It was too true; Randall, horse-breaker, groom and coachman, excellent, invaluable creature at all other times, was a brainless coward in a thunderstorm.

"If we don't go to-day, we can't go till to-morrow," said Georgie Chatterton, and she nodded at Durant to remind him that in that case his departure would be postponed till Thursday.

Frida too turned toward him. "If I don't go to-day, I shall never go."

He understood. She was afraid, afraid of what might come between her and her deliverance, afraid of her fate, afraid of the conscience that was her will, afraid of her own fear, of the terror that would come upon her when she realized the full meaning of her lust for life. To-morrow any or all of those things might turn her from the way; to-day she was strong; she held her life in her two hands. At any rate, she was not afraid of the weather. She would go straight to her end, through rain and lightning and thunderbolts and all the blue and yellow demons of the sky.

"Are you afraid, Georgie?"

"Of thunder and lightning?" asked Georgie pointedly. "No."

"All right, then. We've got forty-five minutes. I must put Polly into the cart myself. Five for that; forty to get to the station."

She strode off to the stables, followed by the footman and Durant. Among them they forced Polly into the trap, and led her dancing to the porch, where Miss Chatterton stood, prepared for all weathers.

"I say," cried she, "this is all very well; but who's going to drive Polly there and back again?"

"I am," said Durant calmly. He had caught a furtive flash from Frida's eyes that lighted upon, glanced off him and fell to the ground. The woman in her had appealed to his chivalry. At the same instant there was a swish, as if the skirts of heaven were trailing across the earth, and the rain came down. He hastily thrust Miss Tancred's arms into the sleeves of her mackintosh and wriggled into his own. The final speeches were short and to the point.

"Mr. Durant," said Miss Chatterton, "you are a hero."

"Frida," said the Colonel, "you are a fool." And for once Durant was inclined to agree with him. The more so as Miss Tancred took advantage of his engagement with his mackintosh to enthrone herself on the driver's high seat. She said good-by to the Colonel, and gathered up the reins; Miss Chatterton climbed up beside her; Polly gave a frantic plunge and a dash forward; and the hero was obliged to enter the dogcart after the deft fashion of a footman, with a run and a flying leap into the back seat.

Miss Chatterton was unkind enough to laugh. "Well done!" said she. "Sit tight, and try to look as chivalrous as I'm sure you feel."

But it is hard to look or feel chivalrous sitting on a back seat in a wet mackintosh with a thunderstorm pouring down your neck and into your ears, and a woman, possessed by all the devils, driving furiously to an express train that she can never catch. In that lunatic escape from Coton Manor she had not looked back once; she left Durant to contemplate a certain absurd little figure that stood under an immense Doris portico, regarding the face of the sky.

The main thoroughfare of Whithorn-in-Arden was scored like the bed of a torrent, and fringed with an ochreish scum tossed up from the churning loam. The church clock struck three as they dashed through.

"You'll never do it," said Durant; "it's a good twenty minutes from here."

"In the brougham it is. Polly will do it in ten—with me driving her."

She did it in seven. Durant had pictured the two ladies scurrying along the platform, and himself, a dismal figure, aiding their unlovely efforts to board a departing train; as it was, the three minutes saved allowed Frida to achieve her flight with dignity.

For two out of those three minutes he stood outside their carriage window, beyond the shelter of the station roof, with the rain from the ornamental woodwork overflowing on to his innocent head. He was trying to smile.

"Heroic," murmured Miss Chatterton; and her eyebrows intimated that she saw pathos in his appearance. As for Frida, her good-by was so curt and cold that Durant, who had suffered many things in redeeming the discourtesy of his former attitude to her, was startled and not a little hurt. His plain, lean face, that seemed to have grown still plainer and leaner under the lashing of the rain, set again in its habitual expression of repugnance; hers paled suddenly to a lighter sallow than before; the hand she had given to him withdrew itself in terror from his touch. He drew himself up stiffly, raising a hat that was no hat but a gutter, and the train crawled out of the station.

He stood yet another minute staring at the naked rails, two shining parallel lines that seemed to touch and vanish, over the visible verge, into the gray fringe of the infinite where the rain washed out the world.

And then he saw nothing but Frida Tancred, sitting on the edge of the fir plantation and gazing into the distance; he heard his own voice saying to her, "Let yourself go, Miss Tancred; let yourself go!"

And she was gone.

XIII

All that Durant got out of Polly was the privilege of driving her home, through mud and rain, at a melancholy trot. True, he was in no hurry to get back; so he let her take her own pace, in pity for her trembling limbs and straining heart. Polly had done all she knew for her mistress in that frantic dash for freedom and the express; and, when he thought of what Frida Tancred's life had been, he guessed that the little animal was used to carrying her through worse storms than this.

The storm was over now; it had driven the clouds into the north, where they hung huddled and piled in a vast amphitheater; other clouds, charged with light now instead of darkness, were still rolling up from the south, east and west, their wings closed till the sky was shut in like Whithorn-in-Arden, ringed with its clouds as Arden with its woods; above, beneath, there rose the same immense, impenetrable boundary, green on the earth and gray in heaven.

And Frida Tancred had escaped from these confines, would never come back to dwell in them again; she had said so, and he believed her. To be sure, she had shown weakness at the last, she had been driven to juggle with the conscience that would not let her go; had she not persuaded it that she was leaving the Colonel for the Colonel's good? But once gone, once there, away over the border and safe in the promised land, she would see clearly, she would realize her right to be happy in the glorious world.

Not that these things could have happened without Georgie Chatterton. He had nothing but admiration for that young woman; there had been daring in her conquest of Frida Tancred, there were ingenuity and determination in the final elopement. Was it possible that he was piqued at the insignificance of the part she had assigned to him? She had left him to settle up the sordid accounts while she ran away with the lady. He had got to say to Colonel Tancred, "Colonel Tancred, I am not your daughter's seducer and abductor; I am only a miserable accessory after the fact." In other words, Miss Chatterton had reminded him that he was too late.

Too late indeed, it seemed. Whether or not Miss Chatterton's faith in him had failed her at the last moment, but when he came down to dinner that evening he found that she had been beforehand with him; there was nothing left for him to do.

The Colonel looked up smiling from a telegram. "News from St. Pancras. Miss Chatterton is carrying my daughter off to the Continent."

"I'm delighted to hear it. It will do her all the good in the world."

"Yes, yes; I'm glad she should have the opportunity. I made a little tour on the Continent myself when I was a young man, and I've felt a brighter fellow for it ever since."

"Really?"

"Yes. One's apt to get into a groove staying at home so much. There's nothing like rubbing brains with foreigners. It stretches you out, clears you of all your narrow insular prejudices, brings you in touch"—Durant quivered; he knew it was coming—"in touch with fresh ideas. I don't know how you feel about it, but six months of it was enough to convince me that there's no place like England, and no people like English people, and no house like my own. As for Frida, a very little goes a long way with Frida; she'll be sick of it in six weeks, but she'll settle down all the better for the change."

"You think so?"

"I do. She may be a little unsettled at first. Her poor mother was just the same—restless, restless. But she settled down."

The Colonel made no further allusion to his daughter's absence. He was presently disturbed about another matter, bustling about the room, wondering, questioning, and exclaiming, "I have lost my little meteorological chronicle? Has anybody seen my little meteorological chronicle? Now, where did I have it last? I wonder if I could have left it with my other papers in Frida's room?"

But Frida's room, the room where she did all her father's writing, and her own reading and dreaming when she had time to read and dream, Frida's room was locked, and nobody could find the key. The Colonel, more than ever convinced that his meteorological chronicle was concealed in Frida's room, ordered the door to be burst open. Durant lent a shoulder to the work and entered somewhat precipitately, followed by the Colonel.

The meteorological chronicle, the labor of years, was found where its author had left it, on his writing-table, together with his other papers, business letters, household accounts, Primrose League programs, all carefully sorted, dated, and docketed. Many of the letters had been answered; they lay, addressed in Frida's handwriting, ready for the post. She had left her work in such perfect order that a new secretary could have been fitted into her place without a hitch. The fact was eloquent of finality and the winding up of affairs; but certain other details were more eloquent still.

Order on the writing-table; in the rest of the room confusion and disarray, rifled bookcases and dismantled walls. Fresh squares of wall-paper outlined in cobwebs marked the places where the great maps had hung. The soul of the room was gone from it with the portrait of the late Mrs. Tancred; the watercolor drawings, sad work of her restless fingers, were no longer there. The furniture had been pushed aside to make room for the deed of desecration; the floor was littered with newspapers and straw; an empty packing-case lay on its side, abandoned, in a corner.

The Colonel opened round eyes of astonishment, but his mustache was still. He rang the bell and summoned the servants. Under severe cross-examination, Chaplin, the footman, gave evidence that three packing-cases had left Coton Manor for the station early in the morning before the bursting of the storm. Frida, too, had discerned the face of the sky, and—admirable strategist!—had secured her transports. The Colonel dismissed his witnesses, and appealed helplessly to Durant; indeed, the comprehension in the young man's face gave him an appearance of guilty complicity.

