gave her privileges that she neglected, and when people were admiring
her brow she was wondering whether there were a good fire in her
bedroom. She was simple, kind and good; inexpressive but not inhuman or
stupid. Now and again she dropped something that had a sifted, selected
air--the sound of an impression at first hand. She had no imagination,
but she had added up her feelings, some of her reflections, about life.
Lyon talked of the old days in Munich, reminded her of incidents,
pleasures and pains, asked her about her father and the others; and she
told him in return that she was so impressed with his own fame, his
brilliant position in the world, that she had not felt very sure he
would speak to her or that his little sign at table was meant for her.
This was plainly a perfectly truthful speech--she was incapable of any
other--and he was affected by such humility on the part of a woman whose
grand line was unique. Her father was dead; one of her brothers was in
the navy and the other on a ranch in America; two of her sisters were
married and the youngest was just coming out and very pretty. She didn't
mention her stepmother. She asked him about his own personal history and
he said that the principal thing that had happened to him was that he
had never married.

'Oh, you ought to,' she answered. 'It's the best thing.'

'I like that--from you!' he returned.

'Why not from me? I am very happy.'

'That's just why I can't be. It's cruel of you to praise your state. But
I have had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of your husband. We
had a good bit of talk in the other room.'

'You must know him better--you must know him really well,' said Mrs.
Capadose.

'I am sure that the further you go the more you find. But he makes a
fine show, too.'

She rested her good gray eyes on Lyon. 'Don't you think he's handsome?'

'Handsome and clever and entertaining. You see I'm generous.'

'Yes; you must know him well,' Mrs. Capadose repeated.

'He has seen a great deal of life,' said her companion.

'Yes, we have been in so many places. You must see my little girl. She
is nine years old--she's too beautiful.'

'You must bring her to my studio some day--I should like to paint her.'

'Ah, don't speak of that,' said Mrs. Capadose. 'It reminds me of
something so distressing.'

'I hope you don't mean when _you_ used to sit to me--though that may
well have bored you.'

'It's not what you did--it's what we have done. It's a confession I must
make--it's a weight on my mind! I mean about that beautiful picture you
gave me--it used to be so much admired. When you come to see me in
London (I count on your doing that very soon) I shall see you looking
all round. I can't tell you I keep it in my own room because I love it
so, for the simple reason----' And she paused a moment.

'Because you can't tell wicked lies,' said Lyon.

'No, I can't. So before you ask for it----'

'Oh, I know you parted with it--the blow has already fallen,' Lyon
interrupted.

'Ah then, you have heard? I was sure you would! But do you know what we
got for it? Two hundred pounds.'

'You might have got much more,' said Lyon, smiling.

'That seemed a great deal at the time. We were in want of the money--it
was a good while ago, when we first married. Our means were very small
then, but fortunately that has changed rather for the better. We had the
chance; it really seemed a big sum, and I am afraid we jumped at it. My
husband had expectations which have partly come into effect, so that now
we do well enough. But meanwhile the picture went.'

'Fortunately the original remained. But do you mean that two hundred was
the value of the vase?' Lyon asked.

'Of the vase?'

'The beautiful old Indian vase--the Grand Duke's offering.'

'The Grand Duke?'

'What's his name?--Silberstadt-Schreckenstein. Your husband mentioned
the transaction.'

'Oh, my husband,' said Mrs. Capadose; and Lyon saw that she coloured a
little.

Not to add to her embarrassment, but to clear up the ambiguity, which
he perceived the next moment he had better have left alone, he went on:
'He tells me it's now in his collection.'

'In the Grand Duke's? Ah, you know its reputation? I believe it contains
treasures.' She was bewildered, but she recovered herself, and Lyon made
the mental reflection that for some reason which would seem good when he
knew it the husband and the wife had prepared different versions of the
same incident. It was true that he did not exactly see Everina Brant
preparing a version; that was not her line of old, and indeed it was not
in her eyes to-day. At any rate they both had the matter too much on
their conscience. He changed the subject, said Mrs. Capadose must really
bring the little girl. He sat with her some time longer and
thought--perhaps it was only a fancy--that she was rather absent, as if
she were annoyed at their having been even for a moment at
cross-purposes. This did not prevent him from saying to her at the last,
just as the ladies began to gather themselves together to go to bed:
'You seem much impressed, from what you say, with my renown and my
prosperity, and you are so good as greatly to exaggerate them. Would you
have married me if you had known that I was destined to success?'

'I did know it.'

'Well, I didn't'

'You were too modest.'

'You didn't think so when I proposed to you.'

'Well, if I had married you I couldn't have married _him_--and he's so
nice,' Mrs. Capadose said. Lyon knew she thought it--he had learned that
at dinner--but it vexed him a little to hear her say it. The gentleman
designated by the pronoun came up, amid the prolonged handshaking for
good-night, and Mrs. Capadose remarked to her husband as she turned
away, 'He wants to paint Amy.'

'Ah, she's a charming child, a most interesting little creature,' the
Colonel said to Lyon. 'She does the most remarkable things.'

Mrs. Capadose stopped, in the rustling procession that followed the
hostess out of the room. 'Don't tell him, please don't,' she said.

'Don't tell him what?'

'Why, what she does. Let him find out for himself.' And she passed on.

'She thinks I swagger about the child--that I bore people,' said the
Colonel. 'I hope you smoke.' He appeared ten minutes later in the
smoking-room, in a brilliant equipment, a suit of crimson foulard
covered with little white spots. He gratified Lyon's eye, made him feel
that the modern age has its splendour too and its opportunities for
costume. If his wife was an antique he was a fine specimen of the period
of colour: he might have passed for a Venetian of the sixteenth century.
They were a remarkable couple, Lyon thought, and as he looked at the
Colonel standing in bright erectness before the chimney-piece while he
emitted great smoke-puffs he did not wonder that Everina could not
regret she had not married _him_. All the gentlemen collected at Stayes
were not smokers and some of them had gone to bed. Colonel Capadose
remarked that there probably would be a smallish muster, they had had
such a hard day's work. That was the worst of a hunting-house--the men
were so sleepy after dinner; it was devilish stupid for the ladies,
even for those who hunted themselves--for women were so extraordinary,
they never showed it. But most fellows revived under the stimulating
influences of the smoking-room, and some of them, in this confidence,
would turn up yet. Some of the grounds of their confidence--not all of
them--might have been seen in a cluster of glasses and bottles on a
table near the fire, which made the great salver and its contents
twinkle sociably. The others lurked as yet in various improper corners
of the minds of the most loquacious. Lyon was alone with Colonel
Capadose for some moments before their companions, in varied
eccentricities of uniform, straggled in, and he perceived that this
wonderful man had but little loss of vital tissue to repair.

They talked about the house, Lyon having noticed an oddity of
construction in the smoking-room; and the Colonel explained that it
consisted of two distinct parts, one of which was of very great
antiquity. They were two complete houses in short, the old one and the
new, each of great extent and each very fine in its way. The two formed
together an enormous structure--Lyon must make a point of going all over
it. The modern portion had been erected by the old man when he bought
the property; oh yes, he had bought it, forty years before--it hadn't
been in the family: there hadn't been any particular family for it to be
in. He had had the good taste not to spoil the original house--he had
not touched it beyond what was just necessary for joining it on. It was
very curious indeed--a most irregular, rambling, mysterious pile, where
they every now and then discovered a walled-up room or a secret
staircase. To his mind it was essentially gloomy, however; even the
modern additions, splendid as they were, failed to make it cheerful.
There was some story about a skeleton having been found years before,
during some repairs, under a stone slab of the floor of one of the
passages; but the family were rather shy of its being talked about. The
place they were in was of course in the old part, which contained after
all some of the best rooms: he had an idea it had been the primitive
kitchen, half modernised at some intermediate period.

'My room is in the old part too then--I'm very glad,' Lyon said. 'It's
very comfortable and contains all the latest conveniences, but I
observed the depth of the recess of the door and the evident antiquity
of the corridor and staircase--the first short one--after I came out.
That panelled corridor is admirable; it looks as if it stretched away,
in its brown dimness (the lamps didn't seem to me to make much
impression on it), for half a mile.'

'Oh, don't go to the end of it!' exclaimed the Colonel, smiling.

'Does it lead to the haunted room?' Lyon asked.

His companion looked at him a moment. 'Ah, you know about that?'

'No, I don't speak from knowledge, only from hope. I have never had any
luck--I have never stayed in a dangerous house. The places I go to are
always as safe as Charing Cross. I want to see--whatever there is, the
regular thing. _Is_ there a ghost here?'

'Of course there is--a rattling good one.'

'And have you seen him?'

'Oh, don't ask me what _I've_ seen--I should tax your credulity. I don't
like to talk of these things. But there are two or three as bad--that
is, as good!--rooms as you'll find anywhere.'

'Do you mean in my corridor?' Lyon asked.

'I believe the worst is at the far end. But you would be ill-advised to
sleep there.'

'Ill-advised?'

'Until you've finished your job. You'll get letters of importance the
next morning, and you'll take the 10.20.'

'Do you mean I will invent a pretext for running away?'

'Unless you are braver than almost any one has ever been. They don't
often put people to sleep there, but sometimes the house is so crowded
that they have to. The same thing always happens--ill-concealed
agitation at the breakfast-table and letters of the greatest importance.
Of course it's a bachelor's room, and my wife and I are at the other end
of the house. But we saw the comedy three days ago--the day after we got
here. A young fellow had been put there--I forget his name--the house
was so full; and the usual consequence followed. Letters at
breakfast--an awfully queer face--an urgent call to town--so very sorry
his visit was cut short. Ashmore and his wife looked at each other, and
off the poor devil went.'

'Ah, that wouldn't suit me; I must paint my picture,' said Lyon. 'But do
they mind your speaking of it? Some people who have a good ghost are
very proud of it, you know.'

What answer Colonel Capadose was on the point of making to this inquiry
our hero was not to learn, for at that moment their host had walked into
the room accompanied by three or four gentlemen. Lyon was conscious
that he was partly answered by the Colonel's not going on with the
subject. This however on the other hand was rendered natural by the fact
that one of the gentlemen appealed to him for an opinion on a point
under discussion, something to do with the everlasting history of the
day's run. To Lyon himself Mr. Ashmore began to talk, expressing his
regret at having had so little direct conversation with him as yet. The
topic that suggested itself was naturally that most closely connected
with the motive of the artist's visit. Lyon remarked that it was a great
disadvantage to him not to have had some preliminary acquaintance with
Sir David--in most cases he found that so important. But the present
sitter was so far advanced in life that there was doubtless no time to
lose. 'Oh, I can tell you all about him,' said Mr. Ashmore; and for half
an hour he told him a good deal. It was very interesting as well as very
eulogistic, and Lyon could see that he was a very nice old man, to have
endeared himself so to a son who was evidently not a gusher. At last he
got up--he said he must go to bed if he wished to be fresh for his work
in the morning. To which his host replied, 'Then you must take your
candle; the lights are out; I don't keep my servants up.'

In a moment Lyon had his glimmering taper in hand, and as he was leaving
the room (he did not disturb the others with a good-night; they were
absorbed in the lemon-squeezer and the soda-water cork) he remembered
other occasions on which he had made his way to bed alone through a
darkened country-house; such occasions had not been rare, for he was
almost always the first to leave the smoking-room. If he had not stayed
in houses conspicuously haunted he had, none the less (having the
artistic temperament), sometimes found the great black halls and
staircases rather 'creepy': there had been often a sinister effect, to
his imagination, in the sound of his tread in the long passages or the
way the winter moon peeped into tall windows on landings. It occurred to
him that if houses without supernatural pretensions could look so wicked
at night, the old corridors of Stayes would certainly give him a
sensation. He didn't know whether the proprietors were sensitive; very
often, as he had said to Colonel Capadose, people enjoyed the
impeachment. What determined him to speak, with a certain sense of the
risk, was the impression that the Colonel told queer stories. As he had
his hand on the door he said to Arthur Ashmore, 'I hope I shan't meet
any ghosts.'

'Any ghosts?'

'You ought to have some--in this fine old part.'

'We do our best, but _que voulez-vous_?' said Mr. Ashmore. 'I don't
think they like the hot-water pipes.'

'They remind them too much of their own climate? But haven't you a
haunted room--at the end of my passage?'

'Oh, there are stories--we try to keep them up.'

'I should like very much to sleep there,' Lyon said.

'Well, you can move there to-morrow if you like.'

'Perhaps I had better wait till I have done my work.'

'Very good; but you won't work there, you know. My father will sit to
you in his own apartments.'

'Oh, it isn't that; it's the fear of running away, like that gentleman
three days ago.'

'Three days ago? What gentleman?' Mr. Ashmore asked.

'The one who got urgent letters at breakfast and fled by the 10.20. Did
he stand more than one night?'

'I don't know what you are talking about. There was no such
gentleman--three days ago.'

'Ah, so much the better,' said Lyon, nodding good-night and departing.
He took his course, as he remembered it, with his wavering candle, and,
though he encountered a great many gruesome objects, safely reached the
passage out of which his room opened. In the complete darkness it seemed
to stretch away still further, but he followed it, for the curiosity of
the thing, to the end. He passed several doors with the name of the room
painted upon them, but he found nothing else. He was tempted to try the
last door--to look into the room of evil fame; but he reflected that
this would be indiscreet, since Colonel Capadose handled the brush--as a
_raconteur_--with such freedom. There might be a ghost and there might
not; but the Colonel himself, he inclined to think, was the most
mystifying figure in the house.

