There were times when Margarethe Styr, so long a recluse, felt embarrassed and awkward in this new and unique intimacy, little as Ordham suspected it; and there were others when she felt an almost irresistible longing to practise the arts of the enchantress and unwrap the lethargy in which her singular young friend appeared to be swaddled—fold by fold. She hated the brute in man as sullenly as ever; but personal vanity—which once had driven her to a ferocious love of power—had been starved for eight years, and, refusing to give up the ghost, sometimes muttered its rights. She imagined scenes in the gallery with the windows open to the moonlight and the warm scented vocal night, when this brilliant but lymphatic young man, under the arts of the accomplished siren, not one of which she had forgotten, would suddenly find himself the passionate determined lover. But the temptation rarely lingered, and finally passed. She indulged in no dream at any time of response, and any such violent dislocation of their present relations could only result in rupture. He would never forgive her, and she should always remember him as looking very young and ridiculous. As it was, she rarely thought of his age, and it was not long before she realized that she had in her hands the clay with which to model the one perfect experience of her life. When she discovered that her mind was revelling in this new and daily companionship, she wondered it had survived that long period of loneliness to which she had condemned it. Styr was essentially a man’s woman. If her brain accepted a mate at all, it must be a man’s. Had she made intimates among her own sex, they would quickly have been reduced to satellites or enemies.

And now, for the first time, her brain had found a mate, a fact the more wonderful and beatific because it was the one glory of which she had never dreamed even in those days when she took refuge in dreams. She determined to forge a deep and mysterious bond with the ego of this man, whom, had she been fifteen years younger and unblackened by life, she fancied she might have loved and married. She had had everything else; now she would have only the highest.

At first she could hardly formulate her wants, for the spiritual desires are very elusive, especially when the brain is fed. Indeed, the line between the mental and the spiritual desires is so fine that the spirit, the soul, is, no doubt, merely the brain raised to a higher and more intense degree both of desire and expression; it has its most comprehensible illustration in the exalted pitch it sometimes reaches under the influence of music, of Nature in the major mood, the account of some stirring and heroical deed. In other words, the soul is the brain in its best moments, when most nearly free of the flesh. It may be that these moments illuminate for a second the misty horizon which obscures the walls of death.

Fortunately there were few if any homely details to dissipate the magic halo flung around this relationship. After all, Ordham had no real rights, no authority, save such as she tacitly granted him. Her cook was a personage of variety and attainments; her household ran on wheels oiled and invisible; society, with its trivial and levelling interruptions, was away; the ugly adder of money could never rear its head between them. If ever the opportunity was granted a woman to snatch a poem out of the vast prose heap of life, it was Margarethe’s, and she had never at any time been the woman to oppose a desire that assailed her in full strength. She would have been the first to make it clear that if she had “reformed,” it was because she had outgrown the lower offerings of her nature and found the higher more interesting and satisfying.

Ordham realized sharply enough later that if he did not love her at this time it was because she pressed down the eyelids of his drowsy passions, his indolent senses; but as the weeks passed he vaguely understood that he was happy, and that only her insistent spurring made him stick to his studies and prepare for a future in which at times he quite lost interest, so perfect was the present. Styr had resisted the demoniacal teasings of her vanity, but she had no intention of denying it rights both natural and harmless; and being a woman as well versed in man as Mercator in the surfaces of Earth, she knew exactly how far to go, when to dazzle and allure him with glimpses of the hidden treasures in both their natures. To have been always merely the good comrade, sexless, the artist dwelling in regions remote from the common interests of life, would have been as fatal as to have laid down all her arms with a sigh and confessed herself the eternal woman. There were times when they quarrelled violently; and, indeed, being mistress of many moods, and not sparing in the use of them, she gave him no opportunity to tire of her and long for the wide circle in which he had hitherto fed his love of variety. She even made him accept an occasional invitation to a castle, and they took many little excursions into the country, where they read and talked and fell silent under the trees of the woods, or on the shores of some lake with a chain of Alps glittering in the distance. For the purposes of a romantic friendship Bavaria is unexcelled!

But if Ordham, owing to his languid temperament and overdeveloped mind, was immature in character and torpid in those recesses of his masculinity inaccessible to any currents not sent out by the heart, he was by no means blind. Although too indolent and too content to analyze deeply, even as time went on, there were moments, generally as he sat by his window at midnight, or loitered up the Isar in the small hours, when he speculated upon the possibility of falling in love with this woman, when his mind was even briefly lit up with the suspicion that he would love her now, were she not so supremely indifferent to the unwilling fascination he had exercised over some other women. But while in other circumstances this fact alone might have piqued his vanity into storming that citadel prisoning all the mysteries of her sex, by this time he was quite determined to marry between his examinations and his first diplomatic appointment; and the mere thought of a love affair with Margarethe Styr, rousing him to his depths as it must, and absorbing every faculty, filled him with terror. She must always be in his life; no girl and her millions should interfere for a moment with this wonderful relationship he had established with the most wonderful of women; but to love her would mean hurricanes and earthquakes in his inner life, whose mere vision not only alarmed the lotus eater in him, but cast an ominous cloud of warning over his future. He might forget it at times, but more and more the uneasy sense of the necessity to provide for that future before it was too late recurred to him under the renewed if gentle manipulation of his mother.

