My cousin Wilford came to Biarritz about this time, stopping for a week, on his way home from a tour in Spain. I couldn't find a room for him at the Hotel d'Angleterre, so he put up at a rival hostelry over the way; but he dined with me on the evening of his arrival, a place being made for him between mine and Monsieur's. He hadn't been at the table five minutes before the rumour went abroad who he was—somebody had recognised him. Then those who were within reach of his voice listened with all their ears—Colonel Escott, Flaherty, Maistre, and Miss Hicks, of course, who even called him by name: 'Oh, Mr. Wilford,' 'Now, Mr. Wilford,' &c. After dinner, in the smoking-room, a cluster of people hung round us; men with whom I had no acquaintance came merrily up and asked to be introduced. Colonel Escott and Flaherty joined us. At the outskirts of the group I beheld Sir Richard Maistre. His eyes (without his realising it perhaps) begged me to invite him, to present him; and I affected not to understand! This is one of the little things I find hardest to forgive myself. My whole behaviour towards the young man is now a subject of self-reproach; if it had been different, who knows that the tragedy of yesterday would ever have happened? If I had answered his timid overtures, walked with him, talked with him, cultivated his friendship, given him mine, established a kindly human relation with him, I can't help feeling that he might not have got to such a desperate pass, that I might have cheered him, helped him, saved him. I feel it especially when I think of Wilford. His eyes attested so much; he would have enjoyed meeting him so keenly. No doubt he was already fond of the man, had loved him through his books, like so many others. If I had introduced him? If we had taken him with us the next morning on our excursion to Cambo? Included him occasionally in our smokes and parleys?

Wilford left for England without dining again at the Hotel d'Angleterre. We were busy 'doing' the country, and never chanced to be at Biarritz at the dinner hour. During that week I scarcely saw Sir Richard Maistre.

Another little circumstance that rankles especially now would have been ridiculous except for the way things have ended. It isn't easy to tell—it was so petty and I am so ashamed. Colonel Escott had been abusing London, describing it as the least beautiful of the capitals of Europe, comparing it unfavourably to Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. I took up the cudgels in its defence, mentioned its atmosphere, its tone; Paris Vienna, St. Petersburg were lyric, London was epic; and so forth and so forth. Then, shifting from the aesthetic to the utilitarian, I argued that of all great towns it was the healthiest, its death-rate was lowest. Sir Richard Maistre had followed my dissertation attentively, and with a countenance that signified approval; and when, with my reference to the death-rate, I paused, he suddenly burned his ships. He looked me full in the eye, and said, 'Thirty-seven, I believe?' His heightened colour, a nervous movement of the lip, betrayed the effort it had cost him; but at last he had done it—screwed his courage to the sticking-place, and spoken. And I—I can never forget it—I grow hot when I think of it—but I was possessed by a devil. His eyes hung on my face, awaiting my response, pleading for a cue. 'Go, on,' they urged. 'I have taken the first, the difficult step—make the next smoother for me.' And I—I answered lackadaisically with just a casual glance at him, 'I don't know the figures,' and absorbed myself in my viands.

Two or three days later his place was filled by a stranger, and Flaherty told me that he had left for the Riviera.

All this happened last March at Biarritz. I never saw him again till three weeks ago. It was one of those frightfully hot afternoons in July; I had come out of my club, and was walking up St. James's Street, towards Piccadilly; he was moving in an opposite sense; and thus we approached each other. He didn't see me, however, till we had drawn rather near to a conjunction: then he gave a little start of recognition, his eyes brightened, his pace slackened, his right hand prepared to advance itself—and I bowed slightly, and pursued my way. Don't ask why I did it. It is enough to confess it without having to explain it. I glanced backwards, by and by, over my shoulder. He was standing where I had met him, half turned round, and looking after me. But when he saw that I was observing him, he hastily shifted about, and continued his descent of the street.

That was only three weeks ago. Only three weeks ago I still had it in my power to act. I am sure—I don't know why I am sure, but I am sure—that I could have deterred him. For all that one can gather from the brief note he left behind, it seems he had no special, definite motive; he had met with no losses, got into no scrape; he was simply tired and sick of life and of himself. 'I have no friends,' he wrote. 'Nobody will care. People don't like me; people avoid me. I have wondered why; I have tried to watch myself and discover; I have tried to be decent. I suppose it must be that I emit a repellent fluid; I suppose I am a "bad sort."' He had a morbid notion that people didn't like him, that people avoided him! Oh, to be sure, there were the Bunns and the Krausskopfs and their ilk, plentiful enough: but he understood what it was that attracted them. Other people, the people he could have liked, kept their distance—were civil, indeed, but reserved. He wanted bread, and they gave him a stone. It never struck him, I suppose, that they attributed the reserve to him. But I—I knew that his reserve was only an effect of his shyness; I knew that he wanted bread: and that knowledge constituted my moral responsibility. I didn't know that his need was extreme; but I have tried in vain to absolve myself with the reflection. I ought to have made inquiries. When I think of that afternoon in St. James's Street—only three weeks ago—I feel like an assassin. The vision of him, as he stopped and looked after me—I can't banish it. Why didn't some good spirit move me to turn back and overtake him?

It is so hard for the mind to reconcile itself to the irretrievable. I can't shake off a sense that there is something to be done. I can't realise that it is too late.



CASTLES NEAR SPAIN

I.

That he should not have guessed it from the beginning seems odd, if you like, until one stops to consider the matter twice; then, I think, one sees that after all there was no shadow of a reason why he should have done so,—one sees, indeed, that even had a suspicion of the truth at any time crossed his mind, he would have had the best of reasons for scouting it as nonsense. It is obvious to us from the first word, because we know instinctively that otherwise there would be no story; it is that which knits a mere sequence of incidents into a coherent, communicable whole. But, to his perceptions, the thing never presented itself as a story at all. It wasn't an anecdote which somebody had buttonholed him to tell; it was an adventure in which he found himself launched, an experience to be enjoyed bit by bit, as it befell, but in no wise suggestive of any single specific climax. What earthly hint had he received from which to infer the identity of the two women? On the contrary, weren't the actions of the one totally inconsistent with what everybody assured him was the manner of life—with what the necessities of the case led him to believe would be the condition of spirit—of the other? If the tale were to be published, the fun would lie, not in attempting to mystify the reader, but in watching with him the mystification of the hero,—in showing how he played at hoodman-blind with his destiny, and how surprised he was, when, the bandage stripped from his eyes, he saw whom he had caught.

II.

On that first morning,—the first after his arrival at Saint-Graal, and the first, also, of the many on which they encountered each other in the forest,—he was bent upon a sentimental pilgrimage to Granjolaye. He was partly obeying, partly seeking, an emotion. His mind, inevitably, was full of old memories; the melancholy by which they were attended he found distinctly pleasant, and was inclined to nurse. To revisit the scene of their boy-and-girl romance, would itself be romantic. In a little while he would come to the park gates, and could look up the long, straight avenue to the chateau,—there where, when they were children, twenty years ago, he and she had played so earnestly at being married, burning for each other with one of those strange, inarticulate passions that almost every childhood knows; and where now, worse than widowed, she withheld herself, in silent, mysterious, tragical seclusion.

And then he heard the rhythm of a horse's hoofs; and looking forward, down the green pathway, between the two walls of forest, he saw a lady cantering towards him.

In an instant she had passed; and it took a little while for the blur of black and white that she had flashed upon his retina to clear into an image—which even then, from under-exposure, was obscure and piecemeal: a black riding-habit, of some flexile stuff, that fluttered in a multitude of pretty curves and folds; a small black hat, a toque, set upon a loosely-fastened mass of black hair; a face intensely white—a softly-rounded face, but intensely white; soft full lips, singularly scarlet; and large eyes, very dark.

It was not much, certainly, but it persisted. The impression, defective as I give it, had been pleasing; an impression of warm femininity, of graceful motion. It had had the quality, besides, of the unexpected and the fugitive, and the advantage of a sylvan background. Anyhow, it pursued him. He went on to his journey's end; stopped before the great gilded grille, with its multiplicity of scrolls and flourishes, its coronets and interlaced initials; gazed up the shadowy aisle of plane-trees to the bit of castle gleaming in the sun at the end; remembered the child Helene, and how he and she had loved each other there, a hundred years ago; and thought of the exiled, worse than widowed woman immured there now: but it was mere remembering, mere thinking, it was mere cerebration. The emotion he had looked for did not come. An essential part of him was elsewhere,—following the pale lady in the black riding-habit, trying to get a clearer vision of her face, blaming him for his inattention when she had been palpable before him, wondering who she was.

