"It is a dream-city," said I, in admiration.

Carlotta did not reply. I thought she had not heard. We jogged on a little in silence. At last she drew very close to me.

"Shall we ever get there?" she asked, pointing ahead with the hand that held the reins.

"To Mogador? Yes, I hope so," I answered with a laugh. I thought she was tired.

"No, not Mogador. The dream-city—where every one wants to get."

"You have travelled far, my dear," said I, "to hanker now after dream-cities and the unattainable. I knew a little girl once who would have asked: 'What is a dream-city?"

"She doesn't ask now because she knows," replied Carlotta. "No. We shall never get there. It looks as if we were riding straight into it—but when we get close, it will just be Mogador."

"Aren't you happy, Carlotta?" I asked.

"Are you, Seer Marcous?"

"I? I am a philosopher, my child, and a happy philosopher would be a lusus naturae, a freak, a subject for a Barnum & Bailey Show. If they caught him they would put him between the hairy man and the living skeleton."

"I suppose I'm getting to be a philosopher, too," said Carlotta, "and I hate it! Sometimes I think I hate everything and everybody—save you, Seer Marcous, darling. It's wicked of me. I must have been born wicked. But I used to be happy. I never wanted to go to dream-cities. I was just like a cat. Like Polyphemus. Do you remember Polyphemus?"

"Yes," said I. And then set off my balance by this strange conversation with Carlotta, I added: "I killed him."

She turned a startled face to me.

"You killed him? Why?"

"He laughed at me because I was unhappy," said I.

"Through me?"

"Yes; through you. But that's neither here nor there. We were not discussing the death of Polyphemus. We were talking about being philosophers, and you said that as a philosopher you hated everything and everybody except me. Why do you exclude me, Carlotta?"

We were riding so near together that my leg rubbed her saddle-girth. I looked hard at her. She turned away her head and put the pantomime parasol between us. I heard a little choking sob.

"Let us get off—and sit down a little—I want to cry.

"The end of all feminine philosophy," I said, somewhat brutally. "No. It's getting late. That's only Mogador in front of us. Let us go to it."

Carlotta shifted her parasol quickly.

"What has happened to you, Seer Marcous? You have never spoken to me like that before."

"The very deuce seems to have happened," said I, angrily—though why I should have felt angry, heaven only knows. "First you turn yourself into a Royal Academy picture with that unspeakable umbrella of yours and the trumpery blue sky and sunshine, and make my sentimental soul ache; and then you—"

"It's a very pretty umbrella," said Carlotta, looking upwards at it demurely.

"Give it to me," I said.

She yielded it with her usual docility. I cast it upon the desert. Being open it gave one or two silly rebounds, then lay still. Carlotta reined up her mule.

"Oh-h!" she said, in her old way.

I dismounted hurriedly, and helped her down and passed my arm through the two bridles.

"My dear child," said I, "what is the meaning of all this? Here we have been living for months the most tranquil and unruffled existence, and now suddenly you begin to talk about dream-cities and the impossibility of getting there, and I turn angry and heave parasols about Africa. What is the meaning of it?"

The most extraordinary part of it was that I should be treating Carlotta as a grown-up woman, after the fashion of the hero of a modern French novel. Perhaps I was younger than I thought.

She kept her eyes fixed downward.

"Why are you angry with me?" she asked in a low voice.

"I haven't the remotest idea," said I.

She lifted her eyelids slowly—oh, very, very slowly, glanced quiveringly at me, while the shadow of a smile fluttered round her lips. I verily believe the baggage exulted in her feminine heart. I turned away, leading the two animals, and picked up the parasol which I closed and restored to her.

"I thought you wanted to cry," I remarked.

"I can't," said Carlotta, plaintively.

"And you won't tell me why you exclude me from your universal hatred?"

Carlotta dug up the sand with the point of her foot. The sight of it recalled the row of pink toes thrust unashamedly before my eyes on the second day of her arrival in London. An old hope, an old fear, an old struggle renewed themselves. She was more adorably beautiful even than the Carlotta of the pink tus, and spiritually she was reborn. I heard her whisper:

"I can't."

Now I had sworn to myself all the oaths that a man can swear that I should be Carlotta's grandfather to the end of time. Hitherto I had felt the part. Now suddenly grey beard and slippered pantaloons are cast aside and I am young again with a glow in my heart which beats fast at her beauty. I shut my teeth.

"No," said I to myself. "The curtain shall not rise on that farcical tragedy again."

I threw the reins on the neck of Carlotta's mule, which with its companion had been regarding us with bland stupidity.

"I think we had better ride on, Carlotta," I said. "Mount."

She meekly gave me her little foot and I hoisted her into the saddle.

We did not exchange a word till we reached Mogador. But each of us felt that something had happened.

At dinner we met as usual. Carlotta spoke somewhat feverishly of our travels, and asked me numberless questions, betraying an unprecedented thirst for information. I never gave her historical instruction with less zest.

After the meal we went onto the flat roof. Carlotta poured out my coffee at the small table beside the long Madeira cane chair which was my accustomed seat. The starlit night was blue and languorous. From some cafe came the monotonous strains of Moorish music, the harsh strings and harsh men's voices softened by the distance. Carlotta took my coffee-cup when I had finished and set it down in her granddaughterly way. Then she stood in front of me.

