of being ladies and who had not that pleasant soapy aroma of Aunt Lucy. At first Mary enjoyed walking in the Parc Monceau with Grandmamma or driving with her to the Bois de Boulogne; but soon these walks and drives became tiresome, for she was continually being told to hold herself up or not to turn round and stare or to talk without shouting. In the basement at Paternoster Row she had never missed the company of other children; but here in the Parc Monceau, which was full of children, Mary began to long for playmates. She took to lingering behind Grandmamma on these walks, and when she was reproved for doing so she always made the same excuse that she had waited behind a moment to see what that little boy or that little girl was doing. Lady Flower had enough sympathy and imagination to realize that Mary was beginning to feel the need of companions, so she arranged to have a children's party for her granddaughter. But Mary did not enjoy this party at all. The little girls invited were so very well behaved. Nobody romped or did any of the jolly things children did in books. They treated Mary with grave courtesy, calling her Mademoiselle, and except that the guests were in short frocks and wore their hair down there was no difference between this party and one of Grandmamma's crowded afternoons in the salon.

"I really must make up my mind to take you to Châteaublanc," Grandmamma proclaimed after Mary had been in Paris for nearly two months. "Did you tell me that Mr. Fawcus taught you to read and write?"

"Yes, and he said I learned very quickly."

"So I should think," Grandmamma commented dryly. "I'm afraid you'll have a hard time at school."

Mary began to dread this school which was always being talked about, and every time with some unpleasant addition to its already long list of disagreeable potentialities.

"I didn't intend to go to Aix until late in the summer," said Grandmamma. "And I had thought of keeping you with me until then, but perhaps it's unwise to postpone your education any longer. So I'll take you there next week. I've written to Mademoiselle Lucinge and suggested that you should stay right on through the summer holidays, so that by Christmas, when you'll be nearly eleven years old, won't you, I shall expect to see quite a different Mary."

Perhaps Mary looked sad at the notion of the change that was to be wrought in her by so many consecutive months of Mademoiselle Lucinge's Pension. At any rate, Lady Flower became momentarily affectionate, as she put her arm round Mary and said:

"It's not your fault, you poor little thing, and you mustn't think I'm unkind. But I do want you to be able to get a great deal out of life, and there's nothing that is so terribly able to prevent that as not knowing exactly how to behave."

Mary stared at her grandmother, utterly incapable of understanding what she was talking about.

The old lady—for when Lady Flower unbent she suddenly became an old lady—took Mary upon her knee.

"You funny little thing," she said, "you and I are so very much alone in the world."

Then a moment later she disengaged herself from Mary's warm, responsive embrace and became her ivorine self.

"When you go to school, I want you to give up writing to Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus. There will have to come a moment when you quite break off communication with them, and it had better be sooner than later. They have both behaved very well, which shows that they understand how completely the relationship between you and them has changed. Now give me a kiss and run off to Adèle. It is time you were in bed."

Mary went sadly upstairs and dreamed of a castle full of dungeons and of being chased by a crocodile, the castle being the pension de jeunes filles and the crocodile being Mademoiselle Lucinge herself.

A week after this Lady Flower succeeded in making up her mind to brave the long railway journey down through the heart of France and leave her granddaughter at Châteaublanc.

"Perhaps after all I could go to Aix earlier this year," she sighed with the air of proclaiming a martyrdom.

It was a fine June morning when they set out from the Gare de Lyon; but Mary became sad and apprehensive as one green mile after another was left behind under the changeless blue sky, for though she had ceased to pine for the life of the basement in Paternoster Row, she always felt while she was still in Paris that she knew the way back and that if ever she should be faced with something unbearably disagreeable, she should be able to escape. Now she was being carried farther away every moment like that bluebottle who was buzzing on the warm glass of the carriage windows. She began to make up a story about that bluebottle while Grandmamma dozed among her cushions on the opposite seat—a story of how this father bluebottle would arrive at Châteaublanc and try to find the mother bluebottle and all the little bluebottles. Of course if he knew the way back he would be better off than herself, because he would be able to fly. But he wouldn't know the way back, and he would go buzzing about Châteaublanc trying to find his home until one day he would be killed, and the mother bluebottle and all the little bluebottles in Paris would never know what had become of him. Mary was so much moved by the woeful story that she felt a tear spring to her eyes and a lump in her throat. If only she had thought of it sooner, she might have let the bluebottle out. Perhaps even now he would not have traveled too far to know his way back. Mary raised the blind and tried to help the bluebottle out of the open window with her handkerchief; but he did not seem able to understand that she was trying to help him and went buzzing all over the compartment until at last he buzzed across Grandmamma's nose and woke her up.

"What are you doing, Mary?"

Mary did not like to explain just what she was really doing. So she looked abashed and said that she was doing nothing.

"Well, don't," said Grandmamma, dozing off again.

Mary tried to think how one did not do nothing; which raised an old problem of how one thought about nothing, and she tried once more to think about nothing.

"But if I think about nothing," she thought, "I'm thinking about thinking about nothing. And if I think about thinking about nothing I'm thinking about something."

She once asked Uncle William if he could think about nothing and if not why not. Whereupon Uncle William had told her that Parmenides had been puzzled by the same problem two thousand years ago and more.

"Who was Pa Many D's?" Mary had asked, for that was the way she pictured the name.

Uncle William had informed her that Parmenides was a philosopher who founded the Eleatic school.

"Well, when I'm old I'll marry a philosopher," Mary had announced, for it sounded a pleasant word to say and a pleasant thing to be, and Uncle William had founded schools. Mary thought about Pa Many D's now in the hot dusty railway carriage, and tried to remember what school he founded. But she could only think of "asthmatic" and "rheumatic," neither of which sounded right.

Mary printed S-K-O-O-L on the window with a wet finger, shuddered, and looking round perceived that the bluebottle had escaped.

At that moment the train puffed into Dijon station, where Grandmamma waking up decided it was time to have lunch. Mary enjoyed that while it lasted. But after lunch Grandmamma went more fast asleep than ever; the carriage grew hotter and hotter; the country grew greener and greener, and the sky more blue.

"Pouff!" Mary sighed. "Pouff-ff-ff!"