'If she should prove to be a neighbour, I shan't bore myself so dreadfully down here after all,' he thought. 'I wonder if I shall meet her again as I go home.' She would very likely be returning the way she had gone. But, though he loitered, he did not meet her again. He met nobody. It was, in some measure, the attraction of that lonely forest lane, that one almost never did meet anybody in it.

III.

At Saint-Graal Andre was waiting to lunch with him.

'When we were children,' Paul wrote in a letter to Mrs Winchfield, 'Andre, our gardener's son, and I were as intimate as brothers, he being the only companion of my sex and age the neighbourhood afforded. But now, after a separation of twenty years, Andre, who has become our cure, insists upon treating me with distance. He won't waive the fact that I am the lord of the manor, and calls me relentlessly Monsieur. I've done everything to entice him to unbend, but his backbone is of granite. From the merriest of mischief-loving youngsters, he has hardened into the solemnest of square-toes, with such a long upper-lip, and manners as stiff as the stuff of his awful best cassock, which he always buckles on prior to paying me a visit. Whatever is a poor young man to do? At our first meeting, after my arrival, I fell upon his neck, and thee-and-thou'd him, as of old time; he repulsed me with a vous italicised. At last I demanded reason. "Why will you treat me with this inexorable respect? What have I done to deserve it? What can I do to forfeit it?" Il devint cramoisi (in the traditional phrase) and stared.—This is what it is to come back to the home of your infancy.'

Andre, in his awful best cassock, was waiting on the terrace. It was on the terrace that Paul had ordered luncheon to be served. The terrace at Saint-Graal is a very jolly place. It stretches the whole length of the southern facade of the house, and is generously broad. It is paved with great lozenge-shaped slabs of marble, stained in delicate pinks and greys with lichens; and a marble balustrade borders it, overgrown, the columns half uprooted and twisted from the perpendicular, by an aged wistaria-vine, with a trunk as stout as a tree's. Seated there, one can look off over miles of richly-timbered country, dotted with white-walled villages, and traversed by the Nive and the Adour, to the wry masses of the Pyrenees, purple curtains hiding Spain.

Here, under an awning, the table was set, gay with white linen and glistening glass and silver, a centrepiece of flowers and jugs of red and yellow wine. The wistaria was in blossom, a world of colour and fragrance, shaken at odd moments by the swift dartings of innumerable lizards. The sun shone hot and clear; the still air, as you touched it, felt like velvet.

'Oh, what a heavenly place, what a heavenly day,' cried Paul; 'it only needs a woman.' And then, meeting Andre's eye, he caught himself up, with a gesture of contrition. 'I beg a thousand pardons. I forgot your cloth. If you,' he added, 'would only forget it too, what larks we might have together. Allons, a table.'

And they sat down.

If Paul had sincerely wished to forfeit Andre's respect, he could scarcely have employed more efficacious means to do so, than his speech and conduct throughout the meal that followed. You know how flippant, how 'fly-away,' he can be when the mood seizes him, how wholeheartedly he can play the fool. To-day he really behaved outrageously; and, since the priest maintained a straight countenance, I think the wonder is that he didn't excommunicate him.

'I remember you were a teetotaller, Andre, when you were young,' his host began, pushing a decanter towards him.

'That, monsieur, was because my mother wished it, and my father was a drunkard,' Andre answered bluntly. 'Since my father's death, I have taken wine in moderation.' He filled his glass.

'I remember once I cooked some chestnuts over a spirit-stove, and you refused to touch them, on the ground that they were alcoholic.'

'That would have been from a confusion of thought,' the cure explained, with never a smile.

But it was better to err on the side of scrupulosity than on that of self-indulgence.'

'Ah, that depends. That depends on whether the pleasure you got from your renunciation equalled that you might have got from the chestnuts.'

'You're preaching pure Paganism.'

'Oh, I'm not denying I'm a Pagan—in my amateurish way. Let me give you some asparagus. Do you think a man can be saved who smokes cigarettes between the courses?'

'Saved?' questioned Andre. 'What have cigarettes to do with a man's salvation?'

'It's a habit I learned in Russia. I feared it might relate itself in some way to the Schism.' And he lit a cigarette. 'I'm always a rigid Catholic when I'm in France.'

'And when you're in England?'

'Oh, one goes in for local colour, for picturesqueness, don't you know. The Church of England's charmingly overgrown with ivy. And besides, they're going to disestablish it. One must make the most of it while it lasts. Tell me—why can you never get decent brioches except in Catholic countries?'

'Is that a fact?'

'I swear it.'

'It's very singular,' said Andre.

'It's only one of the many odd things a fellow learns from travel.—Hush! Wait a moment.'

He rose hastily, and made a dash with his hand at the tail of a lizard, that was hanging temptingly out from a bunch of wistaria leaves. But the lizard was too quick for him. With a whisk, it had disappeared. He sank back into his chair, sighing. 'It's always like that. They'll never keep still long enough to let me catch them. What's the use of a university education and a cosmopolitan culture, if you can't catch lizards? Do you think they have eyes in the backs of their heads?'

Andre stared.

'Oh, I see. You think I'm frivolous,' Paul said plaintively. 'But you ought to have seen me an hour or two ago.'

Andre's eyes asked, 'Why?'

'Oh, I was plunged in all the most appropriate emotions—shedding floods of tears over my lost childhood and my misspent youth. Don't you like to have a good cry now and then? Oh, I don't mean literal tears, of course; only spiritual ones. For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life. I walked over to Granjolaye.'

Andre looked surprise. 'To Granjolaye? Have you—were you—'

He hesitated, but Paul understood. 'Have you heard from her? Were you invited?' 'Oh, dear, no,' he answered. 'No such luck. Not to the Chateau, only to the gates—the East Gate.' (The principal entrance to the home park of Granjolaye is the South Gate, which opens upon the Route Departementale.) 'I stood respectfully outside, and looked through the grating of the grille. I walked through the forest, by the Sentier des Contrebandiers.'

'Ah,' said Andre.

'And on my way what do you suppose I met?'

'A—a viper,' responded Andre. 'The hot weather is bringing them out. I killed two in my garden yesterday.'

'Oh, you cruel thing! What did you want to kill the poor young creatures for? And then to boast of it!—But no, not a viper. A lady.'

'A lady?'

'Yes—a real lady; she wore gloves. She was riding. I hope you won't think I'm asking impertinent questions, but I wonder if you can tell me who she is.'

'A lady riding in the Sentier des Contrebandiers?' Andre repeated incredulously.

'She looked like one. Of course I may have been deceived. I didn't hear her speak. Do you think she was a cook?'

'I didn't know any one ever rode in the Sentier des Contrebandiers.'

'Oh, for that, I give you my word of honour. A lady—or say a female—in a black riding-habit; dark hair and eyes; very pale, with red lips and things. Oh, I'm not trying to impose upon you. It was about half a mile this side of where the path skirts the road.'

'You might stop in the Sentier des Contrebandiers from January to December and not meet a soul,' said Andre.

'Ah, I see. There's no convincing you. Sceptic! And yet, twenty years ago, you'd have been pretty sure to meet a certain couple of small boys there, wouldn't you?'

'Si fait,' assented Andre. 'We went there a good deal. But we were privileged. The only boys in this country now are peasants' children, and they have no leisure for wandering in the wood. When they're not at school, they're working in the fields. As for their elders, the path is rough and circuitous; the high road's smoother and shorter, no matter where you're bound. Since our time, I doubt if twenty people have passed that way.'

'That argues ill for people's taste. The place is lovely. Underfoot, it's quite overgrown with mosses; and the branches interlace overhead. Where the sun filters through, you get adorable effects of light and shadow. It's fearfully romantic; perfect for making love in, and that sort of thing. Oh, if all the women hereabouts hadn't such hawk-like noses! You see, the Duke of Wellington was here in 1814.—No? He wasn't? I thought I'd read he was.—Ah, well, he was just over the border. But my lady of this morning hadn't a hawk-like nose. I can't quite remember what style of nose she did have, but it wasn't hawk-like. I say, frankly, as between old friends, have you any notion who she was?'