Once he went so far as to resolve that if he detected a disposition on her part to deepen their intimacy, he should leave for England by the next train. This resolution took form one Sunday afternoon when he was returning from a visit to Princess Nachmeister, established for a few weeks in her castle, splendidly poised above lake and woods in the Alps of Tyrol. There had been a large house party, and he had felt frivolous and worldly and irresponsible, in all respects much as he had felt before he met the woman with whom he had found so many more resources than he had dreamed existed in human intercourse. Nachmeister had made a lion of him, had informed her guests, among whom were dignitaries of state, that he was the cleverest young man in Europe, and certain of wielding the baton in the diplomatic orchestra during her lifetime. He was fancying himself mightily.

Nevertheless, he went at once to the villa by the Isar, for he never broke an appointment with its châtelaine. He found Styr in a villanous temper. She had received a late summons to sing in the Hof at midnight for the King. When she unceremoniously turned him out, he was glad to go, and wondered that he could have apprehended sentiment in this sullen, angry, almost ugly woman, who, after a separation of nearly three days, had scarcely a word for him. She had communicated with him in whispers, which forced his own voice down to the same artificial register, and made him feel as absurd as, no doubt, he looked.

“Good-by,” she had whispered in the hall, where he happened to have met her (he had his own gate key); “come to-morrow. I am in the right frame of mind to sing Kundry! I shall pinch Parsifal when I get him under my mantle, and he won’t dare scream. The idea of commanding a performance of Parsifal in this weather!”

“Oh, well,” he whispered back consolingly, “you haven’t sung for a month, and your voice might get rusty.”

“Go away.”

As Ordham, half an hour later, strolled up the Maximilianstrasse, admiring the brown fairy-like palace on its terraces at the end of the perspective (which always looked to him as if it might have been dreamed by some homesick Italian poet), he was pricked by a sudden longing to go and call on a girl. He cared little for girls as a rule, and was well content to be approved by women of the world; but, after all, he was very young, and the mere youth in him moved restlessly now and again as if with an unappeased, if intermittent, hunger. At Princess Nachmeister’s castle he had flirted with three or four charming married women, and upon his return he had hastened to the side of the mortal he liked best on earth. But—well—he would have loved an hour of nonsense, a game of tennis, a gay meaningless flirtation with an innocent light-headed and extravagantly pretty girl. He wondered if the youth in him would last much longer. Had not Styr petted and spoilt him when the mood took her he should have felt quite forty. And he would have enjoyed that extraordinary friendship the more for the occasional relief of a shallow but charming girl. But girls in Munich were as scarce as praise from his Lutz. The thought of her was like a sudden bracing wind out of the northeast. At least he was making progress under her lash that would enable him to face the board of examiners before the end of the summer with few misgivings. He also had taken up French again, and he delved for two hours a day in the other lores prescribed by the guardians of the diplomatic service; so that after all the time left at his disposal for regrets and analysis was limited.

On the following day, Styr, who had never been more gracious, asked him if he would walk with her in the park next morning at four of the clock. For a moment he felt so blank that his mouth stood ajar; but not only had he grown accustomed to fall in with her plans, but he had an immediate vision of himself and the heroine of his romantic friendship alone in the vast solitudes of the Englischergarten, and assented with enthusiasm. Margarethe, when not out of temper (when he, too, could be very sulky and obstinate), never failed to carry him whither she listed; but this mere tantalizing of the natural romance of youth was to breed results of which Styr, far-sighted as she commonly was, had no presentiment.

He went to bed at nine o’clock, an event that had not occurred within his memory. On the following morning at three he fumbled into his clothes under the impression that he was a somnambulist, and wished between prodigious yawns that Frau von Tann had chosen to explore the mysteries of the Englischergarten by moonlight. But when his gloomy servant, who had been ordered to rouse him, brought him a cup of strong coffee, his wits quickened. Further encouraged by the waiting droschke, in whose appearance he had placed little faith, he repaired to the Schwabing bridge in the proper frame of mind to meet a dark-browed woman muffled in a long white cloak and with a white veil floating about her head.

She led him with shining eyes past the lake with its sleeping swans, past the sweetly smelling fields, through silences as of untrodden mountain tops. The stars were crowding one another out of the deep cold blue of the sky; from the earth rose strange subtle perfumes which made him blush for his decadent Roman love of artificial scents; the shadows were dark on the open reaches; distant trees stood out black and sharp; the woods seemed huddled together; even the Isar crawled silently in its sleep.

Suddenly Styr flung out her hands, the palms upturned to the flickering sky. She looked like a priestess about to chant her pæan to the gods. Off the stage she had never appealed so directly to that artistic and sensuous side of his nature he had assiduously cultivated, and he gazed at her, stirred by a formless but eager sense of expectation which he did not comprehend until long after. He did not even attempt to formulate the wish that she were a goddess and himself a god, and that they had floated to a plane where no sound stirred but the music of Wagner; but as she turned her head and her eyes met his, she looked so young, and at the same time so different from all women, that involuntarily he moved a step forward.

“Oh!” she cried. “Do you know that this is the very first time in my life that I have known—lived—romance? Romance! The mere word is wonderful. During all the years of my youth I did not even believe in its existence. To think that once I was sixteen—twenty—twenty-eight—the ideal age—and that I never once glanced over the wall into the lovely mysterious gardens of other women’s youth! It is incredible that I never at least dreamed of—anticipated it.”

“But if it has come—what matter?”

