Only perhaps in this particular section of the British people could this particular effect of cheerful imperviousness have been achieved. They were not of the voracious, cultured hordes who make their way by their well-trained appreciations, nor of the fashionable lion-collecting tribe who do not need to make their way but who need to have their way made amusing. Well-bred, securely stationed, untouched by boredom or anxiety, they were at once too dull and too intelligent to be fluttered by the presence of a celebrity. They wanted nothing of her, except, perhaps, that after their coffee she should give them some music, and they did not want this at all eagerly.

If Madame von Marwitz had come to crush, to subjugate or to enchant, she had failed in every respect and Gregory saw that her failure was not lost upon her. Her manner, as the consciousness grew, became more frankly that of the vain, ill-tempered child, ignored. She ceased to speak; her eyes, fixed on the wall over Sir Oliver's head, enlarged in a sullen despondency.

Lady Montgomery was making her way through a bunch of grapes and Lady Mary had only peeled her peach, when, suddenly, taking upon herself the prerogative of a hostess, Madame von Marwitz caught up her fan and gloves with a gesture of open impatience, and swept to the door almost before Gregory had time to reach it or the startled guests to rise from their places.



CHAPTER XIX

When the time came for going to the drawing-room, Gregory found Betty entertaining the company there, while Karen, on a distant sofa, was apparently engaged in showing her guardian a book of photographs. He took in the situation at a glance, and, as he took it in, he was aware that part of its significance lay in the fact that it obliged him to a swift interchange with Betty, an interchange that irked him, defining as it did a community of understanding from which Karen, in her simplicity, was shut out.

He went across to the couple on the sofa. Only sudden illness could have excused Madame von Marwitz's departure from the dining-room, yet he determined to ask no questions, and to leave any explanations to her.

Karen's eyes, in looking at him, were grave and a little anxious; but the anxiety, he saw, was not on his account. "Tante wanted to see our kodaks," she said. "Do sit here with us, Gregory. Betty is talking to everybody so beautifully."

"But you must go and talk to everybody beautifully, too, now, darling," said Gregory. He put his hand on her shoulder and looked down at her smiling. The gesture, with its marital assurance, the smile that was almost a caress, were involuntary; yet they expressed more than his tender pride and solicitude, they defined his possession of her, and they excluded Tante. "It's been a nice little dinner, hasn't it," he went on, continuing to look at her and not at Madame von Marwitz. "I saw that the General was enjoying you immensely. There he is, looking over at you now; he wants to go on talking about Garibaldi with you. He said he'd never met a young woman so well up in modern history."

Madame von Marwitz's brooding eyes were on him while he thus spoke. He ignored them.

Karen looked a little perplexed. "Did you think it went so well, then, Gregory?"

"Why, didn't you?"

"I am not sure. I don't think I shall ever much like dinners, when I give them," she addressed herself to her guardian as well as to her husband. "They make one feel so responsible."

"Well, as far as you were responsible for this one you were responsible for its being very nice. Everybody enjoyed themselves. Now go and talk to the General."

"I did enjoy him," said Karen, half closing her book. "But Tante has rather a headache—I am afraid she is tired. You saw at dinner that she was tired."

"Yes, oh yes, indeed, I thought that you must be feeling a little ill, perhaps," Gregory observed blandly, turning his eyes now on Madame von Marwitz. "Well, you see, Karen, I will take your place here, and it will give me a chance for a quiet talk with your guardian."

"People must not bother her," Karen rose, pleased, he could see, with this arrangement, and hoping, he knew, that the opportunity was a propitious one, and that in it her dear ones might draw together. "You will see that they don't bother her, Gregory, and go on showing her these."

"They won't bother a bit, I promise," said Gregory, taking her place as she rose. "They are all very happily engaged, and Madame von Marwitz and I will look at the photographs in perfect peace."

Something in these words and in the manner with which her guardian received them, with a deepening of her long, steady glance, arrested Karen's departure. She stood above them, half confident, yet half hesitating.

"Go, mon enfant," said Madame von Marwitz, turning the steady glance on her. "Go. Nobody here, as your husband truly says, is thinking of me. I shall be quite untroubled."

Still with her look of preoccupation Karen moved away.

Cheerfully and deliberately Gregory now proceeded to turn the pages of the kodak album, and to point out with painstaking geniality the charms and associations of each view, "Tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin," expressed his thought, for he didn't believe that Madame von Marwitz, more than any person not completely self-abnegating, could tolerate looking at other people's kodaks. But since it was her chosen occupation, the best she could find to do with their dinner-party, she should be gratified; should be shown Karen standing on a peak in the Tyrol; Karen feeding the pigeons before St. Mark's; Karen, again—wasn't it rather nice of her?—in a gondola. Madame von Marwitz bent her head with its swinging pearls above the pictures, proffering now and then a low murmur of assent.

But in the midst of the Paris pictures she lifted her head and looked at him. It was again the steady, penetrating look, and now it seemed, with the smile that veiled it, to claim some common understanding rather than seek it. "Enough," she said. She dismissed the kodaks with a tap of her fan. "I wish to talk with you. I wish to talk with you of our Karen."

Gregory closed the volume. Madame von Marwitz's attitude as she leaned back, her arms lightly folded, affected him in its deliberate grace and power as newly significant. Keeping his frosty, observant eyes upon her, Gregory waited for what she had to say. "I am glad, very glad, that you have given me this opportunity for a quiet conversation," so she took up the threads of her intention. "I have wanted, for long, to consult with you about various matters concerning Karen, and, in especial, about her future life. Tell me—this is what I wish in particular to ask you—you are going, are you not, in time, when she has learned more skill in social arts, to take my Karen into the world—dans le monde," Madame von Marwitz repeated, as though to make her meaning genially clear. "Skill she is as yet too young to have mastered—or cared to master. But she had always been at ease on the largest stage, and she will do you credit, I assure you."

It was rather, to Gregory's imagination—always quick at similes—as though she had struck a well-aimed blow right in the centre of a huge gong hanging between them. There she was, the blow said. It was this she meant. No open avowal of hostility could have been more reverberating or purposeful, and no open avowal of hostility would have been so sinister. But Gregory, though his ears seemed to ring with the clang of it, was ready for her. He, too, with folded arms, sat leaning back and he, too, smiled genially. "That's rather crushing, you know," he made reply, "or didn't you? Karen is in my world. This is my world."

Madame von Marwitz gazed at him for a moment as if to gauge his seriousness. And then she turned her eyes on his world and gazed at that. It was mildly chatting. It was placid, cheerful, unaware of deficiency. It thought that it was enjoying itself. It was, indeed, enjoying itself, if with the slightest of materials. Betty and Bertram Fraser laughed together; Lady Mary and Oliver ever so slowly conversed. Constance Byng and Mr. Overton discussed the latest opera, young Byng had joined Karen and the General, and a comfortable drone of politics came from Mrs. Overton and Mr. Canning-Thompson. Removed a little from these groups Lady Montgomery, very much like a turtle, sat with her head erect and her eyes half closed, evidently sleepy. It was upon Lady Montgomery that Madame von Marwitz's gaze dwelt longest.

"You are contented," she then said to Gregory, "with these good people; for yourself and for your wife?"

"Perfectly," said Gregory. "You see, Karen has married a commonplace person."

Madame von Marwitz paused again, and again her eyes dwelt on Lady Montgomery, whose pink feathers had given a sudden nod and then serenely righted themselves. "I see," she then remarked. "But she is not contented."

"Ah, come," said Gregory. "You can't shatter the conceit of a happy husband so easily, Madame von Marwitz. You ask too much of me if you ask me to believe that Karen makes confidences to you that she doesn't to me. I can't take it on, you know," he continued to smile.

He had already felt that the loveliness of Madame von Marwitz's face was a veil for its coldness, and hints had come to him that it masked, also, some more sinister quality. And now, for a moment, as if a primeval creature peeped at him from among delicate woodlands, a racial savagery crossed her face with a strange, distorting tremor. The blood mounted to her brow; her skin darkened curiously, and her eyes became hot and heavy as though the very irises felt the glow.

"You do not accept my word, Mr. Jardine?" she said. Her voice was controlled, but he had a disagreeable sensation of scorching, as though a hot iron had been passed slowly before his face.

Gregory shook his foot a little, clasping his ankle. "I don't say that, of course. But I'm glad to think you're mistaken."

"Let me tell you, Mr. Jardine," she returned, still with the curbed elemental fury colouring her face and voice, "that even a happy husband's conceit is no match for a mother's intuition. Karen is like my child to me; and to its mother a child makes confidences that it is unaware of making. Karen finds your world narrow; borne; it does not afford her the wide life she has known."

"You mean," said Gregory, "the life she led with Mrs. Talcott?"

He had not meant to say it. If he had paused to think it over he would have seen that it exposed him to her as consciously hostile and also as almost feminine in his malice. And, as if this recognition of his false move restored to her her full self-mastery, she met his irony with a masculine sincerity, putting him, as on the occasion of their first encounter, lamentably in the wrong. "Ah," she commented, her eyes dwelling on him. "Ah, I see. You have wondered. You have criticized. You have, I think, Mr. Jardine, misunderstood my life and its capacities. Allow me to explain. Your wife is the creature dearest to me in the world, and if you misread my devotion to her you endanger our relation. You would not, I am sure, wish to do that; is it not so? Allow me therefore to exculpate myself. I am a woman who, since childhood, has had to labour for my livelihood and for that of those I love. You can know nothing of what that labour of the artist's life entails,—interminable journeys, suffocating ennui, the unwholesome monotony and publicity of a life passed in hotels and trains. It was not fit that a young and growing girl should share that life. As much as has been possible I have guarded Karen from its dust and weariness. I have had, of necessity, to leave her much alone, and she has needed protection, stability, peace. I could have placed her in no lovelier spot than my Cornish home, nor in safer hands than those of the guardian and companion of my own youth. Do you not feel it a little unworthy, Mr. Jardine, when you have all the present and all the future, to grudge me even my past with my child?"

She spoke slowly, with a noble dignity, all hint of sultry menace passed; willing, for Karen's sake, to stoop to this self-justification before Karen's husband. And, for Karen's sake, she had the air of holding in steady hands their relation, hers and his, assailed so gracelessly by his taunting words. Gregory, for the first time in his knowledge of her, felt a little bewildered. It was she who had opened hostilities, yet she almost made him forget it; she almost made him feel that he alone had been graceless. "I do beg your pardon," he said. "Yes; I had wondered a little about it; and I understand better now." But he gathered his wits together sufficiently to add, on a fairer foothold: "I am sure you gave Karen all you could. What I meant was, I think, that you should be generous enough to believe that I am giving her all I can."

