"Fine music gives me the conception of great distances," Mrs. Mansfield said presently. "It makes me feel that the soul is born for travel."

Heath stood still.

"The winding white road over the hills that loses itself in the vagueness which, in a picture, only some shade of blue can suggest. The road! The road!"

He stood leaning against the wall. As she stood by him Mrs. Mansfield felt strangely, almost cruelly, young. It was as if student days had come for them both. She could hardly believe that her hair was snow-white, and that Charmian had been going to parties for nearly four years.

"The worst of it is," Claude continued, "that it is so hard sometimes not to wander from it."

"It seems to me you never wander."

"Because I know that, if I did, I should probably never come back to the road. What you perhaps consider my strength takes its rise, I believe, in my knowledge of my weakness. Things that are right for others aren't right for me."

No one was near them. The music seemed to have abolished for the moment the difference in age between them. Claude spoke to her as he had seldom spoken to her before, with an almost complete unreserve of manner.

"Do you know why some men enter the cloister?" he continued. "It's because they feel that if they are not monks they will be libertines. Mullion House is my cloister. I haven't got the power of apportioning my life with sweet reason, so much work, so much play, so much retirement, so much society, so much restraint, so much license. I could never pursue my art through wildness, as so many men have done, women too. I don't believe I could even stick to it in the midst of the ordinary life of pleasures and distractions. It's like a bone that I have to seize and take away into a cave where no one can see me gnaw it. Isn't that a beastly simile?"

"Is that why you won't go to Max Elliot's, that you refused Mrs. Shiffney? Do you think that the sort of thing which inspires many men—the audience, let us say, watching the combat—would unnerve you?"

"I don't say that. But I think it might lead me into wild extravagance, or into complete idleness. And I think, I know, that I might be tempted irresistibly to give an audience what it wanted. There's something in me which is ready to rush out to satisfy expectation. I hate it, but it's there."

"And yet you're so uncompromising."

"That's my armor. I daren't wear ordinary clothes, lest every arrow should pierce me."

A bell sounded. They returned to the concert room. When the second part was over Heath looked at Mrs. Mansfield and said:

"Where are we going?"

They were in the midst of the crowd passing out. Women were winding soft things about their necks, men were buttoning up their coats. For a March wind was about in the great city. She returned his look and smiled.

"Ah! You guessed! It's the gallery, I suppose. I'm not accustomed to all this fun. Isn't it amazing what a groove one lives in? Berkeley Square shadows the whole of my life I begin to believe."

"Don't say the motor is waiting!"

"No, it isn't."

"Shall we go to some preposterous place—to the Monico?"

"Where you like. It's just tea time, or coffee time."

They walked to the Monico in the March wind, and went in with a group of Italians, passing the woman who sells foreign papers, and seeing names that transported them to Paris, to Milan, to Rome, to Berlin. A vastness of marble contained a myriad of swarthy strangers, releasing souls astoundingly foreign in vivid gesture and talk. They had coffee with cream like a burgeoning cloud floating airily on the top.

"The only word to describe the effect of all this upon me is spree," said Mrs. Mansfield. "I am out on the spree."

"Capital! And if I stepped right in to your sort of life," said Heath, "would it have the same kind of effect upon me?"

"I don't think it could. It's too conscious, too critical, too fastidious. There's nothing fastidious in a spree. I like the March wind outside, too—the thought of it."

Suddenly her mind went to Charmian and Algiers.

"Charmian's in the sun," she said.

Directly she said this Heath looked slightly self-conscious.

"Have you heard from her?"

"This morning. She has made great friends with Susan Fleet."

"Yes?"

"Oh, a woman we all like, who often helps Adelaide Shiffney with things."

"We all like," he repeated.

"A cliche! And indeed I scarcely know Susan Fleet. You see what an absurd close borough I live in, have always lived in. And I never thoroughly realized that till I met you."

"And I live in loneliness, outside of it all, of everything almost."

Lightly she answered:

"With Mrs. Shiffney and others holding open the door, holding up the lamp, and imploring you to come in, to come right in as they say on the other side of the Atlantic."

"You don't do that."

"Do you wish me to?"

"I don't know what I wish. But I am dissatisfied."

He frowned, moving his chair, lit a cigarette, pushed away his coffee cup.

"What is it like at Algiers?"

"Very beautiful, Charmian says. Adelaide and the others have gone off to a desert place called Bou-Saada—"

"Bou-Saada!" he said slowly.

"And Charmian and Susan Fleet are up on the hill at Mustapha Superieur. They've left the yacht for a few days. They are visiting Arab villas and exploring tropical gardens."

She watched him and sipped her coffee. All the student feeling had gone from her. And now she was deeply aware of the difference between her age and Heath's.

"I suppose they won't be back for a good while," he said.

"Oh, I expect them in a week or two."

"So soon?"

"Adelaide is always in a hurry, and this was only to be quite a short trip."

"Once out there how can they come away so soon? I should want to stay for months. If I once began really to travel there would never be an end to it, unless I were not my own master."

"It's quite extraordinary how you master yourself," Mrs. Mansfield said. "You are a dragon to yourself, and what a fierce unyielding dragon! It's a fine thing to have such a strong will."

"Ah! But if I let it go!"

"Do you think you ever will?"

"Yes," he said with a sort of deep sadness. "On one side's the will. But on the other side there's an absurd impulsiveness. But don't let's talk any more of me. Do tell me some more about Algiers and your daughter."

When Heath left her that day Mrs. Mansfield said to herself, "If Charmian really does care for him he doesn't know it."

What were Heath's feelings toward Charmian she could not divine. She was unconscious of any desire to baffle her on Heath's part, and was inclined to think that he was so wrapped up in the rather solitary life he had planned out for himself, and in his art, was so detached from the normal preoccupations of strong and healthy young men, that Charmian meant very little, perhaps nothing at all, to him. She had noted, of course, the slightly self-conscious look which had come into Heath's face when she had mentioned Charmian, but she explained that to herself easily enough. Her mention of Charmian in the sun had recalled to him the persistence of Mrs. Shiffney, which he knew she was aware of. In such matters he was like a sensitive boy. He had the peculiar delicacies of the nervously constituted artist, which seem very ridiculous to the average man, but not to the discerning woman. Mrs. Mansfield felt almost sure that his self-consciousness arose not from memories of Charmian, but of Adelaide Shiffney. And she supposed that he was probably quite indifferent to Charmian. It was better so. Although she believed that it was wise for most men to marry, and not very late in life, she excepted Heath from her theory. She could not "see" him married. She could not pick out any girl or woman whom she knew, and say: "That would be the wife for him." Evidently he was one of the exceptional men for whom the normal conditions are not intended. She thought again of his music, and found a reason there. But then she remembered yellow-haired Fan. He was at home with a child, why not with a wife and child of his own? She put aside the problem, but did not resign the thought, "In any case Charmian would be the wrong woman for him to marry." And when she said that to herself she was thinking solely of the welfare of Heath. Because he was a man, and had been unreserved with her, Mrs. Mansfield instinctively desired to protect his life. She had the feeling, "I understand him better than others." In a chivalrous nature understanding breeds a strong sense of obligation. Mrs. Mansfield felt as if she had duties toward Heath. During the two weeks which elapsed before Charmian's return from Algiers she thought more about his future than about her child's. But she was a very feminine woman and, to her, a man's future always seemed to matter more than a woman's.

Heath, too, had his great talent. That might need protection in the future. Mrs. Mansfield did not believe in an untroubled life for such a man as Heath. There was something disturbing both in his personality and in his music which seemed to her to preclude the possibility of his dwelling always in peace. But she hoped he would be true to his instinct, to the strange instinct which kept him now in a sort of cloistered seclusion. She knew he had friends, acquaintances, made during his time at the College of Music, through the introductions he had brought to London from Cornwall, through family connections. Human intercourse must be part of every life. But she was glad, very glad, that neither Mrs. Shiffney nor Max Elliot had persuaded him into the world where artists are handed on and on till they "know everybody." His words: "Do you know why some men enter the cloister? It's because they feel that if they are not monks they will be libertines," remained with her. Doubtless Heath knew himself. She thought of those who have pursued their art through wildness—Heath's expression—with an inflexibility quite marvellous, an order in the midst of disorder, which to the onlooker seems no less than a miracle. But they were surely Bohemians born, and full of characteristics that were racial. Such characteristics did not exist in Heath, she thought. She pondered. He was surely not a Bohemian. And yet he did not belong to the other race so noticeable in England, the race of the cultured talented, who live well-ordered lives in the calm light of a mild and unobjectionable publicity, who produce in the midst of comfort, giving birth to nothing on straw, who are sane even to the extent of thinking very much as the man in Sloane Street thinks, who occasionally go to a levee, and have set foot on summer days in the gardens of Buckingham Palace. Heath, perhaps, could not be dubbed with a name. Was he a Bohemian who, for his health's sake, could not live in Bohemia? She remembered the crucifix standing in front of the piano where he passed so many hours, the strange and terrible words he had chosen to set to music, the setting he had given them. It was an uncompromising nature, an uncompromising talent. And yet—there was the other side. There was something ready to rush out to satisfy expectation.

She was deeply interested in Heath.

About ten days after the "spree" at the Monico she received a telegram from Marseilles—"Starting to-night, home the day after to-morrow; love.—CHARMIAN."

Heath dropped in that day, and Mrs. Mansfield mentioned the telegram.

"Charmian will be back on Thursday. I told you Adelaide Shiffney would be in a hurry."

"Then they are not going on to the Greek Isles," he said.

"Not this time."

She glanced at him and thought he was looking rather sad.

"Will you come and dine on Thursday night just with me and Charmian?" she said. "If she is tired with the journey from Paris you may be alone with me. If not, she can tell us about her little African experiences."

"Thank you. Yes, I should like to come very much!"

The strangely imaginative expression, which made his rather plain face almost beautiful, shone in his eyes and seemed to shed a flicker of light about his brow and lips, as he added:

"I have travelled so little that to me there is something almost wonderful in the arrival of someone from Africa. Even the name comes to me always like fire and black mystery. Last night, just before I went to bed, I was reading Chateaubriand, and I came across a passage that kept me awake for hours."

"What was it?"