“No, it does not matter. But oh, poor poets! poor psychologists! That I can drink this full cup of romance without finding the commonplace dregs of love at the bottom! All the other senses and appreciations are intensified, instead of being submerged, as when one is surrendering ignominiously to the race. I feel that I have attained heights that other women, silly victims that most of them are, have not even the power to imagine. My hands are in the secret caskets of life, and all the jewels are mine! mine!”

She looked so triumphant, so wholly beautiful, so like Isolde, that the colour mounted to his face, although she frightened him a little, and he wished he were ten years older. But she never gave him time to feel that he was not rising to the occasion (although this agonizing sensation visited him occasionally in the retrospect), any more than she ever permitted an electrified moment to prolong itself until it had kindled fire. She came down to earth abruptly.

“Let us walk faster. I want to walk in the woods, and if we loiter we shall take cold.”

But as they entered those dim glades which might have been the depths of remote forests, he asked abruptly, “Am I your lover?”

“Yes—in a new fashion!” She spoke gayly. “It is a sort of mental marriage. Are you content?” She looked at him with the humorous flash in her eyes which always lit up the breach between their ages.

“I think it is rather odd that I am, you know. I must be as cold as a fish—or else that woman I told you about so put me off—”

“Well, don’t put your good fortune under a microscope. Be grateful that when you do awaken you will have preserved the freshness of youth to give zest and charm to the energy of maturity.”

“Suppose I never do awaken.”

“You will. For long I wondered why you had so many of the qualifications as well as something of the temperament of genius, without any one of the creative gifts. But I have come to the conclusion that you have a very rare gift—that of the supreme lover.”

“I?”

“It will wake up in due course, that genius of yours—oh, yes.”

“And why not for you?” He was still conscious of no desire to touch her, but what man could resist flirtation in such surroundings?

“Because neither of us wishes it. We have a perfect thing. Why shatter it? When you cross that dark threshold, you never know! If I were fifteen years younger and of your own world—”

“You would not be you. I don’t know—I have a feeling—a presentiment—that one day I shall love you. I sometimes have a vision of myself ten years older living with you in Venice.” He spoke with sudden energy. “I am certain it will come to pass.”

“Venice smells so dreadfully. I had no idea you were given to romantic musings.”

“I am not. It is, as I said, a sort of fleeting vision, a presentiment. I know that you will always be in my life; and naturally I see you where one can command the greatest seclusion. I do not picture myself wholly your lover, but I always see you quite alone with me—when I am older, and, somehow, different.”

“Well, remember that I too shall be older,” she replied with mock sadness. “By that time, no doubt, Wagner will have ground my voice to powder, and I shall be playing Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra, or introducing Ibsen to London and New York.”

She had succeeded in diverting him. “Ah! you would go to America—you intend to go there some day?”

“Long before my voice has gone, I hope. If I could create a furore in London I should not hesitate to go to New York at once. And—after all—it is my own city; as much mine as if I had been born there, for I went so young. The hatred I felt for it when I left has fled—with the memory of other things; I dream of it now sometimes, and love every stone of it. One can never continue to hate one’s own city, which must always stand out in the memory as one’s best friend. Besides, when you look down upon the world—Society—from one of its own pedestals, nothing matters; no one can hurt you.”

“Would any one try to hurt you?” he asked anxiously. “Do you fear any one now?”

“Not here. But if I went to the land of the free to interpret an unpopular master unprotected by personal fame,—which, in American eyes, only London can give, and only New York set the final seal upon,—I should be hounded into the Hudson River.”

An intonation started him upon a fresh tack. “Did you ever think of self-destruction?”

“More than once. No doubt you have yourself. But because you are young and temperamental. I contemplated putting an end to myself for no such poetic reasons. There were more reasons than one, and generally it was the intense vitality of my mind that deterred me, perhaps an insolent sense of power that would not permit me to lose in the game with life. Now and again, I loved too much—what I then called love; but the reflection that no man was worth the sacrifice restored my cynicism, and cynicism is fatal to that intensity of egoism which counsels annihilation. Strange to think that I once was hard and cynical!”

“At least you might tell me something of your love attacks.” He continued artfully, “I shall never feel really in your confidence until you do.”

“Love affairs of that sort are too commonplace to remember. At first I loved once or twice out of mere youth and racial instinct. But I soon got over that. The great affair? Well, he was the conventional hero, fashioned by satirical Nature for the crudity of youth. He was handsome—but handsome!—brilliant, charming, above all, inconstant—the sort of man that keeps a woman questioning, ‘Will he come?’ Such a man would only incite me to amusement to-day; no type is so ingenuous. But then—well, I tried to kill him one day. He was too quick and too strong for me. I was spared the vulgarity of a newspaper scandal; even a whisper of the attempt never passed my threshold; I took good care that it should not. The mere vision of half a column of headlines with my name in letters as black as Pluto did as much later on to extinguish my love as my separation from the man—I never saw him after. But I had been possessed with the lust to kill, to annihilate, to whirl him and myself out of life. And it was long before that rage, which included everybody and everything on earth, subsided. But at last I came to my senses. And—who knows?—all my life seems to have been but a schooling for my art.”

“Then you regret nothing?”

“I waste no time in futilities, and there is nothing of the Magdalene in my composition.”

“What would you have done if you had not discovered your voice?”