Madame von Marwitz rose as he said this and he also got up. It was not so much, Gregory was aware, that they had fought to a truce as that they had openly crossed swords. Her eyes still dwelt on him, and now as if in a sad wonder. "But you are young. You are a man. You have ambition. You wish to give more to the loved woman."

"I don't really quite know what you mean by more, Madame von Marwitz," said Gregory. "If it applies to my world, I don't expect, or wish, to give Karen a better one."

They stood and confronted each other for a moment of silence.

"Bien," Madame von Marwitz then said, unemphatically, mildly. "Bien. I must see what I can do." She turned her eyes on Karen, who, immediately aware of her glance, hastened to her. Madame von Marwitz laid an arm about her neck. "I must bid you good-night, ma cherie. I am very tired."

"Tante, dear, I saw that you were so tired, I am so sorry. It has all been a weariness to you," Karen murmured.

"No, my child; no," Madame von Marwitz smiled down into her eyes, passing her hand lightly over the little white-rose wreath. "I have seen you, and seen you happy; that is happiness enough for me. Good-night, Mr. Jardine. Karen will come with me."

Pausing for no further farewells, Madame von Marwitz passed from the room with a majestic, generalized bending of the head.

Betty joined her brother-in-law. "Dear me, Gregory," she said. "We've had the tragic muse to supper, haven't we. What is the matter, what has been the matter with Madame von Marwitz? Is she ill?"

"She says she's tired," said Gregory.

"It was disconcerting, wasn't it, her trailing suddenly out of the dining-room in that singular fashion," said Betty. "Do you know, Gregory, that I'm getting quite vexed with Madame von Marwitz."

"Really? Why, Betty?"

"Well, it has been accumulating. I'm a very easy-going person, you know; but I've been noticing that whenever I want Karen, Madame von Marwitz always nips in and cuts me out, so that I have hardly seen her at all since her guardian came to London. And then it did rather rile me, I confess, to find that the one hat in Karen's trousseau that I specially chose for her is the one—the only one—that Madame von Marwitz objects to. Karen never wears it now. She certainly behaved very absurdly to-night, Gregory. I suppose she expected us to sit round in a circle and stare."

"Perhaps she did," Gregory acquiesced. "Perhaps we should have."

He was anxious to maintain the appearance of bland lightness before Betty. Karen had re-entered as they spoke and Betty called her to them. "Tell me, Karen dear, is Madame von Marwitz ill? She didn't give me a chance to say good-night to her." Betty had the air of wishing to exonerate herself.

"She isn't ill," said Karen, whose face was grave. "But very tired."

"Now what made her tired, I wonder?" Betty mused. "She looks such a robust person."

It was bad of Betty, and as Karen stood before them, looking from one to the other, Gregory saw that she suspected them. Her face hardened. "A great artist needs to be robust," she said. "My guardian works every day at her piano for five or six hours."

"Dear me," Betty murmured. "How splendid. I'd no idea the big ones had to keep it up like that."

"There is great ignorance about an artist's life," Karen continued coldly to inform her. "Do you not know what von Bulow said: If I miss my practising for one day I notice it; if for two days my friends notice it; if I miss it for three days the public notices it. The artist is like an acrobat, juggling always, intent always on his three golden balls kept flying in the air. That is what it is like. Every atom of their strength is used. People, like my guardian, literally give their lives for the world."

"Oh, yes, it is wonderful, of course," Betty assented. "But of course they must enjoy it; it can hardly be called a sacrifice."

"Enjoy is a very small word to apply to such a great thing," said Karen. "You may say also, if you like, that the saint enjoys his life of suffering for others. It is his life to give himself to goodness; it is the artist's life to give himself to beauty. But it is beauty and goodness they seek, not enjoyment; we must not try to measure these great people by our standards."

Before this arraignment Betty showed a tact for which Gregory was grateful to her. He, as so often, found Karen, in her innocent sententiousness, at once absurd and adorable, but he could grant that to Betty she might seem absurd only.

"Don't be cross with me, Karen," she said. "I suppose I am feeling sore at being snubbed by Madame von Marwitz."

"But indeed she did not mean to snub you, Betty," said Karen earnestly. "And I am not cross; please do not think that. Only I cannot bear to hear some of the things that are said of artists."

"Well, prove that you're not cross," said Betty, smiling, "by at last giving me an afternoon when we can do something together. Will you come and see the pictures at Burlington House with me to-morrow and have tea with me afterwards? I've really seen nothing of you for so long."

"To-morrow is promised to Tante, Betty. I'm so sorry. Her great concert is to be on Friday, you know; and till then, and on the Saturday, I have said that I will be with her. She gets so very tired. And I know how to take care of her when she is tired like that."

"Oh, dear!" Betty sighed. "There is no hope for us poor little people, is there, while Madame von Marwitz is in London. Well, on Monday, then, Karen. Will you promise me Monday afternoon?"

"Monday is free, and I shall like so very much to come, Betty," Karen replied.

When Gregory and his wife were left alone together, they stood for some moments without speaking on either side of the fire, and, as Karen's eyes were on the flames, Gregory, looking at her carefully, read on her face the signs of stress and self-command. The irony, the irritation and the oppression that Madame von Marwitz had aroused in him this evening merged suddenly, as he looked at Karen into intense anger. What had she not done to them already, sinister woman? It was because of her that constraint, reticence and uncertainty were rising again between him and Karen.

"Darling," he said, putting out his hand and drawing her to him; "you look very tired."

She came, he fancied, with at first a little reluctance, but, as he put his arm around her, she leaned her head against his shoulder with a sigh. "I am tired, Gregory."

They stood thus for some moments and then, as if the confident tenderness their attitude expressed forced her to face with him their difficulty, she said carefully: "Gregory, dear, did you say anything to depress Tante this evening?"

"Why do you ask, darling?" Gregory, after a slight pause, also carefully inquired.

"Only that she seemed depressed, very much depressed. I thought, I hoped that you and she were talking so nicely, so happily."

There was another little pause and then Gregory said: "She rather depressed me, I think."

"Depressed you? But how, Gregory?"

He must indeed be very careful. It was far too late, now, for simple frankness; simple frankness had, perhaps, from the beginning been impossible and in that fact lay the insecurity of his position, and the immense advantage of Madame von Marwitz's. And as he paused and sought his words it was as if, in the image of the Bouddha, looking down upon him and Karen, Madame von Marwitz were with them now, a tranquil and ironic witness of his discomfiture. "Well," he said, "she made me feel that I had only a very dingy sort of life to offer you and that my friends were all very tiresome—borne was the word she used. That did rather—well—dash my spirits."

Standing there within his arm, of her face, seen from above, only the brow, the eyelashes, the cheek visible, she was very still for a long moment. Then, gently, she said—and in the gentleness he felt that she put aside the too natural suspicion that he was complaining of Tante behind her back: "She doesn't realise that I don't care at all about people. And they are rather bornes, aren't they, Gregory."

"I don't find them so," said Gregory, reasonably. "They aren't geniuses, of course, or acrobats, or saints, or anything of that sort; but they seem to me, on the whole, a very nice lot of people."

"Very nice indeed, Gregory. But I don't think it is saints and geniuses that Tante misses here; she misses minds that are able to recognise genius." Her quick ear had caught the involuntary irony of his quotation.

"Ah, but, dear, you mustn't expect to find the average nice person able to pay homage at a dinner-party. There is a time and a place for everything, isn't there."

"It was not that I meant, Gregory, or that Tante meant. There is always a place for intelligence. It wasn't an interesting dinner, you must have felt that as well as I, not the sort of dinner Tante would naturally expect. They were only interested in their own things, weren't they? And quite apart from homage, there is such a thing as realisation. Mr. Fraser talked to Tante—I saw it all quite well—as he might have talked to the next dowager he met. Tante isn't used to being talked to as if she were toute comme une autre; she isn't toute comme une autre."

"But one must pretend to be, at a dinner-party," Gregory returned. To have to defend his friends when it was Tante who stood so lamentably in need of defence had begun to work upon his nerves. "And some dowagers are as interesting as anybody. There are all sorts of ways of being interesting. Dowagers are as intelligent as geniuses sometimes." His lightness was not unprovocative.

"It isn't funny, Gregory, to see Tante put into a false position."

"But, my dear, we did the best we could for her."

"I know that we did; and our best isn't good enough for her. That is all that I ask you to realise," said Karen.

She was angry, and from the depths of his anger against Madame von Marwitz Gregory felt a little gush of anger against Karen rise. "You are telling me what she told me," he said; "that my best isn't good enough for her. You may say it and think it, of course; but it's a thing that Madame von Marwitz has no right to say."

Karen moved away from his arm. Something more than the old girlish sternness was in the look with which she faced him, though that flashed at him, a shield rather than a weapon. He recognised the hidden pain and astonishment and his anger faded in tenderness. How could she but resent and repell any hint that belittled Tante's claims and justifications? how could she hear but with dismay the half threat of his last words, the intimation that from her he would accept what he would not accept from Tante? The sudden compunction of his comprehension almost brought the tears to his eyes. Karen saw that his resistance melted and the sternness fell from her look. "But Gregory," she said, her voice a little trembling, "Tante did not say that. Please don't make mistakes. It is so dreadful to misunderstand; nothing frightens me so much. I say it; that our best isn't good enough, and I am thinking of Tante; only of Tante; but she—too sweetly and mistakenly—was thinking of me. Tante doesn't care, for herself, about our world; why should she? And she is mistaken to care about it for me; because it makes no difference, none at all, to me, if it is borne. All that I care about, you know that, Gregory, is you and Tante."

Gregory had his arms around her. "Do forgive me, darling," he said.

"But was I horrid?" Karen asked.

"No. It was I who was stupid," he said. "Do you know, I believe we were almost quarrelling, Karen."

"And we can quarrel safely—you and I, Gregory, can't we?" Karen said, her voice still trembling.

He leaned his head against her hair. "Of course we can. Only—don't let us quarrel—ever. It is so dreadful."

"Isn't it dreadful, Gregory. But we must not let it frighten us, ever, because of course we must quarrel now and then. And we often have already, haven't we," she went on, reassuring him, and herself. "Do you remember, in the Tyrol, about the black bread!—And I was right that time.—And the terrible conflict in Paris, about La Gaine d'Or; when I said you were a Philistine."

