"Why should I doubt it?" said I.

Stenson, whom I had brought to look after Carlotta's luggage, came up and touched his hat.

"Train just signalled, sir."

Pasquale put out his hand after another glance at his watch.

"I am sorry I cannot wait to greet the fair one. I'll drop in soon and pay my respects. I am only just back in London, you know. A rivederci."

He waved me farewell and hurried off. The arrival of the train, the exuberance of Carlotta, the joy of having her sidle up against me once more in the cab while she poured out her story, and the subsequent gaiety of the evening banished Pasquale from my mind. But it is odd that I should have met him at Paddington.

We parted on the landing to dress for dinner. A moment afterwards there was a beating at my door. I opened it to behold Carlotta, in a glow of wondering delight, brandishing a silver-backed brush in one hand and the hand-mirror in the other.

"Oh, my darling Seer Marcous! For me? All that for me?"

"No. It is for Antoinette," said I.

"Oh-h!"

She laughed and pulled me by the arm into her room and shut the door.

"Oh, everything is beautiful, beautiful, and I shall die if I do not kiss you."

"You must be kept alive at all hazards," I laughed; and this time I did not reject her. But it was a child around whom my arms closed. An inner flash, accompanied by a spasm of pain, revealed it, and changed a passionate desire to gentleness.

"There," said I, after she had released herself and flown to open the drawers of the new toilette table, where lay some odds and ends of jewelry I had purchased for her. "You have been saved from extinction. The next deadly peril is hunger. I give you a quarter of an hour."

She came down to dinner in a low-necked frock, wearing the necklace and bangle; and, child that she is, in her hand she carried the silver-backed mirror. I believe she has taken it to bed with her, as a seven-year-old does its toy. She certainly kept it by her all the evening and admired herself therein unashamedly like the traditional Lady from the Sea. Once, desiring to show me the ravishing beauty of a turquoise pendant, she bent her neck forward, as I sat, so as to come within reach of my nearsighted eyes (it is a superstition of hers that I am nearly blind without my glasses), and quite naturally slid onto my knee. She has the warm russet complexion that suits her heavy bronze hair, and there is a glow beneath the satin of her neck and arms. And she is fragrant—I recognise it now—of hyacinths. The world can hold nothing more alluring to the senses of man. My fingers that held the turquoise trembled as they chanced to touch her—but she was all unconcerned. Nay, further—she gazed into the mirror—

"It makes me look so white—oh, there was a girl at Bude who had a gold locket—and it lay upon her bones—you could count them. I am glad I have no bones. I am quite soft—feel."

She clasped my fingers and pressed their tips into the firm young flesh below her throat.

"Yes," said I, with some huskiness in my voice, "your turquoise can sleep there very pleasantly. See, I will kiss it to bring you good luck."

She cooed with pleasure. "I don't think any one kissed the locket of the girl at Bude. She was too thin. And too old; she must have been thirty! Now," she added, lifting up the locket, "you will kiss the place, too, where it is to lie."

I looked for a moment into her eyes. Seeing me hesitate, they grew pathetic.

"Oh-h," she said, reproachfully.

I know I am a fool. I know that Pasquale would have hurled his sarcasms at me. I know that the whole of her deliciousness was mine for the taking—mine for ever and ever. If I had loved her less passionately I would have kissed her young throat lightly with a jest. But to have kissed her thus with such longing as mine behind my lips would have been an outrage.

I lifted her to her feet, and rose and turned away, laughing unsteadily.

"No, my dear," said I, "that would be—unsuitable."

The bathos of the word made me laugh louder. Carlotta, aware that a joke was in the air, joined in my mirth, and her laughter rang fresh.

"What is the suitable way of kissing?"

I took her hand and saluted it in an eighteenth century manner.

"This," said I.

"Oh-h," said Carlotta. "That is so dull." She caught up Polyphemus and buried her face in his fur. "That's the way I should like to be kissed."

"The man you love, my dear," said I, "will doubtless do it."

She made a little grimace.

"Oh, then, I shall have to wait such a long time."

"You needn't," said I, taking her hands again and speaking very seriously. "Can't you learn to love a man, give him your whole heart and all your best and sweetest thoughts?"

"I would marry any nice man if you gave me to him," she answered.

"It would not matter who he was? Anyone would do?"

"Why, of course," said Carlotta.

"And any one wanting to marry you could kiss you as you kissed Polyphemus."

"Oh-h, he would have to be nice—not like Mustapha."

I turned away with a sigh and lit a cigarette, while Carlotta curled herself up on the sofa and inspected her face and necklace in the silver mirror. In a moment she was talking to the cat, who had jumped on her lap and with arched back was rubbing himself against her.

Soon the touch of sadness was lost in the happy sight of her and the happy thought that my house was no longer left to me desolate. We laughed away the evening.

But now, sitting alone, I feel empty of soul; like a man stricken with fierce hunger who, expecting food in a certain place, finds nothing but a few delicate cakes that mock his craving.

October 14th.

A week has passed. I have spent it chiefly in trying to win her love.

Is she, after all, only a child, and is this love of mine but a monstrous passion?

What is to be done? Life is beginning to be a torture. If I send her away, I shall eat my heart out. If she stays, fuel is but added to the fire. Her caressing ways will drive me mad. To repulse her were brutal—she loves to be fondled; she can scarcely speak to me without touching me, leaning over me, thus filling me with the sense of her. She treats me with an affectionate child's innocence, as if I were sexless. My happiest time with her is spent in public places, restaurants, and theatres where her unclouded pleasure is reflected in my heart.

I am letting her take music lessons with Herr Stuer, who lives close by in the Avenue Road. Perhaps music may help in her development.

October 21st.

To please her I am accustoming myself to this out-of-door life, which once I despised so cordially. Pasquale has joined us two or three times. Last night he gave a dinner in Carlotta's honour at the Continental. The ladies of the party have asked her to go to see them. She must have some society, I suppose, and I must go with her. They belong to the half smart set, eager to conceal beneath a show of raffishness their plentiful lack of intellect and their fundamental bourgeois respectability. In spite of Pasquale's brilliance and Carlotta's rapturous enjoyment I sat mumchance and depressed, out of my element.

My work is at a standstill, and Carlotta is my life. I fear I am deteriorating.

On Judith, whom I have seen once or twice since Carlotta's return, I called this afternoon. She is unhappy. Although I have not confessed to my thraldom, her woman's wit, I feel sure, has penetrated to the heart of my mystery. There has been no deep emotion in our intercourse. Its foundation has been real friendship sweetened with pleasant sentimentality. And yet jealousy of Carlotta consumes her. Her amour propre is deeply wounded. She makes me feel as if I had played the part of a brute. But O Judith, my dear, I have only been a man. "The same thing," I fancy I hear her answer. But no. I have never loved a woman, my dear, in all my life before, and as I made no secret of it, I am guiltless of anything like betrayal. In due season I will tell you frankly of the new love; but how can I tell you now? How could I tell any human being?

I imagine myself as Panurge, taking counsel with a Pantagruelian friend. "I am in love with Carlotta and desire to marry her." "Then marry her," says Pantagruel. "But she does not love me." "Then don't marry," says Pantagruel. "But nay," urges poor Panurge, "she would marry me according to any rite, civil or ecclesiastical, to-morrow." "Mariez-vous doncques de par dieu," replies Pantagruel. "But I should be a villain to take advantage of her innocence and submission." "Then don't marry." "But I can't live without her," says Panurge, desperately. "I am as a man bewitched. If I don't marry her I shall waste away with longing." "Then marry her in God's name!" says Pantagruel. And I am no wiser by his counsel, and I have paraded the complication of my folly before mocking eyes.

October 23d.

I perceive that the young man of the idiot metaphor was gifted with piercing acumen. Beneath the Jaquesian melancholy of my temperament he diagnosed the potentiality of canine rabidness. No rational being is afflicted with this grotesque concentration of idea, this fierce hot fury waxing in intensity day by day.

I must consult a brain specialist.

October 25th.

I went to Judith this afternoon, more to prove the loyalty of my friendship than to seek comfort from her society. Over tea we discussed the weather and books and her statistical work. It was dull, but unembarrassing. The grey twilight crept into the room and there was a pause in our talk. She broke it by asking, without looking at me:

"When are we to have an evening together again?"

"Whenever you like, my dear Judith."

"To-morrow?"

"I am afraid not to-morrow," said I.

"Are you doing anything so very particular?"

"I have arranged to take Carlotta to the Empire."

"Oh," said Judith shortly, and I was left uncomfortable for another spell of silence.

"It would be very kind, Marcus, to ask me to accompany you," she said at last.

"Carlotta and myself?"

"Why not?"

"My question arose from the stupidity of surprise," said I. "I thought you disliked Carlotta."

"By no means. I should be glad to make her further acquaintance. Any one that interests you must also be interesting to me."

"In that case," said I, "your coming will give us both the greatest possible pleasure."

"I haven't had a merry evening for ever so long."

"We will dine somewhere first and have supper afterwards. The whole gamut of merriment. Toute la lyre. And you shall have," I added, "some of your favourite Veuve Cliquot."

"It will be charming," said Judith, politely.

In fact, politeness has been the dominant note of her attitude to-day, a sober restraint of manner such as she would adopt when rather tired towards an ordinary acquaintance. Has she reconciled herself to the inevitable and taken this Empire frolic as a graceful method of showing it? I should like to believe so, but the course is scarcely consistent with that motor of illogic which she is pleased to call her temperament. I am puzzled.

Her smile as we parted sent a chill through me, being the smile of a mask instead of a woman's face; and it was not the face of Judith. I don't anticipate much merriment tomorrow evening.

At Carlotta's suggestion, I have sent a line to Pasquale to ask him to join us. His gay wit will lend to the entertainment a specious air of revelry which Carlotta will take as genuine.

I have often thought lately of the hopeless passion of Alfonso the Magnanimous of Naples, as set forth by Pope Pius II in his Commentaries; for I am beginning to take a morbid interest in the unhappy love affairs of other men and to institute comparisons. If they have lived through the torment, why should not I? But Alfonso sighed for Lucrezia d'Alagna, a beautiful chaste statue of ice who loved him; whereas I crave the warm-blooded thing that is mine for the taking, but no more loves me than she loves the policeman who salutes her on his beat. I cannot take her. Something stronger than my passion opposes an adamantine barrier. I love her with my soul as well as with my body, and my soul cries out for the soul that the Almighty forgot when endowing her with entity.