"What does it mean, Durant? what does it mean?"

Durant smiled, not without compassion. When a young woman arranges her accounts, and makes off with three packing-cases, containing her library and her mother's portrait, the meaning obviously is that she is not coming back again in a hurry. He suggested that perhaps Miss Tancred proposed to make a lengthier stay on the Continent than had been surmised.

"The whole thing," said the Colonel, "is incomprehensible to me."

For the rest of the evening he remained visibly subdued by the presence of the incomprehensible; after coffee he pulled himself together and prepared to face it.

"There will be no whist this evening," he announced. "You will excuse me, Durant; I have an immensity of work on hand. Chaplin, put some whiskey and water in the study, and light the little lamp on my literary machine."

Tuesday morning's post brought explanation. Two letters lay on the breakfast table, both from a fresh hotel, the Hotel Metropole, both addressed in Frida Tancred's handwriting, one to the Colonel and the other to Durant. Durant's ran thus:

"DEAR MR. DURANT:—You will explain everything to my father, won't you? I have done my best, but he will never see it; it is the sort of thing he never could see—my reasons for going away and staying away. They are hard to understand, but, as far as I have made them out myself, it seems that I went away for his sake; but I believe, in fact I know, that I shall stay away for my own. You will understand it; we thrashed it all out that Saturday afternoon—you remember?—and you understood then. And so I trust you.

"Always sincerely yours,

"FRIDA TANCRED.

"P.S.—Write and tell me how he takes it. I can see it—so clearly!—from his point of view. I hope he will not be unhappy.

"P.P.S.—We sail to-morrow."

He was still knitting his brows over the opening sentences when the Colonel flicked his own letter across the table.

"Read this, Durant, and tell me what you think of it."

Durant read:

"MY DEAR FATHER:—You will see from Georgie's telegram that we shall be leaving England to-morrow. I did not tell you this before because it would have meant so much explanation, and if we once began explaining things I don't think I should ever have gone at all. And I had to go. Believe me, I was convinced that in going I was doing the best thing for you. I thought you had been making sacrifices for my sake, and that you would be happier without me, though you would not say so. Whether I could have brought myself to leave you without the help of this conviction, and whether I have the conviction strongly still, I cannot say; it is hard to be perfectly honest, even with myself. But now that I have gone I simply can't come back again. Not yet. Perhaps never, till I have done the things I want to do.

"Of course you will be angry—it is so unexpected. But only think—you would not be angry, would you, if I married? You would have considered that perfectly legitimate. Yet it would have meant my leaving you for good. And what marriage and settling down in it is to other women, seeing the world and wandering about in it is to me—it's the thing I care for most. We do not talk about these things, so this is the first you have heard of it. Think—if I had been very much in love with anyone I would have said nothing about it till I was all but engaged to him. It's the same thing. And it will make less difference to you than my marriage would have made."

Here Frida's pen had come to a stop; with a sudden flight from the abstract to the concrete, she had begun a fresh argument on a fresh page.

"I only mean to use a third of my income. The other two thousand will still go to keeping up the property. I have left everything so that my work could be taken up by anybody to-morrow."

The Colonel's eyes had dogged Durant's down to the bottom of the sheet, when he made a nervous attempt to recapture the letter. It was too late; the swing of Frida's impassioned pleading had carried Durant over the page, and one terse sentence had printed itself instantaneously on his brain. He handed back the letter without a word.

The Colonel drew Durant's arm in his and led him out through the window on to the gravel drive. Up and down, up and down, they walked for the space of one hour, while the Colonel poured out his soul. He went bareheaded, he lifted up his face to the heavens, touched to a deeper anguish by the beauty of the young day.

"Lord, what a perfect morning! Look at this place she's left; look at it! I've nursed the little property for her; it was as much hers as if I was in my grave, Durant. She's lived in it for nearly thirty years, ever since she was no higher than that flower-pot, and she thinks nothing of leaving it. She thinks nothing of leaving me. And I've got more work to do than my brain's fit for; why I was in the very thick of my Primrose League correspondence, up to the neck in all manner of accounts; and she knew it, and chose this time. I've got to give a lecture next week in Whithorn parish-room, a lecture on 'Imperialism,' and I've my little chronicle on hand, too; but it's nothing to her. The whole thing's a mystery to me. I can't think what can have made her do it. She never was a girl that cared for gadding about, and for society and that. As for trying to make me believe that I should be no worse off if she married, the question has never risen, Durant. She hasn't married. She never even wanted to be married. She never would have been married."

"That makes it all the more natural that she should want to see something of the world instead."

"No, it's not natural. I could have understood her wanting to get married, that's natural enough; but what's a woman got to do with seeing the world? It's not as if she was my son, Durant."

Durant listened and wondered. As far as he could make out, the Colonel's attitude to his daughter was twofold. On the one hand, he seemed to regard her as part of the little property, and as existing for the sake of the little property, from which point of view she had acquired a certain value in his eyes. On the other hand, he looked upon her as an inferior part of Himself, and as existing for the sake of Himself; it was a view old as the hills and the earth they were made of, being the paternal side of the simple primeval attitude of the man to the woman. And, seeing that the little property was a mere drop in the ocean of the Colonel's egoism, this view might be said to include the other as the greater includes the less. On either theory Frida Tancred was not supposed to have any rights, or, indeed, any substantial existence of her own; she was an attribute, an adjunct.

"Seeing the world—fiddlesticks! Don't tell me there isn't something else at the bottom of it—it's an insult to my intelligence."

As everything the Colonel did not understand was an insult to his intelligence, his intelligence must have had to put up with an extraordinary number of affronts.

He leaned heavily on the young man's arm. "It's shaken me. I shall never be the fellow I was. I can't understand it. Nobody could have done more for any girl than I've done for Frida; and she deserts me, Durant, deserts me in my old age with my strength failing."

Durant vainly tried to make himself worthy of Frida Tancred's trust, but he could add nothing to her reasoning, and she had kept her best argument to the last,—"It will make less difference to you than my marriage would have made."

"After all, sir, will it make so very much difference if—if your daughter does go away for a year or two?"

"I can't say. I can't tell you that till I've tried it, my boy. It's all too new to me, and I tell you I can't understand it."

He trailed off with a slow and stricken movement, like a lesser Lear, and reentered the house by the window of Frida's room. The sight of the well-ordered writing-table subtilized for a moment his sense of her desertion.

"Look at that. She was my right hand, Maurice, and I can't realize that she's gone. It's the queerest sensation; I feel as if she was here and yet wasn't here."

Durant said he had heard that people felt like that after the amputation of their right hands. As for the wound, he hoped that time would heal it.

"Any soldier can tell you that old wounds will still bleed, Durant. I think that was the luncheon bell."

Lunch, over which the Colonel lingered lovingly and long, somewhat obscured the freshness of the tragedy, and made it a thing of the remoter past. An hour later he was playing with his little rain-gauge on the lawn. At afternoon teatime he appeared immaculately attired in the height of the fashion; brown boots, the palest of pale gray summer suitings, a white pique waistcoat, the least little luminous hint of green in his silk necktie, and he seemed the spirit of youth incarnate.

At this figure Durant smiled with a pity that was only two-thirds contempt. He longed to ask him whether the old wound was bleeding badly. He was bound to believe that the Colonel had a heart under his immaculate waistcoat, with pulses and arteries the same as other people's, his own unconquerable conviction being that if you pricked the gentlemannikin he would bleed sawdust.

The Colonel had scarcely swallowed his tea when Durant saw him trotting off in the direction of the cottage; there was that about him which, considering his recent bereavement, suggested an almost indecent haste. He returned and sat down to dinner, flushed but uncommunicative. He seemed aware that it was Durant's last night, and it was after some weak attempts to give the meal a commemorative and farewell character, half-festal, half-funereal, that he sank into silence, and remained brooding over the ice pudding in his attitude of owl-like inscrutability. But during the privacy of dessert his mystic mood took flight; he hopped, as it were, onto a higher perch; he stretched the wing of victory and gazed at it admiringly; there was an effect as of the preening of young plumage, the fluttering of innumerable feathers.

And, with champagne running in his veins like the sap of spring, he proclaimed his engagement to that charming lady, Mrs. Fazakerly.

Durant had no sooner congratulated him on the event than he remembered that he had left the postscript of Miss Tancred's letter unanswered. She had said, "Write and tell me how he takes it"; she had hoped that he would not be unhappy. So he wrote: "He took it uncommonly well" (that was not strictly true, but Durant was determined to set Frida Tancred's conscience at rest, even if he had to tamper a little with his own). "I should not say that he will be very unhappy. On the contrary, he has just assured me that he is the happiest man on earth. He is engaged to be married to Mrs. Fazakerly."

