"Pouff!" Mary sighed. "Pouff-ff-ff!"

The train reached Macon, when Mary was in the middle of speculating how
many times she had said pouff since Dijon.

"I must have said a thrillion pouffs," she decided, and wished that
Grandmamma would wake up and be conversational, so that she might
display her acquaintance with that numeral. Or perhaps she had better
reserve it for Mademoiselle Lucinge. How could she bring it in? Mary
began to compose the interview with her mistress.

"How do you do, my little girl?"

"I am very well, thank you, Mademoiselle."

"Did you have a comfortable journey?"

"Yes, thank you, Mademoiselle. My grandmamma and I passed a very
pleasant day in the train. What a long way off you live! About a
thrillion miles, I suppose."

Mary decided that this sounded a little too far when it was put into
speech. Perhaps on consideration she had better be content with
impressing Grandmamma.

"Supposing she never wakes up!" Mary thought in alarm. "Supposing she's
gone to sleep like the Sleeping Beauty for thrillions of years? Only
she's not a Beauty," Mary added to herself in hopeful parenthesis.
However, soon after this Grandmamma did wake up, by which time Mary
herself had fallen asleep, and did not wake until the train reached
Lyon, where they got out and drove in the dusk along the banks first
of one river and then of another equally large until they reached
their hotel. Mary was sent with the chambermaid to have a bath before
she went to bed, and she had to walk along half a dozen dark, crooked
passages before she reached the bathroom, which was full of steam; the
bath itself was covered with a large sheet which floated about in the
water and kept bellying out on either side of Mary as she splashed
about. Her bath seemed to have caused much excitement in the hotel,
for all the time people kept coming to the door and shouting outside
to the chambermaid, who kept shouting back as excitedly while the
pipes on the wall groaned and bubbled and clashed until Mary was glad
when her bath was finished and the chambermaid, after wrapping her in
several towels, picked her up in her arms and carried her back through
the corridors, running fast and shouting to everybody she met to get
out of the way. That night Mary slept in an enormous four-poster with
heavy red curtains, and in the morning she went for a drive with her
grandmother first along the banks of the sluggish, dark green Saône
and then beside the sparkling azure Rhône. But what Mary liked best in
Lyon was the Cathedral on the top of a steep hill, which looked like
an elephant upside down with gilded legs and a golden trunk. After
_déjeuner_ they got into a most extraordinary train with carriages as
tall as houses where passengers sat on top without any roof over them,
in which they were puffed along until they reached their destination.

Châteaublanc was a small red-roofed town built upon the southern slopes
of a range of low hills that rose not much higher than the rolling
countryside of woodland, pasture, and vineyard, at the foot of which
a small tributary of the Saône ran its shallow course over a bed of
limestone. The ruins of the castle that gave its name to Châteaublanc
still stood like an acropolis above the town, the sight of which
compensated Mary for much, since this must really once upon a time
have been an enchanted castle without any need to pretend that it was
one. In fact, from the moment she alighted at the station Mary liked
Châteaublanc. She liked the wide main street, where the houses dreamed
in the sunlight behind green shutters and Gloire de Dijon roses, and
where in the middle of the front parterres beautiful purple and silver
globes shimmered with the movement of the small world therein reflected.

"Oh, Grandmamma, how beautiful they are!" she cried, clapping her hands.

"Yes, you're in roseland here," said Lady Flower.

"No. Not the roses. They're beautiful too. But those purple balls!"

"My dear child, you don't mean to say you think those monstrous tinsel
spheres beautiful! Why, they're perfectly hideous!"

Mary regarded her grandmother in amazement. She must be mad. She must
be upset by the journey. She must be joking.

"Oh, and look! That garden's got five!" she shrieked, nearly falling
out of the _fiacre_ in her delight. "One purple. One silver. One blue.
One gold. And one red. I hope in heaven there are thrillions and
thrillions of them."

"God forbid!" exclaimed Lady Flower, sniffing her vinaigrette in dismay
at the picture. "And I suppose you mean trillions."

Mary was silent after this until the _fiacre_ took them beyond the main
street into an avenue of clipped acacias and limes, from which they
turned aside through wide paths into a curved drive where hydrangeas
bloomed in the beds on either side.

"What funny flowers!" Mary exclaimed. "They're like the little woman
in a house Uncle ... Fawcus ... Mr. Fawcus gave me. When it was going
to be wet, her bonnet and dress was pink and when it was going to be
fine they were blue. Only really she wasn't ever pink or blue, but like
those flowers, and then she was always wrong."

The _fiacre_ pulled up before a house with a white portico and French
windows opening to the wide verandah that ran round it.

"Is this really going to be my school?" Mary asked incredulously. "Why,
I thought it was going to be quite an ugly place. Oh, Grandmamma," she
cried, "how kind of you to give me such a nice school!"

Lady Flower had been influenced by a number of considerations in her
choice of a school for Mary, but what undoubtedly had least influence
was her granddaughter's point of view in the matter. Nevertheless,
as grown-up people use, she accepted the child's gratitude with
complacency.

It certainly was a good school. Mademoiselle Lucinge was a woman of
taste and breeding, who when little more than a girl had gone as
governess to the house of an English nobleman, where she had remained
ten years. Having inherited from a distant relative a house and a
small property, she had felt justified in carrying out a project
upon which she had for a long time set her heart. During her stay
in England she had had an opportunity of coming into contact with a
number of distinguished people, and from the moment she had opened her
_pension_ she had been successful. The greater number of her pupils
were English, but many other nationalities were represented; and Lady
Flower, who was prejudiced in favor of a cosmopolitan education,
thought that in Mademoiselle Lucinge she had found the ideal person to
correct in her granddaughter the effects of a deplorable upbringing,
for which, strange to say, she did not in the least blame herself.

When Mary went to Châteaublanc, she found herself the youngest of
thirty-five girls, and it had been agreed between Lady Flower and
Mademoiselle that for the first two years she was to spend all her
time there. So, when her grandmother bade good-by on the day after her
arrival it was to be a long good-by, although it was understood that
she might expect a visit whenever Lady Flower should be on her way to
Aix.

Mary was too much delighted with the _pension_ to feel any sorrow at
the prospect of so long a parting. Nor indeed was it to be expected
that in barely three months her grandmother would have become
indispensable to her happiness. Her new surroundings had already begun
even to dim the basement of Paternoster Row. Uncle William and Aunt
Lucy were now far away indeed. It would not be long before Mary would
begin to remember her past life in a few bright patches like the bright
patches of a faded carpet.

A month after Mary had arrived at the _pension_ war was declared
between France and Prussia. The pupils went home for their summer
holidays, and Mary was left with two girls from South America, both
considerably older than herself. During this time Mademoiselle Lucinge
took a great deal of trouble with Mary's education and was really more
like a private governess in the care she lavished than the proprietress
and headmistress of a fashionable school. The war was going so badly
for France that it seemed more prudent to close the school that autumn.
The two South American girls were sent off to Bordeaux that they might
sail thence for home and relieve the minds of their parents who had
sent a packet of anxious and excited letters. Mademoiselle Lucinge
wrote to her grandmother to ask what she would like Mary to do. Lady
Flower wrote back to say that she was convinced that the French defeats
were of no importance and that very shortly the Prussians would be
driven back over the Rhine. In any case, Paris was no place for her
granddaughter, and in Paris she herself must stay to do her work with
the Red Cross. Would Mademoiselle keep Mary at Châteaublanc?

Nothing could have fallen out better for Mary. She had now the entire
attention of Mademoiselle; she had a beautiful house and beautiful
gardens to herself; she had as many books to read as she wanted.

Mademoiselle Lucinge was a devout Catholic, and so were most of
her pupils. As regards Mary's religious teaching, Lady Flower let
Mademoiselle understand that she had no objection to as much religion
being instilled into her granddaughter as was consonant with her social
obligations in days to come; but she particularly requested that no
attempt should be made to lure her into Catholicism. The Papacy was
very unpopular in England at this period, and Lady Flower would have
regarded it as a serious reflection upon her duty as guardian if she
had allowed her granddaughter to enter society under such a handicap.
She herself privately believed in nothing that was not material, even
obvious, but inasmuch as positive scepticism would be considered as
unbecoming as Popish extravagance she conformed to the religious mode
of the time and expected her granddaughter to do the same.

Mademoiselle had not been a governess in England for ten years without
learning how little the English mind being considered eccentric
abroad, how much they hate to be thought eccentric at home. At the
same time, Mary was the youngest pupil in her school, and she regarded
her own duties of guardianship more gravely than Lady Flower regarded
hers. Whatever might be Mary's life in days to come, Mademoiselle was
determined that she should not be denied in childhood an opportunity to
prepare the soul for those deep consolations of religious belief that
might one day come to her aid in a time of stress. And Mary loved the
quiet hours with Mademoiselle, when in her gray boudoir she spoke to
her about God.

One mellow Sunday evening in mid-September, when the news from the
seat of war was as bad as it could be and when Mademoiselle's austere
and gracious countenance was lined with care and grief for her country,
Mary had been learning the fifth commandment in the catechism of the
Church of England:

  _Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the
  land which the Lord thy God giveth thee._

A robin redbreast was singing in the magnolia on the lawn beneath the
turret window of Mademoiselle's gray room, and Mary's thoughts on
seeing the bird went back to the attic in Paternoster Row, where she
had first read of the death of poor Cock Robin. When Mademoiselle's
exposition of filial piety was concluded, Mary asked her if she ought
to honor her grandmother as much as she would have honored her father
and mother were they alive.

"Quite as much, my child," said Mademoiselle.

Mary thought for a moment or two.

"But oughtn't I to honor Mr. and Mrs. Fawcus, who Grandmamma says I
mustn't call Uncle William and Aunt Lucy any more?"

It was Mademoiselle's turn to think for a moment.

"You ought to honor their memory," she said at last.

"But why mayn't I write to them and tell them where I am? And tell
about you, Mademoiselle, and what I'm doing and about the garden and
the lizards and the white cows who pull the carts and about treading on
the grapes and beating the corn with those funny sticks and about my
sabots and the melon I have for breakfast? They would like to hear."

Mademoiselle could not bear that the gratitude and affection of a
little child should be thus discouraged, although Lady Flower's last
words had been to forbid any communication between Mary and her former
guardians. In the end she compromised by letting Mary write a letter
and writing herself by the same post to Mr. Fawcus, begging him not to
reply and explaining the circumstances in which she had allowed Mary to
write. It was unlike Mademoiselle to compromise; but she was tormented
by the woes of France that autumn and not so much mistress as usual of
her judgment or emotions. Her kindly intention did much harm, for when
Mary received no answer to her letter she was embittered by the thought
that her beloved friends had already forgotten her, and this was the
first disillusion of her life.

During this time Mary, with the facility of childhood, learned to speak
French, so that before the leaves fell from the trees that year she was
as fluent as if she had been living in Châteaublanc from infancy. One
day in October--it was soon after the news had arrived of Gambetta's
escape from Paris in a balloon--Mary, wandering in a remote corner of
the grounds, discovered a stripling of about sixteen who was digging
holes for young trees to be planted in them when the autumn rains
should have soaked down into the soil. He was a slim, handsome boy with
fine features and dark, silky hair; but it was not his good looks that
interested Mary so much as the fact that he seemed to be working in a
frenzy of despair.

"_Qu'est-ce que tu as?_" she demanded.

"_J'ai mal au cœur_," he replied sullenly, wiping a tear from his eye
and bending low over his spade.

"But why are you crying?" she persisted. She spoke in French, of course.

"My tears belong to me," he said. "At least the Prussians have left us
our tears."

"Are you the son of our gardener?" she asked.

To this ollendorfian query he nodded.

"Of Monsieur Menard?"

He nodded again.

"_Alors, tu es Pierre?_"

"_Oui, je suis Pierre._"

Mary produced an apple from the pocket of the hideous crimson pelisse
she was wearing, and while she slowly munched it she regarded the boy
with solemn curiosity. She had heard of young Pierre Menard who had run
away from home to join the troops that were everywhere being recruited
in the provinces to drive the Prussians out of France, and of how his
father had found him in the market-place of Villefranche and brought
him back, because he was too young to be a soldier.

"I'm sorry you could not go to be a soldier, Pierre," she said at last.
"Would you like the other half of my apple?"

The boy accepted the proffered fruit with a surly grace, and presently
he was confiding in Mary the tale of his wrecked ambition.

"If I'm strong enough to plant trees, I'm strong enough to carry a
_chassepot_," he declared. "If I can dig holes for trees, I can dig
graves for Prussians."

Mary condoled with him, listened to his tales of the Emperor, not the
degenerate captive of the enemy, but the great Napoleon, and lamented
with him the glory of which he was being foiled by his father's cruelty.

"We must fight on for years, Gambetta says, and, who knows? I may rise
to be a marshal of France before the war comes to an end."

"You might be Emperor," Mary agreed with enthusiasm.

Pierre tried to look modest and disclaim so exalted an ambition as
that; but there was in the manner of his disclaimer a suggestion that
he did not think such an altitude impossible.

