Jocelyn

In his mind he perpetually reviewed all the unconsidered trifles of their meetings, the words spoken, and the words that seemed to hang unspoken on her lips, the thoughts that showed in her face and the thoughts unimaged, unconfessed—and neither her woman’s instinctive dissimulation, nor the greatly unconscious, greatly untested barrier of a girl’s reserve, could hide them altogether from his despairing eyes. He searched as a thirsty man seeks water in a desert, where to find it is life—to fail death. The knowledge that he was staking his all in that search, and yet that, even if he found it, it must needs be brackish, perhaps undrinkable, gave him a keenness of vision denied to most lover’s eyes. As the days ran into weeks he grew tired and worn-looking, and hollows began to come into his sun-burnt face. He lived, knowing nothing with certainty, nothing of what she felt, nothing of what he desired, nothing of the end. He lived a prey to hunger and to doubt....

One morning, as he was coming up to the hotel, he encountered Mrs. Travis, setting forth upon her daily visit to Monte Carlo. She told him that Jocelyn had taken a book, and gone for a walk by herself. He accompanied the good lady to the station, and watched her train go out, then he took the nearest way through the outskirts of the town to a sloping ridge which he knew to be Jocelyn’s favourite walk. The sun blazed fiercely, and in the town the heat brooded breathlessly over the houses, over the streets, and the dried watercourses. He passed a company of soldiers, in blue jackets and white trousers, straggling dustily along the road; three or four little girls on donkeys clattered by him laughingly, bumping up and down and chattering incessantly, while the drivers followed, flourishing sticks.

In the narrow lane of the steep ascent wild roses hung in clusters from the hedges; and now and then he passed unkempt cottages whence came the smell of burning wood and the barking of dogs. He came out at last upon a ridge, running between two terraced, vine-grown valleys. The uncertainty of his quest gave him courage, and he walked rapidly without dwelling upon the thought whether or not she would be glad to see him; but he had almost given up hope, and was about to retrace his steps, when he suddenly caught sight of her sitting on a bank of thyme, a little way down the left hand slope. Her elbows rested on her knees, and her chin was sunk in her hands; a book lay open by her side. His heart gave a great leap, and beat painfully; he stood still, doubting what he should do, but the sudden ceasing of footsteps had attracted her attention, and she looked up. He lifted his hat.

“May I come? Or shall I go back?” he said.

She looked at him startled, half rising from the ground.

“Shall I go away?” he repeated.

“It would be better,” she said; and then, as if to recall the strange words, she held out her hand and said—

“Oh, no! Come, of course, if you like.”

He went down the slope, dry and slippery under his feet, and threw himself at full length close to her. In the valley below the almond trees were flushing in the sun; on the hillsides the olives glistened, here and there a tall cypress stood like a sentinel over the scene, and pine trees crowning the ridge behind seemed to climb towards the blue of the sky. Cuckoos were calling, bees droning, and the tinkle of cow-bells floated up the valley. Little flowers pushed their tiny heads up around, and in all the still air was the scent of the thyme.

“This is the hour I love best,” said Jocelyn, “when the day is just sleeping; resting after its climb, before it begins to go down hill again. Listen to the bees, what a lullaby!”

She held up her finger, and sat with her head bent a little to one side, and a smile on her lips. Giles watching her, as always, saw the smile fade, leaving her face weary and troubled. He took up her book, and began turning over the leaves, with the feeling that by the trivial action he was warding off the pain which he felt was coming. Suddenly, she said—

“What does the world want with people? They only spoil it! It is so beautiful, except for our horrible, horrible selves.”

She put her hands out, as if she would push away from her something weighty and oppressive. The motion went straight to his heart; he sat up with an abrupt movement, and turning half away from her, clenched his hands; feelings of grief and rage tore at him.

Presently he felt a soft pull at his sleeve. He looked at her. The little oval face, with its large brown eyes, was so pathetic that all bitterness left him, and he thought only of how to bring the light back into it. He began to talk about the book, about anything that came uppermost in his mind, and gradually the old friendly serenity came into her face. They sat there a long time, talking and reading, while the shadows of the pine trees lengthened, and in the slanting sun the light mellowed on the hillside. At last Jocelyn said—

“It’s time for me to go back.”

She was rising to her feet, when her foot slipped, and she fell nearly to the ground. Giles standing close caught her in his arms. He felt her breath on his cheek, the soft pressure of her yielding body against him—and his eyes blazed with the sweet emotion that leaped up in his heart. When she was on her feet again, he held her for one second. Suddenly her frame became rigid, she pushed him violently away from her, and covering her face with her hands, turned, and almost ran up the slope. Giles stood where she had left him, motionless....

Half an hour later he too went up the slope. At the turning into the lane, Jocelyn rose from the trunk of a fallen tree on which she had been sitting, and came up to him without a word. Her face was flushed, there were circles beneath her eyes, and he knew that she had been crying. With a catch in his breath, he took her hand and stroked it gently. They went down the hill together silently.

CHAPTER VI

The little grey villa hanging over the Cornice road smiled down a sheer descent at the sea, which danced, far out, to the tune of the breeze in lines of sapphire, and, shorewards, was ringed smoothly with a dull, turquoise crescent of water, broken only where the foam-scud, shining in the brilliant sunshine, flew up over the green-grey rocks. Below the wall, on the nether side of the road, a clump of silver olives swayed gracefully in the freshening breeze, and beyond, a group of stone pines brooded, thoughtful and apart, at the edge of the cliff. Hanging masses of pink geranium, and wine-coloured bougainvillea stained the greyness of the villa walls, and rainbow roses clung in festoons round its closed, green shutters.

Up the curved, white vista of dusty road toiled the figure of an old man, sturdily bending under his load of palm branches. A two-horsed cart rattled noisily downwards towards the bridge to the crack of the driver’s lash and his shrill “yuips.” Just in front of the villa three small brown urchins chattered busily in the dust, heaving flat stones aimlessly along the road; and the soft, metallic note of women’s talk, with a wailing rise at the end of each sentence, floated up from a gaily-skirted group washing linen in the tank below. To the left, where the road wound past a buttress of old grey masonry, palms clustered skyward in dusty profusion; to the right, through a slanting, mauve network of wisteria and sleepy heliotrope, one caught a glimpse of the lichen-dotted wall of a Saracen tower, rising solid and picturesque, pierced in the centre by a white-washed stone archway. The sea gave a blue-green setting to the spreading foliage, to the gnarled trunks of the balancing olives and the stems of the pines; the edging foam, glinting white as it shot up over the rocks, seemed to throw a playful challenge to the friends that had hung so long above in airy seclusion.

