The Street Called Straight

t was not till the motor had actually got out of Havre and was well along the dusty white road to the château that Davenant began to have misgivings. Up to that point the landmarks—and and the sea-marks—had been familiar. On board the Louisiana, in London, in Paris, even in Havre, he had felt himself on his accustomed beat. On steamers or trains and in hotels he had that kind of confidence in himself which, failing him somewhat whenever he entered the precincts of domestic life, was sure to desert him altogether now, as he approached the strange and imposing.

"Madame est à la campagne."

A black-eyed old woman had told him so on the previous day. For the instant he was relieved, since it put off the moment of confronting the great lady a little longer.

He had, in fact, rung the bell at the frowning portal in the rue de l'Université with some trepidation. Suggestions of grandeur and mystery beyond anything he was prepared to meet lay within these seemingly fortified walls. At the same time it gave glory to the glamour in which the image of Olivia Guion always appeared to him to think she had passed and repassed these solemn gates at will, and that the stately Louis Quinze hôtel, of which the concierge allowed him a glimpse across the courtyard, had, on and off, been her home for years. It was one more detail that removed her beyond his sphere and made her inaccessible to his yearnings.

From the obliging post-office clerk at the bank on which he drew—a gentleman posted in the movements of all distinguished Americans on the continent of Europe—he learned that "la campagne" for the Marquise de Melcourt meant the château of Melcourt-le-Danois in the neighborhood of Harfleur. He was informed, moreover, that by taking the two-o'clock train to Havre he could sleep that night at the Hôtel Frascati, and motor out to Melcourt easily within an hour in the morning. It began then to occur to him that what had presented itself at first as a prosaic journey from Boston to Paris and back was becoming an adventure, with a background of castles and noble dames.

Nevertheless, he took heart for the run to Havre, and except for feeling at twilight the wistfulness that comes out of the Norman landscape—the melancholy of things forgotten but not gone, dead but still brooding wraith-like over the valley of the Seine, haunting the hoary churches, and the turreted châteaux, and the windings of the river, and the long lines of poplar, and the villages and forests and orchards and corn-fields—except for this, his spirits were good. If now and then he was appalled at what he, a shy fellow with no antecedents to recommend him and no persuasive powers, had undertaken, he thought of Olivia Guion. The thing he was attempting became trivial when compared with the possible benefits to her.

That reflections too, enabled him to come victoriously out of three long hours of inward wrestling—three long hours spent on the jetty which thrust itself into the sea just outside his hotel at Havre. He supposed he had already fought the battle with himself and won it. Its renewal on the part of powers within his soul took him by surprise.

He had strolled out after dinner to the Chaussée des États-Unis to while away the time before going to bed. Ships and sailors, with the lights and sights and sounds of a busy port, had for him the fascination they exert over most men who lead rather sedentary lives. At that time in the evening the Chaussée des États-Unis was naturally gay with the landsman's welcome to the sailor on shore. The cafés were crowded both inside and out. Singing came from one and the twang of an instrument from another, all along the quay. Soldiers mingled fraternally with sailors, and pretty young women, mostly bareheaded and neatly dressed in black, mingled with both. It was what a fastidious observer of life might call "low," but Davenant's judgments had no severity of that kind. He looked at the merry groups, composed for the most part of chance acquaintances, here to-day and gone to-morrow, swift and light of love, with a curious craving for fellowship. From the gatherings of friends he felt himself invariably the one shut out.

It was this sense of exclusion that finally sent him away from the cheerful quay to wander down the jetty which marks the line where the Harbor of Grace, with its intricate series of basins and docks, becomes the sea. It was a mild night, though the waves beat noisily enough against the bastions of the pier. At intervals he was swept by a scud of spray. All sorts of acrid odors were in the wind—smells of tar and salt and hemp and smoke and oil—the perfumes of sea-hazard and romance.

Pulling his cap over his brows and the collar of his ulster about his ears, he sat down on the stone coping. His shoulders were hunched; his hands hung between his knees. He did not care to smoke. For a few minutes he was sufficiently occupied in tracing the lines and the groupings of lights. He had been in Havre more than once before, and knew the quai de Londres from the quai de New York, and both from the quai du Chili. Across the mouth of the Seine he could distinguish the misty radiance which must be Trouville from that which must be Honfleur. Directly under his eyes in the Avant Port the dim hulls of steamers and war-ships, fishing-boats and tugs, lay like monsters asleep.

There was no reason why all this should make him feel outside the warm glow and life of things; but it did. It did worse in that it inspired a longing for what he knew positively to be unattainable. It stirred a new impulse to fight for what he had definitely given up. It raised again questions he thought he had answered and revived hopes he had never had to quench, since from the beginning they were vain.

Were they vain? In taking this form the query became more insidious—more difficult to debate and settle once for all. To every argument there was a perpetually recurring, "Yes, but—" with the memory of the instants when her hand rested in his longer than there was any need for, of certain looks and lights in her eyes, of certain tones and half-tones in her voice. Other men would have made these things a beginning, whereas he had taken them as the end. He had taken them as the end by a foregone conclusion. They had meant so much to him that he couldn't conceive of asking more, when perhaps they were nothing but the first fruits.

The wind increased in violence; the spray was salt on his mustache, and clung to the nap of his clothing. The radiance that marked Trouville and Honfleur grew dim almost to extinction. Along the quay the cafés began to diminish the number of their lights. The cheerful groups broke up, strolling home to the mansard or to the fo'castle, with bursts of drunken or drowsy song. Davenant continued to sit crouched, huddled, bowed. He ceased to argue, or to follow the conflict between self-interest and duty, or to put up a fight of any kind. He was content to sit still and suffer. In its own way suffering was a relief. It was the first time he had given it a chance since he had brought himself to facing squarely the fact of his useless, pointless love. He had always dodged it by finding something to be done, or choked it down by sheer force of will. Now he let it rush in on him, all through him, all over him, flooding his mind and spirit, making his heart swell and his blood surge and his nerves ache and his limbs throb and quiver. If he could have formed a thought it would have been that of the Hebrew Psalmist when he felt himself poured out like water. He had neither shame for his manhood nor alarm for his pride till he heard himself panting, panting raucously, with a sound that was neither a moan nor a sob, but which racked him convulsively, while there was a hot smarting in his eyes.

