"Ellen will be down in a moment; and before she comes, I am so glad of
this quiet moment with you."

Archer murmured his pleasure at their meeting, and the Marchioness
continued, in her low sighing accents: "I know everything, dear Mr.
Archer--my child has told me all you have done for her.  Your wise
advice: your courageous firmness--thank heaven it was not too late!"

The young man listened with considerable embarrassment.  Was there any
one, he wondered, to whom Madame Olenska had not proclaimed his
intervention in her private affairs?

"Madame Olenska exaggerates; I simply gave her a legal opinion, as she
asked me to."

"Ah, but in doing it--in doing it you were the unconscious instrument
of--of--what word have we moderns for Providence, Mr. Archer?" cried
the lady, tilting her head on one side and drooping her lids
mysteriously.  "Little did you know that at that very moment I was
being appealed to: being approached, in fact--from the other side of
the Atlantic!"

She glanced over her shoulder, as though fearful of being overheard,
and then, drawing her chair nearer, and raising a tiny ivory fan to her
lips, breathed behind it:  "By the Count himself--my poor, mad, foolish
Olenski; who asks only to take her back on her own terms."

"Good God!" Archer exclaimed, springing up.

"You are horrified?  Yes, of course; I understand.  I don't defend poor
Stanislas, though he has always called me his best friend.  He does not
defend himself--he casts himself at her feet: in my person."  She
tapped her emaciated bosom.  "I have his letter here."

"A letter?--Has Madame Olenska seen it?" Archer stammered, his brain
whirling with the shock of the announcement.

The Marchioness Manson shook her head softly.  "Time--time; I must have
time.  I know my Ellen--haughty, intractable; shall I say, just a shade
unforgiving?"

"But, good heavens, to forgive is one thing; to go back into that
hell--"

"Ah, yes," the Marchioness acquiesced.  "So she describes it--my
sensitive child!  But on the material side, Mr. Archer, if one may
stoop to consider such things; do you know what she is giving up?
Those roses there on the sofa--acres like them, under glass and in the
open, in his matchless terraced gardens at Nice!  Jewels--historic
pearls: the Sobieski emeralds--sables,--but she cares nothing for all
these!  Art and beauty, those she does care for, she lives for, as I
always have; and those also surrounded her.  Pictures, priceless
furniture, music, brilliant conversation--ah, that, my dear young man,
if you'll excuse me, is what you've no conception of here!  And she had
it all; and the homage of the greatest.  She tells me she is not
thought handsome in New York--good heavens!  Her portrait has been
painted nine times; the greatest artists in Europe have begged for the
privilege.  Are these things nothing?  And the remorse of an adoring
husband?"

As the Marchioness Manson rose to her climax her face assumed an
expression of ecstatic retrospection which would have moved Archer's
mirth had he not been numb with amazement.

He would have laughed if any one had foretold to him that his first
sight of poor Medora Manson would have been in the guise of a messenger
of Satan; but he was in no mood for laughing now, and she seemed to him
to come straight out of the hell from which Ellen Olenska had just
escaped.

"She knows nothing yet--of all this?" he asked abruptly.

Mrs. Manson laid a purple finger on her lips.  "Nothing directly--but
does she suspect?  Who can tell?  The truth is, Mr. Archer, I have been
waiting to see you.  From the moment I heard of the firm stand you had
taken, and of your influence over her, I hoped it might be possible to
count on your support--to convince you ..."

"That she ought to go back?  I would rather see her dead!" cried the
young man violently.

"Ah," the Marchioness murmured, without visible resentment.  For a
while she sat in her arm-chair, opening and shutting the absurd ivory
fan between her mittened fingers; but suddenly she lifted her head and
listened.

"Here she comes," she said in a rapid whisper; and then, pointing to
the bouquet on the sofa:  "Am I to understand that you prefer THAT, Mr.
Archer?  After all, marriage is marriage ... and my niece is still a
wife..."

XVIII.

"What are you two plotting together, aunt Medora?" Madame Olenska cried
as she came into the room.

She was dressed as if for a ball.  Everything about her shimmered and
glimmered softly, as if her dress had been woven out of candle-beams;
and she carried her head high, like a pretty woman challenging a
roomful of rivals.

"We were saying, my dear, that here was something beautiful to surprise
you with," Mrs. Manson rejoined, rising to her feet and pointing archly
to the flowers.

Madame Olenska stopped short and looked at the bouquet.  Her colour did
not change, but a sort of white radiance of anger ran over her like
summer lightning.  "Ah," she exclaimed, in a shrill voice that the
young man had never heard, "who is ridiculous enough to send me a
bouquet?  Why a bouquet?  And why tonight of all nights?  I am not
going to a ball; I am not a girl engaged to be married.  But some
people are always ridiculous."

She turned back to the door, opened it, and called out:  "Nastasia!"

The ubiquitous handmaiden promptly appeared, and Archer heard Madame
Olenska say, in an Italian that she seemed to pronounce with
intentional deliberateness in order that he might follow it:
"Here--throw this into the dustbin!" and then, as Nastasia stared
protestingly:  "But no--it's not the fault of the poor flowers.  Tell
the boy to carry them to the house three doors away, the house of Mr.
Winsett, the dark gentleman who dined here.  His wife is ill--they may
give her pleasure ... The boy is out, you say?  Then, my dear one, run
yourself; here, put my cloak over you and fly.  I want the thing out of
the house immediately!  And, as you live, don't say they come from me!"

She flung her velvet opera cloak over the maid's shoulders and turned
back into the drawing-room, shutting the door sharply.  Her bosom was
rising high under its lace, and for a moment Archer thought she was
about to cry; but she burst into a laugh instead, and looking from the
Marchioness to Archer, asked abruptly: "And you two--have you made
friends!"

"It's for Mr. Archer to say, darling; he has waited patiently while you
were dressing."

"Yes--I gave you time enough: my hair wouldn't go," Madame Olenska
said, raising her hand to the heaped-up curls of her chignon.  "But
that reminds me: I see Dr. Carver is gone, and you'll be late at the
Blenkers'.  Mr. Archer, will you put my aunt in the carriage?"

She followed the Marchioness into the hall, saw her fitted into a
miscellaneous heap of overshoes, shawls and tippets, and called from
the doorstep:  "Mind, the carriage is to be back for me at ten!"  Then
she returned to the drawing-room, where Archer, on re-entering it,
found her standing by the mantelpiece, examining herself in the mirror.
It was not usual, in New York society, for a lady to address her
parlour-maid as "my dear one," and send her out on an errand wrapped in
her own opera-cloak; and Archer, through all his deeper feelings,
tasted the pleasurable excitement of being in a world where action
followed on emotion with such Olympian speed.

Madame Olenska did not move when he came up behind her, and for a
second their eyes met in the mirror; then she turned, threw herself
into her sofa-corner, and sighed out:  "There's time for a cigarette."

He handed her the box and lit a spill for her; and as the flame flashed
up into her face she glanced at him with laughing eyes and said:  "What
do you think of me in a temper?"

Archer paused a moment; then he answered with sudden resolution:  "It
makes me understand what your aunt has been saying about you."

"I knew she'd been talking about me.  Well?"

"She said you were used to all kinds of things--splendours and
amusements and excitements--that we could never hope to give you here."

Madame Olenska smiled faintly into the circle of smoke about her lips.

"Medora is incorrigibly romantic.  It has made up to her for so many
things!"

Archer hesitated again, and again took his risk.  "Is your aunt's
romanticism always consistent with accuracy?"

"You mean: does she speak the truth?"  Her niece considered.  "Well,
I'll tell you: in almost everything she says, there's something true
and something untrue.  But why do you ask?  What has she been telling
you?"

He looked away into the fire, and then back at her shining presence.
His heart tightened with the thought that this was their last evening
by that fireside, and that in a moment the carriage would come to carry
her away.

"She says--she pretends that Count Olenski has asked her to persuade
you to go back to him."

Madame Olenska made no answer.  She sat motionless, holding her
cigarette in her half-lifted hand.  The expression of her face had not
changed; and Archer remembered that he had before noticed her apparent
incapacity for surprise.

"You knew, then?" he broke out.

She was silent for so long that the ash dropped from her cigarette.
She brushed it to the floor.  "She has hinted about a letter: poor
darling!  Medora's hints--"

"Is it at your husband's request that she has arrived here suddenly?"

Madame Olenska seemed to consider this question also.  "There again:
one can't tell.  She told me she had had a 'spiritual summons,'
whatever that is, from Dr. Carver.  I'm afraid she's going to marry Dr.
Carver ...  poor Medora, there's always some one she wants to marry.
But perhaps the people in Cuba just got tired of her!  I think she was
with them as a sort of paid companion.  Really, I don't know why she
came."

"But you do believe she has a letter from your husband?"

Again Madame Olenska brooded silently; then she said:  "After all, it
was to be expected."

The young man rose and went to lean against the fireplace.  A sudden
restlessness possessed him, and he was tongue-tied by the sense that
their minutes were numbered, and that at any moment he might hear the
wheels of the returning carriage.

"You know that your aunt believes you will go back?"

Madame Olenska raised her head quickly.  A deep blush rose to her face
and spread over her neck and shoulders.  She blushed seldom and
painfully, as if it hurt her like a burn.

"Many cruel things have been believed of me," she said.

"Oh, Ellen--forgive me; I'm a fool and a brute!"

She smiled a little.  "You are horribly nervous; you have your own
troubles.  I know you think the Wellands are unreasonable about your
marriage, and of course I agree with you.  In Europe people don't
understand our long American engagements; I suppose they are not as
calm as we are."  She pronounced the "we" with a faint emphasis that
gave it an ironic sound.

Archer felt the irony but did not dare to take it up.  After all, she
had perhaps purposely deflected the conversation from her own affairs,
and after the pain his last words had evidently caused her he felt that
all he could do was to follow her lead.  But the sense of the waning
hour made him desperate: he could not bear the thought that a barrier
of words should drop between them again.

"Yes," he said abruptly; "I went south to ask May to marry me after
Easter.  There's no reason why we shouldn't be married then."

"And May adores you--and yet you couldn't convince her?  I thought her
too intelligent to be the slave of such absurd superstitions."

"She IS too intelligent--she's not their slave."

Madame Olenska looked at him.  "Well, then--I don't understand."

Archer reddened, and hurried on with a rush.  "We had a frank
talk--almost the first.  She thinks my impatience a bad sign."

"Merciful heavens--a bad sign?"

"She thinks it means that I can't trust myself to go on caring for her.
She thinks, in short, I want to marry her at once to get away from some
one that I--care for more."

Madame Olenska examined this curiously.  "But if she thinks that--why
isn't she in a hurry too?"

"Because she's not like that: she's so much nobler.  She insists all
the more on the long engagement, to give me time--"

"Time to give her up for the other woman?"

"If I want to."

Madame Olenska leaned toward the fire and gazed into it with fixed
eyes.  Down the quiet street Archer heard the approaching trot of her
horses.

"That IS noble," she said, with a slight break in her voice.

"Yes.  But it's ridiculous."

"Ridiculous?  Because you don't care for any one else?"

"Because I don't mean to marry any one else."

"Ah."  There was another long interval.  At length she looked up at him
and asked:  "This other woman--does she love you?"

"Oh, there's no other woman; I mean, the person that May was thinking
of is--was never--"

"Then, why, after all, are you in such haste?"

"There's your carriage," said Archer.

She half-rose and looked about her with absent eyes.  Her fan and
gloves lay on the sofa beside her and she picked them up mechanically.

"Yes; I suppose I must be going."

"You're going to Mrs. Struthers's?"

"Yes."  She smiled and added:  "I must go where I am invited, or I
should be too lonely.  Why not come with me?"