This evening a letter from the Editor of The Quarterly Review. It would give him great pleasure if I would contribute a Renaissance article, taking as my text a German, a Russian, and an English attempt to whitewash the Borgia family. Six months ago the compliment would have filled me with gratification. To-day what to me are the whitewashed Borgias or the solemn denizens of the Athenaeum reading-room who will slumber over my account of the blameless poisonings of this amiable family? They are vanity and vexation of a spirit already sore at ease.

As I write the door creaks. I look up. Behold Carlotta in hastily slipped on dressing-gown, open in front, her hair streaming loose to her waist, her bare feet flashing pink beneath her night-dress.

"Oh, Seer Marcous, darling, I am so frightened!"

She ran forward and caught the lappels of my coat as I rose from my chair.

"What is the matter?"

"There is a mouse in my bed."

Polyphemus saved the situation by jumping from the sofa and rubbing his back against her feet.

"Take the cat and tell him to kill it," said I, "and go back to bed at once."

I must have spoken roughly, for she regarded me with her great eyes full of innocent reproach.

"There, take up the cat and go," I repeated. "You mustn't come down here looking like that."

"I thought I looked very pretty," said Carlotta, moving a step nearer.

I sat down at my writing-table and fixed my eyes on my paper.

"You are like a Houri that has been sent away from Paradise for misbehaviour," I said.

She laughed her curious cooing laugh.

"Hou! Seer Marcous is shocked!" And she ran, away, rubbing Polyphemus's nose against her face.

I wonder if the Devil, having grown infirm, is mixing up his centuries and mistaking me for a mediaeval saint? Paphnutius for instance, who was visited by such a seductress. What is the legend? To get rid of her he burns off his hand, whereupon she falls dead. He prays and she returns to life and becomes a nun. No, Messer Diavolo, I am not Paphnutius. I will not maim myself, nor do I want Carlotta to fall dead; and I cannot pray and effect a pietistic resurrection. I am simply a fool of a modern man tempted out of his wits, who scarce knows what it is that he speaks or writes.

I am not superstitious, but I feel myself to-night on the brink of some disaster. I walk restlessly about the room. On the mantel-piece are three photographs in silver frames: Judith, Carlotta, Pasquale. That which is of mockery in the spirit of each seems to-night to be hovering round the portraits and to be making sport of me. An autumn gale is howling among the trees outside, like a legion of lost souls. Listen. Messer Diavolo himself might be riding by with a whoop of derision.



CHAPTER XV

October 26th.

I knew something would happen. Messer Diavolo does not ride whooping to no purpose by the windows of people whom he desires to torment; nor does he inspire photographs for nothing with an active spirit of mockery.

We dined at the Trocadero. Carlotta loves the band and the buzz of Babel and the heavy scents and the clatter and the tumult and the glare of light; otherwise I should have chosen a discreeter hostelry where the footfalls of the waiting-men were noiseless and the walls in quiet shadow, where there was nothing but the mellow talk of friends to distract the mind from the consideration of exquisite flavours. But in these palaces of clashing splendour, the stunned brain fails to receive impressions from the glossopharyngeal nerve, and one eats unthinkingly like a dog. But this matters little to Carlotta. Perhaps when I was nineteen it mattered little to me. And to-night, also, it mattered little, for my mind was preoccupied and a dinner with Lucullus would have been savourless.

If the Psalmist cried, "What is man that Thou art mindful of him?" what cry had he at the back of his head to utter concerning woman? Did he leave her to be implicitly dealt with by Charles Darwin in his "Theory of Sexual Selection"? Or did he in the good old oriental way regard her as unimportant in the eyes of the Deity? If the latter, he was a purblind prophet and missed the very fount of human tears.

When I looked at Judith, I was smitten with a great pain. She had not looked so young, so fresh, so fragilely fair for many months. She wore a dress of corn-flower blue that deepened the violet of her eyes. In the mass of flax hued thistle-down that is her hair a blue argus butterfly completed the chord of colour. There was the faintest tinge of pink in her cheek applied with delicate art. Her dress seemed made of unsubstantial dream stuff—I believe they call it chiffon—and it covered her bosom and arms like the spray of a fairy sea. She had the air of an impalpable Undine, a creation of sea-foam and sea-flower; an exquisite suggestion of the ethereal which floated beauty, as it were, into her face. I know little of women, save what these past few grievous months have taught me; but I know that hours of anxious thought and desperate hope lay behind this effect of fragile loveliness. The wit of woman could not have rendered a woman's body a greater contrast to that of her rival; and with infinite subtlety she had imbued the contrast with the deeper significance of rare and spiritual things. I know this was so. I know it was a challenge, a defiance, an ordeal by combat; and the knowledge hurt me, so that I felt like a Dathan or Abiram who had laid hand on the Ark of the Covenant (for the soul of a woman, by heaven! is a holy thing), and I wished that the earth could open and swallow me up.

We sat down to table in the middle of the great room—a quiet corner on the balcony away from the band is not to Carlotta's taste—like any conventional party of four, and at first talked of indifferent matters. Conciergerie dinner-parties in the Terror always began with a discussion of the latest cure for megrims, or the most fashionable cut of a panier. Presently Pasquale who had been talking travel with Judith appealed to me.

"What year was it, Ordeyne, that I came home from Abyssinia?"

"I forget," said I. "I only remember you presenting me with that hideous thing hanging in my passage, which you called a dulcimer."

"Gage d'amour?" smiled Judith.

Pasquale laughed and twirled his swaggering moustache.

"I did get it from a damsel, and that is why I called it a dulcimer, but she didn't sing of Mount Abora. I wish I could remember the year."

"I think it was in 1894," said Judith quietly.

Pasquale, who had been completely unaware of Judith's existence until half an hour before, could not repress a stare of polite surprise.

"I believe you are right. In fact, you are. But how can you tell?"

"Through the kindness of Sir Marcus," replied Judith graciously, "you are a very old acquaintance. I could write you off-hand a nice little obituary notice with all the adventures—well, I will not say complete—but with all the dates accurate, I assure you. I have a head for that sort of thing."

"Yes," I cried, desiring to turn the conversation. "Don't tell Mrs. Mainwaring anything you wish forgotten. Facts are her passion. She writes wonderful articles full of figures that make your head spin, and publishes them in the popular magazines over the signature of Willoughby the statistician. Allow me to present to you a statistical ghost."

But Pasquale's subtle Italian brain was paying but half attention to me. I could read his inferences from Judith's observations, and I could tell what she wanted him to infer. I seem to have worn my sensory system outside instead of inside my skin this evening.

"Ordeyne," said he, "you are a pig, and the great-grandfather of pigs—"

"Foul" cried Carlotta, seizing on an intelligible point of the conversation.

"Why didn't you present me to Mrs. Mainwaring in 1894? I declare I have thought myself allied to that man for twenty years in bonds of the most intimate friendship, and he has never so much as mentioned you to me."

"Seer Marcous says that Pasquale is a bad lot," remarked Carlotta, with an air of sapience, after a sip of orangeade, a revolting beverage which she loves to drink at her meals.

Pasquale threw back his handsome head and laughed again like the chartered libertine he is, and Judith smiled.

"'Out of the mouths of babes, etc.,'" said I, apologetically.

"In all seriousness," said Pasquale to Judith, "I had no idea that any one was such a close friend of Ordeyne's."

Judith turned to me, with a graceful gesture of her shoulders.

"I think we have been close friends, Marcus?"

"Oh, ye-es," broke in Carlotta. "Mrs. Mainwaring has the picture of Seer Marcous in her bedroom, and there is the picture of Mrs. Mainwaring in our drawing-room. You have not seen it? But yes. You have not recognised it, Pasquale? Mrs. Mainwaring is so pretty tonight. Much prettier than the photograph. Yes, you are so pretty. I would like to put you on the mantel-piece as an ornament instead of the picture."

"May I be allowed to endorse Carlotta's sentiment of appreciation?" I said, with a view to covering her indiscretion, for I saw a flash of conjecture in Pasquale's eyes and a sudden spot of real red in Judith's cheeks. She had evidently desired to suggest an old claim on my regard, but to have it based on such intimate details as the enshrining of my photograph was not to her fancy.

"I am vastly beholden to you both," said Judith, who has a graceful way of receiving compliments. "But," turning to Pasquale, "we have travelled far from Abyssinia."

"To Sir Marcus's mantel-piece. Suppose we stay there."

"There is you and me and Mrs. Mainwaring," said the literal Carlotta, "and I am the big one in the middle. It was made big—big," she added, extending her arms in her exaggerating way. "I was wearing this dress."

"Mr. Pasquale and I will have to enlarge our frames, Marcus," said Judith, "or we shall be jealous. We shall have to make common cause together."

"We will declare an inoffensive alliance," laughed Pasquale.

"Offensive if you like," said Judith.

It may have been some effect of the glitter of lights, but I vow I saw a swift interchange of glances. Pasquale immediately turned to Carlotta with a jesting remark, and Judith engaged me in conversation on our old days in Rome. Suddenly she swerved from the topic, and leaning forward, indicated our companions with an imperceptible motion of her head.

"Don't you think," she said in a low voice, "they are a well-matched pair? Both young and picturesque; it would solve many things."

I glanced round. Carlotta, elbow on the table and chin in hand, was looking deep into Pasquale's eyes, just as she has looked into mine. Her lips had the half-sensuous, half-childish pout provocative of kisses.

"Do, and I will love you," I heard her say.

Oh, those dove-notes, those melting eyes, those lips! Oh, the horrible fool passion that burns out my soul and brain and reduces me to rave like a lovelorn early Victorian tailor! Which was worse I know not—the spasm of jealousy or the spasm of self-contempt that followed it. At that moment the music ceased suddenly on a loud crashing chord.

The moment seemed to be magnetic to all but Carlotta, who was enjoying herself prodigiously. Our three personalities appeared to vibrate rudely one against the other. I was conscious that Judith read me, that Pasquale read Judith, that again something telegraphic passed between them. The waiter offered me partridge. Pasquale quickly turned from Carlotta to his left-hand neighbour.

"I think we ought to drink Faust's health, don't you?"

I started. Had I not myself traced the analogy?

"Faust?" queried Judith at a loss.

"Our friend Faust opposite me," said Pasquale, raising his champagne glass. "Hasn't he been transformed from the lean and elderly bookworm into the gay, young gallant about the town? Once one could scarcely drag him from his cell to the quietest of dinners, and now—has he told you of his dissipations this past month, Mrs. Mainwaring?"