But in the end he found relief and worked his way out to a sort of victory. That is to say, he came back to see, as he had seen all along, that there was one clear duty to be done. If he loved Olivia Guion with a love that was worthy to win, it must also be with a love that could lose courageously. This was no new discovery. It was only a fact which loneliness and the craving to be something to her, as she was everything to him, had caused him for the moment to lose sight of. But he came back to it with conviction. It was conviction that gave him confidence, that calmed him, enabling him, as a clock somewhere struck eleven, to get up, shake the sea-spray from his person, and return to his hotel.

It was while he was going to bed that Rodney Temple's words came back to him, as they did from time to time: "Some call it God."

"I wonder if it is—God," he questioned.

But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the morning, was of another kind. It was that which attaches to the unlikely and the queer. Once having plunged into a country road, away from railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase. His assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger. In vain an obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they sped had once—and not so many years ago—been the border of the bed of the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and edged along the top with verdure, marked the natural brink of the river, and that the church so admirably placed on a hillside was the shrine of a martyred maiden saint, whose body had come ashore here at Graville, having been flung into the water at Harfleur. Davenant was deaf to these interesting bits of information. He was blind, too. He was blind to the noble sweep of the Seine between soft green hills. He was blind to the craft on its bosom—steamers laden with the produce of orchard and the farm for England; Norwegian brigantines, weird as The Flying Dutchman in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen; fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages, clambering over cliffs to a casino, a plage, and a Hôtel des Bains, or nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties only when the chauffeur turned and said:

"Voilà, monsieur—voilà le château de madame la marquise."

If it was possible for Davenant's heart to leap and sink in the same instant, it did it then. It leaped at the sight of this white and rose castle, with its towers and donjon and keep; it sank at the thought that he, poor old unpretentious Peter Davenant, with no social or personal passports of any kind, must force his way over drawbridge and beneath portcullis—or whatever else might be the method of entering a feudal pile—into the presence of the châtelaine whose abode here must be that of some legendary princess, and bend her to his will. Stray memories came to him of Siegfrieds and Prince Charmings, with a natural gift for this sort of thing, but only to make his own appearance in the rôle the more absurd.

Melcourt-le-Danois had that characteristic which goes with all fine and fitting architecture of springing naturally out of the soil. It seemed as if it must always have been there. It was as difficult to imagine the plateau on which it stood without it as to see Mont Saint Michel merely as a rocky islet. The plateau crowned a white bluff running out like the prow of a Viking ship into a bend of the Seine, commanding the river in both directions. It was clear at a glance that when Roger the Dane laid here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the first place a strip of gardens, and orchards of small fruit, through which the, road from Harfleur to the village of Melcourt, half a mile farther up the Seine, ran like a bit of white braid.

Viewed from the summit of the cliff on which Davenant's motor had stopped, the château was composed of two ancient towers guarding the long, and relatively low, relatively modern, brick mansion of the epoch of Louis Treize. The brick, once red, had toned down now to a soft old rose; the towers, once white, were splashed above the line to which the ivy climbed with rose and orange. Over the tip of the bluff and down its side of southern exposure, toward the village of Melcourt, ran a park of oak and chestnut, in all the October hues of yellow and olive-brown.

But ten minutes later, when the motor had made a detour round cliffs and little inlets and arrived at the main entrance to the château, Davenant found the aspect of things less intimidating. Through a high wrought-iron grille, surmounted by the head of an armorial beast, he had the view of a Lenôtre garden, all scrolls and arabesques. The towers, which at a distance had seemed part of a continuous whole, now detached themselves. The actual residence was no more imposing than any good-sized house in America. Davenant understood the chauffeur to say that "Madame la marquise l'avait modernisé jusqu'au bout des ongles."

Having summoned up courage to ring the bell, he found it answered by a middle-aged woman with a face worn by time and weather to the polished grooves and creases to which water wears a rock.

"On ne visite pas le château."

She made the statement with the stony, impersonal air of one who has to say the same thing a good many times a year. Davenant pressed close to the grille, murmuring something of which she caught the word "Madame."

"Madame la marquise n'est pas visible."

The quick Norman eye had, however, noticed the movement of Davenant's hand, detecting there something more than a card. In speaking she edged nearer the grille. Thrusting his fingers between the curves of the iron arabesques, he said, in his best French: "Prenez."

Measuring time by the pounding of his heart rather than the ticking of his watch, it seemed to him he had a long time to wait before the woman reappeared, handing him back his card through the openwork of the grille, saying briefly: "Madame la marquise ne reçoit pas." Perhaps it was the crestfallen look in the blond giant's face that tempted her to add: "Je le regrette, monsieur."

In the compassionate tone he read a hint that all was not lost. Scribbling under his name the words: "Boston, Mass. Very urgent," he once more passed the card through the grille, accompanied by the manual act that had won the woman's sympathy in the first place.

"Allez, please," he said, earnestly, "and—vite."

He found his penciled words effective, for presently the woman came back. "Venez, monsieur," she said, as she unlocked the grille with a large key carried beneath her apron. Her stony official manner had returned.

As he drew near the house a young man sketching or writing under a yew-tree looked up curiously. A few steps farther on a pretty girl, in a Leghorn hat, clipping roses into a basket, glanced at him with shy, startled eyes. In the hall, where he was left standing, a young officer in sky-blue tunic and red breeches, who had been strumming at a piano in an adjoining room, strolled to the door and stared at him. A thin, black-eyed, sharp-visaged, middle-aged lady, dressed in black and wearing a knitted shawl—perhaps the mother of the three young people he had just seen—came half-way down the strip of red carpet on the stairs, inspected him, and went up again. It was all more disconcerting than he had expected.

The great hall, of which the chief beauty was in the magnificent sweep of the monumental stairway, with its elaborate wrought-iron balustrade, struck him as a forbidding entry to a home. A man-servant came at last to deliver him from the soft, wondering eyes of the young officer, and lead him into a room which he had already recognized as a library through the half-open door.

Here he had just time to get a blurred impression of portraits, busts, Bull surfaces, and rich or ancient bindings—with views through the long windows of the traffic on the Seine—when a little old lady appeared in a doorway at the farther end of the room. He knew she was a little old lady from all sorts of indefinable evidence, in spite of her own efforts to be young. He knew it in spite of fluffy golden hair and a filmy, youthful morning robe that displayed the daintiness of her figure as well as the expensiveness of her taste.