"Well, you owned afterwards, after you read about the beastly thing, that you were glad we hadn't gone."

"Yes; I was glad. You were right there. Sometimes it is you and sometimes I," Karen declared, as if that were the happy solution.

So, in their mutual love, they put aside the menacing difference. Something had happened, they could but be aware of that; but their love tided them over. They did not argue further as to who was right and who wrong that evening.



CHAPTER XX

The first of Madame von Marwitz's great concerts was given on Friday, and Karen spent the whole of that day and of Saturday with her, summoned by an urgent telephone message early in the morning. On Sunday she was still secluded in her rooms, and Miss Scrotton, breaking in determinedly upon her, found her lying prone upon the sofa, Karen beside her.

"I cannot see you, my Scrotton," said Madame von Marwitz, with kindly yet listless decision. "Did they not tell you below that I was seeing nobody? Karen is with me to watch over my ill-temper. She is a soothing little milk-poultice and I can bear nothing else. I am worn out."

Before poor Miss Scrotton's brow of gloom Karen suggested that she should herself go down to Mrs. Forrester for tea and leave her place to Miss Scrotton, but, with a weary shake of the head, Madame von Marwitz rejected the proposal. "No; Scrotton is too intelligent for me to-day," she said. "You will go down to Mrs. Forrester for your tea, my Scrotton, and wait for another day to see me."

Miss Scrotton went down nearly in tears.

"She refused to see Sir Alliston," Mrs. Forrester said, soothingly. "She really is fit for nothing. I have never seen her so exhausted."

"Yet Karen Jardine always manages to force her way in," said Miss Scrotton, controlling the tears with difficulty. "She has absolutely taken possession of Mercedes. It really is almost absurd, such devotion, and in a married woman. Gregory doesn't like it at all. Oh, I know it. Betty Jardine gave me a hint only yesterday of how matters stand."

"Lady Jardine has always seemed to me a rather trivial little person. I should not accept her impression of a situation," said Mrs. Forrester. "Mercedes sends for Karen constantly. And I am sure that Gregory is glad to think that she can be of use to Mercedes."

"Oh, Betty Jardine thinks, too, that it is Mercedes who takes Karen from her husband. But I really can't agree with her, or with you, dear Mrs. Forrester, there. Mercedes is simply too indolent and kind-hearted to defend herself from the sort of habit the girl has imposed upon her. As for Gregory being grateful I can only assure you that you are entirely mistaken. My own impression is that he is beginning to dislike Mercedes. Oh, he is a very jealous temperament; I have always felt it in him. He is one of those cold, passionate men who become the most infatuated and tyrannical of husbands."

"My dear Eleanor," Mrs. Forrester raised her eyebrows. "I see no sign of tyranny. He allows Karen to come here constantly."

"Yes; because he knows that to refuse would be to endanger his relation to her. Mercedes is angelic to him of course, and doesn't give him a chance for making things difficult for Karen. But it is quite obvious to me that he hates the whole situation."

"I hope not," said Mrs. Forrester, gravely now. "I hope not. It would be tragical indeed if this last close relation in Mercedes's life were to be spoiled for her. I could not forgive Gregory if he made it difficult in any way for Karen to be with her guardian."

"Well, as long as he can conceal his jealousy, Mercedes will manage, I suppose, to keep things smooth. But I can't see it as you do, Mrs. Forrester. I can't believe for a moment that Mercedes needs Karen or that the tie is such a close one. She only likes to see her now because she is bored and impatient and unhappy, and Karen is—she said it just now, before the girl—a poultice for her nerves. And the reason for her nerves isn't far to seek. I must be frank with you, dear Mrs. Forrester; you know I always have been, and I'm distressed, deeply distressed about Mercedes. She expected Claude Drew to be back from America by now and I heard yesterday from that horrid young friend of his, Algernon Bently, that he has again postponed his return. It's that that agonizes and infuriates Mercedes, it's that that makes her unwilling to be alone with me. I've seen too much; I know too much; she fears me, Mrs. Forrester. She knows that I know that Claude Drew is punishing her now for having snubbed him in America."

"My dear Eleanor," Mrs. Forrester murmured distressfully. "You exaggerate that young man's significance."

"Dear Mrs. Forrester," Miss Scrotton returned, almost now with a solemn exasperation, "I wish it were possible to exaggerate it. I watched it grow. His very effrontery fascinates her. We know, you and I, what Mercedes expects in devotion from a man who cares for her. They must adore her on their knees. Now Mr. Drew adored standing nonchalantly on his feet and looking coolly into her eyes. She resented it; she had constantly to put him in his place. But she would rather have him out of his place than not have him there at all. That is what she is feeling now. That is why she is so worn out. She is wishing that Claude Drew would come back from America, and she is wanting to write one letter to his ten and finding that she writes five. He writes to her constantly, I suppose?"

"I believe he does," Mrs. Forrester conceded. "Mercedes is quite open about the frequency of his letters. I am sure that you exaggerate, Eleanor. He interests her, and he charms her if you will. Like every woman, she is aware of devotion and pleased by it. I don't believe it's anything more."

"I believe," said Miss Scrotton, after a moment, and with resolution, "that it's a great passion; the last great passion of her life."

"Oh, my dear!"

"A great passion," Miss Scrotton persisted, "and for a man whom she knows not to be in any way her equal. It is that that exasperates her."

Mrs. Forrester meditated for a little while and then, owning to a certain mutual recognition of facts, she said: "I don't believe that it's a great passion; but I think that a woman like Mercedes, a genius of that scope, needs always to feel in her life the elements of a 'situation'—and life always provides such women with a choice of situations. They are stimulants. Mr. Drew and his like, with whatever unrest and emotion they may cause her, nourish her art. Even a great passion would be a tempest that filled her sails and drove her on; in the midst of it she would never lose the power of steering. She has essentially the strength and detachment of genius. She watches her own emotions and makes use of them. Did you ever hear her play more magnificently than on Friday? If Mr. Drew y etait pour quelque chose, it was in the sense that she made mincemeat of him and presented us in consequence with a magnificent sausage."

Miss Scrotton, who had somewhat forgotten her personal grievance in the exhilaration of these analyses, granted the sausage and granted that Mercedes made mincemeat of Mr. Drew—and of her friends into the bargain. "But my contention and my fear is," she said, "that he will make mincemeat of her before he is done with her."

Miss Scrotton did not rank highly for wisdom in Mrs. Forrester's estimation; but for her perspicacity and intelligence she had more regard than she cared to admit. Echoes of Eleanor's distrusts and fears remained with her, and, though it was but a minor one, such an echo vibrated loudly on Monday afternoon when Betty Jardine appeared at tea-time with Karen.

It was the afternoon that Karen had promised to Betty, and when this fact had been made known to Tante it was no grievance and no protest that she showed, only a slight hesitation, a slight gravity, and then, as if with cheerful courage in the face of an old sadness: "Eh bien," she said. "Bring her back here to tea, ma cherie. So I shall come to know this new friend of my Karen's better."

Betty was not at all pleased at being brought back to tea. But Karen asked her so gravely and prettily and said so urgently that Tante wanted especially to know her better, and asked, moreover, if Betty would let her come to lunch with her instead of tea, so that they should have their full time together, that Betty once more pocketed her suspicions of a design on Madame von Marwitz's part. The suspicion was there, however, in her pocket, and she kept her hand on it rather as if it were a small but efficacious pistol which she carried about in case of an emergency. Betty was one who could aim steadily and shoot straight when occasion demanded. It was a latent antagonist who entered Mrs. Forrester's drawing-room on that Monday afternoon, Karen, all guileless, following after. Mrs. Forrester and the Baroness were alone and, in a deep Chesterfield near the tea-table, Madame von Marwitz leaned an arm, bared to the elbow, in cushions and rested a meditative head on her hand. She half rose to greet Betty. "This is kind of you, Lady Jardine," she said. "I feared that I had lost my Karen for the afternoon. Elle me manque toujours; she knows that." Smiling up at Karen she drew her down beside her, studying her with eyes of fond, maternal solicitude. "My child looks well, does she not, Mrs. Forrester? And the pretty hat! I am glad not to see the foolish green one."

"Oh, I like the green one very much, Tante," said Karen. "But you shall not see it again."

"I hope I'm to see it again," said Betty, turning over her pistol. "I chose it, you know."

Madame von Marwitz turned startled eyes upon her. "Ah—but I did not know. Did you tell me this, Karen?" the eyes of distress now turned to Karen. "Have I forgotten? Was the green hat, the little green hat with the wing, indeed of Lady Jardine's choosing? Have I been so very rude?"

"Betty will understand, Tante," said Karen—while Mrs. Forrester, softly chinking among her blue Worcester teacups, kept a cogitating eye on Betty Jardine—"that I have so many new hats now that you must easily forget which is which."

"All I ask," said Betty, laughing over her mishap, "is that I, sometimes, may see Karen in the green hat, for I think it charming."

"Indeed, Betty, so do I," said Karen, smiling.

"And I must be forgiven for not liking the green hat," Madame von Marwitz returned.

Betty and Karen were supplied with tea, and after they had selected their cakes, and a few inconsequent remarks had been exchanged, Madame von Marwitz said:

"And now, my Karen, I have a little plan to tell you of; a little treat that I have arranged for you. We are to go together, on this next Saturday, to stay at Thole Castle with my friends the Duke and Duchess of Bannister. I have told them that I wish to bring my child."

"But how delightful, Tante. It is to be in the country? We shall be there, you and I and Gregory, till Monday?"

"I thought that I should please you. Yes; till Monday. And in beautiful country. But it is to be our own small treat; yours and mine. Your husband will lend you to me for those two days." Holding the girl's hand Madame von Marwitz smiled indulgently at her, with eyes only for her. Betty, however, was listening.

"But cannot Gregory come, too, Tante?" Karen questioned, her pleasure dashed.

"These friends of mine, my Karen," said Madame von Marwitz, "have heard of you as mine only. It is as my child that you will come with me; just as it is as your husband's wife that you see his friends. That is quite clear, quite happy, quite understood."

Karen's eyes now turned on Betty. They did not seek counsel, they asked no question of Betty; but they gave her, in their slight bewilderment, her opportunity.

"But Karen, I think you are right," so she took up the gage that Madame von Marwitz had flung. "I don't think that you must accept this invitation without, at least, consulting Gregory."

