CHAPTER IV

"COME UNTO THESE YELLOW SANDS"

"A thousand times welcome, my dear Savage!" Anastasia Beauchamp cried, taking Adrian's hand in both hers and looking up at him affectionately from beneath a broad-brimmed brown hat crowned by a positive vineyard of purple and white glass grapes and autumn foliage, the whole inwrapped cloudily in a streaming blue gauze veil. "You have played the good Samaritan quite long enough in my opinion, and it's high time you bestowed some attention upon the rest of us, though we are neither insane nor conspicuously immoral. And here we all are, that's to say, all of us who matter, in this really quite tidy, comfortable hotel, plus the amiable family Bernard, my devoted, despised little Byewater and his compatriot Lenty B. Stacpole—note the inevitable transatlantic initial, I beseech you! Clever, excellent fellows both of them, though a trifle slight temperamentally. And here, to complete our circle, you arrive as the God in the Car."

Anastasia's smile bore effective testimony to her appreciation of Adrian's handsome looks and gallant bearing.

"Yes, very much the God in the Car, my dear boy," she repeated. "You are the picture of health. Playing the good Samaritan, it must be conceded, hasn't damaged you.—And I honestly believe, though I won't swear to it for fear of committing an indiscretion, that every one, every one, mind you—save possibly our excellent Americans, to whom your near neighborhood may reveal their own temperamental deficiencies—will be as genuinely happy to see you as I am myself."

"Kindest and most sympathetic of friends," Adrian returned, touched both by her words and warmth of manner, "how inexpressibly good you are to me!"

"I only pay an old debt. Your mother was good to me once—well—" She caught at an end of her streaming veil and brought it to anchor under her chin. "Well—when I stood in need of a wise and sweet counselor very badly. And I never forget. Gratitude can be—mind, I don't say it always is, but it can be—a very delightful sentiment to entertain.—But now you are expiring for a detailed account of a certain dear lady. At this moment she is down on the beach with the rest of our company. They will be back shortly for tea. So come here with me on to the piazza, while we wait for them, and I'll give you all the news I can."

Adrian, the brave song of the engines still in his ears, his eyes still dazzled by the seventy-mile rush along the white roads of the rich and pleasant Norman country, followed Miss Beauchamp and her somewhat Bacchanalian headgear from the large, light-colored hotel saloon into the arcade, found her a comfortable seat, and stationed himself beside her.

From thence he commanded a comprehensive view of the opposite side of the shallow valley, dotted with modest green-shuttered villas and rustic chalets set in ledges of roughly terraced garden. Of the rutted road, bordered by elms and sycamores, leading down from the fertile uplands through the straggling gray village of Ste. Marie to the shore. Of the high chalk cliffs forming the headland, which closed the view westward, and the quarter-mile-wide sweep of grass running up the back of it, stunted, bronzed oak and thorn thickets filling in the rounded hollows. Of the curving beach, its rows of gaily painted wooden bathing-cabins, and chairs arranged in friendly groups along the fore-shore occupied by women in airy summer costumes,—their docile men-kind, assisted in some cases by white-capped nurses, dealing meanwhile with a slightly turbulent infant population upon the near shingle and the dark mussel and seaweed covered reef of rocks just below.

Upon that same friendly grouping of chairs Adrian's glance directed itself eagerly, seeking a feminine presence acutely interesting to him, but without result. Open parasols and hats of brobdingnagian proportions rendered their charming owners practically invisible. Wistfully he relinquished the search. Then, looking at the scene as a whole, his poetic sense was fired by the spaciousness and freedom of the expanse of gleaming sands for which Ste. Marie is celebrated. Furrowed in places and edged by rare traceries of blue shadow, traversed by sparkling blue-green waterways, interspersed with broad, smooth lagoons—where the rather overdefined forms of pink-armed, pink-legged bathers, clad in abbreviated garments, swam, splashed, and floated—the sands ranged out under a translucent clearness of early afternoon sunshine to the first glinting ripples of the gently inflowing tide. Farther still, along the horizon, the solid blue of the intervening belt of deep sea melted, by imperceptible gradations, into low-lying tracts of furrowed, semi-transparent opaline cloud.

Those gold and silver shimmering levels, washed by and rimmed with heavenly blue, commanded Adrian's imagination. He found the strong air sweet to breathe, the keen scent of the brine pleasant to his nostrils. Disease, age, death, and kindred ugly concomitants of human experience lost their vraisemblance and meaning. Only glad and gracious things were credible. These in multitude innumerable; and along with them, making audible the note of pathos without which even perfect beauty still lacks perfection, the haunting solicitation of the Beyond and of the Unattained, forever beckoning the feet of man onward with the promise of stranger and more noble joys hidden from him as yet within the womb of the coming years.

Whereupon Anastasia Beauchamp, divining in some sort the trend of her companion's meditations, proceeded to pat him genially upon the arm.

"My dear young god, 'come down off that roof right away,' as little Byewater would put it, and listen to my recital of sordid domestic woes recently suffered by our belle Gabrielle."

Adrian became practical, his nose at once pugnacious and furiously busy, on the instant.

"Great heavens!" he exclaimed, "who has dared to offer her annoyance?"

"Mice, my dear Savage, beetles, and, to be quite plain with you, drains. Yes, you may well make a grimace. That mild-looking little chalet yonder across the valley—the one with the parterre of marigolds—which she had rented without preliminary inspection, proved a veritable pest-house. When I arrived in July—mainly with a view to safeguarding your interests, since frankly I hold most seaside places in abhorrence—"

"How can I ever be sufficiently grateful to you!" the young man murmured fervently.

"I have no child—and—perhaps, at my age, even the ghost, even the fiction, of motherhood is better than nothing.—But this is a digression—sentimental or scientific, which? To return. I found Madame Vernois nervous and debilitated, little Bette with a temperature and sore throat, the indispensable maid Henriette drowned in tears and sulks, and our poor, beautiful Gabrielle in a most admired distraction."

Harrowed by which description, her hearer gave way to smothered imprecations.

"Exactly. At the time I too made little remarks. Then I sniffed once—twice. Twice was quite sufficient. Better sacrifice a month's rent than be poisoned. Without ceremony I bundled them over here, bag and baggage, since when, dear creatures, they flourish. The Bernards, who had taken the villa next door to the pest-house, also had cause for dissatisfaction. They joined us. This addition to our party I could have dispensed with. I entertain the highest respect for M. Bernard's acquirements, only I could wish he had learned early in life that imparting information and making conversation are by no means synonymous. Never am I alone with him for over five minutes but he positively lapidates me with the remains of the architectural past. Conversation should be interchange of opinions, ideas, experiences, not a bombardment with facts which one is perfectly competent to read up for oneself if one's a mind to. Should you ever be tempted to start a hobby—we none of us know what we may come to!—avoid archæology, my dear Savage, I implore you, out of retrospective tenderness for my sufferings during the last few weeks! Yes—and then I must record one truly alarming episode. The great Zélie and a horde of her nauseating adherents threatened a descent upon Madame St. Leger. Promptly I engaged all the vacant rooms in the hotel—fortunately they weren't very numerous—until the peril was over-past."