She tripped rapidly down the long room, with quick little steps and a quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The face would have still possessed the Guion beauty, had she given it a chance. Looking at it as she came nearer, Davenant was reminded of things he had read of those Mongolian tribes who are said to put on masks to hide their fear and go resolutely forth to battle. Having always considered this a lofty form of courage, he was inconsistent in finding its reflection here—the fear of time beneath these painted cheeks and fluffy locks, and the fight against it carried on by the Marquise's whole brave bearing—rather pitifully comic.

Madame herself had no such feeling. She wore her mask with absolute nonchalance, beginning to speak while still some yards away.

"Eh, bien, monsieur?"

Davenant doubled himself up into a deep bow, but before he had time to stammer out some apologetic self-introduction, she continued:

"You've come from Davis and Stern, I suppose, on business. I always tell them not to send me people, but to cable. Why didn't they cable? They know I don't like Americans coming here. I'm pestered to death with them—that is, I used to be—and I should be still, if I didn't put 'em down."

The voice was high and chattering, with a tendency to crack. It had the American quality with a French intonation. In speaking, the Marquise made little nervous dashes, now to the right, now to the left, as though endeavoring to get by some one who blocked her way.

"I haven't come on business, my—my lady."

He used this term of respect partly from a frightened desire to propitiate a great personage and partly because he couldn't think of any other.

"Then what have you come on? If it's to see the château you may as well go away. It's never shown. Those are positive orders. I make no exceptions. They must have told you so at the gate. But you Americans will dare anything. Mon Dieu, quel tas de barbares!"

The gesture of her hands in uttering the exclamation was altogether French, but she betrayed her oneness with the people she reviled by saying: "Quel tah de bah-bah!"

"I haven't come to see the château either, my lady—"

"You can call me madame," she interrupted, not without a kindlier inflection on the hint.

He began again. "I haven't come to see the château, either—madame. I've come to see you."

She made one of her little plunges. "Oh, indeed! Have you? I thought you'd learned better than that—over there. You used to come in ship-loads, but—"

He began to feel more sure of himself. "When I say I came to see you, madame, I mean, I came to—to tell you something."

"Then, so long as it's not on business, I don't want to hear it. I suppose you're one of Walter Davenant's boys? I don't consider him any relation to me at all. It's too distant. If I acknowledged all the cousins forced on me from over there I might as well include Abraham and Adam. Are you the first or the second wife's son?"

He explained his connection with the Davenant name. "But that isn't what I came to talk about, madame—not about myself. I wanted to tell you of—of your nephew—Mr. Henry Guion."

She turned with a movement like that of a fleeing nymph, her hand stretched behind her. "Don't. I don't want to hear about him. Nor about my niece. They're strangers to me. I don't know them."

"You'd like to know them now, madame—because they're in great trouble."

She took refuge behind a big English arm-chair, leaning on the back.

"I dare say. It's what they were likely to come to. I told my niece so, the last time she allowed me the privilege of her conversation. But I told her, too, that in the day of her calamity she wasn't to look to me."

"She isn't looking to you, madame. I am. I'm looking to you because I imagine you can help her. There's no one else—"

"And has she sent you as her messenger? Why can't she come herself, if it's so bad as all that—or write? I thought she was married—to some Englishman."

"They're not married yet, madame; and unless you help her I don't see how they're going to be—the way things stand."

"Unless I help her! My good fellow, you don't know what you're saying. Do you know that she refused—refused violently—to help me?"

He shook his head, his blue eyes betraying some incredulity.

"Well, then, I'll tell you. It'll show you. You'll be able to go away again with a clear conscience, knowing you've done your best and failed. Sit down."

As she showed no intention of taking a seat herself, he remained standing.

"She refused the Duc de Berteuil." She made the statement with head erect and hands flung apart. "I suppose you have no idea of what that meant to me?"

"I'm afraid I haven't."

"Of course you haven't. I don't know an American who would have. You're so engrossed in your own small concerns. None of you have any conception of the things that really matter—the higher things. Well, then, let me tell you. The Duc de Berteuil is—or rather was—the greatest parti in France. He isn't any more, because they've married him to a rich girl from South America or one of those places—brown as a berry—with a bust—" She rounded her arms to give an idea of the bust. "Mais, n'importe. My niece refused him. That meant—I've never confessed it to any one before—I've been too proud—but I want you to understand—it meant my defeat—my final defeat. I hadn't the courage to begin again. C'était le désastre. C'était Sedan."

"Oh, madame!"

It seemed to him that her mouth worked with an odd piteousness; and before going on she put up a crooked little jeweled hand and dashed away a tear.

"It would have been everything to me. It would have put me where I belong, in the place I've been trying to reach all these years. The life of an American woman in Europe, monsieur, can be very cruel. We've nothing to back us up, and everything to fight against in front. It's all push, and little headway. They don't want us. That's the plain English of it. They can't imagine why we leave our own country and come over here. They're so narrow. They're selfish, too. Everything they've got they want to keep for themselves. They marry us—the Lord only knows why!—and nine times out of ten all we get for it is the knowledge that we've been bamboozled out of our own dots. There was René de Lonchartres who married that goose Annie Armstrong. They ridiculed her when she came over here, and at the same time clapped him on the back for having got her. That's as true as you live. It's their way. They would have ridiculed me, too, if I hadn't been determined years ago to beat them on their own ground. I could have done it, too, if—"

"If it had been worth while," he ventured.

"You know nothing about it. I could have done it if my niece had put out just one little finger—when I'd got everything ready for her to do it. Yes, I'd got everything ready—and yet she refused him. She refused him after I'd seen them all—his mother, his sisters, his two uncles—one of them in waiting on the Duc d'Orléans—Philippe V., as we call him—all of them the purest old noblesse d'epée in Normandy."

Her agitation expressed itself again in little dartings to and fro. "I went begging to them, as you might say. I took all their snubs—and oh! so fine some of them were!—more delicate than the point of a needle! I took them because I could see just how I should pay them back. I needn't explain to you how that would be, because you couldn't understand. It would be out of the question for an American."

"I don't think we are good at returning snubs, madame. That's a fact."

"You're not good at anything but making money; and you make that blatantly, as if you were the first people in the world to do it. Why, France and England could buy and sell you, and most of you don't know it. Mais, n'importe. I went begging to them, as I've told you. At first they wouldn't hear of her at any price—didn't want an American. That was bluff, to get a bigger dot. I had counted on it in advance. I knew well enough that they'd take a Hottentot if there was money enough. For the matter of that, Hottentot and American are much the same to them. But I made it bluff for bluff. Oh, I'm sharp. I manage all my own affairs in America—with advice. I've speculated a little in your markets quite successfully. I know how I stand to within a few thousand dollars of your money. I offered half a million of francs. They laughed at it. I knew they would, but it's as much as they'd get with a French girl. I went to a million—to a million and a half—to two millions. At two millions—that would be—let me see—five into twenty makes four—about four hundred thousand dollars of your money—they gave in. Yes, they gave in. I expected them to hold out for it, and they did. But at that figure they made all the concessions and gave in."