Judith smiled. "Have you been Mephistopheles?"

"What is Mephistopheles?" asked Carlotta.

"The devil," said Pasquale, "who made Sir Marcus young again."

"Oh, that's me," cried Carlotta, clapping her hands. "He does not read in big books any longer. Oh, I was so frightened when I first came." (I must say she hid her terrors pretty effectually.) "He was so wise, and always reading and writing, and I thought he was fifty. And now he is not wise at all, and he said two, three days ago I had made him twenty-five."

"If you go on at the rate you have begun, my dear," Judith remarked in her most charming manner, "in another year you will have brought him down to long clothes and a feeding-bottle."

Carlotta thought this very funny and laughed joyously. I laughed too, out of courtesy, at Judith's bitter sarcasm, and turned the conversation, but Pasquale was not to be baulked of his toast.

"Here's to our dear friend Faust; may he grow younger and younger every day."

We clinked glasses. Judith sighed when the performance was concluded.

"That is one of the many advantages of being a man. If you do sell your soul to the devil you can see that you get proper payment. A woman is paid in promissory notes, which are dishonoured when they fall due."

I contested the proposition. The irony of this peculiarly painful revel lay in the air of gaiety it seemed necessary to maintain. A miserable business is civilisation!

"Did you ever hear of a woman getting youth out of such a bargain?" she retorted with some vehemence.

"As women systematically underpay cabmen," said I, "so do they try to underpay the devil; and he is one too many for them."

"I am afraid," said Pasquale, "that the old days of shrewd bargains are over. There is a glut in the soul-market and they only fetch the price of old bones."

"He is talking foolish things that I do not understand," said Carlotta, putting her hand on my arm.

"It is called sham cynicism, my dear," said I, "and we all ought to be ashamed of ourselves."

"What do you like best to talk about?" Judith asked sweetly.

"Myself. And so does everybody," replied Carlotta.

We laughed, and for a time talk ceased to be allusive. But later, over our coffee, while the band was playing loudly some new American march, and Carlotta and Pasquale were laughing together, Judith drew near me.

"You did not answer my question about those two, Marcus."

My fingers trembled as I lit a fresh cigarette.

"He is not a man to whom any woman's destiny should be entrusted."

"And is she a woman on whom a man should stake his life's happiness?"

"God knows," said I, setting my teeth.

It was not an enjoyable dinner-party. I longed for the evening to be over, to have Carlotta safe back with me at home. I felt a curious dread of the Empire.

We arrived there towards the end of the first ballet. Carlotta, as soon as she had taken her seat, leaned both elbows on the front of the box and surrendered her senses to the stage. Pasquale talked to Judith. Wishing for a few moments alone I left the box and sauntered moodily along the promenade behind the First Circle. The occupants were either leaning over the partitions and watching the spectacle or sitting with drink before them at the little marble tables at the back. The gaudy, gilded, tobacco-smoke and humanity-filled theatre seemed to be unreal, the stage but a phantom cloud effect. I wondered why I, a creature from the concrete world, was there. I had an insane impulse to fly from it all, to go out into the streets, and wander, wander for ever, away from the world. I was walking along the promenade, lost in this lunacy, when I stumbled against a fellow-promenader and the shock brought me to my senses. It was an elderly, obese Oriental wearing a red fez. He had a long nose and small, crafty eyes, and was deeply pitted with smallpox. I made profuse apologies and he accepted them with suavity. It then occurring to me that I was he having in a discourteous and abjectly absurd manner, I made my way back to the box. I drew a chair to Judith's side.

"You are giving me a captivating evening," she said, with a smile.

"Whom are you captivating?" I asked, idly jesting. "Pasquale?"

"You are cruel," whispered Judith, with a flicker of her eyelids.

I flushed, ashamed, not having weighed the significance of my words. All I could say was: "I beg your pardon," whereat Judith laughed mirthlessly. I relapsed into silence. Turn followed turn on the stage. While the curtain was lowered Carlotta sank back with a little sigh of enjoyment, and nodded brightly at me.

"Do you remember," she said, turning to me, at a fresh fall of the curtain, "when you brought me first? I said I should like to live here. Wasn't I silly?"

She turned again, then suddenly rose to her feet and staggered back to the back of the box, pointing outward, with an expression of wild terror on her face.

"Hamdi—he's down there—he saw me."

I sprang to her assistance and put my arm around her.

"Nonsense, dear," said I.

But Pasquale, looking around the house, cried:

"By Jove! she's right. I would recognise the old villain a thousand years hence in Tartarus. There he is."

I left Carlotta, and the first person my eyes rested upon in the stalls was my obese but suave Oriental, regarding the box with an impassive countenance.

"That's Hamdi Effendi, all right," said Pasquale.

Carlotta clutched my arms as I joined her at the back of the box.

"Oh, take me away, Seer Marcous, take me away," she moaned piteously. My poor child was white and shaken with fear. I again put my arm round her.

"No harm can happen to you, dear," I said, soothingly.

"Oh, darling Seer Marcous, take me home," cried Carlotta.

"Very well," said I. I helped her on with her wrap, and apologising to the two others, begged them to remain.

"We'll all go together," said Judith quietly.

"And form a body-guard," laughed Pasquale.

Carlotta clinging to my arm we left the box and slipped through the promenade and down the stairs.

Hamdi Effendi, having anticipated our intention, cut off our retreat in the vestibule. Carlotta shrank nearer to me.

"I beg your pardon, Monsieur, but may I have the pleasure of a few words with you about this young lady?" said he in the urbanest manner and the most execrable French.

"I hardly see the necessity," said I.

"Pardon me, but this young lady is a Turkish subject and my daughter. My name is Hamdi Effendi, Prefect of Police at Aleppo, and my address in London is the Hotel Metropole."

"I am charmed to make your acquaintance," said I. "I have often heard of you from Mademoiselle—but I believe both her father and mother were English, so she is neither your daughter nor a Turkish subject."

"Ah, that we will see," rejoined the polite Oriental. He addressed some words rapidly in Turkish to Carlotta, who shudderingly replied in the same language.

"Mademoiselle unfortunately does not consent to accompany me," he interpreted with a smile. "So I am afraid I will have to take her back without her consent."

"If you do, Hamdi Effendi," said Pasquale in a light tone of conversation, but with the ugliest snarl of the lips that I have ever beheld, "I shall most certainly kill you."

Hamdi turned to him with a polite bow.

"Ah, it is Monsieur Pasquale. I thought I recognised you."

"You have every reason to do so," said Pasquale.

"I saved you from prison."

"You accepted a bribe."

"For heaven's sake," cried Judith, "go on speaking in low voices, or we shall have a scene here."

One or two idlers hung near with an air of curiosity and the huge beuniformed commissionaire watched us with an uncertain eye. I kept a tight hold of Carlotta and drew her more behind the screen of a palm near which we happened to stand.

"Madame is right," said Hamdi. "We can discuss this little affair like gentlemen."

"Then, in the most gentlemanly way in the world," said Pasquale, "I swear to you that if you touch this young lady, I will kill you."

"It appears, to be Monsieur," said the obese Turk with a graceful wave of the hand in my direction, "and not you, who has robbed my home of its treasure, unless," he added, and I shall always remember the hideous leer of that pulpy-nosed and small-pox pitted face, "unless Monsieur has relieved you of your responsibilities."

For a moment I was speechless. Pasquale put himself in front of me.

"Steady on, Ordeyne."

"Sir," said I, "I found this young lady destitute in the streets of London. She is my wife and therefore a British subject; so you can take yourself and your infamous insinuations to the devil, and the quicker the better."

"Or there'll be two of us engaged in the killing," said Pasquale.

Hamdi again exchanged a few sentences in Turkish with Carlotta, and then smiled upon us with the same unruffled suavity.

"Au revoir, Mesdames et Messieurs." With a courteous salute he shuffled back towards the stall-entrance.

The tension over, Carlotta broke from me and clutched Pasquale by the arm.

"Oh, kill him, kill him, kill him!" she cried in a passionate whisper.

He freed himself gently and took out a cigarette case.

"Scarcely necessary. He'll soon die." And turning to me he added: "Not a sound organ in his body. Besides, it seems to me that if there is any murdering to be done, it's the business of Sir Marcus."

"There is going to be no murdering," said I, profoundly disgusted, "and don't talk in that revolting way about the wretched man dying."

I regained possession of Carlotta who, seeing that I was angry, cast a scared glance at me, and became docile as suddenly as she had grown passionate. I turned to Judith.

"Will you ever forgive me—" I began.

But the sight of her face froze me. It was white and hard and haggard, and the lips were drawn into a thin line, and the delicate colour she had put upon her cheeks stood out in ghastly contrast. Her dress, like the foam of a summer sea, mocked the winter in her face.

"There is nothing to forgive," she said, smiling icily. "I came for a variety entertainment and I have not been disappointed. Good-bye. Perhaps Mr. Pasquale will be so kind as to put me into a cab."

"I will drive you home, if you will allow me," said Pasquale.

We separated, shaking hands as if nothing had happened, as perfunctorily as if we had been the most distant of acquaintances.

On our way back we spoke very little. Carlotta nestled close against me, seeking the shelter of my arm. She cried, I don't know why, but it seemed to afford comfort. I kissed her lips and her hair.

At home, I drew the sofa near the fire—it has been a raw night and she feels the cold like a tropical plant—and sat down by her side.

"Did you hear what I said to Hamdi Effendi—that you were my wife?"

"But that was only a lie," she answered in her plain idiom.

My petting and soothing together with the sense of home security and a cup of French chocolate prepared by Antoinette, who, astonished at our early return and seeing her darling in distress, had hastened to provide culinary consolation, had restored her wonted serenity of demeanour. Polyphemus also purred reassuringly upon her lap.

"It was a lie this evening," said I, "but in a few days I hope it will be true."

"You are going to marry me?" she asked, suddenly sitting erect and looking at me rather bewildered.

"If you will have me, Carlotta."

"I will do what Seer Marcous tells me," she answered. "Will you marry me to-morrow?"

"I think it hardly possible, my dear," I answered. "But I shall lose no time, I assure you. Once you are my wife neither Hamdi Effendi nor the Sultan of Turkey can claim you. No one can take an Englishman's wife away from him."

"Hamdi is a devil," said Carlotta.

"We can laugh at him," said I.

"Did you ever see such an ugly mug?"