II

Lyon found Sir David Ashmore a capital subject and a very comfortable
sitter into the bargain. Moreover he was a very agreeable old man,
tremendously puckered but not in the least dim; and he wore exactly the
furred dressing-gown that Lyon would have chosen. He was proud of his
age but ashamed of his infirmities, which however he greatly exaggerated
and which did not prevent him from sitting there as submissive as if
portraiture in oils had been a branch of surgery. He demolished the
legend of his having feared the operation would be fatal, giving an
explanation which pleased our friend much better. He held that a
gentleman should be painted but once in his life--that it was eager and
fatuous to be hung up all over the place. That was good for women, who
made a pretty wall-pattern; but the male face didn't lend itself to
decorative repetition. The proper time for the likeness was at the last,
when the whole man was there--you got the totality of his experience.
Lyon could not reply that that period was not a real compendium--you had
to allow so for leakage; for there had been no crack in Sir David's
crystallisation. He spoke of his portrait as a plain map of the
country, to be consulted by his children in a case of uncertainty. A
proper map could be drawn up only when the country had been travelled.
He gave Lyon his mornings, till luncheon, and they talked of many
things, not neglecting, as a stimulus to gossip, the people in the
house. Now that he did not 'go out,' as he said, he saw much less of the
visitors at Stayes: people came and went whom he knew nothing about, and
he liked to hear Lyon describe them. The artist sketched with a fine
point and did not caricature, and it usually befell that when Sir David
did not know the sons and daughters he had known the fathers and
mothers. He was one of those terrible old gentlemen who are a repository
of antecedents. But in the case of the Capadose family, at whom they
arrived by an easy stage, his knowledge embraced two, or even three,
generations. General Capadose was an old crony, and he remembered his
father before him. The general was rather a smart soldier, but in
private life of too speculative a turn--always sneaking into the City to
put his money into some rotten thing. He married a girl who brought him
something and they had half a dozen children. He scarcely knew what had
become of the rest of them, except that one was in the Church and had
found preferment--wasn't he Dean of Rockingham? Clement, the fellow who
was at Stayes, had some military talent; he had served in the East, he
had married a pretty girl. He had been at Eton with his son, and he used
to come to Stayes in his holidays. Lately, coming back to England, he
had turned up with his wife again; that was before he--the old man--had
been put to grass. He was a taking dog, but he had a monstrous foible.

'A monstrous foible?' said Lyon.

'He's a thumping liar.'

Lyon's brush stopped short, while he repeated, for somehow the formula
startled him, 'A thumping liar?'

'You are very lucky not to have found it out.'

'Well, I confess I have noticed a romantic tinge----'

'Oh, it isn't always romantic. He'll lie about the time of day, about
the name of his hatter. It appears there are people like that.'

'Well, they are precious scoundrels,' Lyon declared, his voice trembling
a little with the thought of what Everina Brant had done with herself.

'Oh, not always,' said the old man. 'This fellow isn't in the least a
scoundrel. There is no harm in him and no bad intention; he doesn't
steal nor cheat nor gamble nor drink; he's very kind--he sticks to his
wife, is fond of his children. He simply can't give you a straight
answer.'

'Then everything he told me last night, I suppose, was mendacious: he
delivered himself of a series of the stiffest statements. They stuck,
when I tried to swallow them, but I never thought of so simple an
explanation.'

'No doubt he was in the vein,' Sir David went on. 'It's a natural
peculiarity--as you might limp or stutter or be left-handed. I believe
it comes and goes, like intermittent fever. My son tells me that his
friends usually understand it and don't haul him up--for the sake of his
wife.'

'Oh, his wife--his wife!' Lyon murmured, painting fast.

'I daresay she's used to it.'

'Never in the world, Sir David. How can she be used to it?'

'Why, my dear sir, when a woman's fond!--And don't they mostly handle
the long bow themselves? They are connoisseurs--they have a sympathy for
a fellow-performer.'

Lyon was silent a moment; he had no ground for denying that Mrs.
Capadose was attached to her husband. But after a little he rejoined:
'Oh, not this one! I knew her years ago--before her marriage; knew her
well and admired her. She was as clear as a bell.'

'I like her very much,' Sir David said, 'but I have seen her back him
up.'

Lyon considered Sir David for a moment, not in the light of a model.
'Are you very sure?'

The old man hesitated; then he answered, smiling, 'You're in love with
her.'

'Very likely. God knows I used to be!'

'She must help him out--she can't expose him.'

'She can hold her tongue,' Lyon remarked.

'Well, before you probably she will.'

'That's what I am curious to see.' And Lyon added, privately, 'Mercy on
us, what he must have made of her!' He kept this reflection to himself,
for he considered that he had sufficiently betrayed his state of mind
with regard to Mrs. Capadose. None the less it occupied him now
immensely, the question of how such a woman would arrange herself in
such a predicament. He watched her with an interest deeply quickened
when he mingled with the company; he had had his own troubles in life,
but he had rarely been so anxious about anything as he was now to see
what the loyalty of a wife and the infection of an example would have
made of an absolutely truthful mind. Oh, he held it as immutably
established that whatever other women might be prone to do she, of old,
had been perfectly incapable of a deviation. Even if she had not been
too simple to deceive she would have been too proud; and if she had not
had too much conscience she would have had too little eagerness. It was
the last thing she would have endured or condoned--the particular thing
she would not have forgiven. Did she sit in torment while her husband
turned his somersaults, or was she now too so perverse that she thought
it a fine thing to be striking at the expense of one's honour? It would
have taken a wondrous alchemy--working backwards, as it were--to produce
this latter result. Besides these two alternatives (that she suffered
tortures in silence and that she was so much in love that her husband's
humiliating idiosyncrasy seemed to her only an added richness--a proof
of life and talent), there was still the possibility that she had not
found him out, that she took his false pieces at his own valuation. A
little reflection rendered this hypothesis untenable; it was too evident
that the account he gave of things must repeatedly have contradicted her
own knowledge. Within an hour or two of his meeting them Lyon had seen
her confronted with that perfectly gratuitous invention about the profit
they had made off his early picture. Even then indeed she had not, so
far as he could see, smarted, and--but for the present he could only
contemplate the case.

Even if it had not been interfused, through his uneradicated tenderness
for Mrs. Capadose, with an element of suspense, the question would still
have presented itself to him as a very curious problem, for he had not
painted portraits during so many years without becoming something of a
psychologist. His inquiry was limited for the moment to the opportunity
that the following three days might yield, as the Colonel and his wife
were going on to another house. It fixed itself largely of course upon
the Colonel too--this gentleman was such a rare anomaly. Moreover it had
to go on very quickly. Lyon was too scrupulous to ask other people what
they thought of the business--he was too afraid of exposing the woman he
once had loved. It was probable also that light would come to him from
the talk of the rest of the company: the Colonel's queer habit, both as
it affected his own situation and as it affected his wife, would be a
familiar theme in any house in which he was in the habit of staying.
Lyon had not observed in the circles in which he visited any marked
abstention from comment on the singularities of their members. It
interfered with his progress that the Colonel hunted all day, while he
plied his brushes and chatted with Sir David; but a Sunday intervened
and that partly made it up. Mrs. Capadose fortunately did not hunt, and
when his work was over she was not inaccessible. He took a couple of
longish walks with her (she was fond of that), and beguiled her at tea
into a friendly nook in the hall. Regard her as he might he could not
make out to himself that she was consumed by a hidden shame; the sense
of being married to a man whose word had no worth was not, in her
spirit, so far as he could guess, the canker within the rose. Her mind
appeared to have nothing on it but its own placid frankness, and when he
looked into her eyes (deeply, as he occasionally permitted himself to
do), they had no uncomfortable consciousness. He talked to her again and
still again of the dear old days--reminded her of things that he had not
(before this reunion) the least idea that he remembered. Then he spoke
to her of her husband, praised his appearance, his talent for
conversation, professed to have felt a quick friendship for him and
asked (with an inward audacity at which he trembled a little) what
manner of man he was. 'What manner?' said Mrs. Capadose. 'Dear me, how
can one describe one's husband? I like him very much.'

'Ah, you have told me that already!' Lyon exclaimed, with exaggerated
ruefulness.

'Then why do you ask me again?' She added in a moment, as if she were so
happy that she could afford to take pity on him, 'He is everything
that's good and kind. He's a soldier--and a gentleman--and a dear! He
hasn't a fault. And he has great ability.'

'Yes; he strikes one as having great ability. But of course I can't
think him a dear.'

'I don't care what you think him!' said Mrs. Capadose, looking, it
seemed to him, as she smiled, handsomer than he had ever seen her. She
was either deeply cynical or still more deeply impenetrable, and he had
little prospect of winning from her the intimation that he longed
for--some hint that it had come over her that after all she had better
have married a man who was not a by-word for the most contemptible, the
least heroic, of vices. Had she not seen--had she not felt--the smile go
round when her husband executed some especially characteristic
conversational caper? How could a woman of her quality endure that day
after day, year after year, except by her quality's altering? But he
would believe in the alteration only when he should have heard _her_
lie. He was fascinated by his problem and yet half exasperated, and he
asked himself all kinds of questions. Did she not lie, after all, when
she let his falsehoods pass without a protest? Was not her life a
perpetual complicity, and did she not aid and abet him by the simple
fact that she was not disgusted with him? Then again perhaps she _was_
disgusted and it was the mere desperation of her pride that had given
her an inscrutable mask. Perhaps she protested in private, passionately;
perhaps every night, in their own apartments, after the day's hideous
performance, she made him the most scorching scene. But if such scenes
were of no avail and he took no more trouble to cure himself, how could
she regard him, and after so many years of marriage too, with the
perfectly artless complacency that Lyon had surprised in her in the
course of the first day's dinner? If our friend had not been in love
with her he could have taken the diverting view of the Colonel's
delinquencies; but as it was they turned to the tragical in his mind,
even while he had a sense that his solicitude might also have been
laughed at.

The observation of these three days showed him that if Capadose was an
abundant he was not a malignant liar and that his fine faculty exercised
itself mainly on subjects of small direct importance. 'He is the liar
platonic,' he said to himself; 'he is disinterested, he doesn't operate
with a hope of gain or with a desire to injure. It is art for art and he
is prompted by the love of beauty. He has an inner vision of what might
have been, of what ought to be, and he helps on the good cause by the
simple substitution of a _nuance_. He paints, as it were, and so do I!'
His manifestations had a considerable variety, but a family likeness ran
through them, which consisted mainly of their singular futility. It was
this that made them offensive; they encumbered the field of
conversation, took up valuable space, converted it into a sort of
brilliant sun-shot fog. For a fib told under pressure a convenient place
can usually be found, as for a person who presents himself with an
author's order at the first night of a play. But the supererogatory lie
is the gentleman without a voucher or a ticket who accommodates himself
with a stool in the passage.

In one particular Lyon acquitted his successful rival; it had puzzled
him that irrepressible as he was he had not got into a mess in the
service. But he perceived that he respected the service--that august
institution was sacred from his depredations. Moreover though there was
a great deal of swagger in his talk it was, oddly enough, rarely swagger
about his military exploits. He had a passion for the chase, he had
followed it in far countries and some of his finest flowers were
reminiscences of lonely danger and escape. The more solitary the scene
the bigger of course the flower. A new acquaintance, with the Colonel,
always received the tribute of a bouquet: that generalisation Lyon very
promptly made. And this extraordinary man had inconsistencies and
unexpected lapses--lapses into flat veracity. Lyon recognised what Sir
David had told him, that his aberrations came in fits or periods--that
he would sometimes keep the truce of God for a month at a time. The
muse breathed upon him at her pleasure; she often left him alone. He
would neglect the finest openings and then set sail in the teeth of the
breeze. As a general thing he affirmed the false rather than denied the
true; yet this proportion was sometimes strikingly reversed. Very often
he joined in the laugh against himself--he admitted that he was trying
it on and that a good many of his anecdotes had an experimental
character. Still he never completely retracted nor retreated--he dived
and came up in another place. Lyon divined that he was capable at
intervals of defending his position with violence, but only when it was
a very bad one. Then he might easily be dangerous--then he would hit out
and become calumnious. Such occasions would test his wife's
equanimity--Lyon would have liked to see her there. In the smoking-room
and elsewhere the company, so far as it was composed of his familiars,
had an hilarious protest always at hand; but among the men who had known
him long his rich tone was an old story, so old that they had ceased to
talk about it, and Lyon did not care, as I have said, to elicit the
judgment of those who might have shared his own surprise.