The train reached Macon, when Mary was in the middle of speculating how many times she had said pouff since Dijon.

"I must have said a thrillion pouffs," she decided, and wished that Grandmamma would wake up and be conversational, so that she might display her acquaintance with that numeral. Or perhaps she had better reserve it for Mademoiselle Lucinge. How could she bring it in? Mary began to compose the interview with her mistress.

"How do you do, my little girl?"

"I am very well, thank you, Mademoiselle."

"Did you have a comfortable journey?"

"Yes, thank you, Mademoiselle. My grandmamma and I passed a very pleasant day in the train. What a long way off you live! About a thrillion miles, I suppose."

Mary decided that this sounded a little too far when it was put into speech. Perhaps on consideration she had better be content with impressing Grandmamma.

"Supposing she never wakes up!" Mary thought in alarm. "Supposing she's gone to sleep like the Sleeping Beauty for thrillions of years? Only she's not a Beauty," Mary added to herself in hopeful parenthesis. However, soon after this Grandmamma did wake up, by which time Mary herself had fallen asleep, and did not wake until the train reached Lyon, where they got out and drove in the dusk along the banks first of one river and then of another equally large until they reached their hotel. Mary was sent with the chambermaid to have a bath before she went to bed, and she had to walk along half a dozen dark, crooked passages before she reached the bathroom, which was full of steam; the bath itself was covered with a large sheet which floated about in the water and kept bellying out on either side of Mary as she splashed about. Her bath seemed to have caused much excitement in the hotel, for all the time people kept coming to the door and shouting outside to the chambermaid, who kept shouting back as excitedly while the pipes on the wall groaned and bubbled and clashed until Mary was glad when her bath was finished and the chambermaid, after wrapping her in several towels, picked her up in her arms and carried her back through the corridors, running fast and shouting to everybody she met to get out of the way. That night Mary slept in an enormous four-poster with heavy red curtains, and in the morning she went for a drive with her grandmother first along the banks of the sluggish, dark green Saône and then beside the sparkling azure Rhône. But what Mary liked best in Lyon was the Cathedral on the top of a steep hill, which looked like an elephant upside down with gilded legs and a golden trunk. After déjeuner they got into a most extraordinary train with carriages as tall as houses where passengers sat on top without any roof over them, in which they were puffed along until they reached their destination.

Châteaublanc was a small red-roofed town built upon the southern slopes of a range of low hills that rose not much higher than the rolling countryside of woodland, pasture, and vineyard, at the foot of which a small tributary of the Saône ran its shallow course over a bed of limestone. The ruins of the castle that gave its name to Châteaublanc still stood like an acropolis above the town, the sight of which compensated Mary for much, since this must really once upon a time have been an enchanted castle without any need to pretend that it was one. In fact, from the moment she alighted at the station Mary liked Châteaublanc. She liked the wide main street, where the houses dreamed in the sunlight behind green shutters and Gloire de Dijon roses, and where in the middle of the front parterres beautiful purple and silver globes shimmered with the movement of the small world therein reflected.

"Oh, Grandmamma, how beautiful they are!" she cried, clapping her hands.

"Yes, you're in roseland here," said Lady Flower.

"No. Not the roses. They're beautiful too. But those purple balls!"

"My dear child, you don't mean to say you think those monstrous tinsel spheres beautiful! Why, they're perfectly hideous!"

Mary regarded her grandmother in amazement. She must be mad. She must be upset by the journey. She must be joking.

"Oh, and look! That garden's got five!" she shrieked, nearly falling out of the fiacre in her delight. "One purple. One silver. One blue. One gold. And one red. I hope in heaven there are thrillions and thrillions of them."

"God forbid!" exclaimed Lady Flower, sniffing her vinaigrette in dismay at the picture. "And I suppose you mean trillions."

Mary was silent after this until the fiacre took them beyond the main street into an avenue of clipped acacias and limes, from which they turned aside through wide paths into a curved drive where hydrangeas bloomed in the beds on either side.

"What funny flowers!" Mary exclaimed. "They're like the little woman in a house Uncle ... Fawcus ... Mr. Fawcus gave me. When it was going to be wet, her bonnet and dress was pink and when it was going to be fine they were blue. Only really she wasn't ever pink or blue, but like those flowers, and then she was always wrong."

The fiacre pulled up before a house with a white portico and French windows opening to the wide verandah that ran round it.

"Is this really going to be my school?" Mary asked incredulously. "Why, I thought it was going to be quite an ugly place. Oh, Grandmamma," she cried, "how kind of you to give me such a nice school!"

Lady Flower had been influenced by a number of considerations in her choice of a school for Mary, but what undoubtedly had least influence was her granddaughter's point of view in the matter. Nevertheless, as grown-up people use, she accepted the child's gratitude with complacency.

It certainly was a good school. Mademoiselle Lucinge was a woman of taste and breeding, who when little more than a girl had gone as governess to the house of an English nobleman, where she had remained ten years. Having inherited from a distant relative a house and a small property, she had felt justified in carrying out a project upon which she had for a long time set her heart. During her stay in England she had had an opportunity of coming into contact with a number of distinguished people, and from the moment she had opened her pension she had been successful. The greater number of her pupils were English, but many other nationalities were represented; and Lady Flower, who was prejudiced in favor of a cosmopolitan education, thought that in Mademoiselle Lucinge she had found the ideal person to correct in her granddaughter the effects of a deplorable upbringing, for which, strange to say, she did not in the least blame herself.

When Mary went to Châteaublanc, she found herself the youngest of thirty-five girls, and it had been agreed between Lady Flower and Mademoiselle that for the first two years she was to spend all her time there. So, when her grandmother bade good-by on the day after her arrival it was to be a long good-by, although it was understood that she might expect a visit whenever Lady Flower should be on her way to Aix.

Mary was too much delighted with the pension to feel any sorrow at the prospect of so long a parting. Nor indeed was it to be expected that in barely three months her grandmother would have become indispensable to her happiness. Her new surroundings had already begun even to dim the basement of Paternoster Row. Uncle William and Aunt Lucy were now far away indeed. It would not be long before Mary would begin to remember her past life in a few bright patches like the bright patches of a faded carpet.