“No doubt I should have discovered in time that I was an actress. Had it not been for that smouldering mental fire in me which always seemed to whisper, ‘Wait! wait!’ I should have become the most famous courtesan of modern times. I had it in me! There were intervals when Cora Pearl inspired me with envy. It was mere instinct—rather the watch-fires of genius—that led me to shun the public eye, even when on the stage.”

“You would have been a horrible woman if you had chosen to go that pace!” he exclaimed, with a sudden access of vision. “You had it in you to become all bad.”

“All.”

“Was art your only hope? Suppose you had loved the right sort of man?”

“Such women don’t love the right sort of man. They are born off the key, and they do not meet the men to inspire them with ideals. Nor women either. Besides, after that I never wished to love again. The only good thing about love is the getting over it. Good God!” She flung out her hands again. “The delight of that recovery, the sense of freedom, the intoxicating liberty! Love to women of my nature is a hideous slavery, the sooner we become flint the better. Leave love for the conservators of the race. But enough of such black subjects this beautiful morning. The sun climbed the Alps while we were in the woods, and the stars have gone out. Let us return. I have a make-up for you! After breakfast I shall take a photograph—but it will flatter you!”

Some time before she had taught him how to use her camera, and he had taken a series of photographs of her in the costumes and attitudes of her various rôles. Thus it happens that to-day Bridgminster is the only person living who can recall Styr without the aid of memory, for even in London, when she realized the half of her supreme ambition, she would not be photographed for the public. And as Ordham, in spite of his laziness, could do most things well that he gave his mind to, these photographs, some twenty in number, are not only admirable specimens of the amateur’s art, but such approximate presentments of Styr that it is to be hoped they will yet find their way into a public gallery.

She let him sleep for two hours after breakfast, then sending for him to come to her in the garden, dressed him in a flowing wig, a velvet jacket, a low soft collar, and wandering scarf. Then she stood off.

“Pout out your lips. Make your eyes heavy with sullen dreams. There! You are Rossetti at nineteen. You look as if about to die of a rose in aromatic pain. How have you escaped the æsthetic craze, at the very least?”

“I don’t think that I have. Only whereas they think they can do things, I know that I cannot, and do not propose to make myself ridiculous to no end. Please hurry. This wig is very warm.”

He sent the photograph later to his mother, and it left her breathless for quite a moment. As much as she could fall in love with any man, she had fallen in love with Rossetti. At least he had haunted her girlish dreams, and perhaps those of her early married life until the world absorbed her. Of course she had never seen him in his beautiful youth; and to him—then deeply in love with Elizabeth Siddal—she had been nothing more than an interesting sitter whom her august papa had not too graciously allowed him to paint. But stranger things than that have happened in Nature’s workshop.

The King suffered from toothache. Detesting dentists, and knowing from bitter experience that it would endure until the nerve died, he indifferently granted Styr’s request for a month’s leave of absence. Chaperoned by Fräulein Lutz, she and Ordham went on what they called a walking tour in the Bavarian Alps. Travelling third class, both for the picturesque companionship it afforded and to escape awkward rencounters, they took the train from village to village, and spent several hours of each day leisurely climbing, driving, wandering in the woods, or floating on the brilliant waters, as deeply toned as emerald or sapphire, of Alpine lakes. Avoiding hotels, they lodged on the outskirts of their villages, and Lutz went to market every morning. They took no servants with them, and nothing could exceed Ordham’s devotion in carrying wraps and ordering carriages. But this, they were not long discovering, was the limit of his usefulness. Either Styr or the chaperon bought the tickets, found the porters, engaged the rooms, bargained with guides, ordered the meals, made out the routes, and asked all necessary questions. On the morning after their arrival in Oberammergau, Fräulein Lutz almost burst into Styr’s bedroom.

“Mein Gott!” she exclaimed. “But I have just prepared his bath! But I, Hiobe Lutz! This is the climax. I met him wandering in the hall with his eyes half opened and seeming to look for something he could not find. He wore a pink dressing-gown with green facings, and his bare feet were not even in slippers. I asked him if he were ill. He said, No, that he had no bath. It never occurred to him to walk downstairs and ask for his tub, nor even to call out of the window. But he looked so helpless, so young, that I—Himmel!—I ran downstairs and found for that giant baby his tub, which had been put in the shed. Then, accompanied by the daughter of the house, I carried it up to his room—then returned again with jugs of water, hot and cold! He thanked us ‘so much.’ Oh, he has the prettiest manners. They never fail. But myself, I shall have to cross the English Channel and pass those examinations for him.”

“You know you are devoted to him.”

“What is it?” asked Lutz with sudden suspicion. “Can it be this hypnotism they talk about?”

“Charm comes from the same root, I fancy. And then he really is helpless. How can people, even the rich and great, bring up a boy like that?”

Lutz nodded in sage disgust. “The aristocracy! Ach Gott! What will become of them when the next French Revolution, so to speak, comes? How they must have suffered, those poor pampered things! It was not the fear of death. That was nothing. Race can always meet downfall and death with an air—an air that sustains them within as without. But before the scaffold! When they had to dress, to wait on themselves!—to think! Ah, that was the tragedy. I feel sorry for these poor helpless aristocrats; but no, I would not abolish the institution, because it gives to us humble bourgeois the savour that Europe furnishes for America! So, when I saw that poor helpless boy—who can talk like his grandfather—ach! I cannot understand him. He is made up of too many parts, contradictions, for my old brain. On the whole, I should like to spank him.”