Archer felt that at any cost he must keep her beside him, must make her
give him the rest of her evening.  Ignoring her question, he continued
to lean against the chimney-piece, his eyes fixed on the hand in which
she held her gloves and fan, as if watching to see if he had the power
to make her drop them.

"May guessed the truth," he said.  "There is another woman--but not the
one she thinks."

Ellen Olenska made no answer, and did not move.  After a moment he sat
down beside her, and, taking her hand, softly unclasped it, so that the
gloves and fan fell on the sofa between them.

She started up, and freeing herself from him moved away to the other
side of the hearth.  "Ah, don't make love to me!  Too many people have
done that," she said, frowning.

Archer, changing colour, stood up also: it was the bitterest rebuke she
could have given him.  "I have never made love to you," he said, "and I
never shall.  But you are the woman I would have married if it had been
possible for either of us."

"Possible for either of us?"  She looked at him with unfeigned
astonishment.  "And you say that--when it's you who've made it
impossible?"

He stared at her, groping in a blackness through which a single arrow
of light tore its blinding way.

"I'VE made it impossible--?"

"You, you, YOU!" she cried, her lip trembling like a child's on the
verge of tears.  "Isn't it you who made me give up divorcing--give it
up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must
sacrifice one's self to preserve the dignity of marriage ... and to
spare one's family the publicity, the scandal?  And because my family
was going to be your family--for May's sake and for yours--I did what
you told me, what you proved to me that I ought to do.  Ah," she broke
out with a sudden laugh, "I've made no secret of having done it for
you!"

She sank down on the sofa again, crouching among the festive ripples of
her dress like a stricken masquerader; and the young man stood by the
fireplace and continued to gaze at her without moving.

"Good God," he groaned.  "When I thought--"

"You thought?"

"Ah, don't ask me what I thought!"

Still looking at her, he saw the same burning flush creep up her neck
to her face.  She sat upright, facing him with a rigid dignity.

"I do ask you."

"Well, then: there were things in that letter you asked me to read--"

"My husband's letter?"

"Yes."

"I had nothing to fear from that letter: absolutely nothing!  All I
feared was to bring notoriety, scandal, on the family--on you and May."

"Good God," he groaned again, bowing his face in his hands.

The silence that followed lay on them with the weight of things final
and irrevocable.  It seemed to Archer to be crushing him down like his
own grave-stone; in all the wide future he saw nothing that would ever
lift that load from his heart.  He did not move from his place, or
raise his head from his hands; his hidden eyeballs went on staring into
utter darkness.

"At least I loved you--" he brought out.

On the other side of the hearth, from the sofa-corner where he supposed
that she still crouched, he heard a faint stifled crying like a
child's.  He started up and came to her side.

"Ellen!  What madness!  Why are you crying?  Nothing's done that can't
be undone.  I'm still free, and you're going to be."  He had her in his
arms, her face like a wet flower at his lips, and all their vain
terrors shrivelling up like ghosts at sunrise.  The one thing that
astonished him now was that he should have stood for five minutes
arguing with her across the width of the room, when just touching her
made everything so simple.

She gave him back all his kiss, but after a moment he felt her
stiffening in his arms, and she put him aside and stood up.

"Ah, my poor Newland--I suppose this had to be.  But it doesn't in the
least alter things," she said, looking down at him in her turn from the
hearth.

"It alters the whole of life for me."

"No, no--it mustn't, it can't.  You're engaged to May Welland; and I'm
married."

He stood up too, flushed and resolute.  "Nonsense!  It's too late for
that sort of thing.  We've no right to lie to other people or to
ourselves.  We won't talk of your marriage; but do you see me marrying
May after this?"

She stood silent, resting her thin elbows on the mantelpiece, her
profile reflected in the glass behind her.  One of the locks of her
chignon had become loosened and hung on her neck; she looked haggard
and almost old.

"I don't see you," she said at length, "putting that question to May.
Do you?"

He gave a reckless shrug.  "It's too late to do anything else."

"You say that because it's the easiest thing to say at this moment--not
because it's true.  In reality it's too late to do anything but what
we'd both decided on."

"Ah, I don't understand you!"

She forced a pitiful smile that pinched her face instead of smoothing
it.  "You don't understand because you haven't yet guessed how you've
changed things for me: oh, from the first--long before I knew all you'd
done."

"All I'd done?"

"Yes.  I was perfectly unconscious at first that people here were shy
of me--that they thought I was a dreadful sort of person.  It seems
they had even refused to meet me at dinner.  I found that out
afterward; and how you'd made your mother go with you to the van der
Luydens'; and how you'd insisted on announcing your engagement at the
Beaufort ball, so that I might have two families to stand by me instead
of one--"

At that he broke into a laugh.

"Just imagine," she said, "how stupid and unobservant I was!  I knew
nothing of all this till Granny blurted it out one day.  New York
simply meant peace and freedom to me: it was coming home.  And I was so
happy at being among my own people that every one I met seemed kind and
good, and glad to see me.  But from the very beginning," she continued,
"I felt there was no one as kind as you; no one who gave me reasons
that I understood for doing what at first seemed so hard
and--unnecessary.  The very good people didn't convince me; I felt
they'd never been tempted.  But you knew; you understood; you had felt
the world outside tugging at one with all its golden hands--and yet you
hated the things it asks of one; you hated happiness bought by
disloyalty and cruelty and indifference.  That was what I'd never known
before--and it's better than anything I've known."

She spoke in a low even voice, without tears or visible agitation; and
each word, as it dropped from her, fell into his breast like burning
lead.  He sat bowed over, his head between his hands, staring at the
hearthrug, and at the tip of the satin shoe that showed under her
dress.  Suddenly he knelt down and kissed the shoe.

She bent over him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and looking at
him with eyes so deep that he remained motionless under her gaze.

"Ah, don't let us undo what you've done!" she cried.  "I can't go back
now to that other way of thinking.  I can't love you unless I give you
up."

His arms were yearning up to her; but she drew away, and they remained
facing each other, divided by the distance that her words had created.
Then, abruptly, his anger overflowed.

"And Beaufort?  Is he to replace me?"

As the words sprang out he was prepared for an answering flare of
anger; and he would have welcomed it as fuel for his own.  But Madame
Olenska only grew a shade paler, and stood with her arms hanging down
before her, and her head slightly bent, as her way was when she
pondered a question.

"He's waiting for you now at Mrs. Struthers's; why don't you go to
him?" Archer sneered.

She turned to ring the bell.  "I shall not go out this evening; tell
the carriage to go and fetch the Signora Marchesa," she said when the
maid came.

After the door had closed again Archer continued to look at her with
bitter eyes.  "Why this sacrifice?  Since you tell me that you're
lonely I've no right to keep you from your friends."

She smiled a little under her wet lashes.  "I shan't be lonely now.  I
WAS lonely; I WAS afraid.  But the emptiness and the darkness are gone;
when I turn back into myself now I'm like a child going at night into a
room where there's always a light."

Her tone and her look still enveloped her in a soft inaccessibility,
and Archer groaned out again:  "I don't understand you!"

"Yet you understand May!"

He reddened under the retort, but kept his eyes on her.  "May is ready
to give me up."

"What!  Three days after you've entreated her on your knees to hasten
your marriage?"

"She's refused; that gives me the right--"

"Ah, you've taught me what an ugly word that is," she said.

He turned away with a sense of utter weariness.  He felt as though he
had been struggling for hours up the face of a steep precipice, and
now, just as he had fought his way to the top, his hold had given way
and he was pitching down headlong into darkness.

If he could have got her in his arms again he might have swept away her
arguments; but she still held him at a distance by something
inscrutably aloof in her look and attitude, and by his own awed sense
of her sincerity.  At length he began to plead again.

"If we do this now it will be worse afterward--worse for every one--"

"No--no--no!" she almost screamed, as if he frightened her.

At that moment the bell sent a long tinkle through the house.  They had
heard no carriage stopping at the door, and they stood motionless,
looking at each other with startled eyes.

Outside, Nastasia's step crossed the hall, the outer door opened, and a
moment later she came in carrying a telegram which she handed to the
Countess Olenska.

"The lady was very happy at the flowers," Nastasia said, smoothing her
apron.  "She thought it was her signor marito who had sent them, and
she cried a little and said it was a folly."

Her mistress smiled and took the yellow envelope.  She tore it open and
carried it to the lamp; then, when the door had closed again, she
handed the telegram to Archer.

It was dated from St. Augustine, and addressed to the Countess Olenska.
In it he read:  "Granny's telegram successful.  Papa and Mamma agree
marriage after Easter.  Am telegraphing Newland.  Am too happy for
words and love you dearly.  Your grateful May."

Half an hour later, when Archer unlocked his own front-door, he found a
similar envelope on the hall-table on top of his pile of notes and
letters.  The message inside the envelope was also from May Welland,
and ran as follows:  "Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at
twelve Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love
May."

Archer crumpled up the yellow sheet as if the gesture could annihilate
the news it contained.  Then he pulled out a small pocket-diary and
turned over the pages with trembling fingers; but he did not find what
he wanted, and cramming the telegram into his pocket he mounted the
stairs.

A light was shining through the door of the little hall-room which
served Janey as a dressing-room and boudoir, and her brother rapped
impatiently on the panel.  The door opened, and his sister stood before
him in her immemorial purple flannel dressing-gown, with her hair "on
pins."  Her face looked pale and apprehensive.

"Newland!  I hope there's no bad news in that telegram?  I waited on
purpose, in case--"  (No item of his correspondence was safe from
Janey.)

He took no notice of her question.  "Look here--what day is Easter this
year?"

She looked shocked at such unchristian ignorance.  "Easter?  Newland!
Why, of course, the first week in April.  Why?"

"The first week?"  He turned again to the pages of his diary,
calculating rapidly under his breath.  "The first week, did you say?"
He threw back his head with a long laugh.

"For mercy's sake what's the matter?"

"Nothing's the matter, except that I'm going to be married in a month."

Janey fell upon his neck and pressed him to her purple flannel breast.
"Oh Newland, how wonderful!  I'm so glad!  But, dearest, why do you
keep on laughing?  Do hush, or you'll wake Mamma."

Book II

XIX.

The day was fresh, with a lively spring wind full of dust.  All the old
ladies in both families had got out their faded sables and yellowing
ermines, and the smell of camphor from the front pews almost smothered
the faint spring scent of the lilies banking the altar.

Newland Archer, at a signal from the sexton, had come out of the vestry
and placed himself with his best man on the chancel step of Grace
Church.

The signal meant that the brougham bearing the bride and her father was
in sight; but there was sure to be a considerable interval of
adjustment and consultation in the lobby, where the bridesmaids were
already hovering like a cluster of Easter blossoms.  During this
unavoidable lapse of time the bridegroom, in proof of his eagerness,
was expected to expose himself alone to the gaze of the assembled
company; and Archer had gone through this formality as resignedly as
through all the others which made of a nineteenth century New York
wedding a rite that seemed to belong to the dawn of history.
Everything was equally easy--or equally painful, as one chose to put
it--in the path he was committed to tread, and he had obeyed the
flurried injunctions of his best man as piously as other bridegrooms
had obeyed his own, in the days when he had guided them through the
same labyrinth.

So far he was reasonably sure of having fulfilled all his obligations.
The bridesmaids' eight bouquets of white lilac and lilies-of-the-valley
had been sent in due time, as well as the gold and sapphire
sleeve-links of the eight ushers and the best man's cat's-eye
scarf-pin; Archer had sat up half the night trying to vary the wording
of his thanks for the last batch of presents from men friends and
ex-lady-loves; the fees for the Bishop and the Rector were safely in
the pocket of his best man; his own luggage was already at Mrs. Manson
Mingott's, where the wedding-breakfast was to take place, and so were
the travelling clothes into which he was to change; and a private
compartment had been engaged in the train that was to carry the young
couple to their unknown destination--concealment of the spot in which
the bridal night was to be spent being one of the most sacred taboos of
the prehistoric ritual.