A month after Mary had arrived at the pension war was declared between France and Prussia. The pupils went home for their summer holidays, and Mary was left with two girls from South America, both considerably older than herself. During this time Mademoiselle Lucinge took a great deal of trouble with Mary's education and was really more like a private governess in the care she lavished than the proprietress and headmistress of a fashionable school. The war was going so badly for France that it seemed more prudent to close the school that autumn. The two South American girls were sent off to Bordeaux that they might sail thence for home and relieve the minds of their parents who had sent a packet of anxious and excited letters. Mademoiselle Lucinge wrote to her grandmother to ask what she would like Mary to do. Lady Flower wrote back to say that she was convinced that the French defeats were of no importance and that very shortly the Prussians would be driven back over the Rhine. In any case, Paris was no place for her granddaughter, and in Paris she herself must stay to do her work with the Red Cross. Would Mademoiselle keep Mary at Châteaublanc?

Nothing could have fallen out better for Mary. She had now the entire attention of Mademoiselle; she had a beautiful house and beautiful gardens to herself; she had as many books to read as she wanted.

Mademoiselle Lucinge was a devout Catholic, and so were most of her pupils. As regards Mary's religious teaching, Lady Flower let Mademoiselle understand that she had no objection to as much religion being instilled into her granddaughter as was consonant with her social obligations in days to come; but she particularly requested that no attempt should be made to lure her into Catholicism. The Papacy was very unpopular in England at this period, and Lady Flower would have regarded it as a serious reflection upon her duty as guardian if she had allowed her granddaughter to enter society under such a handicap. She herself privately believed in nothing that was not material, even obvious, but inasmuch as positive scepticism would be considered as unbecoming as Popish extravagance she conformed to the religious mode of the time and expected her granddaughter to do the same.

Mademoiselle had not been a governess in England for ten years without learning how little the English mind being considered eccentric abroad, how much they hate to be thought eccentric at home. At the same time, Mary was the youngest pupil in her school, and she regarded her own duties of guardianship more gravely than Lady Flower regarded hers. Whatever might be Mary's life in days to come, Mademoiselle was determined that she should not be denied in childhood an opportunity to prepare the soul for those deep consolations of religious belief that might one day come to her aid in a time of stress. And Mary loved the quiet hours with Mademoiselle, when in her gray boudoir she spoke to her about God.

One mellow Sunday evening in mid-September, when the news from the seat of war was as bad as it could be and when Mademoiselle's austere and gracious countenance was lined with care and grief for her country, Mary had been learning the fifth commandment in the catechism of the Church of England:

Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

A robin redbreast was singing in the magnolia on the lawn beneath the turret window of Mademoiselle's gray room, and Mary's thoughts on seeing the bird went back to the attic in Paternoster Row, where she had first read of the death of poor Cock Robin. When Mademoiselle's exposition of filial piety was concluded, Mary asked her if she ought to honor her grandmother as much as she would have honored her father and mother were they alive.

"Quite as much, my child," said Mademoiselle.

Mary thought for a moment or two.

"But oughtn't I to honor Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus, who Grandmamma says I mustn't call Uncle William and Aunt Lucy any more?"

It was Mademoiselle's turn to think for a moment.

"You ought to honor their memory," she said at last.

"But why mayn't I write to them and tell them where I am? And tell about you, Mademoiselle, and what I'm doing and about the garden and the lizards and the white cows who pull the carts and about treading on the grapes and beating the corn with those funny sticks and about my sabots and the melon I have for breakfast? They would like to hear."

Mademoiselle could not bear that the gratitude and affection of a little child should be thus discouraged, although Lady Flower's last words had been to forbid any communication between Mary and her former guardians. In the end she compromised by letting Mary write a letter and writing herself by the same post to Mr. Fawcus, begging him not to reply and explaining the circumstances in which she had allowed Mary to write. It was unlike Mademoiselle to compromise; but she was tormented by the woes of France that autumn and not so much mistress as usual of her judgment or emotions. Her kindly intention did much harm, for when Mary received no answer to her letter she was embittered by the thought that her beloved friends had already forgotten her, and this was the first disillusion of her life.

During this time Mary, with the facility of childhood, learned to speak French, so that before the leaves fell from the trees that year she was as fluent as if she had been living in Châteaublanc from infancy. One day in October—it was soon after the news had arrived of Gambetta's escape from Paris in a balloon—Mary, wandering in a remote corner of the grounds, discovered a stripling of about sixteen who was digging holes for young trees to be planted in them when the autumn rains should have soaked down into the soil. He was a slim, handsome boy with fine features and dark, silky hair; but it was not his good looks that interested Mary so much as the fact that he seemed to be working in a frenzy of despair.

"Qu'est-ce que tu as?" she demanded.

"J'ai mal au cœur," he replied sullenly, wiping a tear from his eye and bending low over his spade.

"But why are you crying?" she persisted. She spoke in French, of course.

"My tears belong to me," he said. "At least the Prussians have left us our tears."

"Are you the son of our gardener?" she asked.

To this ollendorfian query he nodded.

"Of Monsieur Menard?"

He nodded again.

"Alors, tu es Pierre?"

"Oui, je suis Pierre."

Mary produced an apple from the pocket of the hideous crimson pelisse she was wearing, and while she slowly munched it she regarded the boy with solemn curiosity. She had heard of young Pierre Menard who had run away from home to join the troops that were everywhere being recruited in the provinces to drive the Prussians out of France, and of how his father had found him in the market-place of Villefranche and brought him back, because he was too young to be a soldier.

"I'm sorry you could not go to be a soldier, Pierre," she said at last. "Would you like the other half of my apple?"

The boy accepted the proffered fruit with a surly grace, and presently he was confiding in Mary the tale of his wrecked ambition.

"If I'm strong enough to plant trees, I'm strong enough to carry a chassepot," he declared. "If I can dig holes for trees, I can dig graves for Prussians."

Mary condoled with him, listened to his tales of the Emperor, not the degenerate captive of the enemy, but the great Napoleon, and lamented with him the glory of which he was being foiled by his father's cruelty.