"And did he give in?" Davenant asked, with naïve curiosity.

"Oh, I'd made sure of him beforehand. He and I understood each other perfectly. He would have let it go at a million and a half. He was next door to being in love with her besides. All he wanted was to be well established, poor boy! But I meant to go up to two millions, anyhow. I could afford it."

"Four hundred thousand dollars," Davenant said, with an idea that he might convey a hint to her, "would be practically the sum—"

"I could afford it," she went on, "because of those ridiculous copper-mines—the Hamlet and Tecla. I wasn't rich before that. My dot was small. No Guion I ever heard of was able to save money. My father was no exception."

"You are in the Hamlet and Tecla!" Davenant's blue eyes were wide open. He was on his own ground. The history of the Hamlet and Tecla Mines had been in his own lifetime a fairy-tale come true.

Madame de Melcourt nodded proudly. "My father had bought nearly two thousand shares when they were down to next to nothing. They came to me when he died. It was mere waste paper for years and years. Then all of a sudden—pouff!—they began to go up and up—and I sold them when they were near a thousand. I could have afforded the two millions of francs—and I promised to settle Melcourt-le-Danois on them into the bargain, when I—if I ever should—But my niece wouldn't take him—simply—would—not. Ah," she cried, in a strangled voice, "c'était trop fort!"

"But did she know you were—what shall I say?—negotiating?"

"She was in that stupid England. It wasn't a thing I could write to her about. I meant it as a surprise. When all was settled I sent for her—and told her. Oh, monsieur, vous n'avez pas d'idée! Queue scène! Queue scène! J'ai failli en mourir." She wrung her clasped hands at the recollection.

"That girl has an anger like a storm. Avec tous ses airs de reine et de sainte—she was terrible. Never shall I forget it—jamais! jam-ais! au grand jamais! Et puis," she added, with a fatalistic toss of her hands, "c'était fini. It was all over. Since then—nothing!"

She made a little dash as if to leave him, returning to utter what seemed like an afterthought. "It would have made her. It would have made me. We could have dictated to the Faubourg. We could have humiliated them—like that." She stamped her foot. "It would have been a great alliance—what I've been so much in need of. The Melcourt—well, they're all very well—old noblesse de la Normandie, and all that—but poor!—mais pauvres!—and as provincial as a curé de campagne. When I married my poor husband—but we won't go into that—I've been a widow since I was so high—ever since 1870—with my own way to make. If my niece hadn't deserted me I could have made it. Now all that is past—fini-ni-ni! The clan Berteuil has set the Faubourg against me. They've the power, too. It's all so intricate, so silent, such wheels within wheels—but it's done. They've never wanted me. They don't want any of us—not for ourselves. It's the sou!—the sou!—the everlasting sou! Noble or peasant—it makes no difference. But if my niece hadn't abandoned me—"

"Why shouldn't you come home, madame?" Davenant suggested, touched by so much that was tragic. "You wouldn't find any one after the sou there."

"They're all about me," she whispered—"the Melcourt. They're all over the house. They come and settle on me, and I can't shake them off. They suffocate me—waiting for the moment when—But I've made my will, and some'll be disappointed. Oh, I shall leave them Melcourt-le-Danois. It's mine. I bought it with my own money, after my husband's death, and restored it when the Hamlet and Tecla paid so well. It shall not go out of their family—for my husband's sake. But," she added, fiercely, "neither shall the money go out of mine. They shall know I have a family. It's the only way by which I can force the knowledge on them. They think I sprang out of the earth like a mushroom. You may tell my niece as much as that—and let her get all the comfort from it she can. That's all I have to say, monsieur. Good morning."

The dash she made from him seeming no more final than those which had preceded it, he went on speaking.

"I'm afraid, madame, that help is too far in the future to be of much assistance now. Besides, I'm not sure it's what they want. We've managed to keep Mr. Henry Guion out of prison. That danger is over. Our present concern is for Miss Olivia Guion's happiness."

As he expected, the shock calmed her. Notwithstanding her mask, she grew suddenly haggard, though her eyes, which—since she had never been able to put poudre de riz or cherry paste in them—were almost as fine as ever, instantly flashed out the signal of the Guion pride. Her fluffy head went up, and her little figure stiffened as she entrenched herself again behind the arm-chair. Her only hint of flinching came from a slackening in the flow of speech and a higher, thinner quality in the voice.

"Has my nephew, Henry Guion, been doing things—that—that would send him—to prison?"

In spite of herself the final words came out with a gasp.

"It's a long story, madame—or, at least, a complicated one. I could explain it, if you'd give me the time."

"Sit down."

They took seats at last. Owing to the old lady's possession of what she herself called a business mind he found the tale easy in the telling. Her wits being quick and her questions pertinent, she was soon in command of the facts. She was soon, too, in command of herself. The first shock having passed, she was able to go into complete explanations with courage.

"So that," he concluded, "now that Mr. Guion is safe, if Miss Guion could only marry—the man—the man she cares for—everything would be put as nearly right as we can make it."

"And at present they are at a deadlock. She won't marry him if he has to sell his property, and so forth; and he can't marry her, and live in debt to you. Is that it?"

"That's it, madame, exactly. You've put it in a nutshell."

She looked at him hardly. "And what has it all got to do with me?"

He looked at her steadily in his turn. "I thought perhaps you wouldn't care to live in debt to me, either."

She was startled. "Who? I? En voilà une idée!"

"I thought," he went on, "that possibly the Guion sense of family honor—"

"Fiddle-faddle! There's no sense of family honor among Americans. There can't be. You can only have family honor where, as with us, the family is the unit; whereas, with you, the unit is the individual. The American individual may have a sense of honor; but the American family is only a disintegrated mush. What you really thought was that you might get your money back."

"If you like, madame. That's another way of putting it. If the family paid me, Miss Guion would feel quite differently—and so would Colonel Ashley."

"When you say the family," she sniffed, "you mean me."