Styr laughed and put the finishing touches to her costume of brown linen, which looked simple and bucolic, but had been cut in Paris, and, with a hat and veil as soft and rich in their shading as a pheasant’s wing, was no less artistic and becoming than the white frocks she put on for supper. A few moments later Ordham entered their common sitting room, fresh, smiling, unconscious of the comment he had inspired. He had quite forgotten the episode of the bath.

He shook hands with Countess Tann and Fräulein Lutz in his usual formal manner, his eyes beaming with pleasure as they always did upon entering the presence of his chosen friend, unless something had happened to put him out of temper. As he was so much more amiable and happy even than usual this morning, Styr suddenly understood how he must have missed his servant, although he had never referred to the man. He was feeling pleasantly cared for once more, even if he had ungratefully forgotten the author of his well-being. No doubt the warm water for his bath had often failed to appear, and he had none of the national mania for “cold tubs.” From this time forth, until he was safely deposited in the Legation once more, Lutz grimly made a nurse of herself. She not only saw to his bath, but she packed and unpacked his trunk, and discovering that many objects were mateless, divorced, of course, in the laundry, she wrote to Hines for a new supply. He accepted all these attentions with the most charming courtesy, but his lack of emphasis amused Styr, although poor Lutz took his polite acquiescence in her devotions as a matter of course.

Upon this morning he went at once out upon the little balcony where they were to breakfast, and murmured his delight, calling Styr to join him with an imperious motion of his head. They had arrived after dark and seen little of the long straggling village on the bank of its narrow stream. Their lodging was at the very end of the street, where the road branches to Ettal, and from the balcony they could see the romantic winding village in the narrow valley, above which towered a peak surmounted by a cross. There were mills with great wheels on the river, dilapidated bridges, peasants in costume, the usual church with its domed steeple high on its terrace, and surrounded by tombs. Even the roofs of the houses were picturesque, the women working in the narrow fields. On all sides, covering the mountains, was the forest, and over all a peace indescribable.

As they had brought their own coffee, and fruit was abundant, they enjoyed their breakfast even if the bread was sour and the butter ill-made; luxuries they had dismissed from their minds. When it was over, leaving Lutz to consult with their hostess, Margarethe and Ordham strolled through the village. Oberammergau resembled many other Bavarian and Tyrolean villages up to a certain point, and then its individuality began. On the plastered façades of the pointed houses were beautiful religious frescoes as soft and mellow as those of Ghirlandajo, and in the church, larger and more graceful than many, were two hideous bedizened skeletons of saints. Protected by glass, and gorgeously arrayed, their awful skulls and hands, chemically preserved, seemed to cry out for the last act of death, which would grant them the dust and oblivion of the grave. The church was half full of men and women, dropped in for a casual prayer, and all dressed in the picturesque garb of Ober-Bayern, so rare these few years later.

Even the people of this village of the Passion Play are different from those of other villages. Bavarian peasants are kindly, but these of Oberammergau have an exquisite and unfailing courtesy, and every child greets the stranger with “Grüss Gott,” and runs to kiss his hand. Although it would be several years before the next performance of the Passion Play, many of the men wore their hair long, for a religious drama of some sort is given every year. The very expression of these people indicated a superiority of intelligence and character. All hoped to be chosen, or rechosen, for the next great performance; and few in that village, where the light was as searching as ever was turned upon a throne, but cultivated the best that was in him. It is probably the only spot on Earth where Christianity is a working success.

Ordham and Margarethe lingered at the windows of the shops, admiring the wood carving, and bought a number of crucifixes and religious groups for the servants at home. Finally, they sat down at a table outside one of the cafés, where the Christus of the last performance, who looked as much like Christ as any mortal can, was drinking beer and eating a large piece of black bread and Swiss cheese. Our friends listened for a few moments to his animated discussion with a neighbour upon the utility of damming the river, that it might do more good in summer and less harm in winter. When he had finished his repast he rose, bowed profoundly to the strangers, and sauntered off, followed by a troop of children that all hoped to be Christuses in their turn.

“I should think it must be a terrible strain,” said Ordham. “Surely human nature must break out occasionally.”

“No doubt it does. But these people are saturated with the spirit of the Passion Play, and so have their ancestors been before them—for three hundred years. They are not only moral but happy. The first time I came here, one young woman, whose histrionic talent was remarkable, told me that she had refused two offers from Berlin managers because life would be a blank to her if she could not look out of her window every morning and see the cross on Kochel. This is the only community in the world which is consistent generation in and out to a high ideal.”

“I wonder if it is a haven of rest to outsiders,” said Ordham, who was staring at her after his habit, his cigarette cold. “Could you come here if your voice failed you; if, for any reason, you could not act—come here and find peace?”

Margarethe shook her head. “For a week—a fortnight. Then I should fly to the very centres of distraction. This peace is not for the outsider. It is not sold in the shops with the crucifixes. It takes generations to make. Even if one brought here a peaceful, even a religious, mind, one would never feel quite the real thing. And yet I do not believe there is a self-righteous person in Oberammergau. Alas! Our tête-à-tête is over. Here comes your grenadier.”

Ordham hastily lit a cigarette as his Lutz strode up, exclaiming: “Did you think to escape your lesson? We shall have it here. It shall be conversation and dictation.”

“The morning is so beautiful—you are going away?” Margarethe was opening her parasol.

