Ordham did dine with his mother, whom he knew to be alone, but he left her after coffee, and drove to the Temple. He roamed about the gardens for a time, watching the ghost shadows of the ancient buildings, the blue-black mystery of the river that it took an American artist to interpret; then made his way to the Inner Temple and ascended to an upper floor, opening a door with a latch-key. The gas he lit revealed, not an office, but a comfortably furnished den, the walls covered with the red paper dear to the heart of even the exceptional man. There were several boxes of cigars and cigarettes on a buffet, a tea service, a roller desk, manifestly locked, and on the walls all the photographs he had taken of Styr during their summer. They were really creditable performances, and he had put them under glass, not only for personal reasons, but because he fully appreciated their unique value, even though he had no mind that any eyes but his should behold them. The collection represented Styr in every costume familiar to opera goers: in her Fedora gowns, in other home toilettes, and in Alpine costume leaning on her staff against a background of rocks, the cross on Kochel, and the glacier above Berchtesgaden. Several times Fräulein Lutz had been induced to snap the camera and take them together.

Ordham had now revelled in this unsuspected refuge for something over two months. At the castle Mabel had been too much occupied to enter his rooms save now and then on a sentimental excursion; but in the comparative seclusion of town and increasing ennui, she not only wandered in and out of his rooms perpetually, whether he were there or not, but took an inexplicable pleasure in upsetting and rearranging his things. This was a phase of matrimony for which Ordham was wholly unprepared, although he recalled an amusing picture Styr had drawn of one phase of the American household: the front bedroom the common sitting room; formality, much less exclusiveness, practically unknown. He had assumed that among the wealthy classes, accustomed to large houses, life would be planned on the European scale; but while he was given his own suite as a matter of course in Grosvenor Square, the ancient instinct was planted in Mabel, whose ancestors had been simple democratic folk to whom the traditions of their new country were dear, despite their social eminence. It never occurred to her that what was her Jackie’s was not her own, nor was it in her to suspect that she could fail to be welcome at all hours and seasons.

Ordham had been amused at first, but not for long. When only his opportune return diverted her from a cabinet which contained Styr’s letters and photographs, he was so incensed that he nearly ordered her out instead of gently conducting her forth to admire a new picture. After a day of black, albeit invisible, sulks, that gift for compromise which seldom failed him came to his rescue; and a week later found him installed in The Temple, with solitude within and beauty without, and only the roar of the Strand in his ears. Here he wrote his letters to Styr, read and reread hers, smoked, and dwelt upon the happiness of the past summer, as his eyes travelled from presentment to presentment of its heroine. He also enjoyed the sensation of deceiving his wife, for he felt that it was even a duty to balk a gregarious nature like that, and this secret life that he shared with Styr alone was eminently agreeable to the future master of the diplomatic art. Too proud to write of his disappointment to his friend, however her presence might have tempted confession, the very fact that he had taken this room as a solitary retreat would have told the whole story to his acute correspondent, even had not that atmosphere of melancholy superseded the subtle exaltation of those letters written from Ordham when his energies were humming and he was excited with a foretaste of power.

He lit the fire and a cigar, and settled himself into the ample Morris chair, but not with his usual sense of unqualified delight. Heretofore, when he had entered this room, it was to banish all unpleasant thought, all haunting doubt; but to-night he intended to open certain water-tight compartments and look squarely on their contents. He fancied that this unusual disposition to confront and probe must be inspired by the woman who had pricked his energies in so many other ways. Certainly, had he never known her, he would, after some such crisis as this evening’s understanding with his mother-in-law, have gone at once to the theatre, postponed indefinitely the admission that his marriage was a mistake.

No man could be more direct, more outspoken, than Ordham when it suited him, and this was his chief charm for people thrown much in his society,—betraying, as it did, the cool courage under his listless habit, furnishing the high lights, as it were, for that formal indubitably diplomatic nature. To-night he put several facts into the plainest possible English. He was mortally tired of his wife, hopelessly disappointed in her. He could have resigned himself to her intellectual lacks, trusting to time and his own assiduous tutoring to furnish her skull respectably; but her character was so utterly without variety, depth, mystery, interest of any sort, that the task of stuffing the brain was not worth while. Neither time nor determination can create a personality, and to Ordham’s mind people without strong individual characteristics were hardly worthy of visibility, no matter how admirable the shell. He had caught himself staring at Mabel in wonderment, half fancying he saw behind her that stately romantic elusive figure of his wooing, suggesting infinite possibilities. Had he been hypnotized, and where had she gone? True, Mabel was as beautiful as ever, as tall, her manners retained their grace, her head its lofty poise; but her features lost their dignity, her eyes their dreams, the moment she began to chatter; and heavens, how she did chatter!

He was still annoyed and embarrassed at this prospect of early paternity, still felt that this projection of himself would appropriate what was left of his youth; but at least it had the merit of causing a certain tenderness to linger. Not for the world would he have given Mabel a hint of his present evolution; he had only to remind himself of her pathetic condition to be delivered of the temptation. But later, when she was well again, strong, more tactless than ever in her renewed beauty and social successes, should he hate her? This was the ghost that had been tapping at his brain for weeks. He had no desire to hate his wife. It would be demoralizing, inconvenient, a constant source of irritation. Could he but crowd the world between them, wean her until she shared his own indifference, he fancied he could accept his lot philosophically; a well-bred ornamental wife was not to be despised. But inflict himself with her society and pertinacious affections he would not.

He realized now why his spirits had gradually sunk below their normal level, save only when the drawing-rooms were full of kaleidoscopic guests; moreover, that resentment had steadily grown at the trickery which had brought him to his present pass, anger at his own unthinkable stupidity. True, he was now immensely wealthy, but a young Briton’s only appreciation of money is in the incessant want of it, and, this passed, Ordham had almost forgotten that checkered interval between his father’s death and his present affluence. Besides, it was now positive that his brother had a mortal, if leisurely, disease; his inheritance was but a matter of time. If these women had not made a fool of him, he should still be free—young.