'What kind of horse had she?'

'Ah, there!' cried Paul, with a despairing gesture. 'You've touched my vulnerable point. I never shall have any memory for horses. I think it was black—no, brown—no, grey—no, green. Oh, what am I saying? I can't remember. Do—do you make it an essential?'

'She might have been from Bayonne.'

'Who rides from Bayonne? Fancy a Bayonnaise on a horse! They're all busy in their shops.'

'You forget the military. She may have been the wife of an officer.'

'Oh, horror! Do you really think so? Then she must have been frowsy and provincial, after all; and I thought her so smart and distinguished-looking and everything.'

'Or perhaps an Englishwoman from Biarritz. They sometimes ride out as far as this.'

'Dear Andre, if she were English, I should have known it at a glance—and there the matter would have rested. I have at least a practised eye for English women. I haven't lived half my life in England without learning something.'

'Well, there are none but English at Biarritz at this season.'

'She was never English. Don't try to bully me. Besides, she evidently knew the country. Otherwise, how could she have found the Sentier des Contrebandiers?—She wasn't from Granjolaye?'

'There's no one at Granjolaye save the Queen herself.'

'Deceiver! Manuela told me last night. She has her little Court, her maids-of-honour. I think my inconnue looked like a maid-of-honour.'

'She has her aunt, old Mademoiselle Henriette, and a couple of German women, countesses or baronesses or something, with unpronounceable names.'

'I can't believe she's German. Still, I suppose there are some Christian Germans. Perhaps....'

'They're both middle-aged. Past fifty, I should think.'

'Oh.—Ah, well, that disposes of them. But how do you know her Majesty hasn't a friend, a guest, staying with her?'

'It's possible, but most unlikely, seeing the close retirement in which she lives. She's never once gone beyond her garden, since she came back there, three, four, years ago; nor received any visitors. Personne—not the Bishop of Bayonne nor the Sous-Prefet, not even feu Monsieur le Comte, though they all called, as a matter of civility. She has her private chaplain. If a guest had arrived at Granjolaye, the whole country would know it and talk of it.'

'Oh, I see what you're trying to insinuate,' cried Paul. 'You're trying to insinuate that she came from Chateau Yroulte.' That was the next nearest country-house.

'Nothing of the sort,' said Andre. 'Chateau Yroulte has been shut up and uninhabited these two years—ever since the death of old Monsieur Raoul. It was bought by a Spanish Jew; but he's never lived in it and never let it.'

'Well, then, where did she come from? Not out of the Fourth Dimension? Who was she? Not a wraith, an apparition? Why will you entertain such weird conjectures?'

'She must have come from Bayonne. An officer's wife, beyond a doubt.'

'Oh, you're perfectly remorseless,' sighed Paul, and changed the subject. But he was unconvinced. Officers' wives, in garrison-towns like Bayonne, had, in his experience, always been, as he expressed it, frowsy and provincial.

IV.

One would think, by this time, the priest, poor man, had earned a moment of mental rest; but Paul's thirst for knowledge was insatiable. He began to ply him with questions about the Queen. And though Andre could tell him very little, and though he had heard all that the night before from Manuela, it interested him curiously to hear it repeated.

It amounted to scarcely more than a single meagre fact. A few months after the divorce, she had returned to Granjolaye, and she had never once been known to set her foot beyond the limits of her garden from that day to this. She had arrived at night, attended by her two German ladies-in-waiting. A carriage had met her at the railway station in Bayonne, and set her down at the doors of her Chateau, where her aunt, old Mademoiselle Henriette, awaited her. What manner of life she led there, nobody had the poorest means of discovering. Her own servants (tongue-tied by fear or love) could not be got to speak; and from the eyes of all outsiders she was sedulously screened. Paul could imagine her, in her great humiliation, solitary among the ruins of her high destiny, hiding her wounds; too sensitive to face the curiosity, too proud to brook the pity, of the world. She seemed to him a very grandiose and tragic figure, and he lost himself musing of her—her with whom he had played at being married, when they were children here, so long, so long ago. She was the daughter, the only child and heiress, of the last Duc de la Granjolaye de Ravanches,—the same nobleman of whom it was told that when Louis Napoleon, meaning to be gracious, said to him, 'You bear a great name, Monsieur,' he had answered sweetly, 'The greatest of all, I think.' It is certain he was the head of one of the most illustrious houses in the noblesse of Europe, descended directly and legitimately, through the Bourbons, from Saint Louis of France; and, to boot, he was immensely rich, owning (it was said) half the iron mines in the north of Spain, as well as a great part of the city of Bayonne. Paul's grandmother, the Comtesse de Louvance, was his next neighbour. Paul remembered him vaguely as a tall, drab, mild-mannered man, with a receding chin, and a soft, rather piping voice, who used to tip him, and have him over a good deal to stay at Granjolaye.

On the death of Madame de Louvance, the property of Saint-Graal had passed to her son, Edmond,—Andre's feu Monsieur le Comte. Edmond rarely lived there, and never asked his sister or her boy there; whence, twenty years ago, at the respective ages of thirteen and eleven, Paul and Helene had vanished from each other's ken. But Edmond never married, either; and when, last winter, he died, he left a will making Paul his heir. Of Helene's later history Paul knew as much as all the world knows, and no more—so much, that is, as one could gather from newspapers and public rumour. He knew of her father's death, whereby she had become absolute mistress of his enormous fortune. He knew of her princely marriage, and of her elevation by the old king to her husband's rank of Royal Highness. He knew of that swift series of improbable deaths which had culminated in her husband's accession to the throne, and how she had been crowned Queen-Consort. And then he knew that three or four years afterwards she had sued for and obtained a Bull of Separation from the Pope, on the plea of her husband's infidelity and cruelty. The infidelity, to be sure, was no more than, as a Royalty, if not as a woman, she might have bargained for and borne with; but everybody remembers the stories of the king's drunken violence that got bruited about at the time. Everybody will remember, too, how, the Papal Separation once pronounced, he had retaliated upon her with a decree of absolute divorce, and a sentence of perpetual banishment, voted by his own parliament. Whither she had betaken herself after these troubles Paul had never heard—until, yesterday, arriving at Saint-Graal, they told him she was living cloistered like a nun at Granjolaye.

News travels fast and penetrates everywhere in that lost corner of garrulous Gascony. The news that Paul had taken up his residence at Saint-Graal could scarcely fail to reach the Queen. Would she remember their childish intimacy? Would she make him a sign? Would she let him see her, for old sake's sake? Oh, in all probability, no. Most certainly, no. And yet—and yet, he couldn't forbid a little furtive hope to flicker in his heart.

V.

It was only April, but the sun shone with midsummer strength.

After Andre left him, he went down into the garden.

From a little distance the house, against the sky, looked insubstantial, a water-colour, painted in grey and amber on a field of luminous blue. If he had wished it, he could have bathed himself in flowers; hyacinths, crocuses, jonquils, camellias, roses, grew round him everywhere, sending up a symphony of warm odours; further on, in the grass, violets, anemones, celandine; further still, by the margins of the pond, narcissuses, and tall white flowers-de-luce; and, in the shrubberies, satiny azaleas; and overhead, the magnolia trees, drooping with their freight of ivory cups. The glass doors of the orangery stood open, a cloud of sweetness hanging heavily before them. In the park, the chestnuts were in full leaf; and surely a thousand birds were twittering and piping amongst their branches.

'Oh, bother! How it cries out for a woman,' said Paul. 'It's such a waste of good material'

The beauty went to one's head. One craved a sympathetic companion to share it with, a woman on whom to lavish the ardours it enkindled. 'If I don't look out I shall become sentimental,' the lone man told himself. 'Nature's so fearfully lacking in tact. Fancy her singing an epithalamium in a poor fellow's ears, when he doesn't know a single human woman nearer than Paris.' To make matters worse, the day ended in a fiery sunset, and then there was a full moon; and in the rosery a nightingale performed its sobbing serenade. 'Please go out and give that bird a penny, and tell him to go away,' Paul said to a servant. It was all very well to jest, but at every second breath he sighed profoundly. I'm afraid he had become sentimental. It seemed a serious pity that what his heart was full of should spend itself on the incapable air. His sense of humour was benumbed. And when, presently, the frogs in the pond, a hundred yards away, set up their monotonous plaintive concert, he laid down his arms. 'It's no use, I'm in for it,' he confessed. After all, he was out of England. He was in Gascony, the borderland between amorous France and old romantic Spain.