“But yes,” said Lutz severely. “Is her place here, to distract your sufficiently frivolous mind? Ask me a question.”

“Do you prefer chocolate or coffee?” he asked ingratiatingly.

“Chocolate, with thanks. But we are no longer in the Ollendorff stage or you would not be returning next month to England to face your destiny. I have thought of ten terrible questions, than which they can construct nothing more difficult, more ridiculous. I have brought pencil and paper. Write, while I drink the excellent chocolate.”

And Ordham groaned and resigned himself.

If Lutz was inexorable in her own province she was an irreproachable chaperon. They saw little of her save at meals, and wandered in the woods, or, here in Oberammergau, sat for hours beside the cross, high on Kochel, indulging in those long silences where ego’s wing-tips graze one another now and again. Often Ordham went frankly to sleep, and Styr forgot him, and dreamed of conquests in London and New York, such as Patti herself had never wrung from those blasé publics.

They went on to Berchtesgaden, that strange tumbled mass of peaks and ledges and rocky walls, with its bit of valley, its castle, its village dotted all over the scenery it cannot escape. They climbed to the glacier, explored the salt mine, and spent hours on the great green lake, Königsee; which looks as if a mountain had been sliced through its middle, the high walls thrust apart, and waters, from some dark and sinister depths of Earth, depths where she prepared her demoniacal schemes to blast surfaces dear to man, had risen and covered the floor of the gorge. It is a wild primeval landscape, suggestive of centuries of convulsions, perhaps that the end is not yet. But if the mountains were terrible, the lake gloomy, the monastery in the tiny valley was peaceful, and when they climbed into the recesses of these volcanic masses, they found the peasants, in the little dairy huts, very hospitable and friendly. But once, when they went out by moonlight, quite alone on the lake, the great dark expanse between its bare and menacing walls filled them with terror, and they took hands and ran home like children.

All things end, and the day after their return to Munich he appeared at the villa with a very long face.

“I leave to-night for England,” he groaned, flinging himself on the divan. “This morning I received a notice that the examinations will begin next Monday. I did not read the reason. The fact was enough.”

“Desolation!” Styr sat down abruptly, but she kept all sentiment out of her voice. “What in heaven’s name am I to do without you?”

“I wish I could think that you felt half as badly as I do. But while I go to untold horrors, you go on a tour to win new laurels.”

“Yes, in hot German cities and hotter concert rooms. And my Gastspiel does not begin until the 25th of August; but I find invitations from Switzerland—Zurich, Geneva, Lucerne. I shall accept them if the King consents. Yes,—I have work—but still! Well, you would have gone soon in any case.”

“I shall return the moment this beastly business is over and I have seen Bridg.”

“But as soon as you pass you are in the service—you must work in the Foreign Office for six months, and then you will be appointed, no doubt far from Munich.”

“I shall get a three months’ leave. Influence may not be able to get a man into the service, but it will do much later. I shall go when and where I wish. I am determined to spend the autumn in Munich. There will be that much more, at least. How in heaven’s name shall I ever get on without you?”

“Do not protest too much.” Styr had no belief that he would fly back to her, and once more was thankful that she had remade herself. She should miss him, but it would have been the last straw did she still retain the capacity to miss any man too much. She added dutifully: “Besides, I want you to marry.”

He kicked about among the cushions. “That, at least, you need not remind me of. But if I do, I shall come here on my honeymoon.”

“You might leave her behind.”

“I wish to heaven I could. Why not perfect these commercial marriages? If I give the girl the position of a married woman, which they all appear to be dying for, the prospect of a title, and the advantages of my mother’s protection in London, she might at least give me my complete liberty.”

“And her money.”

“Of course.”

“And you would come back to Munich and lie on my divan! You are fast nibbling through the icing of what Excellenz calls the big black cake of life, my friend, and must now look forward to an attack or two of indigestion. I have a presentiment that you will not come back to Munich until it has made you quite ill. Then, indeed, you will want consolation. I wonder how different you will be?”

He turned upon her large anxious eyes. “Do you really believe I shall have to go through the mill like other men? I should go to pieces! The only thing I can think of that I shouldn’t funk if it came to the point would be war. I shouldn’t hate that, although, no doubt, it would be dirty and uncomfortable. But the trials of life, petty and big! I hate the very thought of them, but I shall have them, of course—a few, anyhow. But I shall always come to you for consolation—always! Promise that no one shall take my place in the very slightest degree, that you will never have another intimate friend.”

“That is easy to promise. Do not permit your mind to boil with jealousy.”

“It will.” He looked as placid as a lake. “But no matter what comes, I can always conjure up this room—this room! Oh, I cannot leave it! I hate the Civil Service Commission! I hate the diplomatic service! I hate my creditors! I hate matrimony! And I hate my brother most of all.”

“You will feel much better after dinner. Come, it is ready.”

He remained with her until his servant came to fetch him for the night train. As he took her hand at parting his boyishness vanished, and his manner was a mixture of formality and sincere regret. “Good-by,” he said. “I wish this summer might have lasted forever. You have made it the most wonderful experience I shall ever have, and you will always be the most wonderful woman in the world to me.”

They were standing in the hall, before the open door. He suddenly smiled into her eyes with an expression that was not unlike a kiss. Then he shook hands with her once more and went out to his cab.