It was a masterly stroke on Mrs. Fazakerly's part, and it had followed so closely on the elopement (as closely, indeed, as consequence on cause) that Durant had to admit that he had grossly underrated the powers of this remarkable woman. He had been lost in admiration of Miss Chatterton's elaborate intrigue and bold independent action; but now he came to think of it, though Miss Chatterton's style was more showy, Mrs. Fazakerly had played by far the better game of the two. Durant, who had regarded himself as a trump card up Mrs. Fazakerly's sleeve, perceived with a pang that he had counted for nothing in the final move. Mrs. Fazakerly had not, as he idiotically supposed, been greatly concerned with Frida Tancred's attitude toward him. She had divined nothing, imagined nothing, she had been both simpler and subtler than he knew. She had desired the removal of Frida Tancred from her path, and at the right moment she had produced Georgie Chatterton. She had played her deliberately, staking everything on the move. Georgie's independence had been purely illusory. She had appeared at Mrs. Fazakerly's bidding, she had behaved as Mrs. Fazakerly had foreseen, she had removed Frida Tancred, and Durant had been nowhere. Mrs. Fazakerly's little gray eyes could read the characters of men and women at a glance, and as instantly inferred their fitness or unfitness for her purpose. She might be a poor hand at the game of whist, but at the game of matrimony she was magnificent and supreme.

Frida had said, "We sail to-morrow"; therefore, Durant walked all the way to Whithorn-in-Arden to post his letter, so that it might reach her before she left London. And as he came back across the dewy path in the dim light, and Coton Manor raised its forehead from the embrace of the woods and opened the long line of its dull windows, he realized all that it had done for Frida. He understood the abnegation and the tragedy of her life. She had been sacrificed, not only to her father, but to her father's fetish, the property; Coton Manor had to be kept up at all costs, and the cost had been Frida's, it had been her mother's. The place had crushed and consumed her spirit, as it swallowed up two-thirds of her material inheritance; it had made the living woman as the dead. He remembered how the house had been called her mother's monument, and how it had become her own grave. Her soul had never lived there. And now that she was gone it was as empty as the tomb from which the soul has lifted the body at resurrection time.

And he, too, was set at liberty.

He left by the slow early train on Wednesday without waiting for the afternoon express, his object being not so much to reach town as to get away from Coton Manor. The Colonel accompanied him to the station; and, to his infinite surprise and embarrassment, he found Mrs. Fazakerly on the platform waiting to see him off.

He could think of nothing nice to say to her about her engagement, not even when she took possession of him with a hand on his arm, led him away to the far end of the platform, and gazed expectantly into his face.

"You don't congratulate me, Mr. Durant."

"On what?" he asked moodily.

"On having done a good deed."

"A good deed?"

"Didn't I tell you there was nothing I wouldn't do for Frida Tancred?"

Incomparable cunning! To set herself right in his eyes and her own, she was trying to persuade him that she had accepted the Colonel for his daughter's sake. A good deed! Well, whatever else she had done, and whatever her motives may have been, the deed remained; she had set Frida Tancred free. Nevertheless, he could not be pleasant.

"Self-sacrifice, no doubt, is a virtue," said he; "yet one draws the line——"

"Does one?"

He felt a delicate pressure on his arm, the right touch, the light touch. "Mr. Durant, you are dense, and you are ungrateful."

"I don't see it."

"Don't you see what I have done for you?" There was a strange light behind the pince-nez as she smiled up into his face. "I have cleared the way."

"For Miss Tancred, you mean," said Durant; thereby proving that in her calculations as to his mean density Mrs. Fazakerly was not altogether wrong.

But Durant was always an imaginative man. And as he sped on the same journey over the same rails, his imagination followed Frida Tancred in her flight toward freedom and the unknown.



THE COSMOPOLITAN

PART II

OUTWARD BOUND

XIV

After seven weeks in England Maurice Durant began to look back with longing on the seven years he had spent away from it, and so turned his back on Dover and his face to the South of France. Those three weeks in Coton Manor had disgusted him with the country, another three weeks in London had more than satisfied his passion for town. It was there that he realized more keenly than anywhere else that he was a foreigner in England, and he went abroad in order to feel himself an Englishman again.

Restless as ever, he spent two years wandering the world, then shut himself up for three more in a little villa in the Apennines, and worked as he had never worked before, with the result that at the end of the five years, he found himself irresistibly drawn back to England again. Gradually—very gradually—England was waking to the fact that Maurice Durant was a clever painter; still more gradually it had dawned on Maurice that he was becoming famous. His name had traveled to London, as a name frequently does, via Paris and New York, and Fame had lured him to London by dint of taking it up and incessantly sounding it, not with a coarse and startling blast from her favorite instrument, the trumpet, but with a delicate crescendo, lyrically, subtly, insinuatingly, like a young siren performing on a well-modulated flute. The trumpet, no doubt, would have deafened or irritated him; but before he got sick of it the softer music was by no means disagreeable to his ear.

It seemed that he had scored a double success, being equally happy in his landscapes and his portraits. The critics were divided. One evening it would appear that, within the limits of his art, Maurice Durant was the subtlest, the finest exponent of modern womanhood; the next morning he would be told that he had rendered the beauty of the divine visible world more imaginatively, more individually, than any living artist, but that as a portrait painter he had yet to find himself. These were the variations on the one familiar theme; for as to his modernity, which was obvious, they were all agreed. But at last he came across an account of himself which he acknowledged to be more or less consistent and correct. It was the final appreciation, the summing up of a judge who was said to be the only man in England who had a right to his opinion. And this was his opinion of Maurice Durant:

"He stands in a unique and interesting position. On his right hand, the hand he paints with, are the heights unattainable by any but the great artists; on his left, the dizzy verge of popularity. As a matter of fact, he is neither popular nor great. His just horror of vulgarity will save him from the abyss; his equal fear of committing himself, of letting himself go, the fear, shall I say, of failure, of the fantastic or ridiculous attitudes a man necessarily assumes in falling from a height, will keep him forever from the loftier way. It is not that his temperament is naturally timorous and cold; if he is afraid of anything, he is afraid of his own rashness, his own heat. There are about him delicacies and repugnances, a certain carefully cultivated restraint, and a half-critical, half-imaginative caution which, we submit, is incompatible with greatness in his art. But he has imagination."

A little more praise or a little more blame, and he would have suspected himself of genius; as it was, he was content to stand distinguished from the ruck of the popular and the respectable by virtue of that imagination which his critic had allowed to him. He was not a great painter, and he knew it; but he was a brilliantly clever one, and he knew that also, and in the fact and his intimate knowledge of it lay the secret of his success. He kept a cool head on his shoulders, and thus his position and the personal dignity depending on it were secure. He would never tumble from his height through the giddiness of vanity; and when the same high authority kept on assuring the world, on the word of a critic, that Maurice Durant was branded with the curse of cleverness, that he was the victim of his own versatility, and that he had just missed greatness, Maurice merely remarked that he was glad to hear it, for he was sure that greatness would have bored him.

Whether it was the same ungovernable terror that restrained him from marrying, or whether he was the friend of too many women to be the lover of one, or whether he really was self-contained and self-sufficient, all this time he had remained single. His singleness had many advantages; it kept him free; it made it easy for him to get about from place to place and obtain an uninterrupted view of the world; it left an open way for his abrupt incalculable movements, his panic flights.

And as he had always fled from everything that disturbed and irritated him, so now, in the very middle of an English summer and a London season, he was flying from the sound of his own fame. Not far this time; only from the center to the verge, from Piccadilly pavement to the south coast. He had hired a small cutter for a month, and lived on board in much physical discomfort and intellectual peace. He hardly knew it by sight, that beautiful full face of his own country; but he was learning to know it as he sailed from the white cliffs to the red, from the red to the gray and black, the iron slopes and precipices of the Land's End.

He had just returned from a fortnight's cruise, and was wondering what he would do with the weeks that remained to him—whether he would explore the west coast of England or set sail for the Channel Islands—when he found himself, very lazy and very happy, lying at anchor in a certain white-walled harbor in the south of Cornwall. A neighboring regatta had carried off, the fleet of yachts that had their moorings there, and the harbor was dotted with fishing-boats, pilot-boats, ocean steamers, steam tugs, wherries, and such craft. The little Torch, rocking madly on miniature waves as she played with her chain, was almost alone in her lightness and frivolity. About an hour before midnight Durant woke in his berth, and felt this vivacity of hers increasing; larger waves lapped her and broke against her sides, but overhead, on deck, there was no sign of a wind. He got up, climbed the companion ladder, and put his head out over the hatch. A schooner yacht had come in, and lay straining at her cable in the narrow channel between the Torch and a Portsmouth pilot. She had only just put into harbor, for her crew were still busy taking down her sails. As if it were her own movement alone that made her visible, she swayed there, dimly discerned, while she slipped her white canvas like a beauty disrobing in the dark, sail by sail, till she stood naked under a veil of dusk, and the light went up above her bows.