"You are not only the kindest and the most superb of friends, but you are a great general. You should command armies," Adrian declared. "Forever shall archæology be anathema to me!"

"Saving the proposed raid of the objectionable Zélie, our history has been of the simplest," Anastasia continued. "People, pleasant and unpleasant, have come and gone; we remain—and there's the sum total of it. Now tell me about yourself. How long do we keep you?"

"Alas, only until this evening. I must go back to Rouen, where my letters await me. We have been moving daily from place to place, as inclination suggested. To-morrow I must rejoin René Dax—for a few days, a week probably, to observe how the new treatment prospers. It is decided that he shall remain in the country-house, near Caen, of an intelligent young doctor who has been in attendance upon him during our touring. His man-servant, of course, is with him. And there he can also have his pet animals."

"Will he recover?"

Adrian raised his shoulders and spread out his hands.

"God knows!" he answered. "He is quite gentle, quite tractable. At moments he is irresistibly entertaining. On his good days he composes little poems of an exquisite fancifulness and fragility—iridescent flowers as of spun glass. But whether he will ever draw or paint again is an open question."

"It is pathetic," Miss Beauchamp put in musingly. "What a sequel to his extravagant popularity!"

And both lapsed into silence, looking out across the immense expanse of gleaming sands. Adrian was the first to speak. He did so with uncertain hesitation.

"You said it was high time I came, tres chère Mademoiselle. Does that imply that I have stayed away too long? I feared to be precipitate, lest I might appear to take unfair advantage of the—"

"The studio escapade—precisely."

"And employ it to further my own interests. On that account I have resolutely effaced myself. To do so has constituted a severe penance; but to do otherwise would, in my opinion, have shown an odious lack of imagination and of delicacy."

"I venture to doubt whether in affairs of the heart delicacy has not more miscarriages of happiness to answer for than precipitancy! The word too much, as between man and woman, is more easily forgiven than the word too little."

"It is inconceivable," Adrian broke out hotly, all of a fume and a fluster, "that Madame St. Leger should mistake my motives."

"Take it from me, my dear Savage," Anastasia replied, with a finely humorous smile, "that exactly in proportion as a woman is indifferent is she just and clear-sighted. Let her care for one of you tiresome male creatures ever, yes, ever so little, and those praiseworthy qualities suffer instant suspension. Reason and probability pick up their petticoats and scuttle. She develops a positively inordinate ingenuity in misconstruction and mistake."

Adrian turned an eagerly inquiring countenance upon the speaker, his whole soul in his eyes.

"But, dearest, most deeply valued friend, tell me, tell me, may I believe that she does then care?"

And asking it he bared his head, instinctively doing homage to that most lovely idea. Miss Beauchamp's smile changed in character, softening to a sweetness which held something of relinquishment and farewell.

"Ah! the good years, the good years," she said, "when love and all the world is young!—May you believe that she cares, my dear boy? Well, without its being the least unnatural, she very well might care, I fancy. But you really must find that out for yourself. Listen—the chirruping of the children. Here they all come."

She rose and went forward; and Adrian, an odd tingling sensation in his blood, went forward too and stood beside her under the central arch of the arcade watching the little procession winding its way by the rough path up the broken grass slope from the beach.

First, slender-legged, short-kilted, fresh as flowers, frisking lambkin-like and chattering in high-pitched, clear little voices, came Bette and her two little friends. Next M. Bernard, dignified, serious, robust, wearing light-brown tweeds, Panama in hand, decidedly warm, expounding, recounting, archæologically dilating to Madame Vernois—refined, fragile, dressed in black—who leaned upon his arm. At a little distance Madame Bernard, small, fair-haired, neat-featured, pretty, inclining to stoutness, her person rigorously controlled by the last word in corsets and clothed in the last word of mauve linen costumes and mauve and white hats. She was not an ardent pedestrian, and mounted laboriously with the help of a long-handled parasol, uttering reproachful little ejaculations and complaints the while for the benefit of the two young Americans, who, good-naturedly loaded up with the ladies' folding chairs, rugs and cushions, followed close behind.

And there, apparently, was an end of the procession. Whereupon Adrian turned to Anastasia with a deeply injured countenance and a quite lamentably orphaned look in his handsome eyes.

"Madame St. Leger is not with them? What can have occurred? Where then can she be?" he demanded, in tones of child-like disappointment and distress.

"There—there!" Anastasia returned, merrily. "See, no ill-chance has befallen your goddess, my dear distracted young god. Look—look—near the cliff edge, to the right."

Then noting the change which came over Adrian's expression and bearing as his eyes followed her pointing hand, Miss Beauchamp's broadly amused smile faded. She shook her head, sighed, turned away, while the witty, large-featured face grew gray, aged, sibylline beneath the shadow of her broad-brimmed, vine-crowned, slightly rampageous hat.

"Like to like," she murmured. "However, others before now have gone through that enchanted and perilous gate! Only may the Almighty permit these two not to cram their romance into one flimsy, purple-patched, paper-bound yellow-back, but print it openly and honestly in three good, stout volumes, of which all save the first twenty or thirty pages deal with the married state."

CHAPTER V

IN WHICH ADRIAN MAKES DISQUIETING ACQUAINTANCE
WITH THE LONG ARM OF COINCIDENCE

Adrian sat well back in the car. The tires ate up the long perspectives of white road, while the brave music of the engines made accompaniment to the lyrics of his thought. On either side the lines of poplars galloped, and behind them the great gold, green and rusty-red squares of the crops, marked only by the nature of their respective growths, innocent of dividing fence or hedge-row, swished back, half the circle, as on a turn-table. In the valleys herds of oxen and stout-built, white-bellied, tortoise-shell cows moved leisurely through the rich meadow-grass. Prosperous gray homesteads, flanked by mellow wide-ranging barns and sheds, orchards of reddening apples, and yards containing a cheerfully garrulous population of poultry, calves, and pigs, came into view only to vanish backward along with the rest. In places, tracts of forest, the trees crowded and for the most part very tall and slight, as is the habit of northern French woodlands, made a dark stain amid the gilded brightness, casting long shadows across the downward-sloping pastures at their foot. A note of pastel blue in farmers' and peasants' clothing, now and again of lustrous dappled gray in the barrel or buttocks of some well-shaped draught-horse, of orange or rose in a child's frock or walled garden close, of white in airing linen, struck momentarily into observation. But dominant was the gilt of the level sunlight, the gold of the harvest, and the silver powdering dust of the highway. All these found sublimated repetition in the iridescence of a sunset modulated to rare half-tones by the near neighborhood of the sea. And Adrian sat well back in the car, restful yet keen, affected sensuously and passively rather than consciously and actively by the fair, fruitful landscape fleeting to right and left of him, revising his impressions of the past day.