But he was not the man to arrest his vision on the surface of his mistakes. He stared appalled at the sudden and vivid realization of all that true marriage meant. Mere mating, respectable or otherwise, that automatic opening of the door to a waiting generation always squatting on the threshold, was not for men like himself; the world swarmed with those that asked for nothing better, and cared little whether nature blindfolded them or not; why could not he have been spared? Marriage—it was a portentous thing; no mere similarity of tastes due to breeding and experience, but, for highly organized beings, a thousand points of contact, mental, physical, spiritual, which compassed an unimaginable union; mystery and discovery; the quick response to half utterances, the same enthusiasms in beauties and pleasures forever hidden from the mass upon whose fertile surfaces grew the exotics of life; passions of soul and body such as only Styr could suggest when the music of Wagner set her free; immortality this side of the grave,—that was union in love as Ordham conceived it. And consciously or not, upon at least half a thousand points had he met and mingled with Margarethe Styr. The other half, of course, were not to be commanded in a mere romantic friendship, wandering silently with the woman in scenes made up of ice and stars, floating on sinister lakes between Plutonian walls, sitting in a dimly lit room above the murmuring Isar till dawn—but how wonderful it all had been! Had he really appreciated it?

When he left her, he had refused to ask himself if she loved him, but he knew that she did. It breathed in her letters, floated from them in an almost visible aura. From the faithful Kilchberg he had heard in due course of her stupendous performance of Isolde, knew that she must have received his letter immediately before it.

Did he love her? It was significant that he did not reply even to himself, “Of course!” But although he admitted it as frankly as he had disposed of his sentiments toward his wife, he was as yet conscious of nothing beyond a vast immaterial longing for that other part of himself, so full of splendour and terrible mystery. After some dodging he analyzed this paradox also: he was sitting in the forbidding wreckage of early matrimonial disillusions, his passions lay so deep under the torpors he had cultivated that they had been but superficially disturbed, and he was still very shy. But between himself and Margarethe Styr there could be every response, every correlation, every analogue. It only depended upon circumstance or their own wills when that chemical affinity developed which sooner or later drives all lovers into each other’s arms. In this hour of cold reasoning, of almost vicious hatred of all things pertaining to his condition, he hoped it would be late, or never. He had not the least idea whether he lived for that moment or wished that Styr had never crossed his orbit. It was his disposition to live on the surface—there was so much on the surface! A man might occupy himself with it for a lifetime, and far better than plunging down to eternal fires. He believed that the wise men of life were its dilettantes, and to be prince of the dilettantes had nature eminently equipped him. But alas! . . .

Of course he did not wish he had never met Styr! What nonsense! Not only did he owe to her all he was or ever should be, not only was he philosophical by habit and temper, but he should exult in the memory of her to the end of his days. He strongly doubted, however, if he wanted to add to those memories, in other words enter upon a different phase. Had it not been for the great advantages she must reap from this London season, he could have wished that he had left England to educate itself. He longed above all things to meet her again, and there was nothing which he would not have done to avoid it. Could they get through these thirty-five days in safety? They would be crowded with work and social engagements; possibly he should see little of her, and prosaic London was not romantic Bavaria. Did he emerge from this coming ordeal with that spiritual bond between them still unvitalized, he vowed that he never would see her again. The moment they ceased to play with love would be the first real moment of his life, and he had but a confused idea of what must come after; nor was it comfortable to speculate. It was not so much that he dreaded the energies of a real passion, as the recklessness they might breed. He had no wish to sacrifice his career, to be haled into the divorce courts, to be relegated to that half world which exists for men as well as for women, particularly for young fools, there to be known as “Styr’s lover.”

And a career he was determined to have. He was become fully conscious of his abilities, his gift for leadership, his enjoyment of power. And if he had thought little or not at all of serving his country when preparing for the diplomatic career, he thought of it a great deal now. If much of his careless insolent youth had been buried under disillusions and ennui these last months, he found himself and life twice as interesting. Not lightly would he imperil that future which for the first time seemed vital and full. . . .

But Styr? Styr? Styr? He recalled the young heroes of Balzac and other veracious French realists, who wept as freely as women when a cruel destiny dammed up their love secretions. He envied them, but remembered also that one secret of the supremacy of the British race was that it used its emotions to feed its energies, and began to act while its more brilliant but less practical neighbours were spending half their forces in grief or rage. But this reflection did not abate one whit of his desire to be alone with this woman once more—he suddenly realized that it was growing from moment to moment, that his cold analytical temper had been displaced by throbbing pulses. He rose hastily, walked the room, lit another cigar, spent an hour reading her letters. They always translated him from the present, soothed as well as stimulated him, banished his melancholy, leaving only a pleasant sadness in its wake. He walked home toward dawn almost happy. Thirty-five days! At least they would have many talks. Thank God that “dark threshold,” as she once had phrased it, had never been crossed, would hardly obtrude itself during this the last of their intimacies. And the antechamber was very large and of an inexpressible beauty. Not to compare with it were the commonplace mansions whose every corner was free to so many men, and for life. He was an ingrate. He would accept the good the gods brought him and take devilish good care not to cry for more.

When he reached home, he found Mabel asleep on a sofa in his room, with the stains of tears on her face. He carried her into her own room and put her to bed. Then, as she inevitably awakened and wanted to talk, he considerately mixed her a sleeping draught, and saw no more of her until the luncheon hour.

When a great audience assembles with an amiable desire to be pleased, agreeably titillated with the thought of a new interest in the wide and often barren ranges of the impersonal life, and with their vanity pluming itself upon inaugurating a new era, the object of their distinguished regard must fail ignominiously to convince them that they have made a mistake.

Covent Garden was filled from stalls to roof on the night of Styr’s London débût, and the pit and the galleries were crowded with the true music lovers, who were mainly Germans. Princess Nachmeister, as well as Ordham and the enthusiasts he had enlisted, both in the fashionable and artistic world, had pulled the wires so subtly that practically everybody present fancied himself the discoverer of Styr, and hardly a person in the stalls and boxes but bore a distinguished name, either inherited or made. Ordham sat in his box alone. Mabel was ailing and her mother remained with her. He looked as impassive as he was nervous and angry; Styr had stolen into London, no one knew when, and he had not had a glimpse of her in private, although a few moments before he left Grosvenor Square he had received an invitation to lunch with her on the following day.