Where she gets her occasional bits of slang from I do not know; but her little foreign staccato pronunciation gives them unusual quaintness. I laughed, and Carlotta, throwing Polyphemus off her lap, laughed too, and sidled up against me. The cat regarded us for a moment with a disgusted eye, then stretched himself as if he had quitted Carlotta of his own accord, and walked away in a state of dignified boredom.

"Hamdi is like a pig and an elephant and a great fat turkey," said Carlotta.

"If all the world were beautiful," I exclaimed, "such a thing as our appreciation of beauty would not exist. I should not even be aware that my Carlotta was beautiful."

She put her hands on my knees in her impulsive way, and bending forward looked at me delightedly.

"Oh, you do think so?"

"You are the loveliest and most intoxicating creature on the earth, Carlotta."

"Now I am sure, sure, sure," she cried, enraptured. "You have never said it before, Seer Marcous darling, and I must kiss you."

I checked her with my hands on her soft shoulders.

"Only if you promise to marry me."

"Of course," said Carlotta.

She said it as thoughtlessly and light-heartedly as if I had asked her to come out for a walk. Again I felt the odd spasm of pain. In my late madness I had often pictured the scene: how I should hold her throbbing beauty in my arms, my senses clouded with the fragrance of her, and how, in burning words, I should pour out the litany of my passion. But to the gods it seemed otherwise. No Quaker maiden's betrothal kiss was chaster. Cold grew the fever in my veins and the litany died on my lips.

Who and what is she whom I love? There have been days when her eyes have carried in their depths the allurements of a sorceress, when her limbs have woven Venusberg enchantments which it has taken all my strength to withstand. But tonight, when I take the greatest step and claim her as mine till our lives' end, she yields with the complaisance of an ignorant child and raises up between us the barrier of her innocence. When shall I learn the soul of her?

Well, jacta est alea. The events of to-night have precipitated our destiny. In all probability Hamdi is powerless to take her from my protection, and this marriage is unnecessary as a safeguard. I have no notion of the international law on such points—but at any rate it will make the assurance of her safety absolute. No power on earth can take her from me. Great Heaven! The thought of her gone forever out of my life brings the cold sweat to my forehead. Without her, child, enchantress, changeling that she is, how could I face existence?

I shall have my heart's desire. Why, I should be athrill with the joy and the flame of youth! I should laugh and sing! I should perform the happy antics of love's exuberance! I should be transported to the realms where the fairy tales end!

Instead, I sit before a dying fire, as I sat last night, and am oppressed with the sense of tragedy. It was not altogether Carlotta's innocence that formed the barrier between us. That which rendered it impassable was Judith's white face.

Judith's white face will haunt my dreams to-night.



CHAPTER XVI

October 27th

I do not like living. It is thoroughly disagreeable. Today Judith taunted me with never having lived, and I admitted the justice of the taunt and regretted in poignant misery the change from my old conditions. If to live is to have one's reason cast down and trampled under foot, one's heart aflame with a besotted passion and one's soul racked with remorse, then am I living in good sooth—and I would far rather be dead and suffering the milder pains of Purgatory. Men differently constituted get used to it, as the eels to skinning. They say "mea culpa," "damn," or "Kismet," according to their various traditions, and go forth comforted to their workaday pursuits. I envy them. I enter this exquisite Torture Chamber, and I shriek at the first twinge of the thumbscrew and faint at the preliminary embraces of the scavenger's daughter.

I envy a fellow like Caesar Borgia. He could murder a friend, seduce his widow, and rob the orphans all on a summer's day, and go home contentedly to supper; and after a little music he could sleep like a man who has thoroughly earned his repose. What manner of creatures are other men? They area blank mystery to me; and I am writing—or have been writing—a sociological study of the most subtle generation of them that has ever existed! I am an empty fool. I know absolutely nothing. I can no more account for the peaceful slumbers of that marvellous young man of five-and-twenty than I can predicate the priority of the first hen or the first egg. I, with never a murder or a seduction or a robbery on my conscience, could not sleep last night. I doubt whether I shall sleep to-night. I feel as if I shall remain awake through the centuries with a rat gnawing my vitals.

So unhappy looking a woman as Judith, when I called on her early this forenoon, I have never beheld. Gone was the elaborate coquetry of yesterday; gone the quiet roguishness of yesteryear; gone was all the Judith that I knew, and in her place stood a hollow-eyed woman shaking at gates eternally barred.

"I—thought you would come this morning. I had that lingering faith in you."

"Your face haunted me all night," I said. "I was bound to come."

"So, this is the end of it all," she remarked, stonily.

"No," said I. "It only marks the transition from a very ill-defined relationship to as loyal a friendship as ever man could offer woman."

She gave a quivering little shrug of disgust and turned away.

"Oh, don't talk like that 'I can't offer you bread, but I'll give you a nice round polished stone.' Friendship! What has a woman like me got to do with friendship?"

"Have I ever given you much more?"

"God knows what you have given me," she cried, bitterly. She stared out of the window at the sodden street and murky air. I went to her side and touched her wrist.

"For heaven's sake, Judith, tell me what I can do."

"What's done is done," she said, between her teeth. "When did you marry her?"

I explained briefly the condition of affairs. She looked at me hard and long; then stared out of the window again, and scarce heeded what I said.

"It was to set myself right with you on this point," I added, "that I have visited you at such an hour."

She remained silent. I took a few turns about the familiar room that was filled with the associations of many years. The piano we chose together. The copy of the Botticelli Tondo—the crowned Madonna of the Uffizi—I gave her in Florence. We had ransacked London together to find the Chippendale bookcase; and on its shelves stood books that had formed a bond between us, and copies of old reviews containing my fugitive contributions. A spurious Japanese dragon in faence, an inartistic monstrosity dear to her heart, at which I had often railed, grinned forgivingly at me from the mantel-piece. I have never realised how closely bound up with my habits was this drawing-room of Judith's. I stopped once more by her side.

"I can't leave you altogether, dear," I said, gently. "A bit of myself is in this room."

Her bosom shook with unhappy laughter.

"A bit?" Then she turned suddenly on me. "Are you simply dull or sheerly cruel?"

"I am dull," said I. "Why do you refuse my friendship? Our relation has been scarcely more. It has not touched the deep things in us. We agreed at the start that it should not. The words 'I love you' have never passed between us. We have been loyal to our compact. Now that love has come into my life—and Heaven knows I have striven against it—what would you have me do?"

"And what would you have me do?" said Judith, tonelessly.

"Forgive me for breaking off the old, and trust me to make the new pleasant to you."

She made no answer, but stood still staring out of the window like a woman of stone. Presently she shivered and crossed to the fire, before which she crouched on a low chair. I remained by the window, anxious, puzzled, oppressed.

"Marcus," she said at last, in a low voice. I obeyed her summons. She motioned me to a chair, and without looking at me began to speak.

"You said there was a bit of you in this room. There is everything of you. Your whole being is for me in this room. You are with me wherever I go. You are the beginning and end of life to me. I love you with a passion that is killing me. I am an emotional woman. I made shipwreck of myself because I thought I loved a man. But, as God hears me, you are the only man I have loved. You came to me like a breath of Heaven while I was in Purgatory—and you have been Heaven to me ever since. It has been play to you—but to me—"

I fell on my knees beside her. Each of the low half-whispered words was a red hot iron. I had received last night the message of her white face with incredulity. I had reviewed our past life together and had found little warrant in it for that message. It could not come from the depths. It was staggeringly impossible. And now the impossible was the flaming fact.

I fell on my knees beside her.

"Not play, Judith—"

She put out her hand to check me, and the words died on my lips. What could I say?

"For you it was a detached pleasant sentiment, if you like; for me the deadliest earnest. I was a fool too. You never said you loved me, but I thought you did. You were not as other men, you knew nothing of the ways of the world or of women or of passion—you were reserved, intellectual—you viewed things in a queer light of your own. I felt that the touch of a chain would fret you. I gave you absolute freedom—often when I craved for you. I made no demands. I assented to your philosophic analysis of the situation—it is your way to moralise whimsically on everything, as if you were a disconnected intelligence outside the universe—and I paid no attention to it. I used to laugh at you—oh, not unkindly, but lovingly, happily, victoriously. Oh, yes, I was a fool—what woman in love isn't? I thought I gave you all you needed. I was content, secure. I magnified every little demonstration. When you touched my ear it was more to me than the embrace of another man might have been. I have lived on one kiss of yours for a week. To you the kiss was of no more value than a cigarette. I wish," she added in a whisper, "I wish I were dead!"

She had spoken in a low, monotonous voice, staring haggardly at the fire, while I knelt by her side. I murmured some banal apologia, miserably aware that one set of words is as futile as another when one has broken a woman's heart.

"You never knew I loved you?" she went on in the same bitter undertone. "What kind of woman did you take me for? I have accepted help from you to enable me to live in this flat—do you imagine I could have done such a thing without loving you? I should have thought it was obvious in a thousand ways."

The fire getting low, she took up the scoop for coals. Mechanically I relieved her of the thing and fulfilled the familiar task. Neither spoke for a long time. She remained there and I went to the window. It had begun to rain. A barrel-organ below was playing some horrible music-hall air, and every vibrant note was like a hammer on one's nerves. The grinder's bedraggled Italian wife perceiving me at the window grinned up at me with the national curve of the palm. She had a black eye which the cacophonous fiend had probably given her, and she grinned like a happy child of nature. Men in my position do not blacken women's eyes; but it is only a question of manners. Was I, for that, less of a brute male than the scowling beast at the organ?

The sudden sound of a sob made me turn to Judith, who had broken down and was crying bitterly, her face hidden in her hands. I bent and touched her shoulder.

"Judith—"

She flung her arms around my neck.

"I can't give you up, I can't, I can't, I can't," she cried, wildly.

For the first time in my life I heard a woman give abandoned, incoherent utterance to an agony of passion; and it sounded horrible, like the cry of an animal wounded to death.

A guilt-stricken creature, scarce daring to meet her eyes, I bade her farewell. She had recovered her composure.

"Make me one little promise, Marcus, do me one little favour," she said, with quivering lip, and letting her cold hand remain in mine. "Stay away from her to-day. I couldn't bear to think of you and her together, happy, love-making, after what I've said this morning. I should writhe with the shame and the torture of it. Give me your thoughts to-day. Wear a little mourning for the dead. It is all I ask of you."

"I should have done what you ask without the asking," I replied.

I kissed her hand, and went out into the street.

I had walked but a few blind steps when I became aware of the presence and voice of Pasquale.