For the first few days she did not miss him at all; once more there was novelty in loneliness and freedom. When she did begin to miss him, she found a certain exhilaration in a sensation that was also a novelty. Then the King, still nursing his tooth, and always kindly, gave her another leave of absence, and she went to Switzerland.

Nothing, save, possibly, a voluntary check from his brother, could have surprised Ordham more than the information that he had passed his examinations. With the optimism, not inherent, but veneered upon his mind by a too fortunate life, he had, up to the moment of his arrival, taken his success in this ordeal for granted; perhaps it is fairer to state that he saw himself always, when prefiguring his future, as an ambassador in Paris or St. Petersburg; but no sooner did he find himself at the entrance to those forbidding straits which he must traverse to find the sole agency for his talents, than he descended into the depths of black despair. He would not pass. How could he? His French was good, for he had talked it in the nursery, and it had been actively exercised in Paris. But he had barely brushed up his Latin. He should forget every date—of course! And how could any man remember a mass of stuff it had taken Mill and Smith a lifetime to grind out? And German! They laid as much stress upon it as if England meditated immediate occupation of middle and southeastern Europe. They would treat him like a witness at a murder trial. How he hated that hideous language—and how could he have been so fatuous as to imagine that he could accumulate the necessary amount in less than a year?—the greater part of which he had wasted. For once in his life he knew remorse, repentance, wished that he had a will of iron, and had exercised it during that delightful sojourn in Munich. It shamed him to reflect that what little he did know he owed to the interest of one woman and the determined pounding of another.

He appeared before the board of examiners, pale, dejected, resigned, with no crest whatever, and impressed that formidable body as being at least a modest youth, high-bred and dignified, who would not be rejected for personal reasons did he survive the mental ordeal—a finale which sometimes surprised the cock-sure aspirant for diplomatic honours.

And he had passed! Not brilliantly, but he was launched upon the diplomatic sea, and he had no apprehension, with his immense family influence and the talents he was beginning to appreciate, of foundering. For a few moments he felt an inclination to be wildly jubilant. But this he sternly repressed, shrugged his shoulders, and reminded himself that such a commonplace achievement was to be expected of any man who had brains instead of porridge in his skull. To this succeeded an hour of irritation and disgust that he had not distinguished himself, put his rival competitors to the blush, made them wish he had forborne to enter the lists. But he was generous and philosophical, and this mood also passed. He wrote a note to Lord Bridgminster, and sent telegrams to Countess Tann, Princess Nachmeister, Fräulein Lutz, and his mother. Then he felt that he might dismiss the tiresome matter from his mind, as well as the harrowing ordeal that awaited him in the north, and settle down to the enjoyment of such plays as the month of August afforded.

He found the English drama and its interpretations tame and trite after those highly seasoned performances of the Continent with what were practically whole star casts, but they were better than visiting political country houses with his mother; and he slept late, strolled up and down Piccadilly, and wrote daily notes to Margarethe Styr, whom he missed quite as much as he had anticipated. It would have been interesting to abuse the play with her and drive out into the cool green English country every afternoon. He consoled himself by reading several new books he had not heard of while abroad, and sending them to her with colloquial ramblings on the fly-leaves. It was very cool and pleasant in his mother’s little house in Chesterfield Street, where hitherto he had passed but a night or two during hasty visits from Paris. He had been little in England since Lady Bridgminster, shorn of her power, had departed out of Bridgminster House in St. James’s Square, and made a nest for herself on the income of a dowager supplemented by a small annual allowance from her tight-fisted papa, and occasional checks from the duchess; the latter assisting her to enjoy life after a fashion and contract new debts.

Ordham had always been vaguely sorry for his mother, and his examination of the little house, this first time he was alone in it, deepened and somewhat clarified his sympathy. It seemed to him that she had just missed everything. She had almost been a great beauty, but although the general effect she managed to achieve, still made people, particularly in a ballroom, turn and stare at her, a closer inspection found the face, in spite of its large blue eyes, almost insignificant. If not born with a consuming desire for individual recognition, she had planted the ambition early in life, and consistently cultivated it. But although a feature in London society, she was not a personality, and there is a vast difference. Even her position in the political world, towering as it had been, she owed to her husband, brilliant, fascinating, and one of the chiefs of his party, as well as to the superb entertainments his income permitted her to give in St. James’s Square and Yorkshire. She had facility of speech, of pen, in all les graces; but she was devoid of originality, and almost stopped short of being clever. Distinguished in manner, she was deficient in charm and made no slaves. With a sincere love of beauty, she lacked the eye which corresponds to ear in music, and there was always a want of harmony in the detail of both her dress and her rooms. Worldly by birth and training, she was bohemian (of a sort) by instinct, and even when in Bridgminster House had mixed her parties in a fashion which society, less anxious to be amused at any cost than it became a few years later, condemned; and although nothing but indiscretions of which she was incapable could deprive her of the great position to which she had been born, and had held no less through her long period as a political hostess than her immense and powerful connection, she was now merely the faddish daughter of one peer and widow of another, instead of the personal force she still so ardently desired to be.