The opera was Tristan und Isolde, and Styr, delighted to sing it again after her long abstinence, gave the great rendering to which Ordham was accustomed. Although the fashionable part of the audience was reduced almost to idiocy before the end of the evening, particularly during the long innings of the tenor—second-rate, of course, on such short notice, and at this season—in the last act, there was no question of Styr’s personal triumph. The most bored remained until the end, and then gave “The Great German Prima Donna” an ovation. She had been called out repeatedly after the two preceding acts, but only twenty appearances after the final curtain satisfied an audience proud of its perspicacity, and generously happy in paying tribute to genius. The Germans shouted themselves hoarse, particularly when she dragged Richter out with her. All admired Styr’s manner of receiving homage almost as much as her voice and acting. It was neither effusive like that of the Latin song birds to whom they were accustomed; she kissed no bouquets and baskets of orchids, although these tributes were many: nor was she the haughty gracious queen of fiction, after the fashion of certain actresses and prime donne, thoroughly spoilt or qualifying for social incursions. She merely walked out and showed herself, seeming to tower above them all, with the cold, calm, grave majesty of the Sphinx. She was Styr. She was theirs until the opera lights went out. They might look their full. She bent her head to the royal box only because custom demanded it; nevertheless, she throbbed with exultation, for she knew that the wires would carry her triumph that night to every capital in the world. Her fortune was made. Once she sought Ordham’s eyes, and her own flashed out the gratitude she felt, then lingered for fully half a minute. When the ovation subsided, she obeyed a summons to the royal box, repaid compliments with the suave phrases of long experience, then, ignoring the crowd gathered about her dressing room, and numerous invitations to supper, went home to her frugal meal and bed.

Ordham walked restlessly up and down the large private sitting room in one of the Dover Street hotels where a table was laid for two. The Countess Tann, he had been informed, was dressing, begged him to accept her apologies; she would join him in ten minutes.

He roamed about for half an hour, so torn with annoyance, doubt, and mortification, as well as resentment against the great and capricious Styr herself, that he was far from that mood of tremulous happiness, stung with fear, which he had achieved in imagination many times. It was abominable of Styr to steal into London when he had made up his mind to rise at four of the clock and meet her at the station. With this heroic act he had hoped to atone for certain unavoidable derelictions. It was the bitterest mortification of his life that he was unable to introduce his friend to London society under his own roof. His mother-in-law had deftly avoided a renewal of the subject. Mabel had sweetly vowed to break through that Puritan casing in which her mother dwelt like an antediluvian mammal (this was Ordham’s image, not Mabel’s); but he had chanced to overhear a scrap of conversation between the pair which convinced him that not only did she meditate nothing of the sort, but had joined forces with her mother and old Levering in acquainting London society with the variegated, manifold, and heinous iniquities of Styr’s past. The favourite story, Ordham discovered soon after, was that “Peggy Hill” had deserted her starving and consumptive mother in the native mining town to become the squaw of an Indian chieftain, and had worn paint and feathers and carried pappooses on her back until a Western millionnaire had chanced along, offered her sealskin and diamonds, fought a duel unto death with the chieftain—who, wearing only feathers, had many vulnerable points—and carried the heartless mother to New York. There she promptly deserted him for a horse jockey, and after having figured as co-respondent in innumerable divorce suits, had opened a disreputable resort, over which she had presided affluently (when not in jail) until ordered once for all out of New York by the police. Then she had cultivated her voice, and, finding it a gold mine, conserved it with a fairly consistent exercise of virtue. This richly picturesque past, in which any prima donna might rejoice, delighted London, but it was hardly one to open the portals of society. London could stand a good deal—but really! There are lines! They would applaud her in Covent Garden, talk about her over every tea cup; but extend to her the greatest of the world’s hospitalities—hardly! The information that Munich society was at her feet they treated with the contempt it deserved. Munich!

Ordham had discovered with astonishment and no little humiliation, that although with money, energy, and finesse, he might import German opera to London and induce people to hear it, although he was popular, admired, and wealthy, he had practically no power socially. He reflected bitterly that this was not to be accounted for only by his youth, his brother’s durability, the fact that he was not established under an imposing roof of his own, but that, much as he was liked, he stood for nothing, would be forgotten before he had lived out of London a month. He was a second son married to a rich American girl and living in the house of his mother-in-law. Who was he to presume to dictate to London society? Had he attempted it, he would have been put in his place as summarily as had he been an American himself.

And his mother had basely deserted him. Invited to join a driving party to the châteaux of northern France, she had left London with a hurried note of explanation to her son, feigning to forget the coming of his friend, but devoutly thankful for any escape from what was assuming the contours of a problem. She might rank among the independent women of London, rather weak on the subject of celebrities; but really! His grandmother doted on him, and he had approached her in the hope that she in her great rank and cynical indifference to a criticism that never could affect her, would help him out of his difficulty, enable him to return some of those hospitalities now bulking in his tormented imagination. But he had merely received a reminder of the duke’s aversion from foreigners and disbursements, and much sound advice against making mistakes in his youth; society had cast out its own before. But he had no intention of insulting Styr by entertaining her without the countenance of his family.

His only success had been among certain personages in the world of art, letters, and music, who, indeed, did not wait for his gentle manipulation; they were thankful for the opportunity to do homage to one of the world’s great artists. Whether the ridiculous stories current were true or not hardly concerned them, but they assumed as a matter of course that they were incidental, having suffered more or less themselves. Styr was certain to receive a social ovation from the sets that Ordham privately thought the best worth while in London, but that by no means satisfied him; after all, they were not of his own class, and it was this class—in the eyes of the world, representative England—that he had set his heart upon honouring his friend.