"Got the ring all right?" whispered young van der Luyden Newland, who
was inexperienced in the duties of a best man, and awed by the weight
of his responsibility.

Archer made the gesture which he had seen so many bridegrooms make:
with his ungloved right hand he felt in the pocket of his dark grey
waistcoat, and assured himself that the little gold circlet (engraved
inside: Newland to May, April ---, 187-) was in its place; then,
resuming his former attitude, his tall hat and pearl-grey gloves with
black stitchings grasped in his left hand, he stood looking at the door
of the church.

Overhead, Handel's March swelled pompously through the imitation stone
vaulting, carrying on its waves the faded drift of the many weddings at
which, with cheerful indifference, he had stood on the same chancel
step watching other brides float up the nave toward other bridegrooms.

"How like a first night at the Opera!" he thought, recognising all the
same faces in the same boxes (no, pews), and wondering if, when the
Last Trump sounded, Mrs. Selfridge Merry would be there with the same
towering ostrich feathers in her bonnet, and Mrs. Beaufort with the
same diamond earrings and the same smile--and whether suitable
proscenium seats were already prepared for them in another world.

After that there was still time to review, one by one, the familiar
countenances in the first rows; the women's sharp with curiosity and
excitement, the men's sulky with the obligation of having to put on
their frock-coats before luncheon, and fight for food at the
wedding-breakfast.

"Too bad the breakfast is at old Catherine's," the bridegroom could
fancy Reggie Chivers saying.  "But I'm told that Lovell Mingott
insisted on its being cooked by his own chef, so it ought to be good if
one can only get at it."  And he could imagine Sillerton Jackson adding
with authority:  "My dear fellow, haven't you heard?  It's to be served
at small tables, in the new English fashion."

Archer's eyes lingered a moment on the left-hand pew, where his mother,
who had entered the church on Mr. Henry van der Luyden's arm, sat
weeping softly under her Chantilly veil, her hands in her grandmother's
ermine muff.

"Poor Janey!" he thought, looking at his sister, "even by screwing her
head around she can see only the people in the few front pews; and
they're mostly dowdy Newlands and Dagonets."

On the hither side of the white ribbon dividing off the seats reserved
for the families he saw Beaufort, tall and redfaced, scrutinising the
women with his arrogant stare.  Beside him sat his wife, all silvery
chinchilla and violets; and on the far side of the ribbon, Lawrence
Lefferts's sleekly brushed head seemed to mount guard over the
invisible deity of "Good Form" who presided at the ceremony.

Archer wondered how many flaws Lefferts's keen eyes would discover in
the ritual of his divinity; then he suddenly recalled that he too had
once thought such questions important.  The things that had filled his
days seemed now like a nursery parody of life, or like the wrangles of
mediaeval schoolmen over metaphysical terms that nobody had ever
understood.  A stormy discussion as to whether the wedding presents
should be "shown" had darkened the last hours before the wedding; and
it seemed inconceivable to Archer that grown-up people should work
themselves into a state of agitation over such trifles, and that the
matter should have been decided (in the negative) by Mrs. Welland's
saying, with indignant tears:  "I should as soon turn the reporters
loose in my house."  Yet there was a time when Archer had had definite
and rather aggressive opinions on all such problems, and when
everything concerning the manners and customs of his little tribe had
seemed to him fraught with world-wide significance.

"And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living
somewhere, and real things happening to them ..."

"THERE THEY COME!" breathed the best man excitedly; but the bridegroom
knew better.

The cautious opening of the door of the church meant only that Mr.
Brown the livery-stable keeper (gowned in black in his intermittent
character of sexton) was taking a preliminary survey of the scene
before marshalling his forces.  The door was softly shut again; then
after another interval it swung majestically open, and a murmur ran
through the church:  "The family!"

Mrs. Welland came first, on the arm of her eldest son.  Her large pink
face was appropriately solemn, and her plum-coloured satin with pale
blue side-panels, and blue ostrich plumes in a small satin bonnet, met
with general approval; but before she had settled herself with a
stately rustle in the pew opposite Mrs. Archer's the spectators were
craning their necks to see who was coming after her.  Wild rumours had
been abroad the day before to the effect that Mrs. Manson Mingott, in
spite of her physical disabilities, had resolved on being present at
the ceremony; and the idea was so much in keeping with her sporting
character that bets ran high at the clubs as to her being able to walk
up the nave and squeeze into a seat.  It was known that she had
insisted on sending her own carpenter to look into the possibility of
taking down the end panel of the front pew, and to measure the space
between the seat and the front; but the result had been discouraging,
and for one anxious day her family had watched her dallying with the
plan of being wheeled up the nave in her enormous Bath chair and
sitting enthroned in it at the foot of the chancel.

The idea of this monstrous exposure of her person was so painful to her
relations that they could have covered with gold the ingenious person
who suddenly discovered that the chair was too wide to pass between the
iron uprights of the awning which extended from the church door to the
curbstone.  The idea of doing away with this awning, and revealing the
bride to the mob of dressmakers and newspaper reporters who stood
outside fighting to get near the joints of the canvas, exceeded even
old Catherine's courage, though for a moment she had weighed the
possibility.  "Why, they might take a photograph of my child AND PUT IT
IN THE PAPERS!" Mrs. Welland exclaimed when her mother's last plan was
hinted to her; and from this unthinkable indecency the clan recoiled
with a collective shudder.  The ancestress had had to give in; but her
concession was bought only by the promise that the wedding-breakfast
should take place under her roof, though (as the Washington Square
connection said) with the Wellands' house in easy reach it was hard to
have to make a special price with Brown to drive one to the other end
of nowhere.

Though all these transactions had been widely reported by the Jacksons
a sporting minority still clung to the belief that old Catherine would
appear in church, and there was a distinct lowering of the temperature
when she was found to have been replaced by her daughter-in-law.  Mrs.
Lovell Mingott had the high colour and glassy stare induced in ladies
of her age and habit by the effort of getting into a new dress; but
once the disappointment occasioned by her mother-in-law's
non-appearance had subsided, it was agreed that her black Chantilly
over lilac satin, with a bonnet of Parma violets, formed the happiest
contrast to Mrs. Welland's blue and plum-colour.  Far different was the
impression produced by the gaunt and mincing lady who followed on Mr.
Mingott's arm, in a wild dishevelment of stripes and fringes and
floating scarves; and as this last apparition glided into view Archer's
heart contracted and stopped beating.

He had taken it for granted that the Marchioness Manson was still in
Washington, where she had gone some four weeks previously with her
niece, Madame Olenska.  It was generally understood that their abrupt
departure was due to Madame Olenska's desire to remove her aunt from
the baleful eloquence of Dr. Agathon Carver, who had nearly succeeded
in enlisting her as a recruit for the Valley of Love; and in the
circumstances no one had expected either of the ladies to return for
the wedding.  For a moment Archer stood with his eyes fixed on Medora's
fantastic figure, straining to see who came behind her; but the little
procession was at an end, for all the lesser members of the family had
taken their seats, and the eight tall ushers, gathering themselves
together like birds or insects preparing for some migratory manoeuvre,
were already slipping through the side doors into the lobby.

"Newland--I say: SHE'S HERE!" the best man whispered.

Archer roused himself with a start.

A long time had apparently passed since his heart had stopped beating,
for the white and rosy procession was in fact half way up the nave, the
Bishop, the Rector and two white-winged assistants were hovering about
the flower-banked altar, and the first chords of the Spohr symphony
were strewing their flower-like notes before the bride.

Archer opened his eyes (but could they really have been shut, as he
imagined?), and felt his heart beginning to resume its usual task.  The
music, the scent of the lilies on the altar, the vision of the cloud of
tulle and orange-blossoms floating nearer and nearer, the sight of Mrs.
Archer's face suddenly convulsed with happy sobs, the low benedictory
murmur of the Rector's voice, the ordered evolutions of the eight pink
bridesmaids and the eight black ushers: all these sights, sounds and
sensations, so familiar in themselves, so unutterably strange and
meaningless in his new relation to them, were confusedly mingled in his
brain.

"My God," he thought, "HAVE I got the ring?"--and once more he went
through the bridegroom's convulsive gesture.

Then, in a moment, May was beside him, such radiance streaming from her
that it sent a faint warmth through his numbness, and he straightened
himself and smiled into her eyes.

"Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here," the Rector began ...

The ring was on her hand, the Bishop's benediction had been given, the
bridesmaids were a-poise to resume their place in the procession, and
the organ was showing preliminary symptoms of breaking out into the
Mendelssohn March, without which no newly-wedded couple had ever
emerged upon New York.

"Your arm--I SAY, GIVE HER YOUR ARM!" young Newland nervously hissed;
and once more Archer became aware of having been adrift far off in the
unknown.  What was it that had sent him there, he wondered?  Perhaps
the glimpse, among the anonymous spectators in the transept, of a dark
coil of hair under a hat which, a moment later, revealed itself as
belonging to an unknown lady with a long nose, so laughably unlike the
person whose image she had evoked that he asked himself if he were
becoming subject to hallucinations.

And now he and his wife were pacing slowly down the nave, carried
forward on the light Mendelssohn ripples, the spring day beckoning to
them through widely opened doors, and Mrs. Welland's chestnuts, with
big white favours on their frontlets, curvetting and showing off at the
far end of the canvas tunnel.

The footman, who had a still bigger white favour on his lapel, wrapped
May's white cloak about her, and Archer jumped into the brougham at her
side.  She turned to him with a triumphant smile and their hands
clasped under her veil.

"Darling!" Archer said--and suddenly the same black abyss yawned before
him and he felt himself sinking into it, deeper and deeper, while his
voice rambled on smoothly and cheerfully:  "Yes, of course I thought
I'd lost the ring; no wedding would be complete if the poor devil of a
bridegroom didn't go through that.  But you DID keep me waiting, you
know!  I had time to think of every horror that might possibly happen."

She surprised him by turning, in full Fifth Avenue, and flinging her
arms about his neck.  "But none ever CAN happen now, can it, Newland,
as long as we two are together?"

Every detail of the day had been so carefully thought out that the
young couple, after the wedding-breakfast, had ample time to put on
their travelling-clothes, descend the wide Mingott stairs between
laughing bridesmaids and weeping parents, and get into the brougham
under the traditional shower of rice and satin slippers; and there was
still half an hour left in which to drive to the station, buy the last
weeklies at the bookstall with the air of seasoned travellers, and
settle themselves in the reserved compartment in which May's maid had
already placed her dove-coloured travelling cloak and glaringly new
dressing-bag from London.

The old du Lac aunts at Rhinebeck had put their house at the disposal
of the bridal couple, with a readiness inspired by the prospect of
spending a week in New York with Mrs. Archer; and Archer, glad to
escape the usual "bridal suite" in a Philadelphia or Baltimore hotel,
had accepted with an equal alacrity.

May was enchanted at the idea of going to the country, and childishly
amused at the vain efforts of the eight bridesmaids to discover where
their mysterious retreat was situated.  It was thought "very English"
to have a country-house lent to one, and the fact gave a last touch of
distinction to what was generally conceded to be the most brilliant
wedding of the year; but where the house was no one was permitted to
know, except the parents of bride and groom, who, when taxed with the
knowledge, pursed their lips and said mysteriously:  "Ah, they didn't
tell us--" which was manifestly true, since there was no need to.