Madame von Marwitz did not look at her. She continued to gaze as serenely at Karen as though Betty were a dog that had barked irrelevantly from the hearth-rug. But Karen fixed widened eyes upon her.

"I do not need to consult Gregory, Betty," she said. "We have, I know, no engagements for this Saturday to Monday, and he will be delighted for me that I am to go with Tante."

"That may be, my dear," Betty returned with a manner as imperturbable as Madame von Marwitz's; "but I think that you should give him an opportunity of saying so. He may not care for his wife to go to strangers without him."

"They are not strangers. They are friends of Tante's."

"Gregory may not care for you to make—as Madame von Marwitz suggests—a different set of friends from his own."

"If they become my friends they will become his," said Karen.

During this little altercation, Madame von Marwitz, large and white, her profile turned to Betty, sat holding Karen's hand and gazing at her with an almost slumbrous melancholy.

Mrs. Forrester, controlling her displeasure with some difficulty, interposed. "I don't think Lady Jardine really quite understands the position, Karen," she said. "It isn't the normal one, Lady Jardine. Madame von Marwitz stands, really, to Karen in a mother's place."

"Oh, but I can't agree with you, Mrs. Forrester," Betty replied. "Madame von Marwitz doesn't strike me as being in the least like Karen's mother. And she isn't Karen's mother. And Karen's husband, now, should certainly stand first in her life."

A silence followed the sharp report. Mrs. Forrester's and Karen's eyes had turned on the Baroness who sat still, as though her breast had received the shot. With tragic eyes she gazed out above Karen's head; then: "It is true," she said in a low voice, as though communing with herself; "I am indeed alone." She rose. With the slow step of a Niobe she moved down the room and disappeared.

"I do not forgive you for this, Betty," said Karen, following her guardian. Betty, like a naughty school-girl, was left confronting Mrs. Forrester across the tea-table.

"Lady Jardine," said the old lady, fixing her bright eyes on her guest, "I don't think you can have realised what you were saying. Madame von Marwitz's isolation is one of the many tragedies of her life, and you have made it clear to her."

"I'm very sorry," said Betty. "But I feel what Madame von Marwitz is doing to be so mistaken, so wrong."

"These formalities don't obtain nowadays, especially if a wife is so singularly related to a woman like Madame von Marwitz. And Mercedes is quite above all such little consciousnesses, I assure you. She is not aware of sets, in that petty way. It is merely a treat she is giving the child, for she knows how much Karen loves to be with her. And it is only in her train that Karen goes."

"Precisely." Betty had risen and stood smoothing her muff and not feigning to smile. "In her train. I don't think that Gregory's wife should go in anybody's train."

"It was markedly in Mercedes's train that he found her."

"All the more reason for wishing now to withdraw her from it. Karen has become something more than Madame von Marwitz's panache."

Mrs. Forrester at this fixed Betty very hard and echoes of Miss Scrotton rang loudly. "You must let me warn you, Lady Jardine," she said, "that you are making a position, difficult already for Mercedes, more difficult still. It would be a grievous thing if Karen were to recognize her husband's jealousy. I'm afraid I can't avoid seeing what you have made so plain to-day, that Gregory is trying to undermine Karen's relation to her guardian."

At this Betty had actually to laugh. "But don't you see that it is simply the other way round?" she said. "It is Madame von Marwitz who is trying to undermine Karen's relation to Gregory. It is she who is jealous. It's that I can't avoid seeing."

"I don't think we have anything to gain by continuing this conversation," Mrs. Forrester replied. "May I give you some more tea before you go?"

"No, thanks. Is Karen coming with me, I wonder? We had arranged that I was to take her home."

Mrs. Forrester rang the bell and she and Betty stood in an uneasy silence until the man returned to say that Mrs. Jardine was to spend the evening with Madame von Marwitz who had suddenly been taken very ill.

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear!" Mrs. Forrester almost moaned. "This means one of her terrible headaches and we were to have dined out. I must telephone excuses at once."

"I wish I hadn't had to make you think me such a pig," said Betty.

"I don't think you a pig," said Mrs. Forrester, "but I do think you a very mistaken and a very unwise woman. And I do beg you, for Gregory and for Karen's sake, to be careful what you do."



CHAPTER XXI

"I'm afraid you think that I've made a dreadful mess of things, Gregory. I simply couldn't help myself," said Betty, half an hour later. "If only she hadn't gone on gazing at Karen in that aggressive way I might have curbed my tongue, and if only, afterwards, Mrs. Forrester hadn't shown herself such an infatuated partisan. But I'm afraid she was right in saying that I was an unwise woman. Certainly I haven't made things easier for you, unless you want a situation nette. It's there to your hand if you do want it, and in your place I should. It was a challenge she gave, you know, to you through me. After the other night there was no mistaking it. I should forbid Karen to go on Saturday."

Gregory stood before her still wearing his overcoat, for they had driven up simultaneously to the door below, his hands in his pockets and eyes of deep cogitation fixed on his sister-in-law. He was inclined to think that she had made a dreadful mess of things; yet, at the same time, he was feeling a certain elation in the chaos thus created.

"You advise me to declare war on Madame von Marwitz?" he inquired. "Come; the situation is hardly nette enough to warrant that; what?"

"Ah; you do see it then!" Betty from the sofa where she sat erect, her hands in her muff, almost joyfully declared. "You do see, then, what she is after!"

He didn't intend to let Betty see what he saw, if that were now possible. "She's after Karen, of course; but why not? It's a jealous and exacting affection, that is evident; but as long as Karen cares to satisfy it I'm quite pleased that she should. I can't declare war on Madame von Marwitz, Betty, even if I wanted to. Because, if she is fond of Karen, Karen is ten times fonder of her."

"Expose her to Karen!" Betty magnificently urged. "You can I'm sure. You're been seeing things more and more clearly, just as I have; you've been seeing that Madame von Marwitz, as far as her character goes, is a fraud. Trip her up. Have things out. Gregory, I warn you, she's a dangerous woman, and Karen is a very simple one."

"But that's just it, my dear Betty. If Karen is too simple to see, now, that she's dangerous, how shall I make her look so? It's I who'll look the jealous idiot Mrs. Forrester thinks me," Gregory half mused to himself. "And, besides, I really don't know that I should want to trip her up. I don't know that I should like to have Karen disillusioned. She's a fraud if you like, and Karen, as I say, is ten times fonder of her than she is of Karen; but she is fond of Karen; I do believe that. And she has been a fairy-godmother to her. And they have been through all sorts of things together. No; their relationship is one that has its rights. I see it, and I intend to make Madame von Marwitz feel that I see it. So that my only plan is to go on being suave and acquiescent."

"Well; you may have to sacrifice me, then. Karen is indignant with me, I warn you."

"I'm a resourceful person, Betty. I shan't sacrifice you. And you must be patient with Karen."

Betty, who had risen, stood for a moment looking at the Bouddha. "Patient? I should think so. She is the one I'm sorriest for. Are you going to keep that ridiculous thing in here permanently, Gregory?"

"It's symbolic, isn't it?" said Gregory. "It will stay here, I suppose, as long as Madame von Marwitz and Karen go on caring for each other. With all my griefs and suspicions I hope that the Bouddha is a fixture."

He felt, after Betty had gone, that he had burned a good many of his boats in thus making her, to some extent, his confidant. He had confessed that he had griefs and suspicions, and that, in itself, was to involve still further his relation to his wife. But he had kept from Betty how grave were his grounds for suspicion. The bearing away of Karen to the ducal week-end wasn't really, in itself, so alarming an incident; but, as a sequel to Madame von Marwitz's parting declaration of the other evening, her supremely insolent, "I must see what I can do," it became sinister and affected him like the sound of a second, more prolonged, more reverberating clash upon the gong. To submit was to show himself in Madame von Marwitz's eyes as contemptibly supine; to protest was to appear in Karen's as meanly petty.

His reflections were interrupted by the ringing of the telephone and when he went to it Karen's voice told him that she was spending the evening with Tante, who was ill, and that she would not be back till ten. Something chill and authoritative in the tones affected him unpleasantly. Karen considered that she had a grievance and perhaps suspected him of being its cause. After all, he thought, hanging up the receiver with some abruptness, there was such a thing as being too simple. One had, indeed, to be very patient with her. And one thing he promised himself whatever came of it; he wasn't going to sacrifice Betty by one jot or tittle to his duel with Madame von Marwitz.

It was past ten when Karen returned and his mood of latent hostility melted when he saw how tired she looked and how unhappy. She, too, had steeled herself in advance against something that she expected to find in him and he was thankful to feel that she wouldn't find it. She was to find him suave and acquiescent; he would consent without a murmur to Madame von Marwitz's plan for the week-end.

"Darling, I'm so sorry that she's ill, your guardian," he said, taking her hat and coat from her as she sank wearily on the sofa. "How is she now?"

She looked up at him in the rosy light of the electric lamps and her face showed no temporizing recognitions or gratitudes. "Gregory," she said abruptly, "do you mind—does it displease you—if I go with Tante next Saturday to stay with some friends of hers?"

"Mind? Why should I?" said Gregory, standing before her with his hands in his pockets. "I'd rather have you here, of course. I've been feeling a little deserted lately. But I want you to do anything that gives you pleasure."

She studied him. "Betty thought it a wrong thing for me to do. She hurt Tante's feelings deeply this afternoon. She spoke as if she had some authority to come between you and me and between me and Tante. I am very much displeased with her," said Karen, with her strangely mature decision.

The moment had come, decisively, not to sacrifice Betty. "Betty sees things more conventionally and perhaps more wisely," he said, "than you or I—or Madame von Marwitz, even, perhaps. She feels a sense of responsibility towards you—and towards me. Anything she said she meant kindly, I'm sure."

Karen listened carefully as though mastering herself. "Responsibility towards me? Why should she? I feel none towards her."

"But, my dear child, that wouldn't be in your place," he could not control the ironic note. "You are a younger woman and a much more inexperienced one. It's merely as if you'd married into a family where there was an elder sister to look after you."

Karen's eyes dwelt on him and her face was cold, rocky. "Do you forget, as she does, that I have still with me a person who, for years, has looked after me, a person older still and more experienced still than the little Betty? I don't need any guidance from your sister; for I have my guardian to tell me, as she always has, what is best for me to do. It is impertinent of Betty to imagine that she has any right to interfere. And she was more than impertinent. I had not wished to tell you; but you must understand that Betty has been insolent."