As he wandered about, glaring at the walls and furniture, far too exclusive to be artistic (it was, indeed, early Victorian), he felt his temper rising every moment; he hated Life, that gave with one hand only to take with the other, that had contracted the habit of late of balking his royal pleasure. Nevertheless, he was able to reflect that it was as well many circumstances had combined to stifle the lover in him for the moment. This first interview was the only one he had dreaded. Could they but shoot those breakers even plain speech between them would not be fraught with danger. He did not need experience to assure him that when lovers, long inarticulate, meet after a separation not too long, those brain centres that check and regulate human actions are liable to suffocation by fire and flood. But, were all barriers razed, he was in too bad a humour to-day (he had also been forced to swallow effusive regrets from Mabel before leaving home) to find a corner in him for ardours. At the same time he sighed at this new evidence of the eternal contrast between the anticipated and the real; his tremours over this first meeting had been very sweet.

Nothing perhaps is so eloquent of the artless respectability of the British race as the composition of its older hotels: drawing-rooms and bedrooms rarely connect. (And yet an Englishwoman, visiting the United States for the first time, innocently remarked that she could see the Americans were a virtuous race, as they used portières instead of doors!) The only door of Styr’s sitting room in this expensive hostelry gave entrance to the public corridor. Ordham heard the hissing of under-flounces for a full minute before the door opened and Styr entered. Her cheeks were flushed. She wore a Fedora gown of white camel’s-hair and silk, with a yellow flower in her hair and another in her girdle. He had never seen her look so lovely off the stage.

“It is too delightful to see you once more!” she cried with the warm hypocrisy of a woman who longs to fling herself into a man’s arms and say nothing. “I know I am unforgiven for not letting you come to the station. But did you really think I should let you see me after twenty-four hours in train and boat? That was like a man! And now I have kept you waiting. But of course I expected that you would be late.”

“How can you say such a thing? I wanted above all things to go to that train. I shall never forgive you.”

“Ah! but had I let you meet me, I never should have forgiven myself. Shall we sit beside these delightful window boxes? I changed the luncheon hour to two o’clock—I woke up so late. Oh, tell me that I was quite wonderful last night. It seemed to me that I never had made a real effort before. I know that I triumphed, but I want to hear that you were satisfied.”

Ordham muttered what banalities he could summon. It was evident that her spirits were high, whether artificial or not. She ran on: “Never, never can I express to you what this sudden and splendid opportunity to sing in London means to me. You are my good angel. What had I ever done that you should take so much trouble for me? Those examinations? Yes, for that I shall take credit till the last of my days. But even so—”

“There was no question of paying any debt.” Ordham was scowling at the roses in the carpet. “I could not if I would repay you for many things. I have not the least desire to do so. I wanted you to come here and force London to accept Wagner. Of course you have become the rage in a night. You will reconquer some seventeen times during this too brief visit. It is hardly worth talking about. I wonder if you will like London. Have you ever been here before? I forget.”

“Never. Think of it! I had often visited the Continent before going there to live, but for one reason or another I never got to London. I am as excited at the idea of seeing as of singing to it.”

He had recklessly brought up the subject, but he suddenly felt the meanness of every excuse he had concocted. Should he tell her the truth? Why not first as last? She would not be long discovering it. While he hesitated, she came to his rescue. Before leaving Munich Princess Nachmeister had casually remarked that she feared dear Adela was too puritanical to receive a stage artist under her roof; for the matter of that, the Anglo-Saxon races, compared with the continent of Europe, were so provincial on many subjects that she never met an English or American woman who did not make her feel as if she were the mistress of every man in Europe. But as regarded stage folk, it must be remembered that Munich was almost exceptional in its catholicity. In Paris, in Rome, in many other capitals, they were anathema outside their proper spheres. Therefore was Styr prepared for the dark brow and nervous manner of her friend. She knew that as he had not written her before this of receptions arranged in her honour and begging her to reserve certain dates, his family must have refused point-blank to receive her. She was hardly disappointed, for she had little of the American’s romantic weakness for the social citadels of the old world, and she knew Ordham so well that her sympathy in any case would have been for him, not for herself. She leaned forward and said impulsively:

“Do promise me one thing! This is not only my first visit to England, but it may be a long time before I can come again. I want to be a tourist. I want to see all the sights. And to see them with you! Ah, fancy! Don’t be haughty and tell me that you scorn sight-seeing. Don’t tell me that you want me to meet a lot of tiresome people. I have not time for both. Do you hate the idea?”

“Hate it?” He seized her hand and kissed it in his immense relief. “I should love it. I have never been inside the Tower, nor the British Museum, and only once to the Abbey—to a wedding. It will be too enchanting to have all those hours alone with you. We will go to Windsor and Hampton Court, Madame Tussaud’s and the National Gallery, exactly like two American tourists. Promise that you will not go to a single place with any one else.”

“I do not expect to see any one else except the opera house people.”

“But—of course!—attentions will be showered upon you. It is most unfortunate that my wife—”

“Oh, do let me forget that you are married. We shall wander about just as we did in Bavaria, and in this crowded city no one will be the wiser. Will you take me to the Tower this afternoon?”

“Will I? Rather!”

His good humour was quite restored, and he spent an entirely happy afternoon, even condescending to share her interest in that mighty volume of tragic drama, the Tower of London.

Mabel rustled into her husband’s dressing room as he was giving the last careful strokes to his front locks, which he arranged in a manner peculiar to himself. He nodded to her absently, longing for the time when he could ask her bluntly to respect his privacy, since she was impervious to hints, and she wandered to the window and fingered the bright flowers in the boxes.

“It is such a heavenly day,” she sighed. “Somehow, I never can grow accustomed to spending summer in the city. How—how—does Countess Tann like London?”

“She loves it, of course. Who does not love London at this season?”

“Well, it is certainly much nicer than to sing here in winter. I suppose she is perfectly wild over her success.”

“She has never had anything else.”