"In the sense that I naturally think first of its most distinguished member. And, of course, the greater the distinction the greater must be—shall I call it the indignity?—of living under an obligation—"

"Am I to understand that you put up this money—that's your American term, isn't it?—that you put up this money in the expectation that I would pay you back?"

"Not exactly. I put up the money, in the first place, to save the credit of the Guion name, and with the intention, if you didn't pay me back, to do without it."

"And you risked being considered over-officious."

"There wasn't much risk about that," he smiled. "They did think me so—and do."

"And you got every one into a fix."

"Into a fix, but out of prison."

"Hm!"

She grew restless, uncomfortable, fidgeting with her rings and bracelets.

"And pray, what sort of a person is this Englishman to whom my niece has got herself engaged?"

"One of their very finest," he said, promptly. "As a soldier, so they say, he'll catch up one day with men like Roberts and Kitchener; and as for his private character—well, you can judge of it from the fact that he wants to strip himself of all he has so that the Guion name shall owe nothing to any one outside—"

"Then he's a fool."

"From that point of view—yes. There are fools of that sort, madame. But there's something more to him."

He found himself reciting glibly Ashley's claims as a suitor in the way of family, position, and fortune.

"So that it would be what some people might call a good match."

"The best sort of match. It's the kind of thing she's made for—that she'd be happy in—regiments, and uniforms, and glory, and presenting prizes, and all that."

"Hm. I shall have nothing to do with it." She rose with dignity. "If my niece had only held out a little finger—"

"It was a case, madame," he argued, rising, too—"it was a case in which she couldn't hold out a little finger without offering her whole hand."

"You know nothing about it. I'm wrong to discuss it with you at all. I'm sure I don't know why I do, except that—"

"Except that I'm an American," he suggested—"one of your own."

"One of my own! Quelle idée! Do you like him—this Englishman?"

He hedged. "Miss Guion likes him."

"But you don't."

"I haven't said so. I might like him well enough if—"

"If you got your money back."

He smiled and nodded.

"Is she in love with him?"

"Oh—deep!"

"How do you know? Has she told you so?"

"Y-es; I think I may say—she has."

"Did you ask her?"

He colored. "I had to—about something."

"You weren't proposing to her yourself, were you?"

He tried to take this humorously. "Oh no, madame—"

"You can't be in love with her, or you wouldn't be trying so hard to marry her to some one else—not unless you're a bigger fool than you look."

"I hope I'm not that," he laughed.

"Well, I shall have nothing to do with it—nothing. Between my niece and me—tout est fini." She darted from him, swerving again like a bird on the wing. "I don't know you. You come here with what may be no more than a cock-and-bull story, to get inside the château."

"I shouldn't expect you to do anything, madame, without verifying all I've told you. For the matter of that, it'll be easy enough. You've only to write to your men of business, or—which would be better still—take a trip to America for yourself."

She threw out her arms with a tragic gesture. "My good man, I haven't been in America for forty years. I nearly died of it then. What it must be like now—"

"It wouldn't be so fine as this, madame, nor so picturesque. But it would be full of people who'd be fond of you, not for the sou—but for yourself."

She did her best to be offended. "You're taking liberties, monsieur. C'est bien américan, céla."

"Excuse me, madame," he said, humbly. "I only mean that they are fond of you—at least, I I know Miss Guion is. Two nights before I sailed I heard her almost crying for you—yes, almost crying. That's why I came. I thought I'd come and tell you. I should think it might mean something to you—over here so long—all alone—to have some one like that—such a—such a—such a wonderful young lady wanting you—in her trouble—"

"And such a wonderful young man wanting his money back. Oh, I'm not blind, monsieur. I see a great deal more than you think. I see through and through you. You fancy you're throwing dust in my eyes, and you haven't thrown a grain. Pouff! Oh, la, la! Mais, c'est fini. As for my niece—le bon Dieu l' a bien punie. For me to step in now would be to interfere with the chastisement of Providence. Le bon Dieu is always right. I'll say that for Him. Good morning." She touched a bell. "The man will show you to the door. If you like to stroll about the grounds—now that you've got in—well, you can."

With sleeves blowing she sped down the room as if on pinions. The man-servant waited respectfully. Davenant stood his ground, hoping for some sign of her relenting. It was almost over her shoulder that she called back:

"Where are you staying?"

He told her.

"Stupid place. You'll find the Chariot d'Or at Melcourt a great deal nicer. Simple, but clean. An old chef of mine keeps it. Tell him I sent you. And ask for his poularde au riz."

hat do you think of him?"

Ashley's tone indicated some uncertainty as to what he thought himself. Indeed, uncertainty was indicated elsewhere than in his tone. It seemed to hang about him, to look from his eyes, to take form in his person. Perhaps this was the one change wrought in him by a month's residence in America. When he arrived everything had bespoken him a man aggressively positive with the habit of being sure. His very attitude, now, as he sat in Rodney Temple's office in the Harvard Gallery of Fine Arts, his hands thrust into his pockets, his legs stretched apart, his hat on the back of his head, suggested one who feels the foundations of the earth to have shifted.

Rodney Temple, making his arrangements for leaving for the day, met one question with another. "What do you?"

"You know him," Ashley urged, "and I don't."

"I thought you did. I thought you'd read him right off—as a cow-puncher."

"He looks like one, by Jove! and he speaks like one, too. You wouldn't call him a gentleman? What?"

"If you mean by a gentleman one who's always been able to take the best in the world for granted, perhaps he isn't. But that isn't our test—over here."

"Then, what is?"

"I'm not sure that I could tell you so that you'd understand—at any rate, not unless you start out with the fact that the English gentleman and the American differ not only in species, but in genus. I'd go so far as to say that they've got to be recognized by different sets of faculties. You get at your man by the eye and the ear; we have to use a subtler apparatus. If we didn't we should let a good many go uncounted. Some of our finest are even more uncouth with their consonants than good friend Davenant. They'd drop right out of your list, but they take a high place in ours. To try to discern one by the methods created for the other is like what George Eliot says of putting on spectacles to detect odors. Ignorance of this basic social fact on both sides has given rise to much international misjudgment. See?"

"Can't say that I do."

"No, you wouldn't. But until you do you won't understand a big simple type—"

"I don't care a hang about his big simple type. What I want to know is how to take him. Is he a confounded sentimentalist?—or is he still putting up a bluff?"

"What difference does it make to you?"

"If he's putting up a bluff, he's waiting out there at Michigan for me to call it. If he's working the sentimental racket, then I've got to be the beneficiary of his beastly good-will."