The oddest thing of all was that neither surprise nor familiarity
prevented the Colonel's being liked; his largest drafts on a sceptical
attention passed for an overflow of life and gaiety--almost of good
looks. He was fond of portraying his bravery and used a very big brush,
and yet he was unmistakably brave. He was a capital rider and shot, in
spite of his fund of anecdote illustrating these accomplishments: in
short he was very nearly as clever and his career had been very nearly
as wonderful as he pretended. His best quality however remained that
indiscriminate sociability which took interest and credulity for granted
and about which he bragged least. It made him cheap, it made him even in
a manner vulgar; but it was so contagious that his listener was more or
less on his side as against the probabilities. It was a private
reflection of Oliver Lyon's that he not only lied but made one feel
one's self a bit of a liar, even (or especially) if one contradicted
him. In the evening, at dinner and afterwards, our friend watched his
wife's face to see if some faint shade or spasm never passed over it.
But she showed nothing, and the wonder was that when he spoke she almost
always listened. That was her pride: she wished not to be even suspected
of not facing the music. Lyon had none the less an importunate vision of
a veiled figure coming the next day in the dusk to certain places to
repair the Colonel's ravages, as the relatives of kleptomaniacs
punctually call at the shops that have suffered from their pilferings.

'I must apologise, of course it wasn't true, I hope no harm is done, it
is only his incorrigible----' Oh, to hear that woman's voice in that
deep abasement! Lyon had no nefarious plan, no conscious wish to
practise upon her shame or her loyalty; but he did say to himself that
he should like to bring her round to feel that there would have been
more dignity in a union with a certain other person. He even dreamed of
the hour when, with a burning face, she would ask _him_ not to take it
up. Then he should be almost consoled--he would be magnanimous.

Lyon finished his picture and took his departure, after having worked
in a glow of interest which made him believe in his success, until he
found he had pleased every one, especially Mr. and Mrs. Ashmore, when he
began to be sceptical. The party at any rate changed: Colonel and Mrs.
Capadose went their way. He was able to say to himself however that his
separation from the lady was not so much an end as a beginning, and he
called on her soon after his return to town. She had told him the hours
she was at home--she seemed to like him. If she liked him why had she
not married him or at any rate why was she not sorry she had not? If she
was sorry she concealed it too well. Lyon's curiosity on this point may
strike the reader as fatuous, but something must be allowed to a
disappointed man. He did not ask much after all; not that she should
love him to-day or that she should allow him to tell her that he loved
her, but only that she should give him some sign she was sorry. Instead
of this, for the present, she contented herself with exhibiting her
little daughter to him. The child was beautiful and had the prettiest
eyes of innocence he had ever seen: which did not prevent him from
wondering whether she told horrid fibs. This idea gave him much
entertainment--the picture of the anxiety with which her mother would
watch as she grew older for the symptoms of heredity. That was a nice
occupation for Everina Brant! Did she lie to the child herself, about
her father--was that necessary, when she pressed her daughter to her
bosom, to cover up his tracks? Did he control himself before the little
girl--so that she might not hear him say things she knew to be other
than he said? Lyon doubted this: his genius would be too strong for
him, and the only safety for the child would be in her being too stupid
to analyse. One couldn't judge yet--she was too young. If she should
grow up clever she would be sure to tread in his steps--a delightful
improvement in her mother's situation! Her little face was not shifty,
but neither was her father's big one: so that proved nothing.

Lyon reminded his friends more than once of their promise that Amy
should sit to him, and it was only a question of his leisure. The desire
grew in him to paint the Colonel also--an operation from which he
promised himself a rich private satisfaction. He would draw him out, he
would set him up in that totality about which he had talked with Sir
David, and none but the initiated would know. They, however, would rank
the picture high, and it would be indeed six rows deep--a masterpiece of
subtle characterisation, of legitimate treachery. He had dreamed for
years of producing something which should bear the stamp of the
psychologist as well as of the painter, and here at last was his
subject. It was a pity it was not better, but that was not _his_ fault.
It was his impression that already no one drew the Colonel out more than
he, and he did it not only by instinct but on a plan. There were moments
when he was almost frightened at the success of his plan--the poor
gentleman went so terribly far. He would pull up some day, look at Lyon
between the eyes--guess he was being played upon--which would lead to
his wife's guessing it also. Not that Lyon cared much for that however,
so long as she failed to suppose (as she must) that she was a part of
his joke. He formed such a habit now of going to see her of a Sunday
afternoon that he was angry when she went out of town. This occurred
often, as the couple were great visitors and the Colonel was always
looking for sport, which he liked best when it could be had at other
people's expense. Lyon would have supposed that this sort of life was
particularly little to her taste, for he had an idea that it was in
country-houses that her husband came out strongest. To let him go off
without her, not to see him expose himself--that ought properly to have
been a relief and a luxury to her. She told Lyon in fact that she
preferred staying at home; but she neglected to say it was because in
other people's houses she was on the rack: the reason she gave was that
she liked so to be with the child. It was not perhaps criminal to draw
such a bow, but it was vulgar: poor Lyon was delighted when he arrived
at that formula. Certainly some day too he would cross the line--he
would become a noxious animal. Yes, in the meantime he was vulgar, in
spite of his talents, his fine person, his impunity. Twice, by
exception, toward the end of the winter, when he left town for a few
days' hunting, his wife remained at home. Lyon had not yet reached the
point of asking himself whether the desire not to miss two of his visits
had something to do with her immobility. That inquiry would perhaps have
been more in place later, when he began to paint the child and she
always came with her. But it was not in her to give the wrong name, to
pretend, and Lyon could see that she had the maternal passion, in spite
of the bad blood in the little girl's veins.

She came inveterately, though Lyon multiplied the sittings: Amy was
never entrusted to the governess or the maid. He had knocked off poor
old Sir David in ten days, but the portrait of the simple-faced child
bade fair to stretch over into the following year. He asked for sitting
after sitting, and it would have struck any one who might have witnessed
the affair that he was wearing the little girl out. He knew better
however and Mrs. Capadose also knew: they were present together at the
long intermissions he gave her, when she left her pose and roamed about
the great studio, amusing herself with its curiosities, playing with the
old draperies and costumes, having unlimited leave to handle. Then her
mother and Mr. Lyon sat and talked; he laid aside his brushes and leaned
back in his chair; he always gave her tea. What Mrs. Capadose did not
know was the way that during these weeks he neglected other orders:
women have no faculty of imagination with regard to a man's work beyond
a vague idea that it doesn't matter. In fact Lyon put off everything and
made several celebrities wait. There were half-hours of silence, when he
plied his brushes, during which he was mainly conscious that Everina was
sitting there. She easily fell into that if he did not insist on
talking, and she was not embarrassed nor bored by it. Sometimes she took
up a book--there were plenty of them about; sometimes, a little way off,
in her chair, she watched his progress (though without in the least
advising or correcting), as if she cared for every stroke that
represented her daughter. These strokes were occasionally a little wild;
he was thinking so much more of his heart than of his hand. He was not
more embarrassed than she was, but he was agitated: it was as if in the
sittings (for the child, too, was beautifully quiet) something was
growing between them or had already grown--a tacit confidence, an
inexpressible secret. He felt it that way; but after all he could not be
sure that she did. What he wanted her to do for him was very little; it
was not even to confess that she was unhappy. He would be
superabundantly gratified if she should simply let him know, even by a
silent sign, that she recognised that with him her life would have been
finer. Sometimes he guessed--his presumption went so far--that he might
see this sign in her contentedly sitting there.

At last he broached the question of painting the Colonel: it was now
very late in the season--there would be little time before the general
dispersal. He said they must make the most of it; the great thing was to
begin; then in the autumn, with the resumption of their London life,
they could go forward. Mrs. Capadose objected to this that she really
could not consent to accept another present of such value. Lyon had
given her the portrait of herself of old, and he had seen what they had
had the indelicacy to do with it. Now he had offered her this beautiful
memorial of the child--beautiful it would evidently be when it was
finished, if he could ever satisfy himself; a precious possession which
they would cherish for ever. But his generosity must stop there--they
couldn't be so tremendously 'beholden' to him. They couldn't order the
picture--of course he would understand that, without her explaining: it
was a luxury beyond their reach, for they knew the great prices he
received. Besides, what had they ever done--what above all had _she_
ever done, that he should overload them with benefits? No, he was too
dreadfully good; it was really impossible that Clement should sit. Lyon
listened to her without protest, without interruption, while he bent
forward at his work, and at last he said: 'Well, if you won't take it
why not let him sit for me for my own pleasure and profit? Let it be a
favour, a service I ask of him. It will do me a lot of good to paint him
and the picture will remain in my hands.'

'How will it do you a lot of good?' Mrs. Capadose asked.

'Why, he's such a rare model--such an interesting subject. He has such
an expressive face. It will teach me no end of things.'

'Expressive of what?' said Mrs. Capadose.

'Why, of his nature.'

'And do you want to paint his nature?'

'Of course I do. That's what a great portrait gives you, and I shall
make the Colonel's a great one. It will put me up high. So you see my
request is eminently interested.'

'How can you be higher than you are?'

'Oh, I'm insatiable! Do consent,' said Lyon.

'Well, his nature is very noble,' Mrs. Capadose remarked.

'Ah, trust me, I shall bring it out!' Lyon exclaimed, feeling a little
ashamed of himself.

Mrs. Capadose said before she went away that her husband would probably
comply with his invitation, but she added, 'Nothing would induce me to
let you pry into _me_ that way!'

'Oh, you,' Lyon laughed--'I could do you in the dark!'

The Colonel shortly afterwards placed his leisure at the painter's
disposal and by the end of July had paid him several visits. Lyon was
disappointed neither in the quality of his sitter nor in the degree to
which he himself rose to the occasion; he felt really confident that he
should produce a fine thing. He was in the humour; he was charmed with
his _motif_ and deeply interested in his problem. The only point that
troubled him was the idea that when he should send his picture to the
Academy he should not be able to give the title, for the catalogue,
simply as 'The Liar.' However, it little mattered, for he had now
determined that this character should be perceptible even to the meanest
intelligence--as overtopping as it had become to his own sense in the
living man. As he saw nothing else in the Colonel to-day, so he gave
himself up to the joy of painting nothing else. How he did it he could
not have told you, but it seemed to him that the mystery of how to do it
was revealed to him afresh every time he sat down to his work. It was in
the eyes and it was in the mouth, it was in every line of the face and
every fact of the attitude, in the indentation of the chin, in the way
the hair was planted, the moustache was twisted, the smile came and
went, the breath rose and fell. It was in the way he looked out at a
bamboozled world in short--the way he would look out for ever. There
were half a dozen portraits in Europe that Lyon rated as supreme; he
regarded them as immortal, for they were as perfectly preserved as they
were consummately painted. It was to this small exemplary group that he
aspired to annex the canvas on which he was now engaged. One of the
productions that helped to compose it was the magnificent Moroni of the
National Gallery--the young tailor, in the white jacket, at his board
with his shears. The Colonel was not a tailor, nor was Moroni's model,
unlike many tailors, a liar; but as regards the masterly clearness with
which the individual should be rendered his work would be on the same
line as that. He had to a degree in which he had rarely had it before
the satisfaction of feeling life grow and grow under his brush. The
Colonel, as it turned out, liked to sit and he liked to talk while he
was sitting: which was very fortunate, as his talk largely constituted
Lyon's inspiration. Lyon put into practice that idea of drawing him out
which he had been nursing for so many weeks: he could not possibly have
been in a better relation to him for the purpose. He encouraged,
beguiled, excited him, manifested an unfathomable credulity, and his
only interruptions were when the Colonel did not respond to it. He had
his intermissions, his hours of sterility, and then Lyon felt that the
picture also languished. The higher his companion soared, the more
gyrations he executed, in the blue, the better he painted; he couldn't
make his flights long enough. He lashed him on when he flagged; his
apprehension became great at moments that the Colonel would discover his
game. But he never did, apparently; he basked and expanded in the fine
steady light of the painter's attention. In this way the picture grew
very fast; it was astonishing what a short business it was, compared
with the little girl's. By the fifth of August it was pretty well
finished: that was the date of the last sitting the Colonel was for the
present able to give, as he was leaving town the next day with his wife.
Lyon was amply content--he saw his way so clear: he should be able to do
at his convenience what remained, with or without his friend's
attendance. At any rate, as there was no hurry, he would let the thing
stand over till his own return to London, in November, when he would
come back to it with a fresh eye. On the Colonel's asking him if his
wife might come and see it the next day, if she should find a
minute--this was so greatly her desire--Lyon begged as a special favour
that she would wait: he was so far from satisfied as yet. This was the
repetition of a proposal Mrs. Capadose had made on the occasion of his
last visit to her, and he had then asked for a delay--declared that he
was by no means content. He was really delighted, and he was again a
little ashamed of himself.

By the fifth of August the weather was very warm, and on that day, while
the Colonel sat straight and gossiped, Lyon opened for the sake of
ventilation a little subsidiary door which led directly from his studio
into the garden and sometimes served as an entrance and an exit for
models and for visitors of the humbler sort, and as a passage for
canvases, frames, packing-boxes and other professional gear. The main
entrance was through the house and his own apartments, and this approach
had the charming effect of admitting you first to a high gallery, from
which a crooked picturesque staircase enabled you to descend to the
wide, decorated, encumbered room. The view of this room, beneath them,
with all its artistic ingenuities and the objects of value that Lyon had
collected, never failed to elicit exclamations of delight from persons
stepping into the gallery. The way from the garden was plainer and at
once more practicable and more private. Lyon's domain, in St. John's
Wood, was not vast, but when the door stood open of a summer's day it
offered a glimpse of flowers and trees, you smelt something sweet and
you heard the birds. On this particular morning the side-door had been
found convenient by an unannounced visitor, a youngish woman who stood
in the room before the Colonel perceived her and whom he perceived
before she was noticed by his friend. She was very quiet, and she looked
from one of the men to the other. 'Oh, dear, here's another!' Lyon
exclaimed, as soon as his eyes rested on her. She belonged, in fact, to
a somewhat importunate class--the model in search of employment, and she
explained that she had ventured to come straight in, that way, because
very often when she went to call upon gentlemen the servants played her
tricks, turned her off and wouldn't take in her name.