Mary saw a good deal of Pierre, because Mademoiselle who was sorry for
the boy raised no objection to her frequenting his company. For a long
time Mary had been anxious to visit the ruined castle on the hill above
the town, and on All Saints' Day she begged and obtained permission
to be escorted there by Pierre. There was not much left of the old
castle beyond crumbling ivy-colored walls and nettle-grown courts,
although there was one round tower, which was still almost intact.
Below the foundations of this tower was a large _oubliette_ bristling
with the very spikes which had impaled unhappy prisoners precipitated
upon them years ago. Mary and Pierre gazed down with awe through the
open trap and imagined that they could still see bones and bloodstains
upon the floor thirty feet below. Immediately beside the trap was a
small embrasure in the thick walls of the tower lighted by a lancet
window through which could be seen a vast expanse of country, meadows
and woods and vineyards and that great serpent the Saône. Hither it
was that the prisoner condemned to die was led up blinking from the
dungeons below to take his last look at France; here he was allowed to
spend a few wistful moments; hence he stepped upon the trap to vanish
forever from the eyes of men.

There was room for both Mary and Pierre to stand close together in the
embrasure and on this holy morn to gaze out at the russet landscape
breathless beneath the milky blue of the November sky.

"My little one," said Pierre, "I would rather throw myself down into
that _oubliette_ than stay here any longer while France bleeds to
death. Hark! Do you hear the sound of drums?"

"Yes, very far away. Trump--trump--trump--trump!" she whispered in awe
of the menacing beat.

"_Alors, je file!_" he cried. "You can find your way home alone?"

"But suppose there are cows on the road?"

"My little one, it is impossible to permit cows to stand in the way of
_la patrie et la gloire_. I will conduct you outside the Castle gates
and you must find your way home. As for me, this time I will go to the
war. _Vive la France!_"

Mary stood in the ruined gateway, waving her hand to Pierre who went
running and skipping along the white road after those faint-heard,
those elusive drum-taps that might have been anywhere and seemed to be
everywhere.

"We shall meet again after the war," he had called back to her.

Mademoiselle sent for Monsieur Menard and begged him not to interfere
again with his son's desire to serve France, and she was so eloquent
that Monsieur Menard gave way. But when peace was signed, Pierre did
not come back to Châteaublanc, because his father vowed that there
would be no doing anything with him nowadays. So through the interest
of one of Mademoiselle's patrons he was found a clerkship in the
English branch of a big French commercial house, and Mary did not see
him again in Châteaublanc.

But he was her first romance, and the memory of Pierre did not fade
quickly, even when Mademoiselle's house was full of girls again and
Mary's real school life began.

_Chapter Three_

THE MAIDEN

_Chapter Three: The Maiden_

On a January afternoon, the afternoon of her twentieth birthday, Mary
Flower stood by the drawing-room windows of a house in King's Gate,
staring out across the Knightsbridge road to where in soot and snow the
trees of Hyde Park were etched upon a gray expanse of sky. The house
was very still, for it was the time when old Lady Flower took her daily
nap, to the routine of which she attributed the vitality that enabled
her at seventy to sustain the exertion of arranging an advantageous
marriage for her granddaughter. To-day lunch had been protracted
to celebrate with various dishes Mary's birthday, and to-night a
dinner-party was to be followed by a musical reception. The house,
seeming to conspire with her ladyship's snores, achieved a stillness
that was even more perceptible than usual.

Mary's meditations were neither so profound nor so romantic as any
passer-by that looked up and glimpsed the form of that beautiful young
woman in her glass world might have imagined. Mostly they were directed
to her new evening gown, a polonaise snatched it might almost be said
prematurely by Lady Flower from the most fashionable of Parisian
costumiers. Mary dreamed of its _passementerie_ of beads and ruching of
Honiton lace, and then with heightened color of the amount of bare arm
it must reveal. She supposed that her grandmother was right and that
she should display as much of the upper part of her arm without risk of
censorious comment, but....

Mary wished that Daisy Harland had come up from the country yesterday
instead of waiting until to-night to wish her best friend many happy
returns of the day. Daisy's opinion would have been so valuable. Daisy
was so advanced, so unconventional, and yet always so right. But then
Grandmamma, too, was always right, and Grandmamma had deliberately
chosen the dress. Mary gave up bothering about the problem, which was
no problem at all really, because she must obviously take Grandmamma's
advice as long as Grandmamma was alive to give it. And if Grandmamma
should die? Why, then, in this great house she, Mary Flower, should
be all alone! No wonder Grandmamma was anxious for her to be safely
married. Marriage? That was indeed something to talk about with her
friend. If only the frost would hold so that Daisy might be resigned
to stay in London for a while and spend hours in discussing marriage.
Not of course as the topic had been discussed at school, where nobody
knew anything for certain and the horridest girls vied with one
another in dreadful propoundings. No, not like that, but seriously,
almost religiously--if one could compare two things so far asunder as
religion and marriage.

Mary contemplated the prospect of marriage with several of the men who
visited the house in King's Gate. None of them considered thus made her
feel at all anxious to be married; rather did each one present himself
to her fancy like an unknown bottle of medicine, the efficacy of which
was guaranteed but of the niceness or nastiness of which there was
nothing to be learned from its external appearance. It was not that
Mary had never imagined herself in love. Like most schoolgirls she
had cherished impossible loyalties and sentimental passions; but the
figures upon which these had been bestowed were like the figures in a
picture book or the remote incarnations that are begotten by music.
Love was an aspiration to a life beyond the present, a kind of yearning
upon immortality; it was never a practical guide to the humdrum, the
yet so intricate humdrum, of existence; it had nothing at all to do
with marriage.

Lady Flower was responsible for this attitude of her granddaughter. By
living so much in Paris, by allowing the French half of her character
to recover from years of discouragement by her husband, and by brooding
over her son's _mésalliance_--it was typical of the sentimental English
that they should have to borrow the right word from France--the old
lady felt herself more and more definitely inclined to the _mariage de
convenance_. She never let pass an opportunity to impress upon Mary
its superiority.

"Love, my dear child," she would tell her, "is an invention of the
poets to excuse their own weaknesses."

This afternoon, as Mary stared out across the wintry park, love did
seem a long way off from King's Gate, and marriage, for all it was such
a mystery, did seem comparatively near.

"Though suppose nobody ever does propose to me?" Mary thought. She
turned round for reassurance from the large gilded mirror over the
mantelpiece, and wished that she had never seen herself in a glass
before, so that she could arrive at a decision about her beauty. Was
she beautiful? If with six other girls she stood before a mirror for
the first time, so that she did not know which was herself, should she
think herself beautiful? But she should know which was herself, because
she should recognize the other girls, and the stranger in the middle
would be herself.

"Oh, am I or am I not beautiful?" she asked aloud of her reflection,
standing motionless in that frozen, reflected room where nothing was
alive except the swift pendulum of the ormulu clock on the wall behind
her. "Am I or am I not beautiful?" she repeated with a sigh, as she
took her place once more by the window and gazed out at the black and
white trees in the Park, beneath whose filigree of boughs people were
wandering in couples upon the powdered grass, walking so slowly that
they must be happy, Mary thought. She was filled with envy of those
shadows beyond the railings, who could upon this cold January afternoon
pace up and down with such unhurried steps. They surely must be lovers,
who could find delight in this chill and somber air, who could stroll
arm in arm about this landscape that was sinking beneath the weight of
a leaden sky. There opposite, two shadows were actually sitting upon a
bench, sitting as close as birds sit upon a perch at dusk. They must
love each other very deeply and very dearly, to endure the cold, very
deeply and very dearly to stay there away from the firelight. Beautiful
firelight, Mary thought; and she watched for a while its diminished
reflection lambent within the milky windowpanes.

"_Miladi_ is awake, Mademoiselle," said Adèle, coming into the room.

The canaries that lived in the domed conservatory at the back of the
drawing-room began to sing. The depression of the long silence was
broken.

Mary ran up the cheerful gas-lit stairs to her grandmother.

Lady Flower had tried to neutralize the fretwork of age by excess of
lace. She was still ivory; but the ivory was scratched, here and there
even badly cracked. The texture of lace seemed more likely than any
other to distract the attention of the observer, to confuse him by its
infinite reticulation and thus provide an illusive calendry for that
wrinkled countenance of hers.

"Well, dear," she began at once, sitting up among the pillows when Mary
came into the room. "I slept much better than I expected after those
grated chestnuts we had for your birthday lunch. I have an impression
of dreaming a good deal, but I've forgotten what about. So much the
better, for there is nobody so irritating as a _raconteur des rêves_."

Mary had been half inclined to tell Lady Flower about her own dreams
by the window; but she was deterred by this remark, and perhaps in any
case she would have been too much afraid of the old lady's cynical
toleration to expose those fleeting and intangible shades of romantic
love to her sparrowy eyes and pecks.

"I'm glad you feel rested," she said.

"Thank you, my dear."

They were always very courteous to each other, these two, or rather
Lady Flower was always very courteous to her granddaughter. Mary was
dutiful; and Lady Flower accepted any hint of affection, any display
of sympathy or consideration, as the fruit of a good upbringing. She
had no qualms about the younger generation. In the estimation of Lady
Flower young people existed to show respect and do their duty toward
their elders. Youth and labor at this period were still in bondage.

"I have invited more people than I intended for this evening," Lady
Flower went on. "I was anxious to give you an opportunity of seeing
various aspects of contemporary life."

"How kind of you, Grandmamma."

"Nothing to thank me for; I am doing no more than my duty."

Lady Flower made this admission a trifle unwillingly; but she thought
it right to let Mary understand that, as she grew older, she, too,
would find duty dogging her like a shadow. She must not be allowed to
suppose that marriage meant freedom.

"Yes," she continued complacently, "I have invited several artistic
people. They seem to be getting themselves a good deal talked about
nowadays, and I felt you ought to meet some of them. By the way, Mr.
Alison is coming."

"I'm glad," said Mary. "He's very nice."

"Very nice, indeed," her grandmother agreed emphatically. "And very
much _beau garçon_. About thirty-five," she went on, meditating aloud.
"About thirty-five, and extremely well off. He wrote to me that he was
returning from the Continent on purpose to be present at your birthday
party. I must say I find that highly significant."

"Significant of what?"

"My dear, innocence is a charming and attractive quality; but do not
be too _ingénue_. No, not too _ingénue_. At any rate with me. You must
surely have noticed how _empressé_ he has always been with you? He
admires you, and though of course I do not wish to influence you unduly
or to persuade you into a hasty marriage, at the same time ... however,
there are others every bit as suitable as Mr. Alison. I just happen
to have noticed that he is rather obviously ... however, please, my
dear child, pay no attention to what I was saying, because I should
be unwilling, oh, yes, most unwilling, to precipitate a marriage with
anybody, even a young man so perfectly eligible as Mr. Alison. At the
same time, you are twenty, are you not? And I am seventy. You will of
course inherit a comfortable sum when I die, but that makes it all the
more imperative to choose for your husband a man who has money."

Mary did not quite see the logic of this; but she had long ago been
successfully cured of asking why; and, since the prospect of marrying
Mr. Alison was at least as pleasant as the prospect of marrying anybody
else, she was not sufficiently interested to pursue the topic.

But Mr. Alison took Mary into dinner; Lady Flower felt that he deserved
some reward for hurrying back from Nice.

James Alison, known generally as Jemmie Alison, was a stockbroker who
had succeeded at the age of twenty-seven to a lucrative business. As
a boy, when he had fair, curly hair, he had been definitely handsome.
He was now a florid man with a heavy fair mustache, who was still
good-looking, although his hair was beginning to require some arranging
before it would cover the top of his head, and his features showed
signs of coarsening. From his schooldays at Eton, indeed from the day
he was born, he had never been compelled to deny himself anything,
and like many men who have inherited a fortune early in life he looked
older than he was and felt older than he looked. After dinner he was
separated from Mary for some time; but at last he managed to find a
seat beside her in the conservatory while a famous tenor was singing:

 _I had a message to send her,
   To her, whom my soul loved best;
 But I had my task to finish,
   And she has gone home to rest._

"Beautiful song," said Mr. Alison.

"Exquisite!" Mary sighed.

 _I had a message to send her,
   So tender, and true, and sweet,
 I longed for an Angel to bear it,
   And lay it down at her feet._

"Things can be said in songs that can't be said any other way," Mr.
Alison murmured with a sigh.

Mary appeared wrapt in the melody.

 _I cried, in my passionate longing;--
   "Has the earth no Angel-friend
 Who will carry my love the message
   That my heart desires to send?"_

Mr. Alison looked appealingly at Mary; but she was still wrapt in the
melody.

 _Then I heard a strain of music,
   So mighty, so pure, so clear,
 That my very sorrow was silent,
   And my heart stood still to hear._

"One of the loveliest songs I ever heard," Mr. Alison declared. "And he
sings it divinely."

 _And I tenderly laid my message
   On the music's outspread wings._

 _I heard it float farther and farther,
   In sound more perfect than speech;
 Farther than sight can follow,
   Farther than soul can reach._

Mary with a tear in each eye was staring up at the dome of the
conservatory. Mr. Alison, although he could not muster a tear even
in one eye, looked in the same direction and derived a great deal of
satisfaction from the thought that he and this beautiful girl by his
side were both staring at the same pane of glass. The singer achieved a
triumphant C.

 _And I know that at last my message
   Has passed through the golden gate;
 So my heart is no longer restless,
   And I am content to wait._

"'Content to wait,'" Mr. Alison echoed meaningly, when the applause had
died down. "'Content to wait,'" he repeated. "So long as I know that
somebody has received my message."

Mary was nearly sure that this was a declaration; but she was not
absolutely sure, and she wished that Daisy Harland had not at the last
moment telegraphed to say that she could not be with her beloved Mary
on her twentieth birthday.

"Ah, Miss Flower," Mr. Alison continued, shaking his head. "It would
be hard for you to understand the thoughts of a man like myself when
he hears a song like that. At the same time, the moral of it surely is
that, however far away we may seem from heaven, we are not so far away
in reality. We can hope. We can hope, Miss Flower. I wonder if I might
venture to say Mary?"