“But I mean in London, where no one, that is only a few, really likes Wagner. Some one said yesterday that, although Styr’s personal success was beyond dispute, he feared the Wagner season would be a failure as a whole; five weeks of Wagner was more than any one not a German could stand, and if they give the Ring again—”

“They will do nothing so tactless. But Die Walküre is romantic enough to please the silliest and great enough to entrance those that really do know music. No other performance of Götterdämmerung will be given, more’s the pity, for Brünhilde was always one of her two greatest rôles, and her rendering of it has deepened and even changed somewhat since I heard it in Munich. But no doubt it would fill the house only once—with people that want to be able to say they have heard the Ring! Styr has also consented to sing Elizabeth and Elsa; her voice is rather heavy for those rôles, but a hundred people will go to hear Lohengrin and Tannhäuser where one will even show himself at the greater operas a second time. The enterprise is not in the hands of fools—I know several members of the committee—and everything has been thought of to insure the season’s success.”

“How nice! Of course she is quite extraordinary. I am so sorry I could only sit through one act last night. And what a pity I cannot meet her. It is too old-fashioned of mother.”

“You could leave a card on her.”

“But, Jackie dear, she would then feel at liberty to come here, and after all it is mother’s house.”

Ordham turned to her with a rising flush. “Do you mean that you believe Countess Tann would force herself upon any one? I must have given you a strange opinion of her.”

“Good heavens, Jackie dear, I hope you have not told her that we—that mother will not receive her. How dreadful!”

“Certainly I have not. But she does not happen to be a fool. She has now been in London ten days, and as neither my wife nor my mother-in-law has left so much as a card on her, don’t you suppose she understands?”

“But surely you told her that I cannot go about?”

“You drive every day. There is no effort involved in leaving a card.”

“But—how like a man! One can hardly go that far and no farther. If this were only our house!”

Ordham drew his lids together. “If it were, would you receive Countess Tann?”

But Mabel did not flinch. “Of course I would, Jackie darling. I would even defy mother—we could go to a hotel—if only I felt up to it. But I am a wreck and mother takes such care of me.”

Ordham set his teeth and turned away, grimly reflecting that the one mental trait his wife possessed which compelled his admiration was the neatness with which she could deliver a lie. She broke off the heads of several geraniums and then cried out, as if suddenly inspired with a bright idea: “Let us go to the country to-day. It is too utterly heavenly to stay in town. Let us take a long drive through Surrey.”

“It is not good for you to take long drives.”

“Oh, it won’t hurt me a bit. We can rest often in those ducky little inns, and sit in the woods. It would be too delicious.”

“There might be an accident, and I never should forgive myself.”

“Oh! With our horses? One is always thankful when any horses of mother’s will go off a walk. Say that you will!” She spoke with a charming girlish eagerness.

“I am afraid that I cannot. I have half a dozen engagements.”

“But, Jackie darling, you ought not to make engagements for a whole day when you know how lonesome I am without you.” Mabel fell headlong into the domestic snare, heedless of resolutions and advice from her mother-in-law.

He turned to her with the flush gone from his face, and said in the gentlest manner possible: “Should you mind if I asked you not to call me Jackie? I have often intended to do so. I hope you don’t mind.”

It was Mabel’s turn to flush, and although her temper was not quick, her eyes flashed and her lips trembled. “Why?” she demanded. “Do—do you think it a liberty?”

“How can you say such a thing?” But although he spoke promptly, he was surprised to discover that she had put a latent resentment into form.

“Why,” stammered Mabel, “you are English. I believe mother is right. But this—this is really too much. I wonder if you could ever understand that we Americans have exactly as good an opinion of ourselves as you English have of yourselves? Perhaps we too look down upon all other nations. We have the right to! United States History is the only history that English people never seem to know anything about.”

“You look too pretty when you flash with patriotism like that.” Ordham smiled and kissed her lightly. “But you flew off at a tangent without giving me time to explain. It merely happens that I have always hated the nickname of Jack. In fact, I don’t like nicknames at all. It seems to me that they deindividualize. Men that permit themselves to be called Bertie and Olly and Sonny might as well shave their heads or wear a beard. I was christened John, and I feel John, not Johnny or Jackie.”

“Your mother calls you Johnny.”

“My mother goes in for fads. Nobody else has ever dared to call me Johnny.”

Mabel, always easily mollified, put her arms about his unresponsive neck. “If you had told me before, I never would have called you Jackie, although I love it, and John is so horridly formal. I shall feel as if I were addressing my husband’s double, or something. Do you really hate it—Jackie?”

“Yes.”

“Well! . . . I won’t any more. But you must do something for me in return. You must take me to the country to-day.”

“I really could not take the risk.”

“Then take me to Kensington Gardens.”

“I am so sorry—I think I told you I had several engagements. You see—you are generally occupied all day, with one thing or another. I have been thrown on my own resources, and now I cannot get out of these engagements I have made.”

“But you always used to come home to luncheon.”

“Now that you have so many American friends in London I did not fancy you would miss me; and as several of my own old friends are in town, I thought it a good opportunity to show them some attentions.”

“Why don’t you bring them to the house?”

“I could not think of fatiguing you, and men prefer to dine at a club, anyway.”

The words “Margarethe Styr” were shrieking in Mabel’s brain, but she was very proud, and rarely impolitic in any but small matters. Her mother had soothed her growing jealousy by assuring her that the great singer was far too occupied, now that all artistic London was running after her, to spare time for any man. Mabel could not crush her natural suspicions, particularly as she had discovered that he had once more thrown over the much-enduring Foreign Office, but she was determined not to alienate this puzzling young Englishman, whom she understood less every day, by “making scenes.” “Don’t bore him!” Lady Pat had warned her before leaving for France. “Give him his head and don’t ask him questions. He would not confide in himself if he could help it. He worships you and is far too lazy to pursue any woman, or even to respond to her advances. But don’t bore him.”