'But how did you get into the garden?' Lyon asked.

'The gate was open, sir--the servants' gate. The butcher's cart was
there.'

'The butcher ought to have closed it,' said Lyon.

'Then you don't require me, sir?' the lady continued.

Lyon went on with his painting; he had given her a sharp look at first,
but now his eyes lighted on her no more. The Colonel, however, examined
her with interest. She was a person of whom you could scarcely say
whether being young she looked old or old she looked young; she had at
any rate evidently rounded several of the corners of life and had a face
that was rosy but that somehow failed to suggest freshness. Nevertheless
she was pretty and even looked as if at one time she might have sat for
the complexion. She wore a hat with many feathers, a dress with many
bugles, long black gloves, encircled with silver bracelets, and very bad
shoes. There was something about her that was not exactly of the
governess out of place nor completely of the actress seeking an
engagement, but that savoured of an interrupted profession or even of a
blighted career. She was rather soiled and tarnished, and after she had
been in the room a few moments the air, or at any rate the nostril,
became acquainted with a certain alcoholic waft. She was unpractised in
the _h_, and when Lyon at last thanked her and said he didn't want
her--he was doing nothing for which she could be useful--she replied
with rather a wounded manner, 'Well, you know you _'ave_ 'ad me!'

'I don't remember you,' Lyon answered.

'Well, I daresay the people that saw your pictures do! I haven't much
time, but I thought I would look in.'

'I am much obliged to you.'

'If ever you should require me, if you just send me a postcard----'

'I never send postcards,' said Lyon.

'Oh well, I should value a private letter! Anything to Miss Geraldine,
Mortimer Terrace Mews, Notting 'ill----'

'Very good; I'll remember,' said Lyon.

Miss Geraldine lingered. 'I thought I'd just stop, on the chance.'

'I'm afraid I can't hold out hopes, I'm so busy with portraits,' Lyon
continued.

'Yes; I see you are. I wish I was in the gentleman's place.'

'I'm afraid in that case it wouldn't look like me,' said the Colonel,
laughing.

'Oh, of course it couldn't compare--it wouldn't be so 'andsome! But I do
hate them portraits!' Miss Geraldine declared. 'It's so much bread out
of our mouths.'

'Well, there are many who can't paint them,' Lyon suggested,
comfortingly.

'Oh, I've sat to the very first--and only to the first! There's many
that couldn't do anything without me.'

'I'm glad you're in such demand.' Lyon was beginning to be bored and he
added that he wouldn't detain her--he would send for her in case of
need.

'Very well; remember it's the Mews--more's the pity! You don't sit so
well as _us_!' Miss Geraldine pursued, looking at the Colonel. 'If _you_
should require me, sir----'

'You put him out; you embarrass him,' said Lyon.

'Embarrass him, oh gracious!' the visitor cried, with a laugh which
diffused a fragrance. 'Perhaps _you_ send postcards, eh?' she went on to
the Colonel; and then she retreated with a wavering step. She passed out
into the garden as she had come.

'How very dreadful--she's drunk!' said Lyon. He was painting hard, but
he looked up, checking himself: Miss Geraldine, in the open doorway, had
thrust back her head.

'Yes, I do hate it--that sort of thing!' she cried with an explosion of
mirth which confirmed Lyon's declaration. And then she disappeared.

'What sort of thing--what does she mean?' the Colonel asked.

'Oh, my painting you, when I might be painting her.'

'And have you ever painted her?'

'Never in the world; I have never seen her. She is quite mistaken.'

The Colonel was silent a moment; then he remarked, 'She was very
pretty--ten years ago.'

'I daresay, but she's quite ruined. For me the least drop too much
spoils them; I shouldn't care for her at all.'

'My dear fellow, she's not a model,' said the Colonel, laughing.

'To-day, no doubt, she's not worthy of the name; but she has been one.'

'_Jamais de la vie!_ That's all a pretext.'

'A pretext?' Lyon pricked up his ears--he began to wonder what was
coming now.

'She didn't want you--she wanted me.'

'I noticed she paid you some attention. What does she want of you?'

'Oh, to do me an ill turn. She hates me--lots of women do. She's
watching me--she follows me.'

Lyon leaned back in his chair--he didn't believe a word of this. He was
all the more delighted with it and with the Colonel's bright, candid
manner. The story had bloomed, fragrant, on the spot. 'My dear Colonel!'
he murmured, with friendly interest and commiseration.

'I was annoyed when she came in--but I wasn't startled,' his sitter
continued.

'You concealed it very well, if you were.'

'Ah, when one has been through what I have! To-day however I confess I
was half prepared. I have seen her hanging about--she knows my
movements. She was near my house this morning--she must have followed
me.'

'But who is she then--with such a _toupet_?'

'Yes, she has that,' said the Colonel; 'but as you observe she was
primed. Still, there was a cheek, as they say, in her coming in. Oh,
she's a bad one! She isn't a model and she never was; no doubt she has
known some of those women and picked up their form. She had hold of a
friend of mine ten years ago--a stupid young gander who might have been
left to be plucked but whom I was obliged to take an interest in for
family reasons. It's a long story--I had really forgotten all about it.
She's thirty-seven if she's a day. I cut in and made him get rid of
her--I sent her about her business. She knew it was me she had to thank.
She has never forgiven me--I think she's off her head. Her name isn't
Geraldine at all and I doubt very much if that's her address.'

'Ah, what is her name?' Lyon asked, most attentive. The details always
began to multiply, to abound, when once his companion was well
launched--they flowed forth in battalions.

'It's Pearson--Harriet Pearson; but she used to call herself
Grenadine--wasn't that a rum appellation? Grenadine--Geraldine--the jump
was easy.' Lyon was charmed with the promptitude of this response, and
his interlocutor went on: 'I hadn't thought of her for years--I had
quite lost sight of her. I don't know what her idea is, but practically
she's harmless. As I came in I thought I saw her a little way up the
road. She must have found out I come here and have arrived before me. I
daresay--or rather I'm sure--she is waiting for me there now.'

'Hadn't you better have protection?' Lyon asked, laughing.

'The best protection is five shillings--I'm willing to go that length.
Unless indeed she has a bottle of vitriol. But they only throw vitriol
on the men who have deceived them, and I never deceived her--I told her
the first time I saw her that it wouldn't do. Oh, if she's there we'll
walk a little way together and talk it over and, as I say, I'll go as
far as five shillings.'

'Well,' said Lyon, 'I'll contribute another five.' He felt that this was
little to pay for his entertainment.

That entertainment was interrupted however for the time by the Colonel's
departure. Lyon hoped for a letter recounting the fictive sequel; but
apparently his brilliant sitter did not operate with the pen. At any
rate he left town without writing; they had taken a rendezvous for three
months later. Oliver Lyon always passed the holidays in the same way;
during the first weeks he paid a visit to his elder brother, the happy
possessor, in the south of England, of a rambling old house with formal
gardens, in which he delighted, and then he went abroad--usually to
Italy or Spain. This year he carried out his custom after taking a last
look at his all but finished work and feeling as nearly pleased with it
as he ever felt with the translation of the idea by the hand--always, as
it seemed to him, a pitiful compromise. One yellow afternoon, in the
country, as he was smoking his pipe on one of the old terraces he was
seized with the desire to see it again and do two or three things more
to it: he had thought of it so often while he lounged there. The impulse
was too strong to be dismissed, and though he expected to return to town
in the course of another week he was unable to face the delay. To look
at the picture for five minutes would be enough--it would clear up
certain questions which hummed in his brain; so that the next morning,
to give himself this luxury, he took the train for London. He sent no
word in advance; he would lunch at his club and probably return into
Sussex by the 5.45.

In St. John's Wood the tide of human life flows at no time very fast,
and in the first days of September Lyon found unmitigated emptiness in
the straight sunny roads where the little plastered garden-walls, with
their incommunicative doors, looked slightly Oriental. There was
definite stillness in his own house, to which he admitted himself by his
pass-key, having a theory that it was well sometimes to take servants
unprepared. The good woman who was mainly in charge and who cumulated
the functions of cook and housekeeper was, however, quickly summoned by
his step, and (he cultivated frankness of intercourse with his
domestics) received him without the confusion of surprise. He told her
that she needn't mind the place being not quite straight, he had only
come up for a few hours--he should be busy in the studio. To this she
replied that he was just in time to see a lady and a gentleman who were
there at the moment--they had arrived five minutes before. She had told
them he was away from home but they said it was all right; they only
wanted to look at a picture and would be very careful of everything. 'I
hope it is all right, sir,' the housekeeper concluded. 'The gentleman
says he's a sitter and he gave me his name--rather an odd name; I think
it's military. The lady's a very fine lady, sir; at any rate there they
are.'

'Oh, it's all right,' Lyon said, the identity of his visitors being
clear. The good woman couldn't know, for she usually had little to do
with the comings and goings; his man, who showed people in and out, had
accompanied him to the country. He was a good deal surprised at Mrs.
Capadose's having come to see her husband's portrait when she knew that
the artist himself wished her to forbear; but it was a familiar truth to
him that she was a woman of a high spirit. Besides, perhaps the lady was
not Mrs. Capadose; the Colonel might have brought some inquisitive
friend, a person who wanted a portrait of _her_ husband. What were they
doing in town, at any rate, at that moment? Lyon made his way to the
studio with a certain curiosity; he wondered vaguely what his friends
were 'up to.' He pushed aside the curtain that hung in the door of
communication--the door opening upon the gallery which it had been found
convenient to construct at the time the studio was added to the house.
When I say he pushed it aside I should amend my phrase; he laid his hand
upon it, but at that moment he was arrested by a very singular sound. It
came from the floor of the room beneath him and it startled him
extremely, consisting apparently as it did of a passionate wail--a sort
of smothered shriek--accompanied by a violent burst of tears. Oliver
Lyon listened intently a moment, and then he passed out upon the
balcony, which was covered with an old thick Moorish rug. His step was
noiseless, though he had not endeavoured to make it so, and after that
first instant he found himself profiting irresistibly by the accident of
his not having attracted the attention of the two persons in the studio,
who were some twenty feet below him. In truth they were so deeply and so
strangely engaged that their unconsciousness of observation was
explained. The scene that took place before Lyon's eyes was one of the
most extraordinary they had ever rested upon. Delicacy and the failure
to comprehend kept him at first from interrupting it--for what he saw
was a woman who had thrown herself in a flood of tears on her
companion's bosom--and these influences were succeeded after a minute
(the minutes were very few and very short) by a definite motive which
presently had the force to make him step back behind the curtain. I may
add that it also had the force to make him avail himself for further
contemplation of a crevice formed by his gathering together the two
halves of the _portière_. He was perfectly aware of what he was
about--he was for the moment an eavesdropper, a spy; but he was also
aware that a very odd business, in which his confidence had been trifled
with, was going forward, and that if in a measure it didn't concern him,
in a measure it very definitely did. His observation, his reflections,
accomplished themselves in a flash.

His visitors were in the middle of the room; Mrs. Capadose clung to her
husband, weeping, sobbing as if her heart would break. Her distress was
horrible to Oliver Lyon but his astonishment was greater than his horror
when he heard the Colonel respond to it by the words, vehemently
uttered, 'Damn him, damn him, damn him!' What in the world had happened?
Why was she sobbing and whom was he damning? What had happened, Lyon saw
the next instant, was that the Colonel had finally rummaged out his
unfinished portrait (he knew the corner where the artist usually placed
it, out of the way, with its face to the wall) and had set it up before
his wife on an empty easel. She had looked at it a few moments and
then--apparently--what she saw in it had produced an explosion of dismay
and resentment. She was too busy sobbing and the Colonel was too busy
holding her and reiterating his objurgation, to look round or look up.
The scene was so unexpected to Lyon that he could not take it, on the
spot, as a proof of the triumph of his hand--of a tremendous hit: he
could only wonder what on earth was the matter. The idea of the triumph
came a little later. Yet he could see the portrait from where he stood;
he was startled with its look of life--he had not thought it so
masterly. Mrs. Capadose flung herself away from her husband--she dropped
into the nearest chair, buried her face in her arms, leaning on a table.
Her weeping suddenly ceased to be audible, but she shuddered there as if
she were overwhelmed with anguish and shame. Her husband remained a
moment staring at the picture; then he went to her, bent over her, took
hold of her again, soothed her. 'What is it, darling, what the devil is
it?' he demanded.

Lyon heard her answer. 'It's cruel--oh, it's too cruel!'

'Damn him--damn him--damn him!' the Colonel repeated.

'It's all there--it's all there!' Mrs. Capadose went on.

'Hang it, what's all there?'

'Everything there oughtn't to be--everything he has seen--it's too
dreadful!'