I don't know whom his imagination dwelt the more fondly with: the stricken Queen, beyond there, alone in the darkness and the silence, where the night lay on the forest of Granjolaye; or the pale horse-woman of the morning.

But surely, as yet, he had no ghost of a reason for dreaming that the two were one and the same.

VI.

'Now, let's be logical,' he said next morning. 'Let's be logical and hopeful—yet not too hopeful, not utopian. Let's look the matter courageously in the face. Since she rode there once, why may she not ride again in the Sentier des Contrebandiers? Why mayn't she ride there often—even daily? I think that's logical. Don't you think that's logical?'

The person he addressed, a tall, slender young man, with a fresh-coloured skin, a straight nose, and rather a ribald eye, was vigorously brushing a head of yellowish hair, in the looking-glass before him.

'Tush! But of course you think so,' Paul went on. 'You always think as I do. If you knew how I despise a sycophant! And yet—you're not bad looking. No, I'll be hanged if I can honestly say that you're bad looking. You've got nice hair, and plenty of it; and there's a weakness about your mouth and chin that goes to my heart. I hate firm people.—What? So do you? I thought so.—Ah, well, my poor friend, you're booked for a shocking long walk this morning. You must summon your utmost fortitude.—Under the greenwood tree, who loves to lie with me?' he carolled forth, to Marzials's tune. 'But come! I say! That's anticipating.'

And he set forth for the Smugglers' Pathway,—where, sure enough, she rode again. As she passed him, her eyes met his: at which he was conscious of a good deal of interior commotion. 'By Jove, she's magnificent, she's really stunning,' he exclaimed to himself. He perceived that she was rather a big woman, tall, with finely-rounded, smoothly-flowing lines. Her hair,—velvety blue-black in its shadows,—where the light caught it was dully iridescent. Her features were irregular enough to give her face a high degree of individuality, yet by no means to deprive it of delicacy or attractiveness. She had a superb white throat, and a soft voluptuous chin; and 'As I live, I never saw such a mouth,' said Paul.

Where did she come from? Bayonne? Never. Andre might have been mistaken about Chateau Yroulte; the Spanish Jew had perhaps sold it, or found a tenant. Or, further afield, there were Chateaux Labenne, Saumuse, d'Orthevielle. Or else, the Queen had a guest.

'Anyhow,' he mused, when he got home, 'that makes five, six miles that you have tramped, to enjoy an instant's glimpse of her. Fortunately they say walking is good for the constitution. It only shows what extremities a country life may drive one to.'

The next day, not only did her eyes meet his, but he could have sworn that she almost smiled. Oh, a very furtive smile, the mere transitory suggestion of a smile. But the inner commotion was more marked.

The next day (the fourth) she undoubtedly did smile, and slightly inclined her head. He removed his hat, and went home, and waited impatiently for twenty-four hours to wear away. 'She smiled—she bowed,' he kept repeating. But, alas, he couldn't forget that in that remote countryside it is very much the fashion for people who meet in the roads and lanes to bow as they pass.

On the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth days she bowed and smiled.

'I fairly wonder at myself—to walk that distance for a bow and smile,' said Paul. 'To-morrow I'm going to speak. Faut brusquer les choses.'

And he penetrated into the forest, firmly determined to speak. 'Only I can't seem to think of anything very pat to say,' he sighed. 'Hello! She's off her horse.'

She was off her horse, standing beside it, holding the loose end of a strap in her hand.

Providence was favouring him. Here was his obvious chance. Something was wrong. He could offer his assistance. And yet, that inner commotion was so violent, he felt a little bewildered about the mot juste. He approached her gradually, trying to compose himself and collect his wits.

She looked up, and said in French 'I beg your pardon. Something has come undone. Can you help me?'

Her voice was delicious, cool and smooth as ivory. His heart pounded. He vaguely bowed, and murmured, 'I should be delighted.'

She stood aside a little, and he took her place. He bent over the strap that was loose, and bit his lips, and cursed his embarrassments. 'Come, I mustn't let her think me quite an ass.' He was astonished at himself. That he should still be capable of so strenuous a sensation! 'And I had thought I was blase!' He was intensely conscious of the silence, of the solitude and dimness of the forest, and of their isolation there, so near to each other, that superb pale woman and himself. But his eyes were bent on the misbehaving strap, which he held helplessly between his fingers.

At last he looked up at her. 'How warm and beautiful and fragrant she is,' he thought. 'With her white face, with her dark eyes, with those red lips and that splendid figure—what an heroic looking woman!'

'This is altogether disgraceful,' he said, 'and I assure you I'm covered with confusion. But I won't dissemble. I haven't the remotest notion what needs to be done. I'm afraid this is the first time in my life I have ever touched anything belonging to a horse.'

He said it with a pathetic drawl, and she laughed.—'And yet you're English.'

'Oh, I dare say I'm English enough. Though I don't see how you knew it. Don't tell me you knew it from my accent.'

'Oh, non pas,' she hastened to protest. 'But you're the new owner of Saint-Graal. Everybody of the country knows, of course, that the new owner of Saint-Graal, Mr. Warringwood, is English.'

'Ah, then she's of the country,' was Paul's mental note.

'And I thought all Englishmen were horsemen,' she went on.

'Oh, there are a few bright exceptions—there's a little scattered remnant. It's the study of my life to avoid being typical.'

'Ah, well, then give me the strap.'

He gave her the strap, and in the twinkling of an eye she had snapped the necessary buckle. Then she looked up at him and smiled oddly. It occurred to him that the entire comedy of the strap had perhaps been invented as an excuse for opening a conversation; and he was at once flattered and disappointed. 'Oh, if she's that sort ...' he thought.

'I'm heart-broken not to have been able to serve you,' he said.

'You can help me to mount,' she answered.

And, before he quite knew how it was done, he had helped her to mount, and she was galloping down the path. The firm grasp of her warm gloved hand on his shoulder accompanied him to Saint-Graal. 'It's amazing how she sticks in my mind,' he said. He really couldn't fix his attention on any other subject. 'I wonder who the deuce she is. She's giving me my money's worth in walking. That business of the strap was really brazen. Still, one mustn't quarrel with the means if one desires the end. I hope she isn't that sort.'

VII.

On the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth days, she passed him with a bow and a good-morning.

'This is too much!' he groaned, in the silence of his chamber. 'She's doing it with malice. I'll not be trifled with. I—I'll do something desperate. I'll pretend to faint, and she'll have to get down and bandage up my wounds.'

On the thirteenth day, as they met, she stopped her horse.

'You're at least typically English in one respect,' she said.

'Oh, unkind lady! To announce it to me in this sudden way. Then my life's a failure.'

'I mean in your fondness for long walks.'

'Ah, then you're totally in error. I hate long walks.'

'But it's a good ten kilometres to and from your house; and you do it every morning.'

'That's only because there aren't any omnibuses or cabs or things. And' (he reminded himself that if she was that sort, he might be bold) 'I'm irresistibly attracted here.'

'It's very pretty,' she admitted, and rode on.

He looked after her, grinding his teeth. Was she that sort? 'One never can tell. Her face is so fine—so noble even.'

The next day, 'Yes, I suppose it's very pretty. But I wasn't thinking of Nature,' he informed her, as she approached.

She drew up.

'Oh, it has its human interest too, no doubt.' She glanced in the direction of the Chateau of Granjolaye.

'The Queen,' said he. 'But one never sees her.'

'That adds the charm of mystery, don't you feel? To think of that poor young exiled woman, after so grand a beginning, ending so desolately—shut up alone in her mysterious castle! It's like a legend.'

'Then you're not of her Court?'

'I? Of her Court? Mais quelle idee!'

'It was only a hypothesis. Of course, you know I'm devoured by curiosity. My days are spent in wondering who you are.'

She laughed. 'You must have a care, or you'll be typical,' she warned him.