Even the pretty little house (for which, of course, she paid an exorbitant rent) lacked the individuality to which its rich collection of blue china and hawthorn jars, Chippendale and old oak furniture, fine brasses, antique vases, and Venetian mirrors, bits of Italian tapestry and stained glass, entitled it. The drawing-room, unexpectedly large, like so many of the drawing-rooms in those little houses in Mayfair, should have been a memorial sonnet to Rossetti, and it looked like the embodiment of his first incoherent dreams when groping for the formulæ of the new art-religion. At the end of this room was the famous portrait which Rossetti had painted at his own request. He had seen the young girl at the opera and thought her the living embodiment of Beatrice. One of his few patrons had been able to persuade the duke that the fashionably obscure artist was a genius, but more because he would disdain payment than because of any enthusiasm inspired by pictures which the duke thought as stiff and outlandish as those ridiculous formal gardens about Ordham Castle. He was a Briton to his marrow, was his Grace, and he carried his detestation of all things foreign to such an extent that he had never paid a second visit to the Continent nor to any of those country houses which kept green the memories of Palladio and Inigo Jones. But his daughter, who had also gone to the patron’s house to see “the Rossettis,” had conceived an immediate passion for the new school, and sweetly gave her father no peace until he consented to let the artist paint her. The duke yielded with the utmost ungraciousness, and stipulated that the man—what was his name?—was to charge nothing for the honour, and was to present the portrait to Lady Patricia at once—there should be no public exhibition. As Rossetti never exhibited, and asked for nothing but the joy of painting this Renaissance lady who might have served as the original inspiration of the Brotherhood, he agreed to anything and eagerly awaited the day appointed for the first sitting.

She had not entered his studio and removed her bonnet before he saw the mistake he had made. Here was no Beata Beatrix, no mediæval saint, no about-to-be-murdered spouse of a sixteenth-century Italian, haunting immense and gloomy chambers, but an excessively thin narrow young English girl almost six feet in height, with a little white face of no particular character, immense blue eyes without a particle of expression, and an extraordinary mass of pale golden hair, which stood out from her head like wings. But Rossetti was an artist. If his spirits went down to zero, it was not long before they ascended with a rush. At least here was material to work on; that hair, that poise of head, that aristocratic languor were no delusion, and he could conjure up his first impression of her and the dreams of beauty which had haunted him ever since. In short, he idealized her, and the long picture (which had been exhibited to all London society for twenty-five years) was one of the most characteristic things he had ever done, and, perhaps, had contributed as much as any cause to Lady Bridgminster’s fatal desire to express so much more than she could conceive. Against a background of dull blue tapestry, with full throat strained, the jaw line from chin to ear salient, with lids slowly drooping, hair that seemed to be an aura emanating from the pure young fires of her spirit, stood this vision in diaphanous white clasping against her angelic flatness an upright sheaf of Annunciation lilies. The thinness was the willow grace of a reed, the pale complexion the white symbol of maidenly exaltation; the half-opened eyes, as blue as an Italian lake, were looking straight into paradise. When this wonderful picture was finished and had been admired by the artists that worshipped at his shrine, Rossetti, with his tongue in his cheek, covered the hands and arms with tan-coloured suède gloves. In that touch, done perhaps, in a moment of unconscious foresight, as of deliberate sarcasm, Rossetti had epitomized the life of Lady Bridgminster.

He had intended to make many sketches of her during these sittings, but she inspired him no further, as much to her disappointment as to his. Nevertheless, he liked her well enough, and went to her house after she married Bridgminster as long as he went anywhere. He had no reason to regret the acquaintance, for she bought several of his pictures, patronized the entire Brotherhood, was one of the first to acknowledge the genius of Burne-Jones, and commissioned the greatest decorator of modern times to refurnish the state drawing-rooms of Ordham in the style of the Italian Renaissance.

Lady Bridgminster was superstitious about this picture, and, when moving from palace to hovel, to use her own expression, took it with her, refusing the offer of the new millionnaire to whom her step-son had unaccountably leased the splendid theatre of her triumphs. Not only did it remind her, that in spite of six sons and what she regarded as a lifetime of disappointments, she had once been young and romantic like other women, but she had a fancy that it was her real self, and that did she let it go out of her keeping she should become but a grey shadow flitting amongst people who never could be quite sure whether she were there or not. This was her one imaginative flight, and she cherished it.

“Lady Pat” was little broader and even less covered with flesh than when the picture was painted a quarter of a century ago. How she had ever contrived to produce six strapping boys was one of those mysteries which Nature will explain one day, no doubt, with other paradoxes. But they had cost her few pains, and nurses and tutors had brought, were bringing, them up. At Ordham Castle, where they had lived the year round, until the older boys went to school and the father’s death consigned the younger to the dower house in Kent, she had complained of their noise, but as a matter of fact she had not a nerve in her body. She was as hard and supple as a Toledo blade, with all the brain she really needed, and an internal organization practically flawless. With an appearance of the most æsthetic delicacy, she had never had so much as an attack of indigestion, never succumbed to the blues, when that malady was raging, and had no more emotional capacity than an incubator. Oscar Wilde once said of Lady Bridgminster that she would tempt St. Anthony to keep his vows; and true it was that, although only thirty-nine at the time of her husband’s death, still reigning as a beauty, and a great lady of whom any husband might be proud, not even an ambitious merchant had sought her hand. But by this time she knew her limitations far better than people fancied, and had neither the hope nor the wish to marry again. But she was a restless dissatisfied creature, bitterly regretting Bridgminster House and Ordham, and always flitting about in search of novelty and distraction. Her son, lying on the sofa in the drawing-room during the warm hours of the afternoon, contrasted her with Margarethe Styr, and pitied her, not the woman whose past was so black that even his imagination dared not lift the curtain.