'Everything he has seen? Why, ain't I a good-looking fellow? He has made
me rather handsome.'

Mrs. Capadose had sprung up again; she had darted another glance at the
painted betrayal. 'Handsome? Hideous, hideous! Not that--never, never!'

'Not _what_, in heaven's name?' the Colonel almost shouted. Lyon could
see his flushed, bewildered face.

'What he has made of you--what you know! _He_ knows--he has seen. Every
one will know--every one will see. Fancy that thing in the Academy!'

'You're going wild, darling; but if you hate it so it needn't go.'

'Oh, he'll send it--it's so good! Come away--come away!' Mrs. Capadose
wailed, seizing her husband.

'It's so good?' the poor man cried.

'Come away--come away,' she only repeated; and she turned toward the
staircase that ascended to the gallery.

'Not that way--not through the house, in the state you're in,' Lyon
heard the Colonel object. 'This way--we can pass,' he added; and he drew
his wife to the small door that opened into the garden. It was bolted,
but he pushed the bolt and opened the door. She passed out quickly, but
he stood there looking back into the room. 'Wait for me a moment!' he
cried out to her; and with an excited stride he re-entered the studio.
He came up to the picture again, and again he stood looking at it. 'Damn
him--damn him--damn him!' he broke out once more. It was not clear to
Lyon whether this malediction had for its object the original or the
painter of the portrait. The Colonel turned away and moved rapidly about
the room, as if he were looking for something; Lyon was unable for the
instant to guess his intention. Then the artist said to himself, below
his breath, 'He's going to do it a harm!' His first impulse was to rush
down and stop him; but he paused, with the sound of Everina Brant's sobs
still in his ears. The Colonel found what he was looking for--found it
among some odds and ends on a small table and rushed back with it to the
easel. At one and the same moment Lyon perceived that the object he had
seized was a small Eastern dagger and that he had plunged it into the
canvas. He seemed animated by a sudden fury, for with extreme vigour of
hand he dragged the instrument down (Lyon knew it to have no very fine
edge) making a long, abominable gash. Then he plucked it out and dashed
it again several times into the face of the likeness, exactly as if he
were stabbing a human victim: it had the oddest effect--that of a sort
of figurative suicide. In a few seconds more the Colonel had tossed the
dagger away--he looked at it as he did so, as if he expected it to reek
with blood--and hurried out of the place, closing the door after him.

The strangest part of all was--as will doubtless appear--that Oliver
Lyon made no movement to save his picture. But he did not feel as if he
were losing it or cared not if he were, so much more did he feel that he
was gaining a certitude. His old friend _was_ ashamed of her husband,
and he had made her so, and he had scored a great success, even though
the picture had been reduced to rags. The revelation excited him so--as
indeed the whole scene did--that when he came down the steps after the
Colonel had gone he trembled with his happy agitation; he was dizzy and
had to sit down a moment. The portrait had a dozen jagged wounds--the
Colonel literally had hacked it to death. Lyon left it where it was,
never touched it, scarcely looked at it; he only walked up and down his
studio, still excited, for an hour. At the end of this time his good
woman came to recommend that he should have some luncheon; there was a
passage under the staircase from the offices.

'Ah, the lady and gentleman have gone, sir? I didn't hear them.'

'Yes; they went by the garden.'

But she had stopped, staring at the picture on the easel. 'Gracious, how
you _'ave_ served it, sir!'

Lyon imitated the Colonel. 'Yes, I cut it up--in a fit of disgust.'

'Mercy, after all your trouble! Because they weren't pleased, sir?'

'Yes; they weren't pleased.'

'Well, they must be very grand! Blessed if I would!'

'Have it chopped up; it will do to light fires,' Lyon said.

He returned to the country by the 3.30 and a few days later passed over
to France. During the two months that he was absent from England he
expected something--he could hardly have said what; a manifestation of
some sort on the Colonel's part. Wouldn't he write, wouldn't he explain,
wouldn't he take for granted Lyon had discovered the way he had, as the
cook said, served him and deem it only decent to take pity in some
fashion or other on his mystification? Would he plead guilty or would he
repudiate suspicion? The latter course would be difficult and make a
considerable draft upon his genius, in view of the certain testimony of
Lyon's housekeeper, who had admitted the visitors and would establish
the connection between their presence and the violence wrought. Would
the Colonel proffer some apology or some amends, or would any word from
him be only a further expression of that destructive petulance which our
friend had seen his wife so suddenly and so potently communicate to him?
He would have either to declare that he had not touched the picture or
to admit that he had, and in either case he would have to tell a fine
story. Lyon was impatient for the story and, as no letter came,
disappointed that it was not produced. His impatience however was much
greater in respect to Mrs. Capadose's version, if version there was to
be; for certainly that would be the real test, would show how far she
would go for her husband, on the one side, or for him, Oliver Lyon, on
the other. He could scarcely wait to see what line she would take;
whether she would simply adopt the Colonel's, whatever it might be. He
wanted to draw her out without waiting, to get an idea in advance. He
wrote to her, to this end, from Venice, in the tone of their
established friendship, asking for news, narrating his wanderings,
hoping they should soon meet in town and not saying a word about the
picture. Day followed day, after the time, and he received no answer;
upon which he reflected that she couldn't trust herself to write--was
still too much under the influence of the emotion produced by his
'betrayal.' Her husband had espoused that emotion and she had espoused
the action he had taken in consequence of it, and it was a complete
rupture and everything was at an end. Lyon considered this prospect
rather ruefully, at the same time that he thought it deplorable that
such charming people should have put themselves so grossly in the wrong.
He was at last cheered, though little further enlightened, by the
arrival of a letter, brief but breathing good-humour and hinting neither
at a grievance nor at a bad conscience. The most interesting part of it
to Lyon was the postscript, which consisted of these words: 'I have a
confession to make to you. We were in town for a couple of days, the 1st
of September, and I took the occasion to defy your authority--it was
very bad of me but I couldn't help it. I made Clement take me to your
studio--I wanted so dreadfully to see what you had done with him, your
wishes to the contrary notwithstanding. We made your servants let us in
and I took a good look at the picture. It is really wonderful!'
'Wonderful' was non-committal, but at least with this letter there was
no rupture.

The third day after Lyon's return to London was a Sunday, so that he
could go and ask Mrs. Capadose for luncheon. She had given him in the
spring a general invitation to do so and he had availed himself of it
several times. These had been the occasions (before he sat to him) when
he saw the Colonel most familiarly. Directly after the meal his host
disappeared (he went out, as he said, to call on _his_ women) and the
second half-hour was the best, even when there were other people. Now,
in the first days of December, Lyon had the luck to find the pair alone,
without even Amy, who appeared but little in public. They were in the
drawing-room, waiting for the repast to be announced, and as soon as he
came in the Colonel broke out, 'My dear fellow, I'm delighted to see
you! I'm so keen to begin again.'

'Oh, do go on, it's so beautiful,' Mrs. Capadose said, as she gave him
her hand.

Lyon looked from one to the other; he didn't know what he had expected,
but he had not expected this. 'Ah, then, you think I've got something?'

'You've got everything,' said Mrs. Capadose, smiling from her
golden-brown eyes.

'She wrote you of our little crime?' her husband asked. 'She dragged me
there--I had to go.' Lyon wondered for a moment whether he meant by
their little crime the assault on the canvas; but the Colonel's next
words didn't confirm this interpretation. 'You know I like to sit--it
gives such a chance to my _bavardise_. And just now I have time.'

'You must remember I had almost finished,' Lyon remarked.

'So you had. More's the pity. I should like you to begin again.'

'My dear fellow, I shall have to begin again!' said Oliver Lyon with a
laugh, looking at Mrs. Capadose. She did not meet his eyes--she had got
up to ring for luncheon. 'The picture has been smashed,' Lyon
continued.

'Smashed? Ah, what did you do that for?' Mrs. Capadose asked, standing
there before him in all her clear, rich beauty. Now that she looked at
him she was impenetrable.

'I didn't--I found it so--with a dozen holes punched in it!'

'I say!' cried the Colonel.

Lyon turned his eyes to him, smiling. 'I hope _you_ didn't do it?'

'Is it ruined?' the Colonel inquired. He was as brightly true as his
wife and he looked simply as if Lyon's question could not be serious.
'For the love of sitting to you? My dear fellow, if I had thought of it
I would!'

'Nor you either?' the painter demanded of Mrs. Capadose.

Before she had time to reply her husband had seized her arm, as if a
highly suggestive idea had come to him. 'I say, my dear, that
woman--that woman!'

'That woman?' Mrs. Capadose repeated; and Lyon too wondered what woman
he meant.

'Don't you remember when we came out, she was at the door--or a little
way from it? I spoke to you of her--I told you about her.
Geraldine--Grenadine--the one who burst in that day,' he explained to
Lyon. 'We saw her hanging about--I called Everina's attention to her.'

'Do you mean she got at my picture?'

'Ah yes, I remember,' said Mrs. Capadose, with a sigh.

'She burst in again--she had learned the way--she was waiting for her
chance,' the Colonel continued. 'Ah, the little brute!'

Lyon looked down; he felt himself colouring. This was what he had been
waiting for--the day the Colonel should wantonly sacrifice some innocent
person. And could his wife be a party to that final atrocity? Lyon had
reminded himself repeatedly during the previous weeks that when the
Colonel perpetrated his misdeed she had already quitted the room; but he
had argued none the less--it was a virtual certainty--that he had on
rejoining her immediately made his achievement plain to her. He was in
the flush of performance; and even if he had not mentioned what he had
done she would have guessed it. He did not for an instant believe that
poor Miss Geraldine had been hovering about his door, nor had the
account given by the Colonel the summer before of his relations with
this lady deceived him in the slightest degree. Lyon had never seen her
before the day she planted herself in his studio; but he knew her and
classified her as if he had made her. He was acquainted with the London
female model in all her varieties--in every phase of her development and
every step of her decay. When he entered his house that September
morning just after the arrival of his two friends there had been no
symptoms whatever, up and down the road, of Miss Geraldine's
reappearance. That fact had been fixed in his mind by his recollecting
the vacancy of the prospect when his cook told him that a lady and a
gentleman were in his studio: he had wondered there was not a carriage
nor a cab at his door. Then he had reflected that they would have come
by the underground railway; he was close to the Marlborough Road
station and he knew the Colonel, coming to his sittings, more than once
had availed himself of that convenience. 'How in the world did she get
in?' He addressed the question to his companions indifferently.

'Let us go down to luncheon,' said Mrs. Capadose, passing out of the
room.

'We went by the garden--without troubling your servant--I wanted to show
my wife.' Lyon followed his hostess with her husband and the Colonel
stopped him at the top of the stairs. 'My dear fellow, I _can't_ have
been guilty of the folly of not fastening the door?'

'I am sure I don't know, Colonel,' Lyon said as they went down. 'It was
a very determined hand--a perfect wild-cat.'

'Well, she _is_ a wild-cat--confound her! That's why I wanted to get him
away from her.'

'But I don't understand her motive.'

'She's off her head--and she hates me; that was her motive.'

'But she doesn't hate me, my dear fellow!' Lyon said, laughing.

'She hated the picture--don't you remember she said so? The more
portraits there are the less employment for such as her.'

'Yes; but if she is not really the model she pretends to be, how can
that hurt her?' Lyon asked.

The inquiry baffled the Colonel an instant--but only an instant. 'Ah,
she was in a vicious muddle! As I say, she's off her head.'

They went into the dining-room, where Mrs. Capadose was taking her
place. 'It's too bad, it's too horrid!' she said. 'You see the fates
are against you. Providence won't let you be so disinterested--painting
masterpieces for nothing.'

'Did _you_ see the woman?' Lyon demanded, with something like a
sternness that he could not mitigate.

Mrs. Capadose appeared not to perceive it or not to heed it if she did.
'There was a person, not far from your door, whom Clement called my
attention to. He told me something about her but we were going the other
way.'

'And do you think she did it?'

'How can I tell? If she did she was mad, poor wretch.'

'I should like very much to get hold of her,' said Lyon. This was a
false statement, for he had no desire for any further conversation with
Miss Geraldine. He had exposed his friends to himself, but he had no
desire to expose them to any one else, least of all to themselves.

'Oh, depend upon it she will never show again. You're safe!' the Colonel
exclaimed.

'But I remember her address--Mortimer Terrace Mews, Notting Hill.'

'Oh, that's pure humbug; there isn't any such place.'

'Lord, what a deceiver!' said Lyon.

'Is there any one else you suspect?' the Colonel went on.

'Not a creature.'

'And what do your servants say?'

'They say it wasn't _them_, and I reply that I never said it was. That's
about the substance of our conferences.'

'And when did they discover the havoc?'

'They never discovered it at all. I noticed it first--when I came back.'

'Well, she could easily have stepped in,' said the Colonel. 'Don't you
remember how she turned up that day, like the clown in the ring?'

'Yes, yes; she could have done the job in three seconds, except that the
picture wasn't out.'

'My dear fellow, don't curse me!--but of course I dragged it out.'

'You didn't put it back?' Lyon asked tragically.

'Ah, Clement, Clement, didn't I tell you to?' Mrs. Capadose exclaimed in
a tone of exquisite reproach.