"Oh, certainly, please call me Mary," she begged him nervously.

"Thank you, Mary."

Mr. Alison wished that he could quote a line of poetry about some
romantic Mary; but he could only think of _Mary had a little lamb_. And
he felt that to sigh this forth with as much passionate emphasis as he
could achieve would sound rather silly.

"I suppose," he ventured, "you couldn't bring yourself to call me
Jemmie? All my chums call me Jemmie. Jemmie Alison. Nobody ever calls
me James. Nobody ever did call me James except my grandmother on my
father's side. Funny old woman. She simply would not call me Jemmie.
She always said the name reminded her of a fright she had in childhood
when some burglars broke into her father's house, who of course would
have been my great-grandfather. Now that's going back some way. My
father died in '72. He was sixty-three then. So he was born in 1809,
when my grandmother was twenty-one. That makes her born in 1788. So I
suppose this burglary must have happened about 1798. That's a long time
ago, isn't it?"

"A very long time ago," Mary agreed. She was so much muddled by Mr.
Alison's statistics that if he had told her the burglary took place
shortly after the Battle of Hastings she would have accepted it as a
fact.

"I wish the old lady could have lived to meet you, Mary," he went on.
"You are just the kind of girl she would have liked me to marry."

Luckily for Mary, who did not know what comment she ought to make on
this last piece of information, by this time the tenor was off again:

 _Do you grieve no costly offering
   To the lady you can make?
 One there is, and gifts less worthy
   Queens have stooped to take._

 _Take a Heart of virgin silver,
   Fashion it with heavy blows,
 Cast it into Love's hot furnace
   When it fiercest glows._

"Is that your heart or mine?" Mr. Alison asked in a puzzled voice. "I
don't quite get that. I mean, is that his heart or hers?"

Mary motioned him not to talk, because people were beginning to turn
round and peer at the palms among which they were sitting, curious to
know what discordant mutter was profaning the music.

 _With pain's sharpest point transfix it,
   And then carve in letters fair,
 Tender dreams and quaint devices,
   Fancies sweet and rare._

 _Set within it Hope's blue sapphire,
   Many-changing, opal fears,
 Blood-red ruby-stones of daring,
   Mixed with pearly tears._

"Hope's red ruby!" exclaimed Mr. Alison. "That's really uncommonly
fine, I think."

 _And when you have wrought and labored
   Till the gift is all complete,
 You may humbly lay your offering
   At the Lady's feet._

 _Should her mood perchance be gracious--
   With disdainful smiling pride,
 She will place it with the trinkets
   Glittering at her side._

"I got muddled in that song," Mr. Alison confessed. "I don't think it's
as good as the first one. Mary, before another song begins, may I tell
you that I love you? May I ask you to be my wife? I know that you do
not love me yet. But you might learn to love me. Mightn't you, Mary?
You're very young. I can wait, now that I have delivered my message at
the golden gate. Now I shall always reverence that song, Mary. To my
dying day. It seems to me sitting here beside you at this moment more
like a sacred song than just ordinary poetry. I wonder who wrote it?"

"I wonder," echoed Mary, glad to find the conversation turning away
from personalities to literature.

"I suppose it wasn't Shakespeare?" Mr. Alison hazarded.

"No, I don't _think_ it was Shakespeare."

"He wrote such a lot of well-known stuff," said Mr. Alison. "One's
pretty safe five times out of ten to guess Shakespeare. But, Mary, you
have not replied to my question. May I hope? May I set in my heart
Hope's red ruby?"

"It was Hope's blue sapphire," she corrected.

"Well, whatever jewel it was, may I hope?"

"I hadn't expected anything like this," said Mary, wondering whether it
would create general consternation if she were to jump up from her seat
and rush out of the conservatory.

"I know it seems sudden; but it's not really so sudden. All the time
I've been in the south of France I've been thinking about you. I tried
to drown my despair by playing roulette. In fact, I won quite a lot of
money, because I played so recklessly."

Mary turned pale. Could her existence really affect a man of the world
like Mr. Alison up to the point of reckless gambling?

"I felt in my inmost being that you could not love me. You're as much
above me as a--as a--as an angel!" He tried not to look proud of the
simile. "I know I am not worthy of you, Mary. I know that. But I have
said enough. You look agitated. Please do not let my impetuosity
distress you. Hark! Somebody else is going to sing."

The deep notes of a voluptuous contralto broke into the murmur of small
talk like a dinner-gong.

"Don't forget, Mary," said Mr. Alison, when the sonorous abracadabra of
an Italian song had died away in loud applause. "I have delivered my
message, and I am content to wait. Shall I take you downstairs and get
you an ice?"

"Oh, thank you, Mr. Alison."

"Mary, please!" he moaned reproachfully. "Jemmie. I thought you'd
promised me that much."

It was lucky the ices were downstairs; for his tone would have melted
the lot had they been in the conservatory.

"Jemmie," she whispered, feeling exactly as if she had swallowed a pill
without water.

"You have made me radiantly happy," he affirmed. "By Jove, I feel as
if I never knew my name _was_ Jemmie until this moment."

As for Mary, she felt nothing except a vague hope that she had not
committed herself too deeply by granting Mr. Alison's desire to be
called Jemmie. Her grandmother might choose to consider that by doing
so she had accepted him. She prayed that Daisy Harland would soon reach
London. Otherwise, at this rate, she would find herself married before
she knew it.

For the rest of the evening she managed to avoid her suitor, though it
was at the cost of having to endure the dissertative bibble-babble upon
Japanese interiors of a young man with long hair and a double chin, one
of those artistic people whom the hostess had invited to her reception
in order to support a daring social experiment that was having a vogue.

"Did Mr. Alison give you an amusing account of his tour in France?"
Lady Flower inquired after the sound of the last carriage had died away
on the frosty air.

"He talked about France. He wasn't very amusing," said Mary.

"You seemed to be getting on very well together, nevertheless,"
observed her grandmother. "In fact, when What's-his-name, the tenor,
was singing it was really quite noticeable that you were too much
occupied with each other to pay any attention to the music."

"We were discussing the music," Mary said, wishing that her
grandmother would go to bed, and not ask any more questions.

"I suppose that if he does seriously intend to ask for your hand he
will speak to me first. He's not so young as to be able to neglect
that courtesy. He's not one of the young communards of to-day who
consider they have equal rights with parents and guardians. He'll
be ready to admit that we elders have some authority left. Only
fancy, my dear, Lady Pringle tells me that her daughters demand, yes,
positively demand, to play in a lawn-tennis competition next summer.
A public affair, as far as I can make out. She made me shudder with
her description of it. Young women of breeding and education are to
expose themselves in front of anybody who likes to pay the necessary
charge for admission. Dear me, I remember that your poor grandfather
used sometimes to be shocked by what he considered my ultra-modern and
extravagantly continental ideas. What would he have said, had he been
alive to-day? I do hope your friend, Daisy Harland, won't persuade
_you_ into wanting to appear as a female acrobat. She has always
struck me as the kind of young woman who would do anything. She was a
dreadfully noisy girl, I remember."

Mary allowed Daisy's character to be sacrificed in order to divert her
grandmother from the discussion of Mr. Alison. Soon she was able to
propose bed and was glad when at last she found herself alone in the
dark with her secret.

Her first proposal....

Only that afternoon she had been wondering if any one would propose to
her, and already on her twentieth birthday she had received one.

Jemmie....

But she did not think of him as Jemmie. Were she to become his wife
to-morrow, she should for a long time think of him as Mr. Alison.

Mary Alison....

That was rather attractive.

Mrs. Alison....

It was in his favor that he had neither father nor mother alive. If
she did make up her mind to marry him, she should not want another
grandmamma in her mother-in-law.

Mary Alison ... yours most truly, Mary Alison....

But marriage meant more than that. Rather horrid intimacies ...
children....

"Do I want children?" Mary asked herself. "I don't believe I do at all."

Pain! And of course, unless she had been utterly misinformed, it must
hurt horribly.

"I should never have the courage," she told herself. "Never," she
decided, and turning over she was soon fast asleep.

A week later, Daisy Harland did come to London, and to her in that top
room of the Harlands' house in South Kensington, in that room papered
with hunting scenes, which was bound up more closely with her girlhood
than any room in the world, Mary confided the tale of her first
proposal.

"He's not so bad," Daisy commented. "He's clean to look at. Pretty well
off too, I should say. But why be in a hurry?"

"Oh, I'm not in any hurry. It's my grandmother who is so anxious to see
me safely married."

"I wonder why. I suppose she can't bear the idea of not arranging the
whole matter to please herself."

Mary gazed down at the garden of the Square, in which little girls well
wrapped up in white furs were running about after large particolored
balls of india rubber, while their nurses gossiped gravely with one
another, moving with slow and stately tread behind their perambulators.
What fun she and Daisy had always had in the Square when she used to
stay with her friend for the holidays! Perhaps it was the bareness
of winter that made it seem so small nowadays; or perhaps everything
shrank as one grew older.

"Don't you think that a girl ought to love the man she is going to
marry?" Mary pressed.

"But what is love? Personally I've never been in love."

"Daisy! You were tremendously in love with Gerald Ashworth. Don't you
remember when you bought that lilac notepaper with two hearts stamped
in the top corner?"

Her friend laughed.

"You don't think seriously that the kind of silliness in which one
indulges at fifteen is to be considered an experience?"

"Yes, I do," Mary insisted. "If I hadn't been in love when I was small,
I shouldn't be bothering now about being in love with Jemmie Alison. I
shouldn't expect anything. As it is, I feel somehow that I want more
than he can give me."

"If you'd come back with me to Berkshire and hunt, you'd soon forget
all your troubles."

"Should I? I wonder. Not by hunting, Daisy. You would not enjoy hunting
so much, if you weren't so proud of yourself for learning to ride so
late in life."

"I wish we'd had our place in Berkshire when I was little," said Daisy
regretfully. "I _should_ have been a horsewoman then. The pater might
just as well have launched out a bit earlier. We didn't really save
anything by living in London."

"But it was fun when we used to play up here," said Mary. "Do you
remember when we made those paper boxes and filled them with ink and
dropped them on the pavement? Oh, and don't you remember when Eustace
Arnesby came to tea, and he dropped one on an old gentleman's hat?"

"Eustace is at Sandhurst now," said Daisy. "Talking of young love, I
did have rather a pash for him."

"Daisy!"

"What's the matter?"

"You do say such terrible things."

"In fact," Daisy continued, "when I look back at my innocent girlhood,
I seem to have spent my time falling in and falling out of love with
lanky boys. And you, my darling Mary, are trying to make out that that
kind of thing is serious. Well, if it was, my young life has been
lived, for at present I couldn't fall in love with anybody."

"I believe I could," said Mary meditatively. "But not with Jemmie
Alison. If you really think about it, marriage is terrible."

"Why?"

Here was Mary's opportunity to ask Daisy a few direct questions; but,
when it came to the point, she could not bring herself to do so. She
could not imagine that she would ever feel more intimate with any other
girl than she felt with Daisy, and if she could not ask Daisy she could
not ask anybody.

"Why?" her friend repeated.

"Oh, always being with the same person," said Mary, with this
explanation allowing the opportunity to pass.

Daisy went back to her hunting; Mary remained in London.

"We might go to Ventnor in March," said Lady Flower. "I don't feel
inclined to travel far. I really believe that I'm beginning to feel
old. I wish I could see you safely married. You strike me as being
somewhat listless in your manner. That would vanish if you were
married."

Jemmie Alison ventured to think that Mary was not looking quite
herself. He would have been glad to suggest the same remedy as Lady
Flower; but he lacked the courage and compromised.

"What you want is a dog," he decided. "A nice little dog. Give you an
excuse for taking a walk every morning in the Park. I should like to
think of you with your little dog under the trees when I'm working in
my office."

Jemmie Alison proved that he had faith in his prescription by taking
a great deal of trouble to procure for Mary the very dog for the
purpose--a wise Dandie Dinmont not so young as to require the elements
of training, yet not so old as to be fretting for a former mistress or
master.

"He is called Mac. You don't dislike that name?" the donor asked.

Mary said that she thought it was a most suitable name.

"There's so much in a name," he continued meaningly.

"Yes, and it's so unlucky, I always think, to change a name," Mary
added.

"Oh, you think it's unlucky?" Jemmie Alison asked in a gloomy tone.

Mac was a success from the moment of his arrival, and Mary was really
grateful to her friend--friendship was the relation established between
her and Jemmie Alison after several discussions--for the kind thought
that made the dog hers. She was glad when the need of exercising Mac
took her out into Hyde Park where by now, crocuses, a myriad steady
flames, defied the wind and lighted the dim green of the London grass.
There were also white and purple crocuses that gave Mary a keener
pleasure than the yellow ones, for they seemed to be not so much the
first flowers of Spring as the last flowers of Winter, and to express
with their cold hues and tranquillity of form the sharpness of life
that was there all the time. They reminded her somehow of those lovers
who wandered about in the iron chill of that January afternoon, those
regardful lovers whose happy indifference to time or weather she had so
greatly envied.