Those impressions were, as he told himself, in a high degree both stimulating and poetic. He had been happy, very happy; but his happiness was of the traveling rather than the stationary order. No touch of satiety showed in it; rather much haunting solicitation of the Unattained and the Beyond. From Pisgah height he had beheld the Land of Promise, for the first time reasonably secure of entrance into that ardently coveted and most delectable country. But the waters of Jordan still rolled between; and whether these would pile themselves politely apart, bidding him cross dry-shod, or whether a pretty smart bit of swimming would be required before he touched the opposite bank, he was as yet by no means sure. Enfin—he could swim for it, if all came to all, and would swim for it gaily and strongly enough!

As that afternoon he first caught sight of Gabrielle St. Leger standing, tall and svelte in her light summer dress, upon a grass-grown mound on the turn of the slope, her strong yet pliant figure detaching itself in high relief against the immense expanse of Ste. Marie's blue lagoons and gleaming sands, Adrian apprehended that she too suffered those solicitations of the Unattained and the Beyond. Her attitude, indeed, was eloquent of questioning expectation. It recalled to him the superb and ill-fated drawing of her, uplifted amid the cruel and witty obscenities of poor René Dax's studio—the exalted Madonna of the Future, her child upon her arm, going forth from things habitual and familiar in obedience to the call of Modernity, of the new and tremendous age. Resemblance was there; yet as he looked a difference in her to-day's attitude soon disclosed itself to this analytic though ardent lover. For, assuredly, the sentiment of this second and living picture of her was less abstract, more warm and directly human? Not devotion to a Cause, to an impersonal ideal or idea, inspired that outlooking of questioning expectation across the shimmering levels to the freedom of the open sea, but some stirring of the heart, some demand of her sweet flesh for those natural joys which were its rightful portion. This difference—and then another, which, even here by himself in the rapidly running car, Adrian approached sensitively and with inward deprecation. In to-day's picture she had been alone. She had not carried her child on her arm; so that only the woman, beautiful and youthful, not the already made mother, was present.

And the above fact, it must be owned, contributed in no small degree to the young man's content. A thousand times, notwithstanding his love of analysis, he had refused and shied away from analysis of precisely this—namely, the feeling he entertained toward little Bette. She was a delicious being, granted; but she was also poor Horace St. Leger's child, and from much which this implied Adrian did quite incontestably shrink. La belle Gabrielle might still be, as he sincerely believed still was, essentially la Belle au Bois Dormant, just as he himself was the princely adventurer selected by Providence for the very agreeable task of waking her up. Yet, during that protracted sleep of hers, things had happened, primitive and practical things, to the actuality of which delicious Mademoiselle Bette's existence bore indubitable witness. Hence to carry away with him that other picture of Gabrielle as seen to-day, interrogating the fair sunlit spaces unaccompanied, gave him quite peculiar satisfaction. In the glow of which his thoughts now turned affectionately to the memory of poor Horace St. Leger. For wasn't la belle Gabrielle, after all, his, and not Adrian's, discovery? And wasn't he, Adrian, consequently under a gigantic debt of gratitude to Horace for so speedily taking his departure and leaving the coast clear? He might have lived on—agonizing reflection!—ten, twenty, even—since centenarians are at present so conspicuously the fashion—a good thirty years longer; lived on, indeed, until it ceased to matter much whether he took his departure or not. Thinking over all which, Adrian forgave the poor man his abbreviated enjoyment of paternity, and in so doing made his final peace with the existence of little Bette.

Not to have done so would, in his opinion, have betrayed a culpably ungenerous and churlish spirit. The more as when—her attention attracted by the pretty outcry of little Bette herself and of Madame Vernois—Gabrielle turning her gaze landward became aware of his presence, the light in her face and quick welcoming gesture of her hand showed his advent as far from displeasing to her. Both expression and action struck him so spontaneous and unstudied that, without undue vanity, he might well believe himself to count for something in those allurements of the Beyond and the Unattained. Delightfully certain it was, in any case, that she descended with haste from her grassy monticule, and—he could most joyfully have sworn—put some restraint upon herself so as to advance and offer her greetings with due soberness and dignity.

All through his visit her manner had remained gentle, serious, touched even with a hint of embarrassment. From these signs he drew most hopeful auguries. After tea, under the quite perceptibly out-of-joint noses of the two excellent young Americans, she had drawn him aside and plied him with questions respecting his nursing of René Dax. In response he gave her a detailed account of the last two months. With the artist's happy faculty for playing two mutually destructive parts at one and the same time in all sincerity, he mourned René's mental affliction and felt the pity of it while looking into Gabrielle's eyes, watching her every change of expression and reveling in the emotion his eloquent recital evoked. Her quickness of sympathy and comprehension were enchanting. Never had he found her so responsive. Never had he felt so closely united to her in sentiment.—And that the egregious Tadpole, of all living creatures, should prove so excellent a stalking-horse!

Putting aside the high delight of having Madame St. Leger as a listener, he found sensible relief in speaking freely of the subject. For the responsibility of his position had been severe and wearing. Especially had it been so during those, at first, frequently recurrent periods of acute mania, when his affection and philosophy alike were strained to breaking-point, making him doubt whether the protracted struggle to keep wayward soul and distempered body together was either merciful or obligatory. If this unhappy lunatic of genius was so passionately desirous of letting loose that same wayward soul of his through a gaping wound in his throat, why the deuce should he, Adrian, in company with three or four other strong and healthy men, be at such tremendous pains to prevent it? Mightn't the poor Tadpole know very much best what was best for him? And wouldn't it, therefore, be more humane and intelligent to leave nicely sharpened razors within easy reach, ignoring the probable consequences of such intentional negligence? Are there not circumstances which render connivance at suicide more than permissible? Time and again he had argued the vexed question with himself as to the binding necessity, even the practical morality, of preserving human life when, through disease, life has so cruelly lost its distinctively human characteristics and values.

"And," Gabrielle St. Leger remarked, with a smile edged by engagingly gentle mockery, "then invariably ended, against your better judgment, by still carefully removing the razors!"

That same smile dwelt in the young man's memory as singularly rich with promise, justifying the belief that a lifetime spent in la belle Gabrielle's society would fail to exhaust her power of—to put it vulgarly—jumping the unexpected upon you, and bracing your interest by the firing off of all manner of fine little surprises. Monotony, he thanked Heaven, would very certainly not be among the dangers to be feared in marriage with Madame St. Leger!