The Colonel groaned, dramatically; he covered his face with his hands.
His wife's words were for Lyon the finishing touch; they made his whole
vision crumble--his theory that she had secretly kept herself true. Even
to her old lover she wouldn't be so! He was sick; he couldn't eat; he
knew that he looked very strange. He murmured something about it being
useless to cry over spilled milk--he tried to turn the conversation to
other things. But it was a horrid effort and he wondered whether they
felt it as much as he. He wondered all sorts of things: whether they
guessed he disbelieved them (that he had seen them of course they would
never guess); whether they had arranged their story in advance or it was
only an inspiration of the moment; whether she had resisted, protested,
when the Colonel proposed it to her, and then had been borne down by
him; whether in short she didn't loathe herself as she sat there. The
cruelty, the cowardice of fastening their unholy act upon the wretched
woman struck him as monstrous--no less monstrous indeed than the levity
that could make them run the risk of her giving them, in her righteous
indignation, the lie. Of course that risk could only exculpate her and
not inculpate them--the probabilities protected them so perfectly; and
what the Colonel counted on (what he would have counted upon the day he
delivered himself, after first seeing her, at the studio, if he had
thought about the matter then at all and not spoken from the pure
spontaneity of his genius) was simply that Miss Geraldine had really
vanished for ever into her native unknown. Lyon wanted so much to quit
the subject that when after a little Mrs. Capadose said to him, 'But can
nothing be done, can't the picture be repaired? You know they do such
wonders in that way now,' he only replied, 'I don't know, I don't care,
it's all over, _n'en parlons plus_!' Her hypocrisy revolted him. And
yet, by way of plucking off the last veil of her shame, he broke out to
her again, shortly afterward, 'And you _did_ like it, really?' To which
she returned, looking him straight in his face, without a blush, a
pallor, an evasion, 'Oh, I loved it!' Truly her husband had trained her
well. After that Lyon said no more and his companions forbore
temporarily to insist, like people of tact and sympathy aware that the
odious accident had made him sore.

When they quitted the table the Colonel went away without coming
upstairs; but Lyon returned to the drawing-room with his hostess,
remarking to her however on the way that he could remain but a moment.
He spent that moment--it prolonged itself a little--standing with her
before the chimney-piece. She neither sat down nor asked him to; her
manner denoted that she intended to go out. Yes, her husband had trained
her well; yet Lyon dreamed for a moment that now he was alone with her
she would perhaps break down, retract, apologise, confide, say to him,
'My dear old friend, forgive this hideous comedy--you understand!' And
then how he would have loved her and pitied her, guarded her, helped her
always! If she were not ready to do something of that sort why had she
treated him as if he were a dear old friend; why had she let him for
months suppose certain things--or almost; why had she come to his studio
day after day to sit near him on the pretext of her child's portrait, as
if she liked to think what might have been? Why had she come so near a
tacit confession, in a word, if she was not willing to go an inch
further? And she was not willing--she was not; he could see that as he
lingered there. She moved about the room a little, rearranging two or
three objects on the tables, but she did nothing more. Suddenly he said
to her: 'Which way was she going, when you came out?'

'She--the woman we saw?'

'Yes, your husband's strange friend. It's a clew worth following.' He
had no desire to frighten her; he only wanted to communicate the impulse
which would make her say, 'Ah, spare me--and spare _him_! There was no
such person.'

Instead of this Mrs. Capadose replied, 'She was going away from us--she
crossed the road. We were coming towards the station.'

'And did she appear to recognise the Colonel--did she look round?'

'Yes; she looked round, but I didn't notice much. A hansom came along
and we got into it. It was not till then that Clement told me who she
was: I remember he said that she was there for no good. I suppose we
ought to have gone back.'

'Yes; you would have saved the picture.'

For a moment she said nothing; then she smiled. 'For you, I am very
sorry. But you must remember that I possess the original!'

At this Lyon turned away. 'Well, I must go,' he said; and he left her
without any other farewell and made his way out of the house. As he went
slowly up the street the sense came back to him of that first glimpse of
her he had had at Stayes--the way he had seen her gaze across the table
at her husband. Lyon stopped at the corner, looking vaguely up and down.
He would never go back--he couldn't. She was still in love with the
Colonel--he had trained her too well.

MRS. TEMPERLY

'Why, Cousin Raymond, how can you suppose? Why, she's only sixteen!'

'She told me she was seventeen,' said the young man, as if it made a
great difference.

'Well, only _just_!' Mrs. Temperly replied, in the tone of graceful,
reasonable concession.

'Well, that's a very good age for me. I'm very young.'

'You are old enough to know better,' the lady remarked, in her soft,
pleasant voice, which always drew the sting from a reproach, and enabled
you to swallow it as you would a cooked plum, without the stone. 'Why,
she hasn't finished her education!'

'That's just what I mean,' said her interlocutor. 'It would finish it
beautifully for her to marry me.'

'Have you finished yours, my dear?' Mrs. Temperly inquired. 'The way you
young people talk about marrying!' she exclaimed, looking at the
itinerant functionary with the long wand who touched into a flame the
tall gas-lamp on the other side of the Fifth Avenue. The pair were
standing, in the recess of a window, in one of the big public rooms of
an immense hotel, and the October day was turning to dusk.

'Well, would you have us leave it to the old?' Raymond asked. 'That's
just what I think--she would be such a help to me,' he continued. 'I
want to go back to Paris to study more. I have come home too soon. I
don't know half enough; they know more here than I thought. So it would
be perfectly easy, and we should all be together.'

'Well, my dear, when you do come back to Paris we will talk about it,'
said Mrs. Temperly, turning away from the window.

'I should like it better, Cousin Maria, if you trusted me a little
more,' Raymond sighed, observing that she was not really giving her
thoughts to what he said. She irritated him somehow; she was so full of
her impending departure, of her arrangements, her last duties and
memoranda. She was not exactly important, any more than she was humble;
she was too conciliatory for the one and too positive for the other. But
she bustled quietly and gave one the sense of being 'up to' everything;
the successive steps of her enterprise were in advance perfectly clear
to her, and he could see that her imagination (conventional as she was
she had plenty of that faculty) had already taken up its abode on one of
those fine _premiers_ which she had never seen, but which by instinct
she seemed to know all about, in the very best part of the quarter of
the Champs Elysées. If she ruffled him envy had perhaps something to do
with it: she was to set sail on the morrow for the city of his affection
and he was to stop in New York, where the fact that he was but half
pleased did not alter the fact that he had his studio on his hands and
that it was a bad one (though perhaps as good as any use he should put
it to), which no one would be in a hurry to relieve him of.

It was easy for him to talk to Mrs. Temperly in that airy way about
going back, but he couldn't go back unless the old gentleman gave him
the means. He had already given him a great many things in the past, and
with the others coming on (Marian's marriage-outfit, within three
months, had cost literally thousands), Raymond had not at present the
face to ask for more. He must sell some pictures first, and to sell them
he must first paint them. It was his misfortune that he saw what he
wanted to do so much better than he could do it. But he must really try
and please himself--an effort that appeared more possible now that the
idea of following Dora across the ocean had become an incentive. In
spite of secret aspirations and even intentions, however, it was not
encouraging to feel that he made really no impression at all on Cousin
Maria. This certitude was so far from agreeable to him that he almost
found it in him to drop the endearing title by which he had hitherto
addressed her. It was only that, after all, her husband had been
distantly related to his mother. It was not as a cousin that he was
interested in Dora, but as something very much more intimate. I know not
whether it occurred to him that Mrs. Temperly herself would never give
his displeasure the benefit of dropping the affectionate form. She might
shut her door to him altogether, but he would always be her kinsman and
her dear. She was much addicted to these little embellishments of human
intercourse--the friendly apostrophe and even the caressing hand--and
there was something homely and cosy, a rustic, motherly _bonhomie_, in
her use of them. She was as lavish of them as she was really careful in
the selection of her friends.

She stood there with her hand in her pocket, as if she were feeling for
something; her little plain, pleasant face was presented to him with a
musing smile, and he vaguely wondered whether she were fumbling for a
piece of money to buy him off from wishing to marry her daughter. Such
an idea would be quite in keeping with the disguised levity with which
she treated his state of mind. If her levity was wrapped up in the air
of tender solicitude for everything that related to the feelings of her
child, that only made her failure to appreciate his suit more
deliberate. She struck him almost as impertinent (at the same time that
he knew this was never her intention) as she looked up at him--her tiny
proportions always made her throw back her head and set something
dancing in her cap--and inquired whether he had noticed if she gave two
keys, tied together by a blue ribbon, to Susan Winkle, when that
faithful but flurried domestic met them in the lobby. She was thinking
only of questions of luggage, and the fact that he wished to marry Dora
was the smallest incident in their getting off.

'I think you ask me that only to change the subject,' he said. 'I don't
believe that ever in your life you have been unconscious of what you
have done with your keys.'

'Not often, but you make me nervous,' she answered, with her patient,
honest smile.

'Oh, Cousin Maria!' the young man exclaimed, ambiguously, while Mrs.
Temperly looked humanely at some totally uninteresting people who came
straggling into the great hot, frescoed, velvety drawing-room, where it
was as easy to see you were in an hotel as it was to see that, if you
were, you were in one of the very best. Mrs. Temperly, since her
husband's death, had passed much of her life at hotels, where she
flattered herself that she preserved the tone of domestic life free from
every taint and promoted the refined development of her children; but
she selected them as well as she selected her friends. Somehow they
became better from the very fact of her being there, and her children
were smuggled in and out in the most extraordinary way; one never met
them racing and whooping, as one did hundreds of others, in the lobbies.
Her frequentation of hotels, where she paid enormous bills, was part of
her expensive but practical way of living, and also of her theory that,
from one week to another, she was going to Europe for a series of years
as soon as she had wound up certain complicated affairs which had
devolved upon her at her husband's death. If these affairs had dragged
on it was owing to their inherent troublesomeness and implied no doubt
of her capacity to bring them to a solution and to administer the very
considerable fortune that Mr. Temperly had left. She used, in a
superior, unprejudiced way, every convenience that the civilisation of
her time offered her, and would have lived without hesitation in a
lighthouse if this had contributed to her general scheme. She was now,
in the interest of this scheme, preparing to use Europe, which she had
not yet visited and with none of whose foreign tongues she was
acquainted. This time she was certainly embarking.

She took no notice of the discredit which her young friend appeared to
throw on the idea that she had nerves, and betrayed no suspicion that he
believed her to have them in about the same degree as a sound,
productive Alderney cow. She only moved toward one of the numerous doors
of the room, as if to remind him of all she had still to do before
night. They passed together into the long, wide corridor of the hotel--a
vista of soft carpet, numbered doors, wandering women and perpetual
gaslight--and approached the staircase by which she must ascend again to
her domestic duties. She counted over, serenely, for his enlightenment,
those that were still to be performed; but he could see that everything
would be finished by nine o'clock--the time she had fixed in advance.
The heavy luggage was then to go to the steamer; she herself was to be
on board, with the children and the smaller things, at eleven o'clock
the next morning. They had thirty pieces, but this was less than they
had when they came from California five years before. She wouldn't have
done that again. It was true that at that time she had had Mr. Temperly
to help: he had died, Raymond remembered, six months after the
settlement in New York. But, on the other hand, she knew more now. It
was one of Mrs. Temperly's amiable qualities that she admitted herself
so candidly to be still susceptible of development. She never professed
to be in possession of all the knowledge requisite for her career; not
only did she let her friends know that she was always learning, but she
appealed to them to instruct her, in a manner which was in itself an
example.

When Raymond said to her that he took for granted she would let him come
down to the steamer for a last good-bye, she not only consented
graciously but added that he was free to call again at the hotel in the
evening, if he had nothing better to do. He must come between nine and
ten; she expected several other friends--those who wished to see the
last of them, yet didn't care to come to the ship. Then he would see all
of them--she meant all of themselves, Dora and Effie and Tishy, and even
Mademoiselle Bourde. She spoke exactly as if he had never approached her
on the subject of Dora and as if Tishy, who was ten years of age, and
Mademoiselle Bourde, who was the French governess and forty, were
objects of no less an interest to him. He felt what a long pull he
should have ever to get round her, and the sting of this knowledge was
in his consciousness that Dora was really in her mother's hands. In Mrs.
Temperly's composition there was not a hint of the bully; but none the
less she held her children--she would hold them for ever. It was not
simply by tenderness; but what it was by she knew best herself. Raymond
appreciated the privilege of seeing Dora again that evening as well as
on the morrow; yet he was so vexed with her mother that his vexation
betrayed him into something that almost savoured of violence--a fact
which I am ashamed to have to chronicle, as Mrs. Temperly's own urbanity
deprived such breaches of every excuse. It may perhaps serve partly as
an excuse for Raymond Bestwick that he was in love, or at least that he
thought he was. Before she parted from him at the foot of the staircase
he said to her, 'And of course, if things go as you like over there,
Dora will marry some foreign prince.'