"Coming from Mrs. Mainwaring's? I am just on my way there to restore her opera-glasses which I ran away with last night. What's her number? I forget. I dropped in at Lingfield Terrace to inquire, but found you had already started."

"Seventeen," I answered, mechanically.

"You are not looking well, my good friend," said he. "I hope last night has not upset you. It's all bluff, you know, on the part of the precious Hamdi."

"I dare say it was," I assented.

"And bluff on your part, too. I have never given your imaginative faculties sufficient credit. It bowled Hamdi out clean."

"Yes," said I. "It bowled him out clean."

"Serve him right," said Pasquale. "He's the wickedest old thief unhung."

"Quite so," said I, "the wickedest old thief unhung."

Pasquale shook me by the arm.

"Are you a man or a phonograph? What on earth has happened to you?"

I think I envied the laughter in his handsome, dark face, and the careless grace of the fellow as he stood beneath the dripping umbrella debonair as a young prince, in perfectly fitting blue serge-he wore no overcoat; mine was buttoned up to the chin, and immaculate suede gloves.

"What is it?" he repeated, gaily.

"I didn't sleep last night," said I, "my breakfast disagreed with me, and it's raining in the most unpleasant manner."

Even while I was speaking he left my side and darted across the road. In some astonishment I watched him for a moment from the kerb, and then made my way slowly to the other side. I found him in conversation with an emaciated, bedraggled woman standing by an enormous bundle, about three times her own cubic bulk, which she had rested on the slimy pavement. One hand pressed a panting bosom.

"You are going to carry that in your arms all the way to South Kensington?" I heard him cry as I approached.

"Yes, sir," said the woman.

"Then you shan't. I'm not going to allow it. Catch hold of this."

The umbrella which he thrust out at her she clutched automatically, to prevent it falling about her ears. The veto she received with a wonderment which deepened into stupefaction when she saw him lift the huge bundle in his arms and stalk away with it down the street. She turned a scared face at me.

"It's washing," she said.

Pasquale paused, looked round and motioned her onward. She followed without a word, holding the trim silver mounted umbrella, and I mechanically brought up the rear. It had all happened so quickly that I too was confused. The scanty populace in the rain-filled street stared and gaped. A shambling fellow in corduroys bawled an obscene jest. Pasquale put down his bundle.

"Do you want to be sent to hell by lightning?" he asked, with the evil snarl of the lips.

"No," said the man, sheering off.

"I'm glad," remarked Pasquale, picking up the bundle. And we resumed our progress.

Luckily a four-wheeled cab overtook us. Pasquale stopped it, squeezed the bundle inside, and held the door open for the faltering and bewildered woman, as if she had been the authentic duchessa at Ealing.

"You were saying, Ordeyne," he observed, as the cabman drove off with three shillings and his incoherent fare, "you were saying that your breakfast disagreed with you."

In spite of my heaviness of heart, I laughed and loved the man. There was something fantastically chivalrous in the action; something superb in the contempt of convention; something whimsical, adventurous, unexpected; and something divine in the wrathful pity; and something irresistible in his impudent apostrophe to myself. It has been the one flash of comfort during this long and desolate day.

I have kept my promise to Judith. I have lunched and dined at the club, and in the library of the club I have tried to while away the hours. I intended this morning to make the necessary arrangements for the marriage. After my interview with Judith I had not the heart. I put it off till to-morrow. I have observed the day as a day of mourning. I have worn sackcloth and ashes. I have done such penance as I could for the grievous fault I have committed. Carlotta is in bed and asleep. She went early, says Antoinette, having a bad headache. No wonder, poor child.

A few moments ago I was tempted to peep into her room and satisfy myself that she was not ailing. A headache is the common precursor to many maladies. But I remembered my promise and refrained. The cooing notes of the voice would have called me to her side, and her arms would have been around my neck and I should have forgotten Judith.



CHAPTER XVII

October 28th.

I rose late this morning. When I went down to breakfast I found that Carlotta had already gone for her music lesson.

I drove at once to the Temple to see my lawyers and to make arrangements for a marriage by special license.

I returned at one o'clock. Stenson met me in the hall.

"I beg your pardon, Sir Marcus, but Mademoiselle hasn't come back yet."

I waited an uneasy hour. Such a lengthy absence from home was unprecedented. At two o'clock I went round to Herr Stuer in the Avenue Road—a five minutes' walk.

He entered the sitting-room into which I had been ushered, wiping his lips.

"I am sorry to disturb you, Herr Stuer," said I, "but will you kindly tell me when Miss Carlotta left you, this morning?"

"Miss Carlotta came not at all this morning," he replied.

"But it was her regular day?"

"At ten o'clock. She did not come. At eleven I have another pupil. She has not before missed one lesson."

I flew back home, in an agony of hope that her laughing face would meet me there and dispel a dread that chilled me like an icy wind.

There was no Carlotta.

There has been no Carlotta all this awful day.

There will never be a Carlotta again.

I drove to the police station.

"What do you think has happened?" asked the Inspector.

It was only too horribly obvious. Any man but myself would have kept her under lock and key and established a guard round the house. Any man but myself would have never let her out of his sight until he had married her, until he had tracked Hamdi and his myrmidons back to Alexandretta.

"Abduction has happened," I cried wildly. "Between Lingfield Terrace and Avenue Road she has been caught, thrust into a closed carriage, gagged and carried God knows where by the wiliest old thief in Asia. He is the Prefect of Police in Aleppo. His name is Hamdi Effendi and he is staying at the Hotel Metropole."

The Inspector questioned me. Heaven knows how I answered. I saw the scene. The waiting carriage. The unfrequented bit of road. My heart's darling, her face a radiant flower in the grey morning, tripping lightheartedly along. The sudden dash, the struggle, the swiftly closed door. It was a matter of a few seconds. My brain grew dizzy with the vision.

"You say that he threatened to abduct her?" asked the Inspector.

"Yes," said I, "and a friend of mine promised to kill him. Heaven grant he keep his promise!"

"Be careful, Sir Marcus," smiled the Inspector. "Or if there is a murder committed you will be an accessory before the fact."

I intimated my disregard of the contingency. What did it matter? Nothing in the world mattered save the recovery of the light and meaning of my existence. My friend's name? Sebastian Pasquale, He lived near by in the St. John's Wood Road.

"The best thing you can do, Sir Marcus," said the Inspector, "is to get hold of Mr. Pasquale and take him with you to Scotland Yard. Perhaps two heads will be better than one. In the meanwhile we shall communicate with headquarters and make the necessary inquiries in the neighbourhood."

I drove to St. John's Wood Road, and learned to my dismay that Pasquale had given up his rooms there a week ago. All his letters were addressed to his club in Piccadilly. I drove thither. How has mankind contented itself for these thousands of years with a horse as its chief means of locomotion? Oh, the exasperation I suffered behind that magnified snail! I dashed into the club. Mr. Pasquale had not been there all day. No, he was not staying there. It was against the rules to give members' private addresses.

"But it's a matter of life and death!" I cried.

"To tell you the truth, sir," said the hall porter, "Mr. Pasquale's only permanent address is his banker's, and we really don't know where he is staying at present."

I wrote a hurried line:

"Hamdi has abducted Carlotta. I am half crazed. As you love me give me your help. Oh, God! man, why aren't you here?"

I left it with the porter, and crawled to Scotland Yard. The cabman at my invectives against his sauntering beast waxed indignant; it was a three-quarter blood mare and one of the fastest trotters in London.

"She passes everything," said he.

"It is because everything is standing still or going backward or turned upside down," said I.

No doubt he thought me mad. Mad as a dingo dog. The thought of the words, the summer and the sun sent a spasm of hunger through my heart. Then I murmured to myself: "'Save my soul from hell and my darling from the power of the dog.' Which dog? Not the dingo dog." I verily believe my brain worked wrong to-day.

Great Scotland Yard at last. I went through passages. I found myself in a nondescript room where a courteous official seated at a desk held me on the rack for half an hour. I had to describe Carlotta: not in the imagery wherein only one could create an impression of her sweetness, but in the objective terms of the police report. What was she wearing? A hat, and jacket, a skirt, shoes; of course she wore gloves; possibly she carried a muff. Impatient of such commonplace details, I described her fully. But the glory of her bronze hair, her great dark brown eyes, the quivering sensitiveness of her lips; her intoxicating compound of Botticelli and the Venusberg; the dove-notes of her voice; all was a matter of boredom to Scotland Yard. They clamoured for the colour of her feathers and the material of which her dress was made; her height in vulgar figures and the sizes of her gloves and shoes.

"How on earth can I tell you?" I cried in desperation.

"Perhaps one of your servants can give the necessary information," replied the urbane official. If I had lost an umbrella he could not have viewed my plight with more inhuman blandness!

A miracle happened. As I was writing a summons to Stenson to obtain these details from Antoinette and attend at once, a policeman entered and I learned that my confidential man was at the door. My heart leapt within me. He had tracked me hither and had come to tell me that Carlotta was safe. But the first glance at his face killed the wild hope. He had tracked me hither, it is true; but only apologetically to offer what information might be useful. "It is a very great liberty, Sir Marcus, and I will retire at once if I have overstepped my duties, but there are important details, sir, in catastrophes of this nature with which my experience has taught me only servants can be acquainted."

There must be a book of ten thousand pages entitled "The Perfect Valet," dealing with every contingency of domestic life which this admirable fellow has by heart. He uttered his Ciceronian sentence with the gravity of a pasteboard figure in the toy theatre of one's childhood.

"Can you describe the young lady's dress?" asked the official.

"I have made it my business," said Stenson, "to obtain accurate information as to every detail of Mademoiselle Carlotta's attire when she left the house this morning."

I faded into insignificance. Stenson was a man after the Inspector's heart. A few eager questions brought the desired result. A dark red toque with a grey bird's wing; a wine-coloured zouave jacket and skirt, black braided; a dark blue bodice; a plain gold brooch (the first trinket I had given her—the occasion of her first clasp of arms around my neck) fastening her collar; a silver fox necklet and muff; patent leather shoes and brown suede gloves.

"Any special mark or characteristics?"

"A white scar above the left temple," said Stenson.

Lord have mercy! The man has lived day by day for five months with Carlotta's magical beauty, and all he has noticed as characteristic is the little white scar—she fell on marble steps as a child—the only flaw, if flaw can be in a thing so imperceptible, in her perfect loveliness.

"Mademoiselle has also a tiny mole behind her right ear," said Stenson.