She leaned a little forward, ready to be fascinated as evidently he had been.

"He is writing of Napoleon, and says of him something like this."

Heath paused, looked down, seemed to make an effort, and continued, with his eyes turned away from Mrs. Mansfield:

"'His enemies, fascinated, seek him and do not see him. He hides himself in his glory, as the lion of the Sahara hides himself in the rays of the sun to escape from the searching eyes of the dazzled hunters.' Isn't that simply gorgeous? It set my imagination galloping. 'As the lion of the Sahara hides himself in the rays of the sun'—by Jove!" He got up. "I was out of England last night. And to think that Miss Charmian is actually arriving from Africa!"

When he was gone Mrs. Mansfield said to herself: "He's a child, too!" And she felt restless and troubled. Naivete leads men of genius into such unsuitable regions sometimes. It was rather wonderful that he could feel as he did about Africa and refuse to go to Africa. For Adelaide would have taken him anywhere. Would Charmian bring back with her something of the wonder of the East? Mrs. Mansfield felt for a moment as if she were going to welcome a stranger in her child. The feeling returned to her on the Thursday afternoon, when she was waiting for Charmian's arrival in her writing-room.

Charmian was due at Charing Cross at three-twenty-five. She ought to be in Berkeley Square about four, unless the train was very crowded, and there was a long delay at the Customs. Four o'clock chimed from the Dresden china clock on the mantelpiece, and she had not arrived. Mrs. Mansfield was conscious of a restlessness almost amounting to nervousness. She got up from her chair, laid down the book she had been reading, and moved slowly about the room.

How would Charmian receive the news that Claude Heath was to dine with them that night? Would she be too tired by the journey to dine? She was a bad sailor. Perhaps the sea in the Channel had been rough. If so, she would arrive not looking her best. Mrs. Mansfield had invited Heath because she wished to be sure at the first possible moment whether Charmian was in love with him or not. And she was positive that now, consciously alert and suspicious, if she saw the two together even for a short time she would know.

And if she knew that it was so, that Charmian had set her affections on Heath—what then?

She resolved not to look beyond the day. But as the moments passed, and she waited, her mind, like a thing beyond control, began to occupy itself with that question. The distant hoot of a motor startled her. Although their motor had a horn exactly the same as a thousand others she knew at once that Charmian was entering the Square. Half a minute later, standing in the doorway of her sitting-room, she heard the door bell and the footsteps of Lassell, the butler. Impulsively she went to the staircase.

"Charmian!" she called. "Charmian!"

"My only mother!" came up a voice from below.

She saw Charmian pushing up her veil over her three-cornered travelling-hat with a bright red feather.

"Where are you? Oh, there!"

She came up the stairs.

"Such a crossing! I'm an unlucky girl! Remedies are no use. Dearest!"

She put two light hands on her mother's shoulders and kissed her twice with lips which were rather cold. Her face was pale, and her eyes looked unusually haggard and restless. An atmosphere of excitement seemed to surround her like an aura, Mrs. Mansfield thought. She put her arm through her mother's.

"Tea with you, and then I think I must go to bed. How nice to be in my own dear bed again! I thought of my pillows on board with a yearning that came from the soul, I'm sure. Of course, we left the yacht at Marseilles. The yachting there was such a talk about resolved itself into the two crossings. I wasn't sorry, for we never saw a calm sea except from the shore."

"No? What a shame! Sit here."

Charmian threw herself down with a movement that was very young and began taking off her long gloves. As her thin, pretty hands came out of them, Mrs. Mansfield bent down and kissed her.

"Dear child! How nice to have you safe home!"

"Is it?"

"What a silly question to ask your only mother!"

"This chair makes me feel exactly how tired I am. It tells me."

"Take off your hat."

"Shall I?" She put up her hands, but she left the hat where it was, and her mother did not ask why.

"Is Adelaide back?"

"No, I left her glued to Paris. I crossed with Susan Fleet. Oh!"

She rested her head on the back of the big chair, and shut her eyes.

"Only tea. I can't eat!"

"Here it is."

"I feel as if I'd been away for centuries, as if London must have changed."

"It hasn't."

"And you?"

"Oh, of course, I've shed my nature, as you see!"

"I believe you think I've shed mine."

"Why?"

"I don't know."

Her eyes wandered about the room.

"Everything just the same."

"Then Africa really has made a great difference?"

The alert look that Mrs. Mansfield knew so well came into Charmian's face despite her fatigue.

"Who thought it would?"

"Well, you've never been out of Europe before."

"You did?"

"Wouldn't it be natural if I had fancied it might?"

"Perhaps. But it was only the very edge of Africa. I never went beyond Mustapha Superieur. I didn't even want to go. I wonder if Susan Fleet did."

"Do you think so?"

"I'm afraid I didn't think very much about it. But I begin to wonder now. I think she's so unselfish that perhaps she makes other people selfish."

"You made great friends, didn't you?"

"Yes. I think she's rather wonderful. She's very unlike other women. She seemed actually glad to give me the address of the place where she gets her coats and skirts. If Theosophy made more women like that I should wish it to spread like cholera in the alleys of Naples. Madre, don't mind me! I was really ill coming across. My head feels all light and empty."

She put up her hands to her temples.

"It's as if everything in my poor little brain-box had been shaken about."

"Poor child! And I've been very inconsiderate."

"Inconsiderate? How?"

"About to-night."

"You haven't accepted a party for me?"

"It isn't so bad as that. But I've invited someone to dinner."

"Mother!" Charmian looked genuinely surprised. "Not Aunt Kitty!"

Aunt Kitty was a sister of Mrs. Mansfield's whom Charmian disliked.

"Oh, no—Claude Heath."

After a slight but perceptible pause, Charmian said:

"Mr. Heath. Oh, you asked him for to-night before you knew I should be here. I see."

"No, I didn't. I thought he would like to hear about your African experiences. I asked him after your telegram came."

Charmian got up slowly, and stood where she could see herself in a mirror without seeming intent on looking in the glass. Her glance to it was very swift and surreptitious, and she spoke, to cover it perhaps.

"I'm afraid I've got very little to tell about Algiers that could interest Mr. Heath. Would you mind very much if I gave it up and dined in bed?"

"Do just as you like. It was stupid of me to ask him. I suppose I acted on impulse without thinking first."

"What time is dinner?"

"Eight as usual."

"I'll lie down and rest and then see how I feel. I'll go now. Nice to be with you again, dearest Madre!"

She bent down and kissed her mother's cheek. The touch of her lips just then was not quite pleasant to Mrs. Mansfield. When she was in her bedroom alone, Charmian took off her hat, and, without touching her hair, looked long and earnestly into the glass that stood on her dressing-table. Then she bent down and put her face close to the glass.

"I look dreadful!" was her comment.

Her maid knocked at the door and was sent away. Charmian undressed herself, got into bed, and lay very still. She felt very interesting, and as if she were going to be involved in interesting and strange events, as if destiny were at work, and were selecting instruments to help on the coming of that which had to be. She thought of her mother as one of these instruments.

It was strange that her mother should have been moved to ask Claude Heath, the man she meant to marry, to come to the house alone on the evening of her return. This action was not a very natural one on her mother's part. It had always been tacitly understood that Heath was Mrs. Mansfield's friend. Yet Mrs. Mansfield had invited him for her daughter. Had thought, for which space does not exist, reached across the sea from child to mother mysteriously, saying to the mother, "Do this!"

But unless the glass told a new tale at seven o'clock Charmian did not mean to go down to dinner.

She closed her eyes and said to herself, again and again, "Look better! Look better! Look better!"



CHAPTER X

When seven o'clock struck she got out of bed, and again looked in the glass. She felt rested in body, and no longer had the tangled sensation in her head. But the face which confronted her reminded her disagreeably of Millie Deans, the American singer. It had what Charmian called the "Pierrot look," a too expressive and unnatural whiteness which surely told secrets. It seemed to her, too, a hard face, too determined in expression, repellent almost. And surely nothing is likely to be more repellent to a man than a girl's face that is hard.

Since her conversation with Susan Fleet by the little lake in the Algerian garden, Charmian had felt that destiny had decreed her marriage with Claude Heath. So she put the matter to herself. Really that conversation had caused her secretly to decide that she would marry Claude Heath.

"It may be so," Susan Fleet had said. "Perhaps part of your destiny is to learn through that man, and to teach him."

The words had gone to join the curious conviction that had come to Charmian out of the white dust floating up from the road that runs through Mustapha, out of the lilies, out of the wrinkled trunk of the great palm that was separated by the yellow-green water from all its fellows, "I shall be here again with him."

Surely the strong assertion of the will is the first step that takes a human being out of the crowd. Charmian had suffered because she was in the crowd, undistinguished, lost like a violet in a prairie abloom with thousands of violets. Something in Algeria, something perhaps in Susan Fleet, had put into her a resolve, unacknowledged even to herself. She had returned to England, meaning to marry Claude Heath, meaning to use her will as the ardent and capable servant of her heart.

But what she said to herself was this, "I believe destiny means to bring us together." She wrapped a naked little fact up in a soft tissue of romance and wonder.

But the face in the glass which now looked at her was too determined, too hard. It startled her. And she changed the expression on it. But then it looked insincere, meretricious, affected, and always haggard.

For a minute Charmian hesitated, almost resolved to go back to bed. But, oh, the dulness of the long evening shut in there! Three hours ago, at Charing Cross Station, she had looked forward to it. But now!

Only once in her life had Charmian made up her face. She knew many girls who disfigured their youth by concealing it with artifice. She thought them rather absurd and rather horrid. Nevertheless she had rouge and powder. One day she had bought them, shut herself in, made up her face, and been thoroughly disgusted with the effect. Yes, but she had done it in a hurry, without care. She had known she was not going to be seen.

Softly she pulled out a drawer.

At half-past seven there was a knock at the door. She opened it and saw her maid.

"If you please, miss, Mrs. Mansfield wishes to know whether you feel rested enough to dine downstairs."

"Yes, I do. Just tell mother, and then come back, please, Halton."

When Halton came Charmian watched her almost as a cat does a mouse, and presently surprised an inquiring look that degenerated into a look of suspicion.

"What's the matter, Halton?"