"We must fight on for years, Gambetta says, and, who knows? I may rise to be a marshal of France before the war comes to an end."

"You might be Emperor," Mary agreed with enthusiasm.

Pierre tried to look modest and disclaim so exalted an ambition as that; but there was in the manner of his disclaimer a suggestion that he did not think such an altitude impossible.

Mary saw a good deal of Pierre, because Mademoiselle who was sorry for the boy raised no objection to her frequenting his company. For a long time Mary had been anxious to visit the ruined castle on the hill above the town, and on All Saints' Day she begged and obtained permission to be escorted there by Pierre. There was not much left of the old castle beyond crumbling ivy-colored walls and nettle-grown courts, although there was one round tower, which was still almost intact. Below the foundations of this tower was a large oubliette bristling with the very spikes which had impaled unhappy prisoners precipitated upon them years ago. Mary and Pierre gazed down with awe through the open trap and imagined that they could still see bones and bloodstains upon the floor thirty feet below. Immediately beside the trap was a small embrasure in the thick walls of the tower lighted by a lancet window through which could be seen a vast expanse of country, meadows and woods and vineyards and that great serpent the Saône. Hither it was that the prisoner condemned to die was led up blinking from the dungeons below to take his last look at France; here he was allowed to spend a few wistful moments; hence he stepped upon the trap to vanish forever from the eyes of men.

There was room for both Mary and Pierre to stand close together in the embrasure and on this holy morn to gaze out at the russet landscape breathless beneath the milky blue of the November sky.

"My little one," said Pierre, "I would rather throw myself down into that oubliette than stay here any longer while France bleeds to death. Hark! Do you hear the sound of drums?"

"Yes, very far away. Trump—trump—trump—trump!" she whispered in awe of the menacing beat.

"Alors, je file!" he cried. "You can find your way home alone?"

"But suppose there are cows on the road?"

"My little one, it is impossible to permit cows to stand in the way of la patrie et la gloire. I will conduct you outside the Castle gates and you must find your way home. As for me, this time I will go to the war. Vive la France!"

Mary stood in the ruined gateway, waving her hand to Pierre who went running and skipping along the white road after those faint-heard, those elusive drum-taps that might have been anywhere and seemed to be everywhere.

"We shall meet again after the war," he had called back to her.

Mademoiselle sent for Monsieur Menard and begged him not to interfere again with his son's desire to serve France, and she was so eloquent that Monsieur Menard gave way. But when peace was signed, Pierre did not come back to Châteaublanc, because his father vowed that there would be no doing anything with him nowadays. So through the interest of one of Mademoiselle's patrons he was found a clerkship in the English branch of a big French commercial house, and Mary did not see him again in Châteaublanc.

But he was her first romance, and the memory of Pierre did not fade quickly, even when Mademoiselle's house was full of girls again and Mary's real school life began.

Chapter Three

THE MAIDEN

Chapter Three: The Maiden

On a January afternoon, the afternoon of her twentieth birthday, Mary Flower stood by the drawing-room windows of a house in King's Gate, staring out across the Knightsbridge road to where in soot and snow the trees of Hyde Park were etched upon a gray expanse of sky. The house was very still, for it was the time when old Lady Flower took her daily nap, to the routine of which she attributed the vitality that enabled her at seventy to sustain the exertion of arranging an advantageous marriage for her granddaughter. To-day lunch had been protracted to celebrate with various dishes Mary's birthday, and to-night a dinner-party was to be followed by a musical reception. The house, seeming to conspire with her ladyship's snores, achieved a stillness that was even more perceptible than usual.

Mary's meditations were neither so profound nor so romantic as any passer-by that looked up and glimpsed the form of that beautiful young woman in her glass world might have imagined. Mostly they were directed to her new evening gown, a polonaise snatched it might almost be said prematurely by Lady Flower from the most fashionable of Parisian costumiers. Mary dreamed of its passementerie of beads and ruching of Honiton lace, and then with heightened color of the amount of bare arm it must reveal. She supposed that her grandmother was right and that she should display as much of the upper part of her arm without risk of censorious comment, but....

Mary wished that Daisy Harland had come up from the country yesterday instead of waiting until to-night to wish her best friend many happy returns of the day. Daisy's opinion would have been so valuable. Daisy was so advanced, so unconventional, and yet always so right. But then Grandmamma, too, was always right, and Grandmamma had deliberately chosen the dress. Mary gave up bothering about the problem, which was no problem at all really, because she must obviously take Grandmamma's advice as long as Grandmamma was alive to give it. And if Grandmamma should die? Why, then, in this great house she, Mary Flower, should be all alone! No wonder Grandmamma was anxious for her to be safely married. Marriage? That was indeed something to talk about with her friend. If only the frost would hold so that Daisy might be resigned to stay in London for a while and spend hours in discussing marriage. Not of course as the topic had been discussed at school, where nobody knew anything for certain and the horridest girls vied with one another in dreadful propoundings. No, not like that, but seriously, almost religiously—if one could compare two things so far asunder as religion and marriage.

Mary contemplated the prospect of marriage with several of the men who visited the house in King's Gate. None of them considered thus made her feel at all anxious to be married; rather did each one present himself to her fancy like an unknown bottle of medicine, the efficacy of which was guaranteed but of the niceness or nastiness of which there was nothing to be learned from its external appearance. It was not that Mary had never imagined herself in love. Like most schoolgirls she had cherished impossible loyalties and sentimental passions; but the figures upon which these had been bestowed were like the figures in a picture book or the remote incarnations that are begotten by music. Love was an aspiration to a life beyond the present, a kind of yearning upon immortality; it was never a practical guide to the humdrum, the yet so intricate humdrum, of existence; it had nothing at all to do with marriage.

Lady Flower was responsible for this attitude of her granddaughter. By living so much in Paris, by allowing the French half of her character to recover from years of discouragement by her husband, and by brooding over her son's mésalliance—it was typical of the sentimental English that they should have to borrow the right word from France—the old lady felt herself more and more definitely inclined to the mariage de convenance. She never let pass an opportunity to impress upon Mary its superiority.

"Love, my dear child," she would tell her, "is an invention of the poets to excuse their own weaknesses."