A restless thing that schooner yacht; her canvas was hardly lowered before it was up again. She had not long lain dreaming, passive to the will of the tide. At sunrise she awoke, and what with her own swinging and vibration, and the voices and trampling of her joyous, red-capped, blue-jerseyed crew, there was no sleep for anyone in her neighborhood after three o'clock. So Durant rolled out of his berth, dressed hastily, and went on deck, eager to see her in her beauty, robed for the morning and the wind. There she was, so near now that he could almost have tipped a rope-end down her skylight from the skylight of the Torch, every line of her exquisite body new-washed in gold and shivering under the touches of the dawn. She was awake, alive; the life that had still beaten through her dreams in the night, stirred by the drowsy fingering of the harbor tide, was throbbing and thrilling with many pulses as she shook out her streamers to the wind. And now her mainsail went slowly up, and she leapt and shuddered through all her being, passionate as though the will of the wind was her will.

Durant stared at her with undisguised admiration. She was a fair size for her kind, and from the sounds that came up through her cabin skylight he judged that she had a party on board. Standing on the deck of the Torch in his light flannels, Durant looked much too long for his own ridiculously tiny cutter. He was so deeply absorbed in spelling out the letters on the yacht's life-belts—Windward—that he was quite unaware that he himself was an object of considerable interest to a lady who had just come on deck. Literally flying as he was from the sound of his own name, he was unprepared to hear it sung out in cheerful greeting.

"Mr. Durant!"

He started and blinked, unable to recognize the lady of the voice. Assuming that he had once known, and since forgotten her, he had raised his cap on the chance.

She was trying to say something to him now, but the noise of the struggling sail cut off her words. She turned, and seemed to be calling to somebody else. Another lady, whom the sail had hidden from his sight till now, came forward and leaned eagerly over the rail, steadying herself by the shrouds. This lady did not shout his name; but, as her eyes met his across the narrow channel, she smiled—a smile he could not place or recognize or understand; he could only raise his cap to it blindly as before.

She was smiling still, while the first lady laughed, if possible in a more bewildering manner than before. "Don't you know us?" She seemed to be whispering across the gulf.

He shook his head in desperation, whereupon the second lady gave orders to the men to stop hoisting the mainsail.

"If you are Mr. Durant, come on board!"

This time the voice was distinct in the silence that followed the hoisting of the sail. He knew that lady now.

And he knew the other also, though there was nothing but the turn of her head and the black accent over her eyes to remind him of Frida Tancred.

XV

"Well, is it all that you expected? Does the reality come up to the dream?"

"It does. I never knew a dream that tallied so exactly with the reality."

Frida was leaning back in a deck-chair, looking at Durant, who sat beside her on the schooner's rail.

For three days the Windward had sailed up and down the coast of Cornwall; for three days the little Torch, with all sails set, wheeled round her moorings or followed her flight. Durant had accepted Miss Tancred's invitation to join them in a week's cruise in English waters. He spent his mornings in his own yacht, his afternoons and evenings on board the schooner. The proposal had been a godsend to him in his state of indecision. After his aimless wanderings he was exhilarated by this eager challenge and pursuit, absurdly pitting the speed of his own small craft against the swiftness and strength of the larger vessel. But he enjoyed still more sitting on the rail of the Windward and talking to Frida. There was something infinitely soothing in the society of a woman who knew nothing and cared nothing about his fame. He was not the only guest. Besides Miss Chatterton there was Mr. Manby, a little middle-aged gentleman, who called himself an artist; Miss Manby, a little middle-aged woman, who seemed to be his sister; and two little girls with their hair down their backs, his daughters, Eileen and Ermyntrude Manby. Durant was a good deal alone with Frida, for a stiff breeze had kept the artist and his sister much below, and Georgie and the little girls hardly counted.

They were alone now.

Frida had smiled as she spoke, a smile of intelligence and reminiscence; and he was irresistibly reminded of the first and last occasion when he had discoursed to her about realities.

"And what are you going to do with it?" he asked.

"With what? With the reality or the dream?"

"With both, with life—now you've got it?"

"Why should I do anything with it? Unless you're talking of moral obligations, which would be very tiresome of you."

"I'm not thinking of moral obligations."

"What were you thinking of, then?"

"I was thinking—of you."

Frida lay back a little further on her cushion as if she were withdrawing herself somewhat from his scrutiny. She clasped her hands behind her head; her face was uptilted to the sky.

His eyes followed her gaze. Over their heads the wind had piled up a great palace of white clouds; under the rifted floors the blue sky ran shallow in a faint milky turquoise, while above, between, beyond those aerial roofs and pinnacles and domes it deepened to lapis lazuli, luminous, transparent, light behind color and color behind light. The green earth looked greener under the low-lying shafts of blue and silver; far off, on the sea, the shadows of the clouds lay like the stain of spilt red wine.

"Who was the great man?" she asked with apparent irrelevance, "who said that women were incapable of a disinterested passion for nature?"

He knitted his brows. Frida had proved a little disconcerting at times. He had had to begin all over again with her, aware that, though ostensibly renewing their old acquaintance, he was actually making a new one, to which faint recognitions and perishing reminiscences gave a bewildering, elusive charm. But Frida remembered many things that he had forgotten, and a certain directness and familiarity born of this superior memory of hers puzzled him and put him out. This time, however, he had a dreamy recollection.

"Fancy your remembering that!"

"I remember everything. At any rate, I remember quite enough to see that you're just the same; you haven't changed a little bit. Except that you don't look as you did the first night I met you."

"And how did I look then?"

She paused, carefully selecting her phrase. "You looked—as if—I'd given you a shock. You had expected something different. That dream did not tally with the reality."

"How on earth——"

"How on earth did I know? You may not be aware of it, but you have a very expressive face."

"I was not aware of it."

Poor Durant. His face was expressive enough now in all conscience. She held out her hand and laid it on his sleeve, and he remembered how she used to shrink from his touch.

"My dear Mr. Durant, don't look like that; it makes my heart bleed. Of course I saw it. I saw everything. I saw your face looking over the banisters as I was going downstairs, when I've no doubt you thought you'd caught sight of a very pretty woman; and I saw it with a very different expression on it when you shook hands and found that the woman wasn't a bit pretty, after all. Of course it was a shock to you, and of course I understood. I knew so exactly how you felt, and I was so sincerely sorry for you."

"Sorry! I have a distinct recollection of being abominably rude to you that night, and unpleasant afterward. Can you, will you forgive me?"

"What? Five years after the offense? No. I forgave you at the time; I'm not going to do it all over again. What does it matter? It's all so long ago. The funny part of it was that I wasn't a bit annoyed with you, but I was furious with—whom do you think?"

"I haven't a notion if it wasn't with me."

"It was a she—the other lady, the woman I wasn't, the woman you thought I was, my ideal self. Needless to say, my feminine jealousy was such that I could have throttled her. I suppose I did pretty well do for her as it happened. There can be nothing deader than a dead idea."

"Don't be too sure. I have known them come to life again."

His gaze, that had fallen, and was resting on the hem of her blue serge gown, now traveled up the long, slender line of her limbs, past the dim curves of her body to the wonder of her face. How marvelously changed she was! She was not only both younger and older than when he had left her five years ago, she was another woman. The heaviness had gone from her eyes and forehead, the bitter, determined, self-restraint from her mouth and chin; instead of self-restraint she had acquired that rarer virtue, self-possession. Her lips had softened, had blossomed into the sweet red flower that was part of Nature's original design. Her face had grown plastic to her feeling and her thought. She was ripened and freshened by sun and wind, by salt water and salt air; a certain nameless, intangible grace that he had caught once, twice, long ago, and seen no more, was now her abiding charm. The haggard, sallow-faced provincial, with her inscrutable manners and tumultuous heart, had developed into the finished cosmopolitan; she had about her the glory and bloom of the world. For once his artist's instinct had failed him; he had not discovered the promise of her physical beauty—but that he should have ignored the finer possibilities of her soul! If she had really known all that he had thought and felt about her then, had understood and had yet forgiven him, Frida was unlike any other woman in the world. He was not sure that this was not the secret of her charm—the marvelous dexterity of her sympathy, the swiftness with which she precipitated herself into his point of view. It had its drawbacks; it meant that she could see another man's and her own with equal clearness.

The sound of voices from a neighboring cabin, followed by the noise of unskillful footsteps stumbling up a companion ladder, warned them that they were not alone. Mr. Manby appeared on deck with great noise and circumstance, skating, struggling, clutching at impossible supports, being much hampered by a camp stool and a sketching block which he carried, and his own legs, which seemed hardly equal to carrying him. Durant had recognized in the little artist a familiar type. A small, nervous man, attired in the usual threadbare gray trousers, the usual seedy velveteen coat and slouch hat, with a great deal of grizzled hair tumbling in the usual disorder about his peaked and peevish face. Durant sprang forward and helped this pitiful figure to find its legs; not with purely benevolent intentions, he settled it and its belongings in a secure (and remote) position amidships.

"Glad to see you back again!" Frida sang out.

Mr. Manby screwed up his eyes, put his head very much on one side, and peered into the wild face of Nature with a pale, propitiatory smile.

"Yes, yes; I mustn't neglect my opportunities. Every minute of this weather is invaluable."