Once they were settled in their compartment, and the train, shaking off
the endless wooden suburbs, had pushed out into the pale landscape of
spring, talk became easier than Archer had expected.  May was still, in
look and tone, the simple girl of yesterday, eager to compare notes
with him as to the incidents of the wedding, and discussing them as
impartially as a bridesmaid talking it all over with an usher.  At
first Archer had fancied that this detachment was the disguise of an
inward tremor; but her clear eyes revealed only the most tranquil
unawareness.  She was alone for the first time with her husband; but
her husband was only the charming comrade of yesterday.  There was no
one whom she liked as much, no one whom she trusted as completely, and
the culminating "lark" of the whole delightful adventure of engagement
and marriage was to be off with him alone on a journey, like a grownup
person, like a "married woman," in fact.

It was wonderful that--as he had learned in the Mission garden at St.
Augustine--such depths of feeling could coexist with such absence of
imagination.  But he remembered how, even then, she had surprised him
by dropping back to inexpressive girlishness as soon as her conscience
had been eased of its burden; and he saw that she would probably go
through life dealing to the best of her ability with each experience as
it came, but never anticipating any by so much as a stolen glance.

Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their
transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than
a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue
or a Greek goddess.  The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might
have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her
look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor
dull, but only primitive and pure.  In the thick of this meditation
Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a
stranger, and plunged into a reminiscence of the wedding-breakfast and
of Granny Mingott's immense and triumphant pervasion of it.

May settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject.  "I was surprised,
though--weren't you?--that aunt Medora came after all.  Ellen wrote
that they were neither of them well enough to take the journey; I do
wish it had been she who had recovered!  Did you see the exquisite old
lace she sent me?"

He had known that the moment must come sooner or later, but he had
somewhat imagined that by force of willing he might hold it at bay.

"Yes--I--no: yes, it was beautiful," he said, looking at her blindly,
and wondering if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his
carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards.

"Aren't you tired?  It will be good to have some tea when we
arrive--I'm sure the aunts have got everything beautifully ready," he
rattled on, taking her hand in his; and her mind rushed away instantly
to the magnificent tea and coffee service of Baltimore silver which the
Beauforts had sent, and which "went" so perfectly with uncle Lovell
Mingott's trays and side-dishes.

In the spring twilight the train stopped at the Rhinebeck station, and
they walked along the platform to the waiting carriage.

"Ah, how awfully kind of the van der Luydens--they've sent their man
over from Skuytercliff to meet us," Archer exclaimed, as a sedate
person out of livery approached them and relieved the maid of her bags.

"I'm extremely sorry, sir," said this emissary, "that a little accident
has occurred at the Miss du Lacs': a leak in the water-tank.  It
happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Luyden, who heard of it this
morning, sent a housemaid up by the early train to get the Patroon's
house ready.  It will be quite comfortable, I think you'll find, sir;
and the Miss du Lacs have sent their cook over, so that it will be
exactly the same as if you'd been at Rhinebeck."

Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated in still more
apologetic accents:  "It'll be exactly the same, sir, I do assure
you--" and May's eager voice broke out, covering the embarrassed
silence:  "The same as Rhinebeck?  The Patroon's house?  But it will be
a hundred thousand times better--won't it, Newland?  It's too dear and
kind of Mr. van der Luyden to have thought of it."

And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman, and their
shining bridal bags on the seat before them, she went on excitedly:
"Only fancy, I've never been inside it--have you?  The van der Luydens
show it to so few people.  But they opened it for Ellen, it seems, and
she told me what a darling little place it was: she says it's the only
house she's seen in America that she could imagine being perfectly
happy in."

"Well--that's what we're going to be, isn't it?" cried her husband
gaily; and she answered with her boyish smile:  "Ah, it's just our luck
beginning--the wonderful luck we're always going to have together!"

XX.

"Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said; and
his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental
Britannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table.

In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people
whom the Newland Archers knew; and these two they had sedulously
avoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not
"dignified" to force one's self on the notice of one's acquaintances in
foreign countries.

Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so
unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances
of their fellow-travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve,
that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a
word with a "foreigner" other than those employed in hotels and
railway-stations.  Their own compatriots--save those previously known
or properly accredited--they treated with an even more pronounced
disdain; so that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a
Mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tete-a-tete.
But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at
Botzen one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage
(whose names, dress and social situation were already intimately known
to Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle
of liniment.  The other lady--the intruder's sister, Mrs. Carfry--had
been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer, who
never travelled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunately
able to produce the required remedy.

Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle were
travelling alone they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies,
who supplied them with ingenious comforts and whose efficient maid
helped to nurse the invalid back to health.

When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle again.  Nothing, to Mrs. Archer's mind, would
have been more "undignified" than to force one's self on the notice of
a "foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental service.
But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown,
and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves
linked by an eternal gratitude to the "delightful Americans" who had
been so kind at Botzen.  With touching fidelity they seized every
chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their
continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding
out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the
States.  The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey,
whenever they alighted at Brown's Hotel, found themselves awaited by
two affectionate friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in
Wardian cases, made macrame lace, read the memoirs of the Baroness
Bunsen and had views about the occupants of the leading London pulpits.
As Mrs. Archer said, it made "another thing of London" to know Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged the
tie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought
"only right" to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies,
who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine flowers under
glass.  And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England,
Mrs. Archer's last word had been:  "You must take May to see Mrs.
Carfry."

Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; but
Mrs. Carfry, with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them
an invitation to dine; and it was over this invitation that May Archer
was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins.

"It's all very well for you, Newland; you KNOW them.  But I shall feel
so shy among a lot of people I've never met.  And what shall I wear?"

Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her.  She looked
handsomer and more Diana-like than ever.  The moist English air seemed
to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight
hardness of her virginal features; or else it was simply the inner glow
of happiness, shining through like a light under ice.

"Wear, dearest?  I thought a trunkful of things had come from Paris
last week."

"Yes, of course.  I meant to say that I shan't know WHICH to wear."
She pouted a little.  "I've never dined out in London; and I don't want
to be ridiculous."

He tried to enter into her perplexity.  "But don't Englishwomen dress
just like everybody else in the evening?"

"Newland!  How can you ask such funny questions?  When they go to the
theatre in old ball-dresses and bare heads."

"Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle won't.  They'll wear caps like my mother's--and
shawls; very soft shawls."

"Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?"

"Not as well as you, dear," he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly
developed in her Janey's morbid interest in clothes.

She pushed back her chair with a sigh.  "That's dear of you, Newland;
but it doesn't help me much."

He had an inspiration.  "Why not wear your wedding-dress?  That can't
be wrong, can it?"

"Oh, dearest!  If I only had it here!  But it's gone to Paris to be
made over for next winter, and Worth hasn't sent it back."

"Oh, well--" said Archer, getting up.  "Look here--the fog's lifting.
If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch a
glimpse of the pictures."

The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months'
wedding-tour which May, in writing to her girl friends, vaguely
summarised as "blissful."

They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection, Archer had not
been able to picture his wife in that particular setting.  Her own
inclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was for
mountaineering in July and swimming in August.  This plan they
punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald, and
August at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast, which
some one had recommended as quaint and quiet.  Once or twice, in the
mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said: "There's Italy"; and
May, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied:
"It would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn't have to
be in New York."

But in reality travelling interested her even less than he had
expected.  She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an
enlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand
at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally got
back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered
HIS clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she
looked forward to sailing.

In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; and
she found the theatres less exciting than the Paris cafes chantants
where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Elysees, she
had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant
terrace on an audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpret
to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.

Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage.  It
was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as
all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice
the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest
notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that
May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be
to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration.  Her innate dignity
would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might
even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it
altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good.  But
with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers
such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly
outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him
made that unthinkable.  Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be
loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of
the same virtues.

All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind.  If her
simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed
and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were
on the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of
all his old traditions and reverences.

Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel,
though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at
once how they would fall into place in their proper setting.  He had no
fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life
would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within
it there would be nothing small and stifling--coming back to his wife
would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open.
And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would
be filled.

All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive
from Mayfair to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sister
lived.  Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends'
hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had always
travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughty
unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings.  Once only, just
after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of
queer Europeanised Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in
palaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the
fashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun
in the world, as unreal as a carnival.  These queer cosmopolitan women,
deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need
of retailing to every one they met, and the magnificent young officers
and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their
confidences, were too different from the people Archer had grown up
among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics,
to detain his imagination long.  To introduce his wife into such a
society was out of the question; and in the course of his travels no
other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.

Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of
St. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him, had
said:  "Look me up, won't you?"--but no proper-spirited American would
have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting was
without a sequel.  They had even managed to avoid May's English aunt,
the banker's wife, who was still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had
purposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that their
arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to
these unknown relatives.

"Probably there'll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry's--London's a desert at
this season, and you've made yourself much too beautiful," Archer said
to May, who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her
sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose her
to the London grime.

"I don't want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied,
with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck
again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American
women for the social advantages of dress.

"It's their armour," he thought, "their defence against the unknown,
and their defiance of it."  And he understood for the first time the
earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her
hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and
ordering her extensive wardrobe.

He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry's to be a small
one.  Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long
chilly drawing-room, only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who was
her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her nephew, and a
small dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor,
pronouncing a French name as she did so.

Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like a
swan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more
voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her; and he
perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an
extreme and infantile shyness.

"What on earth will they expect me to talk about?" her helpless eyes
implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was
calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms.  But beauty, even
when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart; and
the Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their
desire to put her at her ease.

In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing
affair.  Archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at her
ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her
references, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to
admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee.  The Vicar soon
abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and
accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until
the ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the
drawing-room.

The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a
meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed
off to bed.  But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine,
and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his
last symposium with Ned Winsett.  The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had
been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for
Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake
Leman.  Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Riviere, who
had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he
went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Riviere added with
simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.

It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without
one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts.  He was a man
of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called
him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense
expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his
animation.

His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and
it had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but an
insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism,
then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length--after
other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into
tutoring English youths in Switzerland.  Before that, however, he had
lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier, been advised by
Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a
dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Merimee in his mother's
house.  He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious
(having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it was
apparent that his literary ambitions had failed.  His situation, in
fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned
Winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who
loved ideas need hunger mentally.  As it was precisely of that love
that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of
vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so
richly in his poverty.

"You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's
intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation,
one's critical independence?  It was because of that that I abandoned
journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private
secretaryship.  There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one
preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's quant a
soi.  And when one hears good talk one can join in it without
compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer
it inwardly.  Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there?
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.  And so I have never
regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms
of the same self-abdication."  He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he
lit another cigarette.  "Voyez-vous, Monsieur, to be able to look life
in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?  But, after
all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to
grow old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is almost as
chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest.
Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge.  Do you
suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America--in
New York?"

Archer looked at him with startled eyes.  New York, for a young man who
had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert, and who thought the life of
ideas the only one worth living!  He continued to stare at M.  Riviere
perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities and
advantages would be the surest hindrance to success.

"New York--New York--but must it be especially New York?" he stammered,
utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could
offer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the only
necessity.

A sudden flush rose under M. Riviere's sallow skin.  "I--I thought it
your metropolis: is not the intellectual life more active there?" he
rejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of
having asked a favour, he went on hastily:  "One throws out random
suggestions--more to one's self than to others.  In reality, I see no
immediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added, without a
trace of constraint:  "But Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to be
taking you upstairs."

During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode.  His
hour with M. Riviere had put new air into his lungs, and his first
impulse had been to invite him to dine the next day; but he was
beginning to understand why married men did not always immediately
yield to their first impulses.