"Nothing, miss. Which dress will you wear?"

So Halton had guessed, or had suspected—there was not much difference between the two mental processes.

"The green one I took on the yacht."

"Yes, miss."

"Or the—wait a minute."

"Yes, miss?"

"Yes—the green one."

When the maid had taken the dress out Charmian said: "Why did you look at me as you did just now, Halton? I wish to know."

"I don't know, miss."

"Well, I have put something on."

"Yes, miss."

"I looked so sea-sick—yellow. No one wants to look yellow."

"No, I'm sure, miss."

"But I don't want—come and help me, Halton. I believe you know things I don't."

Halton had been with the lovely Mrs. Charlton Hoey before she came to Charmian, and she did know things unknown to her young mistress. Trusted, she was ready to reveal them, and Charmian went downstairs at three minutes past eight more ingenious than she had been at ten minutes before that hour.

Although she was quite, quite certain that neither her mother nor Claude Heath would discover what had been done with Halton's assistance, she was nevertheless sufficiently uncertain to feel a tremor as she put her hand on the drawing-room door, and it was a tremor in which a sense of shame had a part.

Claude Heath was in the room with Mrs. Mansfield. As Charmian looked at him getting quickly up from the sofa where he had been sitting he seemed to her a stranger. Was this really the man who had made her suffer, weep, confide in Susan Fleet, in Algeria? Had pink roses and dust, far-off and near sounds, movements and stillnesses, and that strange little island spoken to her of him, prophesied to her about him? She had a sense of banality, of disillusion, as if all that had been in her own brain only, almost crazily conceived without any action of events to prompt it.

But when she met his eyes the disagreeable sensation dropped away. For his eyes searched her in a way that made her feel suddenly important. He was looking for Africa, but she did not know it.

Although he did not see what Charmian had done to her face, he noticed change in her. She seemed to him more of a personage than she had seemed before she went away. He was not sure that he liked the change. But it made an impression upon him. And what he considered as the weakness within him felt a desire to please and conciliate it.

Mrs. Mansfield had seen at a glance that Charmian had touched up her face, but she showed nothing of what she felt, if she felt anything, about this new departure. And when Heath said to Charmian, "How well you are looking!" Mrs. Mansfield added:

"Your rest has done you good."

"Yes, I feel rather less idiotic!" said Charmian; "but only rather. You mustn't expect me to be quite my usual brilliant self, Mr. Heath. You must wait a day or two for that. What have you been doing all this time?"

It seemed to Heath that there was a hint of light patronage in her tone and manner. He was unpleasantly conscious of the woman of the world. But he did not realize how much Charmian had to conceal at this moment.

When almost immediately they went in to dinner, Mrs. Mansfield deliberately turned the conversation to Charmian's recent journey. This was to be Charmian's dinner. Charmian was the interesting person, the traveller from Algeria. Had not Claude Heath been invited to hear all about the trip? Mrs. Mansfield remembered the imaginative look which had transformed his face just before he had quoted Chateaubriand. And she remembered something else, something Charmian had once said to her: "You jump into minds and hearts and poor little I remain outside, squatting, like a hungry child!" She had a sincere horror of the elderly mother who clings to that power which should rightly be in the hands of youth. And to-night something in her heart said: "Give place! give place!" The fact which she had noticed in connection with Charmian's face had suddenly made something within her weep over the child, take herself to task. There was still much impulse in Mrs. Mansfield. To-night a subtlety in Charmian, which no man could have detected, set that impulse in a generous and warm blaze; filled her with a wish to abdicate in the child's favor, to make her the center of the evening's attention, the source of the evening's conversation; to show Heath that Charmian could be as interesting as herself and more attractive than she was.

The difficulty was to obtain the right response from Charmian. She had learnt, and had decided upon so much in Algiers that she was inclined to pretend that Algiers was very uninteresting. She did not fully realize that Claude Heath was naive as well as clever, was very boyish as well as very observant, very concentrated and very determined. And she feared to play the schoolgirl if she made much of her experience. Algiers meant so much to her just then that she belittled Algiers in self-defense.

Heath was chilled by her curt remarks.

"Of course, it's dreadfully French!" she said. "I suppose the conquerors wish to efface all the traces of the conquered as much as possible. I quite understand their feelings. But it's not very encouraging to the desirous tourist."

"Then you were disappointed?" said Heath.

"You should have gone to Bou-Saada," said Mrs. Mansfield. "You would have seen the real thing there. Why didn't you?"

"Adelaide Shiffney started in such a hurry, before I had had time to see anything, or recover from the horrors of yachting. You know how she rushes on as if driven by furies."

There was a small silence. Charmian knew now that she was making the wrong impression, that she was obstinately doing, being, all that was unattractive to Heath. But she was governed by the demon that often takes possession of girls who love and feel themselves unloved. The demon forced her to show a moral unattractiveness that did not really express her character. And realizing that she must be seeming rather horrid in condemning her hostess and representing the trip as a failure, she felt defiant and almost hard.

"Did you envy me?" she said to Heath, almost a little aggressively.

"Well, I thought you must be having a very interesting time. I thought a first visit to Africa must be a wonderful experience."

"But, then—why refuse to come?"

She gazed full into his face, and made her long eyes look impertinent, challenging. Mrs. Mansfield felt very uncomfortable.

"I!" said Heath. "Oh, I didn't know I was in question! Surely we were talking about the impression Algiers made upon you."

"Well, but if you condemn me for not being more enthusiastic, surely it is natural for me to wonder why you wouldn't for anything set foot in the African Paradise."

She laughed. Her nerves felt on edge after the journey. And something in the mental atmosphere affected her unfavorably.

"But, Miss Charmian, I don't condemn you. It would be monstrous to condemn anyone for not being able to feel in a certain way. I hope I have enough brains to see that."

He spoke almost hotly.

"Your mother and I had been imagining that you were having a wonderful time," he added. "Perhaps it was stupid of us."

"No. Algiers is wonderful."

Heath had changed her, had suddenly enabled her to be more natural.

"I include Mustapha, of course. Some of the gardens are marvellous, and the old Arab houses. And I think perhaps you would have thought them more marvellous even than I did."

"But, why?"

"Because I think you could see more in beautiful things than I can, although I love them."

Her sudden softness was touching. Heath had never been paid a compliment that had pleased him so much as hers. He had not expected it, and so it gained in value.

"I don't know that," he said hesitatingly.

"Madretta, don't you agree with me?"

"No doubt you two would appreciate things differently."

"But what I mean is that Mr. Heath in the things we should both appreciate could see more than I."

"Pierce deeper into the heart of the charm? Perhaps he could. Oh, eat a little of this chicken!"

"No, dearest mother, I can't. I'm in a Nebuchadnezzar mood. Spinach for me."

She took some.

"Everything seems a little vague and Channelly to-night, even spinach."

She looked up at Heath, and now he saw a sort of evasive charm in her eyes.

"You must forgive me if I'm tiresome to-night, and remember that while you and Madre have been sitting comfortably in Mullion House and Berkeley Square, I've been roaring across France and rolling on the sea. I hate to be a slave to my body. Nothing makes one feel so contemptible. But I haven't attained to the Susan Fleet stage yet. I'll tell you all about her some day, Mr. Heath, but not now. You would like her. I know that. But perhaps you'll refuse to meet her. Do you know my secret name for you? I call you—the Great Refuser."

Heath flushed and glanced at Mrs. Mansfield.

"I have my work, you see."

"We heard such strange music in Algiers," she answered. "I suppose it was ugly. But it suggested all sorts of things to me. Adelaide wished Monsieur Rades was with us. He's clever, but he could never do a big thing. Could he, mother?"

"No, but he does little things beautifully."

"What it must be to be able to do a big thing!" said Charmian. "To draw in color and light and perfume and sound, and to know you will be able to weave them together, and transform them, and give them out again with you in them, making them more strange, more wonderful. We saw an island, Susan Fleet and I, that—well, if I had had genius I could have done something exquisite the day I saw it. It seemed to say to me: 'Tell them! Tell them! Make them feel me! Make them know me! All those who are far away, who will never see me, but who would love me as you do, if they knew me.' And—it was very absurd, I know!—but I felt as if it were disappointed with me because I had no power to obey it. Madre, don't you think that must be the greatest joy and privilege of genius, that capacity for getting into close relations with strange and beautiful things? I couldn't obey the little island, and I felt almost as if I had done it a wrong."

"Where was it? In the sea?"

"No—oh, no! But I can't tell you! It has to be seen—"

Suddenly there came upon her again, almost like a cloud enveloping her, the strong impression that destiny would lead her some day to that Garden of the Island with Heath. She did not look at him. She feared if she did he would know what was in her mind and heart. Making an effort, she recovered her self-command, and said:

"I expect you think I'm a rather silly and rhapsodizing girl, Mr. Heath. Do you mind if I tell you what I think?"

"No, tell me please!" he said quickly.

"Well, I think that, if you've got a great talent, perhaps genius, you ought to give it food. And I think you don't want to give it food."

"Swinburne's food was Putney!" said Mrs. Mansfield, "and I could mention many great men who scarcely moved from their own firesides and yet whose imagination was nearly always in a blaze."

Heath joined in eagerly, and the discussion lasted till the end of dinner. Never before had Charmian felt herself to be on equal terms with her mother and Heath. She was secretly excited and she was able to give herself to her excitement. It helped her, pushed on her intelligence. She saw that Heath found her more interesting than usual. She began to realize that her journey had made her interesting to him. He had refused to go, and now was envying her because she had not refused. Her depreciation of Algiers had been a mistake. She corrected it now. And she saw that she had a certain influence upon Heath. She attributed it to her secret assertion of her will. She was not going to sit down any longer and be nobody, a pretty graceful girl who didn't matter. Will is everything in the world. Now she loved she had a fierce reason for using her will. Even her mother, who knew her in every mood, was surprised by Charmian that evening.

Heath stayed till rather late. When he got up to go away, Charmian said:

"Don't you wish you had come on the yacht? Don't you wish you had seen the island?"

He hesitated, looking down on her and Mrs. Mansfield, and holding his hands behind him. After a strangely long pause he answered:

"I don't want to wish that, I don't mean to wish it."