'I never said I wasn't human,' he called after her, as she cantered away.

VIII.

The next day still (the fifteenth), 'Haven't I heard you lived at Saint-Graal when you were a child?' she asked.

'If you have, for once in a way rumour has told the truth. I lived at Saint-Graal till I was thirteen.'

'Then perhaps you knew her?'

'Her?'

'The Queen. Mademoiselle de la Granjolaye de Ravanches.'

'Oh, I knew her very well—when we were children.'

'Tell me all about her.'

'It would be a long story.'

She leaped from her horse; then, raising her riding whip, and looking the animal severely in the eye, 'Bezigue! Attention,' she said impressively. 'You're to stop exactly where you are and not play any tricks. Entendu? Bien.' She moved a few steps down the pathway, and stopped at an opening among the trees, where the ground was a cushion of bright green moss. 'By Jove, she is at her ease,' thought Paul, who followed her. 'How splendidly she walks—what undulations!' From the French point of view, as she must be aware, the situation gave him all sorts of rights.

She sank softly, gracefully, upon the moss.

'It's a long story. Tell it me,' she commanded, and pointed to the earth. He sat down facing her, at a little distance.

'It's odd you should have chosen this place,' said he.

'Odd? Why?' She looked at him inquiringly. For a moment their eyes held each other; and all at once the blood swept through him with suffocating violence. She was so beautiful, so sumptuous, so warmly and richly feminine; and surely the circumstances were not anodyne. Her softly rounded face, its very pallor, the curve and colour of her lips, her luminous dark eyes, the smooth modulations of her voice, and then her loose abundance of black hair, and the swelling lines of her breast, the fluent contour of her waist and hips, under the fine black cloth of her dress—all these, with the silence of the forest, the heat of the southern day, the woodland fragrances of which the air was full, and the sense of being intimately alone with her, set up within him a turbulent vibration, half of delight, half of pained suspense. And the complaisant informality with which she met him played a sustaining counterpoint. 'What luck, what luck, what luck,' were the words which shaped themselves to the strong beating of his pulses. What would happen next? Whither would it lead? He had savoured the bouquet, he was famished to taste the wine. And yet, so complicated are our human feelings, he was obscurely vexed. Only two kinds of woman, he would have maintained yesterday, could conceivably do a thing like this: an ingenue or 'that sort.' She wasn't an ingenue. Something, at the same time, half assured him that she wasn't 'that sort,' either. But—the circumstances! The situation!

'Why odd?' she repeated.

'Oh, I don't want to talk about the Queen,' he said, in a smothered voice.

'The oddity relates itself to the Queen?'

'Oh, this is where we used to waste half our lives when we were children. That's all. This was our favourite nook.'

'Perfect then for the story you're going to tell me.'

'What story?'

'You said it was a long story.'

'There's really no story at all.' His eyes were fastened upon her hands, small and tapering, in their tan gauntlets. The point of a patent-leather boot glanced from the edge of her skirt. A short gold watch-chain dangled from her breast, a cluster of charms at the end.

'You said it was a long story,' she repeated sternly.

'It would be a dull one. We knew each other when we were infants, and used to play together. That is all.'

'But what was she like? Describe her to me. I adore souvenirs d'enfance.' Her eyes were bright with eagerness.

'Oh, she was very pretty. The prettiest little girl I've ever seen. She had the most wonderful eyes—deep, deep, into which you could look a hundred miles; you know the sort; dreamy, poetical, sad; oh, lovely eyes. And she used to wear her hair down her back; it was very long, and soft—soft as smoke, almost; almost impalpable. She always dressed in white—short white frocks, with broad sashes, red or blue. That was the fashion then for little girls. Perhaps it is still—I've never noticed.'

'Yes. Don't stop. Go on.'

'Dear me, I don't know what to say. I used to see her a good deal, because they were our neighbours. Her father used to ask me over to stay at Granjolaye. She needed a playmate, and I was the only one available. Sometimes she would come and spend a day at Saint-Graal. Do you know Granjolaye? The castle? It's worth going over. It used to belong to the Kings of Navarre, you know. We used to play together in the great audience chamber, and chase each other through the secret passages in the walls. At Saint-Graal we confined ourselves to the garden. Her head was full of the queerest romantic notions. You couldn't persuade her that the white irises that grew about our pond weren't enchanted princesses. One day we filled a bottle with holy water at the Church, and then she sprinkled them with it, pronouncing an incantation. "If ye were born as ye are, remain as ye are; but if ye were born otherwise, resume your original shapes." They remained as they were; but that didn't shake her faith. Something was amiss with the holy water, or with the form of her incantation.'

She laughed softly. 'Then she was nice? You liked her?' she asked.

'Oh, I was passionately in love with her. All children are passionately in love with somebody, aren't they? A real grande passion. It began when I was about ten.' He broke off, to laugh. 'Do you care for love stories? I'm a weary, wayworn man; but upon my word, I've never in all my life felt any such intense emotion for a woman, anything that so nearly deserved to be called love, as I felt for Helene de la Granjolaye when I was an infant. Night after night I used to lie awake thinking how I loved her—longing to tell her so—planning how I would, next day—composing tremendous declarations—imagining her response—and waiting in a fever of impatience for the day to come. But then, when I met her, I didn't dare. Bless me, how I used to thrill at sight of her, with love, with fear. How I used to look at her face, and pine to kiss her. If her hand touched mine, I almost fainted. It's very strange that children before their teens should be able to experience the whole gamut of the spiritual side of love; and yet it's certain.'

She was looking at him with intent eyes, her lips parted a little. 'But you did tell her at last, I hope?' she said, anxiously.

He had got warmed to his subject, and her interest inspired him. 'Oh, at last! It was here—in this very spot. I had picked a lot of celandine, and stuck them about in her hair, where they shone like stars. Oh, the joy of being allowed to touch her hair! It made utterance a necessity. I fumbled and stammered, and blushed and thrilled, and almost choked. And at last I blurted it out. "I love you so. I love you so." That—after the eloquent declarations I had composed overnight!'

'And she?'

'She answered quite simply, "Et moi, je t'aime tant, aussi." And then she began to cry. And when I asked her what she was crying for, she explained that I oughtn't to have left her in doubt for so long; she had been so unhappy from fear that I didn't "love her so." She was quite unfemininely frank, you see. Oh, the ecstacy of that hour! The ecstacy of our first kiss! From that time on it was "mon petit mari" and "ma petite femme." The greatest joy in life for me, for us, was to sit together, holding each other's hands, and repeating from time to time, "J' t'aime tant, j' t'aime tant." Now and then we would vary it with a fugue upon our names—"Helene!"—"Paul!"' He laughed. 'Children, with their total lack of humour, are the drollest of created beings, aren't they?'

'Oh, I don't think it's droll. I know, all children have those desperate love affairs. But they seem to me pathetic. How did it go on?'

'Oh, for two or three years we lived in Paradise. There were no other boys in the neighbourhood, so she was constant.'

'For three years? And then?'

'Then my grandmother died, and I was carried off to Paris. She remained here. And so it ended.'

'And when did you meet her next? After you were grown up?'

'I have never met her since.'

'You must have followed her career with a special interest, though?'

'Ah, quant a ca!'

'Her marriage, her coronation, her divorce. Poor Woman! What she must have suffered. Have you made any attempt to see her since you came back to Saint-Graal?'

'Ah, merci, non! If she wanted to see me, she'd send for me.'

'She sees no one, everybody says. But I should think she'd like to see you—her old playmate. If she should send for you—But I suppose I musn't ask you to tell me about it afterwards? Of course, like everybody else in her neighbourhood, I'm awfully interested in her.'

There was a moment's silence. She looked at the moss beneath her, and stroked it lightly with a finger-tip. Paul looked at her.

'You're horribly unkind,' he said at last.

'Unkind?' She raised wide eyes of innocent surprise.

'You know I'm in an agony of curiosity.'

'About what?'

'About you.'

'Me?'

'Yourself.'

She lifted the cluster of charms at the end of her watch-chain. One of them was a tiny golden whistle. On this she blew, and Bezigue came trotting up. She mounted him to-day without Paul's assistance. Smiling down on the young man, she said, 'Oh, after the reckless way in which I've cast the conventions to the winds, you really can't expect me to give you my name and address.' And before he could answer, she was gone.