"That young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had some awfully good
talk after dinner about books and things," he threw out tentatively in
the hansom.

May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had
read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the
key to them.

"The little Frenchman?  Wasn't he dreadfully common?" she questioned
coldly; and he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment at
having been invited out in London to meet a clergyman and a French
tutor.  The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment
ordinarily defined as snobbishness, but by old New York's sense of what
was due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands.  If May's
parents had entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would have
offered them something more substantial than a parson and a
schoolmaster.

But Archer was on edge, and took her up.

"Common--common WHERE?" he queried; and she returned with unusual
readiness:  "Why, I should say anywhere but in his school-room.  Those
people are always awkward in society.  But then," she added
disarmingly, "I suppose I shouldn't have known if he was clever."

Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use
of the word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to
dwell on the things he disliked in her.  After all, her point of view
had always been the same.  It was that of all the people he had grown
up among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible.
Until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at
life differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the
nice.

"Ah--then I won't ask him to dine!" he concluded with a laugh; and May
echoed, bewildered:  "Goodness--ask the Carfrys' tutor?"

"Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, if you prefer I shouldn't.
But I did rather want another talk with him.  He's looking for a job in
New York."

Her surprise increased with her indifference: he almost fancied that
she suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness."

"A job in New York?  What sort of a job?  People don't have French
tutors: what does he want to do?"

"Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand," her husband
retorted perversely; and she broke into an appreciative laugh.  "Oh,
Newland, how funny!  Isn't that FRENCH?"

On the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled for him by her
refusing to take seriously his wish to invite M. Riviere.  Another
after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of
New York; and the more Archer considered it the less he was able to fit
M. Riviere into any conceivable picture of New York as he knew it.

He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many
problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the
hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge
in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the
most difficult in marriage.  "After that I suppose we shall have pretty
nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the
worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very
angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.

XXI.

The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea.

The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and
cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals
along the winding path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of
petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.

Half way between the edge of the cliff and the square wooden house
(which was also chocolate-coloured, but with the tin roof of the
verandah striped in yellow and brown to represent an awning) two large
targets had been placed against a background of shrubbery.  On the
other side of the lawn, facing the targets, was pitched a real tent,
with benches and garden-seats about it.  A number of ladies in summer
dresses and gentlemen in grey frock-coats and tall hats stood on the
lawn or sat upon the benches; and every now and then a slender girl in
starched muslin would step from the tent, bow in hand, and speed her
shaft at one of the targets, while the spectators interrupted their
talk to watch the result.

Newland Archer, standing on the verandah of the house, looked curiously
down upon this scene.  On each side of the shiny painted steps was a
large blue china flower-pot on a bright yellow china stand.  A spiky
green plant filled each pot, and below the verandah ran a wide border
of blue hydrangeas edged with more red geraniums.  Behind him, the
French windows of the drawing-rooms through which he had passed gave
glimpses, between swaying lace curtains, of glassy parquet floors
islanded with chintz poufs, dwarf armchairs, and velvet tables covered
with trifles in silver.

The Newport Archery Club always held its August meeting at the
Beauforts'.  The sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet,
was beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter
game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions,
and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes
the bow and arrow held their own.

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle.  It surprised
him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions
to it had so completely changed.  It was Newport that had first brought
home to him the extent of the change.  In New York, during the previous
winter, after he and May had settled down in the new greenish-yellow
house with the bow-window and the Pompeian vestibule, he had dropped
back with relief into the old routine of the office, and the renewal of
this daily activity had served as a link with his former self.  Then
there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey
stepper for May's brougham (the Wellands had given the carriage), and
the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library,
which, in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out
as he had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake book-cases and
"sincere" arm-chairs and tables.  At the Century he had found Winsett
again, and at the Knickerbocker the fashionable young men of his own
set; and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to
dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening
at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a
fairly real and inevitable sort of business.

But Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of
unmitigated holiday-making.  Archer had tried to persuade May to spend
the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine (called,
appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians and
Philadelphians were camping in "native" cottages, and whence came
reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost trapper-like existence
amid woods and waters.

But the Wellands always went to Newport, where they owned one of the
square boxes on the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good
reason why he and May should not join them there.  As Mrs. Welland
rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for May to have
worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be
allowed to wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which Archer
had as yet found no answer.

May herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with
so reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer.  She reminded
him that he had always liked Newport in his bachelor days, and as this
was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure he was going to
like it better than ever now that they were to be there together.  But
as he stood on the Beaufort verandah and looked out on the brightly
peopled lawn it came home to him with a shiver that he was not going to
like it at all.

It was not May's fault, poor dear.  If, now and then, during their
travels, they had fallen slightly out of step, harmony had been
restored by their return to the conditions she was used to.  He had
always foreseen that she would not disappoint him; and he had been
right.  He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a
perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless
sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had
represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of
an unescapable duty.

He could not say that he had been mistaken in his choice, for she had
fulfilled all that he had expected.  It was undoubtedly gratifying to
be the husband of one of the handsomest and most popular young married
women in New York, especially when she was also one of the
sweetest-tempered and most reasonable of wives; and Archer had never
been insensible to such advantages.  As for the momentary madness which
had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself
to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments.  The idea that
he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess
Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory
simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.

But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather
empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons
why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if
they had been children playing in a grave-yard.

He heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the Marchioness Manson
fluttered out of the drawing-room window.  As usual, she was
extraordinarily festooned and bedizened, with a limp Leghorn hat
anchored to her head by many windings of faded gauze, and a little
black velvet parasol on a carved ivory handle absurdly balanced over
her much larger hatbrim.

"My dear Newland, I had no idea that you and May had arrived!  You
yourself came only yesterday, you say?  Ah,
business--business--professional duties ... I understand.  Many
husbands, I know, find it impossible to join their wives here except
for the week-end."  She cocked her head on one side and languished at
him through screwed-up eyes.  "But marriage is one long sacrifice, as I
used often to remind my Ellen--"

Archer's heart stopped with the queer jerk which it had given once
before, and which seemed suddenly to slam a door between himself and
the outer world; but this break of continuity must have been of the
briefest, for he presently heard Medora answering a question he had
apparently found voice to put.

"No, I am not staying here, but with the Blenkers, in their delicious
solitude at Portsmouth.  Beaufort was kind enough to send his famous
trotters for me this morning, so that I might have at least a glimpse
of one of Regina's garden-parties; but this evening I go back to rural
life.  The Blenkers, dear original beings, have hired a primitive old
farm-house at Portsmouth where they gather about them representative
people ..."  She drooped slightly beneath her protecting brim, and
added with a faint blush:  "This week Dr. Agathon Carver is holding a
series of Inner Thought meetings there.  A contrast indeed to this gay
scene of worldly pleasure--but then I have always lived on contrasts!
To me the only death is monotony.  I always say to Ellen: Beware of
monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.  But my poor child is
going through a phase of exaltation, of abhorrence of the world.  You
know, I suppose, that she has declined all invitations to stay at
Newport, even with her grandmother Mingott?  I could hardly persuade
her to come with me to the Blenkers', if you will believe it!  The life
she leads is morbid, unnatural.  Ah, if she had only listened to me
when it was still possible ... When the door was still open ... But
shall we go down and watch this absorbing match?  I hear your May is
one of the competitors."

Strolling toward them from the tent Beaufort advanced over the lawn,
tall, heavy, too tightly buttoned into a London frock-coat, with one of
his own orchids in its buttonhole.  Archer, who had not seen him for
two or three months, was struck by the change in his appearance.  In
the hot summer light his floridness seemed heavy and bloated, and but
for his erect square-shouldered walk he would have looked like an
over-fed and over-dressed old man.

There were all sorts of rumours afloat about Beaufort.  In the spring
he had gone off on a long cruise to the West Indies in his new
steam-yacht, and it was reported that, at various points where he had
touched, a lady resembling Miss Fanny Ring had been seen in his
company.  The steam-yacht, built in the Clyde, and fitted with tiled
bath-rooms and other unheard-of luxuries, was said to have cost him
half a million; and the pearl necklace which he had presented to his
wife on his return was as magnificent as such expiatory offerings are
apt to be.  Beaufort's fortune was substantial enough to stand the
strain; and yet the disquieting rumours persisted, not only in Fifth
Avenue but in Wall Street.  Some people said he had speculated
unfortunately in railways, others that he was being bled by one of the
most insatiable members of her profession; and to every report of
threatened insolvency Beaufort replied by a fresh extravagance: the
building of a new row of orchid-houses, the purchase of a new string of
race-horses, or the addition of a new Meissonnier or Cabanel to his
picture-gallery.

He advanced toward the Marchioness and Newland with his usual
half-sneering smile.  "Hullo, Medora!  Did the trotters do their
business?  Forty minutes, eh?  ...  Well, that's not so bad,
considering your nerves had to be spared."  He shook hands with Archer,
and then, turning back with them, placed himself on Mrs. Manson's other
side, and said, in a low voice, a few words which their companion did
not catch.

The Marchioness replied by one of her queer foreign jerks, and a "Que
voulez-vous?" which deepened Beaufort's frown; but he produced a good
semblance of a congratulatory smile as he glanced at Archer to say:
"You know May's going to carry off the first prize."

"Ah, then it remains in the family," Medora rippled; and at that moment
they reached the tent and Mrs. Beaufort met them in a girlish cloud of
mauve muslin and floating veils.

May Welland was just coming out of the tent.  In her white dress, with
a pale green ribbon about the waist and a wreath of ivy on her hat, she
had the same Diana-like aloofness as when she had entered the Beaufort
ball-room on the night of her engagement.  In the interval not a
thought seemed to have passed behind her eyes or a feeling through her
heart; and though her husband knew that she had the capacity for both
he marvelled afresh at the way in which experience dropped away from
her.

She had her bow and arrow in her hand, and placing herself on the
chalk-mark traced on the turf she lifted the bow to her shoulder and
took aim.  The attitude was so full of a classic grace that a murmur of
appreciation followed her appearance, and Archer felt the glow of
proprietorship that so often cheated him into momentary well-being.
Her rivals--Mrs. Reggie Chivers, the Merry girls, and divers rosy
Thorleys, Dagonets and Mingotts, stood behind her in a lovely anxious
group, brown heads and golden bent above the scores, and pale muslins
and flower-wreathed hats mingled in a tender rainbow.  All were young
and pretty, and bathed in summer bloom; but not one had the nymph-like
ease of his wife, when, with tense muscles and happy frown, she bent
her soul upon some feat of strength.

"Gad," Archer heard Lawrence Lefferts say, "not one of the lot holds
the bow as she does"; and Beaufort retorted:  "Yes; but that's the only
kind of target she'll ever hit."

Archer felt irrationally angry.  His host's contemptuous tribute to
May's "niceness" was just what a husband should have wished to hear
said of his wife.  The fact that a coarseminded man found her lacking
in attraction was simply another proof of her quality; yet the words
sent a faint shiver through his heart.  What if "niceness" carried to
that supreme degree were only a negation, the curtain dropped before an
emptiness?  As he looked at May, returning flushed and calm from her
final bull's-eye, he had the feeling that he had never yet lifted that
curtain.

She took the congratulations of her rivals and of the rest of the
company with the simplicity that was her crowning grace.  No one could
ever be jealous of her triumphs because she managed to give the feeling
that she would have been just as serene if she had missed them.  But
when her eyes met her husband's her face glowed with the pleasure she
saw in his.

Mrs. Welland's basket-work pony-carriage was waiting for them, and they
drove off among the dispersing carriages, May handling the reins and
Archer sitting at her side.