"Do you really think we can control our desires?" she asked, and now she spoke very gravely, almost earnestly.

"I suppose so. Why not?"

"Oh!" she said petulantly. "You remind me of Oliver Cromwell—somebody of that kind—you ought to have lived in Puritan days. It's England—England—England in you shrivelling you up. I'm sure in all Algiers there isn't one person (not English) who thinks as you do. But if you were to travel, if you were to give yourself a chance, how different you'd be!"

"Charmian, you impertinent child!" said Mrs. Mansfield, smiling, but in a voice that was rather sad.

"It's the Channel! It's the Channel! I'm not myself to-night!"

Heath laughed and said something light and gay. But as he went out of the room his face looked troubled.

As soon as he had gone, Charmian got up and turned to her mother.

"Are you very angry with me, Madre?"

"No. There always was a touch of the minx in you, and I suppose it is ineradicable. What have you been doing to your face?"

Charmian flushed. The blood even went up to her forehead, and for once she looked confused, almost ashamed.

"My face? You—you have noticed something?"

"Of course, directly you came down. Has Adelaide taught you that?"

"No! Are you angry, mother?"

"No. But I like young things to look really young as long as they can. And to me the first touch of make-up suggests the useless struggle against old age. Now I'm not very old yet, not fifty. But I've let my hair become white."

"And how it suits you, my beautiful mother!"

"That's my little compensation. A few visits to Bond Street might make me look ten years younger than I do, but if I paid them, do you know I think I should lose one or two friendships I value very much."

Mrs. Mansfield paused.

"Lose—friendships?" Charmian almost faltered.

"Yes. Some of the best men value sincerity of appearance in a woman more than perhaps you would believe to be possible."

"In friendship!" Charmian almost whispered.

Again there was a pause. Mrs. Mansfield knew very well that a sentence from her at this moment would provoke in Charmian an outburst of sincerity. But she hesitated to speak that sentence. For a voice within her whispered, "Am I on Charmian's side?"

After a moment she got up.

"Bedtime," she said.

"Yes, yes."

Charmian kissed her mother lightly first on one eyelid then on the other.

"Dearest, it is good to be back with you."

"But you loved Algiers, I think."

"Did I? I suppose I did."

"I must get a book," said Mrs. Mansfield, going toward a bookcase.

When she turned round with a volume of Browning in her hand Charmian had vanished.

Mrs. Mansfield did not regret the silence that had saved her from Charmian's sincerity. In reply to it what could she have said to help her child toward happiness?

For did not the fact that Charmian had made up her face because she loved Claude Heath show a gulf between her and him that could surely never be bridged?



CHAPTER XI

Heath was troubled and was angry with himself for being troubled. Looking back it seemed to him that he had taken a false step when he consented to that dinner with Max Elliot. Surely since that evening he had never been wholly at peace. And yet on that evening he had entered into his great friendship with Mrs. Mansfield. He could not wish that annulled. It added value to his life. But Mrs. Shiffney and Charmian in combination had come into his life with her. And they began to vex his spirit. He felt as if they represented a great body of opinion which was set against a deep conviction of his own. Their motto was, "The world for the artist." And what was his, or what had been his until now? "His world within the artist." He had fed upon himself, striving rather to avoid than to seek outside influences. After Charmian's return from Africa a persistent doubt assailed him. His strong instinct might be a blind guide. The opinion of the world, represented by the shrewd married woman and the intelligent girl, might have reason on its side.

Certainly Charmian's resolute assertion of herself on the evening of her return had been surprisingly effective. In an hour she had made an impression upon Heath such as she had failed to make in many weeks of their previous acquaintanceship. Her attack had gone home. "If you were to give yourself a chance how different you'd be!" And then her outburst about the island! There had been truth in it. Color and light and perfume and sound are material given out to the artist. He takes them, uses them, combines them, makes them his. He helps them! Ah! That was the word! He, as it were, gives them wings so that they may fly into the secret places, into the very hearts of men.

Heath looked round upon his hermitage, the little house near St. Petersburg Place, and he was companioned by fears. His energies weakened. The lack of self-confidence, which often affected him when he was divorced from his work, began to distress him when he was working. He disliked what he was doing. Music, always the most evasive of the arts, became like a mist in his sight. There were moments when he hated being a composer, when he longed to be a poet, a painter, a sculptor. Then he would surely at least know whether what he was doing was good or bad. Now, though he was inclined to condemn, he did not feel certain even of ineptitude.

Mrs. Searle noted the change in her master, and administered her favorite medicine, Fan, with increasing frequency. As the neurasthenic believes in strange drugs, expensive cures, impressive doctors, she believed in the healing powers of the exceedingly young. Nor was Fan doubtful of her own magical properties. She supposed that her intense interest in herself and the affairs of her life was fully shared by Heath. Her confidences to him in respect of Masterman and other important matters were unbridled. She seldom strove to charm by listening, and never by talking to Heath about himself. Her method of using herself as a draught of healing was to draw him into the current of her remarkable life, to set him floating on the tides of her fate.

Heath had a habit of composing after tea, from five or five-thirty onward. And Fan frequently appeared at the studio door about half-past four, turned slightly sideways with an expectant glance into the large room with the book-lined walls, the dim paintings, and the orange-colored curtains. A faint air of innocent coquetry hung about her. After a pause and a smile from Heath, she would move forward with hasty confidence, sometimes reaching the hearthrug with a run. She was made welcome, petted, apparently attended to with a whole mind. But while she delivered her soul of its burden, at great length and with many indrawn breaths and gusts of feeling, Heath was often saying to himself, "Am I provincial?"

The word rankled now that Charmian had spoken out with such almost impertinent abruptness. Had he then lost faith in Mrs. Mansfield? She had never said that she wished him different from what he was. And indirectly she had praised his music. He knew it had made a powerful impression upon her. Nevertheless, he could not forget Charmian's words. Nor could he help linking her with Mrs. Shiffney in his mind.

Fan pulled at his sleeve, raising her voice. He was reminded of a little dog clawing to attract attention.

"Yes, Fantail! I mean no, of course not! If Masterman refuses to take a bath, of course you are obliged to punish him. Yes, yes, I know. Wear something? What? What's that? Like you? But he's a man. Very well, we'll get him a pair of trousers. No, I won't forget. Yes, like mine, long ones like mine. It'll be all right. Take care with that cup. I think mother must be wanting you. Press the bell hard. Well, use your thumb then. That's it—harder. There, you see, mother does want you. Harriet says so."

Harriet, discreet almost to dumbness though she was, was capable of receiving a hint conveyed by her master's expressive eyebrows. And Fan passed on, leaving Heath alone with his piano. He played what he had played to Mrs. Mansfield to reassure himself. But he was not wholly reassured. And he knew that desire for a big verdict which often tortures the unknown creator. This was a new and, he thought, ugly phase in his life. Was he going to be like the others? Was he going to crave for notoriety? Why had the words of a mere girl, of no unusual cleverness or perception, had such an effect upon him? How thin she had looked that day when she emerged from her furs. That was before she started for Africa. The journey had surely made a great difference in her. She had come back more of a personage, more resolute. He felt the will in her as he had not felt it before. Till she came back he had only felt the strong soul in her mother. That was like an unwavering flame. How Mrs. Mansfield's husband must have loved her.

And Heath's hands slipped from the piano, and he dreamed over women.

He was conscious of solitude.

Susan Fleet was now in town. After the trip to Algiers she had been to Folkestone to visit her mother and dear old Mrs. Simpkins. She had also combined business with pleasure and been fitted for a new coat and skirt. A long telegram from Adelaide Shiffney called her back to London to under-take secretarial and other duties. As the season approached Mrs. Shiffney's life became increasingly agitated. Miss Fleet was an excellent hand at subduing, or, if that were impossible, at getting neatness into agitation. She knew well how to help fashionable women to be absurd with method. She made their silliness almost business-like, and assisted them to arrange their various fads in apple-pie order. Amid their often hysterical lives she moved with a coolness that was refreshing even to them. She never criticized their actions except sometimes by tacitly declining to join in them. And they seldom really wanted her to do that. Her value to them would have been diminished, if not destroyed, had she been quite as they were.

For the moment she was in Grosvenor Square.

Charmian envied Adelaide Shiffney. But she was resolved to see more of Miss Fleet at whatever cost. Recently she had been conscious of a tiny something, not much more than a thread, dividing her from her mother. Since her mother knew that she had made up her face on Claude Heath's account, she had often felt self-conscious at home. Knowing that, her mother, of course, knew more. If Charmian had told the truth she would not have minded the fact that it was known. But she did mind very much its being known when she had not told it. Sometimes she said to herself that she was being absurd, that Mrs. Mansfield knew, even suspected, nothing. But unfortunately she was a woman and, therefore, obliged to be horribly intelligent in certain directions. Her painted cheeks and delicately-darkened eyelashes had spoken what her lips had never said. It was vain to pretend the contrary. And she sedulously pretended it.

Her sense of separation from her mother made Charmian the more desirous of further intercourse with Susan Fleet. She felt as if only Miss Fleet could help her, though how she did not know. After repeated attempts on her part a meeting was at last arranged, and one afternoon the Theosophist made her appearance in Berkeley Square and was shown upstairs to Charmian's little sitting-room.

Charmian was playing a Polonaise of Chopin's on a cottage piano. She played fairly well, but not remarkably. She had been trained by a competent master and had a good deal of execution. But her playing lacked that grip and definite intention which are the blood and bone of a performance. Several people thought nevertheless that it was full of charm.

"Oh, Susan!"—she stopped abruptly on a diminished seventh. "Come and sit here! May I?"

She kissed the serene face, clasping the white-gloved hands with both of hers.

"Another from Folkestone?"

"Yes."

"What a fit! I simply must go there. D'you like my little room?"

Susan looked quietly round, examining the sage-green walls, the water-colors, the books in Florentine bindings, the chairs and sofas covered with chintz, which showed a bold design of purple grapes with green leaves, the cream-colored rough curtains, and Charmian's dachshund, Caroline, who lay awake before the small fire which burned in a grate lined with Morris tiles.

"Yes, I like it very much. It looks like your home and as if you were fond of it."

"I am, so far as one can be fond of a room."