"Won't you make a little room for me on your chair, Seer Marcous, darling?"

I shifted my feet from the foot-rest and she sat down. I may observe that I was not, in oriental bashawdom, occupying the one and only chair on the housetop.

"Tell me about the stars," she said.

I knew what she meant. She loved the old Greek myths; their poetry, obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose, appealed to her young imagination. She was passing through an exquisite phase of development.

I scanned the heavens for a text and found one in the Pleiades. And I told her how these were seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who herself was the daughter of the Sea, and how they were all pure maidens, save one, and were the companions of Artemis; how Orion the hunter, who was afterwards slain by Artemis and whose three-starred girdle gleamed up there in the sky, pursued them with evil intent, and how they prayed the gods for deliverance and were changed into the everlasting stars; and, lastly, how the one who was not a maiden, for she loved a mortal, shrank away from her sisters through shame and was invisible to the eye of man.

"She was ashamed," said Carlotta in a low voice, "because she loved some one afterwards, one of the gods, who would not look at her because she had given herself to a mortal. A woman then has a fire here"—she clasped her hands to her bosom—"and wishes she could burn away to nothing, nothing, just to air, and become invisible."

She was rising hurriedly on the last word, but I brought my hands down on her shoulders.

"Carlotta, my child," said I, "what do you mean?"

She seized my wrists and struggling to rise, panted out in desperation:

"You are one of the gods, and I wish I were changed into an invisible star."

"I don't," said I, huskily.

By main force I drew her to me and our lips met. She yielded, and this time the whole soul of Carlotta came to me in the kiss.

"It's beautiful to snuggle up against you again," said my ever direct Carlotta, after a while. "I haven't done it—oh, for such a long time." She sighed contentedly. "Seer Marcous—"

"You must call me Marcus now," said I, somewhat fatuously.

She shook her head as it lay on my shoulder. "No. You are Marcus—or Sir Marcus—to everybody. To me you are always Seer Marcous. Seer Marcous, darling," she half whispered after a pause. "Once I did not know the difference between a god and a mortal. It was only that morning when I woke up—"

"You took me for a saint in a dressing-gown," said I.

"It's the same thing," she retorted. And then taking up her parable, she told me in her artless way the inner history of her heart since that morning; but what she said is sacred. Also, a man feels himself to be a pitiful dog of a god when a woman relates how she came to establish him on her High Altar.

Later we struck a lighter vein and spoke of the present, the enchantment of the hour, the scented air, the African stars.

"It seems, my dear," said I, "that we have got to Nephelococcygia after all."

"What is Nephelococcygia?" asked Carlotta.

I relented. "It's a base Aristophanic libel on our dream-city," said I.

Thus out of evil has come good; out of pain has grown happiness; out of horror has sprung an everlasting love. Many a man will say that in all my relations with Carlotta I have comported myself as a fool, and that my marriage is the crowning folly. Well, I pretend not unto wisdom. Wisdom would have married me to five thousand a year, a position in fashionable society, my Cousin Dora and premature old age antecedent to eternal destruction. I hold that my salvation has lain the way of folly. Again, it may be urged against me that I have squandered my life, that with all my learning, such as it is, I have achieved nothing. I once thought so. I boasted of it in my diary when I complacently styled myself a waster in Earth's factory. Oh, that diary! Let me here solemnly retract and abjure every crude and idiot opinion and reflection of life set forth in that frenetic record! I regard myself not as a waster—I remember a passage in Epictetus treating of the ways of Providence:

"For what else can I do, a lame old man, than sing hymns to God? If then I were a nightingale I would do the part of a nightingale: if I were a swan, I would do like a swan. But now I am a rational creature and I ought to praise God; this is my work, I do it, nor will I desert this post so long as I am allowed to keep it; and I exhort you to join in this same song."

No, I am neither nightingale nor swan, and cannot add, as they do, to the beauty of the earth. The lame old man has his limitations; but within them, he can, by cleaving to his post and praising God, fulfil his destiny.

Carlotta coming onto the housetop to summon me to lunch looks over my shoulder as I write these words.

"But you are not a lame old man!" she cries in indignation. "You are the youngest and strongest and cleverest man in the world!"

"What am I to do with these miraculous gifts?" I ask, laughing.

"You are to become famous," she says, with conviction.

"Very well, my dear. We will have to go to some new land where attaining fame is easier for a beginner than in London; and we'll send for Antoinette and Stenson to help us."

"That will be very nice," she observes.

So I am to become famous. Ce que femme veut, Dieu le veut. And Carlotta has got a soul of her own now and means to make the most of it. It will lead me upward somewhere. But whether I am to be king of New Babylon or Prime Minister of New Zealand or lawgiver to a Polynesian tribe is a secret as yet hidden in the lap of the gods, whence Carlotta doubtless will snatch it in her own good time.

"You are writing a lot of rubbish," says Carlotta.

"And a little truth. The mixture is Life," I answer.

THE END