The afternoon sunlight still lingered upon the bright lawns and
shrubberies, and up and down Bellevue Avenue rolled a double line of
victorias, dog-carts, landaus and "vis-a-vis," carrying well-dressed
ladies and gentlemen away from the Beaufort garden-party, or homeward
from their daily afternoon turn along the Ocean Drive.

"Shall we go to see Granny?" May suddenly proposed.  "I should like to
tell her myself that I've won the prize.  There's lots of time before
dinner."

Archer acquiesced, and she turned the ponies down Narragansett Avenue,
crossed Spring Street and drove out toward the rocky moorland beyond.
In this unfashionable region Catherine the Great, always indifferent to
precedent and thrifty of purse, had built herself in her youth a
many-peaked and cross-beamed cottage-orne on a bit of cheap land
overlooking the bay.  Here, in a thicket of stunted oaks, her verandahs
spread themselves above the island-dotted waters.  A winding drive led
up between iron stags and blue glass balls embedded in mounds of
geraniums to a front door of highly-varnished walnut under a striped
verandah-roof; and behind it ran a narrow hall with a black and yellow
star-patterned parquet floor, upon which opened four small square rooms
with heavy flock-papers under ceilings on which an Italian
house-painter had lavished all the divinities of Olympus.  One of these
rooms had been turned into a bedroom by Mrs. Mingott when the burden of
flesh descended on her, and in the adjoining one she spent her days,
enthroned in a large armchair between the open door and window, and
perpetually waving a palm-leaf fan which the prodigious projection of
her bosom kept so far from the rest of her person that the air it set
in motion stirred only the fringe of the anti-macassars on the
chair-arms.

Since she had been the means of hastening his marriage old Catherine
had shown to Archer the cordiality which a service rendered excites
toward the person served.  She was persuaded that irrepressible passion
was the cause of his impatience; and being an ardent admirer of
impulsiveness (when it did not lead to the spending of money) she
always received him with a genial twinkle of complicity and a play of
allusion to which May seemed fortunately impervious.

She examined and appraised with much interest the diamond-tipped arrow
which had been pinned on May's bosom at the conclusion of the match,
remarking that in her day a filigree brooch would have been thought
enough, but that there was no denying that Beaufort did things
handsomely.

"Quite an heirloom, in fact, my dear," the old lady chuckled.  "You
must leave it in fee to your eldest girl." She pinched May's white arm
and watched the colour flood her face.  "Well, well, what have I said
to make you shake out the red flag?  Ain't there going to be any
daughters--only boys, eh?  Good gracious, look at her blushing again
all over her blushes!  What--can't I say that either?  Mercy me--when
my children beg me to have all those gods and goddesses painted out
overhead I always say I'm too thankful to have somebody about me that
NOTHING can shock!"

Archer burst into a laugh, and May echoed it, crimson to the eyes.

"Well, now tell me all about the party, please, my dears, for I shall
never get a straight word about it out of that silly Medora," the
ancestress continued; and, as May exclaimed:  "Cousin Medora?  But I
thought she was going back to Portsmouth?" she answered placidly: "So
she is--but she's got to come here first to pick up Ellen.  Ah--you
didn't know Ellen had come to spend the day with me?  Such fol-de-rol,
her not coming for the summer; but I gave up arguing with young people
about fifty years ago.  Ellen--ELLEN!" she cried in her shrill old
voice, trying to bend forward far enough to catch a glimpse of the lawn
beyond the verandah.

There was no answer, and Mrs. Mingott rapped impatiently with her stick
on the shiny floor.  A mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban,
replying to the summons, informed her mistress that she had seen "Miss
Ellen" going down the path to the shore; and Mrs. Mingott turned to
Archer.

"Run down and fetch her, like a good grandson; this pretty lady will
describe the party to me," she said; and Archer stood up as if in a
dream.

He had heard the Countess Olenska's name pronounced often enough during
the year and a half since they had last met, and was even familiar with
the main incidents of her life in the interval.  He knew that she had
spent the previous summer at Newport, where she appeared to have gone a
great deal into society, but that in the autumn she had suddenly
sub-let the "perfect house" which Beaufort had been at such pains to
find for her, and decided to establish herself in Washington.  There,
during the winter, he had heard of her (as one always heard of pretty
women in Washington) as shining in the "brilliant diplomatic society"
that was supposed to make up for the social short-comings of the
Administration.  He had listened to these accounts, and to various
contradictory reports on her appearance, her conversation, her point of
view and her choice of friends, with the detachment with which one
listens to reminiscences of some one long since dead; not till Medora
suddenly spoke her name at the archery match had Ellen Olenska become a
living presence to him again.  The Marchioness's foolish lisp had
called up a vision of the little fire-lit drawing-room and the sound of
the carriage-wheels returning down the deserted street.  He thought of
a story he had read, of some peasant children in Tuscany lighting a
bunch of straw in a wayside cavern, and revealing old silent images in
their painted tomb ...

The way to the shore descended from the bank on which the house was
perched to a walk above the water planted with weeping willows.
Through their veil Archer caught the glint of the Lime Rock, with its
white-washed turret and the tiny house in which the heroic light-house
keeper, Ida Lewis, was living her last venerable years.  Beyond it lay
the flat reaches and ugly government chimneys of Goat Island, the bay
spreading northward in a shimmer of gold to Prudence Island with its
low growth of oaks, and the shores of Conanicut faint in the sunset
haze.

From the willow walk projected a slight wooden pier ending in a sort of
pagoda-like summer-house; and in the pagoda a lady stood, leaning
against the rail, her back to the shore.  Archer stopped at the sight
as if he had waked from sleep.  That vision of the past was a dream,
and the reality was what awaited him in the house on the bank overhead:
was Mrs. Welland's pony-carriage circling around and around the oval at
the door, was May sitting under the shameless Olympians and glowing
with secret hopes, was the Welland villa at the far end of Bellevue
Avenue, and Mr. Welland, already dressed for dinner, and pacing the
drawing-room floor, watch in hand, with dyspeptic impatience--for it
was one of the houses in which one always knew exactly what is
happening at a given hour.

"What am I?  A son-in-law--" Archer thought.

The figure at the end of the pier had not moved.  For a long moment the
young man stood half way down the bank, gazing at the bay furrowed with
the coming and going of sailboats, yacht-launches, fishing-craft and
the trailing black coal-barges hauled by noisy tugs.  The lady in the
summer-house seemed to be held by the same sight.  Beyond the grey
bastions of Fort Adams a long-drawn sunset was splintering up into a
thousand fires, and the radiance caught the sail of a catboat as it
beat out through the channel between the Lime Rock and the shore.
Archer, as he watched, remembered the scene in the Shaughraun, and
Montague lifting Ada Dyas's ribbon to his lips without her knowing that
he was in the room.

"She doesn't know--she hasn't guessed.  Shouldn't I know if she came up
behind me, I wonder?" he mused; and suddenly he said to himself:  "If
she doesn't turn before that sail crosses the Lime Rock light I'll go
back."

The boat was gliding out on the receding tide.  It slid before the Lime
Rock, blotted out Ida Lewis's little house, and passed across the
turret in which the light was hung.  Archer waited till a wide space of
water sparkled between the last reef of the island and the stern of the
boat; but still the figure in the summer-house did not move.

He turned and walked up the hill.

"I'm sorry you didn't find Ellen--I should have liked to see her
again," May said as they drove home through the dusk.  "But perhaps she
wouldn't have cared--she seems so changed."

"Changed?" echoed her husband in a colourless voice, his eyes fixed on
the ponies' twitching ears.

"So indifferent to her friends, I mean; giving up New York and her
house, and spending her time with such queer people.  Fancy how
hideously uncomfortable she must be at the Blenkers'!  She says she
does it to keep cousin Medora out of mischief: to prevent her marrying
dreadful people.  But I sometimes think we've always bored her."

Archer made no answer, and she continued, with a tinge of hardness that
he had never before noticed in her frank fresh voice:  "After all, I
wonder if she wouldn't be happier with her husband."

He burst into a laugh.  "Sancta simplicitas!" he exclaimed; and as she
turned a puzzled frown on him he added:  "I don't think I ever heard
you say a cruel thing before."

"Cruel?"

"Well--watching the contortions of the damned is supposed to be a
favourite sport of the angels; but I believe even they don't think
people happier in hell."

"It's a pity she ever married abroad then," said May, in the placid
tone with which her mother met Mr. Welland's vagaries; and Archer felt
himself gently relegated to the category of unreasonable husbands.

They drove down Bellevue Avenue and turned in between the chamfered
wooden gate-posts surmounted by cast-iron lamps which marked the
approach to the Welland villa.  Lights were already shining through its
windows, and Archer, as the carriage stopped, caught a glimpse of his
father-in-law, exactly as he had pictured him, pacing the drawing-room,
watch in hand and wearing the pained expression that he had long since
found to be much more efficacious than anger.

The young man, as he followed his wife into the hall, was conscious of
a curious reversal of mood.  There was something about the luxury of
the Welland house and the density of the Welland atmosphere, so charged
with minute observances and exactions, that always stole into his
system like a narcotic.  The heavy carpets, the watchful servants, the
perpetually reminding tick of disciplined clocks, the perpetually
renewed stack of cards and invitations on the hall table, the whole
chain of tyrannical trifles binding one hour to the next, and each
member of the household to all the others, made any less systematised
and affluent existence seem unreal and precarious.  But now it was the
Welland house, and the life he was expected to lead in it, that had
become unreal and irrelevant, and the brief scene on the shore, when he
had stood irresolute, halfway down the bank, was as close to him as the
blood in his veins.

All night he lay awake in the big chintz bedroom at May's side,
watching the moonlight slant along the carpet, and thinking of Ellen
Olenska driving home across the gleaming beaches behind Beaufort's
trotters.

XXII.

"A party for the Blenkers--the Blenkers?"

Mr. Welland laid down his knife and fork and looked anxiously and
incredulously across the luncheon-table at his wife, who, adjusting her
gold eye-glasses, read aloud, in the tone of high comedy:

"Professor and Mrs. Emerson Sillerton request the pleasure of Mr. and
Mrs. Welland's company at the meeting of the Wednesday Afternoon Club
on August 25th at 3 o'clock punctually.  To meet Mrs. and the Misses
Blenker.

"Red Gables, Catherine Street.  R. S. V. P."

"Good gracious--" Mr. Welland gasped, as if a second reading had been
necessary to bring the monstrous absurdity of the thing home to him.

"Poor Amy Sillerton--you never can tell what her husband will do next,"
Mrs. Welland sighed.  "I suppose he's just discovered the Blenkers."

Professor Emerson Sillerton was a thorn in the side of Newport society;
and a thorn that could not be plucked out, for it grew on a venerable
and venerated family tree.  He was, as people said, a man who had had
"every advantage."  His father was Sillerton Jackson's uncle, his
mother a Pennilow of Boston; on each side there was wealth and
position, and mutual suitability.  Nothing--as Mrs. Welland had often
remarked--nothing on earth obliged Emerson Sillerton to be an
archaeologist, or indeed a Professor of any sort, or to live in Newport
in winter, or do any of the other revolutionary things that he did.
But at least, if he was going to break with tradition and flout society
in the face, he need not have married poor Amy Dagonet, who had a right
to expect "something different," and money enough to keep her own
carriage.

No one in the Mingott set could understand why Amy Sillerton had
submitted so tamely to the eccentricities of a husband who filled the
house with long-haired men and short-haired women, and, when he
travelled, took her to explore tombs in Yucatan instead of going to
Paris or Italy.  But there they were, set in their ways, and apparently
unaware that they were different from other people; and when they gave
one of their dreary annual garden-parties every family on the Cliffs,
because of the Sillerton-Pennilow-Dagonet connection, had to draw lots
and send an unwilling representative.