She paused, hesitating, thinking of the little island and her sudden outburst, longing to return at once to the subject which secretly obsessed her, yet fearing to seem childish, too egoistic, perhaps naively indiscreet. Susan looked at her with a friendly gaze.

"How are things going with you? Are you happier than you were at Mustapha?"

"You mean—about that?"

"I'm afraid you have been worrying."

"Do I look uglier?" cried Charmian, almost with sharpness.

Susan Fleet could not help smiling, but in her smile there was no sarcasm, only a gentle, tolerant humor.

"I hardly know. People say my ideas about looks are all crazy. I can't admire many so-called beauties, you see. There's more expression in your face, I think. But I don't know that I should call it happy expression."

"I wish I were like you. I wish I could feel indifferent to happiness!"

"I don't suppose I am indifferent. Only I don't feel that every small thing of to-day has power over me, any more than I feel that a grain of dust which I can flick from my dress makes me unclean. It's a long journey we are making. And I always think it's a great mistake to fuss on a journey."

"I don't know anyone who can give me what you do," said Charmian.

"It's a long journey up the Ray," said Susan.

"The Ray?" said Charmian, seized with a sense of mystery.

"The bridge that leads from the personal which perishes to the immortal which endures."

"I can't help loving the personal. I'm not like you. I do love the feeling of definite personality, separated from everything, mine, me. It's no use pretending."

"Pretence is always disgusting."

"Yes, of course. But still—never mind, I was only going to say something you wouldn't agree with."

Susan did not ask what it was, but quietly turned the conversation, and soon succeeded in ridding Charmian of her faint self-consciousness.

"I want you to meet—him."

At last Charmian had said it, with a slight flush.

"I have met him," returned Miss Fleet, in her powerful voice.

"What!" cried Charmian, on an almost indignant note.

"I met him last night."

"How could you? Where? He never goes to anything!"

"I went with Adelaide to the Elgar Concert at Queen's Hall. He was there with a musical critic, and happened to be next to us."

Charmian looked very vexed and almost injured.

"Mrs. Shiffney—and you talked to him?"

"Oh, yes. Adelaide introduced us."

There was a silence. Then Charmian said:

"I don't suppose he was his real self—with Adelaide Shiffney. But did you like him?"

"I did. I thought him genuine. And one sees the spirit clearly in his face."

"I'm sure he liked you."

"I really don't know."

"I do. Did he—did you—either of you say anything about me?"

"Certainly we did."

"Did he—did he seem—did you notice whether he was at all—? Caroline, be quiet!"

The dachshund, who had shown signs of an intention to finish her reverie on Charmian's knees, blinked, looked guilty, lay down again, turned over on her left side with her back to her mistress, and heaved a sigh that nearly degenerated into a whimper.

"I suppose he talked most of the time with Mrs. Shiffney?"

"Well, we had quite five minutes together. I spoke about our time at Mustapha."

"Did he seem interested?"

"Very much, I thought."

"Very much! Oh, Susan! But he has a manner of seeming interested. It may not mean anything. But still I do think since I have come back he sees that I am not quite a nonentity. He has been here several times, for mother of course. Even now I have never heard his music. But there is a difference. I believe in such a place as London unless one has resolution to assert oneself people think one is a sort of shadow. I have so often thought of what you said about my perhaps having to learn through Claude Heath and to teach him, too. Sometimes when I look at him I feel it must be so. But what have I to teach? D'you know since—since—well, it makes me feel humble often. And yet I know that the greatest man needs help. Men are a sort of children. I've often been surprised by the childishness of really big men. Please tell me all he said to you."

Very calmly Susan told. She had just finished, and Charmian was about to speak again, when Mrs. Mansfield opened the door. Charmian sprang up so abruptly that Caroline was startled into a husky bark.

"Oh, Madre! Susan Fleet is here!"

Mrs. Mansfield knew at once that she had broken in upon a confidential interview, not by Miss Fleet's demeanor, but by Charmian's. But she did not show her knowledge. She sat down and joined pleasantly in the talk. She had often seen Miss Fleet in London, but she did not know her well. At once she realized that Charmian had found an excellent friend. And she was not jealous because of the confidence given but not given to her. Youth, she knew, is wilful and must have its way. The nearest, for some inscrutable reason, are generally told the least.

When Miss Fleet went away, Mrs. Mansfield said:

"That is one of the most thoroughbred human beings I have ever seen. No wonder the greatest snobs like her. There is nothing a snob hates so much as snobbery in another. Viva to your new friend, Charmian!"

She wondered a little whether Miss Fleet's perception of character was as keen as her breeding was definite, when she heard that Claude Heath had met her.

Heath told Mrs. Mansfield this. Miss Fleet had made a strong impression upon him. At the moment when he had met her he had felt specially downcast. The musical critic, with whom he had gone to the concert, had been a fellow student with him at the Royal College. Being young the critic was very critical, very sure of himself, very decisive in his worship of the new idols and in his scathing contempt for the old. He spoke of Mendelssohn as if the composer of Elijah had earned undying shame, of Gounod as if he ought to have been hanged for creating his Faust. His glorification of certain modern impressionists in music depressed Heath, almost as much as his abuse of the dead who had been popular, and who were still appreciated by some thousands, perhaps millions, of nobodies. He made Heath, in his discontented condition, feel as if all art were futile.

"Why give up everything," he thought, "merely to earn in the end the active contempt of men who have given up nothing? What is it that drives me on? A sort of madness, perhaps, something to be rooted out."

He almost shivered as the conviction came to him that he must have been composing for posterity, since he did not desire present publicity. No doubt he had tried to trick himself into the belief that he had toiled for himself alone, paid the tribute of ardent work to his own soul. Now he asked himself, with bitter scepticism: "Does any man really ever do that?" And his world seemed to fall about him like shadows dropping down into a void.

Then came his five minutes of talk with Susan Fleet.

When Heath spoke of it to Mrs. Mansfield he said:

"I was a cripple when we began. When we stopped I felt as if I could climb to a peak. And she said nothing memorable. But I had been in her atmosphere."

"And you are very susceptible to atmosphere."

"Too susceptible. That's why I keep so much to myself."

"I know—the cloister."

She looked at him earnestly, even searchingly. He slightly reddened, looked down, said slowly:

"It's not a natural life, the life of the cloister."

"Perhaps you mean to come out."

"I don't know what I mean. I am all at a loose end lately."

"Since when?"

Her eyes were still on him.

"I hardly know. Perhaps hearing about Africa, of that voyage I might have made, unsettled me. I'm a weakling, I'm afraid."

"Very strong in one way."

"Very weak in another, perhaps. It would have been better to go and have done with it, than to brood over not having gone."

"You are envying Charmian?"

"Some days I envy everyone who isn't Claude Heath," he answered evasively, with a little covering laugh. "Of one thing I am quite sure, that I wish I were a male Miss Fleet. She knows what few people know."

"What is that?"

"What is small and what is great."

"And you found that out in five minutes at a concert?"

"Elgar's is music that helps the perceptions."

Mrs. Mansfield's perceptions were very keen. Yet she was puzzled by Heath. She realized that he was disturbed and attributed that disturbance to Charmian. Had he suspected, or found out, that Charmian imagined herself to be in love with him? He came as usual to the house. His friendship with Mrs. Mansfield did not seem to her to have changed. But his relation to Charmian was not what it had been. Indeed, it was scarcely possible that it should be so. For Charmian had continued to be definite ever since her drastic remarks at dinner on the evening of her return. She bantered Heath, laughed at him, patronized him in the pretty way of a pretty London girl who takes the world for her own with the hands of youth. When she found him with her mother she did not glide away, or remain as a mere listener while they talked. She stayed to hold her own, sometimes even—so her mother thought, not without pathos—a little aggressively.

Heath's curious and deep reserve, which underlay his apparent quick and sensitive readiness to be sympathetic with those about him, to give them what they wanted of him, was not abated by Charmian's banter, her delicate impertinences, her laughing attacks. Mrs. Mansfield noticed that. He turned to her still when he wished to speak for a moment out of his heart.

But he was becoming much more at home in Charmian's company. She stirred him at moments into unexpected bursts of almost boyish gaiety. She knew how to involve him in eager arguments.

One day, as he was about to leave the house in Berkeley Square he said to Mrs. Mansfield:

"Miss Charmian ought to have some big object in life on which she could concentrate. She has powers, you know."

When he was gone Mrs. Mansfield smiled and sighed.

"And when will he find out that he is Charmian's big object in life?" she thought.

She knew men well. Nevertheless, their stupidities sometimes surprised her. It was as if something in them obstinately refused to see.

"It's their blindness that spoils us," she said to herself. "If they could see, we should have ten commandments to obey—perhaps twenty."



CHAPTER XII

Toward the end of the London season the management of the Covent Garden Opera House startled its subscribers by announcing for production a new opera, composed by a Frenchmen called Jacques Sennier, whose name was unknown to most people. Mysteriously, as the day drew near for the first performance of this work, which was called Le Paradis Terrestre, the inner circles of the musical world were infected with an unusual excitement. Whispers went round that the new opera was quite extraordinary, epoch-making, that it was causing a prodigious impression at rehearsal, that it was absolutely original, that there was no doubt of its composer's genius. Then reports as to the composer's personality and habits began to get about. Mrs. Shiffney, of course, knew him. But she had introduced him to nobody. He was her personal prey at present. She, however, allowed it to be known that he was quite charming, but the strangest creature imaginable. It seemed that he had absolutely no moral sense, did not know what it meant. If he saw an insect trodden upon, or a fly killed on a window-pane, he could not work for days. But when his first wife—he had been married at sixteen—shot herself in front of him, on account of his persistent cruelty and infidelity, he showed no sign of distress, had the body carried out of his studio, and went on composing. Decidedly an original! Everybody was longing to know him. The libraries and the box-office of the Opera House were bombarded with demands for seats for the first performance, at which the beautiful Annie Meredith, singer, actress, dancer, speculator, and breeder of prize bulldogs, was to appear in the heroine's part.