"If he's putting up a bluff, you can fix him by not calling it at all; and as for his beastly good-will, well, he's a beneficiary of it, too."

"How so?"

"Because beastly good-will is a thing that cuts both ways. He'll get as much out of it as you."

"That's all very fine—"

"It's very fine, indeed, for him. We've an old saying in these parts: By the Street called Straight we come to the House called Beautiful. It's one of those fanciful saws of which the only justification is that it works. Any one can test the truth of it by taking the highway. Well, friend Davenant is taking it. He'll reach the House called Beautiful as straight as a die. Don't you fret about that. You'll owe him nothing in the long run, because he'll get all the reward he's entitled to. When's the wedding? Fixed the date yet?"

"Not going to fix one," Ashley explained, moodily. "One of these days, when everything is settled at Tory Hill and the sale is over, we shall walk off to the church and get married. That seems to be the best way, as matters stand."

"It's a very sensible way at all times. And I hear you're carrying Henry off with you to England."

Ashley shrugged his shoulders. "Going the whole hog. What? Had to make the offer. Olivia couldn't leave him behind. Anything that will make her happy—"

"Will make you happy."

"That's about the size of it."

Having locked the last drawer and put out the desk light, Temple led his guest down the long gallery and across the Yard to the house on Charlesbank. Here Ashley pursued kindred themes in the company of Mrs. Fane, finding himself alone with her at tea. He was often alone with her at tea, her father having no taste for this form of refreshment, while her mother found reasons for being absent.

"Queer old cove, your governor," Ashley observed, stretching himself comfortably before the fire. The blaze of logs alone lit up the room.

"Is that why you seem to have taken a fancy to him?"

"I like to hear him gassing. Little bit like the Bible, don't you know."

"He's very fond of the Bible."

"Seems to think a lot of that chap—your governor."

A nod supposed to indicate the direction of the State of Michigan enabled her to follow his line of thought.

"He does. There's something rather colossal about the way he's dropped out—"

"A jolly sight too colossal. Makes him more important than if he'd stayed on the spot and fought the thing to a finish."

"Fought what thing to a finish?"

He was sorry to have used the expression. "Oh, there's still a jolly lot to settle up, you know."

"But I thought everything was arranged—that you'd accepted the situation."

He stretched himself more comfortably before the fire. "We'd a row," he said, suddenly.

"A row? What kind of a row?"

"A street row—just like two hooligans. He struck me."

"Rupert!" She half sprang up. "He—"

Ashley swung round in his chair. He was smiling.

"Oh, I beg your pardon," she cried, in confusion. "I can't think what made me call you that. I never do—never. It was the surprise—and the shock—"

"That's all right," he assured her. "I often call you Drusilla when I'm talking to Olivia. I don't see why we shouldn't—we've always been such pals—and we're going to be a kind of cousins—"

"Tell me about Peter."

"Oh, there's nothing much that stands telling. We were two idiots—two silly asses. I insulted him—and he struck out. I called him a cad—I believe I called him a damned cad."

"To his face?"

"To his nose."

"Oh, you shouldn't have done that."

"And he got mad, by Jove! Oh, it didn't last. We pulled off in a second or two. We saw we were two idiots—two kids. It wasn't worth getting on one's high horse about—or attempting to follow it up—it was too beastly silly for heroics—except that—that he—"

"Except that he—what?"

"Except that he—got the better of me. He has the better of me still. And I can't allow that, by Jove! Do you see?"

"I don't see very clearly. In what way did he get the better of you?"

"In the whole thing—the way he carried it off—the whole silly business."

"Then I don't see what's to be done about it now."

"Something's got to be done, by Jove! I can't let it go at that."

"Well, what do you propose?"

"I don't propose anything. But I can't go through life letting that fellow stay on top. Why, considering everything—all he's done for Olivia and her father—and now this other thing—and his beastly magnanimity besides—he's frightfully on top. It won't do, you know. But I say, you'll not tell Olivia, will you? She'd hate it—about the row, I mean. I don't mind your knowing. You're always such a good pal to me—"

It was impossible to go on, because Mrs. Temple bustled in from the task of helping Olivia with the packing and sacking at Tory Hill. Having greeted Ashley with the unceremoniousness permissible with one who was becoming an intimate figure at the fireside, she settled to her tea.

"Oh, so sad!" she reflected, her little pursed-up mouth twitching nervously. "The dear old house all dismantled! Everything to go! I've asked Henry to come and stay here. It's too uncomfortable for him, with all the moving and packing going on around him. It'll be easier for dear Olivia, too. So hard for her to take care of him, with all the other things she has on her hands. There's Peter's room. Henry may as well have it. I don't suppose we shall see anything more of Peter for ages to come. But I do wish he'd write. Don't you, Colonel Ashley? I've written to him three times now—and not a line from him! I suppose they must be able to get letters out there, at Stoughton, Michigan. It can't be so far beyond civilization as all that. And Olivia would like it. She's worried about him—about his not writing—and everything. Don't you think, Colonel Ashley?"

Ashley looked blank. "I haven't noticed it—"

"Oh, I have. A woman's eye sees those little things, don't you think? Men have so much on their hands—the great things of the world—but the little things, they often count, don't you think? But I tell dear Olivia not to worry. Everything will come right. Things do come right—very often. I'm more pessimistic than Rodney—that I must say. But still I think things have a way of coming right when we least expect it. I tell dear Olivia that Peter will send a line just when we're not looking for it. It's the watched pot that never boils, you know, and so I tell her to stop watching for the postman. That's fatal to getting a letter—watching for the postman. How snug you two look here together! Well, I'll run up and take off my things. No; no more tea, dear. I won't say good-by, Colonel Ashley, because you'll be here when I come down."

Mrs. Temple was a good woman who would have been astonished to hear herself accused of falsehood but, as a matter of fact, her account of the conversation with Olivia bore little relation to the conversation itself. What she had actually said was:

"Poor Peter! I suppose he doesn't write because he's trying to forget."

The challenge here being so direct, Olivia felt it her duty to take it up. The ladies were engaged in sorting the linen in preparation for the sale.

"Forget what?"

"Forget Drusilla, I suppose. Hasn't it struck you—how much he was in love with her?"

Olivia held a table-cloth carefully to the light. "Is this Irish linen or German? I know mamma did get some at Dresden—"

Mrs. Temple pointed out the characteristic of the Belfast weave and pressed her question. "Haven't you noticed it—about Peter?"