One morning the sun was so warm that, tired with throwing sticks
for Mac, Mary sat down on a chair in the Broad Walk, watching the
children bowling their hoops or running about with pink and blue
balloons, while with one splay paw upon his mistress's instep Mac sat
watching the other dogs. Mary from paying attention to the children
and nurses fell to wondering about the fragments of shell that were
mixed with the fresh gravel of the path. From what far-off beach had
they come, or were they fossil shells from the bed of a long-receded
ocean? Whencesoever it came, each fragment had once been part of a
living animal. A living animal. Not a hundred years hence, she, or all
that part of her beheld now by the passers-by, would seem not more
important than one of these shells. Was there not indeed something
more permanent than this bodily husk? Grandmamma did not think so.
Mary was sure of her unbelief, even if every Sunday morning Grandmamma
in sealskin and dove-gray silk did make use of the pew she rented for
herself and Mary in St. Peter's, Knightsbridge.

"You are seen in church," she told her granddaughter. "One is anxious
for you to be seen."

With the help of her vinaigrette Lady Flower kept awake during the
sermon and congratulated herself upon the charming appearance of Mary,
when Mary rose to take her share of singing unto the Lord at Morning
Prayer.

The notion that her granddaughter was contemplating the serious aspect
and expression of religious fervor would have shocked the old lady; the
knowledge that she was sitting in Kensington Gardens asking herself
what she really was would have made Lady Flower think more earnestly
than ever that it was high time her granddaughter was married.

"It must be for something," Mary told herself, crushing a tiny
scalloped fragment with her toe. "Life must be meant for something."

Any attempt to solve the riddle of the universe had to be postponed
on account of Mac's suddenly being involved in a desperate fight, for
while his mistress had been lost in meditation he had been exposed to
the insults of an aggressive fox terrier.

"Bandy-legged Sawney!" the terrier had murmured when he trotted fussily
past with erect tail. Mac's ears had twitched under this reflection
upon his nationality; but he had restrained himself. Presently the
terrier had come trotting back, this time on three legs as if to
insinuate that he was a better dog on three legs than a Dandie Dinmont
on four.

"Donkey's ears!" he had snarled.

Even this Mac had endured in patience, for his splay paw was still
reposing on his mistress' instep and he was proud of the pose, too
proud to abandon it for a fox-terrier. But, when his mistress had of
her own accord released him by withdrawing her toe from his protection,
Mac had been able to stand no more.

"Let him come back and say another word," he had growled to himself,
turning round and round and scratching up the gravel in his irritation.
The fox-terrier had trotted back more aggressive than ever and to
emphasize his contempt of the Dandie Dinmont's short legs he had
swaggered up and down in front of Mac on the tips of his paws,
boastfully snarling.

Mac rushed in, and the fight began.

The nearest children climbed hastily over the railings to the safety
of the grass: nurses screamed to their charges: a park-keeper looked
out of the window of his little green room and made ready to effect an
impressive arrival upon the scene when the fight was over.

"Your dog began it," a weather-beaten woman said angrily to Mary. "I
call all and sundry to witness that it was your dog who deliberately
made an attack upon mine. Trusty! Trusty! Oh, my poor Trusty, he'll be
killed. That other brute's got him down. He's being bitten to pieces,
my poor old Trusty!"

Mary was hitting both dogs with her whip-lead; but although she felt
that she was using most unfeminine force, such force that the ribbons
of her bonnet came untied and at any moment she expected to find her
hair loose upon her shoulders, her blows had not the slightest effect
upon the dogs. The owner of the fox-terrier was exciting herself more
every moment, and Mary was afraid that presently she should find
herself being rolled over and over among those fragments of shells, her
preoccupation with which had been the cause of Mac's outburst. However,
the Dandie Dinmont was certainly winning; and if the weather-beaten
lady did attack her, perhaps he would have disposed of the fox-terrier
in time to rescue his mistress. At that moment a slim young man rushed
into the middle of the fray and, seizing both dogs by their tails, he
held them apart until he had returned them growling to the arms of
their owners.

"You can think yourself lucky that I don't take out a summons against
you," said the owner of the fox-terrier, hurrying off, without a word
of thanks to the young man, to bathe Trusty's wounds at the nearest
fountain.

He was a dark young man with fine features and deep brown eyes, who
spoke English with a French accent.

"Pardon, Mademoiselle, we have not met before, have we?" he asked,
looking hard at Mary.

She thought that he was trying to improve the occasion and was on
the point of replying with a cold negative, when she began to wonder
where and how she had met this stranger before. In his frankly puzzled
stare there was not a hint of presumption, and, though to enter into
conversation with a young man who had rendered her a service in a
public park was contrary to the whole spirit of her bringing up, Mary
could not resist her curiosity.

"Have we met before?" she asked. "I've a feeling that we have
somewhere. You are French, are you not?"

"From the Lyonnais," he replied.

"But that's where I was at school."

"I lived in Châteaublanc," he continued. In a flash she remembered who
he was.

"Pierre Menard!" she cried.

"And you are the little English girl with--pardon, Mademoiselle--with
red hair."

When two old friends meet after a long lapse of time, the years between
are either swept away altogether or their capacity for separation is
doubled. In this case they were obliterated. Here on this fine morning
in early March Pierre stood before Mary as many times he had stood in
the fair landscapes of memory. She heard again the diminishing sound
of the drum that played him on to glory down that winding road ten
years ago; she stood again beside him in that embrasure, gazing at a
world washed with the gold of that breathless and mellow autumn day;
she saw him again in heroic guise and found in his handling of the
dog-fight such an inspired chivalry as she had found in his setting
forth to fight for France.

"And how well you speak English, Monsieur."

"I have lived in London for eight years. I'm working with Marechal
et Cie, the big silk merchants. I had some business to transact in
Kensington and took the opportunity of walking through the Gardens this
beautiful day."

"Then I must not detain you," she murmured.

With a gesture he disposed of any urgency in his business.

"You were in a greater hurry last time we were together," Mary reminded
him.

She blushed at the adverb she had used, for it seemed to sweep them
toward an intimacy that she felt was imprudent.

"I was not old enough last time, Mademoiselle, to appreciate my good
fortune. And you were, if I may say so, a very little girl in those
days, Mademoiselle."

While they were talking, they had moved away from the populous Broad
Walk and were wandering now through a grove of elms. Mary looking
round realized that they were as much alone together as if they were in
the country. Yet not for anything would she have been anywhere else,
not for anything would she have missed this new music in the twittering
of the sparrows overhead, this fresh glow in the grass, this sudden
accord of herself with the Spring.

"I ought really to be going home," she murmured. "I only came out to
give my little dog a run."

"See how much he is enjoying himself on the grass. I could never have
the heart to deprive him of a moment's pleasure, Mademoiselle. I should
indeed be _ingrat_."

They were wandering deeper into the green heart of the Gardens. Mary,
looking over her shoulder, saw the houses of Kensington lose themselves
in a mist of bare boughs, heard the traffic sound more faintly, ceased
to feel the slightest desire to solve the riddle of the universe, and
threw all the responsibility of her behavior upon Fate.

"I've felt for a long time that something was about to happen,"
she told herself deliberately without being the least aware of
inconsistency, who only half an hour ago was feeling drearily that
nothing was going to happen. What nice hands Pierre had ... she pulled
herself up for a moment, but a moment later asked herself indignantly
by what other name she should think of him. He had always been Pierre.
Why did he keep staring sideways at her without speaking? She must be
careful to appear utterly unconscious of his glances.

"I'm trying to tell myself that you are grown up," Pierre said.

It was so easy to think of him as Pierre. Monsieur Menard would sound
so affected, and Mr. Menard would sound ridiculous.

"I am grown up. I'm twenty."

What would Grandmamma say if she could hear her? Yet after all he must
know within a year or two how old she was, so why pretend?

"I am twenty-seven."

"I think you look older than that," Mary said judicially. "I should
have guessed you were thirty, if I had not known that you were scarcely
seventeen when you went off to the war."

Mary felt that it was important to impress on Pierre how much she was
aware of that boy and girl friendship. It would never do for him to
think that she would have allowed herself to walk with him under these
trees because he was what he was now. No sooner had she decided this
than she felt a sharp desire to glance sideways at him, to see more
exactly what he was indeed now. She tried hard to resist the impulse,
but the longer she resisted the more urgent it became, and thus their
eyes met.

She blushed in confusion, but an instant afterward turned pale with
emotion.

"Mademoiselle, you are ill," he cried. "Sit here awhile. The sun is
shining. You will not catch cold."

Why did he call her Mademoiselle? Why did he not say "Mary"? Oh, she
must not think such thoughts. Probably he did not know her name, or if
he ever knew it he must have forgotten it long ago. He was behaving so
well, and she was behaving so badly.

"I don't know what you must think of me," she murmured.

"Mademoiselle, I should not dare to say so soon what I thought."

"Is your opinion of me as bad as all that?" She was behaving like a
coquette. What was happening to her? Mac's fight must have upset her
more than she thought.

"You are unkind to me," said Pierre with a shrug.

"Unkind?" she echoed.

"You taunt me with my position...." He broke off and began to play with
the dog.

Already a quarrel. How exciting life became when one could quarrel!

"You misunderstand me, Monsieur," Mary said with a dignity that she
hoped was a match for his. "I had not the least intention of taunting
you. Perhaps you are trying to persuade yourself into thinking that,
because you are afraid that you may have led me to suppose that you
were more interested in thinking about me than you really were."

"I am too much interested in you," Pierre retorted. "And you with the
cruelty of your sex have perceived that too quickly. But you are right
to make it clear to me that you have only condescended to give me your
company.... Ah, Mademoiselle, do you think I have forgotten that when
you first met me I was the gardener's son?"

So he was! But he was French. And France was now a republic where all
were equal.

"I remember perfectly what you were," said Mary. "But I don't remember
that it made any difference to me when I was ten, and I don't see why
it should make any difference when I'm twenty."

"Mademoiselle," cried Pierre, starting to his feet, "I entreat you not
to mock me. I have no right to say what I feel for you. But at least I
may beg you to spare my feelings."

"You really do speak English quite perfectly," Mary exclaimed in
obvious, open-eyed admiration of his fluency.

"Mademoiselle, if I should wish to change my employer, I would beg you
to give me a written testimonial."

"Ah, now it's you who are sneering at me," said Mary, turning upon
Pierre reproachful eyes.

He made a gesture that was intended to convey how little it mattered to
her what he did or what he said or what he thought. Who was he in her
world?

Mary felt that it would give quite a wrong impression of herself
if she did not succeed in convincing him that she despised those
artificial barriers of rank and station to which he evidently supposed
she attached so much importance.

"I assure you that I never was and never could be conscious of any
difference between us like that," she affirmed. "I look upon you as an
old friend whom Fate--Fate," she repeated emphatically, for she felt
that it was imperative to make it clear from the start that Fate was
going to be accounted culpable for anything that might happen, "whom
Fate has brought once more into my life. I should never have allowed
myself to take this walk with you alone, if I didn't consider you an
old friend. And now I'm sure you ought to be keeping your appointment.
It would never do for you to neglect your business on my account."

"But shall we ever meet again?" he asked.

"Fate will decide that," answered Mary demurely. "I dare say, if your
business brings you this way sometimes, we shall meet."

And of course they did meet, not once but many times that Spring.

"It was really a happy thought of Mr. Alison's to give you that
odd-looking dog," Lady Flower observed. "Your color is much better
since you've made a habit of exercising that dog in the Park. I really
don't think you'll want to leave town until the season is over. And I
shall not be sorry for an excuse to stay where I am. I find these short
excursions into the country rather a bore nowadays."

"I'm perfectly well in London," Mary assured her grandmother. "I think
it would be a great mistake to go away."

Mary did not meet Pierre in the Park every day, but she did meet him
very often; and, although at the back of her mind she had a suspicion
that he must be neglecting his business to be able to meet her as often
as he did, she allowed herself to suppose that it was Fate. And if ever
before her mirror she was tempted by honesty to ask herself what was
going to be the end of it, she always hurried down to dinner and left
Fate to argue it out upstairs. Her friend Daisy had been back in town
a long time before Mary gave the least hint of an interest in life. In
fact, if she had not met Pierre unexpectedly one morning when she was
out walking with Daisy, she would probably never have said anything
about her romance.

"So that's why you find Jemmie Alison so dull," her friend laughed.

"My dear, what has he got to do with Jemmie Alison?"

"A great deal, I should imagine, by your blushes."

"Did I never tell you about young Menard, when we were at the
_pension_?"

Daisy shook her head.

"Of course, it happened before you came. When I was there during the
war." She related briefly the tale of Pierre's determination to fight
for his country. "And the other day we met again quite by accident."

"And no doubt will go on meeting quite by accident," said Daisy dryly.

"I must take Mac somewhere," Mary protested.

Two days later she met Pierre by the banks of the Serpentine on a
May noon that held the city in a web of silver. The tall houses of
Bayswater, reflected in that shimmering expanse of water, appeared like
the battlements of an enchanted palace above the trees that masked
their prosaic beginnings. The white peacocks haunting the slopes toward
Hyde Park made one feel that life was a dream and that the children
and nurses, the meditative loiterers, even the old maids with their
pet dogs, would all presently be turned into birds to fly above this
cloud-cuckoo-town of London.

No sooner were they seated on two of those green chairs, which in
their emptiness speak as eloquently as musical instruments of latent
emotions, than Pierre took Mary's hand and said: "Mademoiselle, I have
given up Marechal et Cie. Presently I shall find something better to
do. But so long as I was their _employé_ I could not tell you that I
loved you. At this moment I am poor, but I am free. Mary, I hope you
will love me until I can win you in marriage?"

She let her hand remain in his. Citizen and citizeness of
cloud-cuckoo-town, they floated far above ordinary life.

"I only know that I love you, Pierre," she whispered.