But while his imagination played about these agreeable matters the music of the engines changed its tune, the brakes gripped under Martin the chauffeur's boot-sole, and the car slowed down to a crawl in passing a flock of sheep. Two large dogs, bobtailed and shaggy, their red mouths widely open as they raced barking to and fro, rounded up the scared and scattering flock into a compact, bleating, palpitating mass of bister color picked out with rusty black upon the dust-whitened strip of turf by the roadside. The shepherd, tall and lean, a long staff in his hand, his felt hat, hawk-nosed face, unkempt beard, ragged cloak and string-girt leggings, presenting a study in rich browns and umbers under the last glinting gold of the sunset, gesticulated and shouted, directing the evolutions of the racing dogs in a harsh and guttural patois. The scene, a somewhat violent pastoral, stamped itself as a picturesque inset upon the wide-margined page of Adrian's reflections.

The sheep once safely cleared and the pace again quickening, his thought centered complacently upon the moment of his farewells. For surely these showed handsomely on the credit side of his day's pleasure?

The friendly little company—not exclusive of the forgiving though cheapened Americans—had gathered at the hotel entrance to witness his start. Anastasia's voice and manner were rich with meaning and affectionate admonition as she invited him speedily to return. In the expression of Madame Vernois's refined face he seemed to read something approaching appeal as she gracefully seconded that invitation. While Gabrielle herself—she standing a little apart from the rest, nearer to the waiting automobile—answered, not lightly, but with a sweet and grave dignity, on his asking her:

"And you, chère Madame et amie, have I your invitation also? May I soon come back? Without your sanction it would, perhaps, be preferable, be wiser, more desirable for me to stay away."

"I, too, hope you may find it possible soon to return here. If your doing so depends in any degree upon my sanction I give that sanction readily."

And thus speaking she had looked him full in the eyes. Whereupon, though furiously unwilling to quit the dear sight and sound of her, this very modern young god mounted up into his very modern car in quite celestial serenity of spirit.

But as the dusk deepened and the lights of Rouen multiplied in the distance, happy retrospect gave place to happy on-looking, since, at nine and twenty, no sound and wholesome man seriously questions the existence of earthly bliss.

Yes, a week, possibly even a few days, would suffice to assure him all went well with René in his new quarters. Then he might reckon himself at liberty to return to Ste. Marie and the dear people there. And, once there, no overstrained delicacy should withhold him from putting it to the touch with Gabrielle St. Leger. Bowing to Anastasia's advice, he would risk saying the word too much, so as to avoid the greater danger of saying the word too little;—risk it the more gladly because he gratefully believed it mightn't prove the word too much, but the word acceptable, even the word actually, though silently and proudly, waited for. The immediate consequence of which belief was that, the car striking into the town through the Faubourg Beauvosine and traveling the Boulevard and the rue St. Hilaire successively, it appeared to Adrian in act of traversing an altogether heavenly city, whose now poetic ancient buildings, now stately new ones, were alike built of silver, and whose deep-resounding streets, in the growing brilliance of the lamp-light, were paved with gold. Such extravagant tricks, even in this machine-made, mammon-worshiping twentieth century, can love still contrive to play upon the happy lover!

On the way to the hotel, where he had left his light traveling baggage when passing through from Caen in the morning, Adrian alighted at the central post-office, in the rue Jeanne d'Arc, to claim his two-days' mail forwarded from Paris.

Coming out, he stood awhile at the edge of the pavement verifying the several items. Two consignments of proofs—this pleased him. A slim one from the office, containing, as he knew, his fortnightly chronique of current home and foreign politics for the forthcoming number of the Review. The other—and his glance settled upon it affectionately—was stouter, holding the slips of a story of some forty pages. Into that story he had put all the imaginative and verbal skill of which he, as yet, felt himself capable. It was a drama, at once pathetic and brutal, of the Paris underworld which he had this year so intimately investigated during his unsuccessful search for Bibby Smyrthwaite. He felt keen to know how it looked and read in print; for in the back of his mind lurked a hope that just conceivably it might prove a little masterpiece and assure his place among those writers of contemporary fiction whose literary output really counts.

And here for the moment it must be owned the lover was called upon to make room for the artist, while Adrian promised himself the best of good hours, after dinner to-night, in revising punctuation, correcting misprints, and leisurely making those carefully considered alterations in wording so absorbing to one emulous of combining grace and high finish with pungency and vivacity of style. Tenderly he laid the packet down on the seat of the waiting car, and raised his eyes as in invocation to the star-pierced blue of the summer sky roofing the perspective of silver-gray houses and silver-gilt street. For mightn't he take it as a fortunate omen that the proofs should come to hand on this so fortunate day? Omen that the story would strike home and its readers acclaim him as a doer of notable and living work?

He glanced rapidly at the envelopes of his private letters; and, while thus occupied, became aware that Martin, the chauffeur, was engaged—as not infrequently—in an altercation. The man was a clever driver, and to him, Adrian, a willing and trustworthy servant. But his temper was inconveniently inflammable, and he inclined to pick quarrels with half the men and make amorous overtures to more than half the women he met, thus involving both himself and his master in superfluously dramatic incidents. Under provocation his language became variegated and astonishingly ripe. Epithets of the latter description he was now in process of discharging upon some individual who had knocked up against him, in passing, as he stood at the edge of the pavement bending down to examine the tire of the near front wheel of the car.

"Martin, stop that, if you please," Adrian said, warningly, over his shoulder, and returned to the survey of his letters.

There was one from Anastasia Beauchamp. Bless the dear woman, wasn't she indeed a jewel of a friend! And there was one, black-bordered, and addressed, though less neatly than usual, in Joanna Smyrthwaite's small, scholarly handwriting. Adrian was conscious of impatience, of an unreasoning sense of injury. For why, of all days in the year, should he hear from Joanna to-day? He had thought of her seldom lately, owing to preoccupation with and anxiety regarding René Dax; and it struck him as a rather wanton smirching of his delightful day's record and subtle menace to the success of his precious little story that the rather unpleasant matter of poor Joanna should thus obtrude itself. Undefinable apprehension of coming trouble flashed through his mind.

All this was a matter of seconds; but during those seconds, the voice of the choleric chauffeur had risen from a gusty snarl into the screech of a blazing sky-rocket, bursting finally into a star-shower of unrecordable invective.

Adrian, imposingly tall in his long dust-colored frieze motor-coat, wheeled round upon the man angrily.

"Ah, par exemple! but this is intolerable!" he exclaimed. "Have I not already commanded you to be silent? Do you propose to disgrace me, as well as yourself, by fighting in the open street? Behave respectably, not like an idiot. Do you hear—get in behind your steering-wheel and keep quiet until I am ready to start."