Olivia tried to keep her voice steady as she said: "I've no doubt I should have seen it if I hadn't been so preoccupied."

"Some people think—Rodney, for instance—that he'd lost his head about you, dear; but we mothers have an insight—"

"Of course! There seems to be one missing from the dozen of this pattern."

"Oh, it'll turn up. It's probably in the pile over there. I thought I'd speak about it, dear," she went on, "because it must be a relief to you not to have that complication. Things are so complicated already, don't you think? But if you haven't Peter on your mind, why, that's one thing the less to worry about. If you thought he was in love with you, dear—in your situation—going to be married to some one else—But you needn't be afraid of that at all. I never saw a young man more in love with any one than he is with Drusilla—and I think she must have refused him. If she hadn't he would never have shot off in that way, like a bolt from the blue—But what's the matter, dear? You look white. You're not ill?"

"It's the smell of lavender," Olivia gasped, weakly. "I never could endure it. I'll just run into the air a minute—"

This was all that passed between Olivia and Mrs. Temple on the subject. If the latter reported it with suppressions and amplifications it was doubtless due to her knowledge of what could be omitted as well as of what would have been said had the topic been pursued. In any case it caused her to sigh and mumble as she went on with her task of folding and unfolding and of examining textures and designs:

"Oh, how mixy! Such sixes and sevens! Everything the wrong way round! My poor Drusilla!—my poor little girlie! And such a good position! Just what she's capable of filling!—as well as Olivia—better, with all her experience of their army. ''Tis better to have loved and lost,' dear Tennyson says; but I don't know. Besides, she's done that already—with poor Gerald—and now, to have to face it all a second time—my poor little girlie!"

As for Olivia, she felt an overpowering desire to flee away. Speeding through the house, where workmen were nailing up cases or sacking rugs, she felt that she was fleeing—fleeing anywhere—anywhere—to hide herself. As a matter of fact, the flight was inward, for there was nowhere to go but to her room. Her way was down the short staircase from the attic and along a hall; but it seemed to her that she lived through a succession of emotional stages in the two or three minutes it took to cover it. Her first wild cry "It isn't true! It isn't true!" was followed by the question "Why shouldn't it be true?" to end with her asking herself: "What difference does it make to me?"

"What difference can it make to me?"

She had reached that form of the query by the time she took up her station at the window of her room, to stare blankly at the November landscape. She saw herself face to face now with the question which, during the past month, ever since Davenant's sudden disappearance, she had used all her resources to evade. That it would one day force itself upon her she knew well enough; but she hoped, too, that before there was time for that she would have pronounced her marriage vows, and so burned her bridges behind her. Amid the requirements of duty, which seemed to shift from week to week, the one thing stable was the necessity on her part to keep her promise to the man who had stood by her so nobly. If once it had seemed to her that Davenant's demands—whatever they might prove to be—would override all others, it was now quite clear that Ashley's claim on her stood first of all. He had been so loyal, so true, so indifferent to his own interests! Besides, he loved her. It was now quite another love from that of the romantic knight who had wooed a gracious lady in the little house at Southsea. That tapestry-tale had ended on the day of his arrival at Tory Hill. In its place there had risen the tested devotion of a man for a woman in great trouble, compelled to deal with the most sordid things in life. He had refused to be spared any of the details she would have saved him from or to turn away from any of the problems she was obliged to face. His very revolt against it, that repugnance to the necessity for doing it which he was not at all times able to conceal, made his self-command in bringing himself to it the more worthy of her esteem. He had the defects of his qualities and the prejudices of his class and profession; but over and above these pardonable failings he had the marks of a hero.

And now there was this thing!

She had descried it from afar. She had had a suspicion of it before Davenant went away. It had not created a fear; it was too strange and improbable for that; but it had brought with it a sense of wonder. She remembered the first time she had felt it, this sense of wonder, this sense of something enchanted, outside life and the earth's atmosphere. It was at that moment on the lawn when, after the unsuccessful meeting between Ashley and Davenant, she had turned with the latter to go into the house. That there was a protective, intimate element in her feeling she had known on the instant; but what she hadn't known on the instant, but was perfectly aware of now, was that her whole subconscious being, had been crying out even then: "My own! My own!"

With the exaggeration of this thought she was able to get herself in hand. She was able to debate so absurd a suggestion, to argue it down, and turn it into ridicule. But she yielded again as the Voice that talked with her urged the plea: "I didn't say you knew it consciously. You couldn't cry 'My own! My own!' to a man whom up to that point you had treated with disdain. But your subliminal being had begun to know him, to recognize him as—"

To elude this fancy she set herself to recapitulating his weak points. She could see why Ashley should thrust him aside as being "not a gentleman." He fell short, in two or three points, of the English standard. That he had little experience of life as it is lived, of its balance and proportion and perspective, was clear from the way in which he had flung himself and his money into the midst of the Guion disasters. No man of the world could possibly have done that. The very fact of his doing it made him lawfully a subject for some of the epithets Ashley applied to him. Almost any one would apply them who wanted to take him from a hostile point of view.

She forgot herself so far as to smile faintly. It was just the sort of deficiency which she had it in her power to make up. The reflection set her to dreaming when she wanted to be doing something else. She could have brought him the dower of all the things he didn't know, while he could give her.... But she caught herself again.

"What kind of a woman am I?"

She began to be afraid. She began to see in herself the type she most detested—the woman who could deliberately marry a man and not be loyal to him. She was on the threshold of marriage with Ashley, and she was thinking of the marvel of life with some one else. When one of the inner Voices denied this charge, another pressed it home by nailing the precise incident on which her heart had been dwelling. "You were thinking of this—of that—of the time on the stairs when, with his face close to yours, he asked you if you loved the man you'd be going away with—of the evening at the gate when your hand was in his and it was so hard to take it away. He has no position to offer you. There's nothing remarkable about him beyond a capacity for making money. He's beneath you from every point of view except that of his mere manhood, and yet you feel that you could let yourself slip into that—into the strength and peace of it—"

She caught herself again—impatiently. It was no use! There was something wilful within her, something that could be called by even a stronger name, that worked back to the point from which she tried to flee, whatever means she took to get away from it.

She returned to her work, persuading Cousin Cherry to go home to tea and leave her to finish the task alone. Even while she did so one of the inner Voices taunted her by saying: "That'll leave you all the more free to dream of—him."