The Inspector's conception of Stenson expanded into an apotheosis. He paid him deference. His pen wrote greedily every syllable the inspired creature uttered. When the fount of inspiration ran dry, Stenson turned to me with his imperturbable, profoundly respectful air.

"Shall I return home, Sir Marcus, or have you any further need of my service?"

I bade him go home. He withdrew. The Inspector smiled cheerfully. "Now we can get along," said he. "It's a pity Mr.—Mr. Pasquale" (he consulted his notes) "is out of touch with us for the moment. He might have given us great assistance."

He rose from his chair. "I think we shall very soon trace the young lady. An accurate personal description like this, you see, is invaluable."

He handed me the printed form which he had filled in. In spite of my misery I almost laughed at the fatuity of the man in thinking that those mere unimaginative statistics applicable to five hundred thousand young females in London, could in any way express Carlotta.

"This is all very well," said I; "but the first thing to do is to lay that Turkish devil by the heels."

"You can count on our making the most prompt and thorough investigation," said he.

"And in the mean time what can I do?"

"Your best course, Sir Marcus," he answered, "is to go home and leave things in our hands. As soon as ever we have the slightest clue, we shall communicate with you."

He bowed me out politely. In a few moments I found myself in the greyness of the autumn afternoon wandering on the Thames Embankment like a lost soul on the banks of Phlegethon. It seemed as if I had never seen the sun, should never see the sun again. I was drifting sans purpose into eternity.

I passed by some railings. A colossal figure looming through the misty air struck me with a sense of familiarity. It was the statue of Sir Bartle Frere, and these were the gardens beneath the terrace of the National Liberal Club. It was here that I had first met her. The dripping trees seemed to hold the echo of the words spoken when their leaves were green: "Will you please to tell me what I shall do?" I strained my eyes to see the bench on which I had sat, and my eyes tricked me into translating a blurr at the end of the seat into the ghostly form of Carlotta. My misery overwhelmed me; and through my misery shot a swift pang of remorse at having treated her harshly on that sweet and memorable afternoon in May.

I turned the corner at Whitehall Place and looked down the desolate gardens. The benches were empty, the trees were bare, "and no birds sang." I crossed the road.

The Hotel Metropole. The great doors stood invitingly open, and from the pavement one could see the warmth and colour of the vestibule. Here was staying the Arch-Devil who had robbed me of my life. I stood for a moment under the portico shaking with rage. I must have lost consciousness for a few seconds for I do not remember entering or mounting the stairs. I found myself at the bureau asking for Hamdi Effendi. No, he had not left. They thought he was in the hotel. A page despatched in search of him departed with my card, bawling a number. I hate these big caravanserais where one is a mere number, as in a gaol. "Would to heaven it were a gaol," I muttered to myself, "and this were the number of Hamdi Effendi!"

A lean man rose from a chair and, holding out his hand, effusively saluted me by name. I stared at him. He recalled our acquaintance at Etretat. I fished him up from the deeps of a previous incarnation and vaguely remembered him as a young American floral decorator who used to preach to me the eternal doctrine of hustle. I shook hands with him and hoped that he was well.

"Going very strong. Never stronger. Never so well as when I'm full up with work. But you don't hurry around enough in this dear, sleepy old country. Men lunch. In New York all the lunch one has time for is to swallow a plasmon lozenge in a street-car."

His high pitched voice shrieked bombastic platitude into my ears for an illimitable time. I answered occasionally with the fringe of my mind. Could my agonised state of being have remained unperceived by any human creature save this young, hustling, dollar-centred New York floral decorator?

"Since we met, guess how many times I've crossed the Atlantic. Four times!"

Long-suffering Atlantic!

"And about yourself. Still going piano, piano with books and things?"

"Yes, books and things," I echud.

The page came up and announced Hamdi's intention of immediate appearance.

"And how is that charming young lady, your ward, Miss Carlotta?" continued my tormentor.

"Yes," I answered hurriedly. "A charming young lady. You used to give her sweets. Have you noticed that a fondness for sugar plums induces an equanimity of character? It also spoils the teeth. That is why the front teeth of all American women are so bad."

I must be endowed with the low cunning of the fox, who, I am told, by a swift turn puts his pursuers off the scent. The learned term the rhetorical device an ignoratio elenchi. My young friend's patriotism rose in furious defence of his countrywomen's beauty. I looked round the luxuriously furnished vestibule, wondering from which of the many doors the object of my hatred would emerge, and my young friend's talk continued to ruffle the fringe of my mind.

"I'm afraid you're expecting some one rather badly," he remarked with piercing perceptiveness.

"A dull acquaintance," said I. "I shall be sorry when his arrival puts an end to our engaging conversation."

Then the lift door opened and Hamdi stepped out like the Devil in an Alhambra ballet.

He looked at my card and looked at me. He bowed politely.

"I did not know whom I should have the pleasure of seeing," said he in his execrable French. "In what way can I be of service to Sir Marcus Ordeyne?"

"What have you done with Carlotta?" I asked, glaring at him.

His ignoble small-pox pitted face assumed an expression of bland inquiry.

"Carlotta?"

"Yes," said I. "Where have you taken her to?"

"Explain yourself, Monsieur," said Hamdi. "Do I understand that Lady Ordeyne has disappeared?"

"Tell me what you have done with her."

His crafty features grew satanic; his long fleshy nose squirmed like the proboscis of one of Orcagna's fiends.

"Really, Monsieur," said he, with a hideous leer—oh, words are impotent to express the ugliness of that face! "Really, Monsieur, supposing I had stolen Miladi, you would be the last person I should inform of her whereabouts. You are simple, Monsieur. I had always heard that England was a country of arcadian innocence, so unlike my own black, wicked country, and now—" he shrugged his shoulders blandly, "j'en suis convaincu."

"You may jeer, Hamdi Effendi," said I in a white passion of anger. "But the English police you will not find so arcadian."

"Ah, so you have been to the police?" said the suave villain. "You have gone to Scotland—Scotland Place Scotland—n'importe. They are investigating the affair? I thank you for the friendly warning."

"Warning!" I cried, choked with indignation. He held up a soft, fat palm.

"Ah—it is not a warning? Then, Monsieur, I am afraid you have committed an indiscretion which your friends in Scotland Place will not pardon you. You would not make a good police agent. I am of the profession, so I know."

I advanced a step. He recoiled, casting a quick look backward at the lift just then standing idle with open doors.

"Hamdi Effendi," I cried, "by the living God, if you do not restore me my wife—"

But then I stopped short. Hamdi had stepped quickly backward into the lift, and given a sign to the attendant. The door slammed and all I could do was to shake my fist at Hamdi's boots as they disappeared upwards.

I remember once in Italy seeing a cat playing with a partially stunned bat which, flying low, she had brought to the ground. She crouched, patted it, made it move a little, patted it again and retired on her haunches preparing for a spring. Suddenly the bat shot vertically into the air.

I stared at the ascending lift with the cat's expression of impotent dismay and stupefaction. It was inconceivably grotesque. It brought into my tragedy an element of infernal farce. I became conscious of peals of laughter, and looking round beheld the American doubled up in a saddlebag chair. I fled from the vestibule of the hotel clothed from head to foot in derision.

I am at home, sitting at my work-table, walking restlessly about the room, stepping out into the raw air on the balcony and looking for a sign down the dark and silent road. I curse myself for my folly in entering the Hotel Metropole. The damned Turk held me in the palm of his hand. He made mock of me to his heart's content.... And Carlotta is in his power. I grow white with terror when I think of her terror. She is somewhere, locked up in a room, in this great city. My God! Where can she be?

The police must find her. London is not mediaeval Italy for women to be gagged and carried off to inaccessible strongholds in defiance of laws and government. I repeat to myself that she must come back, that the sober working of English institutions will restore her to my arms, that my agony is a matter of a day or two at most, that the special license obtained this morning and now lying before me is not the document of irony it seems, and that in a week's time we shall look back on this nightmare of a day with a smile, and look forward to the future with laughter in our hearts.

But to-night I am very lonely. "Loneliness," says Epictetus, "is a certain condition of the helpless man." And I am helpless. All my aid lies in the learning in those books; and all the learning in all those books on all sides from floor to ceiling cannot render me one infinitesimal grain of practical assistance. If only Pasquale, man of action, swift intelligence, were here! I can only trust to the trained methods of the unimaginative machine who has set out to trace Carlotta by means of the scar on her forehead and the mole behind her ear. And meanwhile I am very lonely. My sole friend, to whom I could have turned, Mrs. McMurray, is still at Bude. She is to have a child, I understand, in the near future, and will stay in Cornwall till the confinement is over. Her husband, even were he not amid the midnight stress of his newspaper office, I should shrink from seeking. He is a Niagara of a man. Judith—I can go to her no more. And though Antoinette has wept her heart out all day long, poor soul, and Stenson has conveyed by his manner his respectful sympathy, I cannot take counsel of my own servants. I have gathered into my arms the one-eyed cat, and buried my face in his fur—where Carlotta's face has been buried. "That's the way I should like to be kissed!" Oh, my dear, my dear, were you here now, that is the way I should kiss you!

I have gone upstairs and wandered about her room. Antoinette has prepared it for her reception to-night, as usual. The corner of the bedclothes is turned down, and her night-dress, a gossamer thing with cherry ribbons, laid out across the bed. At the foot lie the familiar red slippers with the audacious heels; her dressing-gown is thrown in readiness over the back of a chair; even the brass hot water can stands in the basin—and it is still hot. And I know that the foolish woman is wide-awake overhead waiting for her darling. I kissed the pillow still fragrant of her where her head rested last night, and I went downstairs with a lump in my throat.

Again I sit at my work-table and, to save myself from going mad with suspense, jot down in my diary* the things that have happened. Put in bald words they scarcely seem credible.

* It will be borne in mind that I am writing these actual pages, afterwards, at Verona, amplifying the rough notes in my diary. M. O.

A sudden clattering, nerve-shaking, strident peal at the front-door bell.

I flew down the stairs. It was news of Carlotta. It was Carlotta herself brought back to me. My heart swelled with joy as if it would burst. I knew that as I opened the door Carlotta would fall laughing, weeping, sobbing into my arms.

I opened the door. It was only a police officer in plain clothes.

"Sir Marcus Ordeyne?"

"Yes."

"We have traced the young lady all right. She left London by the two-twenty Continental express from Victoria with Mr. Sebastian Pasquale."



CHAPTER XVIII

November 1st.

Five days ago the blow fell, and I am only now recovering; only now awakening to the horrible pain of it.