"It strikes me," said Frida, as Durant established himself beside her again, "that it's you artists whose devotion to Nature is—well—not altogether disinterested."

"Manby's affection seems to be pretty sincere; it stands the test of seasickness."

"Oh, Mr. Manby doesn't really care very much for nature or for art either."

"What does he try to paint pictures for, then?"

"He tries to paint them for a living, for himself and the little girls." And Frida looked tenderly at Mr. Manby as she spoke.

At that moment Durant hated Mr. Manby with a deadly hatred. He had gone so far as to find a malignant satisfaction in the thought that Mr. Manby's pictures were bad, when he remembered that Frida had a weakness for bad pictures. Art did not appeal to Frida. She talked about Paris and Florence and Rome without a word of the Louvre or the Uffizi Gallery or the Vatican. She didn't care a rap about Raphael or Rubens, but she hampered herself with Manbys.

"Is there a Mrs. Manby?" he asked gloomily.

"No. Mrs. Manby died last year."

"H'mph! Poor devil! Lucky for her, though."

Frida ignored the implication. "To go back to the point we were discussing. If you were honest you'd own that you only care for nature because you can make pictures out of it. Now I, on the contrary, have no ulterior motives; I don't want to make anything out of it."

"I wasn't talking about nature. I want to know what you are going to make of your life."

"There you are again. Why should I make anything of it? You talk as if life were so much raw material to be worked into something that it isn't. To my mind it's beautiful enough as it is. I should spoil it if I tried to make anything of it."

He looked at her and he understood. He was a man of talent, some said of genius, but in her there was something greater than that; it was the genius of temperament, an infinite capacity for taking pleasures. To her life was more than mere raw material, it came finished to her hands, because it had lived a long life in her soul. Her dream had tallied.

Beside that rich creative impulse, that divine imagination of hers, his own appeared as something imitative and secondhand, and his art essentially degraded. He was nothing better than a copyist, the plagiarist of nature.

He looked up to where Mr. Manby sat smiling over his sketching block, Mr. Manby, surrounded by his admiring family. Mr. Manby did not see them; he was wrapped in his dream, absorbed in his talent with all its innocent enormities. He at any rate had no misgivings. The little girls, Eileen and Ermyntrude, played about him; they played with blocks and life-buoys and cables, they jumped over coils of rope, they spun round to leeward till the wind wound their faces in their long hair, they ran for'ard, shrieking with happy laughter as they were caught by the showers of spray flung from the yacht's bows. Frida's eyes followed them, and Durant's eyes followed Frida's.

"They are seeing the world, too, it seems."

"Yes; they have caught the fever. But they are young, as you see; they have taken it in time. Some day they'll be tired of wandering, and they'll settle down in a house of their own, over here in England, and be dear little wives and mothers."

"Eileen and Ermyntrude—by the way, I never know which is Eileen and which is Ermyntrude. And you, will you never be tired of wandering?"

She looked at him with the lucid, penetrating gaze he knew so well. "Never. I took the fever when I was—not young, and it goes harder with you then. There's no hope for me; I shall never be cured."

She rose and joined the Manbys. The little girls ran to meet her, they clung to her skirts and danced round her; she put her arm round Ermyntrude, the younger, and Durant saw her winding her long fingers in and out of the golden hair, and looking down into the child's face, Madonna-like, with humid, tender, maternal eyes.

He thought of her as the mother of Manby's children, and he hated the little girls.

There was a voice at his elbow. "Isn't she splendid?" Miss Chatterton had seated herself in Frida's chair.

Her presence brought him instantaneous relief. He had been glad to meet Miss Chatterton again. Not that he would have known her, for time had not dealt very kindly with the young girl. Her face, from overmuch play of expression, showed a few little wrinkles already, her complexion had suffered the fate of sanguine complexions, it had not gone altogether, but it was going—fast, the color was beginning to run. But time had not subdued her extravagant spirits or touched her imperishable mirth. In spite of a lapse of five years she gave him a pleasant sense of continuity; she took him up exactly where she had put him down, on the platform of the little wayside station of Whithorn-in-Arden. Unlike Frida, Miss Chatterton had not developed. When she began to talk she had the air of merely continuing their last important conversation.

"Didn't I tell you how she'd come out if she got her chance?"

"You did."

"And wasn't I right?"

"You were."

"But you oughtn't to have needed telling, you ought to have seen it for yourself."

"Right again. I ought to have seen it for myself."

"He who will not when he may will live to fight another day; isn't that how it goes on?"

"Yes; I congratulate you on your work."

"It isn't my work, lord bless you! nor yours, either—there I was wrong."

"What is it, then?"

Miss Chatterton stared out over the sea and into the universal air. "Why, it's—it's everything! Of course you did something, so did I. But if it comes to that, the present Mrs. Tancred did more than either of us. We couldn't have married the Colonel."

"Then you think that was the reason why she——"

"I do, indeed. She could have had no other. You see she was awfully fond of Frida. And, what's more, she was fond of you."

It was his turn to look out over the sea.

"What do you think? He has never forgiven her for going away, though it happened to be the very thing he wanted. How's that for inconsistency?"

"Has she seen the—the Colonel since?"

"She has. A strange, unaccountable longing to see the Colonel comes over her periodically, like a madness, and she rushes home from the ends of the earth. That's happened three times. It's the most erratic and incalculable thing about her. But going home doesn't answer."

"I should hardly have thought it would."

"Except that she's got the control of more money now. Tell you how it happened. The last time she went home she found the poor little Colonel making his little will. He asked her point-blank what she meant to do with the property when he was in his little grave. He must have had an inkling. And Frida, who is honesty itself, said she didn't know, but she rather thought she would sell it and make for the unexplored. Then he was frightened, and made her make a solemn vow never to do anything of the kind. Somehow the property seems to have recovered itself, with all she put into it; anyhow, after that, it managed to disgorge another thousand a year. So Frida's more independent than ever."

Durant made an impatient movement that nearly sent him overboard to the bottom of the sea, where, indeed, he wished that Frida Tancred's thousands were lying. Georgie noticed the movement, and blushed for the first time in their acquaintance.

"Just look at those children," said she, "they simply adore Frida. It's odd, but she's got the most curious power of making people adore her. I don't know what she does to them, but waiters, policemen, porters, customhouse officers, they're all the same. The people in the hotels we stayed in adored her. So did the Arabs up the Nile and the Soudanese in the desert, so did the Kaffirs on the veldt and the coolies that carried her up the Himalayas—and she's no light weight, is Frida."

Georgie paused while her fancy followed Frida in delightful retrospect. Durant said nothing, he sat waiting for her to go on. She went on.

"Women, too—I've seen them hanging about drafty corridors for hours on the off chance of seeing her. There was a dreadful girl we knew in Paris, who used to grovel on her doormat and weep because she said Frida wouldn't speak to her. Frida loathed her, but she was awfully nice to her till one day when she tripped over her on the mat. Then she wasn't nice to her at all; she hauled her up by the belt, and told her to get up and go away and never make such a fool of herself again."

Georgie cast at Durant a look that said, "That's how our Frida deals with obstructives!"

"And where was all this remarkable fascination five years ago?"

"It was there all right enough, lying dormant, you know. I felt it. Mrs. Fazakerly felt it—that's why she married the Colonel. You felt it."

"I didn't."

"Excuse me, you did. That's why you stayed three weeks at Coton Manor when you needn't have stopped three days. As for Mr. Manby there, he simply worships the ground she treads on, as they say."

"The devil he does! What's he doing here?"

"As you see, he's painting pictures as hard as ever he can go. He paints them in order to live; but as he has to live in order to paint, Frida—well, between you and me, Frida keeps him and Eileen and Ermyntrude, the whole family, in short. But that's a detail. It isn't offered as any explanation of the charm. I don't believe that anybody ever realizes that Frida has money."

He could believe that. He had never realized it himself. Her enjoyment of life was so finished an art that it kept its machinery well out of sight.

"Frida," Georgie serenely continued, "has a weakness for landscape painters. The memory of her mother—no doubt."

"Don't they—don't they bore her?"

"No. It takes a great deal to bore Frida—naturally, after the Colonel. Besides, she doesn't give them the chance. Nobody ever gets what you may call a hold on Frida. There's so much more of her than they can grasp. And there are, at least, three sides of her by which she's unapproachable. One of them's her liberty. If you or I or the little Manby man were to take liberties with her liberty Frida would——"

"What would Frida do?"

"She would drop us down, very gently, at the nearest port, and make for the Unexplored! And yet, I don't know. That's the lovely and fascinating thing about Frida—that you never do know."

XVI

The fortnight's cruise was at an end, the Torch had gone back to her owners, without Durant, who had contrived to stay on board the Windward till the latest possible moment. The yacht was lying-to, outside the same white-walled harbor where she had first found Durant. She wheeled aimlessly about with slackened sails, swaying, balancing, hovering like a bird on the wing, impervious and restless, waiting for the return of the boat that was to take Durant on shore. It had only just put off with the first load of guests—the Manbys—under Georgie Chatterton's escort. As Durant watched it diminishing and vanishing, he thought of how Georgie had described their hostess's method of dealing with exacting friends. She was dropping them, very gently, at the nearest port. Poor Manby! And it would be his own turn next. And yet Georgie had said, "You never know." He must and would know; at any rate, he would take his chance. Meanwhile, he had a whole hour before him to find out in, for the crew had commissions in the town. That hour was Frida's and his own.