Some days passed before she felt equal to talking about Davenant again. This time it was to the tinkling silver, as she and Drusilla Fane sorted spoons and forks at the sideboard in the dismantled dining-room. Olivia was moved to speak in the desperate hope that one stab from Drusilla—who might be in a position to deliver it—would free her from the obsession haunting her.

There had been a long silence, sufficiently occupied, it seemed, in laying out the different sorts and sizes of spoons in rows of a dozen, while Mrs. Fane did the same with the forks.

"Drusilla, did Mr. Davenant ever say anything to you about me?"

She was vexed with herself for the form of her question. It was not Davenant's feeling toward her, but toward Drusilla, that she wanted to know. She was drawing the fire in the wrong place. Mrs. Fane counted her dozen forks to the end before saying:

"Why, yes. We've spoken of you."

Having begun with a mistake, Olivia went on with it. "Did he say—anything in particular?"

"He said a good many things, on and off."

"Some of which might have been—in particular?"

"All of them, if it comes to that."

"Why did you never tell me?"

"For one reason, because you never asked me."

"Have you any idea why I'm asking you now?"

"Not the faintest. I dare say we sha'n't see anything more of him for years to come."

"Did you—did you—refuse him? Did you send him away?"

"Well, that's one thing I didn't have to do, thank the Lord. There was no necessity. I was afraid at one time that mother might make him propose to me—she's terribly subtle in that way, though you mightn't think it—but she didn't. No; if Peter's in love with any one, it's not with me."

Olivia braced herself to say, "And I hope it's not with me."

Drusilla went on counting.

"Did he ever say anything about that?" Olivia persisted.

Drusilla went on counting. "Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. That's all of that set. What a lot of silver you've got! And some of it must have been in the family for thousands of years. Yes," she added, in another tone, "yes, he did. He said he wasn't."

Olivia laid down the ladle she was holding with infinite precaution. She had got the stab she was looking for. It seemed for a minute as if she was free—gloatingly free. He hadn't cared anything about her after all, and had said so! She steadied herself by holding to the edge of the sideboard.

Drusilla stooped to the basket of silver standing on the floor, in a seemingly passionate desire for more forks. By the time she had straightened herself again, Olivia was able to say: "I'm so glad of that. You know what his kindness in helping papa has made people think, don't you?"

But Mrs. Fane astonished her by throwing down her handful of silver with unnecessary violence of clang and saying: "Look here, Olivia, I'd rather not talk about it any more. I've reasons. I can't take a hand in your affairs without being afraid that perhaps—perhaps—I—I—sha'n't play the game."

Olivia was silent, but she had much to think of.

It was a few days later still that she found herself in Rodney Temple's little office in the Gallery of Fine Arts. She had come ostensibly to tell him that everything had been arranged for the sale.

"Lemon and Company think that early in December would be the best time, as people are beginning then to spend money for Christmas. Mr. Lemon seems to think we've got a good many things the smaller connoisseurs will want. The servants are to go next Tuesday, so that if you and Cousin Cherry could take papa then—I'm to stay with Lulu Sentner; and I shall go from her house to be married—some day, when everything else is settled. Did you know that before Mr. Davenant went away he left a small bank account for papa?—two or three thousand dollars—so that we have money to go on with. Rupert wants to spend a week or two in New York and Washington, after which we shall come back here and pick up papa. He's not very keen on coming with us, but I simply couldn't—"

He nodded at the various points in her recital, blinking at her searchingly out of his kind old eyes.

"You look pale," he said, "and old. You look forty."

She surprised him by saying, with a sudden outburst: "Cousin Rodney, do you think it's any harm for a woman to marry one man when she's in love with another?" Before he had time to recover himself, she followed this question with a second. "Do you think it's possible for a person to be in love with two people at the same time?"

He understood now the real motive of her visit.

"I'm not a very good judge of love affairs," he said, after a minute's reflection. "But one thing I know, and it's this—that when we do our duty we don't have to bother with the question as to whether it's any harm or not."

"We may do our duty, and still make people unhappy."

"No; not unless we do it in the wrong way."

"So that if I feel that to go on and keep my word is the right thing—or rather the only thing—?"

"That settles it, dearie. The right thing is the only thing—and it makes for everybody's happiness."

"Even if it seems that it—it couldn't?"

"I'm only uttering platitudes, dearie, when I say that happiness is the flower of right. No other plant can grow it; and that plant can't grow any other flower. When you've done the thing you feel you're called to do—the thing you couldn't refuse while still keeping your self-respect—well, then, you needn't be afraid that any one will suffer in the long run—and yourself least of all."

"In the long run! That means—"

"Oh, there may be a short run. I'm not denying that. But no one worth his salt would be afraid of it. And that, dearie," he added, blinking, "is all I know about love affairs."

There being no one in the gallery on which the office opened, she kissed him as she thanked him and went away. She walked homeward, taking the more retired streets through Cambridge and into Waverton, so as to be the more free for thinking. It was a relief to her to have spoken out. Oddly enough, she felt her heart lighter toward Davenant from the mere fact of having told some one, or having partially told some one, that she loved him.

When, on turning in at the gate of Tory Hill, she saw a taxicab standing below the steps of the main entrance, she was not surprised, since Ashley occasionally took one to run out from town. But when a little lady in furs and an extravagant hat stepped out to pay the chauffeur Olivia stopped to get her breath. If it hadn't been impossible she would have said—

But the taxicab whizzed away, and the little lady tripped up the steps.

Olivia felt herself unable to move. The motor throbbed past her, and out the gate, but she still stood incapable of going farther. It seemed long before the pent-up emotions of the last month or two, controlled, repressed, unacknowledged, as they had been, found utterance in one loud cry: "Aunt Vic!"

Not till that minute had she guessed her need of a woman, a Guion, one of her very own, a mother, on whose breast to lay her head and weep her cares out.

The first tears since the beginning of her trials came to Olivia Guion, as, with arms clasped round her aunt and forehead pressed into the little old lady's furs, she sat beside her on a packing-case in the hail. She cried then as she never knew before she was capable of crying. She cried for the joy of the present, for the trouble of the past, and for the relief of clinging to some one to whom she had a right. Madame de Melcourt would have cried with her, had it not been for the effect of tears on cosmetics.

"There, there, my pet," she murmured, soothingly. "Didn't you know your old auntie would come to you? Why didn't you cable? Didn't you know I was right at the end of the wire. There now, cry all you want to. It'll do you good. Your old auntie has come to take all your troubles away, and see you happily married to your Englishman. She's brought your dot in her pocket—same old dot!—and everything. There now, cry. There's nothing like it."