"It's a wonder," Mrs. Welland remarked, "that they didn't choose the
Cup Race day!  Do you remember, two years ago, their giving a party for
a black man on the day of Julia Mingott's the dansant?  Luckily this
time there's nothing else going on that I know of--for of course some
of us will have to go."

Mr. Welland sighed nervously.  "'Some of us,' my dear--more than one?
Three o'clock is such a very awkward hour.  I have to be here at
half-past three to take my drops: it's really no use trying to follow
Bencomb's new treatment if I don't do it systematically; and if I join
you later, of course I shall miss my drive."  At the thought he laid
down his knife and fork again, and a flush of anxiety rose to his
finely-wrinkled cheek.

"There's no reason why you should go at all, my dear," his wife
answered with a cheerfulness that had become automatic.  "I have some
cards to leave at the other end of Bellevue Avenue, and I'll drop in at
about half-past three and stay long enough to make poor Amy feel that
she hasn't been slighted."  She glanced hesitatingly at her daughter.
"And if Newland's afternoon is provided for perhaps May can drive you
out with the ponies, and try their new russet harness."

It was a principle in the Welland family that people's days and hours
should be what Mrs. Welland called "provided for."  The melancholy
possibility of having to "kill time" (especially for those who did not
care for whist or solitaire) was a vision that haunted her as the
spectre of the unemployed haunts the philanthropist.  Another of her
principles was that parents should never (at least visibly) interfere
with the plans of their married children; and the difficulty of
adjusting this respect for May's independence with the exigency of Mr.
Welland's claims could be overcome only by the exercise of an ingenuity
which left not a second of Mrs. Welland's own time unprovided for.

"Of course I'll drive with Papa--I'm sure Newland will find something
to do," May said, in a tone that gently reminded her husband of his
lack of response.  It was a cause of constant distress to Mrs. Welland
that her son-in-law showed so little foresight in planning his days.
Often already, during the fortnight that he had passed under her roof,
when she enquired how he meant to spend his afternoon, he had answered
paradoxically:  "Oh, I think for a change I'll just save it instead of
spending it--" and once, when she and May had had to go on a
long-postponed round of afternoon calls, he had confessed to having
lain all the afternoon under a rock on the beach below the house.

"Newland never seems to look ahead," Mrs. Welland once ventured to
complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely:  "No; but you see
it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he
reads a book."

"Ah, yes--like his father!" Mrs. Welland agreed, as if allowing for an
inherited oddity; and after that the question of Newland's unemployment
was tacitly dropped.

Nevertheless, as the day for the Sillerton reception approached, May
began to show a natural solicitude for his welfare, and to suggest a
tennis match at the Chiverses', or a sail on Julius Beaufort's cutter,
as a means of atoning for her temporary desertion.  "I shall be back by
six, you know, dear: Papa never drives later than that--" and she was
not reassured till Archer said that he thought of hiring a run-about
and driving up the island to a stud-farm to look at a second horse for
her brougham.  They had been looking for this horse for some time, and
the suggestion was so acceptable that May glanced at her mother as if
to say:  "You see he knows how to plan out his time as well as any of
us."

The idea of the stud-farm and the brougham horse had germinated in
Archer's mind on the very day when the Emerson Sillerton invitation had
first been mentioned; but he had kept it to himself as if there were
something clandestine in the plan, and discovery might prevent its
execution.  He had, however, taken the precaution to engage in advance
a runabout with a pair of old livery-stable trotters that could still
do their eighteen miles on level roads; and at two o'clock, hastily
deserting the luncheon-table, he sprang into the light carriage and
drove off.

The day was perfect.  A breeze from the north drove little puffs of
white cloud across an ultramarine sky, with a bright sea running under
it.  Bellevue Avenue was empty at that hour, and after dropping the
stable-lad at the corner of Mill Street Archer turned down the Old
Beach Road and drove across Eastman's Beach.

He had the feeling of unexplained excitement with which, on
half-holidays at school, he used to start off into the unknown.  Taking
his pair at an easy gait, he counted on reaching the stud-farm, which
was not far beyond Paradise Rocks, before three o'clock; so that, after
looking over the horse (and trying him if he seemed promising) he would
still have four golden hours to dispose of.

As soon as he heard of the Sillerton's party he had said to himself
that the Marchioness Manson would certainly come to Newport with the
Blenkers, and that Madame Olenska might again take the opportunity of
spending the day with her grandmother.  At any rate, the Blenker
habitation would probably be deserted, and he would be able, without
indiscretion, to satisfy a vague curiosity concerning it.  He was not
sure that he wanted to see the Countess Olenska again; but ever since
he had looked at her from the path above the bay he had wanted,
irrationally and indescribably, to see the place she was living in, and
to follow the movements of her imagined figure as he had watched the
real one in the summer-house.  The longing was with him day and night,
an incessant undefinable craving, like the sudden whim of a sick man
for food or drink once tasted and long since forgotten.  He could not
see beyond the craving, or picture what it might lead to, for he was
not conscious of any wish to speak to Madame Olenska or to hear her
voice.  He simply felt that if he could carry away the vision of the
spot of earth she walked on, and the way the sky and sea enclosed it,
the rest of the world might seem less empty.

When he reached the stud-farm a glance showed him that the horse was
not what he wanted; nevertheless he took a turn behind it in order to
prove to himself that he was not in a hurry.  But at three o'clock he
shook out the reins over the trotters and turned into the by-roads
leading to Portsmouth.  The wind had dropped and a faint haze on the
horizon showed that a fog was waiting to steal up the Saconnet on the
turn of the tide; but all about him fields and woods were steeped in
golden light.

He drove past grey-shingled farm-houses in orchards, past hay-fields
and groves of oak, past villages with white steeples rising sharply
into the fading sky; and at last, after stopping to ask the way of some
men at work in a field, he turned down a lane between high banks of
goldenrod and brambles.  At the end of the lane was the blue glimmer of
the river; to the left, standing in front of a clump of oaks and
maples, he saw a long tumble-down house with white paint peeling from
its clapboards.

On the road-side facing the gateway stood one of the open sheds in
which the New Englander shelters his farming implements and visitors
"hitch" their "teams." Archer, jumping down, led his pair into the
shed, and after tying them to a post turned toward the house.  The
patch of lawn before it had relapsed into a hay-field; but to the left
an overgrown box-garden full of dahlias and rusty rose-bushes encircled
a ghostly summer-house of trellis-work that had once been white,
surmounted by a wooden Cupid who had lost his bow and arrow but
continued to take ineffectual aim.

Archer leaned for a while against the gate.  No one was in sight, and
not a sound came from the open windows of the house: a grizzled
Newfoundland dozing before the door seemed as ineffectual a guardian as
the arrowless Cupid.  It was strange to think that this place of
silence and decay was the home of the turbulent Blenkers; yet Archer
was sure that he was not mistaken.

For a long time he stood there, content to take in the scene, and
gradually falling under its drowsy spell; but at length he roused
himself to the sense of the passing time.  Should he look his fill and
then drive away?  He stood irresolute, wishing suddenly to see the
inside of the house, so that he might picture the room that Madame
Olenska sat in.  There was nothing to prevent his walking up to the
door and ringing the bell; if, as he supposed, she was away with the
rest of the party, he could easily give his name, and ask permission to
go into the sitting-room to write a message.

But instead, he crossed the lawn and turned toward the box-garden.  As
he entered it he caught sight of something bright-coloured in the
summer-house, and presently made it out to be a pink parasol.  The
parasol drew him like a magnet: he was sure it was hers.  He went into
the summer-house, and sitting down on the rickety seat picked up the
silken thing and looked at its carved handle, which was made of some
rare wood that gave out an aromatic scent.  Archer lifted the handle to
his lips.

He heard a rustle of skirts against the box, and sat motionless,
leaning on the parasol handle with clasped hands, and letting the
rustle come nearer without lifting his eyes.  He had always known that
this must happen ...

"Oh, Mr. Archer!" exclaimed a loud young voice; and looking up he saw
before him the youngest and largest of the Blenker girls, blonde and
blowsy, in bedraggled muslin.  A red blotch on one of her cheeks seemed
to show that it had recently been pressed against a pillow, and her
half-awakened eyes stared at him hospitably but confusedly.

"Gracious--where did you drop from?  I must have been sound asleep in
the hammock.  Everybody else has gone to Newport.  Did you ring?" she
incoherently enquired.

Archer's confusion was greater than hers.  "I--no--that is, I was just
going to.  I had to come up the island to see about a horse, and I
drove over on a chance of finding Mrs. Blenker and your visitors.  But
the house seemed empty--so I sat down to wait."

Miss Blenker, shaking off the fumes of sleep, looked at him with
increasing interest.  "The house IS empty.  Mother's not here, or the
Marchioness--or anybody but me."  Her glance became faintly
reproachful.  "Didn't you know that Professor and Mrs. Sillerton are
giving a garden-party for mother and all of us this afternoon?  It was
too unlucky that I couldn't go; but I've had a sore throat, and mother
was afraid of the drive home this evening.  Did you ever know anything
so disappointing?  Of course," she added gaily, "I shouldn't have
minded half as much if I'd known you were coming."

Symptoms of a lumbering coquetry became visible in her, and Archer
found the strength to break in:  "But Madame Olenska--has she gone to
Newport too?"

Miss Blenker looked at him with surprise.  "Madame Olenska--didn't you
know she'd been called away?"

"Called away?--"

"Oh, my best parasol!  I lent it to that goose of a Katie, because it
matched her ribbons, and the careless thing must have dropped it here.
We Blenkers are all like that ... real Bohemians!"  Recovering the
sunshade with a powerful hand she unfurled it and suspended its rosy
dome above her head.  "Yes, Ellen was called away yesterday: she lets
us call her Ellen, you know.  A telegram came from Boston: she said she
might be gone for two days.  I do LOVE the way she does her hair, don't
you?" Miss Blenker rambled on.

Archer continued to stare through her as though she had been
transparent.  All he saw was the trumpery parasol that arched its
pinkness above her giggling head.

After a moment he ventured:  "You don't happen to know why Madame
Olenska went to Boston?  I hope it was not on account of bad news?"

Miss Blenker took this with a cheerful incredulity.  "Oh, I don't
believe so.  She didn't tell us what was in the telegram.  I think she
didn't want the Marchioness to know.  She's so romantic-looking, isn't
she?  Doesn't she remind you of Mrs. Scott-Siddons when she reads 'Lady
Geraldine's Courtship'?  Did you never hear her?"

Archer was dealing hurriedly with crowding thoughts.  His whole future
seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless
emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever
to happen.  He glanced about him at the unpruned garden, the
tumble-down house, and the oak-grove under which the dusk was
gathering.  It had seemed so exactly the place in which he ought to
have found Madame Olenska; and she was far away, and even the pink
sunshade was not hers ...

He frowned and hesitated.  "You don't know, I suppose--I shall be in
Boston tomorrow.  If I could manage to see her--"

He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him, though her smile
persisted.  "Oh, of course; how lovely of you!  She's staying at the
Parker House; it must be horrible there in this weather."

After that Archer was but intermittently aware of the remarks they
exchanged.  He could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty that
he should await the returning family and have high tea with them before
he drove home.  At length, with his hostess still at his side, he
passed out of range of the wooden Cupid, unfastened his horses and
drove off.  At the turn of the lane he saw Miss Blenker standing at the
gate and waving the pink parasol.

XXIII.

The next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall River train, he
emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston.  The streets near the station
were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a
shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of
boarders going down the passage to the bathroom.

Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club for breakfast.  Even
the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity to which no
excess of heat ever degrades the European cities.  Care-takers in
calico lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy, and the Common looked
like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic.  If Archer
had tried to imagine Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could not
have called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her than
this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.

He breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning with a slice of
melon, and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and
scrambled eggs.  A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him
ever since he had announced to May the night before that he had
business in Boston, and should take the Fall River boat that night and
go on to New York the following evening.  It had always been understood
that he would return to town early in the week, and when he got back
from his expedition to Portsmouth a letter from the office, which fate
had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table, sufficed to
justify his sudden change of plan.  He was even ashamed of the ease
with which the whole thing had been done: it reminded him, for an
uncomfortable moment, of Lawrence Lefferts's masterly contrivances for
securing his freedom.  But this did not long trouble him, for he was
not in an analytic mood.

After breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the Commercial
Advertiser.  While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came
in, and the usual greetings were exchanged: it was the same world after
all, though he had such a queer sense of having slipped through the
meshes of time and space.

He looked at his watch, and finding that it was half-past nine got up
and went into the writing-room.  There he wrote a few lines, and
ordered a messenger to take a cab to the Parker House and wait for the
answer.  He then sat down behind another newspaper and tried to
calculate how long it would take a cab to get to the Parker House.

"The lady was out, sir," he suddenly heard a waiter's voice at his
elbow; and he stammered:  "Out?--" as if it were a word in a strange
language.

He got up and went into the hall.  It must be a mistake: she could not
be out at that hour.  He flushed with anger at his own stupidity: why
had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived?

He found his hat and stick and went forth into the street.  The city
had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he were a
traveller from distant lands.  For a moment he stood on the door-step
hesitating; then he decided to go to the Parker House.  What if the
messenger had been misinformed, and she were still there?

He started to walk across the Common; and on the first bench, under a
tree, he saw her sitting.  She had a grey silk sunshade over her
head--how could he ever have imagined her with a pink one?  As he
approached he was struck by her listless attitude: she sat there as if
she had nothing else to do.  He saw her drooping profile, and the knot
of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat, and the long
wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade.  He came a step or
two nearer, and she turned and looked at him.

"Oh"--she said; and for the first time he noticed a startled look on
her face; but in another moment it gave way to a slow smile of wonder
and contentment.

"Oh"--she murmured again, on a different note, as he stood looking down
at her; and without rising she made a place for him on the bench.

"I'm here on business--just got here," Archer explained; and, without
knowing why, he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her.
"But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?"  He had really no
idea what he was saying: he felt as if he were shouting at her across
endless distances, and she might vanish again before he could overtake
her.

"I?  Oh, I'm here on business too," she answered, turning her head
toward him so that they were face to face.  The words hardly reached
him: he was aware only of her voice, and of the startling fact that not
an echo of it had remained in his memory.  He had not even remembered
that it was low-pitched, with a faint roughness on the consonants.

"You do your hair differently," he said, his heart beating as if he had
uttered something irrevocable.

"Differently?  No--it's only that I do it as best I can when I'm
without Nastasia."

"Nastasia; but isn't she with you?"

"No; I'm alone.  For two days it was not worth while to bring her."

"You're alone--at the Parker House?"

She looked at him with a flash of her old malice.  "Does it strike you
as dangerous?"

"No; not dangerous--"

"But unconventional?  I see; I suppose it is."  She considered a
moment.  "I hadn't thought of it, because I've just done something so
much more unconventional." The faint tinge of irony lingered in her
eyes.  "I've just refused to take back a sum of money--that belonged to
me."

Archer sprang up and moved a step or two away.  She had furled her
parasol and sat absently drawing patterns on the gravel.  Presently he
came back and stood before her.

"Some one--has come here to meet you?"

"Yes."

"With this offer?"

She nodded.

"And you refused--because of the conditions?"

"I refused," she said after a moment.

He sat down by her again.  "What were the conditions?"

"Oh, they were not onerous: just to sit at the head of his table now
and then."

There was another interval of silence.  Archer's heart had slammed
itself shut in the queer way it had, and he sat vainly groping for a
word.

"He wants you back--at any price?"

"Well--a considerable price.  At least the sum is considerable for me."

He paused again, beating about the question he felt he must put.

"It was to meet him here that you came?"

She stared, and then burst into a laugh.  "Meet him--my husband?  HERE?
At this season he's always at Cowes or Baden."

"He sent some one?"

"Yes."

"With a letter?"

She shook her head.  "No; just a message.  He never writes.  I don't
think I've had more than one letter from him."  The allusion brought
the colour to her cheek, and it reflected itself in Archer's vivid
blush.

"Why does he never write?"

"Why should he?  What does one have secretaries for?"

The young man's blush deepened.  She had pronounced the word as if it
had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary.  For a
moment it was on the tip of his tongue to ask:  "Did he send his
secretary, then?"  But the remembrance of Count Olenski's only letter
to his wife was too present to him.  He paused again, and then took
another plunge.

"And the person?"--

"The emissary?  The emissary," Madame Olenska rejoined, still smiling,
"might, for all I care, have left already; but he has insisted on
waiting till this evening ... in case ... on the chance ..."

"And you came out here to think the chance over?"

"I came out to get a breath of air.  The hotel's too stifling.  I'm
taking the afternoon train back to Portsmouth."

They sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the
people passing along the path.  Finally she turned her eyes again to
his face and said:  "You're not changed."

He felt like answering:  "I was, till I saw you again;" but instead he
stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park.

"This is horrible.  Why shouldn't we go out a little on the bay?
There's a breeze, and it will be cooler.  We might take the steamboat
down to Point Arley."  She glanced up at him hesitatingly and he went
on:  "On a Monday morning there won't be anybody on the boat.  My train
doesn't leave till evening: I'm going back to New York.  Why shouldn't
we?" he insisted, looking down at her; and suddenly he broke out:
"Haven't we done all we could?"

"Oh"--she murmured again.  She stood up and reopened her sunshade,
glancing about her as if to take counsel of the scene, and assure
herself of the impossibility of remaining in it.  Then her eyes
returned to his face.  "You mustn't say things like that to me," she
said.

"I'll say anything you like; or nothing.  I won't open my mouth unless
you tell me to.  What harm can it do to anybody?  All I want is to
listen to you," he stammered.

She drew out a little gold-faced watch on an enamelled chain.  "Oh,
don't calculate," he broke out; "give me the day!  I want to get you
away from that man.  At what time was he coming?"

Her colour rose again.  "At eleven."

"Then you must come at once."

"You needn't be afraid--if I don't come."

"Nor you either--if you do.  I swear I only want to hear about you, to
know what you've been doing.  It's a hundred years since we've met--it
may be another hundred before we meet again."

She still wavered, her anxious eyes on his face.  "Why didn't you come
down to the beach to fetch me, the day I was at Granny's?" she asked.

"Because you didn't look round--because you didn't know I was there.  I
swore I wouldn't unless you looked round."  He laughed as the
childishness of the confession struck him.

"But I didn't look round on purpose."

"On purpose?"

"I knew you were there; when you drove in I recognised the ponies.  So
I went down to the beach."

"To get away from me as far as you could?"

She repeated in a low voice:  "To get away from you as far as I could."

He laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction.  "Well, you see
it's no use.  I may as well tell you," he added, "that the business I
came here for was just to find you.  But, look here, we must start or
we shall miss our boat."

"Our boat?"  She frowned perplexedly, and then smiled.  "Oh, but I must
go back to the hotel first:  I must leave a note--"

"As many notes as you please.  You can write here." He drew out a
note-case and one of the new stylographic pens.  "I've even got an
envelope--you see how everything's predestined!  There--steady the
thing on your knee, and I'll get the pen going in a second.  They have
to be humoured; wait--"  He banged the hand that held the pen against
the back of the bench.  "It's like jerking down the mercury in a
thermometer: just a trick.  Now try--"

She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on
his note-case, began to write.  Archer walked away a few steps, staring
with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn, paused
to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a
note on her knee on a bench in the Common.

Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it,
and put it into her pocket.  Then she too stood up.

They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught
sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the
Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing
his brow at the corner hydrant.

"I told you everything was predestined!  Here's a cab for us.  You
see!"  They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public
conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where
cab-stands were still a "foreign" novelty.

Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the
Parker House before going to the steamboat landing.  They rattled
through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel.

Archer held out his hand for the letter.  "Shall I take it in?" he
asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her head, sprang out and disappeared
through the glazed doors.  It was barely half-past ten; but what if the
emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how else to employ
his time, were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks
at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?

He waited, pacing up and down before the herdic.  A Sicilian youth with
eyes like Nastasia's offered to shine his boots, and an Irish matron to
sell him peaches; and every few moments the doors opened to let out hot
men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they went
by.  He marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the
people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all the
other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the
land, were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of
hotels.

And then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other
faces.  He caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him to
the farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the hotel
that he saw, in a group of typical countenances--the lank and weary,
the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild--this other face
that was so many more things at once, and things so different.  It was
that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat, or
worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or
perhaps seeming so because he was so different.  Archer hung a moment
on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the
disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man,
looking doubly foreign in such a setting.  He vanished in the stream of
passersby, and Archer resumed his patrol.

He did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel, and
his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if
Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she
had met the emissary and been waylaid by him.  At the thought Archer's
apprehension rose to anguish.

"If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said.

The doors swung open again and she was at his side.  They got into the
herdic, and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had
been absent just three minutes.  In the clatter of loose windows that
made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to
the wharf.

Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that
they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they
had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their
release and their isolation.

As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede
through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the
old familiar world of habit was receding also.  He longed to ask Madame
Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they
were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.
But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the
delicate balance of her trust in him.  In reality he had no wish to
betray that trust.  There had been days and nights when the memory of
their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on
the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like
fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth
into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper
nearness that a touch may sunder.

As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about
them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples
tipped with spray.  The fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but
ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant promontories
with light-houses in the sun.  Madame Olenska, leaning back against the
boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips.  She had wound a
long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and Archer was
struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression.  She seemed to take
their adventure as a matter of course, and to be neither in fear of
unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their
possibility.

In the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had hoped they would have
to themselves, they found a strident party of innocent-looking young
men and women--school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told
them--and Archer's heart sank at the idea of having to talk through
their noise.

"This is hopeless--I'll ask for a private room," he said; and Madame
Olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in search
of it.  The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming
in at the windows.  It was bare and cool, with a table covered with a
coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a
blueberry pie under a cage.  No more guileless-looking cabinet
particulier ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple: Archer
fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile
with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him.  A woman who had
run away from her husband--and reputedly with another man--was likely
to have mastered the art of taking things for granted; but something in
the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony.  By being so
quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the
conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural
thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other....

XXIV.

They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between
rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say, and
yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues
of silence.  Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not with
conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of her
history; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped
hands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.

She had grown tired of what people called "society"; New York was kind,
it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way
in which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty
she had found herself, as she phrased it, too "different" to care for
the things it cared about--and so she had decided to try Washington,
where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.
And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington, and
make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all
her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after
and protecting from matrimonial perils.

"But Dr. Carver--aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver?  I hear he's been
staying with you at the Blenkers'."

She smiled.  "Oh, the Carver danger is over.  Dr. Carver is a very
clever man.  He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is
simply a good advertisement as a convert."

"A convert to what?"

"To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes.  But, do you know, they
interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody
else's tradition--that I see among our own friends.  It seems stupid to
have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another
country."  She smiled across the table.  "Do you suppose Christopher
Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with
the Selfridge Merrys?"

Archer changed colour.  "And Beaufort--do you say these things to
Beaufort?" he asked abruptly.

"I haven't seen him for a long time.  But I used to; and he
understands."

"Ah, it's what I've always told you; you don't like us. And you like