In a corner of the garden, where a pepper tree threw feathery shadows from its hanging, frond-like leaves, and dull pink berries, on to the grass, Shikari lay, his head between his paws, watching his master’s restless figure out of one half-closed eye.

Presently the sound of wheels was heard coming up the road. Giles stopped his uneasy tramp on the broad verandah, and, followed by the dog, went and stood at the top of the crescent of trellis-roofed steps, that led curving up to the door from the outside porch. The carriage stopped. Jocelyn was the first to alight. She stood, for a minute, before she mounted, looking up at him through the roses which trailed mysteriously over her head out of shadowy masses of hanging foliage—falling through the openings of the twisted trellis-work, they seemed to be whispering and beckoning to her, as she stood under the green archway.

Shikari walked gravely down the steps, and raising himself, placed a paw on each of her shoulders.

Irma was waiting for them in a cool room on the ground floor. She looked very ill, but she greeted her visitors with graceful cordiality. Giles noticed that she looked at Jocelyn with a strangely wistful expression. Nielsen, who had followed them into the room, suddenly produced from his pocket a beautiful little china bowl, which he presented to his hostess with his usual elaborate languor.

“I have been waiting for the chance of giving you this, my dear lady,” he said, bowing. “It was presented to me by my dear frriend Dick Garron; it comes from Yokohama, you know; I have been tortured,” and he spread his hands expressively, “for fear it should be destrroyed by my cats. I should not feel it so deeply, don’t you see, if it were destrroyed by other people’s cats.”

Irma’s tired face, yellow-white from constant pain, lighted up with a smile. Jocelyn had brought her flowers, Mrs. Travis, chocolate; the three characteristic gifts touched her fancy humorously. As she murmured her gracious, foreign thanks, her eyes—like those of a souled monkey—kept glancing from Jocelyn as she put the flowers in water, to Giles, who leant against the door watching her. He caught one look from his wife; there was such sadness, such depth of comprehension, such mockery in it, that he knew once for all there was nothing to hide from her. He dropped his eyes, and there was a moment when his feelings were a strange mingling of shame, regret, bitterness, and compassion—a moment of absolute physical discomfort; then he stepped across, smoothed her cushions, and with a muttered excuse left the room.

Nielsen, an old friend with a great and sympathetic admiration for the sick woman, had much to say, and proceeded to say it. Mrs. Travis was busy inspecting the silver in two cabinets against the wall, examining the pattern critically, and murmuring a constant approval. Jocelyn, left to herself, talked to two bullfinches, who instantly became her friends. Her nerves were on edge, the strain of the situation, whether she would or no, was being forced upon her reason. Her aunt’s complacent comments, Nielsen’s languid chatter, Irma’s eyes so full of meaning and knowledge, and yet so kind, jarred her. The colour came and went in her face, and her eyes looked restlessly about her; she revolted impatiently in a hardly-repressed irritation against the confinement of the pretty, dainty room, shaded by the verandahs from the powerful beat and throb of life outside. She longed to get into the sunshine, away from the thoughts that crowded painfully upon her mind.

She felt an immense relief when Giles’s voice summoned them to the carriage, and she went out and drew a deep breath, with Irma’s farewell words sounding in her ears—

“Good-bye, dear one, you are young and so beautiful; have a good time, it is right, it is fitting.” ...

To the jingling of their ear bells, the pair of little flea-bitten greys raised a whirling column of dust on the winding, downward road to Ventimiglia. With every step gained from the villa, Jocelyn’s spirits rose in the rapid motion through the warm dry air; she lost herself in the brilliant day, in the passing glimpses of the laughing sea, in the hot pine scent from above the road. She shook her parasol gaily, with a smiling “Buon Giorno,” at a group of Italian peasant girls swinging along, slowly and erect, to market; the flowers which she had tied round its handle swayed and quivered, sending their perfume over to Giles, who sat opposite her. She did not look at him; it seemed as though she had determined to forget everything—everything but the throb of the warm life that stirred around her.

As they rose a slight hill, they passed a man with a gun slung over his shoulder by a strap. Side-whiskered, with a hard felt hat and a nondescript dog, he was going out to shoot singing birds.

“Le sport!” said Giles, with a disgusted shrug of his shoulders.

“The brute!” said Jocelyn, her face crimson with sudden anger. “I should like to wring his neck, only”—recovering herself slightly under the surprise in her aunt’s and Nielsen’s faces, “it looks so dirty.”

Giles glanced at her sympathetically—he knew her great love for all birds and animals, and understood.

“You must not be angry with the poor man,” said Nielsen, “they are not a sportin’ people, the Italians, don’t you know.”

But Jocelyn’s feelings were still ruffled.

“I hate people who drop their final g’s,” she said.

Nielsen regarded her through his eyeglass with great consternation.

“I beg your pardon,” he said at last.

“My dear!” said Mrs. Travis—want of affability in other people was a crime to her, it rendered things so uncomfortable.

“Oh! You are excused,” said Jocelyn, whose sudden anger had evaporated now that they were out of sight of the intending sportsman—“it doesn’t matter for foreigners, you know, only you mustn’t do it again.”

She experienced a sudden compunction, and smiled at him appealingly.

Nielsen, who accepted her shrewdly as one not to be judged by ordinary standards, liked her the better for the swift changing of her moods.

They passed through Ventimiglia and along the level road that runs to Bordighera; past the odorous tannery, past the town’s custom-house, past the ill-looking, outlying, roadside cafés.

A villainous Italian, with a dirty face, coming out of one of these, took his slouch hat off to Giles, who returned him a nod.

“Who is that horrid-looking man?” said Jocelyn.

“A friend of mine,” replied Giles gravely; “he pays professional visits to the villa sometimes; he is one of a profession the most elevated in these parts, plays the barrel-organ.”

“Ah! Mais ce n’est pas une profession, ça, c’est une carrière vous savez,” put in Nielsen, sotto voce.

They drove past the long, dull, modern street, and the picturesque town of old Bordighera, tumbled together in lofty and evil-smelling seclusion above. At the garden of palms beyond, the drive came to an end.

Some one suggested picnicking on the rocks below the road; they left the carriage, and made their way down to the beach, where they lunched in the shade of a huge, seaworn boulder.