He bent over and touched her fingers with his lips. Then for a long
time they sat in silence.

"You had better come and speak to my grandmother this afternoon."

He nodded pensively.

"She might raise some difficulties," Mary went on, trying to realize
that there was another existence outside the serene and silver world in
which the beating of her own heart sounded so loud. "Come about four,"
she said, rising. "I will explain how all this has happened."

He kissed once more her hand and stood watching her as she floated
across the level grass toward home.

It was only when Mary heard the door of the house in King's Gate close
behind her and the gong chime for lunch that she began to wonder if
it was all going to be as easy as it had seemed by the banks of the
pale blue Serpentine. However, Pierre was coming this afternoon, and
Grandmamma must be warned. Lunch was surely unusually disturbed to-day.
The maids were always in and out with new dishes. Perhaps it would be
best to wait until they went up to the drawing-room for coffee. Would
that mean Grandmamma's missing her nap? If it did, it could not be
helped. At least she must be told that there was such a person.

"Did I ever tell you about a boy called Pierre Menard?" Mary asked
when she had poured out the coffee. It took a long time to describe
that scene ten years ago when Pierre followed the drum to glory, so
long that Grandmamma was nodding before Mary had finished. But when
Mary added that curiously enough she had met him again the other day,
met him once or twice in fact, and that he had asked her if he could
call this afternoon, Grandmamma sat upright and looked more wide-awake
than Mary had ever seen her yet.

"Is the young man going to call on you or me?"

"On you, Grandmamma."

"Oh," the old lady grimly commented. "Then I'd better go and take my
rest at once."

Mary could not make up her mind whether she should stay in the
drawing-room until Pierre came or whether it would be wiser to let
him interview her grandmother first. In the end she decided upon the
latter course, and in great agitation of spirit she went upstairs to
her own room where she tried to distract her thoughts by trying on
several new dresses with which Lady Flower had insisted on replenishing
her wardrobe, so that she should not carry an end-of-the-season air
about her, the old lady had said. But the new dresses were incapable
of keeping her from running out on the landing every few minutes to
hear if the front door was being opened. It became impossible to remain
in her room, and she went back to the drawing-room so that she might
see Pierre first and warn him that her grandmother was likely to be
difficult.

At last Pierre arrived, looking trim and slim in a frock-coat. Mary
was glad that he had dressed ceremoniously, for she knew how much
importance Grandmamma attached to ceremony.

"Oh, Pierre," she exclaimed. "I only wanted to see you for a moment
just to advise you to talk in French to Lady Flower. She is half French
herself, you know, and I'm sure it will all sound much better in your
own language. It's not that you don't speak English perfectly, but you
might make a slip in a foreign tongue. You might give quite a wrong
impression."

Pierre agreed with her about the wisdom of this, and then he took her
in his arms.

"_Ma bien aimée_," he whispered. "Will you give me courage with one
kiss?"

She fluttered upon his arms more lightly than a bird, more lightly
than a moth, more lightly than a crimson leaf that is blown whispering
along a window-pane. Then hearing her grandmother's step she fled from
the room through the domed conservatory past the staring eyes of the
pelargoniums and the pug-faced, toothless calceolarias.

Twenty minutes later, Mary found Pierre gone and her grandmother
reading _The Times_ as if she were trying to assure herself that normal
life would continue in spite of a presumptuous young Frenchman, who
without prospects asked for the hand of an heiress.

"Although, considering what he is," said Lady Flower, "the young man
behaved very well. I was able to show him at once how ridiculous it was
that he should aspire to marry you."

"But I love him," Mary interposed.

"I have no doubt that at this moment you do love him. It is my
business, dear child, to protect you against impulse."

Lady Flower was once more sitting in her boudoir at Barton Hall with
her son before her. She had made the mistake then of sneering at Mary's
mother, and although in this case it was unlikely that Mary would take
matters into her own hand, it would be imprudent to run the risk of
her doing so. With experience of a similar situation she ought to be
able this time to have her own way. The old lady looked at Mary with
an unwonted warmth of affection: Mary was Edward's daughter. The fact
seemed to strike her for the first time. Edward's daughter ... Edward
who was drowned twenty years ago. Poor Edward, so like his mother! And
there was Mary holding her hands just as he had held them on that June
afternoon, the day before he married and tore himself forever from
the bosom of family life, as perhaps she herself might have held her
hands fifty years ago if she had had to oppose the wishes of that stern
old general who fought at Waterloo or of that dainty mother who bred
in exile had yet kept about her the remote grace and grandeur of the
_ancien régime_.

"It is not that he is of humble birth," she began to explain.
"A Frenchman can surmount that disadvantage more easily than an
Englishman, at any rate in England. But he has no money, and so far
as I can gather no immediate prospects of ever having any money. Even
if I were disposed to give you such a dowry as would enable you to
indulge yourself in the luxury of marriage with a poor man, I should
not permit myself to do so. For I should be wrong. Few men have the
moral strength to live decently upon their wives. I know you will think
that this is only the opinion of a cynical old woman, and I should be
sorry if at your age you thought differently. But at my age one is no
longer shocked by the nakedness of truth; at my age we begin to return
to the shamelessness of childhood. How your dear grandfather would have
disliked that last remark of mine. He had such a profound belief in old
age. Any religious feelings he had, all centered round his respect for
the age of God. Your poor grandfather ... dear me, I am going back into
the past instead of grappling with the present."

Mary had been listening to her grandmother in astonishment. She had
expected a fierce and bitter opposition, which she had promised herself
to defy; but it seemed that the old lady was going to argue with her,
and that would be disconcerting. Grandmother's arguments were always
so difficult to answer.

"I think perhaps I won't talk about this business any more to-day,"
Grandmamma was saying. "I have to make up my mind whether or not I will
tell you something. Meanwhile, may I ask you not to see the young man
until I have decided what to do?"

Mary promised this, and wrote to Pierre giving him a tryst by the
Serpentine three days hence. Adèle was sent to beg Daisy Harland to
come at once to talk over some important news Mary had to tell her.
Mary would have gone herself, but she could see that her grandmother
would not be able to avoid being suspicious of her meeting Pierre, and
she did not want to do anything that would prejudice the old lady still
more against him.

Daisy was much more discouraging than Grandmamma; she thought it was
madness to think of marrying a French clerk who was the son of a common
gardener, and who had at the moment neither money nor employment.

"My dearest Mary, it's the most absurd idea I ever heard! Why, you
would have to live in squalor unless you lived with Lady Flower,
which of course would be impossible. You're too old for this kind of
foolishness now. I saw no reason for your getting married in such a
hurry. But I begin to understand now why your grandmother is so anxious
to tie you up. She evidently knows you better than I do. Of course,
he's a good-looking and--if that attracts you--a romantic young man.
But there are dozens of them in England. As for being in love, you
know as well as I do that love runs its course like measles or scarlet
fever. You can recover from love, but you can't recover from marriage,
which in this case would be like a serious accident. You'd be lame for
the rest of your life."

Lady Flower remarked how much surprised she had been to find that
Mary's friend had grown so sensible.

"It must be hunting, I suppose."

"You only find her sensible because she dislikes the idea of my
marrying Pierre."

"She sees the position from the standpoint of an outsider. Listen,
Mary, I have never said anything about your father to you. I don't even
know how much you have guessed."

Mary blushed hotly. The moment that she had dreaded for years was
upon her. That dreadful secret, the consciousness of which had always
clouded her intimate thoughts, was about to be revealed. She must steel
herself to hear the proclamation of her illegitimacy. The definition in
the dictionary flamed across her memory ... _not authorized by law_ ...
_improper_ ... _not born in lawful wedlock_ ... _bastard_. _Bâtard!_
How often had she shivered over that in the French dictionary. How
sedulously had she tried to ascertain what it really meant, in the way
that no dictionary dares to reveal. And then those sickening hints
from horrid girls ... the girls who came from South America were always
the horridest....

No wonder Grandmamma looked serious and uncomfortable. If only a small
portion of what was hinted were true, she must scarcely know how she
was to look her granddaughter in the face and tell her not merely about
herself, but about life and those mysterious beginnings of life that
seemed to involve men and women in such horrors.

"I have guessed a good deal," Mary admitted bravely.

"Naturally, you must have done so. And I dare say those people with
whom you lived. What was their name? Fox? Fawkes?"

"The Fawcuses," said Mary. From the past the vision of Mrs. Fawcus
came back to her like the page of a fairy tale. In all stories about
illegitimate children, there was a woman like Mrs. Fawcus who looked
after them, kept them hidden, and guarded their secret. Why had she not
made another effort to read _Jane Eyre_ since it was taken away from
her by Mademoiselle Lucinge only the week before she left school? In
that book she might have pierced the dreadful mystery.

"You may have guessed," Grandmamma was saying, "that your father
married beneath him, married a very beautiful girl, the daughter of one
of our own tenant farmers."

"Then I'm not illegitimate!" Mary could not help exclaiming.

"Good gracious me!" said Lady Flower crossly. "What minds modern
young women have. Is no kind of decent veil to be left over the
unpleasant side of life? Why, at your age I did not know the meaning of
illegitimate."

Mary would have liked to retort that she only knew the endless circle
of a dictionary's definitions, that she did not really know its
meaning. However, let her mother have been never so humble, she was
married to her father.

"But you cannot have guessed all the misery that your father's marriage
brought in its train. It killed him: it killed your mother: it killed
your mother's father: it might have killed you. Your father was
dependent upon his father. He defied him, and what was the result?"

Lady Flower left out nothing in the tale of the romantic marriage that
could bring home to her granddaughter what it meant to run in the face
of class tradition.

"The situation is almost the same now as when I entreated your father
twenty years ago to think what he was doing. But in this case it is
worse, because in this case it is the man who is of lower station.
Mary, I implore you to give up this good-looking but hopelessly
ineligible young Frenchman."

Lady Flower burst into tears, and Mary, who would have been less amazed
to behold tears run down the cheeks of a marble statue, promised to
give up Pierre.

This was the letter she wrote:

 23 King's Gate, W.,
 _May 22, 1880._

  _I am afraid that I am not the wonderful being you have so often
  told me that I was. I cannot meet you to-morrow on the banks of the
  Serpentine, however fine the day is. I do not regret for an instant
  that I let myself fall in love with you. No, not for an instant,
  Pierre. I don't know why I say "let myself fall in love," because I
  could not help it. It was nothing to do with me. But I have promised
  my grandmother never to see you again and to give you up. I couldn't
  explain why, even if I were to see you. It has nothing to do with
  you, but only with me. If I married you I should have to elope, and
  though I should be happy when I was with you, I should be feeling
  all the while that my grandmother's old age was being made unhappy.
  You must not blame her. She is convinced that we are not meant for
  each other. My father and mother were drowned many years ago, because
  they eloped; she has lost her husband and her eldest son also: she
  is entirely alone in the world, and she was kind to me when I was a
  little girl. Forget me, Pierre, and try to forgive me. Do not think
  that I do not love you. Don't think that, Pierre. I believe that I
  have loved you ever since I first saw you at Châteaublanc. Why do I
  go on writing? I don't know; but somehow I can't bear to finish this
  letter which is the last I shall ever write to you. Don't think of
  me too unkindly. If you ever do think of me, think of me that morning
  by the Serpentine when you first kissed my hand. Pierre, I can feel
  that kiss still. I shall feel it till I'm an old woman. I've nothing
  more to say, and yet I can't stop...._

Mary put down her pen for a minute, and stared in front of her.
Tick-tick! Tick-tick! Tick-tick! Tick-tick! The ormulu clock swung
Pierre out of her life. She leaned over quickly and wrote:

 _Good-by, good-by,
 Mary._

Adèle came into the room.

"Mr. Alison is downstairs in the drawing-room with _Miladi_,
Mademoiselle."

"I'll come down at once, Adèle. Please take this letter to the post."

Mac rose from his place on the hearthrug and waddled after his
mistress.

_Chapter Four_

THE WIFE

_Chapter Four: The Wife_

On a wet November afternoon a brougham drawn by a pair of gray
horses and coming from the direction of Kensington drove along the
Knightsbridge road and pulled up outside Lady Flower's house in King's
Gate. From it alighted a young woman who by some indefinable effect
of maturity, some sedate expression of achievement, revealed that she
was married. The age at which women decide to be matrons varies like
feminine fashions, and in the year 1890 English women still clung, if
less tightly every year, to the fashion of a middle age as long as
Queen Victoria's reign.

Mary Alison at thirty should have been in the zenith of her beauty.
That auburn hair had deepened in ten years like a gathered chestnut,
but like a chestnut it had preserved the gloss of youth. Experience
had given her blue eyes those profundities of color which inaccurate
and ambitious observers have miscalled violet. Her complexion held the
exquisite translucent hues of a September rose. And yet so much of
her young grace was destroyed by the dress, which made any woman of
the period appear like Noah's wife in a toy Ark, that she seemed less
lovely now than ten years ago when she had stood by the drawing-room
window of this house, up the steps of which she was now walking with
such slow and stately ease of movement. With her long forefinger
pressing the bell, she turned and said to the coachman:

"Burton, you had better leave Mac at home when you come back for me at
six."

At the sound of his mistress' voice, the grizzled head of the Dandie
Dinmont gazed anxiously through the closed windows of the brougham. She
raised a warning finger to bid him be good, and a moment later was lost
to sight in the darkling hall.

"How is her ladyship, Adèle?"