"But, Monsieur, the fellow has grossly insulted me. He cannoned into me by design, the thrice filthy animal, the sodden ass, and would have rolled me in the gutter had I not skilfully braced myself. Clearly his intention was robbery. He is a danger to society, a thief, a pickpocket. Only let Monsieur look for himself, and declare whether a more verminous gaol-bird has ever been presented for his inspection?"

And looking, Adrian beheld the chauffeur, fiery-eyed, with bristling black mustache, and, struggling in his vicious grip, Joanna Smyrthwaite herself—Joanna dissipated, degraded, with prominent, blear blue eyes and weak hanging underlip, masquerading in man's attire, as in those infamous, now obliterated drawings upon René Dax's studio wall.

Disgust, and a vague apprehension of something unnatural and outside reason, seized on Adrian Savage. The sight was loathsome, to a degree, both in suggestion and in fact. Then he understood; and, understanding, suffered a moment of acute indecision. But a crowd was collecting. The police might arrive upon the scene. Making a strong effort to surmount his disgust, he said:

"Let him go, Martin. I know him. I will explain to you presently. Now I require your help."

Then he added rapidly, in English:

"Pardon my servant's rudeness. In the end you shall not have cause to regret it. You are William Smyrthwaite—Bibby—are you not?"

Martin relinquished his hold sulkily. His victim, dazed and breathless, stood at bay; a ring of curious, contemptuous faces behind him, and Adrian, stern, yet excited, and with difficulty repressing evidences of his repugnance, in front.

"And, if I am Bibby Smyrthwaite, what the devil is that to you?" he answered petulantly in English. "I never set eyes on you before. Why should you interfere with me? Haven't I as much right to the pavement as that liveried brute of yours? I've got a job as cab-washer. If I'm late at the yard I shall forfeit my pay. And I want my pay."

His loose-lipped mouth twisted miserably and tears began to dribble down his sunken cheeks.

"Let me go," he blubbered. "I haven't done you any harm, and I want my pay."

Then Adrian, moved by compassion, came close to him and spoke kindly.

"See here, my poor boy," he said. "I am commissioned by persons who have a regard for you to provide for you. You need not worry about your pay. I will take care of all that. For months I have tried to find you to tell you this. I am Adrian Savage, a cousin of your late father, and his executor."

The tears ceased, and the young man's face was overspread by an expression of almost imbecile rapture. Adrian turned sick. Exactly thus had Joanna looked, more than once.

"Is my father dead, then?" Bibby asked.

"Yes, he is dead," Adrian replied, in bewilderment.

Bibby reeled forward and squatted on the broad footboard of the car, his head thrown back, holding his sides, his thin, loose-jointed limbs and body writhing with and shaken by hysterical laughter.

"Dead!" he quavered out—"dead! By God! they've got him at last, then—got him, the stinking, slave-driving old hypocrite! And, please God, they're cooking him now—now—at this very identical minute—cooking him to a turn, down in hell."

CHAPTER VI

CONCERNING A CURSE, AND THE MANNER OF ITS GOING
HOME TO ROOST

The room, furnished in dark walnut, was upholstered in red Utrecht velvet, the walls hung with a striped fawn-and-red paper. A mirror, in a florid gilt frame, was fixed above the low mantel-shelf. The atmosphere held odors reminiscent of cigarettes, patchouli, and food in process of cooking. The dinner-table had, by Adrian's orders, been placed near the central window, the two casements of which stood open to the ground. After so many hours spent in the open air, dining in present company he felt the necessity of such freshness as he could by any means get. In the center of the long flagged courtyard the big palmate leaves of a row of pollarded chestnuts caught the light coming from the offices on the left. White-coated, white-capped chefs and scullions passed to and fro. An old liver-colored bitch, basset as to her legs and pointer as to her body, waddled after them, her nose in the air, sniffing, permanently hopeful of scraps. On the flags, just outside the salon window, three tabby kittens played—stalking one another round pots of fuchsia and musk, bouncing out, leaping in the air, spitting, galloping sideways, highly diabolic with teapot-handle tails. Farther along the courtyard, hidden by the lower branches of the intervening trees, a stable-helper sang and whistled as he washed down the hotel omnibus. The servants talked, laughed, scolded over their work. Almost incessantly from the rue Jeanne d'Arc came the long-drawn rattle and swish of the electric trams. And opposite to Adrian at table, clad in a complete outfit of his, Adrian's clothes—a white flannel suit with a faint four-thread black stripe on it, a soft, pale blue shirt, an immaculate collar and narrow black tie—sat William Smyrthwaite, outwardly, at all events, surprisingly transformed.

Adrian had hesitated to propose him as an inmate; but an up-to-date motor-car, a ruffling chauffeur, a well-built suit-case and kit-bag bearing an English name, a very good Paris address, are calculated to promote not only faith, but charity. The hotel proprietor, a short, fat, bland little man with a dancing step and a shrewd, rapacious Norman eye, was sympathy itself.

"That Monsieur should remove his effects and seek another, an inferior, hotel would desolate him, was not to be thought of! He would arrange the affair on the instant. Such lamentable lapses will occur at times—are there not, alas, members of the most respectable, the most distinguished, families who turn badly? Let Monsieur, then, rest assured he was infinitely touched by the confidence Monsieur reposed in him. And, see"—tapping his forehead with a fat forefinger—"the little suite at the back on the ground floor, giving upon the courtyard, became precisely this morning vacant. True, these were not the rooms he should have selected for Monsieur's occupation; but, under the circumstances, it was conceivable they would serve. They were comfortable though modest. They were retired—two bed-chambers connected by a salon. There Monsieur and his guest could dine in private, secure from the intrusive observation of strangers. But, indeed, no—Monsieur was too amiable! He himself was undeserving of thanks, since did it not become evident that Monsieur was engaged in a work of the highest benevolence—the attempted reclamation of an unhappy fellow-creature?—With which work to be associated, even in the humblest capacity, could not but be esteemed by any person of feeling as a privilege."

Then with a rapid change of manner, becoming autocratic, Napoleonic:

"Gustave," he cried, over his shoulder, "portez les bagages de ces messieurs aux numeros sept et huit."—And waving Adrian to follow, he bounced lightly away down the corridor; his eyebrows drawn together as he inwardly debated how many francs extra he dared charge for the Utrecht-velvet upholstered suite without seeming too flagrantly extortionate.

After that first outbreak of unseemly rejoicing at the announcement of his father's death, young Smyrthwaite subsided into a state of acquiescent apathy. He did as he was bid, but with what mental reservations, what underlying thoughts or emotions, Adrian failed to discover. Somewhere, in this weak, slipshod creature, he suspected a bed-rock of obstinacy. He also suspected predatory instincts. Or, was it only that the instinct of self-preservation had taken—as under the stress of poverty it almost must take—a predatory form?