He walked about for the rest of the day in a great state of excitement. 'My dear,' he told himself, 'if you're not careful, something serious will happen to you.'

IX.

When he woke up he saw that it was raining; and in that part of the world it really never does rain but it pours. Needless to touch upon the impatient ennui with which he roamed the house. He sent for Andre to lunch with him.

'Andre, can't you do something to stop this rain?' he asked; but Andre stared. 'Oh, I was thinking of the priests of Baal,' Paul explained. 'I beg your pardon.' And after the coffee, 'Let's go up and play in the garret,' he proposed: at which Andre stared harder still. 'We always used to play in the garret on rainy days,' Paul reminded him. 'Mais, ma foi, monsieur, nous ne sommes plus des gosses,' Andre answered.

'Is there any news about the Queen?' Paul asked.

'There's never any news from Granjolaye,' said Andre.

'And the lady I met in the forest? Have you any new theory who she is?'

'An officer's wife from Ba——'

'Andre!' cried Paul. 'If you say that again, I shall write to the Pope and ask him to disfrock you.'

The next day was fine; but, though he spent the entire morning in the Smuggler's Pathway, he did not meet her. 'It's because the ground's still wet,' he reasoned. 'Oh, why don't things dry quicker?'

The next day he did meet her—and she passed him with a bow. He shook his fist at her unsuspecting back.

The next day he perceived Bezigue riderless near the opening among the trees. The horse neighed, as he drew near. She was seated on the moss. He stood still, and bowed tentatively from the path. 'Are you disengaged? May I come in?' he asked.

'Oh, do,' she answered. 'And—won't you take a seat?'

'Thank you,' and he placed himself beside her.

'Tell me about your life afterwards,' she said.

'My life afterwards? After what?'

'After you were carried off to Paris.'

'What earthly interest can that have?'

'I want to know.'

'It was the average life of the average youth whose family is in average circumstances.'

'You went to school?'

'What makes you doubt it? Do I seem so illiterate?'

'Where? In England? Eton? Harrow?'

'No, in Paris. The Lycee Louis le Grand. Oh, I have received an education—no expense was spared. I forget how many years I passed a faire mon droit in the Latin Quarter. You'd be surprised if you were to discover what a lot I know. Shall I prove to you that the sum of the angles of a right-angled triangle is equal to two right angles? Or conjugate the verb amo? Or give you a brief summary of the doctrines of Aristotle? Or an account of the life and works of Gustavus Alolphus?'

'When did you go to England?'

'Not till Necessity drove me there. I had to eke out a meagre patrimony. I went to England to seek my fortune.'

'Did you find it?'

'I never had the knack of finding things. When my father used to send me into the library to fetch a book, or my mother into her dressing-room to fetch her scissors, I could never find them. I looked for it everywhere, but I couldn't find it.'

'What did you do?'

'I lived by my wits. Chevalier d'industrie.'

'Ah, non. Je ne crois pas.'

'You don't believe my wits were sufficient to the task? I was like the London hospitals—practically unendowed; only they wouldn't support me by voluntary contributions. So—I wrote for the newspapers, I'm afraid.'

'For the newspapers?'

'Oh, I admit, it's scandalous. But you may as well know the worst. A penny-a-liner! But I shan't do so any more, now that I have stepped into the shoes of my uncle. You'll never catch me fatiguing myself with work, now that I've got enough to live on!'

'Lazy!'

'Oh, I'm everything that's reprehensible.'

'And you never married?'

'I don't think so.'

'Aren't you sure?'

'As sure as one can be of anything in this doubtful world.'

'But why didn't you?'

'Pas si bete. Marriage is such a bore. I never met a woman I could bear the thought of passing all my life with.'

'Conceited!'

'I daresay. If you like false modesty better, I'll try to meet your wishes. What woman would have had a poor devil like me?'

'Still, marriage is, after all, very much in vogue.'

'Yes, but it's mad. Either you must love the woman you marry, or you mustn't love her. But if you marry a woman without loving her, I hope you'll not deny you're doing a very shocking thing. If, on the contrary, you do love her, raison de plus for not marrying her Fancy marrying a woman you love; and then, day by day, watching the beautiful wild flower of love fatten into a domestic cabbage! Isn't that a syllogism?'

'You have been in love then?'

'Never.'

'Never?'

'Oh, I've made a fool of myself occasionally, of course. But I've never been in love.'

'Except with Helene de la Granjolaye?'

'Oh, yes, I was in love with her—when I was ten.'

'Till you were...?'

'Till I was...?'

'How long did it take you to get over it, I mean?'

'I don't know. It wore away gradually. The tooth of time.'

'You're not at all in love with her any more?'

'After twenty years? And she a Queen? I hope I know my place.'

'But if you were to meet her again?'

'I should probably suffer a horrible disillusion.'

'But you have found, at any rate, that "first love is best"?'

'First and last. The last shall be first,' he said oracularly.

'Don't you smoke?' she asked.

'Oh, one by one you drag my vices from me. Let me own, en bloc, that I have them all.'

'Then you may light a cigarette and give me one.'

He gave her a cigarette, and held a match while she lit it. Then he lit one for himself. Her manner of smoking was leisurely, luxurious. She inhaled the smoke, and let it escape slowly in a slender spiral. He looked at her through the thin cloud, and his heart closed in a convulsion. 'How big and soft and rich—how magnificent she is—like some great splendid flower, heavy with sweetness!' he thought. He had to breathe deep to overcome a feeling of suffocation; he was trembling in every nerve, and he wondered if she perceived it. He divined the smooth perfection of her body, through the supple cloth that moulded it; he noticed vaguely that the dress she wore to-day was blue, not black. He divined the warmth of her round white throat, the perfume of her skin. 'And how those lips could kiss!' his imagination shouted wildly. Again, the silence, the solitude and dimness of the forest, their intimate seclusion there, the great trees, the sky, the bright green cushion of moss, the few detached sounds,—bird-notes, rustling leaves, snapping twigs,—by which the silence was intensified; again all these lent an acuteness to his sensations. Her dark eyes were smiling lustrously, languidly, at the smoke curling in the air before her, as if they saw a vision in it.

'You're adorable at moments,' he said at last.

'At moments! Thank you.' She laughed.

'Oh, you can't expect me to pretend that I find you adorable always. There are times when I could fall upon you and exterminate you.'

'Why?'

'When you passed me yesterday with a nod.'

'Twas your own fault. You didn't look amusing yesterday.'

'When you baffle my perfectly innocent desire to know whom I have the honour of addressing.'

'Shall I summon Bezigue?' she asked, touching her bunch of charms.

He acted his despair.

'Besides, what does it matter? I know who you are,' she went on. 'Let that console you.'

'Did I say you were adorable? You're hateful.'

'What's in a name? Nothing but the power to compromise. Would you have me compromise myself more than I've done already? A woman who makes a man's acquaintance without an introduction, and talks about love, and smokes cigarettes, with him!' She gave a little shudder. 'How horrible it sounds when you state it baldly.'

'One must never state things baldly. One must qualify. It's the difference between Truth and mere Fact. Truth is Fact qualified. You must add that the woman knew the man by common report to be of the highest possible respectability, and that she saw for herself he was (alas!) altogether harmless. And then you must explain that the affair took place in the country, in the spring; and that the cigarettes were the properest conceivable sort of cigarettes, having been rolled by hand in England.'

'You wouldn't believe me if I said I had never done such a thing before? They all say that, don't they?'

'Yes, they all say that. But, oddly enough, I do believe you.'

'Then you're not entirely lost to grace, not thoroughly a cynic.'

'Oh, there are some good women.'

'And some good men?'

'Possibly. I've never happened to meet one.'

'The eye of the beholder!'

'If you like. But I don't know. There are such things, no doubt, as cynics by temperament; congenital cynics. Then, indeed, you may cry: The eye of the beholder. But others become cynics, are driven into cynicism, by sad experience. I started in life with the rosiest faith in my fellow-man. If I've lost it, it's because he's always behaved shabbily to me, soon or late; always taking some advantage. The struggle for existence! We're all beasts, who take part in it; we must be, or we're devoured. Women for the most part are out of it. Anyhow, plus je vois les hommes, plus j'aime les femmes.'