"Come, Karen; don't use such unsuitable words. Hasty perhaps; not insolent. Betty herself has told me all about it."

A steely penetration came to Karen's eyes. "She has told you? She has been here?"

"Yes."

"She complained of Tante to you?"

"She thinks her wrong."

"And you; you think her wrong?"

Gregory paused and looked at the young girl on the sofa, his wife. There was that in her attitude, exhausted yet unappealing, in her face, weary yet implacable, which, while it made her seem pitiful to him, made her also almost a stranger; this armed hostility towards himself, who loved her, this quickness of resentment, this cold assurance of right. He could understand and pity; but he, too, was tired and overwrought. What had he done to deserve such a look and such a tone from her except endure, with unexampled patience, the pressure upon his life, soft, unremitting, sinister, of something hateful to him and menacing to their happiness? What, above all, was his place in this deep but narrow young heart? It seemed filled with but one absorbing preoccupation, one passion of devotion.

He turned from her and went to the mantelpiece, and shifting the vases upon it as he spoke, remembering with a bitter upper layer of consciousness how Madame von Marwitz's blighting gaze had rested upon these ornaments in her first visit;—"I'm not going to discuss your guardian with you, Karen," he said; "I haven't said that I thought her wrong. I've consented that you should do as she wishes. You have no right to ask anything more of me. I certainly am not going to be forced by you into saying that I think Betty wrong. If you are not unfair to Betty you are certainly most unfair to me and it seems to me that it is your tendency to be fair to one person only. I'm in no danger of forgetting her control and guidance of your life, I assure you. If you were to let me forget it, she wouldn't. She is showing me now—after telling me the other night what she thought of my monde—how she controls you. It's very natural of her, no doubt, and very natural of you to feel her right; and I submit. So that you have no ground of grievance against me." He turned to her again. "And now I think you had better go to bed. You look very tired. I've some work to get through, so I'll say good-night to you, Karen dear."

She rose with a curious automatic obedience, and, coming to him, lifted her forehead, like a child, for his kiss. Her face showed, perhaps, a bleak wonder, but it showed no softness. She might be bewildered by this sudden change in their relation, but she was not weakened. She went away, softly closing the door behind her.

In their room, Karen stood for a moment before undressing and looked about her. Something had happened, and though she could not clearly see what it was it seemed to have altered the aspect of everything, so that this pretty room, full of light and comfort, was strange to her. She felt an alien in it; and as she looked round it she thought of how her little room at Les Solitudes where, with such an untroubled heart, she had slept and waked for so many years.

Three large photographs of Tante hung on the walls, and their eyes met hers as if with an unfaltering love and comprehension. And on the dressing-table was a photograph of Gregory; the new thing in her life; the thing that menaced the old. She went and took it up, and Gregory's face, too, was suddenly strange to her; cold, hard, sardonic. She wondered, gazing at it, that she had never seen before how cold and hard it was. Quickly undressing she lay down and closed her eyes. A succession of images passed with processional steadiness before her mind; the carriage in the Forest of Fontainebleau and Tante in it looking at her; Tante in the hotel at Fontainebleau, her arm around the little waif, saying: "But it is a Norse child; her name and her hair and her eyes;" Tante's dreadful face as she tottered back to Karen's arms from the sight at the lake-edge; Tante that evening lying white and sombre on her pillows with eyelids pressed down as if on tears, saying: "Do they wish to take my child, too, from me?"

Then came the other face, the new face; like a sword; thrusting among the sacred visions. Consciously she saw her husband's face now, as she had often, with a half wilful unconsciousness, seen it, looking at Tante—ah, a fierce resentment flamed up in her at last with the unavoidable clearness of her vision—looking at Tante with a courteous blankness that cloaked hostility; with cold curiosity; with mastered irony, suspicion, dislike. He was, then, a man not generous, not large and wise of heart, a man without the loving humour that would have enabled him to see past the defects and flaws of greatness, nor with the heart and mind to recognize and love it when he saw it. He was petty, too, and narrow, and arrogantly sure of his own small measures. Her memories heaped themselves into the overwhelming realisation. She was married to a man who was hostile to what—until he had come—had been the dearest thing in her life. She had taken to her heart something that killed its very pulse. How could she love a man who looked such things at Tante—who thought such things of Tante? How love him without disloyalty to the older tie? Already her forbearance, her hiding from him of her fear, had been disloyalty, a cowardly acquiescence in something that, from the first hint of it, she should openly have rebelled against. Slow flames of shame and anger burned her. How could she not hate him? But how could she not love him? He was part of her life, as unquestionably, as indissolubly, as Tante.

Then, the visions crumbling, the flames falling, a chaos of mere feeling overwhelmed her. It was as though her blood were running backward, knotting itself in clots of darkness and agony. He had sent her away unlovingly—punishing her for her fidelity. Her love for Tante destroyed his love for her. He must have known her pain; yet he could speak like that to her; look like that. The tears rose to her eyes and rolled down her cheeks as she lay straightly in the bed, on her back, the clothes drawn to her throat, her hands clasped tightly on her breast. Hours had passed and here she lay alone.

Hours had passed and she heard at last his careful step along the passage, and the shock of it tingled through her with a renewal of fear and irrepressible joy. He opened, carefully, the dressing-room door. She listened, stilling her breaths.

He would come to her. They would speak together. He would not leave her when she was so unhappy. Even the thought of Tante's wrongs was effaced by the fear and yearning, and, as the bedroom door opened and Gregory came in, her heart seemed to lift and dissolve in a throb of relief and blissfulness.

But, with her joy, the thought of Tante hovered like a heavy darkness above her eyes, keeping them closed. She lay still, ashamed of so much gladness, yet knowing that if he took her in his arms her arms could but close about him.

The stillness deceived Gregory. In the dim light from the dressing-room he saw her, as he thought, sleeping placidly, her broad braids lying along the sheet.

He looked at her for a moment. Then, not stooping to her, he turned away.



CHAPTER XXII

If only, Gregory often felt, in thinking it over and over in the days of outer unity and inner estrangement that followed, she had not been able to go to sleep so placidly.

All resentment had faded from his heart when he went in to her. He had longed for reconciliation and for reassurance. But as he had looked at the seeming calm of Karen's face his tenderness and compunction passed into a bitter consciousness of frustrated love. Her calm was like a repulse. Their personal estrangement and misunderstanding left her unmoved. She had said what she had to say to him; she had vindicated her guardian; and now she slept, unmindful of him. He asked himself, and for the first time clearly and steadily, as he lay awake for hours afterwards in the little dressing-room bed, whether Karen's feelings for him passed beyond a faithful, sober affection that took him for granted, unhesitatingly and uncritically, as a new asset in a life dedicated elsewhere. Romance for her was personified in Tante, and her husband was a creature of mere kindly domesticity. It was to think too bitterly of Karen's love for him to see it thus, he knew, even while the torment grasped him; but the pressure of his own love for her, the loveliness, the romance that she so supremely personified for him, surged too strongly against the barrier of her mute, unanswering face, for him to feel temperately and weigh fairly. There was a lack in her, and because of it she hurt him thus cruelly.

They met next morning over a mutual misinterpretation, and, with a sense of mingled discord and relief, found themselves kissing and smiling as if nothing had happened. Pride sustained them; the hope that, since the other seemed so unconscious, a hurt dealt so unconsciously need not, for pride's sake, be resented; the fear that explanation or protest might emphasise estrangement. The easiest thing to do was to go on acting as if nothing had happened. Karen poured out his coffee and questioned him about the latest political news. He helped her to eggs and bacon and took an interest in her letters.

And since it was easiest to begin so, it was easiest so to go on. The routine of their shared life blurred for them the sharp realisations of the night. But while the fact that such suffering had come to them was one that could, perhaps, be lived down, the fact that they did not speak of it spread through all their life with a strange, new savour.

Karen went to her ducal week-end; but she did not, when she came back from it, regale her husband with her usual wealth of detailed description. She could no longer assume the air of happy confidence where Tante and her doings with Tante were concerned. That air of determined cheerfulness, that pretence that nothing was really the matter and that Tante and Gregory were bound to get on together if she took it for granted that they would, had broken down. There was relief for Gregory, though relief of a chill, grey order, in seeing that Karen had accepted the fact that he and Tante were not to get on. Yet he smarted from the new sense of being shut out from her life.

It was he who assumed the air; he who pretended that nothing was the matter. He questioned her genially about the visit, and Karen answered all his questions as genially. Yes; it had been very nice; the great house sometimes very beautiful and sometimes very ugly; the beauty seemed, in a funny way, almost as accidental as the ugliness. The people had been very interesting to look at; so many slender pretty women; there were no fat women and no ugly women at all, or, if they were, they contrived not to look it. It all seemed perfectly arranged.

Had she talked to many of them? Gregory asked. Had she come across anybody she liked? Karen shook her head. She had liked them all—to look at—but it had gone no further than that; she had talked very little with any of them; and, soberly, unemphatically, she had added: "They were all too much occupied with Tante—or with each other—to think much of me. I was the only one not slender and not beautiful!"

Gregory asked who had taken her in to dinner on the two nights, and masked ironic inner comments when he heard that on Saturday it had been a young actor who, she thought, had been a little cross at having her as his portion. "He didn't try to talk to me; nor I to him, when I found that he was cross," she said. "I didn't like him at all. He had fat cheeks and very shrewd black eyes." On Sunday it had been a young son of the house, a boy at Eton. "Very, very dear and nice. We had a great talk about climbing Swiss mountains, which I have done a good deal, you know."

Tante, it appeared, had had the ambassador on Saturday and the Duke himself on Sunday. And she and Tante, as usual, had had great fun in their own rooms every night, talking everybody over when the day was done. Karen said nothing to emphasise the contrast between the duke's friends and Gregory's, but she couldn't have failed to draw her comparison. Here was a monde where Tante was fully appreciated. That she herself had not been was not a matter to engage her thoughts. But it engaged Gregory's. The position in which she had been placed was a further proof to him of Tante's lack of consideration. Where Karen was placed depended, precisely, he felt sure of it, on where Madame von Marwitz wished her to be placed. It was as the little camp-follower that she had taken her.