She gave no sign of resenting this speech, but she looked at him for
the first time as if she were hesitating, as if it were not instantly
clear to her what to say. It appeared to him, on his side, for a moment,
that there was something strange in her hesitation, that abruptly, by an
inspiration, she was almost making up her mind to reply that Dora's
marriage to a prince was, considering Dora's peculiarities (he knew that
her mother deemed her peculiar, and so did he, but that was precisely
why he wished to marry her), so little probable that, after all, once
such a union was out of the question, _he_ might be no worse than
another plain man. These, however, were not the words that fell from
Mrs. Temperly's lips. Her embarrassment vanished in her clear smile. 'Do
you know what Mr. Temperly used to say? He used to say that Dora was the
pattern of an old maid--she would never make a choice.'

'I hope--because that would have been too foolish--that he didn't say
she wouldn't have a chance.'

'Oh, a chance! what do you call by that fine name?' Cousin Maria
exclaimed, laughing, as she ascended the stair.

II

When he came back, after dinner, she was again in one of the public
rooms; she explained that a lot of the things for the ship were spread
out in her own parlours: there was no space to sit down. Raymond was
highly gratified by this fact; it offered an opportunity for strolling
away a little with Dora, especially as, after he had been there ten
minutes, other people began to come in. They were entertained by the
rest, by Effie and Tishy, who was allowed to sit up a little, and by
Mademoiselle Bourde, who besought every visitor to indicate her a remedy
that was _really_ effective against the sea--some charm, some philter,
some potion or spell. 'Never mind, ma'm'selle, I've got a remedy,' said
Cousin Maria, with her cheerful decision, each time; but the French
instructress always began afresh.

As the young man was about to be parted for an indefinite period from
the girl whom he was ready to swear that he adored, it is clear that he
ought to have been equally ready to swear that she was the fairest of
her species. In point of fact, however, it was no less vivid to him than
it had been before that he loved Dora Temperly for qualities which had
nothing to do with straightness of nose or pinkness of complexion. Her
figure was straight, and so was her character, but her nose was not, and
Philistines and other vulgar people would have committed themselves,
without a blush on their own flat faces, to the assertion that she was
decidedly plain. In his artistic imagination he had analogies for her,
drawn from legend and literature; he was perfectly aware that she struck
many persons as silent, shy and angular, while his own version of her
peculiarities was that she was like a figure on the _predella_ of an
early Italian painting or a mediæval maiden wandering about a lonely
castle, with her lover gone to the Crusades. To his sense, Dora had but
one defect--her admiration for her mother was too undiscriminating. An
ardent young man may well be slightly vexed when he finds that a young
lady will probably never care for him so much as she cares for her
parent; and Raymond Bestwick had this added ground for chagrin, that
Dora had--if she chose to take it--so good a pretext for discriminating.
For she had nothing whatever in common with the others; she was not of
the same stuff as Mrs. Temperly and Effie and Tishy.

She was original and generous and uncalculating, besides being full of
perception and taste in regard to the things _he_ cared about. She knew
nothing of conventional signs or estimates, but understood everything
that might be said to her from an artistic point of view. She was formed
to live in a studio, and not in a stiff drawing-room, amid upholstery
horribly new; and moreover her eyes and her voice were both charming. It
was only a pity she was so gentle; that is, he liked it for himself, but
he deplored it for her mother. He considered that he had virtually
given that lady his word that he would not make love to her; but his
spirits had risen since his visit of three or four hours before. It
seemed to him, after thinking things over more intently, that a way
would be opened for him to return to Paris. It was not probable that in
the interval Dora would be married off to a prince; for in the first
place the foolish race of princes would be sure not to appreciate her,
and in the second she would not, in this matter, simply do her mother's
bidding--her gentleness would not go so far as that. She might remain
single by the maternal decree, but she would not take a husband who was
disagreeable to her. In this reasoning Raymond was obliged to shut his
eyes very tight to the danger that some particular prince might not be
disagreeable to her, as well as to the attraction proceeding from what
her mother might announce that she would 'do.' He was perfectly aware
that it was in Cousin Maria's power, and would probably be in her
pleasure, to settle a handsome marriage-fee upon each of her daughters.
He was equally certain that this had nothing to do with the nature of
his own interest in the eldest, both because it was clear that Mrs.
Temperly would do very little for _him_, and because he didn't care how
little she did.

Effie and Tishy sat in the circle, on the edge of rather high chairs,
while Mademoiselle Bourde surveyed in them with complacency the results
of her own superiority. Tishy was a child, but Effie was fifteen, and
they were both very nice little girls, arrayed in fresh travelling
dresses and deriving a quaintness from the fact that Tishy was already
armed, for foreign adventures, with a smart new reticule, from which
she could not be induced to part, and that Effie had her finger in her
'place' in a fat red volume of _Murray_. Raymond knew that in a general
way their mother would not have allowed them to appear in the
drawing-room with these adjuncts, but something was to be allowed to the
fever of anticipation. They were both pretty, with delicate features and
blue eyes, and would grow up into worldly, conventional young ladies,
just as Dora had not done. They looked at Mademoiselle Bourde for
approval whenever they spoke, and, in addressing their mother
alternately with that accomplished woman, kept their two languages
neatly distinct.

Raymond had but a vague idea of who the people were who had come to bid
Cousin Maria farewell, and he had no wish for a sharper one, though she
introduced him, very definitely, to the whole group. She might make
light of him in her secret soul, but she would never put herself in the
wrong by omitting the smallest form. Fortunately, however, he was not
obliged to like all her forms, and he foresaw the day when she would
abandon this particular one. She was not so well made up in advance
about Paris but that it would be in reserve for her to detest the period
when she had thought it proper to 'introduce all round.' Raymond
detested it already, and tried to make Dora understand that he wished
her to take a walk with him in the corridors. There was a gentleman with
a curl on his forehead who especially displeased him; he made childish
jokes, at which the others laughed all at once, as if they had rehearsed
for it--jokes _à la portée_ of Effie and Tishy and mainly about them.
These two joined in the merriment, as if they followed perfectly, as
indeed they might, and gave a small sigh afterward, with a little
factitious air. Dora remained grave, almost sad; it was when she was
different, in this way, that he felt how much he liked her. He hated, in
general, a large ring of people who had drawn up chairs in the public
room of an hotel: some one was sure to undertake to be funny.

He succeeded at last in drawing Dora away; he endeavoured to give the
movement a casual air. There was nothing peculiar, after all, in their
walking a little in the passage; a dozen other persons were doing the
same. The girl had the air of not suspecting in the least that he could
have anything particular to say to her--of responding to his appeal
simply out of her general gentleness. It was not in her companion's
interest that her mind should be such a blank; nevertheless his
conviction that in spite of the ministrations of Mademoiselle Bourde she
was not falsely ingenuous made him repeat to himself that he would still
make her his own. They took several turns in the hall, during which it
might still have appeared to Dora Temperly that her cousin Raymond had
nothing particular to say to her. He remarked several times that he
should certainly turn up in Paris in the spring; but when once she had
replied that she was very glad that subject seemed exhausted. The young
man cared little, however; it was not a question now of making any
declaration: he only wanted to be with her. Suddenly, when they were at
the end of the corridor furthest removed from the room they had left, he
said to her: 'Your mother is very strange. Why has she got such an idea
about Paris?'

'How do you mean, such an idea?' He had stopped, making the girl stand
there before him.

'Well, she thinks so much of it without having ever seen it, or really
knowing anything. She appears to have planned out such a great life
there.'

'She thinks it's the best place,' Dora rejoined, with the dim smile that
always charmed our young man.

'The best place for what?'

'Well, to learn French.' The girl continued to smile.

'Do you mean for her? She'll never learn it; she can't.'

'No; for us. And other things.'

'You know it already. And _you_ know other things,' said Raymond.

'She wants us to know them better--better than any girls know them.'

'I don't know what things you mean,' exclaimed the young man, rather
impatiently.

'Well, we shall see,' Dora returned, laughing.

He said nothing for a minute, at the end of which he resumed: 'I hope
you won't be offended if I say that it seems curious your mother should
have such aspirations--such Napoleonic plans. I mean being just a quiet
little lady from California, who has never seen any of the kind of thing
that she has in her head.'

'That's just why she wants to see it, I suppose; and I don't know why
her being from California should prevent. At any rate she wants us to
have the best. Isn't the best taste in Paris?'

'Yes; and the worst.' It made him gloomy when she defended the old lady,
and to change the subject he asked: 'Aren't you sorry, this last night,
to leave your own country for such an indefinite time?'

It didn't cheer him up that the girl should answer: 'Oh, I would go
anywhere with mother!'

'And with _her_?' Raymond demanded, sarcastically, as Mademoiselle
Bourde came in sight, emerging from the drawing-room. She approached
them; they met her in a moment, and she informed Dora that Mrs. Temperly
wished her to come back and play a part of that composition of
Saint-Saens--the last one she had been learning--for Mr. and Mrs.
Parminter: they wanted to judge whether their daughter could manage it.

'I don't believe she can,' said Dora, smiling; but she was moving away
to comply when her companion detained her a moment.

Are you going to bid me good-bye?'

'Won't you come back to the drawing-room?'

'I think not; I don't like it.'

'And to mamma--you'll say nothing?' the girl went on.

'Oh, we have made our farewell; we had a special interview this
afternoon.'

'And you won't come to the ship in the morning?'

Raymond hesitated a moment. 'Will Mr. and Mrs. Parminter be there?'

'Oh, surely they will!' Mademoiselle Bourde declared, surveying the
young couple with a certain tactful serenity, but standing very close to
them, as if it might be her duty to interpose.

'Well then, I won't come.'

'Well, good-bye then,' said the girl gently, holding out her hand.

'Good-bye, Dora.' He took it, while she smiled at him, but he said
nothing more--he was so annoyed at the way Mademoiselle Bourde watched
them. He only looked at Dora; she seemed to him beautiful.

'My dear child--that poor Madame Parminter,' the governess murmured.

'I shall come over very soon,' said Raymond, as his companion turned
away.

'That will be charming.' And she left him quickly, without looking back.

Mademoiselle Bourde lingered--he didn't know why, unless it was to make
him feel, with her smooth, finished French assurance, which had the
manner of extreme benignity, that she was following him up. He sometimes
wondered whether she copied Mrs. Temperly or whether Mrs. Temperly tried
to copy her. Presently she said, slowly rubbing her hands and smiling at
him:

'You will have plenty of time. We shall be long in Paris.'

'Perhaps you will be disappointed,' Raymond suggested.

'How can we be--unless _you_ disappoint us?' asked the governess,
sweetly.

He left her without ceremony: the imitation was probably on the part of
Cousin Maria.

'Only just ourselves,' her note had said; and he arrived, in his natural
impatience, a few moments before the hour. He remembered his Cousin
Maria's habitual punctuality, but when he entered the splendid _salon_
in the quarter of the Parc Monceau--it was there that he had found her
established--he saw that he should have it, for a little, to himself.
This was pleasing, for he should be able to look round--there were
admirable things to look at. Even to-day Raymond Bestwick was not sure
that he had learned to paint, but he had no doubt of his judgment of the
work of others, and a single glance showed him that Mrs. Temperly had
'known enough' to select, for the adornment of her walls, half a dozen
immensely valuable specimens of contemporary French art. Her choice of
other objects had been equally enlightened, and he remembered what Dora
had said to him five years before--that her mother wished them to have
the best. Evidently, now they had got it; if five years was a long time
for him to have delayed (with his original plan of getting off so soon)
to come to Paris, it was a very short one for Cousin Maria to have taken
to arrive at the highest good.

Rather to his surprise the first person to come in was Effie, now so
complete a young lady, and such a very pretty girl, that he scarcely
would have known her. She was fair, she was graceful, she was lovely,
and as she entered the room, blushing and smiling, with a little
floating motion which suggested that she was in a liquid element, she
brushed down the ribbons of a delicate Parisian _toilette de jeune
fille_. She appeared to expect that he would be surprised, and as if to
justify herself for being the first she said, 'Mamma told me to come;
she knows you are here; she said I was not to wait.' More than once,
while they conversed, during the next few moments, before any one else
arrived, she repeated that she was acting by her mamma's directions.
Raymond perceived that she had not only the costume but several other of
the attributes of a _jeune fille_. They talked, I say, but with a
certain difficulty, for Effie asked him no questions, and this made him
feel a little stiff about thrusting information upon her. Then she was
so pretty, so exquisite, that this by itself disconcerted him. It seemed
to him almost that she had falsified a prophecy, instead of bringing one
to pass. He had foretold that she would be like this; the only
difference was that she was so much more like it. She made no inquiries
about his arrival, his people in America, his plans; and they exchanged
vague remarks about the pictures, quite as if they had met for the first
time.

When Cousin Maria came in Effie was standing in front of the fire
fastening a bracelet, and he was at a distance gazing in silence at a
portrait of his hostess by Bastien-Lepage. One of his apprehensions had
been that Cousin Maria would allude ironically to the difference there
had been between his threat (because it had been really almost a
threat) of following them speedily to Paris and what had in fact
occurred; but he saw in a moment how superficial this calculation had
been. Besides, when had Cousin Maria ever been ironical? She treated him
as if she had seen him last week (which did not preclude kindness), and
only expressed her regret at having missed his visit the day before, in
consequence of which she had immediately written to him to come and
dine. He might have come from round the corner, instead of from New York
and across the wintry ocean. This was a part of her 'cosiness,' her
friendly, motherly optimism, of which, even of old, the habit had been
never to recognise nor allude to disagreeable things; so that to-day, in
the midst of so much that was not disagreeable, the custom would of
course be immensely confirmed.