After the things were cleared and taken back to the carriage, Giles returned from giving directions to the coachman to find Mrs. Travis on the verge of sleep, her mouth slightly open, her hand feebly grasping a drooping parasol, her head nodding from side to side.

He could see Jocelyn at the water’s edge, and Nielsen moving towards her; and he felt a great pang of jealousy.

Lighting a cigar, he strolled away from Mrs. Travis; he did not wish to embarrass the good lady upon her awakening. With his hat over his eyes, he leant against a rock, sending vicious puffs of smoke between his lips, and looking down at a footprint Jocelyn had left in the sand.

CHAPTER VII

“I want to get on that little green rock,” said Jocelyn, pointing to the furthermost rock separated from the others by an eddy of rippling, shallow water. In a moment she had whipped off her shoes and stockings, and with skirts raised to her ankles, was scrambling through the ripples of the circling waves, up the slippery, green slope of the rock.

Nielsen regarded her proceedings from the beach with an air of comical dismay and admiration.

“Take care, my dear young lady,” he kept on saying, rolling his r’s more than usual. His eyeglass was damp with the interest of his glance, and his umbrella hung uselessly over his shoulder.

“Come along,” said Jocelyn, “I thought you used to be an athlete?”

“It was not the part of the athlete in my day to climb slipperry rocks with young ladies,” he said plaintively, gallantly removing a boot, and standing on one leg in an amiable hesitation.

“Mais en verité,” he muttered to himself, drawing off the other boot and revealing pink socks, in the toe of one of which was a decided hole; “she is not a milk and butter Miss, cette chère Jocelyn,” and he hastily divested himself of the holey sock.

Jocelyn having reached the summit, dropped her skirts, and, shading her face with her hand from the burning sun, looked over the hesitating Nielsen at the lines of the bay, that curved in under the stony, sparsely-covered mountains.

It was one of those cloudless Riviera days, when, seen from behind the sun, the coast loses all other colouring in the vivid tints of the sky and sea. The blue of the distant Esterelles melted in the far west into the paler blue of the heavens, and all the nearer hills and jutting promontories were bathed in a wonderful violet ether. One ultimate snowy peak reared itself aloft, emerging triumphant from the trammels of the light. Looking eastwards, where the sun had already sped his course, every line and patch of colouring was thrown into an intense relief. The white houses stared along the stony, drab slopes. The Campanile with the little black cross upon its summit, sprang up high over the old town of Bordighera, against masses of glistening olives beyond. Along a far spur of the hills an old Italian village stretched in straggling seclusion.

Jocelyn bent over to look into the turquoise pools that lapped with white edges round the green, weed-covered rocks, and now and again caught the shadowy gleam of a fish in the cloudy-blue water. On the next rock to her, two picturesque bare-legged fishers angled lazily with twelve-foot rods of stiff bamboo. The breeze caught her hair, and she turned and looked away over the sea, drawing the soft, salt air through her nostrils with an intense feeling of pleasure.

She was in one of her gipsy moods—it was good to set her back to the land, to those eternal ridges of hills which forced upon her a feeling of imprisonment; very good to turn to the sea, the salt sea, stretching before her in blue, illimitable vastness.

A wonderful glow of life and freedom came upon her with the beating of the soft wind against her face. She felt a wild desire to spread her wings in a long, long flight to a freer life, like the little, lateen-rigged fishing smack, running from the land before the wind—a flight away from convention, and the eternal need for repression; away from all her fears, from the horror which sometimes came over her, from the unconfessed longing which fought against it within her breast; away, into a solitude as great as the sea itself, where no other individualities should besiege her own, giving her a sense of suffocation—a solitude, where there should be no knowledge, and no distrust.

Nielsen’s gently imperturbable voice recalled her.

“I am coming, my dear young lady; just a little patience, it is very slipperry, don’t you see.” He was picking a gingerly way with his bare feet from one stone to another.

“Go back,” she cried almost harshly. “I’m coming off!”

What was the use of her wild thoughts! She was bound! bound to that undefined struggle which, whether she would or no, was always going on within her. Her face clouded with its wonted look of defeat, and she sighed. She waited till Nielsen was returning, and then waded back herself.

The feelings which the sea had roused in her made her irritable.

“It’s a dull sea—the Mediterranean,” she said from one side of a rock, putting on her shoes and stockings, “no tides, no ebb and flow; what a monotony! I wonder it finds it worth while to break on its shores at all!”

“You would not say that if you saw it in a storm,” came, in plaintive, half-choked parenthesis, from the other side of the rock, where the discreet Swede was also resuming his boots.

“It manages to break on every shore all round; I should like to know where it parts its hair,” continued Jocelyn meditatively.

“My dear young lady, it is like the bald-headed man, don’t you know; it does not part its hair at all, it has no hair to part in the middle, don’t you see, only a fringe that falls on all sides.”

Nielsen appeared suddenly from round the rock, his hat in his hand, smoothing his own well-covered, flaxen head appreciatively.

Jocelyn laughed gently. She had finished her toilet, and sat looking up at him with her head a little on one side, and her feet drawn under her skirts. Nielsen moved a step towards her, and his brown eyes glowed.

“Do you know you are quite charrming! May I not—“—he bent his head to her hand.

“Please don’t!” she said impatiently.

She had lately found it difficult to take the sentimental remarks of the enamoured Swede as a matter of course.

“Forgive me,” said Nielsen humbly, “you are so beautiful, you see!”

“I would rather you didn’t talk like that, please,” said Jocelyn.

She rose and held out her hand to him frankly; Nielsen took it in his own, letting it go with a deep sigh.

Jocelyn restrained an inclination to laugh.

“What is that ship?” she asked, as they made their way towards the others. Nielsen screwed his eyeglass into his eye.

“A ‘messageries’ for China and the Indies; she will call at Genoa.”

Jocelyn’s eyes followed the great, black steamer racing past. The foam was churning up from under its bows, and along its sides. She looked at it wistfully with wide eyes—the longing was not out of her yet. Nielsen fastened on the look intuitively.

“If you would marry me, you should do that or anything else that you liked,” he said suddenly, pointing to the steamer “I am not verry poor now, you know—the ‘system’ has been verry good to me lately.”

There was an earnestness in his voice, that was in strong contrast to its habitual suave flattery, and his allusion to the “system”—which, with a gambler’s superstition, he never mentioned—struck Jocelyn. She stopped and looked at him.