After this event came a pause in the fortunes of our young couple. Madame von Marwitz, with Mrs. Forrester, went to Paris to give her two concerts there and was gone for a fortnight. In this fortnight he and Karen resumed, though warily, as it were, some old customs. They read their political economy again in the evenings when they did not go out, and he found her at tea-time waiting for him as she had used to do. She shared his life; she was gentle and thoughtful; yet she had never been less near. He felt that she guarded herself against admissions. To come near now would be to grant that it had been Tante's presence that had parted them.

She wrote to Madame von Marwitz, and heard from her, constantly. Madame von Marwitz sent her presents from Paris; a wonderful white silk dressing-gown; a box of chocolate; a charming bit of old enamel picked up in a rive gauche curiosity shop. Then one day she wrote to say that Tallie had been quite ill—povera vecchia—and would Karen be a kind, kind child and run down and see her at Les Solitudes.

Gregory had not forgotten the plan for having Mrs. Talcott with them that winter and had reminded Karen of it, but it appeared then that she had not forgotten, either; had indeed, spoken to Tante of it; but that Tante had not seemed to think it a good plan. Tante said that Mrs. Talcott did not like leaving Les Solitudes; and, moreover, that she herself, might be going down there for the inside of a week at any moment and Karen knew how Tallie would hate the idea of not being on the spot to prepare for her. Let them postpone the idea of a visit; at all events until she was no longer in England.

Gregory now suggested that Karen might bring Mrs. Talcott back with her. There was some guile in the suggestion. Encircling this little oasis of peace where he and Karen could, at all events, draw their breaths, were storms and arid wastes. Madame von Marwitz would soon be back. She might even be thinking of redeeming her promise of coming to stay with them. If old Mrs. Talcott, slightly invalided, could be installed before the great woman's return, she might keep her out for the rest of her stay in London, and must, certainly, keep Karen in to a greater extent than when she had no guest to entertain.

Karen could not suspect his motive; he saw that from her frank look of pleasure. She promised to do her best. It was worth while, he reflected, to lose her for a few days if she were to bring back such a bulwark as Mrs. Talcott might prove herself to be. And, besides, he would be sincerely glad to see the old woman. The thought of her gave him a sense of comfort and security.

He saw Karen off next morning. She was to be at Les Solitudes for three or four days, and on the second day of her stay he had his first letter from her. It was strange to hear from her again, from Cornwall. It was the first letter he had had from Karen since their marriage and, with all its odd recalling of the girlish formality of tone, it was a sweet one. She had found Mrs. Talcott much better, but still quite weak and jaded, and very glad indeed to see her. And Mrs. Talcott really seemed to think that she would like to get away. Karen believed that Mrs. Talcott had actually been feeling lonely, uncharacteristic as that seemed. She would probably bring her back on Saturday. The letter ended: "My dear husband, your loving Karen."

Mrs. Talcott, therefore, was expected, and Mrs. Barker was told to make ready for her.

But on Saturday morning, when Karen was starting, he had a wire from her telling him that plans were altered and that she was coming back alone.

He went to meet her at Paddington, remembering the meeting when she had come up after their engagement. It was a different Karen, a Karen furred and finished and nearly elegant, who stepped from the train; but she had, as then, her little basket with the knitting and the book; and the girlish face was scarcely altered; there was even a preoccupation on it that recalled still more vividly the former meeting at Paddington. "Well, dearest, and why isn't Mrs. Talcott here, too?" were his first words.

Karen took his arm as he steered her towards the luggage. "It is only put off, I hope, that visit," she said, "because I heard this morning, Gregory, and wired to you then, that Tante asks if she may come to us next week." Her voice was not artificial; it expressed determination as well as gentleness and seemed to warn him that he must not show her if he were not pleased. Yet duplicity, in his unpleasant surprise, was difficult to assume.

"Really. At last. How nice," he said; and his voice rang oddly. "But poor old Mrs. Talcott. Madame von Marwitz didn't know, I suppose," he went on, "that we'd just been planning to have her?"

Karen, her arm still in his, stood looking over the heaped up luggage and now pointed out her box to the porter. Then, as they turned away and went towards their cab, she said, more gently and more determinedly: "Yes; she did know we had planned it. I wrote and told her so, and that is why she wrote back so quickly to ask if we could not put off Mrs. Talcott for her; because she will be leaving London very soon and it will be, this next week, her only chance of being with us. Mrs. Talcott did not mind at all. I don't think she really wanted to come so much, Gregory. It is as Tante says, you know," Karen settled herself in a corner of the hansom, "she really does not like leaving Les Solitudes."

Gregory had the feeling of being enmeshed. Why had Madame von Marwitz thrown this web? Had she really divined in a flash his hope and his intention? Was there any truth in her sudden statement that this was the only week she could give them? "Oh! Really," was all that he found to say to Karen's explanations, and then, "Where is Madame von Marwitz going when she leaves us then?"

"To the Riviera, with the Duchess of Bannister, I think it is arranged. I may wire to her, then, Gregory, at once, and say that she is to come?"

"Of course. How long are we to have the pleasure of entertaining her?"

"She did not say; for a week at least, I hope. Perhaps, even, for a fortnight if that will be convenient for you. It will be a great joy to me," Karen went on, "if only"—she was speaking with that determined steadiness, looking before her as they drove; now, suddenly, she turned her eyes on him "if only you will try to enjoy it, too, Gregory."

It was, in a sense, a challenge, yet it was, too, almost an appeal, and it brought them nearer than they had been for weeks.

Gregory's hand caught hers and, holding it tightly, smiling at her rather tremulously, he said: "I enjoy anything, darling, that makes you happy."

"Ah, but," said Karen, her voice keeping its earnest control, "I cannot be happy with you and Tante unless you can enjoy her for yourself. Try to know Tante, Gregory," she went on, now with a little breathlessness; "she wants that so much. One of the first things she asked me when she came back was that I should try to make you care for her. She felt at once—and oh! so did I, Gregory—that something was not happy between you."

Her hand holding his tightly, her earnest eyes on his, Gregory felt his blood turn a little cold as he recognized once more the soft, unremitting pressure. It had begun, then, so early. She had asked Karen that when she first came back. "But you see, dearest," he said, trying to keep his head between realizations of Madame von Marwitz's craft and Karen's candour, "I've never been able to feel that Madame von Marwitz wanted me to care for her or to come in at all, as it were. I don't mean anything unkind; only that I imagined that what she did ask of me was to keep outside and leave your relation and hers alone. And that's what I've tried to do."

"Oh, you mistake Tante, Gregory, you mistake her." Karen's hand grasped his more tightly in the urgency of her opportunity. "She cared for me too much—yes, it is there that you do not understand—to feel what you think. For she knows that I cannot be happy while you shut yourself away from her."

"Then it's not she who shuts me out?" he tried to smile.

"No; no; oh, no, Gregory."

"I must push in, even when I seem to feel I'm not wanted?"

She would not yield to his attempted lightness. "You mustn't push in; you must be in; with us, with Tante and me."

"Do you mean literally? I'm to be a third at your tete-a-tetes?"

"No, Gregory, I do not mean that; but in thought, in sympathy. You will try to know Tante. You will make her feel that you and I are not parted when she is there."

She saw it all, all Tante's side, with a dreadful clearness. And it was impossible that she should see what he did. He must submit to seeming blurred and dull, to pretending not to see anything. At all events her hand was in his. He felt able to face the duel at close quarters with Madame von Marwitz as long as Karen let him keep her hand.



CHAPTER XXIII

Tante arrived on Monday afternoon and the arrival reminded Gregory of the Bouddha's installation; but, whereas the Bouddha had overflowed the drawing-room only, Madame von Marwitz overflowed the flat.

A multitude of boxes were borne into the passages where, end to end, like a good's train on a main line, they stood impeding traffic.

Louise, harassed and sallow, hurried from room to room, expostulating, explaining, replying in shrill tones to Madame von Marwitz's sonorous orders. Victor, led by Mrs. Forrester's footman, made his appearance shortly after his mistress, and, set at large, penetrated unerringly to the kitchen where he lapped up a dish of custard; while Mrs. Barker, in the drawing-room, already with signs of resentment on her face, was receiving minute directions from Madame von Marwitz in regard to a cup of chocolate. In the dining-room, Gregory found two strange-looking men, to whom Barker, also clouded, had served whisky and soda; one of these was Madame von Marwitz's secretary, Schultz; the other a concert impresario. They greeted Gregory with a disconcerting affability.

In the midst of the confusion Madame von Marwitz moved, weary and benignant, her arm around Karen's shoulders, or seated herself at the piano to run her fingers appraisingly over it in a majestic surge of arpeggios. Gregory found her hat and veil tossed on the bed in his and Karen's room, and when he went into his dressing-room he stumbled over three band-boxes, just arrived from a modiste's, and hastily thrust there by Louise.

Victor bounded to greet him as he sought refuge in the library, and overturned a table that stood in the hall with two fine pieces of oriental china upon it. The splintering crash of crockery filled the flat. Mrs. Barker had taken the chocolate to the drawing-room some time since, and Madame von Marwitz, the cup in her hand, appeared upon the threshold with Karen. "Alas! The bad dog!" she said, surveying the wreckage while she sipped her chocolate.

Rose was summoned to sweep up the pieces and Karen stooped over them with murmured regret.

"Were they wedding-presents, my Karen?" Madame von Marwitz asked. "Console yourself; they were not of a good period—I noticed them. I will give you better."

The vases had belonged to Gregory's mother. He was aware that he stood rather blankly looking at the fragments, as Rose collected them. "Oh, Gregory, I am so sorry," said Karen, taking upon herself the responsibility for Victor's mischance. "I am afraid they are broken to bits. See, this is the largest piece of all. They can't be mended. No, Tante, they were not wedding-presents; they belonged to Gregory and we were very fond of them."

"Alas!" said Madame von Marwitz above her chocolate, and on a deeper note.

Gregory was convinced that she had known they were not wedding-presents. But her manner was flawless and he saw that she intended to keep it so. She dined with them alone and at the table addressed her talk to him, fixing, as ill-luck would have it, on the theatre as her theme, and on La Gaine d'Or as the piece which, in Paris, had particularly interested her. "You and Karen, of course, saw it when you were there," she said.

It was the piece of sinister fame to which he had refused to take Karen. He owned that they had not seen it.

"Ah, but that is a pity, truly a pity," said Madame von Marwitz. "How did it happen? You cannot have failed to hear of it."

Unable to plead Karen as the cause for his abstention since Madame von Marwitz regretted that Karen had missed the piece, Gregory said that he had heard too much perhaps. "I don't believe I should care for anything the man wrote," he confessed.