The two weeks had gone he knew not how; and yet he had taken count of the procession of the days. Days of clouds, when, under a drenching mist, the land was sodden into the likeness of the sea, the sea stilled into a leaden image of the land; days of rain, when the wet decks shone like amber, and the sea's face was smoothed out and pitted by the showers; days of sun, when they went with every sail spread, over a warm, quivering sea, whose ripples bore the shivered reflections of the sky in so many blue flames that leaped and danced with the Windward in her course; days of wind, when the Channel was a race of tumultuous waves, green-hearted, silver-lipped, swelling and breaking and swelling, and flowering into foam, days when the yacht careened over with steep decks, laid between wind and water, flush with the foam, driven by the wind as by her soul; days when Durant and Frida, who delighted in rough weather, sat out together on deck alone. They knew every sound of that marvelous world, sounds of the calm, of water lapping against the yacht's side, the tender, half-audible caress of the sea; sounds of the coming gale, more seen than heard, more felt than seen, the deep, long-drawn shudder of the sea when the wind's path is as the rain's path; and that sound, the song of her soul, the keen, high, exultant song that the wind sings, playing on her shrouds as on a many-stringed instrument. The boat, in her unrest, rolling, tossing, wheeling and flying, was herself so alive, so one with the moving wind and water, and withal so slight a shell for the humanity within her, that she had brought them, the man and the woman, nearer and nearer to the heart of being; they touched through her the deep elemental forces of the world. The sea had joined what the land had kept asunder. At this last hour of Durant's last day they were drifting rather than sailing past a sunken shore, a fringe of gray slate, battered by the tide and broken into thin layers, with edges keen as knives; above it, low woods of dwarf oaks stretched northward, gray and phantasmal as the shore, stunted and tortured into writhing, unearthly shapes by the violence of storms. For here and now the sea had its way; it had taken on reality; and earth was the phantom, the vanishing, the vague.

They had been pacing the deck together for some minutes, but at last they stood still, looking landward.

Durant sighed heavily and then he spoke.

"Frida, you know what I am going to say——"

They turned and faced each other. In the man's eyes there was a cloud, in the woman's a light, a light of wonder and of terror.

She smiled bravely through her fear. "Yes, I know what you are going to say. But I don't know——"

"What don't you know?"

"I don't know what you mean."

"You don't know what I mean?"

"I know you are going to say you love me, and you had better not. For I don't know what that means. The thing you call love was left out of my composition. Some women are born like that."

"I don't believe it. It's only your way of saying that you don't care for me."

"I like you. I always have liked you. I'll go farther—if I ever loved any man it would be you."

"The fact remains that it isn't?"

"It isn't, and it never will be. But you may be very certain that it will never be anyone else."

"Tell me one thing—was there ever a time when it might have been?"

"That isn't fair. I can't answer that question."

"You can. Think—was there ever a time, no matter how short, the fraction of a minute, when if I'd only had the sense, if I had only known——"

"Are you sure you didn't know? I was afraid you did."

"Then you really mean it—that if I'd only asked you then——"

"Thank Heaven, you did not!"

"Why are you thanking Heaven?"

"Because—because—I can't be sure, but I might—I might have taken you at your word."

"And why not?"

"I would have made a great mistake. The same mistake that you are making now."

"Mistake?"

"You mistook the idea for the reality once, if you remember—and now aren't you mistaking the reality for the idea?"

"Frida, you are too subtle; you are the most exasperating woman in the world——"

"There, you see. That's the sort of thing we should always be saying to each other if I let you have your way. But supposing you did have it; if we were married we could not understand each other better than we do; so we should not be one bit better off. By this time we should have got beyond the phase we started with——"

"But we should have had it——"

"Yes; and found ourselves precisely where we are now."

"Where we were yesterday, you mean."

"Yes. We were good enough friends yesterday."

"And what are we to-day? Enemies?"

She smiled sadly. "It looks like it. At any rate, we seem to have some difficulty in understanding each other."

"Good God! how coolly you talk about it! Understanding! Do you never feel? Has it never even occurred to you that I can feel? Have you any notion what it is to be made of flesh and blood and nerves, and to have to stay here, squeezed up in this confounded boat, where I can't get away from you?"

"You can get away in three-quarters of an hour, and meanwhile, if you like, you can go below."

"If I did go below I should still feel you walking over my head. I should hear you breathe. And now to look at you and touch you, and know all the time that something sticks between us——"

He stopped and looked before him. It was true that the sea had brought them together. Amid the daemonic triumph and jubilation of the power that claimed them for its own they, the man and the woman, had been thrown on each other, they had looked into each other's eyes, spirit to spirit, the divine thing struggling blind and uncertain in nature's tangled mesh. But now, so near, on the verge of the intangible, the divine, it came over Durant that after all it was this their common nature, their flesh and blood, that was the barrier; it merged them with the world on every side, but it hedged them in and hid them from each other.

"As you know, we're the best friends in the world; there's only one thing that sticks between us—the eternal difference in our points of view."

"I was perfectly right. Why couldn't I trust my first impressions? I thought you frigid and lucid and inhuman——"

"Inhuman?"

"Well, not a bit like a woman."

"My dear Maurice, you are very like a man."

"There's something about you——"

"Really? What is it, do you think?"

"Oh, nothing; a slight defect, that's all. It must be as you say, and as I always thought, that you are incapable of feeling or understanding feeling. I repeat, there's something about you——"

"Ah, Maurice, if you want the truth, there's something about you. I always knew, I felt that it was in you, though I wouldn't own that it was there. Now I am sure. You've been doing your best to make me sure."

"What have I made you sure of?"

"Sure that you are incapable, not of loving perhaps, but of loving a certain kind of woman the way she wants to be loved. You can't help it. As I said before, it is the difference in the point of view. We should get no nearer if we talked till doomsday."

"My point of view, as you call it, has entirely changed."

"No. It is I who have changed. Your point of view is, and always will be, the same."

He tried hard to understand.

"Does it come to this—that if I had loved you then you would have loved me now?"

"You couldn't have loved me then. You were not that sort."

He understood her meaning and it maddened him. "It wasn't my fault. How the devil was I to see?"

"Exactly, how were you? There are some things which you can't see. You can see everything you can paint, and, as you are a very clever artist, I dare say you can paint most things you can see."

"What has that got to do with it?"

"Everything. It's your way all through. You love me because what you see of me is changed. And yet all that time I was the same woman I am now. I am the same woman I was then."

"But I am not the same man!"

"The very same. You have not changed at all."

She meant that he was deficient in that spiritual imagination which was her special power; she meant that she had perceived the implicit baseness of his earlier attitude as a man to her as a woman, a woman who had had no power to touch his senses. It was, as she had said, the difference in their points of view; hers had condemned him forever to the sensual and the seen.

He stood ashamed before her.

Yet, as if she had divined his shame and measured the anguish of it and repented her, she laid her hand on his arm.

"Maurice, it isn't entirely so. I have been horribly unjust."

"Not you! You are justice incarnate. If I had loved you then——"

"You couldn't have loved me then."

"So you have just told me."

"You had good cause. I was not and could not be then—whatever it is that you love now."

"But I might have seen——"

"Seen? Seen? That's it. There was nothing to see."

Her eyes, in her pity for him, filled with tears, tears that in his anger he could not understand.

"Why are you always reminding me of what I was five years ago? I have changed. Can't a man change if you give him five years to do it in?"

"Perhaps. It's a long time."

"Time? It's an eternity. If I was a brute to you, do you suppose the consciousness of my brutality isn't a far worse punishment than anything I could have made you feel?"

She raised her eyebrows. "What? Have you been suffering all this time—this eternity?"

"Yes. That is, I'm suffering enough now."

"Then perhaps you have some idea of what you made me feel."

"Again?"

"It's the first time I've reproached you with it, even in my thoughts."

He looked at her with unbelieving eyes. And yet he knew that it was true. Her sweetness, her lucidity, had been proof against the supreme provocation. She had forgiven, if she had not forgotten, the insult that no woman remembers and forgives.

As his eyes wandered the hand that had lain so lightly on his arm gripped it to command his attention, and he trembled through all his being. But she no longer shrank from him; she kept her hold, she tightened it, insisting.

"Oh, Maurice! haven't I told you that I understood?"

He smiled. "Yes. Thank God I can always appeal to your understanding, if I can't get at your heart. Supposing I didn't care for you then? Supposing I was too stupid to see what you were? Is five years, though it may be eternity, so long a time to learn to know you in? You take a great deal of learning, Frida; you are very difficult. There's so much more of you than any man can grasp. But you are the only woman I ever cared to know. I believe you have a thousand sides to you, and every one—every one I can see—appeals to me. There's no end to the interest. Whatever I see or don't see, I always find something more, and I never could be tired of looking."