Yes! He was evidently in earnest; the innumerable little lines and crow’s-feet in his face, showed cruelly in the blazing sunshine; he was paler than usual, and he looked at her with almost a dog’s look in his weary brown eyes. But all she said was—

“I think you spend too much time over the ‘system’!”

She had caught sight of Giles’s figure against the rock, and she felt a sudden, physical repulsion to the man standing beside her.

“But understand,” said Nielsen, “I love you—I love you! You cannot prevent that, you know.” He put out his hands, as if to take her in his arms, and his face twitched.

“Are you mad?” she cried, hurrying past him. She walked swiftly over the hard sand, and as she went a curious feeling came upon her, a feeling of delight that was almost pain. She had forgotten Nielsen, but the words, “I love you—I love you,” kept echoing within her; they had lost all sound and form, they had become like the breath of an inspiration. All her being rose in a trembling answer. A wave of crimson rushed into her face, and as she hastened she plucked nervously at the single yellow rose fastened in her dress. Nielsen stood still, looking after her. A minute later, however, he was beside her again, talking commonplaces with his usual plaintive, imperturbable drawl, his face showing no traces of its recent emotion.

When they reached the others, Jocelyn threw herself down by her aunt, close to a group of sea-washed rocks, through the broken crevices of which the little waves were leaping and flashing like white fairies at play; and when Giles came up, two minutes later, she seemed to be listening gaily to a story Nielsen was telling.

Mrs. Travis, fanning herself, insinuated gentle complaints of the heat. She wished to see the palm gardens, where it looked shady.

Giles led the way with alacrity; he longed to have Jocelyn to himself, with all the concentrated longing of many hours of repression. Mrs. Travis was soon in rapt admiration of the shrubs and flowers; and she impressed Nielsen into her service to make a bargain in French with the florist proprietor, for a weekly provision of flowers to be sent to Mentone, standing by to afford assistance; she had a great and wholly warranted faith in her powers of cheapening things.

Giles and Jocelyn strolled away from them, and were soon hidden by the thick palm foliage. The garden wound up and down in a mass of flowering plants and scented shrubs.

“It’s a kind of paradise,” said Giles, “rather cut and dried in parts.”

“Yes,” Jocelyn assented—“‘the trail of the florist is over it all.’ But the scents are good; I love the dear flowers.” She plucked a spray of roses daringly, and pinned them in the breast of her dress.

“I was always a thief with flowers, you know; I can’t help it, I have to steal them.”

Presently they followed a little path running upwards at the top of the garden. It led them on to a rocky knoll over which, in a ring of spikey aloes and grotesque prickly pears, a shady olive spread its shimmering branches like a tent. Jocelyn seated herself beneath it, looking down upon the wilderness of the garden foliage. In her white skirt and pale silver-green blouse, she looked like the spirit of the tree, as she leant against the trunk with the yellow sunlight playing fantastically on her through the quivering leaves.

A bare and stony hill sloped behind them, planted here and there with vines and rose-trees, which served only to throw into a greater relief its yellow-grey harshness. In front, the tangled masses of palms and plants, the plain, unpretentious white houses straggling along the shore, and the straight line of the railway running beside the sea, gave the scene the unfinished look of some sub-tropical settlement. Across the dipped valley, under the lee of a high, rounded hill covered with olives and glancing green fig-trees, a little church spire rose modestly and incongruously out of a mass of palms.

Giles, who had turned the brim of his Panama hat down, like a mushroom, over his neck, lay on his face in the sun, looking up at Jocelyn. Her beauty, and the impelling, passionate yearning within him, deprived him helplessly of the power of speech. She was sitting with her hand on Shikari’s head, smelling at the flowers in her dress, her figure swaying a little as she hummed to herself.

Her cheeks were still flushed, and her eyes bright from that strange emotion.

She began to sing a little Finnish song that he knew well, with notes that suggested “sobbing” for a refrain. She had a tiny voice, “niedlich,” as the Germans say. But in the middle of a verse she stopped suddenly and pointed with her ungloved hand at a large, yellow-fanged drover’s dog, which had appeared on the side of the knoll. Shikari sprang up with a growl, his teeth showing. The two dogs approached one another snarling, and before Giles could rise to prevent them, had each other by the throat, and were rolling over and over on the ground. He leaped hastily to his feet, and gripped Shikari hard by the collar; getting a purchase with his foot against the other dog’s shoulder, with a violent, pushing kick, he sent him sprawling down the slope.

As he turned his head for a second, he saw Jocelyn holding Shikari with her arms laced round his neck—the dog was growling and licking her face at the same time—but in another minute the drover’s dog came up the slope again, and, with a savage snarl, sprang at his throat.

Throwing out both hands stiffly, he caught at the brute’s neck, but his grip slipped on the short, wiry hair, and the impetus of the dog’s spring carried him backwards on to the ground.

Jocelyn saw his hands slip, saw him stagger, and fall; it seemed impossible to her that he could keep those hideous fangs from his throat. Involuntarily she threw her hands up to her eyes. She had a mental vision of a torn throat—a gaping, jagged wound. A cloud of hot, whirling dust rose from the dry ground, where the man and beast were struggling. For one second of sheer horror she stood still, her face crimson and as suddenly white, then with a little cry she ran towards them; but the struggle was already over. The first movement of her hands had released the greyhound. The drover’s dog had turned with his teeth on Giles’s throat to attack his old enemy, and Giles scrambling to his feet, had seized his stick, dealing the brute a heavy blow, which half stunned him.

Jocelyn saw him leaning over the two dogs, a hand twisted in the collar of each, his face very pale, his figure strained with the effort of holding them apart; his clothes were covered with dust, and he bled from a scratch on one hand. He released the cowed brute, who slunk away down the hill, and stood up, breathing hard, keeping a foot on Shikari, who growled angrily.

Jocelyn went softly up to him. Even now, seeing him erect, she hardly dared look at his throat, so vivid was the memory of the wound that had gleamed, red and angry, before her covered eyes.

She gave a little choke and put out her hands.

When he felt the touch of her fingers on his shoulder he faced her suddenly. In the moments of fierce excitement, when his muscles and his nerves had been strung and braced, all thought of Jocelyn had left him, he had felt only the fighting fever and the consciousness of strength; but his blood was coursing wildly through his veins, and the touch of those fingers was like a spark to a magazine. All his passion returned with tenfold strength.