I have gone about like a man in a dream. Blurred visages of men with far-away voices have saluted me at the club. Innumerable lines of print which my eyes have scanned have been destitute of meaning. I have forced myself to the mechanical task of copying piles of rough notes for my History; I have been able to bring thereto not an atom of intelligence; popes, princes, painters are a category of disassociated names, less evocative of ideas than the columns in the Post Office London Directory. I have stared stupidly into the fire or at the dripping branches of the trees opposite my windows. I have walked the streets in dull misery. I have sought solace in the Zoological Gardens.

There is a kindly brown bear who pleads humanly for buns, and her I have fed into a sort of friendship. I stand vacantly in front of the cage finding in the beast an odd companionable sympathy. She turns her head on one side, regards me with melting brown eyes, and squatting on her haunches thrusts her paws beseechingly through the bars. Just so did Carlotta beseech and plead. I have bemused myself with gnostic and metempsychosic speculations. Carlotta as an ordinary human being with an immortal soul did not exist, and what I had known and loved was but a simulacrum of female form containing an elemental spirit doomed to be ever seeking a fresh habitat. It was but the lingering ghost of the humanised shell of air that was seen at Victoria station. The fateful spirit, untrammelled by the conventions of men and actuated by destinies unintelligible to mortal mind, had informed the carcass of this little brown bear, which looks at me so strangely, so coaxingly, with Carlotta's eyes and Carlotta's gestures. I asked her yesterday to come back to me. I said that the house was empty; that the rooms ached for the want of her. I pleaded so passionately and the eyes before me so melted that I thought her heart was touched. But in the midst of it all another visitor came up and the creature uttered a whining plaint and put out her paw for buns—by which token I felt indeed that it was Carlotta.

I have accepted the blow silently. As yet I have told no one. I have made no inquiries. When a man is betrayed by his best friend and deserted by the woman he loves, time and solitude are the only comforters. Besides, to whom should I go for comfort? I have lived too remote from my kind, and my kind heeds me not.

Not a line has reached me from Carlotta. She has gone out of my life as lightly and as remorselessly as she went out of Hamdi Effendi's; as she went, for aught she knew, out of that of the unhappy boy who lured her from Alexandretta. If she heard I was dead, I wonder whether she would say: "I am so glad!"

Whether the flight was planned between them, or whether Pasquale waylaid her on her way to the Avenue Road and then and there proposed that she should accompany him, I do not know. It matters very little. She is gone. That is the one awful fact that signifies. No explanations, pleas for forgiveness could make me suffer less. Were she different I might find it in my heart to hate her. This I cannot do. How can one hate a thing devoid of heart and soul? But one can love it—God knows how blindly. So I have locked the door of Carlotta's room and the key is in my possession. It shall not be touched. It shall remain just as she left it—and I shall mourn for her as for one dead.

For Pasquale—if I were of his own reversionary type, I should follow him half across Europe till we met, and then one of us would kill the other. In one respect he resembles Carlotta. He is destitute of the moral sense. How else to solve the enigma? How else to reconcile his flamboyant chivalry towards the consumptive washer-woman with the black treachery towards me, in which even at that very moment his mind must have been steeped? I knew that he had betrayed many, that where women were concerned no considerations of honour or friendship had stood between him and his desires; but I believed—for what reason save my own egregious vanity, I know not—that for me he had a peculiar regard. I believed that it was an idiosyncrasy of this wolf to look upon my sheepfold as sacred from his depredations. I was ashamed of any doubts that crossed my mind as to his loyalty, and did not hesitate to thrust my lamb between his jaws. And while he was giving the lie direct to my faith, I, poor fool, in my despair was seeking madly for his aid in the deliverance of my darling from the power of the dog.

I have felt I owe Hamdi Effendi an apology; for it is well that, in the midst of this buffoon tragedy I find myself playing, I should observe occasionally the decencies of conduct. But, on the other hand, was he not amply repaid for moral injury by the pure joy he must have felt while torturing me with his banter? For all the deeper suffering, I am conscious of writhing under lacerated vanity when I think of that grotesque and humiliating blunder in the Hotel Metropole.

November 2d.

I have received news of the death of old Simon McQuhatty. In my few lucid moments of late I had been thinking of seeking his kindly presence. Now Gossip Death has taken him out across the moor. Now, dear old pagan, he is

"Rolled round in earth's diurnal course With rocks and stones and trees."

November 3d.

Antoinette came up this morning with a large cardboard box addressed to Carlotta. The messenger who brought it was waiting downstairs.

"I came to Monsieur to know whether I should send it back," said Antoinette, on the verge of tears.

"No," said I, "leave it here."

From the furrier's label, I saw that the box contained some furs I had ordered for Carlotta a fortnight ago—she shivered so, poor child, in this wintry climate.

"But, Monsieur," began Antoinette, "the poor angel—"

"May want it in heaven," said I.

The good woman stared.

"We'll be like the ancient Egyptians, Antoinette," I explained, "who placed food and wine and raiment and costly offerings in the tombs of the departed, so that their shades could come and enjoy them for all eternity. We'll have to make believe, Antoinette, that this is a tomb, for one can't rear a pyramid in London, though it is a desert sufficiently vast; and the little second floor room is the inner sanctuary where the body lies in silence embalmed with sweet spices and swathed in endless bands of linen."

"But Mademoiselle is not dead?" cried Antoinette, with a shiver. "How can Monsieur talk of such things? It makes me fear, the way Monsieur speaks."

"It makes me fear, too, Antoinette," said I, gravely.

When she had gone I took the box of furs upstairs and laid it unopened on Carlotta's bed and came away, relocking the door behind me.

November 9th.

I have formed a great resolution. I have devoted the week to the envisagement of things, and while I lay awake last night the solution came to me as something final and irrevocable. Mistrusting the counsels of the night, when the brain is unduly excited by nervous insomnia, I have applied the test of a day's cold reason.

I have broken a woman's heart. I have spurned the passionate love of a woman who has been near and dear to me; a woman of great nature; a woman of subtle brain who has been my chosen companion, my equal partner in any intellectual path I chose to tread; a sensitive lady, with all the graciousness of soul that term conveys. Heaven knows what a woman can see in me to love. I look in the glass at my bony, hawk-like face, on which the stamp of futility seems eternally set, and I am seized with a prodigious wonder; but the fact remains that to me unlovely and unworthy has been given that thing without price, a woman's love. I remember Pasquale laughing merrily at this valuation. He said the love of women was as cheap as dirt, and the only use for it was to make mud pies. The damned cynical villain! "Always reflect," said he, on another occasion, "that although a man may be as ugly as sin, the probability is that he is just as pleasant. Beauties will find hitherto unsuspected amenities in Beasts till the end of time." But I am such a poor and sorry Beast, without the chance of a transformation; a commonplace Beast, dull and didactic; a besotted, purblind, despicable Beast! Yet Judith loved me. Instead of thanking on my knees the high gods for the boon conferred, I rejected it, and went mad for craving of the infinitely lesser glory of Carlotta's baby lips and gold-bronze hair. I have broken Judith's heart. I will expiate the crime I have committed.

Expiate the crime! The realisation of the meaning of the words covers me with shame. As if what I propose will be a sorry penance! That is the danger of a man thinking, as I have always done, in metaphors. It has given me my loose, indirect views of life, of myself, of those around me. If I had advice to offer to a young man, I should say: "Learn to think straight." Expiate, indeed! I will go to her and make confession. I will tell her that awful loneliness is crushing my soul. I will kneel before her and beseech her of her great woman's goodness to give me her love again, and to be my helpmeet and my companion who will be cherished with all that there is of loyalty in me to her life's end. She will pity me a little, for I have suffered, and I will pity her tenderly, in deep sincerity, and our life together will be based on that all-understanding which signifies all-forgiveness. And it shall be a real life together. I used to smile, in a superior way, at her dread of solitude. Heaven forgive me. I did not then know its terrors. It comforted for the first few benumbed days, but now it is gathering around me like a mysterious and appalling force. I crave the human presence in my home. I need the woman's presence in my heart.

We shall live together then as man and wife, in defiance of the world. Let the moralists blame us. We shall not care. It will make little social difference to Judith, and as for myself, have I not already inflicted public outrage on society? does not my Aunt Jessica regard me as a wringer of the public conscience, and does not my Cousin Rosalie mention me with a shudder of horror in her tepid prayers? If I really give them cause for reprobation they will be neither wiser, nor better, nor sorrier. And if the baronetcy flickers out in unseemly odour, I for one shall know that the odour is sweeter than that wherein it was lighted, when my great-grandfather earned the radiance by services rendered at Brighton to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent. This is the only way in which I can make Judith reparation, the only way in which I can find comfort. We shall travel. Italy, beloved of Judith, is calling me. Probably Florence will be our settled home. I shall give up this house of madness. The clean sweet love of Judith will purify my heart of this poisonous passion, and in the end there will be peace.

I have taken Carlotta's photograph from its frame and cast it into the fire, thus burning her for her witchcraft. I watched the flames leap and curl. The last look she gave me before they licked away her face had its infinite allurement, its devilish sorcery so intensified in the fierce yellow light, that the yearning for her clutched me by the throat and shook me through all my being.

But it is over now. I have done with Carlotta. If she thinks I am going to sit and let the wind which comes over Primrose Hill drive me mad like Gastibelza, l'homme a la carabine, in Victor Hugo's poem, she is vastly mistaken. From this hour henceforth I swear she is nothing to me; I will eat and sleep and laugh as if she had never existed. Polyphemus, curled up in Carlotta's old place on the sofa, regards me with his sardonic eye. He is an evil, incredulous, mocking beast, who a few centuries ago would have been burned with his late mistress.

I am sane and happier now that I have come to my irrevocable determination.

To-morrow I go to Judith.



CHAPTER XIX

November 10th.

I had to ring twice before Judith's servant opened the flat door.

"Mrs. Mainwaring is engaged just at present, Sir Marcus."

"Ask her if I can come in and wait, as I have something of importance to say to her."

She left me standing in the passage, a thing that had never before occurred to me in Judith's establishment, and presently returned with her answer. Would I mind waiting in the dining-room? I entered. The table was littered with sheets of her statistical work and odd bits of silk' and lining. A type-writer stood at one end and a sewing-machine at the other. On the writing-desk by the window, in the midst of a mass of letters and account-books, rested a large bowl filled with magnificent blooms of white and yellow chrysanthemums. A volume of Dante lay open face downwards on the corner. It did my heart good to see this untidiness, so characteristic of Judith, so familiar, so intimate. She had taken her trouble bravely, I reflected. The ordinary daily task had not been left undone. Through all she had preserved her valiant sanity. I felt rebuked for my own loss of self-control.