Raymond was perfectly aware that it was not a pleasure, even for her,
that, for several years past, things should have gone so ill in New York
with his family and himself. His father's embarrassments, of which
Marian's silly husband had been the cause and which had terminated in
general ruin and humiliation, to say nothing of the old man's 'stroke'
and the necessity, arising from it, for a renunciation on his own part
of all present thoughts of leaving home again and even for a partial
relinquishment of present work, the old man requiring so much of his
personal attention--all this constituted an episode which could not fail
to look sordid and dreary in the light of Mrs. Temperly's high success.
The odour of success was in the warm, slightly heavy air, which seemed
distilled from rare old fabrics, from brocades and tapestries, from the
deep, mingled tones of the pictures, the subdued radiance of cabinets
and old porcelain and the jars of winter roses standing in soft circles
of lamp-light. Raymond felt himself in the presence of an effect in
regard to which he remained in ignorance of the cause--a mystery that
required a key. Cousin Maria's success was unexplained so long as she
simply stood there with her little familiar, comforting, upward gaze,
talking in coaxing cadences, with exactly the same manner she had
brought ten years ago from California, to a tall, bald, bending, smiling
young man, evidently a foreigner, who had just come in and whose name
Raymond had not caught from the lips of the _maître d'hôtel_. Was he
just one of themselves--was he there for Effie, or perhaps even for
Dora? The unexplained must preponderate till Dora came in; he found he
counted upon her, even though in her letters (it was true that for the
last couple of years they had come but at long intervals) she had told
him so little about their life. She never spoke of people; she talked of
the books she read, of the music she had heard or was studying (a whole
page sometimes about the last concert at the Conservatoire), the new
pictures and the manner of the different artists.

When she entered the room three or four minutes after the arrival of the
young foreigner, with whom her mother conversed in just the accents
Raymond had last heard at the hotel in the Fifth Avenue (he was obliged
to admit that she gave herself no airs; it was clear that her success
had not gone in the least to her head); when Dora at last appeared she
was accompanied by Mademoiselle Bourde. The presence of this lady--he
didn't know she was still in the house--Raymond took as a sign that
they were really dining _en famille_, so that the young man was either
an actual or a prospective intimate. Dora shook hands first with her
cousin, but he watched the manner of her greeting with the other visitor
and saw that it indicated extreme friendliness--on the part of the
latter. If there was a charming flush in her cheek as he took her hand,
that was the remainder of the colour that had risen there as she came
toward Raymond. It will be seen that our young man still had an eye for
the element of fascination, as he used to regard it, in this quiet,
dimly-shining maiden.

He saw that Effie was the only one who had changed (Tishy remained yet
to be judged), except that Dora really looked older, quite as much older
as the number of years had given her a right to: there was as little
difference in her as there was in her mother. Not that she was like her
mother, but she was perfectly like herself. Her meeting with Raymond was
bright, but very still; their phrases were awkward and commonplace, and
the thing was mainly a contact of looks--conscious, embarrassed,
indirect, but brightening every moment with old familiarities. Her
mother appeared to pay no attention, and neither, to do her justice, did
Mademoiselle Bourde, who, after an exchange of expressive salutations
with Raymond began to scrutinise Effie with little admiring gestures and
smiles. She surveyed her from head to foot; she pulled a ribbon
straight; she was evidently a flattering governess. Cousin Maria
explained to Cousin Raymond that they were waiting for one more
friend--a very dear lady. 'But she lives near, and when people live near
they are always late--haven't you noticed that?'

'Your hotel is far away, I know, and yet you were the first,' Dora
said, smiling to Raymond.

'Oh, even if it were round the corner I should be the first--to come to
_you_!' the young man answered, speaking loud and clear, so that his
words might serve as a notification to Cousin Maria that his sentiments
were unchanged.

'You are more French than the French,' Dora returned.

'You say that as if you didn't like them: I hope you don't,' said
Raymond, still with intentions in regard to his hostess.

'We like them more and more, the more we see of them,' this lady
interposed; but gently, impersonally, and with an air of not wishing to
put Raymond in the wrong.

'_Mais j'espère bien!_' cried Mademoiselle Bourde, holding up her head
and opening her eyes very wide. 'Such friendships as we form, and, I may
say, as we inspire! _Je m'en rapporte à Effie_', the governess
continued.

'We have received immense kindness; we have established relations that
are so pleasant for us, Cousin Raymond. We have the _entrée_ of so many
charming homes,' Mrs. Temperly remarked.

'But ours is the most charming of all; that I will say,' exclaimed
Mademoiselle Bourde. 'Isn't it so, Effie?'

'Oh yes, I think it is; especially when we are expecting the Marquise,'
Effie responded. Then she added, 'But here she comes now; I hear her
carriage in the court.'

The Marquise too was just one of themselves; she was a part of their
charming home.

'She _is_ such a love!' said Mrs. Temperly to the foreign gentleman,
with an irrepressible movement of benevolence.

To which Raymond heard the gentleman reply that, Ah, she was the most
distinguished woman in France.

'Do you know Madame de Brives?' Effie asked of Raymond, while they were
waiting for her to come in.

She came in at that moment, and the girl turned away quickly without an
answer.

'How in the world should I know her?' That was the answer he would have
been tempted to give. He felt very much out of Cousin Maria's circle.
The foreign gentleman fingered his moustache and looked at him sidewise.
The Marquise was a very pretty woman, fair and slender, of middle age,
with a smile, a complexion, a diamond necklace, of great splendour, and
a charming manner. Her greeting to her friends was sweet and familiar,
and was accompanied with much kissing, of a sisterly, motherly,
daughterly kind; and yet with this expression of simple, almost homely
sentiment there was something in her that astonished and dazzled. She
might very well have been, as the foreign young man said, the most
distinguished woman in France. Dora had not rushed forward to meet her
with nearly so much _empressement_ as Effie, and this gave him a chance
to ask the former who she was. The girl replied that she was her
mother's most intimate friend: to which he rejoined that that was not a
description; what he wanted to know was her title to this exalted
position.

'Why, can't you see it? She is beautiful and she is good.'

'I see that she is beautiful; but how can I see that she is good?'

'Good to mamma, I mean, and to Effie and Tishy.'

'And isn't she good to you?'

'Oh, I don't know her so well. But I delight to look at her.'

'Certainly, that must be a great pleasure,' said Raymond. He enjoyed it
during dinner, which was now served, though his enjoyment was diminished
by his not finding himself next to Dora. They sat at a small round table
and he had at his right his Cousin Maria, whom he had taken in. On his
left was Madame de Brives, who had the foreign gentleman for a
neighbour. Then came Effie and Mademoiselle Bourde, and Dora was on the
other side of her mother. Raymond regarded this as marked--a symbol of
the fact that Cousin Maria would continue to separate them. He remained
in ignorance of the other gentleman's identity, and remembered how he
had prophesied at the hotel in New York that his hostess would give up
introducing people. It was a friendly, easy little family repast, as she
had said it would be, with just a marquise and a secretary of
embassy--Raymond ended by guessing that the stranger was a secretary of
embassy--thrown in. So far from interfering with the family tone Madame
de Brives directly contributed to it. She eminently justified the
affection in which she was held in the house; she was in the highest
degree sociable and sympathetic, and at the same time witty (there was
no insipidity in Madame de Brives), and was the cause of Raymond's
making the reflection--as he had made it often in his earlier
years--that an agreeable Frenchwoman is a triumph of civilisation. This
did not prevent him from giving the Marquise no more than half of his
attention; the rest was dedicated to Dora, who, on her side, though in
common with Effie and Mademoiselle Bourde she bent a frequent,
interested gaze on the splendid French lady, very often met our young
man's eyes with mute, vague but, to his sense, none the less valuable
intimations. It was as if she knew what was going on in his mind (it is
true that he scarcely knew it himself), and might be trusted to clear
things up at some convenient hour.

Madame de Brives talked across Raymond, in excellent English, to Cousin
Maria, but this did not prevent her from being gracious, even
encouraging, to the young man, who was a little afraid of her and
thought her a delightful creature. She asked him more questions about
himself than any of them had done. Her conversation with Mrs. Temperly
was of an intimate, domestic order, and full of social, personal
allusions, which Raymond was unable to follow. It appeared to be
concerned considerably with the private affairs of the old French
_noblesse_, into whose councils--to judge by the tone of the
Marquise--Cousin Maria had been admitted by acclamation. Every now and
then Madame de Brives broke into French, and it was in this tongue that
she uttered an apostrophe to her hostess: 'Oh, you, _ma toute-bonne_,
you who have the genius of good sense!' And she appealed to Raymond to
know if his Cousin Maria had not the genius of good sense--the wisdom of
the ages. The old lady did not defend herself from the compliment; she
let it pass, with her motherly, tolerant smile; nor did Raymond attempt
to defend her, for he felt the justice of his neighbour's description:
Cousin Maria's good sense was incontestable, magnificent. She took an
affectionate, indulgent view of most of the persons mentioned, and yet
her tone was far from being vapid or vague. Madame de Brives usually
remarked that they were coming very soon again to see her, she did them
so much good. 'The freshness of your judgment--the freshness of your
judgment!' she repeated, with a kind of glee, and she narrated that
Eléonore (a personage unknown to Raymond) had said that she was a woman
of Plutarch. Mrs. Temperly talked a great deal about the health of their
friends; she seemed to keep the record of the influenzas and neuralgias
of a numerous and susceptible circle. He did not find it in him quite to
agree--the Marquise dropping the statement into his ear at a moment when
their hostess was making some inquiry of Mademoiselle Bourde--that she
was a nature absolutely marvellous; but he could easily see that to
world-worn Parisians her quiet charities of speech and manner, with
something quaint and rustic in their form, might be restorative and
salutary. She allowed for everything, yet she was so good, and indeed
Madame de Brives summed this up before they left the table in saying to
her, 'Oh, you, my dear, your success, more than any other that has ever
taken place, has been a _succès de bonté_! Raymond was greatly amused at
this idea of Cousin Maria's _succès de bonté_: it seemed to him
delightfully Parisian.

Before dinner was over she inquired of him how he had got on 'in his
profession' since they last met, and he was too proud, or so he thought,
to tell her anything but the simple truth, that he had not got on very
well. If he was to ask her again for Dora it would be just as he was, an
honourable but not particularly successful man, making no show of lures
and bribes. 'I am not a remarkably good painter,' he said. 'I judge
myself perfectly. And then I have been handicapped at home. I have had a
great many serious bothers and worries.'

'Ah, we were so sorry to hear about your dear father.'

The tone of these words was kind and sincere; still Raymond thought that
in this case her _bonté_ might have gone a little further. At any rate
this was the only allusion that she made to his bothers and worries.
Indeed, she always passed over such things lightly; she was an optimist
for others as well as for herself, which doubtless had a great deal to
do (Raymond indulged in the reflection) with the headway she made in a
society tired of its own pessimism.

After dinner, when they went into the drawing-room, the young man noted
with complacency that this apartment, vast in itself, communicated with
two or three others into which it would be easy to pass without
attracting attention, the doors being replaced by old tapestries, looped
up and offering no barrier. With pictures and curiosities all over the
place, there were plenty of pretexts for wandering away. He lost no time
in asking Dora whether her mother would send Mademoiselle Bourde after
them if she were to go with him into one of the other rooms, the same
way she had done--didn't she remember?--that last night in New York, at
the hotel. Dora didn't admit that she remembered (she was too loyal to
her mother for that, and Raymond foresaw that this loyalty would be a
source of irritation to him again, as it had been in the past), but he
perceived, all the same, that she had not forgotten. She raised no
difficulty, and a few moments later, while they stood in an adjacent
_salon_ (he had stopped to admire a bust of Effie, wonderfully living,
slim and juvenile, the work of one of the sculptors who are the pride of
contemporary French art), he said to her, looking about him, 'How has
she done it so fast?'

'Done what, Raymond?'

'Why, done everything. Collected all these wonderful things; become
intimate with Madame de Brives and every one else; organised her
life--the life of all of you--so brilliantly.'

'I have never seen mamma in a hurry,' Dora replied.

'Perhaps she will be, now that I have come,' Raymond suggested,
laughing.

The girl hesitated a moment 'Yes, she was, to invite you--the moment she
knew you were here.'

'She has been most kind, and I talk like a brute. But I am liable to do
worse--I give you notice. She won't like it any more than she did
before, if she thinks I want to make up to you.'

'Don't, Raymond--don't!' the girl exclaimed, gently, but with a look of
sudden pain.

'Don't what, Dora?--don't make up to you?'

'Don't begin to talk of those things. There is no need. We can go on
being friends.'

'I will do exactly as you prescribe, and heaven forbid I should annoy
you. But would you mind answering me a question? It is very particular,
very intimate.' He stopped, and she only looked at him, saying nothing.
So he went on: 'Is it an idea of your mother's that you should
marry--some person here?' He gave her a chance to reply, but still she
was silent, and he continued: 'Do you mind telling me this? Could it
ever be an idea of your own?'

'Do you mean some Frenchman?'

Raymond smiled. 'Some protégé of Madame de Brives.'