"Tiens!" said Madame von Marwitz, opening her eyes. "You know him?"

"Heaven forbid!" Gregory ejaculated, smiling with some tartness.

"But why this rigour? What have you against M. Saumier?"

It was difficult for a young Englishman of conventional tastes to formulate what he had against M. Saumier. Gregory took refuge in evasions. "Oh, I've glanced at reviews of his plays; seen his face in illustrated papers. One gets an idea of a man's personality and the kind of thing he's likely to write."

"A great artist," Madame von Marwitz mildly suggested. "One of our greatest."

"Is he really? I'd hardly grasped that. I had an idea that he was merely one of the clever lot. But I never can see why one should put oneself, through a man's art, into contact with the sort of person one would avoid having anything to do with in life."

Madame von Marwitz listened attentively. "Do you refuse to look at a Cellini bronze?"

"Literature is different, isn't it? It's more personal. There's more life in it. If a man's a low fellow I don't interest myself in his interpretation of life. He's seen nothing that I'm likely to want to see."

Madame von Marwitz smiled, now with a touch of irony. "But you frighten me. How am I to tell you that I know M. Saumier?"

Gregory was decidedly taken back. "That's a penalty you have to pay for being a celebrity, no doubt," he said. "All celebrities know each other, I suppose."

"By no means. I allow no one to be thrust upon me, I assure you. And I have the greatest admiration for M. Saumier's talent. A great artist cannot be a low fellow; if he were one he would be so much more than that that the social defect would be negligible. Few great artists, I imagine, have been of such a character as would win the approval of a garden party at Lambeth Palace. I am sorry, indeed sorry, that you and Karen missed La Gaine d'Or. It is not a play for the jeune fille; no; though, holding as I do that nothing so fortifies and arms the taste as liberty, I should have allowed Karen to see it even before her marriage. It is a play cruel and acrid and beautiful. Yes; there is great beauty, and it flowers, as so often, on a bitter root. Ah, well, you will waive your scruples now, I trust. I will take Karen with me to see it when we are next in Paris together, and that must be soon. We will go for a night or two. You would like to see Paris with me again; pas vrai, cherie?"

Gregory had been uncomfortably aware of Karen's contemplation while he defended his prejudices, and he was prepared for an open espousal of her guardian's point of view; it was, he knew, her own. But he received once more, as he had received already on several occasions, an unexpected and gratifying proof of Karen's recognition of marital responsibility. "I should like to be in Paris with you again, Tante," she said, "but not to go to that play. I agreed not to go to it when Gregory and I were there. I should not care to go when he so much dislikes it." Her eyes met her guardian's while she spoke. They were gentle and non-committal; they gave Gregory no cause for triumph, nor Tante for humiliation; they expressed merely her own recognition of a bond.

Madame von Marwitz rose to the occasion, but—oh, it was there, the soft pressure, never more present to Gregory's consciousness than when it seemed most absent—she rose too emphatically, as if to a need. Her eyes mused on the girl's face, tenderly brooded and understood. And Karen's voice and look had asked her not to understand.

"Ah, that is right; that is a wife," she murmured. "Though, believe me, cherie, I did not know that I was so transgressing." And turning her glance on Gregory, "Je vous fais mes compliments," she added.

Karen said that he must bring his cigar into the drawing-room, for Tante would smoke her cigarette with him, and there, until bedtime, things went as well as they had at dinner—or as badly; for part of their badness, Gregory more and more resentfully became aware, was that they were made to seem to go well, from her side, not from his.

She had a genius, veritably uncanny for, with all sweetness and hesitancy, revealing him as stiff and unresponsively complacent. It was impossible for him to talk freely with a person uncongenial to him of the things he felt deeply; and, pertinaciously, over her coffee and cigarettes, it was the deep things that she softly wooed him to share with her.

He might be stiff and stupid, but he flattered himself that he wasn't once short or sharp—as he would have been over and over again with any other woman who so bothered him. And he was sincerely unaware that his courtesy, in its dry evasiveness, was more repudiating than rudeness.

When Karen went with her guardian to her room that night, the little room that looked so choked and overcrowded with the great woman's multiplied necessities, Madame von Marwitz, sinking on the sofa, drew her to her and looked closely at her, with an intentness almost tragic, tenderly smoothing back her hair.

Karen looked back at her very firmly.

"Tell me, my child," Madame von Marwitz said, as if, suddenly, taking refuge in the inessential from the pressure of her own thoughts, "how did you find our Tallie? I have not heard of that from you yet."

"She is looking rather pale and thin, Tante; but she is quite well again; already she will go out into the garden," Karen answered, with, perhaps, an evident relief.

"That is well," said Madame von Marwitz with quiet satisfaction. "That is well. I cannot think of Tallie as ill. She is never ill. It is perhaps the peaceful, happy life she leads—povera—that preserves her. And the air, the wonderful air of our Cornwall. I fixed on Cornwall for the sake of Tallie, in great part; I sought for a truly halcyon spot where that faithful one might end her days in joy. You knew that, Karen?"

"No, Tante; you never told me that."

"It is so," Madame von Marwitz continued to muse, her eyes on the fire, "It is so. I have given great thought to my Tallie's happiness. She has earned it." And after a moment, in the same quiet tone, she went on. "This idea of yours, my Karen, of bringing Tallie up to town; was it wise, do you think?"

Karen, also, had been looking at the flames. She brought her eyes now back to her guardian. "Wasn't it wise, Tante? We had asked her to come and stay—long ago, you know."

"Had she seemed eager?"

"Eager? No; I can't imagine Mrs. Talcott eager about anything. We hoped we could persuade her, that was all. Why not wise, Tante?"

"Only, my child, that after the quiet life there, the solitude that she loves and that I chose for her sake, the pure sea air and the life among her flowers, London, I fear, would much weary and fatigue her. Tallie is getting old. We must not forget that Tallie is very old. This illness warns us. It does not seem to me a good plan. It was your plan, Karen?"

Karen was listening, with a little bewilderment. "It seemed, to me very good. I had not thought of Mrs. Talcott as so old as that. I always think of her as old, but so strong and tough. It was Gregory who suggested it, in the first place, and this time, too. When I told him that I was going he thought of our plan at once and told me that now I must persuade her to come to us for a good long visit. He is really very fond of Mrs. Talcott, Tante, and she of him, I think. It would please you to see them together."

Karen spoke on innocently; but, as she spoke, she became aware from a new steadiness in her guardian's look, that her words had conveyed some significance of which she was herself unconscious.

Madame von Marwitz's hand had tightened on hers. "Ah," she said after a moment. She looked away.

"What is it, Tante?" Karen asked.

Madame von Marwitz had begun to draw deep, slow breaths. Karen knew the sound; it meant a painful control. "Tante, what is it?" she repeated.

"Nothing. Nothing, my child." Madame von Marwitz laid her arm around Karen's shoulders and continued to look away from her.

"But it isn't nothing," said Karen, after a little pause. "Something that I have said troubles or hurts you."

"Is it so? Perhaps you say the truth, my child. Hurts are not new to me. No, my Karen, no. It is nothing for us to speak of. I understand. But your husband, Karen, he must have found it thoughtless in me, indelicate, to force myself in when he had hoped so strongly for another guest."

A slow flush mounted to Karen's cheek. She kept silence for a moment, then in a careful voice she said: "No, Tante; I do not believe that."

"No?" said Madame von Marwitz. "No, my Karen?"

"He knew, on the contrary, that I hoped to have you soon—at any time that you could come," said Karen, in slightly trembling tones.

Madame von Marwitz nodded. "He knew that, as you tell me; and, knowing it, he asked Tallie; hoping that with her installed—for a long visit—my stay might be prevented. Do not let us hide from each other, my Karen. We have hidden too long and it is the beginning of the end if we may not say to each other what we see."

Sitting with downcast eyes, Karen was silent, struggling perhaps with new realisations.

Madame von Marwitz bent to kiss her forehead and then, resuming the tender stroking of her hair, she went on: "Your husband dislikes me. Let us look the ugly thing full in the face. You know it, and I know it, and—parbleu!—he knows it well. There; the truth is out. Ah, the brave little heart; it sought to hide its sorrow from me. But Tante is not so dull a person. The loneliness of heart must cease for you. And the sorrow, too, may pass away. Be patient, Karen. You will see. He may come to feel more kindly towards the woman who so loves his wife. Strange, is it not, and a chastisement for my egotism, if I have still any of that frothy element lingering in my nature, that I should find, suddenly, at the end of my life—so near me, bound to me by such ties—one who is unwilling to trust me, oh, for the least little bit; so unwilling to accept me at merely my face value. Most people," she added, "have loved me easily."

Karen sat on in silence. Her guardian knew this apathetic silence, and that it was symptomatic in her of deep emotion. And, the contagion of the suffering beside her gaining upon her, her own fictitious calm wavered. She bent again to look into the girl's averted face. "Karen, cherie," she said, and now with a quicker utterance; "it is not worse than I yet realise? You do not hide something that I have not yet seen. It is dislike; I accept it. It is aversion, even. But his love for you; that is strong, sincere? He will not make it too difficult for me? I am not wrong in coming here to be with my child?"

Karen at length turned her eyes on her guardian with a heavy look. "What would you find too difficult?" she asked.

Madame von Marwitz hesitated slightly, taken aback. But she grasped in an instant her advantage. "That by being here I should feel that I came between you and your husband. That by being here I made it more difficult for you."

"I should not be happier if you were away—if what you think is true, should I?" said Karen.

"Yes, my child," Madame von Marwitz returned, and now almost with severity. "You would. You would not so sharply feel your husband's aversion for me if I were not here. You would not have it in your ears; before your eyes."

"I thought that you talked together quite easily to-night," Karen continued. "I saw, of course, that you did not understand each other; but with time that might be. I thought that if you were here he would by degrees come to know you, for he does not know you yet."

"We talked easily, did we not, my child, to shield you, and you were not more deceived by the ease than he or I. He does not understand me? I hope so indeed. But to say that I do not understand him shows already your wish to shield him, and at my expense. I do understand him; too well. And if there is this repugnance in him now, may it not grow with the enforced intimacy? That is my fear, my dread."

"He has never said that he disliked you."

"Said it? To you? I should imagine not, parbleu!"

"He has only said," Karen pursued with a curious doggedness, "that he did not feel that you cared for him to care."

"Ah! Is it so? You have talked of it, then? And he has said that? And did you believe it? Of me?"