I was about to turn away from the litter of the desk, when my eye caught sight of an envelope bearing a French stamp and addressed in Pasquale's unmistakable handwriting. As there seemed to be a letter inside, I did not take it up to examine it more closely. The glance was enough to assure me that it came from Pasquale. Why should he be corresponding with Judith? I walked away puzzled. Was it a justification, a confession, a plea to her as my friend to obtain my forgiveness? If there is one thing more irritating than another it is to light accidentally upon a mystery affecting oneself in a friend's correspondence. One can no more probe deeply into it than one can steal the friend's spoons. It seems an indiscretion to have noticed it, an unpardonable impertinence to subject it to conjecture. In spite of my abhorring the impulse of curiosity, the sweeping, flaunting, swaggering handwriting of Pasquale worried me.

Judith came in, looking much as she had done on the occasion of my last visit, worn and anxious, with a strange expression in her eyes.

"I am sorry to have kept you waiting," she said, extending a lifeless hand.

I raised it to my lips.

"I would have gladly waited all day to see you, Judith," I said.

"Really?"

She laughed in an odd way.

"And idle speech from me to you at the present time would be an outrage," I answered. "I have passed through much since I saw you last."

"So have I," said Judith. "More than you imagine. Well," she continued as I bowed my head accepting the rebuke, "what have you got so important to tell me?"

"Much," said I. "In the first place you must be aware of what has happened, for I can't help seeing there a letter from Pasquale."

She glanced swiftly at the desk and back again at me.

"Yes," she replied, "he is in Paris."

I was amazed at her nonchalance.

"Has he told you nothing?"

"Perhaps Sir Marcus Ordeyne would like to see his letter," she said, ironically.

"You know perfectly well that I would not read it," said I.

Judith laughed again, and rolled her handkerchief into a little ball between her nervous fingers.

"Forgive me," she said. "I like to see the grand seigneur in you now and then. It puts me in mind of happier days. But about Pasquale—the only thing he tells me is that he is not able to execute a commission for me. He told me on the night he drove me home that he was going to Paris, and I asked him to get me some cosmetic. Carmine Badouin, if you want to know. I have got to rouge now before I am fit to be seen in the street. I am quite frank about it."

"Then you know nothing of Carlotta?" I cried.

"Carlotta?"

"She eloped with that double-dyed, damned, infernal villain, the day after I saw you."

Judith looked at me for a moment, then closed her eyes and turned her head away, resting her hand on the table. My indignation waxed hot against the scoundrel. How dare he write casual letters to Judith about Carmine Badouin with his treachery on his conscience? I know the terms of flippant grace in which the knave couched this precious epistle. And I could see Carlotta reading over his shoulder and clapping her hands and cooing: "Oh, that is so funny!"

When I had told Judith the outlines of the story, pacing up and down the little room while she remained motionless by the table, she put out her hand to me, and in a low voice, and with still averted eyes said that she was sorry, deeply sorry. Her tone rang so true and loyal that my heart throbbed with quick appreciation of her high nature, and I wrung her outstretched hand.

"God bless you, Judith," I cried, fervently. "Bless you for your sweet sympathy. Be sorry for me only as for a man who has passed through the horrors of delirium. But for me as I stand before you now, I ask you not to be sorry. I have come to bring you, if I can, dear Judith, a measure of gladness, perhaps of happiness."

She wrenched herself free from me, and a terrified cry of "Marcus!" checked my dithyrambic appeal. She shrank away so that a great corner of the dining-table separated us, and she stared at me as though my words hats been the affrighting utterance of a madman.

"Marcus! What do you mean?" she cried, with an unnatural shrillness in her voice.

"I mean," said I, "I mean—I mean that 'crushed by three days' pressure, my three days' love lies slain.' Time has withered him at the root. I have buried him deep in unconsecrated ground, like a vampire, with a stake through his heart. And I have come back to you, Judith, humbly to crave your forgiveness and your love—to tell you I have changed, dear—to offer you all I have in the world if you will but take it—to give you my life, my daily, hourly devotion. My God!" I cried, "don't you believe me?"

She still stared at me in a frightened way, leaning heavier on the table. Her lips twitched before they could frame the words,

"Yes, I believe you. You have never lied to me."

"Then in the name of love and heaven," I cried, "why do you look at me like that?"

She trembled, evidently suppressing something with intense effort, whether bitter laughter, indignation or a passionate outburst I could not tell.

"You ask why?" she said, unsteadily. "Because you seem like the angel of the flaming vengeance."

At these astounding words it was my turn to look amazed.

"Vengeance?" I echud. "What wrong have you done me or any living creature? Come, my dear," and I moved nearer by seating myself on the corner of the table, close to the type-writer, and leaning towards her, "let us look at this thing soberly. If ever a man had need of woman I have need of you. I can live alone no longer. We must share one home henceforth together. We can snap our fingers at the world, you and I. If you have anything to say against the proposal, let us discuss it calmly."

Judith's slender figure vibrated like a cord strung to breaking-point. Her voice vibrated.

"Yes, let us discuss it calmly. But not here. The sight of you sitting in the middle of my life, between the sewing-machine and the type-writer, is getting on my nerves. Let us go into the drawing-room. There is an atmosphere of calm there—" her voice quavered in a queer little choke—"of sabbatical calm."

I slid quickly from the table and put my arm round her waist.

"Tell me, Judith, what is amiss with you."

She broke away from me roughly, thrusting me back.

"Nothing. A woman's nothing, if you understand what that means. Come into the drawing-room."

I opened the door; she passed out and I followed her along the passage. She preceded me into the drawing-room, and I stayed for a moment to close the door, fumbling with the handle which has been loose for some months. When I turned and had made a couple of steps forward, I halted involuntarily under the shock of a considerable surprise.

We were not alone. Standing on the hearth-rug, his hands behind his back, his brows bent on me benevolently was a man in clerical attire. He looked ostentatiously, exaggeratedly clerical. His clerical frock-coat was of inordinate length; his boots were aggravatingly clump-soled; by a very large white tie, masking the edges of a turned-down collar, he proclaimed himself Evangelical. An otherwise clean-shaven florid face was adorned with brown side-whiskers growing rather long. A bald, shiny head topped a fringe of brown hair.

I stared at this unexpected gentleman for a second or two, and then, recovering my self-possession, looked enquiringly at Judith.

"Sir Marcus," she said, "let me introduce my husband, Mr. Rupert Mainwaring."

Her husband! This benevolent Evangelical parson her husband! But the brilliant gallant who had dazzled her eyes? The dissolute scoundrel that had wrecked her life? Where was he? Dumfounded, I managed to bow politely enough, but my stupefaction was covered by Judith rushing across the room and uttering a strange sound which resolved itself into a shrill, hysterical laugh as she reached the door which she opened and slammed behind her. I heard her scream hysterically in the passage; then the slam of another door; and the silence told me that she had shut herself in her bedroom. Disregarding the new husband's presence, I rang the bell, and the servant who had left her kitchen on hearing the scream entered immediately.

"Go to your mistress. She is ill," said I.

The maid hurriedly departed. The parson and I looked at one another.

"I am afraid," said I, "that my presence is unhappily an intrusion. I hope to make your better acquaintance on another occasion."

"Oh, please don't go," said he, "my wife is only a little upset and will soon recover. I beg that you will excuse her. Besides, I should like to have a talk with you."

He offered me a chair, my own chair, the comfortable, broad-seated Empire chair I had given Judith as a birthday present years ago, the chair in which I had invariably sat. He did it with the manner of the master of the house, a most courteous gentleman. The situation was fantastic. Some ingenious devil must have conceived it by way of pandering to the after-dinner humour of the high gods. As I sat down I rubbed my eyes. Was this brown-whiskered, bald-headed clerical gentleman real? The rubbing of my eyes dispelled no hallucination. He was flesh and blood and still regarded me urbanely. It was horrible. The desertion of the scoundrelly husband, who I thought was lost somewhere in the cesspool of Europe, was the basis, the sanction of the relations between Judith and myself; and here was this reverend, respectable man apologising for his wife and begging me to be seated in my own chair. The remark of Judith's that I should find sabbatical calm in the drawing-room occurred to me, and I had to grip the arms of the chair to prevent myself from joining Judith in her hysterics.

The appearance of the husband in his legendary colours of rascality would have been a shock. The sudden scattering of my plans for Judith's happiness I should have viewed with consternation. But it would have been normal. For him, however, to appear in the guise of an Evangelical clergyman, the very last kind of individual to be associated with Judith, was, I repeat, horribly fantastic.

"I believe, Sir Marcus," said he, deliberately parting the tails of his exaggerated frock-coat and sitting down near me, "that you are a very great friend of my wife."

I murmured that I had known Mrs. Mainwaring for some years.

"You are doubtless acquainted with her unhappy history."

"I have heard her speak of it," said I.

"You must then share her surprise in seeing me here to-day. I should like to assure you, as representing her friends and society and that sort of thing, as I have assured her, that I have not taken this step without earnest prayer and seeking the counsel of Almighty God."

I am by no means a bigoted pietist, but to hear a person talk lightly about seeking the counsel of Almighty God jars upon my sense of taste. I stiffened at the sanctimonious tone in which the words were uttered.

"You have without doubt very good reasons for coming back into the circle of her life," said I.

"The best of all reasons," he replied, caressing a brown whisker, "namely, that I am a Christian."

I liked him less and less.

"Is that the reason, may I ask, why you remained away from her all these years?"

"I deserve the scoff," said he: "Those were days of sin. I deserve every humiliation that can be put upon me. But I have since found the grace of God. I found it at three o'clock in the afternoon on the eighth of January, eighteen hundred and—"

"Never mind the year," I interrupted.

My gorge rose. The man was a sanctimonious Chadband. He had come with nefarious designs on Judith's slender capital. I saw knavery in the whites of his upturned eyes.

"I should be glad," I continued quickly, "if you would come to the point of the conversation you desire to have with me. I presume it concerns Mrs. Mainwaring. She has reconciled herself to circumstances and has found means to regulate her life with a certain measure of contentment and comfort until now, when you suddenly introduce a disturbing factor. You appear to wish to tell me your reasons for doing so—and I can't see what the grace of God has to do with it."