Mabel, with all the American girl’s independence of spirit, and firm belief in the inferiority of man, found such advice little to her taste, but, loving as she did, was willing to accept any that would help her to enchain her husband’s languid affections. But more than once of late she had turned cold as she asked herself if ever she could understand him, become really intimate with him. And now, kind and thoughtful as he still was, another fear was whispering. It seemed to her confirmed by his refusal of her simple request. While she might control the more direct expressions of her jealousy, the temptation was irresistible to indulge in the ancient formulæ. She dropped her arms and turned away with a quivering lip.

“I don’t believe you love me any longer!”

“How can you say such a thing?”

“Do you?”

“Of course.”

She wheeled about and regarded him steadily. It occurred to him that she looked less vapidly pretty than usual.

“If you ceased to care for me,” she said stammeringly, her eyes widening with fear, “you would kill me. I never could stand it—never—I think that is all there is to me.”

“What a dear little thing you are. As if any man could help caring for the most charming wife in England. But you should have married Stanley, who is always exactly the same. I am afraid I am not. But as for the rest—do not be silly. Now I must run. Take care of yourself and don’t think of going for a drive of more than an hour.”

He tapped her on the cheek, dropped a kiss on her forehead, and departed in haste lest she think of a new argument. Mabel ran into her own room and fell on her divan, weeping wildly. But although she luxuriously let nature have her way for ten minutes or more, she finally drank a sedative, and then set her childish mouth in a straight hard line. There were several American women in England that had acquired conspicuous influence over their husbands—whom, no doubt, they had once had found as incomprehensible as her wonderful Jackie. If they had succeeded, so could she. It only required time and patience; and the return of her old buoyant health, which would enable her to companion him once more. If necessary, she would study politics and talk to old statesmen. But at this prospect she shuddered, and at the same moment her eye fell upon a shelf containing the works of Balzac, Maupassant, Bourget, and several other French authors, which one of her young married friends of their race had sent her, bound in white vellum, as a wedding present. They had been accompanied by a recommendation to read them and soon. She had never taken one from the shelf upon which her servant had arranged them.

“Ketch ’em alive! Ketch ’em alive!” The fly-paper vender had the note of spring in his voice, and other and more distant street cries betrayed the same almost plaintive quickening under the influence of the warmth and light so long withdrawn. Ordham let himself out of the house looking as hard as he felt, but in a few moments the pagan beauty of the morning and the gay face of London in her springtime laughed his ill humor away and banished the memory of his wife. No city is more beautiful than London during her brief season of sunshine, with the flower boxes set like little Italian balconies on her grim old houses, the vivid close green of parks and squares, the endless processions of open carriages filled with smartly dressed folk from all parts of the world; some in the native finery of countries so far from occidental that they give the scene a touch of opera bouffe. As Ordham walked toward Dover Street he fancied he could hear the birds singing in Hyde Park—a colony that dwelt in a tree beside his bedroom window had awakened him early with their chattering—see the swans sailing on the lake in the park of St. James. It was good to be alive, good to belong by divine right to the one really great city in the world, and as he presented six-pence to several of his friends the crossing sweepers—more for the pleasure of receiving their blessing than because he had the least idea they needed it—he smiled at them so radiantly that more than ever they were convinced he was the sweetest young gentleman that ever gave siller, and ‘oped he would be ‘appy for ever and ever.

Ordham felt that he had every reason to be happy. Were not he and Margarethe Styr going for a long day in the country, a long unbroken day? Although they had carried out their programme and visited many sights, still was it their first whole day together. Rehearsals demanded by the heterogeneous mass of singers they had been able to borrow from German cities had stolen many of her free days; she had felt obliged to attend three receptions arranged in her honour and receive once; and during the coming week practically all her spare time would be occupied with rehearsals for Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, for she had not sung the rôles of Elizabeth and Elsa for several years. But these hours they had snatched together had been wholly delightful, their spirits had been high to the edge of excitement; both took a nervous delight in playing with a danger that would soon finish, leave them face to face either with tragedy or a vast and cynical philosophy. It was tacitly understood that this was to be their last period of companionship, and although Ordham alternated between the pit of melancholy when alone and an almost fierce sensation of happiness while with this woman, whom he found more surely his than in the old days when his eyes were closed, he refused at any time to ask more of fate or to dwell upon the future. But that he was no longer the languid manageable youth of less than a year ago he knew as well as she. If he too put ambition before love, accepted the consequences of his marrying, it was because he chose to do so, not because of the woman’s subtle manipulation. Ordham sometimes found an added food for sadness in the knowledge that he had left the best of his youth behind him, but was wise enough to congratulate himself that his acute attack of racial industry had cleared his blood of blinding humours.

But only to Styr was there any change in his appearance, and as he entered her sitting room this morning he looked the archetype of conquering youth, of splendid young English manhood. His mouth, which of late had often been consciously firm, was as soft and boyish as when they had met at Neuschwanstein, and his eyes, always luminous, were sparkling with anticipation. Not the least of his attractions to Styr was his perfect grooming, for being artist as well as woman, she hated the sight of “artistic” men. She herself looked very smart, as he immediately told her, in an entire costume of tan-coloured cloth. As the day was warm and she could not wear a wrap, and as her tailor was the best in Paris, her frock followed every line and curve of her perfect figure. But as she had concluded to ignore the fact that Ordham was man as well as soul, and circumstances protected them both, she saw no reason for making herself clumsy and uncomfortable, as if he were a boy and she his guardian! Moreover, she was not averse from leaving in his memory as many charming pictures of herself as might be composed.

“How delicious it is merely to be alive!” she exclaimed with that enthusiasm which, when the sullenness of her face was routed by the mere pagan joy of living, was not the least of her fascinations. “Where are we going?” she added, as they entered a hansom.

“I have not the least idea.” But in a moment he lifted the trap and directed the cabby to drive to Euston Station.