This afternoon, as Mary stared out across the wintry park, love did seem a long way off from King's Gate, and marriage, for all it was such a mystery, did seem comparatively near.

"Though suppose nobody ever does propose to me?" Mary thought. She turned round for reassurance from the large gilded mirror over the mantelpiece, and wished that she had never seen herself in a glass before, so that she could arrive at a decision about her beauty. Was she beautiful? If with six other girls she stood before a mirror for the first time, so that she did not know which was herself, should she think herself beautiful? But she should know which was herself, because she should recognize the other girls, and the stranger in the middle would be herself.

"Oh, am I or am I not beautiful?" she asked aloud of her reflection, standing motionless in that frozen, reflected room where nothing was alive except the swift pendulum of the ormulu clock on the wall behind her. "Am I or am I not beautiful?" she repeated with a sigh, as she took her place once more by the window and gazed out at the black and white trees in the Park, beneath whose filigree of boughs people were wandering in couples upon the powdered grass, walking so slowly that they must be happy, Mary thought. She was filled with envy of those shadows beyond the railings, who could upon this cold January afternoon pace up and down with such unhurried steps. They surely must be lovers, who could find delight in this chill and somber air, who could stroll arm in arm about this landscape that was sinking beneath the weight of a leaden sky. There opposite, two shadows were actually sitting upon a bench, sitting as close as birds sit upon a perch at dusk. They must love each other very deeply and very dearly, to endure the cold, very deeply and very dearly to stay there away from the firelight. Beautiful firelight, Mary thought; and she watched for a while its diminished reflection lambent within the milky windowpanes.

"Miladi is awake, Mademoiselle," said Adèle, coming into the room.

The canaries that lived in the domed conservatory at the back of the drawing-room began to sing. The depression of the long silence was broken.

Mary ran up the cheerful gas-lit stairs to her grandmother.

Lady Flower had tried to neutralize the fretwork of age by excess of lace. She was still ivory; but the ivory was scratched, here and there even badly cracked. The texture of lace seemed more likely than any other to distract the attention of the observer, to confuse him by its infinite reticulation and thus provide an illusive calendry for that wrinkled countenance of hers.

"Well, dear," she began at once, sitting up among the pillows when Mary came into the room. "I slept much better than I expected after those grated chestnuts we had for your birthday lunch. I have an impression of dreaming a good deal, but I've forgotten what about. So much the better, for there is nobody so irritating as a raconteur des rêves."

Mary had been half inclined to tell Lady Flower about her own dreams by the window; but she was deterred by this remark, and perhaps in any case she would have been too much afraid of the old lady's cynical toleration to expose those fleeting and intangible shades of romantic love to her sparrowy eyes and pecks.

"I'm glad you feel rested," she said.

"Thank you, my dear."

They were always very courteous to each other, these two, or rather Lady Flower was always very courteous to her granddaughter. Mary was dutiful; and Lady Flower accepted any hint of affection, any display of sympathy or consideration, as the fruit of a good upbringing. She had no qualms about the younger generation. In the estimation of Lady Flower young people existed to show respect and do their duty toward their elders. Youth and labor at this period were still in bondage.

"I have invited more people than I intended for this evening," Lady Flower went on. "I was anxious to give you an opportunity of seeing various aspects of contemporary life."

"How kind of you, Grandmamma."

"Nothing to thank me for; I am doing no more than my duty."

Lady Flower made this admission a trifle unwillingly; but she thought it right to let Mary understand that, as she grew older, she, too, would find duty dogging her like a shadow. She must not be allowed to suppose that marriage meant freedom.

"Yes," she continued complacently, "I have invited several artistic people. They seem to be getting themselves a good deal talked about nowadays, and I felt you ought to meet some of them. By the way, Mr. Alison is coming."

"I'm glad," said Mary. "He's very nice."

"Very nice, indeed," her grandmother agreed emphatically. "And very much beau garçon. About thirty-five," she went on, meditating aloud. "About thirty-five, and extremely well off. He wrote to me that he was returning from the Continent on purpose to be present at your birthday party. I must say I find that highly significant."

"Significant of what?"

"My dear, innocence is a charming and attractive quality; but do not be too ingénue. No, not too ingénue. At any rate with me. You must surely have noticed how empressé he has always been with you? He admires you, and though of course I do not wish to influence you unduly or to persuade you into a hasty marriage, at the same time ... however, there are others every bit as suitable as Mr. Alison. I just happen to have noticed that he is rather obviously ... however, please, my dear child, pay no attention to what I was saying, because I should be unwilling, oh, yes, most unwilling, to precipitate a marriage with anybody, even a young man so perfectly eligible as Mr. Alison. At the same time, you are twenty, are you not? And I am seventy. You will of course inherit a comfortable sum when I die, but that makes it all the more imperative to choose for your husband a man who has money."

Mary did not quite see the logic of this; but she had long ago been successfully cured of asking why; and, since the prospect of marrying Mr. Alison was at least as pleasant as the prospect of marrying anybody else, she was not sufficiently interested to pursue the topic.

But Mr. Alison took Mary into dinner; Lady Flower felt that he deserved some reward for hurrying back from Nice.

James Alison, known generally as Jemmie Alison, was a stockbroker who had succeeded at the age of twenty-seven to a lucrative business. As a boy, when he had fair, curly hair, he had been definitely handsome. He was now a florid man with a heavy fair mustache, who was still good-looking, although his hair was beginning to require some arranging before it would cover the top of his head, and his features showed signs of coarsening. From his schooldays at Eton, indeed from the day he was born, he had never been compelled to deny himself anything, and like many men who have inherited a fortune early in life he looked older than he was and felt older than he looked. After dinner he was separated from Mary for some time; but at last he managed to find a seat beside her in the conservatory while a famous tenor was singing:

I had a message to send her, To her, whom my soul loved best; But I had my task to finish, And she has gone home to rest.

"Beautiful song," said Mr. Alison.

"Exquisite!" Mary sighed.

I had a message to send her, So tender, and true, and sweet, I longed for an Angel to bear it, And lay it down at her feet.

"Things can be said in songs that can't be said any other way," Mr. Alison murmured with a sigh.