At the beginning of dinner Smyrthwaite spoke little, but sat, his elbows upon the table, his head bent low over his plate, putting away food with the sullen haste of an animal suspicious of its fellow-animal's intentions and appetite. And when Adrian, to whom this exhibition of gluttony proved anything but agreeable, hinted civilly there was no cause for hurry, he looked across the nicely ordered table with a half-sneering yet oddly boyish smile.

"Oh! it's all very well for you," he said. "You're safe enough to have your solid three meals to-morrow, and all the other blooming to-morrows as long as you live. But, I tell you, I mean to make jolly sure of this meal while I can get it. I've learned not to put much trust in to-morrows. I want to be on the safe side, so that if the wind changes, as far as this meal goes, anyhow, I shall have nothing to repent of."

"But, my good fellow, the wind will not change. That is exactly what I have been trying to assure you," Adrian interposed, pity and repulsion playing see-saw within him to a bewildering extent. "For the future you can be just as secure of three meals a day as I myself am if you choose."

"Bully!" Smyrthwaite said. "I wonder! The old man cut up well?" he added, his face again bent down over the table.

"Your father left a large fortune," Adrian replied, repulsion now very much on the top.

"To me? Not likely!"

"To your sisters. And Joanna"—Adrian hesitated, conscious of a singular distaste to using the Christian name—"at once devoted a considerable sum of money to be employed, in the event of your return, for your maintenance."

With his coarse, thick-jointed fingers Smyrthwaite rubbed a bit of bread round his plate, sopping up the remains of the gravy.

"That's no more than right," he said, "if you come to think of it. Why should the girls have all the stuff?"

His hand went out furtively across the table to a dish of braised beef and richly cooked vegetables which he proceeded to transfer to his own plate.

"All the same, it's nice of Nannie. We were rather chummy in the old days—the blasted old days which I've nearly forgot. But I didn't suppose she cared still. Poor old Nannie! What a beastly hash my father made of our lives! Nannie ought to have married Merriman. Then I should have had a home. Andrew's a bit peachy, but he's a rare good sort."

He slushed in the food silently for a while; and Adrian, anxious to avoid observation of the details of that process, watched the kittens sporting round the flower-pots on the flags just outside.

He had searched for Bibby, spending time, money, even risking personal safety, in that search. He had found Bibby. He had brought him here to civilized quarters. He had clothed him from head to foot.—Adrian felt a pang, for they were such nice clothes! He was rather fond of that particular flannel suit. Really it cost him not a little to part with it; and, he could almost fancy, hanging now upon Bibby's angular, narrow-chested frame, that it bore the plaintive air of a thing unkindly treated, consciously humiliated and disgraced. He apologized to it half sentimentally, half humorously, in spirit.—And then because the small things of life whip one's sense of the great ones into higher activity, the trivial matter of the ill-used flannel suit brought home to Adrian with disquieting clearness the difficulties of this whole third affaire Smyrthwaite in which he had, as it now occurred to him, rather recklessly embarked.

As if the two first affaires, those of father and daughter, hadn't been enough, he must needs go and add that of the degenerate son and brother! And who, after all, would thank him? Wasn't he very much a fool, then, for his pains? Psychologically and in the abstract, as an example of lapse and degradation, Smyrthwaite presented an interesting and instructive study. But in the concrete, as a guest, a companion, as a young man, a relation, moreover, to be reclaimed from evil courses and socially reinstated, the situation took on quite other color. Looking across the table now as, his plate again empty, Bibby sank back in his chair, slouched together, his hands in his trousers pockets, his blue eyes turned upon the door, anxiously awaiting the advent of the garçon with the next course, Adrian was tempted to deplore his own philanthropic impulse. All hope of pulling the boy up to any permanently decent level of living seemed so unspeakably remote.

And, as though some silent transmission of thought had taken place between them, Bibby's next speech went to confirm Adrian's fears.

"You say if I choose," he began; "but the question is, can I choose? You see I'm so beastly out of the habit of all that.—Now I'm getting full I seem to understand things, so I'd best talk at once."

"I ask nothing better than that you should talk," Adrian put in, good-temperedly. For Heaven's sake, let him at least gain whatever scientific knowledge of and from Bibby he could!

"Presently I shall turn sleepy," the other continued, with a curiously unblushing directness of statement. "I always do when I'm first filled up after going short. You see, I've never set eyes on you before, and you come along and tell me some blooming fairy story about poor old Nannie and her money. It may be true or it may be false, but anyhow I don't seem to tumble to it. I fancy these clothes and I fancy this feed, but I don't feel to go much beyond that.—Chicken?—Yes, rather. Leave me the breast. Golly! I do like white meat! Two or three years ago it would have set me on fire. I should have felt like bucking up and making play with it—repentant prodigal, don't you know, and all that kind of rot. But now I don't seem to be able to bother much. If it was winter I suppose I should be more ready to fix on to it, because I'm afraid of the cold. When you're empty half the time cold makes you so beastly sick; and then I get chilblains and my skin chaps. But in the summer I'd just as soon lie out.—Say, can I have the rest of the fowl?"

"By all means," Adrian replied, handing him the dish.

"You see, it's like this," he went on, picking up the bones and ripping off the meat with his teeth, "I've knocked about so long it's grown second nature. I have to move on. I can't stick to one job or stop in one place. I suppose that's left over from the old days, when my father was always down on me with some infernal row or other. He hated me like poison. It's a trick Englishmen have with their sons. They've not got the knack of paternity like you French. I got into the habit of feeling I'd best run because he was sure to be after me; and that's a sort of feeling you can't be quit of. It keeps you always looking over your shoulder to see what's coming next. People haven't been half nasty to me on the whole, and I mightn't have done so badly if I could have stuck. A little mincing devil of an artist, with a head like the dome of St. Paul's—draws for the comic papers—you may know him—René Dax—"

"Yes, I know him," Adrian said.

"He picked me up this winter when I was just pitching myself into the river. It was cold, you see, and I'd been drinking. It's silly to drink when you're empty. It gives you the hump. He took me home with him, and drew funny pictures of me. They were pretty low down some of them, but they made me laugh. He did me very well as to food and all that, but two or three days of it was enough. I couldn't stand the confinement. I pinched what I could and left."

Adrian raised his eyebrows and passed his hand down over his black beard meditatively. A sweet youth, a really sweet and promising youth this!—René had never mentioned the thieving incident to him, and it explained much. It also showed René's conception of the duty entailed by hospitality in an admirable light. Even active exercise of the predatory instinct must be passed over in silence in the case of a guest.

"What he paid me, with what I took, kept me going quite a good while," Smyrthwaite said, stretching and yawning audibly. "But I'm turning thundering sleepy. I told you I should. I'll be shot if I can sit up on end jawing any more like this," he added querulously. "You might let a fellow have ten minutes' nap."