He faced her with blazing eyes, and his lips quivered.

“Are you hurt, Giles?” she said.

Her eyes were bent on him with a strained look, the black pupils expanding; and her lips were tremulous and parted.

“My darling!” he cried, “did you care?”

She looked at him, frightened at his words, yet wondering he should ask.

“Care? Yes.”

“I love you, Jocelyn, I love you! My God! What am I saying?”

He bent his head down to the level of her hands; one of them stole up and smoothed his hair with a little shrinking caress. When he looked again, her eyes were soft and wet, and he knew somehow that she had been glad.

He was nearly choked by the joy that leaped in his heart, but the tears in her eyes helped him to a mastery of himself.

“Dear,” he said, “I am sorry, I couldn’t help it! Forget it—forgive me, I couldn’t help it—you are so sweet and lovely—so sweet and lovely—after all, you knew it long ago.”

He spoke in short, broken sentences, catching his breath with gasps.

She smiled at him softly and sadly, and for one moment he caught, as in a revelation, the love-light in her eyes. Her lips still trembled; with her hands she brushed the dust mechanically from his clothes.

She looked swiftly up at him.

“I was so frightened,” she said, “I thought—” and covered her eyes with her hands, shuddering.

He caught them in his, and stood looking down upon her dark head. He could see the little fluffy hair on her neck, and her shoulders heaving softly. He was too happy to speak; and he was afraid—afraid of the passionate words that rose to his lips. The dry leaves of the olive tree rustled crisply over their heads, and from the road below came the tinkle of cowbells.

Voices broke in upon their silence. They went down in answer to Mrs. Travis’s calling, and as they went, Giles said softly—

“Whatever comes, dear, this has been the hour of my life.”

They drove home without stopping at the villa, putting Nielsen down at the Ventimiglia station. He had been very silent on the return journey. He said to Jocelyn when he left them—

“I must get back to Monte Carrlo, you know, and appease the Fates for my desertion.”

As they passed the last hill into Mentone the evening light was already spreading, mellow and soft, over the town, and the sun was dying behind the Esterelles. The tired little horses, toiling up the steep ascent, nodded their heads diligently.

Jocelyn and Giles got out to walk. Half-way up, Jocelyn stopped and stretched out her arms, saying with a sigh—

“Look! The evening is coming over everything, like a cool blessing, gentle—gentle—”

“Yes!” said Giles. Their eyes met for one moment, and not another word was said.

When they reached the hotel, he took his leave of them. Jocelyn turned on the steps.

“Buona Sera! my friend!” she said. “Buona Sera!” She gave him her hand for a second time. Her eyes looked unnaturally large in the uncertain light. Giles stood with his hat off till she had disappeared—he could not speak.

CHAPTER VIII

Far away, up an inland valley, a single splash of crimson light showed where some chance fire raged unchecked among the mountain forest-growth. Through the perfume of orange trees a floating smoke-wrack of burning wood spent itself upon the warm air. The air was full too of early evening sounds—the barking of dogs, the crack of a whip lash, the hardly-caught metallic murmur of human voices, the rattle of a receding train, and over all the croaking of the frogs, and the sighing of the sea.

Giles swung along the road on his way back to the villa like a man in a dream.

“Buona Sera!—buona Sera!”—the words rang in his ears. The blood was coursing through his veins, and his pulses beat wildly. For the time he was no longer conscious of that ever haunting thought, “What the devil was he doing in that galley?” He let himself go on the flood tide of his passion. Jocelyn’s image danced along the road in front of him. He saw her pale face, under her shady hat, looking at him with soft, dark eyes, through the dim shadows of every road-side tree.

He had walked, like a man possessed, up the long hill to the Pont St. Louis. The gendarmes whom he passed at the Customs looked after him curiously.

“Buona Sera! There is one who marches, hein? Diabe enragé d’un Anglais. Peste! he has not stopped for the gambler’s leap. Buona Sera, signore!” In the alternative they decided that he had broken the bank.

“Buona Sera!” Over the bridge, with its sheer descent to the dim caves on the one side, and the twinkling cottage lights on the other, and up and still up the hill. He could smell the perfume of her dress in every evening scent, in the salt whiffs wafted from below, in the fragrance of the lonely pine trees above the road.

“Buona Sera! Buona Sera!” The words were in the distant croaking of the frogs, on every murmur of the breaking waves.

As he drew his breath freely again after the steep ascent, he looked far out over the cliffs, to the westward, in the still evening light, and his thoughts flew to the girl as she had stood on the hotel steps waving her hand to him. How he loved the delicate, dainty figure, the turn of the slender neck, the pure line of her profile, the softly pointed chin! He pictured her as she had sat under the olive in the afternoon, looking up at the sky through the delicate tracery of its leaves—the creamy white line of the pretty throat bent back, the long, supple hands lying in her lap. He felt an intense, unreasoning delight that, for good or evil, he had told her of his love; then an infinite, tender compassion for her tremulous silence, for the little, swaying, helpless motion of her head and hands, for the swift, dewy glance of her dark eyes.

She knew—nothing could take that from him; she knew, and she had been glad to know.

Now that the keynote had been struck, all the deep chords, unstirred for so many years in his mind, sounded with a full consonance; all the great, unsatisfied longing hitherto unshadowed in his deeply affectionate nature had taken to itself shape, all the vast gambling possibility in him was fiercely aroused.

The latent force, the unspent passion of the years that he had idled away, shallow and indifferent, in a long, unbroken compromise with life, asserted themselves now with a fatal vehemence. He was not a man who could love without passion. Passion would play its full part in his love, neither more nor less; and he knew it.

In the changes that his mind rang on the situation, and the bewildered jangling of his thoughts, the idea of recoil was the only one that did not come to him. He would go forward, at what cost he did not know, he did not stop to count. He hugged to himself, undiscerning of what it meant, the defeat of the eternal compromise.

Again he moved homewards, now idling slowly along, and her words, “The evening is coming over everything, like a cool blessing, gentle—gentle,” sounded in his ears, and he could see again her arms outstretched as though to take it to herself.

He came presently through the scented night to the villa, and let himself in with a sudden, chill feeling of utter languor. He flung himself into a long chair in the unlighted drawing-room, and, worn out, fell fast asleep.