Mary appeared wrapt in the melody.

I cried, in my passionate longing;— "Has the earth no Angel-friend Who will carry my love the message That my heart desires to send?"

Mr. Alison looked appealingly at Mary; but she was still wrapt in the melody.

Then I heard a strain of music, So mighty, so pure, so clear, That my very sorrow was silent, And my heart stood still to hear.

"One of the loveliest songs I ever heard," Mr. Alison declared. "And he sings it divinely."

And I tenderly laid my message On the music's outspread wings. I heard it float farther and farther, In sound more perfect than speech; Farther than sight can follow, Farther than soul can reach.

Mary with a tear in each eye was staring up at the dome of the conservatory. Mr. Alison, although he could not muster a tear even in one eye, looked in the same direction and derived a great deal of satisfaction from the thought that he and this beautiful girl by his side were both staring at the same pane of glass. The singer achieved a triumphant C.

And I know that at last my message Has passed through the golden gate; So my heart is no longer restless, And I am content to wait.

"'Content to wait,'" Mr. Alison echoed meaningly, when the applause had died down. "'Content to wait,'" he repeated. "So long as I know that somebody has received my message."

Mary was nearly sure that this was a declaration; but she was not absolutely sure, and she wished that Daisy Harland had not at the last moment telegraphed to say that she could not be with her beloved Mary on her twentieth birthday.

"Ah, Miss Flower," Mr. Alison continued, shaking his head. "It would be hard for you to understand the thoughts of a man like myself when he hears a song like that. At the same time, the moral of it surely is that, however far away we may seem from heaven, we are not so far away in reality. We can hope. We can hope, Miss Flower. I wonder if I might venture to say Mary?"

"Oh, certainly, please call me Mary," she begged him nervously.

"Thank you, Mary."

Mr. Alison wished that he could quote a line of poetry about some romantic Mary; but he could only think of Mary had a little lamb. And he felt that to sigh this forth with as much passionate emphasis as he could achieve would sound rather silly.

"I suppose," he ventured, "you couldn't bring yourself to call me Jemmie? All my chums call me Jemmie. Jemmie Alison. Nobody ever calls me James. Nobody ever did call me James except my grandmother on my father's side. Funny old woman. She simply would not call me Jemmie. She always said the name reminded her of a fright she had in childhood when some burglars broke into her father's house, who of course would have been my great-grandfather. Now that's going back some way. My father died in '72. He was sixty-three then. So he was born in 1809, when my grandmother was twenty-one. That makes her born in 1788. So I suppose this burglary must have happened about 1798. That's a long time ago, isn't it?"

"A very long time ago," Mary agreed. She was so much muddled by Mr. Alison's statistics that if he had told her the burglary took place shortly after the Battle of Hastings she would have accepted it as a fact.

"I wish the old lady could have lived to meet you, Mary," he went on. "You are just the kind of girl she would have liked me to marry."

Luckily for Mary, who did not know what comment she ought to make on this last piece of information, by this time the tenor was off again:

Do you grieve no costly offering To the lady you can make? One there is, and gifts less worthy Queens have stooped to take. Take a Heart of virgin silver, Fashion it with heavy blows, Cast it into Love's hot furnace When it fiercest glows.

"Is that your heart or mine?" Mr. Alison asked in a puzzled voice. "I don't quite get that. I mean, is that his heart or hers?"

Mary motioned him not to talk, because people were beginning to turn round and peer at the palms among which they were sitting, curious to know what discordant mutter was profaning the music.

With pain's sharpest point transfix it, And then carve in letters fair, Tender dreams and quaint devices, Fancies sweet and rare. Set within it Hope's blue sapphire, Many-changing, opal fears, Blood-red ruby-stones of daring, Mixed with pearly tears.

"Hope's red ruby!" exclaimed Mr. Alison. "That's really uncommonly fine, I think."

And when you have wrought and labored Till the gift is all complete, You may humbly lay your offering At the Lady's feet. Should her mood perchance be gracious— With disdainful smiling pride, She will place it with the trinkets Glittering at her side.

"I got muddled in that song," Mr. Alison confessed. "I don't think it's as good as the first one. Mary, before another song begins, may I tell you that I love you? May I ask you to be my wife? I know that you do not love me yet. But you might learn to love me. Mightn't you, Mary? You're very young. I can wait, now that I have delivered my message at the golden gate. Now I shall always reverence that song, Mary. To my dying day. It seems to me sitting here beside you at this moment more like a sacred song than just ordinary poetry. I wonder who wrote it?"

"I wonder," echoed Mary, glad to find the conversation turning away from personalities to literature.

"I suppose it wasn't Shakespeare?" Mr. Alison hazarded.

"No, I don't think it was Shakespeare."

"He wrote such a lot of well-known stuff," said Mr. Alison. "One's pretty safe five times out of ten to guess Shakespeare. But, Mary, you have not replied to my question. May I hope? May I set in my heart Hope's red ruby?"

"It was Hope's blue sapphire," she corrected.

"Well, whatever jewel it was, may I hope?"

"I hadn't expected anything like this," said Mary, wondering whether it would create general consternation if she were to jump up from her seat and rush out of the conservatory.

"I know it seems sudden; but it's not really so sudden. All the time I've been in the south of France I've been thinking about you. I tried to drown my despair by playing roulette. In fact, I won quite a lot of money, because I played so recklessly."

Mary turned pale. Could her existence really affect a man of the world like Mr. Alison up to the point of reckless gambling?

"I felt in my inmost being that you could not love me. You're as much above me as a—as a—as an angel!" He tried not to look proud of the simile. "I know I am not worthy of you, Mary. I know that. But I have said enough. You look agitated. Please do not let my impetuosity distress you. Hark! Somebody else is going to sing."

The deep notes of a voluptuous contralto broke into the murmur of small talk like a dinner-gong.

"Don't forget, Mary," said Mr. Alison, when the sonorous abracadabra of an Italian song had died away in loud applause. "I have delivered my message, and I am content to wait. Shall I take you downstairs and get you an ice?"

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Alison."

"Mary, please!" he moaned reproachfully. "Jemmie. I thought you'd promised me that much."