They alighted at Bushey, and, hiring a carriage for the day, drove or strolled through the old English lanes, with their high scented hedges, past houses built for subjects of Elizabeth, visited the tomb of Bacon at St. Albans, and even stared at the splendours of Hatfield House like veritable tourists, Ordham characteristically neglecting to mention that he had dined and slept there more than once. They idled on commons and in woods almost as full of light, lunched at the famous inn of Harrow, sat on the tomb favoured by Byron in the old town’s churchyard, hung over high-walled fences to inhale the perfume of flowers that the island’s moisture makes so rich, and to stare at the immense masses of pink and white hawthorn; bought fruit of a farmer (grown under glass, of course!) and sat on his wall to eat it. Few counties in England have more charms than Hertfordshire, and not its least is that it is practically undiscovered by the tourist.

They dined in the inn at Stanmore, dismissing their carriage, as they could take the train at this beautiful old town, which invited them to linger as long as it was light. They soon forsook the enormous joints, the mess of greens, the peas as round and hard as marbles, and an apple dumpling like a tunnel filled with the débris of many wrecks, and wandered forth once more. The streets were very narrow, the houses, of a dozen centuries, covered with ivy close cut; the church looked as old as England. At this hour the little town was silent and outwardly deserted, but one expected every moment to hear the sound of a horn, to see the London coach dash round a corner, a post-chaise with a lady in powder and patches at the window. Stanmore is so close to London that it was the first town reached by the mounted courier galloping through the dawn to tell the country that Victoria was queen, but it is as old and quiet and forgotten as if it were lost in one of the great counties of the north.

Gypsy wagons were halted on one corner of the heath, and the women cooked supper in the early twilight while the men lay on the ground and smoked their pipes. Their children, catching sight of two prosperous strangers, ran without prompting to beg. Ordham and Margarethe gave them silver, then, declining to have their fortunes told, in other words getting rid of them, strolled out over the heath. This large piece of waste land is as wild as anything in America, broken and rough of surface and covered with tangled grasses and shrubs. Beyond was what looked to be a black mass of woods, but the glimpse of a gateway suggested that they might be but the generously planted trees of a park. A grey church spire of some distant hamlet stood out sharply against a red band of afterglow. There was an intermittent tinkle of cow-bells, but no other sound.

They sat down in the very centre of the heath and watched the twilight gather, that long English twilight without chill or dew which brings with it something of the mystery of night while still holding in a loose embrace the safeguards of day. At that hour the flowers smell more sweetly, the night moths flutter among them, and man feels that his day’s work is done. A pungent scent rose from the gorse of Stanmore Heath, but Margarethe, who had felt as exhilarated all day as if she were a girl unexpectedly alone with a man secretly loved, felt her spirits drop. She remembered who she was and one of her objects in coming to London. So far not a word had passed between them concerning his married life. They had renewed the old intimate friendship in snatches that made them eager for more, but had found much to talk about in the monuments they visited, the most tactful programme for Covent Garden, in many subjects of common impersonal interest. But Margarethe had determined upon at least one crossed and dotted conversation with Ordham, and she believed this to be the time.

Ordham, too, was silent, staring straight before him with an expression which Styr had seen before when words lagged, an expression of mingled abstraction, astonishment, and apprehension.

“I want the whole story,” she said abruptly.

He turned to her with a start and flush. “The whole story?”

“Yes. All that has happened since we parted in Munich.”

“I thought we were to ignore the subject of my marriage.”

“To ignore is not to forget. I have tormented myself with so many versions—possibilities—how shall I call it? I want the truth. It will lay the ghost.”

“I am afraid you will hate me. I was an inconceivable ass.”

“No—it is wonderful that the story should be always the same and always different! But I hate generalities. I cannot go on confounding you with millions of other men. I want the specific incidents, your own version. A man’s viewpoint is always his best excuse.”

“Very well.” And as his love for her had always appealed to the carefully secluded fount of truth in his nature, for love would be wholly truth were it not for life, he told the story from beginning to end, omitting neither the skilful plot he had since unravelled, nor his own abject surrender.

“I loved Mabel; there can be no doubt of that. I suppose that the long root of such love is the axis of life. It permits millions to marry every day that have little or no prospect of educating or even supporting possible offspring; but if they paused to forecast, in other words, if their brains were not in a state of toxic poisoning from this love secretion, whatever it may be, the race would soon put an end to itself. Perhaps in time the law will step in and forbid marriages before the man is thirty and the woman twenty-five. As for the turbulence of desire and suffering—after one has endured the acute stage for a certain length of time, there is bound to be a decline and reaction. Man simply cannot suffer and desire at concert pitch forever. Moreover, did the law forbid the banns, a man would take jolly good care to keep out of harm’s way. But I know now that even had Mabel been all they made me believe, all that she looked, I should have ceased to care tuppence for her, although no doubt rather later. It is not necessary to explain the reason to you. A man may love many times in his life, but only one woman takes full and complete possession of his inner kingdom, as you have called it. Man is a sultan. One woman is his sultana; the others, absorbing enough during their little hour, are the caprices of his desultory harem. It is odd that his legal wife should so often be but one of these casual minor passions, and the woman he may never possess the one to persuade him of the immortality of love. It is a nice comment upon the makeshifts of civilization.”

Styr stirred uneasily. She was white, for the story had cut her even more deeply than she had anticipated. It is not pleasant to hear your chosen idol draw a picture of his youthful passion, his first abandon for another woman. She had clenched her long hands, and a blast from the furnace of her soul sped in the direction of Grosvenor Square. But she answered judicially: “The first study of civilized nations is every possible precaution against anarchy. They are doing their little best; we can only wait until the world grows wiser.” Then she laughed with a fair assumption of gayety. “It is something more than humorous that I should be the one to say that, not you: I, Margarethe Styr, and you, John Ordham, so soon to be a hereditary legislator of the most wisely governed country on earth. Well! Never mind! I have played many rôles in my life.”

“Will you not tell me that story now?” he asked eagerly. “You have half promised, more than once. And I am sick of outrageous concoctions. The truth could not be worse.”

“The truth is always worse, when there is any foundation for gossip at all. No!” she said violently, her voice harsh with the revolt let loose by his own story. “I will never tell you. It is only because I have lived so much, suffered so much, weathered a thousand storms, that I have been able to listen to all you have told me to-night without hating you. Were it otherwise, were I ten years younger, it would be months before I should want even to look at you again. You could never stand a similar—a far worse test. This life may not be for us, but at all events you shall never hear from my lips what would make you—Ah! Bah!”