"_Miladi_ grows very weak, madame," the maid replied, leading the way
upstairs. Across Mary's mind floated the picture of herself as a little
girl in Paris following Adèle upstairs to bed. Even so had she led the
way in those days and from time to time had turned round with flashing,
frightening eyes to see if her charge was close behind her. How shadowy
those days in Paris now, shadowy like this flight of London stairs, on
which Adèle alone stood out clear, with her sallow face and eyebrows
like the hair of a Japanese doll. Shadows.... Shadows....

"Mrs. Alison is here, _Miladi_."

Adèle stood aside to let Mary enter the room, where under a canopy of
purple velvet, looking hardly more substantial than a lace handkerchief
left upon the pillow, Lady Flower sat huddled in her last bed. One hand
fluttered down upon the quilt like a faded white petal to greet her
granddaughter, who took it gently in her own that was still fresh and
taper as a rosebud.

"I shall die very soon now, Mary," whispered the old lady. "At any
moment. At any moment. Perhaps to-night. Perhaps this afternoon. Did
you tell Burton to wait?"

"No. I sent him back to Campden Hill. I wanted to stay with you till
you went to sleep."

"To sleep," her grandmother echoed. "I feel disinclined to sleep. I
have such a long sleep before me."

Mary could not bring herself to make the conventionally optimistic
reply. It did not seem worth while to pretend with phrases in the
presence of this old woman already seemingly discarnate for that
obscure event of death.

"A long sleep," the old lady went on in her tenuous voice. "A very long
sleep. And yet I wonder. Ah, well, it was all said by Shakespeare, was
it not? Though frankly I never cared greatly for Shakespeare. It is all
too excitable. And yet I wonder."

"What are you wondering, Grandmamma?"

"If this really is the end. There might be something else, you know.
Give me my vinaigrette."

The old lady sniffed it as if she would ward off the odors of eternity,
just as twenty years ago she had used it against the odors of a much
shorter journey to Lyons. She had been only too anxious to sleep then.
But now.... How bright her eyes were, like precious stones, like pools
of water holding out against the encroaching frost of death.

"I do not really want to die," she said. "It seems such a little
while since I began to feel younger again. Of late lying here I have
remembered so much that I had forgotten. Odd little incidents of
childhood have come back to me so sharply, so very vividly and clearly.
Earlier this afternoon, before you came, I saw my father in that corner
in his Hessian boots and cocked hat; and he said to me, 'Where's your
Mamma?' It was so vivid that I made a movement to get out of bed and
run to look for her. And then he asked me to fill his snuff-box with
maccaboy. I have often wondered why a man so particular about his
personal appearance should be a slave to snuff. But he was. Do you know
what maccaboy is?"

Mary shook her head.

"It is a snuff scented with attar of roses, of which he was
passionately fond. He acquired the habit when he was fighting in the
West Indies. Long ago. Long ago. And of course this vision of him was
nothing but an hallucination caused by weakness. Nothing but that.
There cannot be anything before us when we lie like this. And yet I
wonder. I cannot feel perfectly sure."

Mary did not know what to say. Here was really an opportunity for
a clergyman to be useful; but she was afraid of suggesting such a
visitor. Yet her grandmother might be hoping that somebody would
suggest a clergyman; for, although she would be too proud to ask for
one herself, she might want one to be pressed upon her just as she had
wanted the doctor pressed upon her.

Mary decided to risk the proposal.

"A clergyman?" echoed the old lady, clutching at her vinaigrette.
"A clergyman?" she repeated. "Thank you, my dear, but I should find
a clergyman in my bedroom as uncomfortable as I should find a large
black retriever dog, and about as useful. I'm afraid that my wandering
conversation has given you the impression that my mind is wandering. I
thought I had made it perfectly plain that I considered the vision of
my father an hallucination."

Mary begged her grandmother's pardon, and after a short silence the old
lady inquired graciously after the children.

"What a pity," she said, "that Richard will not become Sir Richard when
I die. I am sorry now that I allowed Barton to be sold. I think, had I
known how much of a Flower I was going to have for a great-grandson, I
should not have done so. However, regrets are useless. You are happy,
are you not?"

"Why, yes, Grandmamma. What makes you ask that?"

The old lady's voice was sounding more remote every minute that she
went on talking, and the furtive November dusk which had long been
hiding in corners of the room now crept boldly forth and climbed the
velvet curtains of the canopy above the bed. Mary wanted to light the
gas, but her grandmother waved her hand to signify that she preferred
the gloom.

"I have wondered sometimes lately if you ever think of that young
Frenchman whom I dissuaded you from marrying."

"Why, no, Grandmamma," said Mary. "Or if I do, only as one might think
of anybody in the past."

"You are happy, really happy? Your marriage has brought you happiness?"

"Yes, yes, indeed, Grandmamma. Could anybody be unhappy with Richard
and Geoffrey and Muriel?"

"You are happy because of the children?" Lady Flower persisted. "Your
husband does not count?"

"But you know how fond I am of Jemmie."

"Fond, fond," the old lady murmured. "Looking back, I wonder if that
means anything. Mary, you must be prepared for your children to bring
you unhappiness. I do not say that they will. I hope that they will
not. But you must be ready for that trial." She suddenly sat forward in
the bed. "Hark! Do you hear a sound?"

"No, I hear nothing, Grandmamma."

"I hear a sound like the sea. Plainly! Yes, yes, quite plainly, the
noise of the sea. Edward, forgive me if I was wrong," she cried. "I
have tried to watch over your little girl. Pray do not light the gas,
Mary. Give me your hand instead. Put me back among my pillows. And do
not light the gas. I cannot bear the idea of your seeing me die. And
this is death. I know...."

Mary laid her grandmother gently back on the pillows, felt a swift
trembling through the frail body, and speaking to her received no
answer.

It was the first time in her life that Mary had come into the presence
of death, and she sat for some time near that silence on the bed,
wondering at her own calm. Were people always as calm as this when they
beheld death? But even as she was congratulating herself she was seized
with a panic and ran madly from the room out on the landing, the rosy
gaslight of which in response to her cries was soon populated by maids
in their black dresses and white caps.

Mary supposed that the correct thing would be to send a message for
her husband to come immediately to King's Gate and take charge of the
house, the servants, and herself. In fact, when Adèle with tear-swollen
eyes came to tell her that the carriage was at the door, she asked if
Madame would not like the coachman to drive back to Madame's house
and fetch Monsieur. By Adèle's manner Mary realized that since her
grandmother's death she was being accorded a respect almost as great as
that which had formerly been accorded to the dead woman.

But what could Jemmie do? He would be extremely bored by being
dragged out before dinner. He would not know what he ought to do,
and irritated by not knowing he would certainly do the wrong thing.
Moreover, she did not feel that she wanted Jemmie. She was anxious to
be quiet and avoid any discussion of her inheritance, any speculation
upon its exact amount, any plans of Jemmie to build this house or buy
that property. In fact, she should like to stay at King's Gate to-night
by herself and sleep in her old room upstairs. She desired to make
amends to her grandmother's memory for that unwonted display of terror
in which she had indulged herself. She sent a note by Burton to say
that she should not be back at Woodworth Lodge until the next morning.

Mr. Alison was displeased by his wife's message. If it would not have
involved him in what might have been the unpleasantness of a houseful
of hysterical servants, he would have driven back to King's Gate to
protest against her action. It would have been sufficiently annoying
to receive word that she might be late for dinner, or even that she
might not be back at all for dinner; but to stay the night for no
purpose except to gratify a whim of piety, that did strike Mr. Alison
as unreasonable. He hoped that Mary was not going to turn religious, to
start getting up early in the morning for Communion and all that kind
of thing. One never knew what a woman might do after thirty. Or take
up with spiritualism. He would soon put a stop to that. Table-turning
and tambourine playing ... long-haired mediums and goggle-eyed women
with skinny necks and Oriental beads ... she had the children, and they
ought to be enough.

"Did Burton say why your mistress had to stay?" he asked the parlormaid.

"No, sir; he said no more than give me Meddem's note."

Mr. Alison strode across the room in irritation, and nearly tripped
over Mac, who squealed in alarm.

"Confound the dog! Take him downstairs, Pinkney," he called to the
retreating maid. "He's getting much too old to be allowed all over the
house. And what is the matter with the gas to-night?"

"It do seem to burn a bit dim, sir. I think Mac has gone and hid under
your chair, sir."

"Come out of that, you brute," Mr. Alison shouted angrily.

There was a low growl in response.

"Did you hear him, Pinkney?"

The maid was stricken by awe.

"He deliberately growled at me."

Mr. Alison rocked the chair violently in order to frighten Mac into the
open; when at last he had succeeded in driving him out of the room and
was alone, he made up his mind to tell Mary on her return that her dog
must be put away. It was not safe to have a dog like that about with
children in the house. In any case it was too old. It was over a year
old when he gave it to Mary nearly eleven years ago. Dogs ought not
to be allowed to grow old. Mr. Alison smoothed his ruffled brow and
patted his bald head.

"That new hair-restorer is as much of a fraud as the rest of them," he
thought. "One of these days somebody will prosecute a hair-restorer
for obtaining money under false pretences. Personally I don't believe
that, when a man has lost his hair so completely as I have, anything in
the world will bring it back. That's where I take exception to their
advertisements. They're dishonest."

Pondering the inclination of humanity to grow more dishonest daily, Mr.
Alison looked at his watch and saw that there was still half an hour to
dinner-time.

"She might easily have come back," he complained to himself.

He had looked forward to telling her about that extremely satisfactory
bit of business with Moss, Doddington & Co. What was the use of slaving
all day in the City to keep a wife and family and carriage and a large
house? Women were apparently incapable of grasping what a serious
strain it put on a man to work for hours under a load of domestic
responsibility. If Mary really appreciated what he was doing for her,
she would have let nothing interfere with her being at home to-night.
He was very sorry of course about her grandmother's death. But after
all the old lady was getting on for eighty-one. At such an age her
death was to be expected at any moment. By the way, he must go to his
tailor to-morrow on the way down to Throgmorton Street. Nothing looked
worse than resuscitated mourning.

"I wonder how much money the old lady will leave after all. A decent
amount, I fancy. Odd that she never asked me to look after her affairs.
She knew I was a good man of business. Business! It was a pity that
Mary did not have to go to the City and work for a while. She would
know herself then how dreary it was to come home and find the house
deserted.

"Ah, nurse, are the children ready for their romp?" he asked as the
door opened.

"Miss Muriel and Master Geoffrey said you promised to play tigers with
them to-night, sir. I'm sure I don't know where they get hold of their
wild ideas. And Master Richard went on at me till I said I would ask
you if he might come down to dessert and have an extra quarter of an
hour when he's done his homework."

"Not to-night, nurse. Not to-night. I'm dining out. In fact, I must go
and dress at once. Tell the children I'll play with them to-morrow, and
tell cook, will you, please, that there will be no dinner to-night.
Mrs. Alison is staying at King's Gate. Her ladyship is dead."

"Oh dear, sir, I am sorry to hear that. My mistress will be very upset.
Though I suppose with such an old lady and all it was to be expected."

"Yes, yes, quite so," said Mr. Alison. "By the way, I shouldn't tell
the children to-night."

"No, sir, it might make them a bit creepy as they say."

"But I don't think I ought to play with them. I'm sure Mrs. Alison
would rather they went to bed very quietly to-night. You'd better say
that we've both had to go out to dinner. Oh, and, nurse, it would be as
well not to let Mac go into the nursery or schoolroom. He seems to be
turning savage. Poor old dog, he was my first present to your mistress
before we were married."

"So I've heard my mistress say, sir. Poor old dog! Dear me, it's always
one thing on top of another, as they say. And I'm sure I've passed the
remark a score of times that it never rains but what it pours."

"Good night, nurse."

"Good night, sir. I'll see that the children keep very quiet. I was
going to give Miss Muriel and Master Geoffrey both a dose of medicine
to-morrow night, and they may jee-ust as well have it to-night."

Mr. Alison dressed in a state of astonishment at himself. "I can't
think what made me so suddenly decide to dine out," he exclaimed aloud.
"Talking to myself now," he continued. "I'm thoroughly upset. That's
what I am. It's a good thing I _am_ going out."

A few minutes later he was walking briskly down Campden Hill, conscious
of the perfume of autumnal trees, vaguely excited by the sound of the
distant traffic in Kensington High Street that with every step became
more distinct. It was a mistake to coop oneself up too much. He was
falling into the habit of thinking that the day was over when he sat
back in the railway carriage and opened the _St. James's Gazette_. He
ought to be careful. What was that he was reading the other day about
keeping young by refusing to be old? How true! It was the fault of
marriage. Yes, marriage was responsible. Bachelors did not grow old.
Responsibility, that was what did it. How free, for instance, he felt
to-night just because Mary had sent word that she was not coming home.
The message had annoyed him just at first; but now he was on the whole
rather glad. The street lamps were twinkling; there must be a touch of
frost in the air. So much the better. Far more healthy than the muggy
weather they had been having. By Jove, the crispness made one feel
ten years younger. Where should he go to-night? Dinner at the Savoy?
Rather late perhaps for that. Why not a few oysters with half a pint of
champagne, and then a theater followed by supper? A theater? Perhaps it
was hardly the thing to go to a theater to-night. No, he would dine at
the Savoy.

"Hansom! Savoy!"

"Right you are, sir."

"And you can drive fairly fast. I'm in a hurry."

It was a comfortable hansom behind a good horse; and Jemmie Alison,
once again the authentic Jemmie, leaning forward over the apron gazed
out at the glittering life he had too long forsaken.