Three nights before the premiere, a friend, suddenly plunged into mourning by the death of a relation, sent Mrs. Mansfield her box. Charmian was overjoyed. Max Elliot, Lady Mildred Burnington, Margot and Kit Drake, Paul Lane, all her acquaintances, in fact, were already "raving" about Jacques Sennier, without knowing him, and about his opera, without having heard it. Sensation, success, they were in the air. Not to go to this premiere would be a disaster. Charmian's instinctive love of being "in" everything had caused her to feel acute vexation when her mother had told her that their application for stalls had been refused. Now, at the last moment, they had one of the best boxes in the house.

"Whom shall we take?" said Mrs. Mansfield. "There's room for four."

"Why not invite Mr. Heath?" said Charmian, with a rather elaborate carelessness. "As he's a musician it might interest him."

"I will if you like. But he's sure to refuse."

Of late Heath had retired into his shell. Mrs. Shiffney had not seen him for months. Max Elliot had given him up in despair. Even in Berkeley Square he was but seldom visible. His excuse for not calling was that he knew nobody had any time to spare in the season.

"Don't write to him, Madre, or he will. Get him to come here and ask him. He really ought to follow the progress of his own art, silly fellow. I have no patience with his absurd fogeydom."

She spoke with the lightest scorn, but in her long eyes there was an intentness which contradicted her manner.

Heath came to the house, was invited to come to the box, and had just refused when Charmian entered the room.

"You're afraid, Mr. Heath," she said, smiling at him.

"Afraid! What of?" he asked quickly, and a little defiantly.

"Afraid of hearing what the foreign composers of your own age are doing, of comparing their talents with your own. That's so English! Never mind what the rest of the world is about! We'll go on in our own way! It seems so valiant, doesn't it? And really it's nothing but cowardice, fear of being forced to see that others are advancing while we are standing still. I'm sick of English stolidity!"

Heath's eyes shown with something that looked like anger.

"I really don't think I'm afraid!" he said stiffly.

Perhaps to prove that he was not, he rescinded his refusal and came to the premiere with the Mansfields. It was a triumph for Charmian, but she did not show that she knew it.

Heath was in his most reserved mood. He had the manner of the defiant male lured from behind his defenses into the open against his will. Some intelligence within him knew that his cold stiffness was rather ridiculous, and made him unhappy. Mrs. Mansfield was really sorry for him.

Nothing is more humorously tragic than pleasure indulged in under protest. And Heath's protest was painfully apparent.

Charmian, who was looking her best, her most self-possessed, a radiant minx, with fleeting hints of depths and softnesses, half veiled by the firm habit of the world, seemed to tower morally above the composer. He marvelled afresh at the triumphant composure of modern girlhood. Sitting between the two women in the box—no one else had been asked to join them—he looked out, almost shyly, at the crowded and brilliant house. Mrs. Shiffney, large, powerful and glittering with jewels, came into a box immediately opposite to theirs, accompanied by Ferdinand Rades, Paul Lane, and a very smart, very French, and very ugly woman, who was covered thickly with white paint, and who looked like all the feminine intelligence of Paris beneath her perfectly-dressed red hair. In the box next the stage on the same side were the Max Elliots with Sir Hilary Burnington and Lady Mildred.

Charmian looked eagerly about the house, putting up her opera-glasses, finding everywhere friends and acquaintances. She frankly loved the world with the energy of her youth.

At this moment the sight of the huge and crowded theater, full of watchful eyes and whispering lips, full of brains and souls waiting to be fed, the sound of its hum and stir, sent a warm thrill through her, thrill of expectation, of desire. She thought of that man, Jacques Sennier, hidden somewhere, the cause of all that was happening in the house, of all that would happen almost immediately upon the stage. She envied him with intensity. Then she looked at Claude Heath's rather grim and constrained expression. Was it possible that Heath did not share her feeling of envy?

There was a tap at the door. Heath sprang up and opened it. Paul Lane's pale and discontented face appeared.

"Halloa! Haven't seen you since that dinner! May I come in for a minute?"

He spoke to the Mansfields.

"Perfectly marvellous! Everyone behind the scenes is mad about it! Annie Meredith says she will make the success of her life in it. Who's that Frenchwoman with Adelaide Shiffney? Madame Sennier, the composer's wife—his second, the first killed herself. Very clever woman. She's not going to kill herself. Sennier says he could do nothing without her, never would have done this opera but for her. She found him the libretto, kept him at it, got the Covent Garden management interested in it, persuaded Annie Meredith to come over from South America to sing the part. An extraordinary woman, ugly, but a will of iron, and an ambition that can't be kept back. Her hour of triumph to-night. There goes the curtain."

As Lane slipped out of the box, he whispered to Heath:

"Mrs. Shiffney hopes you'll come and speak to her between the acts. Her name's on the door."

Heath sat down a little behind Mrs. Mansfield. Although the curtain was now up he noticed that Charmian, with raised opera-glasses, was earnestly looking at Mrs. Shiffney's box. He noticed, too, that her left hand shook slightly, almost imperceptibly.

"Her hour of triumph!" Yes, the hour proved to be that. Madame Sennier's energies had not been expended in vain. From the first bars of music, from the first actions upon the stage, the audience was captured by the new work. There was no hesitating. There were no dangerous moments. The evening was like a crescendo, admirably devised and carried out. And through it all Charmian watched the ugly white face of the red-haired woman opposite to her, lived imaginatively in that woman's heart and brain, admired her, almost hated her, longed to be what she was.

Between the acts she saw men pouring into Mrs. Shiffney's box. And every one was presented to the ugly woman, whose vivacity and animation were evidently intense, who seemed to demand homage as a matter of course. Several foreigners kissed her hand. Max Elliot's whole attitude, as he bent over her, showed adoration and enthusiasm. Even Paul Lane was smiling, as he drew her attention to a glove split by his energy in applause.

Heath had spoken of Mrs. Shiffney's message. He was evidently reluctant to obey it, but Charmian insisted on his going.

"I want to know what Madame Sennier is like. You must ask her if she is happy, find out how happy she is."

"Charmian, Mr. Heath isn't a mental detective!"

"I speak such atrocious French!" said Heath, looking nervous and miserable.

"I suppose you can say, 'Chere Madame, j'espere que vous etes bien contente ce soir?'"

When Heath had left the box Mrs. Mansfield said gravely to her daughter:

"Charmian!"

"Yes, Madretta."

"I don't think you are behaving very kindly this evening. You scarcely seem to remember that Mr. Heath is our guest."

"Against his will," she said, in a voice that was almost hard. There was a hardness, too, in her whole look and manner.

"I think that only makes the hostess's obligation the stronger," said Mrs. Mansfield. "I don't at all like the Margot manner with men."

"I'm sorry, Madre; but I had no idea I was imitating Margot Drake."

Mrs. Mansfield said no more. Charmian, with flushed cheeks and shining eyes, turned to look once more at Adelaide Shiffney's box.

In about three minutes she saw Mrs. Shiffney glance behind her. Max Elliot, who was still with her, got up and opened the door, and Heath stood in the background. Charmian frowned and pressed her little teeth on her lower lip. Her body felt stiff with attention, with scrutiny. She saw Heath come forward, Max Elliot holding him by the arm, and talking eagerly and smiling. Mrs. Shiffney smiled, too, laughed, gave him her powerful hand. Now he was being introduced to Madame Sennier, who surely appraised him with one swift, almost cruelly intelligent glance.

His French! His French! Charmian trembled for it, for him because of it. If Mrs. Mansfield could have known how solicitous, how tender, how motherly, the girl felt at that moment under her mask of shining, radiant hardness! But Mrs. Mansfield was glancing about the house with grave and even troubled eyes.

Heath was talking to Madame Sennier. He was even sitting down beside her. She spoke, evidently with volubility, making rapid gestures with her hands. Then she paused. She was listening attentively to Heath. Mrs. Shiffney and Elliot listened, too, as if absorbed. Heath's French must really be excellent. Why had he—? If only she could hear what he was saying! She tingled with curiosity. How he held them, those three people! From here he looked distinguished, interesting. He stood out even in this crowd as an interesting man. Madame Sennier made an upward movement of her head, full of will. She put out her hand, and laid it on Heath's arm. Now they all seemed to be talking together. Madame Sennier looked radiant, triumphant, even autocratic. She pointed toward the stage emphatically, made elaborate descriptive movements with her hands. A bell sounded somewhere. Heath got up. In a moment he and Max Elliot had left the box together. The two women were alone. They leaned toward each other apparently in earnest conversation.

"I know they are talking about him! I know they are!"

Charmian actually formed the words with her lips. The curtain rose as Heath quietly entered the box. Charmian did not turn to him or look at him then. Only when the act was over did she move and say:

"Well, Mr. Heath, your French evidently comes at call."

"What—oh, we were talking in English!"

"Madame Sennier speaks English?" said Mrs. Mansfield.

"Excellently!"

Charmian felt disappointed.

"Is she happy?" she asked, moving her hand on the edge of the box.

"She seems so."

"Did you tell her what you thought?"

"Yes," said Heath.

His voice had become suddenly deeper, more expressive.

"I told her that I thought it wonderful. And so it is. She said—in French this: 'Ah, my friend, wait till the last act. Then it is no longer the earthly Paradise!'"

There was a moment of silence. Then Charmian said, in a voice that sounded rather dry:

"You liked her?"

"I don't know. Yes, I think I did. We were all rather carried away, I suppose."

"Carried away! By what?"

"Well, it is evidently a great moment in Madame Sennier's life. One must sympathize."

Charmian looked and saw two spots of color burning high up on his cheeks. His voice had suddenly quivered.

"I should think so," said Mrs. Mansfield. "This evening probably means more to Madame Sennier even than to her husband."

Charmian said nothing more till the end of the evening. Beneath the radiant coolness of her demeanor, the air of triumphant self-possession, she was secretly quivering with excitement. She feared to betray herself. Soon she was spellbound by the music of the last act and by the wonderful performance of Annie Meredith. As she listened, leaning forward in the box, and always feeling intensely the nearness to her of Heath, and of Heath's strong musical talent, she remembered something she had once said in the drawing-room in Berkeley Square, "We want a new note." Here was the new note in French music, the new talent given to the wondering and delighted world to-night. To-morrow doubtless Europe and America would know that the husband of the red-haired woman opposite had taken his place among the famous men to whom the world must pay attention. From to-morrow thousands of art lovers would be looking toward Jacques Sennier with expectation, the curious expectation of those who crave for fresh food on which they may feed their intellects, and their souls. The great tonic of a new development in art was offered to all those who cared to take it by the man who would probably be staring from behind the footlights at the crowd in a few moments.