But the growing passion and urgency of her voice seemed to shut Karen more closely in upon herself rather than sweep her into impulsive confidence. There was a hot exasperation in Madame von Marwitz's eye as it studied the averted, stubborn head. "No," was the reply she received.

"No, no, indeed. It was not the truth that he said to you and you know that it was not the truth. Oh, I make no accusation against your husband; he believed it the truth; but you cannot believe that I would rest satisfied with what must make you unhappy. And how can you be happy if your husband does not care for me? How can you be happy if he feels repugnance for me? You cannot be. Is it not so? Or am I wrong?"

"No," Karen again repeated.

"Then," said Madame von Marwitz, and a sob now lifted her voice, "then do not let him put it upon me. Not that! Oh promise me, my Karen! For that would be the end."

Karen turned to her suddenly, and passed her arms around her. "Tante—Tante," she said; "what are you saying? The end? There could not be an end for us! Do not speak so. Do not. Do not." She was trembling.

"Ah—could there not! Could there not!" With the words Madame von Marwitz broke into violent sobs. "Has it not been my doom, always—always to have what I love taken from me! You love this man who hates me! You defend him! He will part you from me! I foresee it! From the first it has been my dread!"

"No one can ever part us, Tante. No one. Ever." Karen whispered, holding her tightly, and her face, bending above the sobbing woman, was suddenly old and stricken in its tormented and almost maternal love. "Tante; remember your own words. You gave me courage. Will you not be patient? For my sake? Be patient, Tante. Be patient. He does not know you yet."



CHAPTER XXIV

Gregory heard no word of the revealing talk; yet, when he and Karen were alone, he was aware of a new chill, or a new discretion, in the atmosphere. It was as if a veil of ice, invisible yet impassable, hung between them, and he could only infer that she had something to hide, he could only suspect, with a bitterer resentment, that Madame von Marwitz had been more directly exerting her pressure.

The pressure, whatever it had been, had the effect of making Karen, when they were all three confronted, more calm, more mildly cheerful than before, more than ever the fond wife who did not even suspect that a flaw might be imagined in her happiness.

Gregory had an idea—his only comfort in this sorry maze where he found himself so involved—that this attitude of Karen's, combined with his own undeviating consideration, had a disconcerting effect upon Madame von Marwitz and at moments induced her to show her weapon too openly in their wary duel. If he ever betrayed his dislike Karen must see that it was Tante who wouldn't allow him to conceal it, who, sorrowfully and gently, turned herself about in the light she elicited and displayed herself to Karen as rejected and uncomplaining. He hoped that Karen saw it. But he could be sure of nothing that Karen saw. The flawless loyalty of her outward bearing might be but the shield for a deepening hurt. All that he could do was what, in former days and in different conditions, Mrs. Talcott had advised him to do; "hang on," and parry Madame von Marwitz's thrusts. She had come, he more and more felt sure of it, urged by her itching jealousy, for the purpose of making mischief; and if it was not a motive of which she was conscious, that made her but the more dangerous with her deep, instinctive craft.

Meanwhile if there were fundamental anxieties to fret one's heart, there were superficial irritations that abraded one's nerves.

Karen was accustomed to the turmoil that surrounded the guarded shrine where genius slept or worked, too much accustomed, without doubt, to realise its effect upon her husband.

The electric bells were never silent. Seated figures, bearing band-boxes or rolls of music, filled the hall at all hours of the day and night. Alert interviewers button-holed him on his way in and out and asked for a few details about Mrs. Jardine's youth, and her relationship to Madame Okraska.

Madame von Marwitz rose capriciously and ate capriciously; trays with strange meals upon them were carried at strange hours to her rooms, and Barker, Mrs. Barker and Rose all quarrelled with Louise.

Madame von Marwitz also showed oddities of temper which, with all her determination to appear at her best, it did not occur to her to control, oddities that met, from Karen, with a fond tolerance.

It startled Gregory when they saw Madame von Marwitz, emerging from her room, administer two smart boxes upon Louise's ears, remarking as she did so, with gravity rather than anger: "Voila pour toi, ma fille."

"Is Madame von Marwitz in the habit of slapping her servants?" he asked Karen in their room, aware that his frigid mien required justification.

She looked at him through the veil of ice. "Tante's servants adore her."

"Well, it seems a pity to take such an advantage of their adoration."

"Louise is sometimes very clumsy and impertinent."

"I can't help thinking that that sort of treatment makes servants impertinent."

"I do not care to hear your criticism of my guardian, Gregory."

"I beg your pardon," said Gregory.

Betty Jardine met him on a windy April evening in Queen Anne's Gate. "I see that you had to sacrifice me, Gregory," she said. She smiled; she bore no grudge; but her smile was tinged with a shrewd pity.

He felt that he flushed. "You mean that you've not been to see us since the occasion."

"I've not been asked!" Betty laughed.

"Madame von Marwitz is with us, you know," Gregory proffered rather lamely.

"Yes; I do know. How do you like having a genius domiciled? I hear that she is introducing Karen into a very artistic set. After the Bannisters, Mr. Claude Drew. He is back from America at last, it seems, and is an assiduous adorer. You have seen a good deal of him?"

"I haven't seen him at all. Has he been back for long?"

"Four or five days only, I believe; but I don't know how often he and Madame von Marwitz and Karen have been seen together. Don't think me a cat, Gregory; but if she is engaged in a flirtation with that most unpleasant young man I hope you will see to it that Karen isn't used as a screen. There have been some really horrid stories about him, you know."

Gregory parted from his sister-in-law, perturbed. Indiscreet and naughty she might be, but Betty was not a cat. The veil of ice was so impenetrable that no sound of Karen's daily life came to him through it. He had not an idea of what she did with herself when he wasn't there, or, rather, of what Madame von Marwitz did with her.

"You've been seeing something of Mr. Claude Drew, I hear," he said to Karen that evening. "Do you like him better than you used to do?" They were in the drawing-room before dinner and dinner had been, as usual, waiting for half an hour for Madame von Marwitz.

Gregory's voice betrayed more than a kindly interest, and Karen answered coldly, if without suspicion; "No; I do not like him better. But Tante likes him. It is not I who see him, it is Tante. I am only with them sometimes."

"And I? Am I to be with them sometimes?" Gregory inquired with an air of gaiety.

"If you will come back to tea to-morrow, Gregory," she answered gravely, "you will meet him. He comes to tea then."

For the last few days Gregory had fallen into the habit of only getting back in time for dinner. "You know it's only because I usually find that you've gone out with your guardian that I haven't come back in time for tea," he observed.

"I know," Karen returned, without aggressiveness. "And so, to-morrow, you will find us if you come."

He got back at tea-time next day, expecting to make a fourth only of the small group; but, on his way to the drawing-room, he paused, arrested, in the hall, where a collection of the oddest looking hats and coats he had ever seen were piled and hung.

One of the hats was a large, discoloured, cream-coloured felt, much battered, with its brown band awry; one was of the type of flat-brimmed silk, known in Paris as the Latin Quartier; another was an enormous sombrero. Gregory stood frowning at these strange signs somewhat as if they had been a drove of cockroaches. He had, as never yet before, the sense of an alien and offensive invasion of his home, and an old, almost forgotten disquiet smote upon him in the thought that what to him was strange was to Karen normal. This was her life and she had never really entered his.

In the drawing-room, he paused again at the door, and looked over the company assembled under the Bouddha's smile. Madame von Marwitz was its centre; pearl-wreathed, silken and silver, she leaned opulently on the cushions of the sofa where she sat, and Karen at the tea-table seemed curiously to have relapsed into the background place where he had first found her. She was watching, with her old contented placidity, a scene in which she had little part. No, mercifully, though in it she was not of it. This was Gregory's relieving thought as his eye ran over them, the women with powdered faces and extravagant clothes and the men with the oddest collars and boots and hair. "Shoddy Bohemians," was his terse definition of them; an inaccurate definition; for though, in the main, Bohemians, they were not, in the main, shoddy.

Belot was there, with his massive head and sagacious eyes; and a famous actress, ugly, thin, with a long, slightly crooked face, tinted hair, and the melancholy, mysterious eyes of a llama. Claude Drew, at a little table behind Madame von Marwitz, negligently turned the leaves of a book. Lady Rose Harding, the only one of the company with whom Gregory felt an affinity, though a dubious one, talked to the French actress and to Madame von Marwitz. Lady Rose had ridden across deserts on camels, and sketched strange Asiatic mountains, and paid a pilgrimage to Tolstoi, and written books on all these exploits; and she had been to the Adirondacks that summer with the Aspreys and Madame von Marwitz, and was now writing a book on that. In a corner a vast, though youthful, German Jew, with finely crisped red-gold hair, large lips and small, kind eyes blinking near-sightedly behind gold-rimmed spectacles, sat with another young man, his hands on his widely parted knees, in an attitude suggesting a capacity to cope with the most unwieldy instruments of an orchestra; his companion, black and emaciated, talked in German, with violent gestures and a strange accent, jerking constantly a lock of hair out of his eyes. A squat, fat little woman, bundled up, clasping her knees with her joined hands, sat on a footstool at Madame von Marwitz's feet, gazing at her and listening to her with a smile of obsequious attention, and now and then, suddenly, and as if irrelevantly, breaking into a jubilant laugh. Her dusty hair looked as though, like the White Queen's, a comb and brush might be entangled in its masses; the low cut neck of her bodice displayed a ruddy throat wreathed in many strings of dirty seed-pearls, and her grey satin dress was garnished with dirty lace.

Gregory had stood for an appreciable moment at the door surveying the scene, before either Karen or her guardian saw him, and it was then the latter who did the honours of the occasion, naming him to the bundled lady, who was an English poetess, and to Mlle. Suzanne Mauret, the French actress. The inky-locked youth turned out to be a famous Russian violinist, and the vast young German Jew none other than Herr Franz Lippheim, to whom—this was the fact that at once, violently, engaged Gregory's attention—Madame von Marwitz had destined Karen.

Franz Lippheim, after Gregory had spoken to everybody and when he at last was introduced, sprang to his feet and came forward, beaming so intently from behind his spectacles that Gregory, fearing that he might, conceivably, be about to kiss him, made an involuntary gesture of withdrawal. But Herr Lippheim, all unaware, grasped his hand the more vigorously. "Our little Karen's husband!" "Unserer kleinen Karen's Mann!" he uttered in a deeply moved German.