Mary lay awake most of the night in the strangeness of her old room.
She tried to concentrate her mind piously upon her dead grandmother,
but all her thoughts came back to herself. She now asked herself the
question to which, when her grandmother asked it, she had returned
so confident an affirmative. Would she not, if she were really happy
with Jemmie, resent being away from him even for a single night? And
was she not actually taking pleasure in being away from him? There
was about the air of this old room of hers something delightfully
fresh and invigorating. She felt much more herself. All these years
of marriage she had been letting her personality be slowly submerged
in her husband, in the cares of a household, and in her children.
She must not forget _them_, the darlings! Should she have loved them
more if their father had been somebody else? If Pierre had been their
father, for instance? But then they would not be Richard, Geoffrey, and
Muriel. And how could she love any other children better than those
three tousle-heads? Besides, what nonsense it was to be speculating
like this. She had not thought of Pierre for years, except casually
to wonder sometimes where he was and if he ever thought of her. She
could not deceive herself into imagining that she was still in love
with Pierre, still less that she was pining for him. All the same, she
wished that she had understood a little more about life before she
married Jemmie. Daisy Harland, who had been so full of good worldly
advice, had not made much of a success with her own marriage. Daisy,
who had been so confident that love was a passing malady, had thrown
over everything for love, had let herself be dragged through the
divorce court for a man who when it was all over had married another
woman. Poor Daisy, was she happier now, somewhere on the Continent,
always wondering if her friends would put up their parasols when they
passed her on some sunny promenade?

And if she had not married Jemmie, she would never have had her beloved
Richard. She thought of his coming back from one of his first days at
school and of his news of being placed in an unusually high class for
French and of his having to write out the verb _porter_.

"All the verb, darling?" she had asked.

"Well, that's what I couldn't ergzactly make out, Mum. Mr. Osbourne
just said write out _porter_: _to carry_, and I think he only meant one
of those lines of verbs like you see in the grammar book."

"It wouldn't do to make a mistake, dearest," she had said anxiously.

"No, it wouldn't, would it, Mummie? Perhaps I'd better write out
everything, though it's pages and pages!"

And she had sat with him while he laboriously wrote the French and
English of every tense and of every person in that tense. _That I
might have been carrying. That thou mightest have been carrying_....
What a sleepy little boy she had tucked up that night! And next day he
had come back to lunch with a woeful face to say that it was only the
single line of principal tenses which had been set and that he had not
liked to expose himself to the ridicule of his classmates by showing up
his toilsome pages.

"But how did you explain you had nothing to show your master?"

"I said I'd left it at home, Mum, and he told me to bring it this
afternoon. It won't take me hardly a minute to do."

No, no, it was unimaginable that she should not be the mother of
Richard: and, pleasant though it was to be sleeping alone in her old
room, Richard belonged to Jemmie as much as to herself.

Should she when at last she lay dying, for though the attempt to
realize the inevitableness of death caught the breath and eluded the
mind's grasp, the ultimate death of herself was a fact that must be
believed, should she in that solemn hour ask a granddaughter--Richard's
or dear fat Geoffrey's child--such questions as her own grandmother
had asked her? Should she when an old woman look back at her life with
doubt and forward to the grave with apprehension? And where now was the
spirit of that cold body downstairs?

Pleasant to be lying like this by oneself. Pleasant ... very pleasant
... the sheets cool and pleasant ... a delicious privacy. Yes, it was
wrong not to tell girls more about the actualities of existence. Would
she tell Muriel one day? That dear dumpling! But, almost before she
knew it, Muriel would be thinking about marriage. In another ten years,
only as long as she had been married, Muriel would be fifteen. Ten
years went by quickly enough, especially when three of them were spent
in having babies. And she might have another baby. Jemmie did not seem
to mind. "The more the merrier," he would say, as he had so often said
before. How insensitive men were. And gross. Men? What did she know
about men? Jemmie looked so much like other men that he was probably
representative of the sex. Pierre had been different. But would he
have been different if she had married him? When she kissed him that
afternoon, when she gave him that one swift kiss, she had not known to
what such a kiss might not be the prelude. Would not the knowledge have
destroyed all its fairy quality? Was it possible to experience romance
unless one was innocent? Oh, that sweet illusion of first love! Even
Grandmamma once upon a time must have known that. While she was lying
there in that dusky room, did she feel faintly upon her withered lips
some blushful kiss of sixty years ago? Did she, ah, did she, and was
it for that she doubted her wisdom in persuading her granddaughter to
marry Jemmie Alison? Anyway, the marriage was accomplished. There was
no use now to repent. Yet people who had enjoyed grand passions did
exist.

"Love, my dear, was invented by the poets to excuse their own
weaknesses."

Something like that Grandmamma had once observed. Were she alive now
and should she make the same remark now, Mary would reply that marriage
without love was invented by ... but she was unable to think of a
suitable mordant retort before she fell asleep in her own room.

It seemed as if the death of Lady Flower had acted upon husband and
wife like an Horatian maxim that would remind humanity of time's
swift flight. In the case of Alison the money they inherited made him
feel more keenly how much of his life was being wasted in the pursuit
of wealth. There was now no need for him to devote so much of his
attention to business, and by taking a partner younger than himself
he was able to spend less time in the office. Having once dined out
away from home, he began to make a habit of dining out; and Mary in
her turn began to wonder what she should do with her life. Occasional
dinner-parties and occasional visits to the opera or the theater did
not seem enough to fill existence at thirty. There were the children
of course, as Jemmie was always reminding her when she seemed inclined
to ask unanswerable questions about the end and meaning of human
existence. But children, when there were nurses and nurse-maids and
governesses and schoolmasters all easily obtainable, did not occupy
a woman's life fully. Besides, well-brought-up children went to bed
early, and was there nothing better to do with life than sit at home
reading novels that were only the least bit less dull than life itself?
Jemmie often looked at his reflection in the glass and exclaimed upon
the approach of age. But Jemmie was forty-five with a man's life behind
him, even if he had been cooped up, as sometimes now in moments of
irritation he implied that he had been cooped up by marriage. If Jemmie
was concerned about the vanishing years, it was because he looked back
with regret to the joys and freedom of his youth. But she, on what
could she look back? One kiss briefer than a shooting-star, swifter
than a swallow's flight, yet in remembrance, ah, how sweet!

So passed the winter of that year; and, when in February the white and
purple crocuses pied the lawns of Woodworth Lodge, husband and wife
both resolved that the year should pay them with what it brought forth.

"One must do something," Mary agreed with Mrs. Wryford, who considered
herself Mary's most intimate friend, because she always stayed longer
than any of the other visitors that haunted Mary's Friday afternoons.

"Of course! It's our duty. Now why don't you have a club like me? My
dear, until I started my club for waitresses I was at a loose end.
And it's so interesting. Why, I've been brought into close contact
with people I should never have seen otherwise except across a crumby
table. I assure you, it's been quite a revelation to me. You'd be
surprised to find how different my girls are, one from another. Oh yes,
indeed, quite distinguishable, I assure you; and I think I can really
claim to know each one individually. And many of them have learned to
confide in me quite a lot."

"Now that must be fascinating," said Mary.

"Yet it's hardly surprising when you think of their homes. Of course
I never go to their homes. Oh no, I make a point of never doing that.
I say to myself, 'Two nights a week, Ella, you are pledged to your
girls.' And I can assure you, Mary, that I never fail to be with them
unless I have a dinner-party or some social engagement. Do, my dear,
take my advice and start a club. You speak French well, don't you? Why
not found a club for French seamstresses in Soho? And now I simply must
run. Good-by, you dear attractive creature," Mrs. Wryford exclaimed,
kissing Mary warmly on each cheek. In the door she stopped a moment. "I
always say and I always shall say that I enjoy the few minutes we have
together every Friday more than anything in the week. Good-by, you dear
thing. It's still quite light. I always think it's a sign of spring
when the days really begin to draw out. Good-by! Good-by!"

How Grandmamma used to dislike women of the type of Mrs. Wryford, Mary
thought.

"And I expect in another thirty years I shall dislike them just as much
as she did."

At dinner that night Mary broached the subject of a club for girls to
her husband.

"French seamstresses!" he exclaimed. "What on earth next will you be
wanting to do? Aren't the children enough of a responsibility?"

"They're no responsibility at all," Mary argued. "You won't allow them
to be. Don't you remember what a fuss you made when you discovered I
was taking out Geoffrey and Muriel every afternoon?"

"I didn't make a fuss. I never do make a fuss. I don't suppose that
a less fussy man than myself exists. I merely observed that for you
to wear yourself out looking after children while a mob of nurses
and nurse-maids were eating off their heads doing nothing at home
was ridiculous. Surely there's a happy medium between dragging a
perambulator round Kensington Gardens and founding clubs for French
seamstresses?"

Mary sat silent for a while pondering her tactics, while Jemmie, with
what she felt was unnecessary gusto, ate a large slice of turbot.

"I don't think there's any need to sulk ..." he began: but at the
moment one of the parlormaids came within range of the conversation,
and, as Mary thought cynically, her husband had not yet reached such a
pitch of married boredom as would let him be rude to her in front of
the servants.

When they were left alone with the dessert, Mary returned to the attack.

"You see, lately, Jemmie, you've left me so much alone in the evening
that I suppose it's natural for me to sit here and make plans for
myself."

The husband glanced up sharply: never until now had his wife thrown
out a hint that she had noticed his increasingly frequent withdrawals
from the fire-side. Could she be jealous? Had any rumor of that phaeton
he bought last week reached Mary? Gossip sprung up no one knew how.
It might be that one of her friends, one of those confounded women
that seemed to spend their lives visiting other women, had warned her
to keep an eye on her husband. It would be awkward if Mary seriously
intended to press him on the subject of dining out, and, more than
dining out, of staying away from home for a couple of nights often
enough. Mary herself would never suspect him of infidelity. Infidelity?
Bosh! There was nothing serious to it. Maudie did not expect him
to face a scandal on her account. He should be middle-aged almost
immediately. This was his last love-affair; and dash it, the little
girl was fond of him. Who could say why? Women were strange creatures.
But it certainly was not for his money. Poor little Maudie! The walnut
he was cracking suddenly burst in fragments upon his plate. He looked
up guiltily.

"What were you saying, dear? I beg your pardon for not answering. I
couldn't crack this nut."

"I said that it was natural for me to make plans for myself," Mary
answered. She perceived that Jemmie was embarrassed and went on more
boldly. "I don't in the least expect you to stay at home because I am
in the house. But surely you can have no objection to my occupying
myself somehow, and this club would be the very thing."

"I daresay you're right," said the husband. After all, it was politic
to give his wife some latitude. "Yes, I daresay you're right. I was a
little taken aback for the moment, and I didn't want you to overtire
yourself slaving for people who have no gratitude. You know, the more
you do for people, the less they give you in return. Did I tell you
about Jackson, our head clerk? We raised his salary last month, and
yesterday he calmly tells me that he has accepted another place at
a larger salary. What do you think of that? That's gratitude! In my
opinion the world's going downhill. Now my father's head clerk stayed
with him till he died and never had a rise of salary all the time.
Didn't want it. Content. But you don't get that type of man nowadays."

Husband and wife rose from their dessert. Husband and wife sat down
in the drawing-room. Wife sang "Three Roses" with an obligato of
kettle-drums from husband's manipulation of _The Times_.

 _Just when the red June Roses blow
 She gave me one,--a year ago,
 A Rose whose crimson breath revealed
 The secret that its heart concealed,
 And whose half-shy, half-tender grace
 Blushed back upon the giver's face.
  To hope was not to know._

_Tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle!_

"Poor little Maudie," thought an infatuated man of forty-five. "Poor
little girl, she'll miss me to-night."

 _Just when the Red June Roses blow
 I plucked her one a month ago.
 Its half-blown crimson to eclipse,
 I laid it on her smiling lips:

 The balmy fragrance of the south
 Drew sweetness from her sweeter mouth,
       Swiftly do golden hours creep,
       To hold is not to keep._

 _Tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle!_

"I mustn't neglect Maudie," thought a sentimental man of forty-five.
"Poor little lonely Maudie! It's a wonderful thing for a man to be
loved as she loves me."

  _Tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle!_

  _The red June Roses now are past,
  This very day I broke the last--
  And now its perfumed breath is hid,
  With her, with her, beneath a coffin lid:
        Ah--h--h--h--h--h,_

  _There will its petals fall apart,
  And wither on her icy heart:--
        At three red Roses' Roses' cost
        My world was gained, my world was gained
              And lost!_

  _Tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle--tinkle---tinkle-tink!_

"That's a very pretty song, you know," said Jemmie. "I enjoyed that. I
wish you'd sing oftener of an evening."

Mary looked round in perplexity.

"I haven't sung after dinner for five years," she reminded him coldly.

"As long as that? Surely not as long ago as that?"

"Five years ago, Jemmie, you asked me if it was necessary every evening
to sit down immediately after dinner at the piano."

"I must have had a headache or something," he protested.

"Yet you never noticed that I no longer sang."

"I suppose I took it for granted that you didn't want to sing. But I
thoroughly enjoyed it this evening. I don't know, I suppose I was in
the mood for singing. Why don't you sing another?"

She lifted the seat of the music-stool, and after rummaging among a
pile of tattered songs she found the one she wanted:

 _I had a message to send her,
 To her whom my heart loved best._

When the last tinkle had died away, Jemmie, who had stopped crackling
_The Times_ because there was nothing more to read that interested
him, asked his wife if he had not heard the song before somewhere. She
smiled ironically.

"I expect I've heard you sing it," he hastened to add apologetically.