She sighed and was silent.

"And you blame me because I couldn't see all this at once? Because it took me five years to love you? Remember, you were very cautious; you wouldn't let me see more than a bit at a time. But I love every bit of you—heart and soul, and body and brain; I love you as I never could love any other woman in the world—the world, Frida," he added, pointing the hackneyed phrase. "You are the world."

They had never stopped pacing the deck together, as they talked, turn after turn, alike and yet unlike in their eagerness and unrest. Now they stood still. Far off they could see the returning boat, a speck at the mouth of the harbor, and they knew that their time was short.

"Maurice," she said, "before you go I have a confession to make. I wasn't quite honest with you just now when I said I only liked you five years ago. I know very well that I loved you. The world has taught me so much."

The world! He frowned angrily as she said it. But through all his anger he admired the reckless nobility of soul that had urged her to that last admission, by way of softening the pangs and penalties she dealt to him. Would any other woman have confessed as much to the man who had once despised her, and now found himself in her power?

She went on. "I thought you might like to know it. I've gone far enough, perhaps; but I'll go farther still. I believe I would give the world to be able to love you now."

"Frida, if you can go as far as that——"

"I can go no farther. No, Maurice, not one step."

"You can. I believe, even now, I could make you love me."

"No. You see, women in my position, my unfortunate position, want to be loved for themselves."

"I do love you for yourself. Do you doubt that, too?"

"I do not doubt it. I am quite sure of it. That's where it is. I know you love me for myself, and so many men have loved me—not for myself. Do you suppose that doesn't touch me? If anything could make me love you that would. And since it doesn't——"

The inference was obvious.

"Is it because you can't give up your life?"

"It is—partly. And yet I might do that. I did it once."

"You did, indeed. I can't conceive how you, being you, lived the life you did——"

"I owed it. It was the price of my freedom."

Her freedom! No wonder that she valued it, if she had paid that price!

She went on dreamily, as if speaking more to herself than him. "To have power over your life—to do what you like with it—take it up or throw it down, to fling it away if that seems the best thing to do. You're not fit to take up your life if you haven't the strength to put it down, too."

"Frida, if you were my wife you wouldn't have to put it down. I'm not asking you to give up the world for me; I'm not even asking you to give up one day of your life. Your life would be exactly what it is now—plus one thing. You'll say, 'What can I give you that you haven't got?' I can give you what you've never had. You don't know what a man's love is and can be; and you must own that without that knowledge your experience, even as experience, is not quite as complete as it might be."

The boat—the boat that was to take him to the shore—was getting nearer. It was his last chance. And while he staked everything on that chance, he thought of Frida as he had first seen her, as she sat tragically at the whist table at Coton Manor, dealing out the cards with deft and supple fingers.

Now she was dealing out his fate.

He remembered how she had said, "Mr. Durant wins because he doesn't care about the game." Because he cared—cared so supremely—was he going to lose?

There were so many things in Frida that he had not reckoned with. She was an extraordinary mixture of impulse and reserve, and she had astonished him more than once by her readiness to give herself away; but beyond a certain point—the point of view in fact—her self-possession was complete. Still, he left no argument untried, for there was no knowing—no knowing what undiscovered spring he might chance to touch in that rich and subtle nature.

Her self-possession was absolute. She parried his probe with a thrust.

"It is your own fault if my experience isn't complete. You should have told me these things five years ago. As you say, nobody else has instructed me since."

"I dare say they've done their best. Of course, other men have loved you——"

"They haven't——"

"But I believe my love would be worth more to you than theirs, for the simple reason that I understand you too well to insist on it. I should always know how much and how little you wanted. For we are rather alike in some ways. I would leave you free."

"I know you would. I am sure. And I would—I would so gladly—but I can't! You see, Maurice, I have loved you."

"All the more reason——"

"All the less. I knew what you thought and felt about me, and it made no difference; I loved you just the same, because I understood. Then I had to fight it. It was hard work, but I did it very thoroughly. It will never have to be done again. Do you see?"

Yes; he saw very plainly. If Frida could not love him there was nobody but himself to blame. He also saw the advantage she had given him. She had owned that she had loved him, and he had hardly realized the full force of the pluperfect. What had been might be again. She was a woman in whom the primordial passion, once awakened, is eternal.

He pressed his advantage home.

"And why had you to fight so hard?"

"Because the thing was stronger than myself, and I wouldn't be beaten. Because I hated myself for caring for you, as I hate myself now for not caring."

In her blind pity she laid her fingers on his trembling hand. She who used to drop his hand as if it had been flame, she should have known better than to touch him now.

He looked at her with hot hungry eyes. His brain in its feverish intensity took note of trifles—the tortuous pattern of the braid on her gown, the gold sleeve-links at her wrists, the specks of brine that glistened on her temples under the wind-woven strands of her black hair; it recorded these things and remembered them afterward. And all the time the boat came nearer, and the slow, steady stroke of the oars measured his hour by minutes, till the sweat, sprung from the labor and passion of his nerves, stood out in beads on his forehead.

He looked at her; and her beauty, the beauty born of her freedom and abounding life, the beauty he worshiped, was implacable; the divinity in it remained untouched by his desire.

"You needn't care," he said desperately. "I'm not asking you to care; I'm not asking you to give me your love, but only to take mine."

She smiled. "I'm not so dishonest as to borrow what I can't repay."

His voice was monotonous in its iteration. "I'm not talking about repayment; I'll risk that. I don't want you to borrow it. I want you to take it, keep it, spend it any way you like, and—throw it away when you can't do anything more with it."

"And never return it? Ah, my friend! we can't do these things."

She dropped into the deck-chair, exhausted with the discussion. Her brow was heavy with thought; she was still racking her brains to find some argument that would appease him.

"I loved you—yes. And in my own way I love you now, if you could only be content with my way."

"Haven't you told me that your way is not my way?"

"Yes; and I've done worse than that. I've been talking to you as if you had made me suffer tortures, as if you had brought me all the pain of existence instead of all the pleasure. If you only knew! There's nothing I've been enjoying all these five years that I don't owe to you—to you and nobody else. You were very good to me even at the first; and afterward—well, I believe I love life as few women can love it, and it came to me through you. Do you think I can ever forget that? Forget what I owe you? You stood by me and showed me the way out; you stood by and opened the door of the world."

To stand by and open the door for her—it was all he was good for. In other words, she had made use of him. Well, had he not proposed to make use of her? After all, in what did his view of her differ from the Colonel's, which he abominated? All along, from the very first, it had been the old theory of the woman for the man. Frida for the Colonel's use, for his (Durant's) amusement, and now for his possession. Under all its disguises it was only an exalted form of the tyranny of sex. And Frida was making him see that there was another way of looking at it—that a woman, like nature, like life, may be an end in herself, to be loved for herself, not for what he could make out of her.

"I am a woman of the world, a worldly woman, if you like. I love the world better than anyone in it. And I'm a sort of pantheist, I suppose; I worship the world. But you will always be a part of the world I love and worship; I could not keep you out of it if I would."

The exultation in her tone provoked his laughter. "Heaven bless you—that's only a nice way of saying that I'm done for.

'He is made one with Nature; there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird.'

You have made a clean sweep of me and my personal immortality."

The splash of the oars sounded nearer. They could hear the voices of the crew; the boat, lightened of her first load, was returning with horrible rapidity, it came dancing toward them in its malignant glee; and they sat facing each other for the last time, tongue-tied.

They had paced the deck together again; one more turn for the last time.

Durant was silent. Her confession was still ringing in his ears; but it rang confusedly, it left his reason as unconvinced as his heart was unsatisfied.

She had loved him, and not in her way, as she called it, but in his. And that was a mystery. He felt that if he could account for it he would have grasped the clue, the key of the position. Whatever she might say, these things were more than subtleties of the pure reason, they were matters of the heart. He was still building a hope beyond the ruins of hope.

"Frida," he said at last, "you are a wonderful woman, so I can believe that you loved me. But, seeing what I was and what you knew about me, I wonder why?"

Louder and nearer they heard the stroke of the oars measuring the minutes. Frida's eyes were fixed on the boat as she answered.

"Why? Ah, Maurice, how many times have I asked myself that question? Why does any woman love any man? As far as I can see, in nine hundred cases out of a thousand woman is unhappy because she loves. In the thousandth case she loves because she is unhappy."

The boat had arrived. The oars knocked against the yacht's side with a light shock. Durant's hour was at an end.

Frida held out her hand. He hardly touched it, hardly raised his eyes to her as she said "Good-bye." But on the last step of the gangway he turned and looked at her—the woman in a thousand.

She was not unhappy.

XVII

Frida had played high and yet she had won the game of life; that dangerous game which most women playing single-handed are bound to lose. She had won, but whether by apathy or care, by skill or divine chance, he could not tell. As to himself he was very certain; when he might have won her he did not care to win, now that he had lost her he would always care. That was just his way.