Ten minutes, twenty minutes, all the minutes of the unnumbered ages spent by Bibby in slumber would, Adrian just then felt, supply a more than grateful respite! He lit a cigarette and stepped out of the open window on to the flags, thereby startling the tabby kittens, who, with arched backs and frenzied spittings, vanished behind the flower-pots. An arc lamp was fixed to the wall just over the kitchen entrance. One of the white-clad chefs brought out a chair, and sat there reading a flimsy, little two-page evening paper. The heavy foliage of the chestnuts hung motionless. In the distance a bugle sounded to quarters. And Adrian thought of Gabrielle St. Leger, standing on the grass-grown monticle looking across the gleaming sands of Ste. Marie into the beckoning future. When next they met he would speak, she would answer—and Adrian's eyes grew at once very gay and very gentle. He pushed up the ends of his mustache and smoothed the tip of his pointed beard. Then he remembered on a sudden that in the houroosh over the finding of Bibby he had forgotten all about his letters.

So he took them out of his pocket and looked at them. It wasn't necessary to read dear Anastasia's letter now, since he knew pretty well what it must contain, having seen her so lately. But here was Joanna's black-edged envelope. He shrugged his shoulders.—Oh! this interminable famille Smyrthwaite! Why, the dickens, had his great-aunt committed the maddening error of marrying into it? With an expressive grimace, followed by an expression of saintly resignation, Adrian tore the envelope open. The letter was a long one, worse luck! He read a few lines, and moved forward to where the arc lamp gave a fuller light. "Par exemple!" he said, once or twice; also, very softly, "Sapristi!" drawing in his breath. Then all lurking sense of comedy deserted him. He straightened himself up, his face bleaching beneath its brown coating of sunburn and his eyes growing hot. The old dog waddled across from the offices and planted herself in front of him, wagging a disgracefully illegitimate tail, looking up in his face, sniffing and feebly grinning. He paid no heed to her feminine cajoleries; paid no heed to the fact that his cigarette had gone out, or to the antics of the again emergent kittens, or to the intermittent sounds from the courtyard and city, or to the all-pervasive stable and kitchen smells.

"Dear Cousin Adrian," Joanna's letter ran, "I find it difficult and even painful to write to you, yet I can no longer refrain from writing. In refraining I might be guilty of an injustice toward you. This nerves me to write. I have suffered very greatly in the past week. I know suffering may purify, but I am not purified by this suffering. On the contrary, the tendencies of my nature which I least approve are brought into prominence by it. I owe it to whatever is best in me; I owe it to you—yes, above all to you—to take steps to check this dreadful florescence of evil in myself.

"But before explaining the principal cause of my suffering, I must tell you this. You may have heard from Margaret. In that case forgive my repeating what you already know. She has engaged herself to Mr. Challoner. The news came to me as a great shock. From every point of view such a marriage is displeasing to me. I have regretted Mr. Challoner's influence over Margaret. Already I cannot but see she is deteriorating, and adopting a view of life dreadfully wanting in elevation of feeling and thought. I know you will sympathize with me in this, and that you will also deplore Margaret's choice. Indeed, the thought of the effect that this news must have upon your mind has caused me much sorrow. You may so reasonably object to Mr. Challoner entering our family. I have never considered that he appreciated your great superiority to himself both in position and in attainments, or treated you with the deference due to you. Mr. Challoner is not a gentleman, and I am humiliated by the prospect of his becoming nearly connected with you by marriage. You are too just to visit this upon me; but it must color your thought of me and of all our future relation.

"I speak of our future relation; and there the agony of suspense in which I have lately lived overcomes me. I can hardly write. Believe me, Adrian, I do not doubt you; I know you are incapable of an inconsiderate, still more of a cruel, action. My trust in you is as deep as my affection. It is myself whom I distrust. Knowing my absence of talent and beauty, knowing my own faults of character from the first, the wonder of your love for me has been almost overpowering, almost incredible."

Adrian folded the thin sheets together and walked back and forth over the flags, looking up at the fair night sky above the big-leaved chestnuts.

"My God! Poor thing! poor Joanna! What can one do? Poor thing!" he said.

Then he stood still again in the lamplight and re-opened the letter.

"And hence, when gossiping reports reach me, however contrary to my knowledge of you and however unworthy of credence they may be, aware as I am of my many shortcomings, they torture me. I cannot control my mind. It places dreadful ideas before me. I realize my utter dependence upon you for all that makes life desirable—I could almost say for all that makes its continuance possible. Before you came to us, at the time of papa's death this winter, I was unhappy, but passively unhappy, as one born blind might be yearning for a sense denied and unknown to him. Now, when fears regarding our relation to each other assail me I am like one who, having enjoyed the rapture and glory of sight, is struck blind, or who learns that sightlessness, absolute and incurable, awaits him. A horror of great darkness is upon me. Only you can relieve me of that horror; therefore I write to you.

"Col. Rentoul Haig tells Margaret he heard from acquaintances of yours in Paris this summer that you have long been attached to a lady there who would in every respect be a suitable wife for you. I know that this cannot be true. Indeed, I know it. But I implore you to tell me yourself that it is not true. Set my mind at rest. The limits of my endurance are reached. Misery is undermining my health, as well as all the nobler elements of my character. I am a prey to insomnia, and to obtain sleep I am obliged to have recourse to drugs. I grow afraid of my own impulses. Dear Adrian, write to me. Forgive me. Comfort me. Reassure me. Yours,

"JOANNA SMYRTHWAITE."

Adrian folded up the letter slowly, returned it to his pocket, and stood thinking.

Thanks to his strong dramatic sense, at first the thing in itself, the isolating intensity of Joanna's passion, filled his imagination. Every word was sincere, dragged live and bleeding out of her heart. Baldness of statement only made it the more telling. This was what she actually believed regarding herself, what she really felt and meant.—"The limits of my endurance are reached, I suffer too much, I grow afraid of my own impulses." This was not a way of talking, rhetoric, a pose; it was reasoned and accurate fact. And, if he understood Joanna aright, her capacity of suffering was enormous. If the limit of endurance had now been reached, about all which lay short of that limit it was terrible to think! She had been tortured, and only in the extremity of torture did she cry for help.

But here Adrian's dramatic sense gave before the common instinct of humanity. The most callous of men might very well be moved by Joanna's letter; and Adrian was among the least callous of men, especially where a woman was concerned. Therefore, for him, practically, what followed? This question struck him as quite the ugliest he had ever been called upon to answer in the whole course of his life. To use poor Joanna's favorite catch-word, a "dreadful" question—a very dreadful question, as he saw it just now, taking the warmth out of the sunshine and the color out of life. He recalled those extremely disagreeable ten minutes, spent among the sweet-scented allspice bushes, in the garden of the Tower House. He had argued out the question, or the equivalent of the question, then—and, as he had believed, answered it fully and finally, once and for all. But apparently he hadn't answered it finally, since on its recurring now the consequences of either alternative presented themselves to him with such merciless distinctness.—The fact that his conscience was clear in respect of Joanna, that she was the victim of self-invented delusion—in as far as reciprocal affection on his part went—made little appreciable difference to the situation. Indeed, to prove his own innocence was merely to cap the climax of her humiliation with conviction of presumptuous folly.