"No. Not me."

Good heavens, could it be that he had heard Maudie sing that song?
Maudie did sometimes sing sentimental songs on wet afternoons.
Nonsense! If Maudie had sung it, Mary could not know that. Gossip could
effect a good deal, but gossip could not discuss Maudie's choice of
music.

"Well, I don't know where I heard it," he declared.

"And I certainly shall never reveal where or when it was," she murmured.

While that night Mary was brushing her chestnut hair before the big
oval mirror of her dressing-table her husband came and, bending over,
kissed the tip of her ear.

"Please! please!" she exclaimed, drawing away. "I did not sing to
attract you, but to amuse myself."

"Well, really you know, dash it, Mary, you do say the most cutting
things sometimes. What have I done to deserve that?"

"Now, Jemmie, don't pretend you mind whether I say cutting things or
not. What do you care nowadays?"

Jemmie sighed to himself and, deliberately omitting his good night
kiss, turned over and buried his head ostentatiously in the pillow.

"I'm not at all sure that she isn't jealous," he confided to himself,
as he set out to keep an appointment with Maudie in dreamland.

Mary lay for some time watching with a weary regard that amorphous
back, like a wayfarer who sees another hill before him and the end of
the journey not yet in sight.

Mrs. Wryford's prophecy that Mary would derive much pleasure from
getting to know individually the various girls in whom she avowed a
general interest by the act of founding for them a club was fulfilled.
Indeed it was more than fulfilled, for Mrs. Wryford certainly never
expected that her friend would find romance for herself in the lives of
French seamstresses, a vicarious romance it might be, but its effect
was to mitigate for Mary much of the dreariness that she was beginning
to think life ended in after one was thirty. Thirty! At this period the
woman of thirty was not considered a romantic subject; indeed, if any
woman of thirty had pretended to romance she would have been considered
a reader of French novels, and as such faintly tinged with impropriety.

However, it was not enough for Mary's philanthropic zeal to sit
listening to the tale of Henri and Jeanne, or of Armand and Virginie.
She must educate her girls. She must provide them with an outlook.
She must widen their horizon. She must teach them that the world was
not bounded by Oxford Street on the north and Shaftesbury Avenue on
the south. With this purpose in view she took them on one Saturday
afternoon to the Zoological Gardens, on another to the Egyptian Hall,
and once again to hear Moore and Burgess Minstrels. Then Mrs. Wryford
brought news of a series of lectures at which various distinguished
travelers with the aid of a magic-lantern would personally conduct
whosoever would fare with them to the uttermost parts of the earth.

"Last week we went to Greenland, Labrador, and Alaska. I can assure
you, my dear Mary, the tints upon the ice were exquisite. I rarely
enjoyed an evening more. Why don't you take your girls next week?
Madagascar is the subject. I hear that the lecturer, who is a
Frenchman, speaks English with quite remarkable fluency."

"What's his name?"

"Now, my dear Mary, do you expect me to remember the name of a
Frenchman?"

Thus it was that Pierre Menard, lean, tropically brown, his hair about
the temples white and everywhere streaked with gray, his mustache and
imperial still black, entered Mary's life again. Mary was glad that the
auditorium was darkened when she saw him first, not so much because she
feared that anybody would notice her agitation, but because she wanted
to stare hard at Pierre without being oppressed by the consciousness
of her surroundings. It seemed to her that he must be aware of her
regard and that presently over a hundred heads he would glance back his
recognition.

"_Dis, Madeleine, n'est-ce pas qu'il est beau?_" one of the girls
whispered to her neighbor.

It was that nice and pretty creature Yvonne who had spoken. She had
always been one of Mary's favorites.

Driving back to Campden Hill, while street-lamp after street-lamp
tossed its bouquet of golden light into the brougham, Mary pondered
the course of her behavior in the near future. It might be that Pierre
would scornfully reject the proffer of renewed friendship. If he had
remembered her at all, she might be now a bitter memory; if he had
forgotten her so completely that a letter from her would bring a
puzzled frown to his brow.... Oh, it was difficult to decide what she
ought to do. Mary did not consider the effect upon herself of bringing
Pierre back into her life. It was of nothing except her effect upon him
that she thought during that black and golden drive to Campden Hill.

At home she found Adèle, who was her maid these days, waiting up.
Madame must prepare herself for a shock; Madame must have courage;
Madame must not give way to grief at the news she must break to Madame.

"Nothing has happened to the children?" Mary exclaimed in terror.

"_Ah, mais non, grâce à Dieu._ Nothing to them. It is the poor little
Mac who is dead. He was run over, Madame, and must be shot, Monsieur
said."

"Where is Monsieur?"

"Monsieur has been called away on business and will not be here until
Monday evening. Monsieur told me to tell Madame."

"And where is Mac?"

"He is buried in the garden. I will show Madame where is his grave in
the morning."

"No, no, show me now."

Adèle looked for a moment as often in Mary's childhood she had been
wont to look when her charge had expressed a desire to do something
that Adèle considered unreasonable. However, nowadays it was she who
must obey, and by the light of a foggy London moon she led the way
across the lawn to where in the shadow of a grimy aucuba the mound was
heaped above Mac's grave.

Mary gazed at it for a minute or two in silence, and without a word
turned and walked back to the house.

"You can go to bed, Adèle. I shall not want you any more to-night."

While Mary brushed her hair before the oval mirror, the scenes of the
life she had spent with Mac moved across her brain like the slides of a
magic-lantern. She saw Jemmie arrive with him in a hansom-cab, saw him
trying to coax him upstairs to the drawing-room at King's Gate.

"I've bought you a little dawg, Mary."

How hard she had tried to express her thanks by addressing him as
Jemmie without letting him see what an effort it was, for she had
known that nothing could please him more. Somehow she gulped out the
Christian name. How happy he had been. And with what grateful affection
he had patted Mac good-by.

The picture faded, and now there behind her stood Daisy Harland
examining Mac critically in the manner of one who knew all that there
was to be known about dogs.

"Not a bad little pup. Come here, boy, and say how-do to your Aunt
Daisy."

But Mac simply would not go and say "how-do" to his Aunt Daisy, and
from the first had attached himself exclusively to his mistress.

There he was now growling in Pierre's arms on the day of the dog-fight
in Kensington Gardens.

Pierre?

Strange that to-night Mac should die, to-night when he who had entered
her life with Mac's help should now stand once more upon its threshold.
Pierre? Why should she not write to Pierre? No harm would come from
that. If he refused to answer her letter, nobody would be any the wiser.

"Mac! Mac! Mac!"

Silence. No pitter-pat of dear bandy legs. He was lying out there in
the cold garden.

"Mac, you clumsy old darling, you must not keep lying on my train."

How restless and unhappy he had been on that wedding morning! How he
had hated it! And when he was left behind to stay at home in charge of
Adèle during the honeymoon, what a howling he had set up! She had heard
him above the noisy guests bidding her good-by on the steps of the
house in King's Gate.

"Poor little dawg," Jemmie had exclaimed. "We really ought to have
taken him with us. I owe a lot to that little dawg. I owe you to him,"
he had murmured with a sound in his voice that had frightened her
rather. But she must let him kiss her now. She had no right to refuse.
She was married. How glad Mac was to see her when she came back, and
how he had enjoyed his first scamper in the garden of Woodworth Lodge.
For him the lawn here must have seemed as large as the Park. Dear old
dog, with what zest he used to chase the sparrows and how good he was
with cats! He hated cats really; but he knew that his mistress loved
them, and he would deny himself the most tempting pursuits to oblige
her.

Jemmie had always liked the old dog until the night Richard was born,
when Mac lying outside her bedroom door had growled at Jemmie, who
had come up to see how she was. No, after that Jemmie had never liked
him, had always talked about its being a mistake to have a dog in a
house where there were children. As if he would ever have hurt the
children! It was only Jemmie he disliked. Yes, it was strange how much
he disliked Jemmie. And now Jemmie had had him shot. Had it really
been necessary ... no, that was unfair. She ought not even in thought
to accuse Jemmie of anything like that. How sad the children would be
to-morrow! Their beloved Mac. That was the kind of irritating thing
Jemmie did. Fancy his telling nurse that the dear little dog was not
to be allowed in the nursery! And nurse had given herself airs of such
importance, because Jemmie had told her this himself. Ridiculous woman!

"Mac! Mac!"

Could it really be true that she should never again see that grizzled
head and those faithful eyes?

If Pierre did come to see her, would he ask after Mac, would he
remember him?

Pierre?

Eleven years. Not quite eleven years since she saw him last. It was not
a very long time really. So distinguished as he had looked! How had he
come to find himself in Madagascar? He must have gone there after she
had told him that everything was over.

Pierre?

It might seem less than eleven years to him. She tossed her hair back
over her shoulders and rose from the dressing-table.

In the benign gaslight her bureau stood invitingly open.

"Yes, I will," she declared, and sitting down she wrote this note:

 Woodworth Lodge,
 Campden Hill, W.
 _May 3rd, 1891._

 _Dear Pierre_,

  _I was at your lecture to-night. If you remember who I am after
  eleven years and feel inclined to renew an old acquaintance, won't
  you come and have tea with us on Wednesday next any time after four?
  I should so much enjoy to hear more about your adventure._

 _Yours sincerely,
 Mary Alison._

There was no answer by post, but on Wednesday afternoon when she was
sitting in the drawing-room, counting over to herself the woolen
spiders and butterflies crawling up and down her curtains, he came.

Once in the early days of marriage Mary had taken part with her
husband in some amateur theatricals, in the course of which she had
been attacked by stage fright and stood speechless on the stage for
what seemed an age of agony before she regained her voice. It was the
first time Jemmie was angry with her, and she had resolved never to act
again. Now when Pierre was shown into the room she felt just as she
felt then. Fortunately he was more at ease than she was, and under his
guidance of the conversation Mary slowly recovered her self-possession.

All the time that Pierre was talking Mary became more and more
conscious of him as a man. She had never regarded Jemmie except as an
institution. These eyes that looked so eagerly into hers and at the
same time beyond hers to remote shores and distant mountain-peaks made
her heart beat faster, her breath come and go. Yet, he was only talking
to her as he had talked to an audience the other night. There was
nothing personal, still less intimate, in his words.

"I was very lucky to arrive in Madagascar just before we went to war
with Queen Ranavalona--a very remarkable woman. So was her niece who
succeeded her. I was also lucky to know English so well, because you
English were always there behind the scenes with your officers in
the Malagasy army; besides, there were always negotiations with your
consular officials. We shall have war again in Madagascar soon."

"Again?" Mary echoed in alarm.

Pierre made a gesture of contempt.

"It will not be a very dangerous war for us," he laughed.

At this moment Jemmie, to his wife's regret, came in unexpectedly early.

"This is Monsieur Menard," she said, introducing the stranger with an
air of faint embarrassment as if she were explaining the presence
of some odd new decorative addition to the drawing-room of Woodworth
Lodge. "Monsieur Menard visited us in King's Gate before we were
married. He has been abroad for ten years."

"Charmed to make your acquaintance," said Pierre, bowing.

Jemmie shook hands with English awkwardness, evidently wondering how
on earth he was expected to reply to the exaggerated courtesy of the
stranger.

"I was wondering what night would suit Monsieur Menard to come and dine
with us."

Jemmie glared at his wife in amazement; but without being openly rude
he did not know how to dispose of the unwelcome invitation.

"What in creation put it in your head to ask that fellow to dinner?" he
demanded when Pierre was gone. "You might have guessed that he would
accept. He was probably afraid to refuse for fear of being rude."

"On the contrary, I think he was agreeably surprised to find that
somebody in this house was polite enough to invite him," said Mary.

"That's meant for me, I suppose? If I were you, Mary, I should keep
a check on my tongue. A sharp tongue doesn't add to a woman's charm.
Where did you pick this fellow up?"

"I told you. He used to visit us at King's Gate before we were married."

"I don't see why we should have all your grandmother's foreign friends
and acquaintances foisted on us for the rest of our lives," Jemmie
grumbled. "And I wish you'd answer my question. Where did you meet him
again?"

"At a lecture on Madagascar to which I took my girls."

Jemmie threw up his eyebrows to express compassion for human folly.

"You'll be bringing Barnum and Bailey back to dinner next," he
prophesied. "Or one of the keepers at the Zoo. I don't want this house
filled with showmen and cranks. I knew what it would be when you
started that club of yours. I should have thought three children was
enough for any woman. But go your own way. Don't let anything I say
interfere with your pleasures. From what I can see of it the women will
be ruling the men before long."

Mary let her husband grumble on for a while. Then she suggested a few
names for a dinner-party.

"I don't want a dinner-party," he declared angrily. "I'm terribly
overworked just now, and I like to rest whenever I can. You know how
late I've been kept every day this week at the office. We get quite
enough dinner-parties that we have to give and go to without letting
ourselves in for any more than are necessary."

"Very well then," said Mary, "I'll ask nobody else."

"A jolly evening for me to look forward to," grumbled her husband.
"Very jolly."

"You'll find Monsieur Menard most interesting, I assure you. His
adventures in Madagascar...."

"Madagascar!" Jemmie interrupted angrily. "What do I care about
Madagascar! I'm not a girl's club. You'll be suggesting in a minute
that I should read _Robinson Crusoe_ on my way to the office."

Mary began to laugh, upon which her husband retired in dudgeon to the
billiard-room, where he succeeded in making a break of thirty-one
by the indiscriminate use of both white balls and was comparatively
pleasant when he emerged again.

On the evening that Pierre was invited to dinner at eight, Mary