'Are you a beast too?'

'Oh, yes. But I don't bite. I'm the kind of beast that runs away. I lie by the fire and purr, but at the first sign of trouble I jump for the open door. That's why the other fellows always got the better of me. They knew I was a coward, and profited by the knowledge. If my dear good uncle hadn't died, I don't know how I should have lived.'

'I'm afraid you have "lived" too much.'

'That was uncalled for.'

'Or else your looks belie you.'

'My looks?'

'You're so dissipated-looking.'

'Dissipated-looking? I? Horror!'

'You've got such a sophisticated eye, if that suits you better. You look blase.'

'You're a horrid, rude, uncomplimentary thing.'

'Oh, if you're going to call names, I must summon my natural protector.' She blew on her golden whistle, and up trotted the obedient Bezigue.

That evening Paul said to himself, 'I vastly fear that something serious has happened to you. No, she's everything you like, but she isn't that sort.'

He was depressed, dejected; the reaction, no doubt, from the excitement of her presence. 'She's married, of course; and of course she's got a lover. And of course she'll never care a pin for the likes of me. And of course she sees what's the matter with me, and is laughing in her sleeve. And I had thought myself impervious. Oh, damn all women.'

X.

'Don't stop; ride on,' he called out to her, next morning, 'I shan't be amusing to-day. I'm frightfully low in my mind.'

'Perhaps it will amuse me to study you in a new aspect,' she said. 'You can entertain me with the story of your griefs.'

'Bare my wounds to make a lady smile. Oh, anything to oblige you.'

She leapt lightly from Bezigue, and sank upon the moss.

'What is it all about?'

'Oh, not what you imagine,' said he. 'It's about my debts.'

'I had hoped it was about your sins.'

'My sins! I'm kept awake at night by the thought of yours.'

'Your conscience is too sensitive. Mine are but peccadillos.'

'You say that because you've no sense of moral proportion. Are cruelty and dissimulation pecadillos?'

'They may be even virtues. It all depends. Discipline and reserve!'

'I'll forgive you everything if you'll tell me your name.'

'Oh, I have debts, as well as you.'

'What have debts to do with the question?'

'I owe something to my reputation.'

'If we're going to consider our reputations, what of mine?'

'Yours has preceded you into the country,' she said, and drew from her pocket a small, thin volume, bound in grey cloth, with a gilt design.

'Oh, heavens!' cried Paul. 'This is how one's past finds one out.'

'Oh, some of them aren't bad,' she said. 'Wait, I'll read you one.'

'Then you know English?'

'A leetle. Bot the one I shall read is in Franch.'

And then she read out, in an enchanting voice, one of his own French sonnets. 'That isn't bad,' she added. 'Do you think it hopelessly bad?'

'It shows promise, perhaps—when you read it.'

'It is strange, though, that it should have been written by a man who had never been in love.'

'Imagination! Upon my word, I never had been. Besides, the idea is stolen. It's almost a literal translation from Rossetti. What with a little imagination and a little ingenuity, one can do wonderfully well on other people's experience.'

'I don't believe you. You have been in love a hundred times.'

'Never.'

'Never? Not even with Helene de la Granjolaye de Ravanches?'

'Oh, I don't count my infancy. Never with anybody else.'

'It's very strange,' she said. 'Tell me some more about her.'

'Oh, bother her.'

'I suppose when they carried you off to Paris you had a tearful parting? Did you kick and scream and say you wouldn't go?'

'Why do you always make me talk about the Queen?'

'She interests me. And when you talk about the Queen, I rather like you. It is nice to see that there was a time when you were capable of an emotion.'

'You fancy I'm incapable now?'

'Tell me about your leave-taking, your farewells.'

'Bother our farewells.'

'They must have been heart-rending?'

'Probably.'

'Don't you remember?'

'Oh, yes, I remember.'

'Go on. Don't make me drag it from you by inches. Tell it to me in a pretty melodious narrative. Either that, or—' she touched her whistle.

'That's barefaced intimidation.'

She raised the whistle to her lips.

'Stay, stay!' he cried, 'I yield.'

'I wait,' she answered.

He bent his brows for an instant, then looked up smiling. 'If it puts you to sleep, you'll know whom to blame.'

'Yes, yes, go on,' she said impatiently.

'Dear me, there's nothing worth telling. It was a few weeks after my grandmother's death. We were going to Paris the next day. Her father drove over, with her, to say good-bye. Whilst he was with my people in the drawing-room, she and I walked in the garden.—I say, this is going to become frightfully sentimental, you know. Sure you want it?'

'Go on. Go on.'

'Well, we walked in the garden; and she was crying, and I was beseeching her not to cry. She wore one of her white frocks, with a red sash, and her hair fell down her back below her waist. I was holding her hand. "Don't cry, don't cry. I'll come back as soon as I'm a man, and marry you in real earnest!" I promised her.' He paused and laughed.

'Go on. And she?'

'"Oh, aren't we married in real earnest now?" she asked. I explained that we weren't. "You have to have the Notary over from Bayonne, and go to Church. I know, because that's how it was when my cousin Elodie was married. We're only married in play?" Then she asked if that wasn't just as good. "Things one does in play are always so much nicer than real things," she said.'

'Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings! She had a prophetic soul.'

'Hadn't she? I admitted that that was true. But I added that perhaps when people were grown up and could do exactly as they pleased, it was different,—perhaps real things would come to be pleasant too.'

'Have you found them so?'

'I suppose I can't be quite grown-up, for I've never yet had a chance to do exactly as I pleased.'

'Poor young man. Go on.'

'And, besides, I reminded her, all the married people we knew were really married, my father and mother, Andre's father and mother, my cousin Elodie. Helene's mother was dead, so her parents didn't count. And I argued that we might be sure they found it fun to be really married, or else they wouldn't keep it up. "Oh, well, then, I suppose we'll have to be really married too," she consented. "But it seems as though it never could be as nice as this. If only you weren't going away!" Whereupon I promised again to come back, if she'd promise to wait for me, and never love anybody else, and never, never, never allow another boy to kiss her. "Oh, never, never, never," she assured me. Then her father called her, and they drove away.'

'And you went to Paris and forgot her. Why were you false to your engagement?'

'Oh, she had allowed another boy to kiss her. She had married a German prince. Besides, I received a good deal of discouragement from my family. The next day, in the train, I confided our understanding to my mother. My mother seemed to doubt whether her father would like me as a son-in-law. I was certain he would; he was awfully good-natured; he had given me two louis as a parting tip. "But do you think he'll care to let his daughter marry a bourgeois?" my mother asked. "A what?" cried I. "A bourgeois," said my mother. "I ain't a bourgeois," I retorted indignantly. "What are you then?" pursued my mother. I explained that my grandmother had been a countess, and my uncle was a count; so how could I be a bourgeois? "But what is your father?" my mother asked. Oh, my father was "only an Englishman." But that didn't make me a bourgeois? "Yes, it does," my mother said. "Just because my father's English?" "Because he's a commoner, because he isn't noble." "But then—then what did you go and marry him for?" I stammered. "Where would you have been if I hadn't?" my mother enquired. That puzzled me for a moment, but then I answered, "Well, if you'd married a Frenchman, a Count or a Duke or something, I shouldn't have been a bourgeois;" and my mother confessed that that was true enough. "I don't care if I am a bourgeois," I said at last. "When I'm big I'm going back to Saint-Graal; and if her father won't let me really marry her, because I'm a bourgeois, then we'll just go on making believe we're married."'

She laughed. 'And now you are big, and you've come back to Saint-Graal, and your lady-love is at Granjolaye. Why don't you call on her and offer to redeem your promise?'

'Why doesn't she send for me—bid me to an audience?'

'Perhaps her prophetic soul warns her how you'd disappoint her.'

'Do you think she'd be disappointed in me?'

'Aren't you disappointed in yourself?'

'Oh, dear, no; I think I'm very nice.'

'I should be disappointed in myself, if I were a man who had been capable of such an innocent, sweet affection as yours for Helene de la Granjolaye, and had then gone and soiled myself with the mud of what they call life.' She spoke earnestly; her face was grave and sad.

He was surprised, and a little alarmed. 'Do you mean by that that you think I'm a bad lot?' he asked.