To Irma, as she raised the curtains that divided the room from her own boudoir, there was the look of a wrecked man about him as he lay there. The long figure was thrown carelessly down in its dusty, white clothes, the neck bent slightly back, and the head rested on an arm twisted behind him. A bar of yellow light from the half-shaded lamp she held in her hand fell across his lean, sun-tanned face and neck, sharpening the features, and throwing into relief the lines which seam a man’s face when sleep follows on the fiercer emotions. She set the lamp upon a table, and stood, leaning painfully against the wall, thinking.

Her husband! those two words were the epitome of her thoughts. She bent forward, and gazed at him long and closely, as if she had never seen him before. How tired he looked! After all, it was the face of a stranger!—ten years of married life, and the face of a stranger! She smiled, a very weary smile. A fine face, with a good brow and chin, now that it was rid of the mask it had worn to her these ten years! She read in its lines things she had never known were there, and another woman had brought them into the face! That was the mischief of it! and the pain! She passed her thin hand across her eyes with a sudden, swift gesture. In her own mind, too, she was finding things she had not suspected. She had thought it impossible she should ever feel that pain, that sudden jealous spasm.

She stood quite motionless, a bent figure, thinking. The day of her wedding came back to her, a day of indifferent obedience to her parents. All the long vista of days since rose before her mind—a level, monotonous line of ghosts.

Her lips trembled as if with cold; she muttered to herself in Polish, “I have no claim upon him.” What was it to her that he should go from her? what had it ever been? Go from her! when he had never been hers. And yet—a vision of Jocelyn, as she had stood that morning, smiling and graceful, talking to the birds, rose before her. A blind, wearing pain of jealous regret was come to torture her. She thought, “It is hard!”

She moved, with one hand on her breast, to the window and stood, looking out into the soft, hazy night. The shadow of her drooping, white-robed figure fell across the bar of light from the flaring lamp.

Yes! He had been very good to her, very good and gentle—few men, she thought, would have been so gentle to a helpless log, such as she had always been. And what had she given him in return? And now—too late! Well, it was natural, this which was happening, only she wished—bitterly, fiercely, vainly wished—that it had not come. She felt tired, and very far spent; he would not have had to wait long!

A faint stir of air ruffled the lace round her thin throat; a whisper behind her said, “Jocelyn!”

She turned to see Giles sitting up, with one hand stretched out, and rubbing his eyes with the other; as she turned he woke to his full consciousness, and a low “Ah, you!” escaped from his lips.

Again a choking spasm of jealousy came upon her, again a vision of the girl passed before her eyes, but she held the quiver out of her voice.

“It does not matter,” she said, but her eyes, black and mournful, looked wild in the dim, smoky light.

Giles put his hands before his face, and bent forward in his chair.

“I am sorry,” was all he said.

Irma turned from the window, and straightened her drooping figure. She took the lamp in her hand, and moved to the door.

“Good night, Giles! It does not matter, there is nothing to be done, you know—nothing.”

The voice sounded staccato, level, monotonous, as if the words were ground out of her; only her eyes, in the backward look she gave him, had meaning.

And from the bent figure, in the darkness of the room behind her, came a muttered word—“Nothing.”

CHAPTER IX

Her aunt’s voice came to her in jerky, complacent periods.

“How hot the nights are getting! We can’t stay here much longer, my dear, nobody stays till June, it’s very late already. If it wasn’t for my new ‘system,’ I wouldn’t stay another day—I’m sure there’s something in it.” She appeared for a moment at the door with her arms raised rectangularly to her back hair.

“How thin Giles is growing!” she said in an injured voice, with a shrewd look at her niece. “It makes me quite uncomfortable to see him.”

It was a canon with her that people should be plump. She was alive to the state of Giles’s feelings, but she resented its affecting the outlines of his person. From much experience she felt secure of her niece’s invulnerability, she had seen so many darts fall blunted from her armour, one adorer more or less, even a married one, did not matter. She always reflected, too, that Giles was a connection of her own by marriage. Mrs. Travis possessed that order of mind which looks upon things belonging to themselves as beyond suspicion and reproach. He was a married man, but a connection of her own, immaculate! Nevertheless she resented the dwindling of his bulk; perhaps she considered it indecent; perhaps, in some mysterious way, she regarded it as the removal of her own property. In any case a moody leanness was unpardonable; to her, Nielsen, attentive yet well-covered, was more satisfactory.

“I shall recommend him to take cod-liver oil; I don’t think it’s right for any man to be so thin,” she said.

Jocelyn made an impatient movement, and the frilled sleeves of her nightdress rustled faintly against the muslin curtain. Mrs. Travis, disappearing again into her room, continued to talk.

“To-day was quite wasted; we mustn’t gad about so much; I ought to have been at the tables. Yes, I shall stay the month out, but the first of June we must go; remind me to take the roses off my new bonnet.” Her voice, overpowered by pins, ran into a mumble.

Jocelyn braced her slender, curving limbs against the wall. “Go!” The word brought her an unpleasant shock of reminder. She threw up her head impatiently. Her small, oval face looked very childish and young in the loose framework of dark hair, brushed in long, rippling tresses back over her shoulders. In the darkened room her slight figure, in its thin white covering, was dimly outlined, and the bare feet, thrust forward as she leaned back, gleamed in a little patch of light that came from the other room.

Mrs. Travis came to the door. She was more comfortable than ever in her night attire, with a comfort that threw off all attempt at decorative disguise, solely excepting curl papers.

“You naughty girl, you’re smoking!” she said.

Jocelyn shrugged her shoulders.

“It’s for the mosquitoes, and the nerves.”

“Well, I don’t like it—my dear mother would have had convulsions if she’d seen you. I don’t think it’s right! Shut your windows, and keep the mosquitoes out, as I do.” She sniffed.

Jocelyn gave a prolonged puff, and flipped the cigarette out of its holder.

“There!” she said. “Run, or the beasts will eat you, you are so good to them.”

Mrs. Travis, with a hasty kiss, retreated rapidly, closing the door. Jocelyn laughed, then she moved restlessly up and down the room. Presently she came back to the window, and leaned far out into the darkness. It was late; the town slept, vaguely stretched below in a rambling confusion of dark shapes and corners, foliage, and dimly burning lights. It was very still....

In the girl’s heart joy and pain were strangely blended.

The first of June! This was the seventh of May, nearly a month, that was all! What did it mean? Whither was she being carried? If it could only be always as it had been that evening! She had been so happy. In less than a month she would go away! It seemed very strange, very unreal; there was a desperate discomfort in the thought, the discomfort of unfulfilment.