“Do you believe in another life?” he asked, tactfully ignoring this outburst, in which he secretly exulted.

“This inner life of ours does not undergo death and resurrection for nothing,” she replied sullenly. “Nor is imagination a mere offshoot of the active mind. If it means anything, it means that somewhere, in some future incarnation, or on some more satisfactory planet, its supernormal efforts will become the facts of existence. And what then? Still subtler and more imperative wants that can only be realized in a higher state still? It makes one incline to Buddhism and Nirvana.”

“Either way of looking at it is a poor compensation for the disappointments of this life, when you are young, at least; and when you are old, you don’t care. The trouble is with civilization. We need a new religion. Perhaps the solution is in a combination of the Eastern and Western forms. It is as significant that Christianity has converted but one-third of the Earth’s peoples as that the remaining two-thirds are an anomaly in this eve of the twentieth century. The last are too supercilious in their ancient wisdom to borrow anything from us. We are raw conceited schoolboys, too ignorant, and worse, to help ourselves from their abundant stores. Perhaps the time will come.”

Margarethe suppressed her feminine resentment at generalities in the twilight. “Well, that may be one of your many missions. But it was not a personal craving alone that made me demand the history of these last ten months. It is an immense relief to me to know that your eyes are opened, that you are no longer blinded by either love or cunning. I have a strong suspicion, and so has Excellenz, that they do not intend you shall go abroad. I have heard since my arrival of your wife’s consuming ambition to be a beauty in London, of her detestation of Continental life, the third, or fourth, fiddle she would be forced to play for many years. They will keep you here if they can.”

“I have heard nothing of all this, but I shouldn’t wonder—and it makes no difference. As soon as my wife is able to travel, I go to whatever post is open to me. I should go the day you left London had I not given my word to remain here until September or thereabouts.”

“And what if she refuses to go with you?”

Ordham smiled grimly. “I have not the faintest idea she will refuse to go with me when she is persuaded that no argument or threat will keep me at home. I can understand that she will hate to leave London,—England,—but she will accompany me. Small doubt of that.”

Margarethe set her teeth. It was with some difficulty that she clung to the programme she had worked out before arriving in England. To manipulate him until his wife should be abhorrent and desertion inevitable, with the consequent scandal and disaster, was not the part she had set herself to play in his life. But when the rich soil of a woman’s nature, long covered with the volcanic ashes of old passions, which conserve and fertilize, is sprouting with the roses and the toadstools of a new passion, the rôles of operatic masterpieces are mere play to that of the disinterested friend. Margarethe had come to this renewal of their intimacy secure in the belief that her passions were either dead or safely entombed; but they had revealed themselves, insolent and powerful, when, shaken with the tumults of Isolde, she had met his eyes that first night in Covent Garden. She was appalled, but her will lost nothing of its strength, she had practised self-control for many years; and by one of those profound and obscure contradictions, ever manifesting themselves in human nature, her idealism recovered from its late inertia and entered upon a new lease. The more insistently and unequivocally love spoke, the more determined she grew that descend to that buried plane set thick with awful corpses she would not, those dead foul memories that must forever make the materializing of love mean but one more carnal experience. Once she could have idealized this bond, even had she known Ordham in her ignorant youth, a thousand times more had she met him with a mature mind and a past of even comparative ignorance; but now, the moment she gave herself, all power of idealism would be slain, and she believed that she should kill herself—perhaps him as well.

Nor was self-control an unendurable tax. She had passed that first and best period of reproductiveness, when passion drowns reason, nor had she reached that age when so many women fatally awaken to the fact that but a bit of youth remains and they had best make the most of it. Moreover, perhaps the vitalest point of all, she was a great artist with the world at her feet. Poor women, that had only their good intentions to bulwark them! She threw them a passing sympathy.

“Perhaps it is not necessary,” she said abruptly, “but I should like your promise that you will permit nothing to interfere with your career, the public exercise of your best energies. I know that you will not reply, ‘Of course!’ and that if you make me the promise you will keep it.”

“The promise is not necessary, but you shall have it if you wish. What else have I left? Were it not for that prospect of future usefulness and activity—I don’t care to think of what I should become—or be doing at the present moment.”

“Speculation would be throwing away good time, for without the abilities which are driving you into a career you would not be you. But what you must husband at present are your opportunities. In some subtle way, your wife, supported by your mother, who seems to have great political influence—I believe you told me that two of her cousins or uncles are in the present cabinet?—might rear obstacles, create postponements, until the government wiped you off its slate as a trifler who was blocking the way of more serious men.”

He sat up in a sudden fright. “I’ll go to the F. O. to-morrow and ask definitely for a post in September, giving my word that nothing less than a mortal illness shall prevent my departure the moment I get orders.”

She leaned forward eagerly, and, taking his hand, held it against her breast, which was neither cold nor calm. “You promise me that, you swear it,” she whispered.

He trembled violently, his lids dropped, and he made a sudden movement as if to take her in his arms. She stood up.

“Gypsies have strong eyes,” she said lightly.

“So much the better,” said Ordham.

“If you kiss me, this will be the last time we shall ever be alone.”

“Again, so much the better. I am going to kiss you, and I am willing to take the consequences. If you run from me, you will stumble.”

He caught her in his arms and kissed her a great many times. And she knew that she should be eternally grateful to him for these few moments of terrified happiness he forced her to admit. But she was grateful also for the gypsies.

She disengaged herself and stood back a pace. “They are coming this way,” she said. “You have not given me that other promise.”

He stood before her, whipping one hand with the gloves he held in the other. His face was so white that it would have looked dead but for the eyes, which were black and blazing. He answered steadily enough, however:

“I swear, since you will have it, that, as much to erect a monument to this love of ours, as to gratify my own ambition and compensate myself for the bleakness of my personal life, I will do what I can to make a great and useful man of myself.”