It was lucky the ices were downstairs; for his tone would have melted the lot had they been in the conservatory.

"Jemmie," she whispered, feeling exactly as if she had swallowed a pill without water.

"You have made me radiantly happy," he affirmed. "By Jove, I feel as if I never knew my name was Jemmie until this moment."

As for Mary, she felt nothing except a vague hope that she had not committed herself too deeply by granting Mr. Alison's desire to be called Jemmie. Her grandmother might choose to consider that by doing so she had accepted him. She prayed that Daisy Harland would soon reach London. Otherwise, at this rate, she would find herself married before she knew it.

For the rest of the evening she managed to avoid her suitor, though it was at the cost of having to endure the dissertative bibble-babble upon Japanese interiors of a young man with long hair and a double chin, one of those artistic people whom the hostess had invited to her reception in order to support a daring social experiment that was having a vogue.

"Did Mr. Alison give you an amusing account of his tour in France?" Lady Flower inquired after the sound of the last carriage had died away on the frosty air.

"He talked about France. He wasn't very amusing," said Mary.

"You seemed to be getting on very well together, nevertheless," observed her grandmother. "In fact, when What's-his-name, the tenor, was singing it was really quite noticeable that you were too much occupied with each other to pay any attention to the music."

"We were discussing the music," Mary said, wishing that her grandmother would go to bed, and not ask any more questions.

"I suppose that if he does seriously intend to ask for your hand he will speak to me first. He's not so young as to be able to neglect that courtesy. He's not one of the young communards of to-day who consider they have equal rights with parents and guardians. He'll be ready to admit that we elders have some authority left. Only fancy, my dear, Lady Pringle tells me that her daughters demand, yes, positively demand, to play in a lawn-tennis competition next summer. A public affair, as far as I can make out. She made me shudder with her description of it. Young women of breeding and education are to expose themselves in front of anybody who likes to pay the necessary charge for admission. Dear me, I remember that your poor grandfather used sometimes to be shocked by what he considered my ultra-modern and extravagantly continental ideas. What would he have said, had he been alive to-day? I do hope your friend, Daisy Harland, won't persuade you into wanting to appear as a female acrobat. She has always struck me as the kind of young woman who would do anything. She was a dreadfully noisy girl, I remember."

Mary allowed Daisy's character to be sacrificed in order to divert her grandmother from the discussion of Mr. Alison. Soon she was able to propose bed and was glad when at last she found herself alone in the dark with her secret.

Her first proposal....

Only that afternoon she had been wondering if any one would propose to her, and already on her twentieth birthday she had received one.

Jemmie....

But she did not think of him as Jemmie. Were she to become his wife to-morrow, she should for a long time think of him as Mr. Alison.

Mary Alison....

That was rather attractive.

Mrs. Alison....

It was in his favor that he had neither father nor mother alive. If she did make up her mind to marry him, she should not want another grandmamma in her mother-in-law.

Mary Alison ... yours most truly, Mary Alison....

But marriage meant more than that. Rather horrid intimacies ... children....

"Do I want children?" Mary asked herself. "I don't believe I do at all."

Pain! And of course, unless she had been utterly misinformed, it must hurt horribly.

"I should never have the courage," she told herself. "Never," she decided, and turning over she was soon fast asleep.

A week later, Daisy Harland did come to London, and to her in that top room of the Harlands' house in South Kensington, in that room papered with hunting scenes, which was bound up more closely with her girlhood than any room in the world, Mary confided the tale of her first proposal.

"He's not so bad," Daisy commented. "He's clean to look at. Pretty well off too, I should say. But why be in a hurry?"

"Oh, I'm not in any hurry. It's my grandmother who is so anxious to see me safely married."

"I wonder why. I suppose she can't bear the idea of not arranging the whole matter to please herself."

Mary gazed down at the garden of the Square, in which little girls well wrapped up in white furs were running about after large particolored balls of india rubber, while their nurses gossiped gravely with one another, moving with slow and stately tread behind their perambulators. What fun she and Daisy had always had in the Square when she used to stay with her friend for the holidays! Perhaps it was the bareness of winter that made it seem so small nowadays; or perhaps everything shrank as one grew older.

"Don't you think that a girl ought to love the man she is going to marry?" Mary pressed.

"But what is love? Personally I've never been in love."

"Daisy! You were tremendously in love with Gerald Ashworth. Don't you remember when you bought that lilac notepaper with two hearts stamped in the top corner?"

Her friend laughed.

"You don't think seriously that the kind of silliness in which one indulges at fifteen is to be considered an experience?"

"Yes, I do," Mary insisted. "If I hadn't been in love when I was small, I shouldn't be bothering now about being in love with Jemmie Alison. I shouldn't expect anything. As it is, I feel somehow that I want more than he can give me."

"If you'd come back with me to Berkshire and hunt, you'd soon forget all your troubles."

"Should I? I wonder. Not by hunting, Daisy. You would not enjoy hunting so much, if you weren't so proud of yourself for learning to ride so late in life."

"I wish we'd had our place in Berkshire when I was little," said Daisy regretfully. "I should have been a horsewoman then. The pater might just as well have launched out a bit earlier. We didn't really save anything by living in London."

"But it was fun when we used to play up here," said Mary. "Do you remember when we made those paper boxes and filled them with ink and dropped them on the pavement? Oh, and don't you remember when Eustace Arnesby came to tea, and he dropped one on an old gentleman's hat?"

"Eustace is at Sandhurst now," said Daisy. "Talking of young love, I did have rather a pash for him."

"Daisy!"

"What's the matter?"

"You do say such terrible things."

"In fact," Daisy continued, "when I look back at my innocent girlhood, I seem to have spent my time falling in and falling out of love with lanky boys. And you, my darling Mary, are trying to make out that that kind of thing is serious. Well, if it was, my young life has been lived, for at present I couldn't fall in love with anybody."

"I believe I could," said Mary meditatively. "But not with Jemmie Alison. If you really think about it, marriage is terrible."

"Why?"

Here was Mary's opportunity to ask Daisy a few direct questions; but, when it came to the point, she could not bring herself to do so. She could not imagine that she would ever feel more intimate with any other girl than she felt with Daisy, and if she could not ask Daisy she could not ask anybody.