If only the new note had been English!

"It shall be! It shall be!" Charmian repeated to herself.

She looked again and again at Madame Sennier, striving to grasp the secret of her will for another, even while she gave herself to the enchantment of the music. But for that woman in all probability the music would never have been given life. Somewhere, far down in the mystery of an individual, it would have lain, corpse-like. A woman had willed that it should live. She deserved the homage she had received, and would receive to-night. For she had made her man do a great thing, because she had helped him to understand his own greatness.

Suddenly, out of the almost chaotic excitement caused in Charmian by the music, and by her secret infatuation, concrete knowledge seemed to detach itself and to arise. As, when she had looked at the island in the Algerian Garden, she had felt "I shall be here some day with him!" so now she seemed to be aware that the future would show a brilliant crowd assembled in some great theater, not for Jacques Sennier, but for one near her. Really she was violently willing that it should be so. But she thought she was receiving—from whom, or from what, she could not tell—a mysterious message.

And the red-haired woman's place was filled by another.

At last the curtain fell on the final scene, and the storm which meant a triumph was unchained. Heath sprang up from his seat, carried away by a generous enthusiasm. He did not know how to be jealous of anyone who could do a really fine thing. Charmian, in the midst of the uproar, heard him shouting "Bravo!" behind her, in a voice quick with excitement. His talent was surely calling to a brother. The noise all over the house strengthened gradually, then abruptly rose like a great wave. A small, thin, and pale man, with a big nose, a mighty forehead, scanty black hair and beard, and blinking eyes, had stepped out before the curtain. He leaned forward, made a movement as if to retreat, was stopped by a louder roar, stepped quickly to the middle of the small strip of stage that was visible, and stood still with his big head slightly thrust out toward the multitude which acclaimed him.

Charmian turned round to Claude Heath, who towered above her. He did not notice her movement. He was gazing at the stage while he violently clapped his hands. She gazed up at him. He felt her eyes, leaned down. For a moment they looked at each other, while the noise in the house increased. Claude saw that Charmian wanted to speak to him—and something else. After a moment, during which the blood rose in his cheeks and forehead, and he felt as if he were out in wind and rain, in falling snow and stern sunshine, he said:

"What is it?"

"All this ought to be for you. Some day it will be—for you!"



CHAPTER XIII

In the studio of Mullion House that night, Harriet, moving softly, placed a plate of sandwiches and a long bottle of Rhine wine before she went up to bed. Moonlight shone on the scrap of garden, gleamed on the leaded panes of the studio windows, from which the orange-colored curtains were drawn back. The aspect of the big room had changed because it was summer. It looked bigger, less cosy without a fire. One lamp was lighted and cast a gentle glow over the books that lay near it, and over the writing-table on which there were sheets of manuscript music. The piano stood open. A spray of white roses in a tall vase looked spectral against the shadows. After Harriet's departure the clock ticked for a long time in an empty room.

It was nearly two o'clock, and the moon was waning, when the studio door was opened to let in Heath. He was alone. Holding the door with one hand, he stood and stared at the room, examined it with a sort of excited and close attention. Then he took off his hat, shut the door, laid hat and coat on the sofa, went to the table where Harriet had put the tray, and poured out a glass of wine. He sighed, looked at the gold of the wine, made beautiful by the lamplight, drank it, and sat down in the worn armchair which faced the line of window. Then he lit a cigar, leaned back, and smoked, keeping his eyes on the glass.

Upon the leaded panes the faint silver shifted, faded, and presently died. Heath watched, and thought, "The moon gone!" He did not feel as if he could ever wish to sleep again. The excitement within him was like a ravaging disease. He was capable of excitement that never comes to the ordinary man, although he took sedulous care to hide that fact. His imagination bristled like a spear held by one alert for attack. What was life going to do to him? What was he going to let it do?

Charmian Mansfield loved him, and believed in his genius, as he did not believe, or had not till now believed in it. He was loved, he was believed in, by the thin mystery of a modern girl, who had known many men with talents, with names, with big reputations. Under that triumphant composure, that almost cruel banter, that whimsical airy contempt, that cool frivolity of the minx, there was emotion, there was love for him and for his talent. Always that night he thought of his talent in connection with Charmian's love, he scarcely knew why. For how long had she loved him? And why did she love him? He thought of his body, and it surprised him that she loved that. He thought of his mind, his imagination, his temper, his tricks, his faults, his habits. He thought of his deep reserve, and of the intense emotion he sometimes felt when he was quite alone and composing. Sometimes he felt like a great fire then. Sometimes he felt brutal, almost savage, decisive in a sense that was surely cruel. Did she suspect all that? Did she love all that without consciously suspecting it? Sometimes, when he had been working very hard, overworking perhaps, he felt inclined to do evil. If she knew that!

But she did not, she could not know him. Why, then, did she love him? Heath was not a conceited man, but he did not at this moment doubt Charmian's love for him. Though he was sometimes child-like, and could be, like most men, very blind, he had a keen intellect which could reason about psychology. He knew how women love success. He knew how, in a moment of excitement such as that at the end of the opera, when Jacques Sennier came before the curtain, they instinctively concentrate on the man who has made the success. He knew, or divined, what woman's concentration is. And he realized the bigness of the tribute paid to him by Charmian's abrupt detachment from the hour and the man, by the sweep of her brain and her heart to him. Any conqueror of women might have been proud of such a tribute, have considered it rare. Her eyes, her voice, in the tempest they had thrilled him. He had been only thinking of Sennier's music and of Sennier, of art and the human being behind it. Nothing within him had consciously called to Charmian. Nor had there—he felt sure now—been the unconscious call sent out by the man of talent who feels himself left out in the cold, who cannot stifle the greedy voice of the jealousy which he despises. No, the initiative had been wholly hers. And something irresistible must have moved her, driven her, to do what she had done. She must have been mastered by an impulse bred out of strong excitement. She had been mastered by an impulse.

"All this ought to be for you. Some day it will be for you."

She had only whispered the words, but they had seemed to stab him, with so much mental force had she sent them out. Mrs. Mansfield had not heard them. And how extraordinary Charmian's eyes had been during that moment when she and he had gazed at one another. He had not known eyes could look like that, as if the whole spirit of a human being were crouching in them, intent. How far away from the eyes the human spirit must often be!

As Heath thought of Charmian's eyes he felt as if he knew very little of real life yet.

She had turned away. Again and again Jacques Sennier had been called. He had returned with Annie Meredith, to whom he had made the gift of a splendid role. They shook hands before the audience, not perfunctorily, but as if they loved one another, were bound together, comrades in the beautiful. He—Heath—had stood upright again, had gone on applauding with the rest. But his thoughts had then all been on himself. "If all this were for me! If I should ever have such an hour in my life, such a tribute as this! If within me is the capacity to conquer all these diverse natures and temperaments, to weld them together in a common desire, the desire to show thankfulness for what a man has been able to give them!" And he had thrilled for the first time with a fierce new longing, the longing for the best that is meant by fame.

This longing persisted now.

Heath had left Mrs. Mansfield and Charmian under the arcade of the Opera House, after putting them into their car. The crush coming out had been great. They had had to wait for nearly half an hour in the vestibule. During that time the Mansfields had talked to many friends. Charmian had completely regained her composure. She had introduced Heath to several people, among others to Kit and Margot Drake, who spoke of nothing but the opera and its composer and Annie Meredith. The vestibule was full of the voices of praise. Everybody seemed unusually excited. Paul Lane had actually come up to them with beads of perspiration standing on his forehead, and his eyes shining with excitement.

"This is a red-letter night in my life," he had said. "I have felt a strong and genuine emotion. There's a future for music, after all, and a big one. If only there were one or two more Jacques Senniers!"

Even then Charmian had not looked again at Heath. She had answered lightly.

"Perhaps there are. Who knows? Even Monsieur Sennier was practically unknown four hours ago."

"There are not many parts of the civilized world in which his name will be unknown in four days from now," said Paul Lane, "or even in twenty-four hours. I'm going to meet him and his wife at supper at Adelaide Shiffney's, so I must say good-night—oh, and good-night, Mr. Heath."

Oh—and good-night, Mr. Heath.

Claude had walked all the way home alone slowly. He had passed through Piccadilly Circus, through Regent Street, through Oxford Street, along the north side of the closed and deserted Park on which the faint moonlight lay. When he reached his door he had not gone in. He had turned, had paced up and down. The sight of a very large policeman looking attentive, then grimly inquiring, then crudely suspicious, had finally decided him to enter his house.

What was life going to do to him if he did not hold back, did not persist any longer in his mania for refusal? There was a new world spread out before him. He stood upon its border. He wanted to step into it. But something within him, something that seemed obscure, hesitated, was perhaps afraid. In his restless mood, in his strong excitement, he wanted to crush that thing down, to stifle its voice. Caution seemed to him almost effeminate just then. He remembered how one day Charmian had said to him, after an argument about psychology: "Really, Mr. Heath, whatever you may say, your strongest instinct is a selfish one, the instinct of self-preservation."

What was Jacques Sennier's strongest instinct?

Madame Sennier had made a powerful impression on Heath, and he had been greatly flattered by the deep attention with which she had listened to what he had to say about her husband's opera.

"Here's a man who knows what he is talking about," she exclaimed, when he finished speaking. When he got up to leave the box she had looked full into his eyes and said: "You are going to do something, too."

Could Jacques Sennier have won his triumph alone?

Impulse was boiling up in Heath. After all that had happened that night he felt as if he could not go to bed without accomplishing some decisive action. Powers were on tiptoe within him surely ready for the giant leap.