Alone in the little hotel that looked over the harbor, left to the tyrannous company of his own thoughts, he made a desperate effort to understand her, to accept her point of view, to be, as she was, comprehensive and generous and just.

He believed every word she had ever said to him, for she was truth itself; he believed her when she said that she had loved him, that she loved him still. Of course she loved him; but how?

They say that passion in a pure woman is first lit at the light of the ideal, and burns downward from spirit to earth. But Frida's had shot up full-flamed from the dark, kindled at the hot heart of nature, thence it had taken to itself wings and flown to the ideal; and for its insatiable longing there was no ideal but the whole. Other women before Frida had loved the world too well; but for them the world meant nothing but their own part and place in it. For Frida it meant nothing short of the divine cosmos. Impossible to fix her part and place in it; the woman was so merged with the object of her desire. He, Maurice Durant, was as she had said a part of that world, but he was not the whole; he was not even the half, that half which for most women is more than the whole. From the first he had been to her the symbol of a reality greater than himself; she loved not him, but the world in him. And thus her love, like his own art, had missed the touch of greatness. It was neither the joy nor the tragedy of her life, but its one illuminating episode; or, rather, it was the lyrical prologue to the grand drama of existence.

He did her justice. It was not that she was changeable or capricious, or that her love was weak; on the contrary, its very nature was to grow out of all bounds of sex and mood and circumstance. Its progress had been from Maurice Durant outward; from Maurice, as the innermost kernel and heart of the world, to the dim verge, the uttermost margin of the world; and that by a million radiating paths. It was not that she left Maurice behind her, for all those million paths led back to him, the man was the center of her universe; but then the center is infinitely small compared with the circumference. He saw himself diminished to a mathematical point in this cosmopolitan's cosmos. For Frida he had ceased to have any objective existence, he was an intellectual quantity, what the Colonel would have called an abstraction. There was nothing for him to do but to accept the transcendent position.

Thus, through all the tension of his soul, his intellect still struggled for comprehension.

Meanwhile, from his window looking over the white-walled harbor, he could see the Windward with all her sails spread, outward bound.

He watched her till there was nothing to be seen but her flying sails, till the sails were one white wing on a dim violet sea, till the white wing was a gray dot, indistinct on the margin of the world.

XVIII

He cared immensely. But not to come behind her in generosity and comprehension he owned that he had no right to complain because this remarkable woman loved the world better than one man, even if that man happened to be himself; in fact, while his heart revolted against it, his pure intellect admired her attitude, for the world is a greater thing that any man in it.

Now and again letters reached him across seas and continents, letters with strange, outlandish postmarks, wonderful, graphic, triumphant letters, which showed him plainly, though unintentionally, that Frida Tancred was still on the winning side, that she could do without him. Across seas and continents he watched her career with a sad and cynical sympathy, as a man naturally watches a woman who triumphs where he has failed.

Meanwhile he lived on her letters, long and expansive, or short and to the point. They proved a stimulating diet; they had so much of her full-blooded personality in them. His own grew shorter and shorter and more and more to the point, till at last he wrote: "Delightful. Only tell me when you've had enough of it."

The answer to that came bounding, as it were, from the other side of the Atlantic. "Not yet. I shall never have enough of it. I've only been 'seeing the world,' only traveling from point to point along an infinite surface, and there's no satisfaction in that. I'm not tired—not tired, Maurice, remember. I don't want to stop. I want to strike down—deeper. It doesn't matter what point you take, so long as you strike down. Just at present I'm off for India."

Her postscript said: "If you ever hear of me doing queer things, remember they were all in the day's pleasure or the day's work."

He remembered—that Frida was only thirty-five; which was young for Frida. And he said to himself, "It is all very well now, but what will she be in another three years? I will give her another three years. By that time she will be tired of the world, or the world will be tired of her, which comes to the same thing, and her heart (for she has a heart) will find her out. With Frida you never know. I will wait and see."

He waited. The three years passed; he saw nothing and he had ceased to hear. He concluded that Frida still loved the world.

As if in a passionate resentment against the rival that had fascinated and won her, he had left off wandering and had buried himself in an obscure Cornish village, where he gave himself up to his work. He was not quite so successful as he had been; on the other hand, he cared less than ever about success. It was the end of the century, a century that had been forced by the contemplation of such realities as plague and famine, and war and rumors of war, to forego and forget the melancholy art of its decadence. And from other causes Durant had fallen into a state of extreme dissatisfaction with himself. Five years ago he had found himself, as they said; found himself out, he said, when at the age of thirty-three he condemned himself and his art as more decadent than the decadents. Frida Tancred had shown insight when she reproached him with his inability to see anything that he could not paint, or to paint anything that he could not see. She had shown him the vanity of the sensuous aspect, she had forced him to love the intangible, the unseen, till he had almost come to believe that it was all he loved. The woman lived for him in her divine form, as his imagination had first seen her, as an Idea, an eternal dream. It was as if he could see nothing and paint nothing else. And when a clever versatile artist of Durant's type flings himself away in a mad struggle to give form and color to the invisible it is not to be wondered at if the world is puzzled and fights shy of him.

Meanwhile the critic who had a right to his opinion said of him: "Now that he has thrown the reins on the back of his imagination it will carry him far. Ten years hence the world will realize that Maurice Durant is a great painter. But in those ten years he must work hard."

As if to show how little he cared he left off working hard and bestirred himself for news of Frida Tancred.

It came at last—from Poona of all places. Frida wrote in high spirits and at length. "I like writing to you," she said, "because I can say what I like, because you always know—you've been there. Where? Oh, everywhere where I've been, except Whithorn-in-Arden. And, now I come to think of it, you were there, too—for a fortnight" ("three weeks—three long weeks—and for your sake, Frida!"). "No, I'm not 'coming home.' Why must I 'stop somewhere'? I can't stop, didn't I tell you? I can only strike down where it's deepest.

"It seems to be pretty deep here. If I could only understand these people—but what European can? They mean something we don't mean.... You should see my Munshi, a terrifically high-caste fellow with a diminutive figure and unfathomable eyes. I am trying to learn Sanscrit. He is trying to teach me. We sit opposite each other at a bamboo table with an immense Sanscrit dictionary between us. He smiles in his sleeve at my attempt to bridge the gulf between Europe and Asia with a Sanscrit dictionary. He is always smiling at me in his sleeve. I know it, and he knows that I know it, which endears me to him very much.

"My Munshi is a bottomless well of Western wisdom. He takes anything that Europe can give him—art, literature, science, metaphysics. He absorbs it all, and Heaven only knows what he is going to do with it, or it with him. He swallows it as a juggler swallows fire, and with about as much serious intention of assimilating it. That smile of his intimates that the things that matter to us do not matter to him; that nothing matters—neither will nor conscience, nor pain nor passion, nor man nor woman, nor life nor death. There's an attitude for you!

"That attitude is my Munshi, and my Munshi is Asia."

He smiled. He had seen Frida in many attitudes, Frida in love with nothing, Frida in love with a person, Frida in love with a thing. Here was Frida in love with an idea. It was just like her. She was seeing Asia from the Asiatic point of view.

"Meanwhile," she went on, "there's a greater gulf fixed between my Munshi and my 'rickshaw coolie than there is between me and my 'rickshaw coolie, or my Munshi and me."

He wondered if she meant to remind him that there was a still greater gulf between him and her.

"To-morrow I and two coolies are going up to Gujerat where the famine is. I inclose a snapshot of the party. My effacement by the coolie is merely a photographic freak—his grin is the broadest part of him, poor fellow. In the autumn I go down to Bombay. I am deep in bacteriology, which reminds me of father and the first time I met you, and your bad puns."

The snapshot was an unflattering likeness of Frida in a 'rickshaw. The foreground was filled by the figure of the grinning coolie. Behind him Frida's face showed dim and small and far-off; she was smiling with the sun in her eyes.

Such as it was he treasured it as his dearest possession. He had been painting pictures all his life, but he had none of Frida.

Silence again. "In the autumn," she had said, "I go down to Bombay." But the autumn passed and there was no news of her. Durant provided himself with an Indian outfit. He was going out to look for her; he was ready to go to the ends of the world to find her. "The day after to-morrow," he said, "I shall start for Bombay."

That night he dreamed of her; or, rather, not of her, but of a coolie who stood before the door of a wayside bungalow, and held in his hands shafts that were not the shafts of a 'rickshaw. And the coolie's face was all one broad grin.

Two days later—the day he was to have sailed for India—hurriedly skimming a column of the Times he came upon the news he was looking for.

"It is with much regret that we record the death from bubonic plague of Miss Frida Tancred. It was quite recently that this lady gave up a large part of her fortune to founding the Bacteriological Laboratory in Bombay, more recently still that she distinguished herself by her services to the famine-stricken population of Gujerat. Miss Tancred has added to the immense debt our Indian Empire owes her by this final example of heroic self-sacrifice. It is said that she contracted plague while nursing one of her coolies, who has since recovered."