Indescribably perplexed and pained, shocked by the position in which he found himself, Adrian passed absently back from the courtyard into the salon. He had forgotten the third affaire Smyrthwaite in the storm and stress of the second. Here, the third affaire presented itself to him under a guise far from encouraging.

Bibby, the whiteness of the flannel suit bringing out his limp, slatternly yet boyish figure into high relief as against the red Utrecht velvet, lay crumpled sideways in the largest of the chairs. His legs dangled over one arm of it, his head nodded forward, sunk between his pointed shoulders, his chin rested on his breast. An ill-conditioned, hopeless, irreclaimable fellow! Yet still the family likeness to Joanna remained—to the degraded Joanna of the "funny pictures" upon René Dax's studio wall—a Joanna wearing his, Adrian's, clothes, moreover, whose mouth hung open as he breathed stertorously in almost bestial after-dinner sleep.

Adrian looked once, picked up his hat, and fled.

For the ensuing three or four hours he walked aimlessly up and down the streets of Rouen, along the pleasant tree-planted boulevards and the quays beside the broad, silent-flowing Seine. He was aware of lights, of blottings of black shadow, of venerable buildings rich in beautiful detail, of the brightly lighted interiors of wine-shops and cafes open to the pavement, of people loud-voiced and insistent, and of vehicles—these in lessening number as it drew toward midnight—passing by. But all his impressions were indefinite, his vision strangely blurred. He walked, as a living man might walk through a phantom city peopled by chaffering ghosts, for all that his surroundings meant to him, his thoughts concentrated upon the overwhelming personal drama, and personal question, raised by Joanna's letter.

Must he, taking his courage rather brutally in both hands, disillusion her and risk the results of such disillusionment? Chivalry, pity, humanity, the very honor of his manhood, protested as against some dastardly and unpardonable act of physical cruelty. How he wished she hadn't employed that illustration of blindness and sight! The thought of her pale eyes fixed on him, doting, imploring, worshiping, hungry with unsatisfied passion, starving for his love, pursued him, making itself almost visible to his outward sense. How was it possible to sear those poor eyes, extinguishing light in them forever by application of the white-hot iron of truth? Before God, he could not do it! It was too horrible.

And yet, the alternative—to lie to her, to lie to love, to be false to himself, to be false to the hope and purpose of years, didn't his manhood, every mental, and moral, and—very keenly—every physical fiber of him protest equally against that? He saw Gabrielle as he had seen her only this afternoon, in her fresh, grave beauty, the promise of hidden delights, of enchanting discoveries in her mysterious smile. Saw, as he so happily believed, a certain awakening of her heart and sense toward the joys which man has with woman and woman with man. How could he consent to cut himself from all this and take Joanna's meager and unlovely body in his arms? It wasn't to be done. He turned faint with loathing and unspeakable distress, staggered as though drunk, nearly fell.

Bibby Smyrthwaite and Joseph Challoner for brothers, Margaret Smyrthwaite for sister, Joanna for bride—this, all which went along with it and which of necessity it implied, was more than he could face. He would rather be dead, rather ten thousand times. He said so in perfect honesty, knowing that were the final choice offered him now and here, notwithstanding his immense value of life and joy in living he would choose to die.

But in point of fact no such choice was offered him, since in his opinion it is the act of a most contemptible poltroon to avoid the issue by means of self-inflicted death. No, he must take the consequences of his own actions, and poor Joanna must take the consequences of her own actions—in obedience to the fundamental natural and moral law which none escape. And among those consequences, both of her and of his own past actions, was the cruel suffering which he found himself constrained to inflict. He shrank, he sickened, for to be cruel was hateful to him, a violation of his nature. In a sort of despair he went back upon the whole question, arguing it through once more, wearily, painfully, point by point.

Adrian's aimless wanderings had, now, conducted him to a small public garden laid out with flower borders, shrubberies, and carefully tended islands of turf, beneath the shadow of a chaste yet florid fifteenth-century church. Clerestory windows glinted high above, touched by the lamplight, and flying buttresses, thick with fantastic carven flowers and little lurking demons, formed a lace-work of stone against the sky. He sat down on one of the garden benches, laying his hat beside him on the seat. He doubled himself together, his elbows upon his knees, pressing his hands against either side of his head.

He was very tired. He was also desperately sad. Never before had he felt the chill breath of a trouble from which there seemed no issue save by the creation of further, deeper trouble. Never before had he—so it now appeared to him—gauged the possibilities of tragedy in human life. And the present situation had grown out of such wholly accidental happenings—well-meant kindnesses and courtesies, an overstrained delicacy in admitting the reality of poor Joanna's infatuation and making her understand that his affections were engaged elsewhere. In his fear of assuming too much and appearing fatuous, he had let things drift. He had been guilty of saying that fatal word "too little" against which dear Anastasia Beauchamp to-day fulminated. There he was to blame. There was his real error, his real mistake. It gnawed mercilessly at his conscience and his sensibility. It would continue so to gnaw, whatever the upshot of this disastrous business, as long as he lived. In the restrained and conventional intercourse of modern, civilized life, the difficulty of avoiding that fatal word "too little" is so constant and so great. His mind, spent with thought and emotion, dwelt with languid persistence upon this point. In this particular he had shirked his duty both to Joanna and to himself, with the terrible result that he was doomed to inflict a cruel injury upon her or to wreck his own life.

And at that moment, dully, without any quickening of interest, amiable or the reverse, he perceived that a young woman sat at the farther end of the bench. When he came to think of it, he believed she had followed him through the streets for some little time. Now she coughed slightly and moved rather nearer to him, fidgeted, pushing about the loose, shingly gravel, which made small rattling noises, with her foot. Adrian still sat doubled together pressing his hands against either side of his head. Presently she began to speak, making overtures to him, praising his handsome looks, his youth his dress, his bearing, his walk, flattering and wheedling him after the manner of her sorry kind. While expressing admiration and offering endearing phrases, her voice remained toneless and monotonous. And this peculiarity rather than what she said aroused Adrian's attention. He looked round and received a definite impression, notwithstanding the dimness of the light. Her reddish hair was turned loosely back from her forehead. Her face was gaunt and worn under its layer of fard. Her mouth was large, and the painted lips, though coarse, were sensitive—her soul had not yet been killed by her infamous trade. Her eyes were pale, desperate with shame and with entreaty. And these were the eyes which, if he would save all which made life noble and dear to him, Adrian must strike blind!