He got up, went to the piano, went to his writing-table, fingered the manuscript paper covered with tiny notes which lay scattered upon it. But, no, it would be absurd, mad, to begin to work at such an hour. And, beside, he could not work. He could not be patient. He wanted to do something with a rush, to change his life in a moment, to take a leap forward, as Sennier had done that night, a leap from shadow into light. He wanted to grasp something, to have a new experience. All the long refusal of his life, which had not seemed to cost him very much till this moment, abruptly, revengefully attacked him in the very soul, crying: "You must pay for me! Pay! Pay!" He hated the thought of his remote and solitary life. He hated the memory of the lonely evenings passed in the study of scores, or in composition, by the lamp that shed a restricted light.

The dazzle of the Covent Garden lamps was still in his eyes. He longed, he lusted for fame.

Afterwards he said to himself: "That night I was 'out' of myself."

Charmian had spurred his nature. It tingled still. There had been something that was almost like venom in that whisper of hers, which yet surely showed her love. Perhaps instinctively she knew that he needed venom, and that she alone could supply it.

The strangest thing of all was that she had never heard his music, knew nothing at first hand of his talent, yet believed in it with such vital force, such completeness. There was something almost great in that. She was a woman who absolutely trusted her instinct. And her instinct must have told her that in him, Claude Heath, there was some particle of greatness.

He loved her just then for that.

"Oh—and good-night, Mr. Heath."

Claude's cheeks burned as if Paul Lane had laid a whip across them.

Again, as when he first entered it that night, he looked at the big room. How had he ever been able to think it cosy, home-like? It was dreary, forbidding, the sad hermitage of one who was resolved to turn his back on life, on the true life of close human relations, of inspiring intimacies, of that intercourse which should be as bread of Heaven to the soul. It was a hateful room. Nothing great, nothing to reach the hearts of men could be conceived, brought to birth in its atmosphere. Jacques Sennier, shut in alone, could never have written his opera here. In vain to try.

With an impulse of defiant anger Claude went to the writing-table, snatched up the music sheets which lay scattered upon it, tore them across and across. There should be an end to it, an end to austere futilities which led, which could lead, to nothing. In that moment of unnatural excitement he saw all his past as a pale eccentricity. He was bitterly ashamed of it. He regretted it with his whole soul, and he resolved to have done with it.

Brushing the fragments of manuscript off on to the floor he sat quickly down at the table. Something within him was trying to think, to reason, but he would not let it. He saw Charmian's eyes, he heard her quick whisper through the applause. She knew for him, as Madame Sennier had known for her husband. Often others know us better than we know ourselves. The true wisdom is to banish the conceit of self, to trust to the instinct of love.

He took a pen, leaned over the table, wrote a letter swiftly, violently even. His pen seemed to form the words by itself. He was unconscious of guiding it. The letter was not long, only two sides of a sheet. He blotted it, thrust it into an envelope, addressed, closed, and stamped it, got up, took his hat, and went out of the studio.

In a moment he was in the deserted road. The large policeman, who had eyed him with such grave suspicion, was gone. No one was in sight. The silver of the moonlight had given place to a faint grayness, a weariness of the night falling toward the arms of dawn.

Claude walked swiftly on, turned the corner, and came into the thoroughfare which skirts Kensington Gardens and the Park. Some fifty yards away there was a letter box. He hurried toward it, driven on by defiance of that within him which would fain have held him back, by the blind instinct to trample which sometimes takes hold of a strong and emotional nature in a moment of unusual excitement.

"The great refuser! No, I'll not be that any longer."

As he drew near to the letter box he felt that till now he had been a composer. Henceforth he would be a man. He had lived for an art. Henceforth he would live for life, and would make life feel his art.

He dropped his letter into the box.

In falling out of his sight it made a faint, uneasy noise.

Claude stood there like one listening.

The grayness seemed to grow slightly more livid over the tree-tops and behind the branches. The letter did not speak again. So he thought of that tiny noise, as the speech of the dropping letter. It must have slid down against the side of the box. Now it was lying still. There was nothing more for him to do but to go home. Yet he waited before the letter box, with his eyes fixed upon the small white plaque on which was printed the time of the next delivery—eight-forty A.M.

Was it the sound, or was it the movement preceding the sound, which had worked a cold change in his heart? He felt almost stunned by what he had done, like a man who strikes and sees the result of his blow, who has not measured its force, and sees his victim measure it. Eight-forty A.M.

A step sounded. He looked, and saw in the distance the large policeman slowly advancing.

When he was again in his house he closed the front door softly, and went once more to the studio. He looked round it, examining the familiar objects: the piano, his work table, the books, the deep, well-worn, homely chairs, the rugs which Mrs. Mansfield had liked. On the floor, by his table, lay the fragments of manuscript music. How had he come to tear it, his last composition?

He went over to the window, opened a square of the glass, sat down on the window-seat, and looked out to the tiny garden. A faint smell, as of dewy earth, rose from it, fresh, delicate, and—somehow—pathetic. As Claude leaned on the window-sill this frail scent, which seemed part of the dying night, connected itself in his mind with his past life. He drew it in through his nostrils, he thought of it, and vaguely it floated about the long days and nights of his work-filled loneliness, making them sad, yet sweet. He had had an ideal and he had striven to guard it carefully. He had lived for it. To-night he had cast it out in a moment of strange excitement. Had he done wrong? Had he been false to himself?

The mere fact that he was sitting and forming such questions in his mind at such a moment proved to him that he had acted madly when he had written and posted his letter. And he was overcome by a sense of dread. He feared himself, that man who could act on a passionate impulse, brushing aside all the restraints that his reason would oppose. And he feared now almost unspeakably the result of what he had done. He had given himself to the life which till now he had always avoided. He had broken with the old life.

At eight-forty that morning his letter would be taken out of the box and would start on its journey. Before night it would have been read and probably answered. Sweat broke out on his face—a feeling of desperation seized him. He loved his complete command of his own life, complete, that is, in the human sense. He had never known how much he loved it, clung to it, till now. And he must part from it. He had invited another to join with him in the directing of his life. He had written burning words. The thought of Madame Sennier and all she had done for her husband had winged his pen.

The delicate smell from the little garden recalled him to the center. He had been, he felt, crazily travelling along some broken edge. The earth poured forth sobriety, truth dew-laden. He had to accept the influence. No longer, in this grayness that grew, that would soon melt in rose and in gold, did the dazzle of the Covent Garden lamps blind his eyes. In this coolness of the approaching morning lust for anything was impossible to him. Fame was but a shadow when the breast of the great mother heaved under the least of her children. A bird chirped. Its little voice meant more to Claude than the tempest of applause which had carried him away in the theater.

Nature took him in the dawn and carried him back to himself. And that was terrible. For when he was himself he knew that he wished he had never written that letter of love to Charmian.

The dawn broke. The light, creeping in through the lattice, touched the fragments of music paper which lay scattered over the floor. Claude looked at them, and thought:

"If only my letter lay there instead!"



CHAPTER XIV

It was the end of January in the following year, and Charmian and Claude Heath had been married for three months. The honeymoon was over. The new strangeness of being husband and wife had worn away a little from both of them. Life had been disorganized. Now it had to be rearranged, if possible, be made compact, successful, beautiful.

For three months Claude had done no work. Charmian and he had been to Italy for their honeymoon, and had visited, among other places, Milan, Florence, Siena, Perugia, Rome, and Naples. They had not stayed their feet at the Italian lakes. Charmian had said:

"Every banal couple who want to pump up a feeling of romance go there. Don't let us join the round-eyed, open-mouthed crowd, and be smirked at by German waiters. I couldn't bear it!"

Her horror of being included in the crowd pursued her even to the church door of St. Paul's, Knightsbridge.

Now she was secretly obsessed by one idea, one great desire. She and Claude must emerge from the crowd with all possible rapidity. The old life of obscurity must be left behind, the new life of celebrity, of fame, be entered upon. Both of them must settle down now to work, Claude to his composition, she to her campaign on his behalf. Of this latter she did not breathe a word to anyone. Her instinct told her to keep her ambition as secret as possible for the present. Later on she would emerge into the open as an English Madame Sennier. But the time for laurel crowns was not yet ripe. All the spade work had yet to be done, with discretion, abnegation, a thousand delicate precautions. She must not be a young wife in a hurry. She must be, or try to be, patient.

The little old house near St. Petersburg Place had been got rid of, and Charmian and Claude had just settled in Kensington Square.

Charmian thought of this house in Kensington Square as a compromise. Claude had wished to give up Mullion House on his marriage. Seeing the obligation to enter upon a new way of life before him he had resolved, almost with fierceness, to break away from his austere past, to destroy, so far as was possible, all associations that linked him with it. With an intensity that was honorable, he set out to make a success of his life with Charmian. To do that, he felt that he must create a great change in himself. He had become wedded to habits. Those habits must all be divorced from him. An atmosphere had enfolded him, had become as it were part of him, drowning his life in its peculiar influence. He must emerge from it. But he would never be able to emerge from it in the little old house which he loved. So he got rid of his lease, with Charmian's acquiescence.

She did not really want to live on the north side of the Park. And the neighborhood was "Bayswatery." But she guessed that Claude was not quite happy in deserting his characteristic roof-tree, and she eagerly sought for another. It was found in Kensington Square. Several interesting and even famous persons lived there. The houses were old, not large, compact. They had a "flavor" of culture, which set them apart from the new and mushroom dwellings of London, and from all flats whatsoever. They were suitable to "artistic" people. A great actress, much sought after in the social world, had lived for years in this square. A famous musician was opposite to her. A baronet, who knew how to furnish, and whose wife gave delightful small parties, was next door but three. A noted novelist had just moved there from a flat in Queen Anne's Mansions. In fact, there was a cachet on Kensington Square.

And though it was rather far out, you can go almost anywhere in ten minutes if you can afford to take a taxi-cab. Charmian and Claude had fifteen hundred a year between them. She had no doubt of their being able to take taxi-cabs on such an income. And, later on, of course Claude would make a lot of money. Jacques Sennier's opera was bringing him in thousands of pounds, and he had received great offers for future works from America, where Le Paradis Terrestre had just made a furore at the Metropolitan Opera House. He and Madame Sennier were in New York now, having a more than lovely time. The generous American nation had taken them both to its heart. Charmian had read several accounts of their triumphs, artistic and social, in English newspapers. She had said to herself "Ours presently!" And with renewed and vital energy, she had devoted herself afresh to the task of "getting into" the new house.