The vague, dreaming sweetness was being rudely rent away from her thoughts—the glamour that hung like a veil over the past day. For a moment she saw plainly all the naked, unsparing reality. She heard again the words of the sick woman, “Have a good time, you are young, you are beautiful—it is fitting.” The devilish, unconscious irony of them! She felt a great sense of injustice, of hard usage at the hands of fate.

That day a wonderful sweetness had come to her. It was as if, for the first time, life had whispered some secret of hidden meaning, had spoken words at which the longing and the lonely restlessness of her soul had yielded. This was love! Love!

She laughed. The mockery and hopelessness of it were so plain that she felt its strength the more. Her eyes moved restlessly from side to side as if seeking a way of escape—she twisted her hands silently, and pressed them to her cheek. She loved him, and he was beyond her reach—why? why? She chafed under the thought.

The passionate, penetrating cry of a peacock broke suddenly through the vibrating air; it echoed painfully within her. Why should she not know love? What had she done? She had not sought—could she help it? Why put it away? It was sweet and good to be with him, she wanted nothing more. Then there flashed before her the look in Giles’s eyes, as he gazed at her after his struggle with the dog; for one most disquieting moment she saw into them, behind them; he knew there was something further, beyond, something fundamental, burning, unknown to her, which passed by, scorching her like a fiery breath. And for that moment she shrank back frightened ashamed, and thrust the shutters to, to drive out the long, fiercely wailing regret in the shrill, bird’s cry.

The figure of the Polish woman, lying in its white drapery, came before her. A woman with haunting, unhappy eyes, ill—her friend, his wife—her friend! She made a little impatient movement in the dark room, and groping, turned to her bed with a shrinking desire to hide herself. She felt as if in the presence of something contaminating and poisonous; she shuddered, her pride revolted. She drew aside the curtains, and flung herself upon the bed. What had she done? Why should she be treated like this? Tears of impotent rage and self-pity filled her eyes. It was all so new, so strange, so unreal. She drew the clothes over her, as a child does to drive away the fear of bogies. She would not think of these things; there seemed a safety and a refuge in the soft pillows and the familiar cool rustle of the sheets as she turned from side to side. She lay a long time rigid, trying not to think, vaguely uneasy, vaguely unhappy, vaguely frightened; she was very tired too. But in spite of herself all the mingled feelings of the past weeks came back to her. The rude shock, so long ago now, of awakening to the knowledge that he loved her—the horror of it; that horror, which was but sharpened by the something in her own heart which she would not confess. All the weary struggle and repression for days and days with no certain knowledge of what she desired. And this was the end! He could never be hers—and she loved him! She buried her face in the pillows, and sobbed as if her heart would break.

After a long time, she fell into a half-conscious, restless state. Motionless and unreasoning, she passed in succession through all the events of the day gigantically exaggerated, blending grotesquely one into the other; then through each one of them, startlingly distinct, having no relation to any other thing that had ever happened to her—visions of things, which seemed like vast, shadow-throwing rocks one might encounter in a desert of sand. Then again, in sudden change, a great, blurred mist of vaporous phantoms came before her. One by one she strove to attain them—they were without form and void, and one by one they passed her by, remote and mournful as the flight of a lapwing. Images, carved in the air, of people she had known, of faces she had never seen; words she had heard, words that had never been spoken, flitted by, hovering like moths with restless wings. All that she had ever done, seen, or heard, was before her in a dancing maze of coloured shapes, threading singly to the centre of a blazing wheel, darting outwards radiant to the misty circle edge, like a flight of gnats round a fire. The lids fast-closed over her eyes seemed to enclose the world for her, to drive down into her brain a mass of wheeling unreality. With an effort she wrenched herself free from her pillows, tossing her bare arms over her head. She fell back again, with one hand clasped behind her thick, soft hair, looking up with wide eyes at the dim shape of the curtained bed roof. It was thus that sleep presently found her....

When she awoke in the morning, a faint feeling of frightened discomfort, a feeling that something new and dangerous was before her, vanished with the slanting, brilliant beams of sun striking through the shutters. She lay, quietly twisting a wisp of her tumbled hair, surprised only that she had forgotten to plait it the night before. Then, as everything came back to her with a rush, she wondered what she had found to so trouble and alarm her. Giles loved her!—well, it was very sweet and good to be loved by him, and she could not help it. She only wanted to be with him—to know that he loved her! What harm was there! She sprang from the bed.

The pulse of life beat very strongly this morning in the green-clothed, quivering valley behind the town; the almond trees seemed to flush a deeper pink; the tinkle of bells, as goats shifted dustily along the road to a new pasture, came with fuller melody to her ears. She leaned from the window and drew in a deep breath of the freshened air.

After all, there was nearly a month, and life was good just now—nearly a month of a sweet companionship, and after—well—all things come to a end!—it was not very good to dwell upon that thought, it was better to take things as they came. She fell to wondering what time Giles would be with them.

That morning Mrs. Travis, in pursuance of her resolve, went early into Monte Carlo. She knew that Giles would come over, but she always shut her eyes to the possibility of mischief, knowing that to recognise it would mean the sacrifice of her daily visit to the gambling-tables. Taking the greatest care never to dive below the surface, she was enabled to persuade herself quite comfortably that her niece ran no risk, and she consoled herself for leaving her with her habitual reflection that Giles was a connection of her own—the elasticity of her principles enabling her that morning to fix the relationship at some two degrees nearer than it really was. He was also a married man, a fact which she could twist either way as it suited her convenience, with an equally full and just feeling of comfort. She departed, getting over the ground at a great pace with a dignified, flat-footed gait, her head full of enthusiasm and artificial flowers. She studied, as she went, a little book on her “system”—without in the least understanding it, which was immaterial, as she always abandoned it after playing it for a quarter of an hour. She assured Jocelyn comfortably, on parting from her, that she would be back quite early, and Jocelyn looked after her, smiling, perfectly assured that she would be free till dinner.

Giles came soon after; his face, impassively haggard, lighted up when Jocelyn came towards him. She had never seemed to him so beautiful and full of life. She gave him both her hands, with the intuitive feeling that in frank friendliness alone lay a narrow path of safety and happiness for the days left to them. She looked at him softly, and so took from him the bitterness which might have driven him to passionate words. In the reaction of a long, sleepless night he had schooled himself painfully to accept this position, but he was relieved beyond measure not to have to take the initiative. It hurt him to see those two hands so frankly stretched to him, but he was grateful to her, with a dull, despairing sort of gratitude.