'You said the other day—yesterday was it?—that you had made a fool of yourself on various occasions.'

'Well?'

'Did the process not generally involve making a fool of a woman too?'

'Reciprocity? Perhaps.'

'And what was it you always said to them?'

'Oh, I suppose I did.'

'You told them you loved them?'

'I'm afraid so.'

'And was it true?'

'No.'

'Well, then!'

'Ah, but they weren't deceived; they never believed it. That's only a convention of the game, a necessary formula, like the "Dear" at the beginning of a letter.'

'You have "lived"; you have "lived." You'd have been so unique, so rare, so much more interesting, if instead of going and "living" like other men, you had remained true to the ideal passion of your childhood.'

'I had the misfortune to be born into the world, and not into a fairy tale, you see. But it's a perfectly gratuitous assumption, that I have "lived."'

'Can you honestly tell me you haven't?' she asked, very soberly, with something like eagerness; her pale face intent.

'As a matter of fact ... Oh, the worst of it is ... I can't honestly say that I've never ... But then, what do you want to rake up such matters for? It's not my fault if I've accepted the traditions of my century. Well, anyhow, you see I can't lie to you.'

'You appear to find it difficult,' she assented, rising.

'Well, what do you infer from that?'

She blew her whistle. 'That—that you're out of training,' she said lightly, as she mounted her horse.

'Oh,' he groaned, 'you're—'

'What?'

'You beggar language.'

She laughed and rode away.

'There, I've spoiled everything,' Paul said, and went home, and passed a sleepless night.

XI.

'I'll bet you sixpence she won't turn up to-day,' he said to his friend in the glass, next morning; nevertheless he went into the forest, and there she was. But she did not offer to dismount.

'Isn't there another inference to be drawn from my inability to lie to you?' he asked.

She smiled on him from her saddle. 'Oh, perhaps there are a hundred.'

'Don't you think a reasonable inference is that—I love you?'

She laughed.

'You know I love you,' he persisted.

'Oh, the conventions of the game! the necesary formula, like "Dear" at the beginning of a letter!' she cried.

'You don't believe me?'

'Qui m'aime me suive,' she said, spurring Bezigue into a rapid trot.

XII.

But the next day he found her already installed in their nook among the trees.

'I hate people who doubt my word,' he said.

'Oh, now you hate me?'

'I love you. I love you.'

She drew away a little.

'Oh, you needn't be afraid. I shan't touch you. Why won't you believe me?'

'Do men always glare savagely like that at women they love?'

'Why won't you believe me?'

'How long have you known me?'

'All my life. A fortnight—three weeks. But that's a lifetime.'

'And what do you know about me?'

'Everything. I know that you're adorable. And I adore you.'

'Adorable—at moments. Do you know whether I am—married, for example?'

'I know that if you are, I should like to kill your husband. Are you? Tell me. Put me out of suspense. Let me go home and open a vein.'

'Have I the air of a jeune fille?'

'Thank goodness, no. But there are such things as widows.'

'And what more do you know about me?'

'Tell me—are you married?'

'You may suppose that I'm a widow.'

'Thank God!'

She laughed.

'Will you marry me?' he asked.

'Oh, marriage is such a bore,' she reminded him.

'Will you marry me?'

'No,' she said. 'But you may give me a cigarette.'

And for a while they smoked without speaking.

'I hope at any rate you believe me now,' he said.

'Because you've offered to make the crowning sacrifice? By the bye, what is my number?'

'Oh, don't,' he cried. 'You're the only woman I've ever cared a straw for; and I care so much for you that I'd—I'd—' He stammered, seeking for a thing to say he'd do.

'You'd go to the length of marrying me. Only fancy!'

'Oh, you may laugh. But I love you.'

'Do you love me as much as you used to love Helene?'

'I love you as much as it's possible for a man to love a woman.'

'Do you know what I think?'

'No. What?'

'If she were to send for you, one of these days, I think you'd forget me utterly. Your old love would come back at sight of her. They say she's very good-looking.'

'Nonsense.'

'I should like to try you.'

'I shouldn't fear the trial.'

'Il ne faut jamais dire a la fontaine, je ne boirai pas de ton eau.'

'But when one's thirst is for wine?'

'It shows that there's some relation between psychology and geography, after all,' she said.

'What do you mean?'

'Oh, the influence of places. It is here that you and she used to play a fugue on each other's names. The spot raises ghosts. Ghosts of your old emotions. And I'm conveniently at hand.'

'If you could see yourself, you'd understand that the influence of places is superfluous. If you could look into my heart you'd recognise that my emotion is scarcely a ghost.'

'There's one thing I should like to see,' she said. 'I should very much like to look into your garden at Saint-Graal.'

'Would you?' he cried eagerly. 'When will you come?'

'Whenever you like?'

'Now. At once.'

'No. To-morrow.'

'To-morrow morning?'

'Yes. You can await me at your park-gates at eleven.'

'Then you'll lunch with me?'

'No.... Perhaps.'

'You're an angel!'

And he trudged home on the air. 'If a woman will listen!' his heart sang. 'If a woman will come to see your garden!'

XIII.

That evening a servant handed him a letter.

'A footman has brought it from Granjolaye, and is waiting for an answer.'

The letter ran thus:—

'Monsieur:

'I am directed by Her Majesty the Queen Helene to request the pleasure of your company at the Chateau de Granjolaye to-morrow at eleven. Her Majesty desires me to add that she has only to-day learned of your presence in the country.

'Agreez, Monsieur, l'assurance de mes sentiments distingues,

'CTSSSE. DE WOLFENBACH.'

'Oh, this is staggering,' cried Paul. 'What to do?' He walked backwards and forwards, pondering his reply. 'I believe the only excuse that will pass with Royalty is illness or death. Shall I send word that I died suddenly this morning? Ah, well, here goes for a thumping lie.'

And he wrote: 'Madame, I am unspeakably honoured by her Majesty's command, and in despair that the state of my health makes it impossible for me to obey it. I am confined to my bed by a severe attack of bronchitis. Pray express to her Majesty my most respectful thanks as well as my profound regret. I shall hope to be able to leave my room at the week's end, when, if her Majesty can be prevailed upon again to accord me an audience, I shall be infinitely grateful.'

'There!' he muttered. 'I have perjured my soul for you, and made myself appear ridiculous into the bargain. Bronchitis! But—a demain! Good—good Lord! if she shouldn't come?'

XIV.

She came, followed by a groom. She greeted Paul with a smile that made his heart leap with a wild hope. Her groom led Bezigue away to the stables.

'Thank you,' said Paul.

'For what?'

'For everything. For coming. For that smile.'

'Oh.'

They walked about the garden. 'It is lovely. The prettiest garden of the neighbourhood,' she said. 'Show me where the irises grow, by the pond.' And when they had arrived there, 'They do look like princesses, don't they? Your little friend had some perceptions. Show me where you and she used to sit down. I am tired.'

He led her into a corner of the rosery. She sank upon the turf.

'It is nice here,' she said, 'and quite shut in. One would never know there was a house so near.'

She had taken off one of her gloves. Her soft white hand lay languidly in her lap. Suddenly Paul seized it, and kissed it—furiously—again and again. She yielded it. It was sweet to smell, and warm. 'My God, how I love you, how I love you!' he murmured.

When he looked up, she was smiling. 'Oh, you are radiant! You are divine!' he cried. And then her eyes filled with tears. 'What is it? What is it? You are unhappy?'

'Oh, no,' she said. 'But to think—to think that after all these years of misery, of heartbreak, it should end like this, here.'

'Here?' he questioned.

'I am glad your bronchitis is better, but you can invent the most awful fibs,' she said.

He looked at her, while the universe whirled round him.

'Helene!'

'Paul!'

XV.

Her divorce didn't carry with it the right to marry again. But she said, 'We can go on making believe we're married. Things one does in play are always so much nicer than real things.' And when he spoke of the 'world,' she answered, 'I have nothing to fear or to hope from the world. It has done its worst by me already.'

As they walked back to the house for luncheon, Paul looked into her face, and said, 'I can't believe my eyes, you know.'

She smiled and took his arm. 'J' t'aime tant,' she whispered.

'And now I can't believe my ears!'

And this would appear to be the end, but I suppose it can't be, for everybody says nowadays that nothing ever ends happily here below.