"Why?" her friend repeated.

"Oh, always being with the same person," said Mary, with this explanation allowing the opportunity to pass.

Daisy went back to her hunting; Mary remained in London.

"We might go to Ventnor in March," said Lady Flower. "I don't feel inclined to travel far. I really believe that I'm beginning to feel old. I wish I could see you safely married. You strike me as being somewhat listless in your manner. That would vanish if you were married."

Jemmie Alison ventured to think that Mary was not looking quite herself. He would have been glad to suggest the same remedy as Lady Flower; but he lacked the courage and compromised.

"What you want is a dog," he decided. "A nice little dog. Give you an excuse for taking a walk every morning in the Park. I should like to think of you with your little dog under the trees when I'm working in my office."

Jemmie Alison proved that he had faith in his prescription by taking a great deal of trouble to procure for Mary the very dog for the purpose—a wise Dandie Dinmont not so young as to require the elements of training, yet not so old as to be fretting for a former mistress or master.

"He is called Mac. You don't dislike that name?" the donor asked.

Mary said that she thought it was a most suitable name.

"There's so much in a name," he continued meaningly.

"Yes, and it's so unlucky, I always think, to change a name," Mary added.

"Oh, you think it's unlucky?" Jemmie Alison asked in a gloomy tone.

Mac was a success from the moment of his arrival, and Mary was really grateful to her friend—friendship was the relation established between her and Jemmie Alison after several discussions—for the kind thought that made the dog hers. She was glad when the need of exercising Mac took her out into Hyde Park where by now, crocuses, a myriad steady flames, defied the wind and lighted the dim green of the London grass. There were also white and purple crocuses that gave Mary a keener pleasure than the yellow ones, for they seemed to be not so much the first flowers of Spring as the last flowers of Winter, and to express with their cold hues and tranquillity of form the sharpness of life that was there all the time. They reminded her somehow of those lovers who wandered about in the iron chill of that January afternoon, those regardful lovers whose happy indifference to time or weather she had so greatly envied.

One morning the sun was so warm that, tired with throwing sticks for Mac, Mary sat down on a chair in the Broad Walk, watching the children bowling their hoops or running about with pink and blue balloons, while with one splay paw upon his mistress's instep Mac sat watching the other dogs. Mary from paying attention to the children and nurses fell to wondering about the fragments of shell that were mixed with the fresh gravel of the path. From what far-off beach had they come, or were they fossil shells from the bed of a long-receded ocean? Whencesoever it came, each fragment had once been part of a living animal. A living animal. Not a hundred years hence, she, or all that part of her beheld now by the passers-by, would seem not more important than one of these shells. Was there not indeed something more permanent than this bodily husk? Grandmamma did not think so. Mary was sure of her unbelief, even if every Sunday morning Grandmamma in sealskin and dove-gray silk did make use of the pew she rented for herself and Mary in St. Peter's, Knightsbridge.

"You are seen in church," she told her granddaughter. "One is anxious for you to be seen."

With the help of her vinaigrette Lady Flower kept awake during the sermon and congratulated herself upon the charming appearance of Mary, when Mary rose to take her share of singing unto the Lord at Morning Prayer.

The notion that her granddaughter was contemplating the serious aspect and expression of religious fervor would have shocked the old lady; the knowledge that she was sitting in Kensington Gardens asking herself what she really was would have made Lady Flower think more earnestly than ever that it was high time her granddaughter was married.

"It must be for something," Mary told herself, crushing a tiny scalloped fragment with her toe. "Life must be meant for something."

Any attempt to solve the riddle of the universe had to be postponed on account of Mac's suddenly being involved in a desperate fight, for while his mistress had been lost in meditation he had been exposed to the insults of an aggressive fox terrier.

"Bandy-legged Sawney!" the terrier had murmured when he trotted fussily past with erect tail. Mac's ears had twitched under this reflection upon his nationality; but he had restrained himself. Presently the terrier had come trotting back, this time on three legs as if to insinuate that he was a better dog on three legs than a Dandie Dinmont on four.

"Donkey's ears!" he had snarled.

Even this Mac had endured in patience, for his splay paw was still reposing on his mistress' instep and he was proud of the pose, too proud to abandon it for a fox-terrier. But, when his mistress had of her own accord released him by withdrawing her toe from his protection, Mac had been able to stand no more.

"Let him come back and say another word," he had growled to himself, turning round and round and scratching up the gravel in his irritation. The fox-terrier had trotted back more aggressive than ever and to emphasize his contempt of the Dandie Dinmont's short legs he had swaggered up and down in front of Mac on the tips of his paws, boastfully snarling.

Mac rushed in, and the fight began.

The nearest children climbed hastily over the railings to the safety of the grass: nurses screamed to their charges: a park-keeper looked out of the window of his little green room and made ready to effect an impressive arrival upon the scene when the fight was over.

"Your dog began it," a weather-beaten woman said angrily to Mary. "I call all and sundry to witness that it was your dog who deliberately made an attack upon mine. Trusty! Trusty! Oh, my poor Trusty, he'll be killed. That other brute's got him down. He's being bitten to pieces, my poor old Trusty!"

Mary was hitting both dogs with her whip-lead; but although she felt that she was using most unfeminine force, such force that the ribbons of her bonnet came untied and at any moment she expected to find her hair loose upon her shoulders, her blows had not the slightest effect upon the dogs. The owner of the fox-terrier was exciting herself more every moment, and Mary was afraid that presently she should find herself being rolled over and over among those fragments of shells, her preoccupation with which had been the cause of Mac's outburst. However, the Dandie Dinmont was certainly winning; and if the weather-beaten lady did attack her, perhaps he would have disposed of the fox-terrier in time to rescue his mistress. At that moment a slim young man rushed into the middle of the fray and, seizing both dogs by their tails, he held them apart until he had returned them growling to the arms of their owners.

"You can think yourself lucky that I don't take out a summons against you," said the owner of the fox-terrier, hurrying off, without a word of thanks to the young man, to bathe Trusty's wounds at the nearest fountain.