He had not seen his wife since the scene of the night before—the impression left upon him by it was too strong and painful. For the space of a short hour, he had proposed to himself not to see Jocelyn again, to keep away at all costs, but his resolve had shrivelled, like all his resolves, before the flame of his passion, and he had come, with the reservation to let yesterday’s words be as if unspoken.

He spent the whole day with her, and went home in the evening humble, and almost happy. He was worn out by the conflicting emotions of the previous day and his sleepless night....

A fortnight of days went by, and as the sands of their hour-glass of time ran out, the strain upon them became almost unbearable. Jocelyn’s continual thought was, “I shall go away, and there will be the end!” But she found that there were moments when she was dumb with the dull craving to feel his arms round her. At other times she longed to get away at once, anywhere away; to be free for ever, and at all costs, from this grinding necessity for repression, from the appealing, haunting look which Giles could not keep out of his face. With the constant varying of her moods their meetings became daily more difficult, the hours spent together more feverish or more dismal. Once Giles broke through the intolerable restraint, but the piteous, frightened look that came into her face at the first word held him mute.

Never for one moment did Jocelyn doubt herself. She would go away, and there would be the end! But the very impossibility of union with him, which she kept ever before her as the one barrier of safety, roused at times in her feelings before which she recoiled ashamed, which she had never thought that her mind could harbour—curiosity to probe her lover’s nature to its depths, ardent longing to know, and to prove the full meaning of the passion she saw in his eyes, felt in every touch of his fingers. At other times she had an intense, passionless pity for the suffering he could not hide from her. And sometimes the old horror came over her, and she would turn from him with aversion, only to be smitten with remorse when he had left her.

She had no one to help her in her trouble; the thought of confiding in her aunt never even occurred to her, so completely was that lady associated with the conventional crust of life.

In these days Giles lived only in the minutes that he was with her; the knowledge that she loved him served but to fan the flame of his passion. Often after he had left her, he would come back when it was dark, and, standing in the shadow of the thick bushes along the terrace wall, watch her bedroom window till the light within it failed.

One night he had watched long; the light behind the closed shutters still sent a faint glow into the soft darkness. Leaning against the wall he waited for it to die. A bat flitted past; great moths fluttered out of the night towards the lamps at the gates; dull murmurs came from the street, and always the frogs croaked. The scented laurel behind which he stood gave forth a sweet, hot odour. Suddenly the shutters of the window swung back, and in the arch of light he saw Jocelyn. She stood motionless, with her hands clasped behind her head; the sleeves of the loose, white garment wrapped around her fell back from her bare arms.

His heart stopped beating; the breath of the laurel was heavy in the air, and ever afterwards its scent brought back with it the sweetness and emotion of that memory.

As she stood, with her face lifted to the purple heaven where the pale stars gleamed fitfully, he could see the masses of her dark hair hanging loose upon her shoulders. He felt, as though with the yearning of his gaze through the impassive darkness, his whole being clung to her in a mute caress, as though her heart were beating against him, her lips quivering upon his own; and, as if in answer, her hands fell to her sides, and she leant forward on the balcony, looking downwards. Breathless he watched. With a swift movement she clasped her hands together into the darkness, and then pressed them to her forehead. Through the sudden hush of the night he could hear her weeping; his passion swelled in one long, dumb cry, and ebbed in a sob of pity. With her face still buried in her hands, she turned inwards with a swaying movement. The shutters swung slowly to, and the light died....

A cockchafer droned by him, its hum fading into the night. With a groan he beat his fists against the wall.

CHAPTER X

“There is no hurry,” he said in constrained tones which seemed to pass through rigid lips, “it will be over soon enough; let the beasts get on, they make too much noise.”

Jocelyn stopped too, looking anxiously into his face; it was set and hard. He leant against the parapet of the bridge, and his profile showed clear-cut through the dusk. One hand gripped the stone coping; she put her own gently upon it. His tall figure quivered from head to foot at the touch, but he kept his eyes away from her face. Presently he began to speak in a measured, expressionless voice.

“Nice place for the end of things, isn’t it?” he said, pointing down the precipitous drop to the dim rocks below. “I’ve known three fellows who ended there—very good chaps; one wouldn’t choose it oneself, it can’t be pretty;” and he laughed shortly.

“Don’t, dear!” said Jocelyn, and her hand tightened on his.

His face worked, and he turned to her.

“Please take your hand away!”

She drew it away quickly, trembling.

“My God!” he said. “Are you made of ice, Jocelyn? Don’t you know what I endure by day and night? Don’t you know what a man’s love is—Great Heaven! how should you? You can’t know how it tears and tortures me—” he broke off.

Each word seemed torn from him, and each had a separate, intense value in the still air. He looked down again at the shadowy rocks, then he said—

“I am sorry—there—has—been—a big—mistake—I’m not man enough; come, dear, let’s go on.”

They moved silently down the deserted road a long way. The growing darkness hid their features from each other. Now they passed through a thick grove of olives that stretched below the road, in banks, to the top of the cliff.

Giles stopped.

“Look!” he said. On the far horizon of the dark sea there was a crimson flare, as of a ship on fire.

“The moon is rising. Sit down a minute, child, and rest, you must be tired.”

She seated herself on a lower bank. The moon rose slowly, the crimson changing to yellow, the yellow to white. Giles stood beside the girl, looking down on her. The wonderful southern night throbbed around them, the still air was warm and full of scent; through the olive branches the stars gleamed, there was no sound save the faint, far-off murmur of the town, and the sough of the sea below.

The moon rose to the level of the olive bank; and Giles saw that she was crying, crying silently, pitifully.

He flung himself down at her feet, and kissed them, crying—

“Don’t, my darling, don’t! it hurts me—it hurts me.”

He clasped his hands on her knees, and she bent her head down upon them. A great trembling passed through his frame; it seemed to him an eternity that passed, while the hot moisture of her tears burned his hands. His face was close to her hair; with every noiseless sob it was the nearer to his lips. He kissed the dark head softly.

Presently she raised her eyes to his, dark and wet with tears. Her lips were trembling. The moonbeams fell upon his face, white, tense, and passionate; on hers, tender, pitiful, and tear-stained.

“I want to be good to you, dearest. What does anything matter while you are so wretched? What can I do? What can I do?”