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BOOKS BY GUY WETMORE CARRYL ·
PUBLISHED BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
THE TRANSGRESSION OF ANDREW
VANE . . . . . . . . $1.50
PUBLISHED BY HARPER AND BROTHERS
FABLES FOR THE FRIVOLOUS . . $1.50
MOTHER GOOSE FOR GROWN-UPS. $1.50
PUBLISHED BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.
GRIMM TALES MADE GAY . . $1.50
THE LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR . . $1.50
ZUT, AND OTHER PARISIANS . . $1.50






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Grn Welmore Carral.








The Transgression of
Andrew Vane
A NOVEL
BY
GUY WETMORE CARRYL
Author of " Zut, and Other Parisians"
REVISED
FOURTH PRINTING
@A
a main
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1904


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Copyright, 1904
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
Published April, 1904
سے ورد و
RODERT DRUMUOND, PRINTER, NEW YOR


55719 € 12-13-55 ms
HENRY HOLT
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Table of Contents.
PROLOGUE.. ....
.......
51
CHAPTER I.
MR. CARNBY RECEIVES A LETTER. .
CHAPTER II.
New FRIENDS AND OLD...
CHAPTER III.
THE GIRL IN RED. ...
CHAPTER IV.
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER.
CHAPTER V.
TAB GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT..
CHAPTER VI.
A REVOLT SUPPRESSED. ......
CHAPTER VII.
A PLEDGE OF FRIENDSHIP.........
.......
71
....... 106
...... 117
CHAPTER VIII.
A PARLEY AND A PRAYER. ...
....... 130
CHAPTER IX.
THE WOMAN IN THE CASE. ...
....... 143
vii


Vüi
Contents.
CHAPTER X.
THE FAIRY GODMOTHER.
CHAPTER XI.
SOME AFTER-DINNER CONVERSATION. .
........ 175
CHAPTER XII.
REACTION......
.................
...... 192
CHAPTER XIII.
RHAPSODIE HONGROISE, No. 2. ..........
CHAPTER XIV.
FATE IS HARD-Cash!........
........ 218
CHAPTER XV.
“AS IT WAS IN THE BEGINNING, IS NOW, AND EVER SHALL BE." 237
CHAPTER XVI.
A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. .......
...... 256
CHAPTER XVII.
A DOG AND HIS MASTER.
...................
CHAPTER XVIII.
FAIR EXCHANGE IS No ROBBERY.. ......
...... 283
CHAPTER XIX.
REDEMPTION. .......
...... 297
CHAPTER XX.
THE SHADOW.......
........ 311


The Transgression of Andrew Vane


For the things ye do, when your life is new,
And your sin is sinned with a smile,
Ye shall pay full sore, ye men, though the score
The Fates hold back for a while:
Ye shall pay, at the end, for your frauded friend,
For the secret your lips betray,
For the lust and the lie, to the Gods on High
Ye shall pay—ye shall pay—ye shall pay!
Ye shall pay ten-fold, with your heart's best gold,
Ah, tempted women and true!
Ye shall render account, to the full amount,
For each beautiful thing ye do.
For the youth ye yield, for the soul ye shield,
For the pitiful prayers ye pray,
'Tis the fancy of Fate that, soon or late,
Ye shall pay-ye shall pay-ye shall pay!


The Transgression of Andrew Vane.
PROLOGUE.
FOR months past, she had felt that she was
weakening, that the crescent wretchedness of five
long years—an uninterrupted descent from level to
level, on each of which the thorns of disillusion
caught at, and tore from her, some shred of hope
or self-respect—had done its work at last. Her
courage and her faith, inherited, the one from the
mental, the other from the moral, vigour of a rigid
and uncompromising Puritan ancestry, were slip-
ping from her. What the end was to be, she did
not dare to ask; but it lay there ahead, grim and
ominous, gradually taking form, through the mist
of the immediate future. Its very suggestion of
divergence from all that was familiar to her, of being
even a degree more monstrous than what she had
already suffered, sickened and appalled her, who
had never known a dread of mere death, but drew
back with unspeakable fear before the looming
of this unknown, ultimate degradation.
John Vane had wooed his wife with the easy con-
fidence born of adequate position, adequate means,


Prologue.
love with her; for of that he gave evidence almost
as conclusive as would have been furnished by the
ceaseless reiteration of that spoken devotion which
a woman craves, without hope of receiving, from
the man she loves. But things had come to him
so easily, so independently of any effort of his own,
that he was become the chief of optimists, imbued
with the serene and confident laisser aller of the clan;
and, now that association was making her intimate
with his methods of work, she found them to be
wholly haphazard, inspired merely by the whim of
the moment, unregulated by any remotest evidence
of system. His performances were the meaningless
flashes and snaps of Chinese crackers, not the steady
and purposeful, if less imposing, fire of a skilfully
laid fuse, leading on to great results. His confidence
in his own ability, in the certainty of his ultimate
triumph, was so absolute that he was content with
the minimum of endeavor, oblivious to the fact that
only statues can remain thus passive with the assur-
ance that laurel wreaths will be laid before them.
He did not realize that the living must pluck their
laurels for themselves.
Lacking the initiative which is its indispensable
ally, Vane nevertheless possessed all the impatience
of restraint or routine characteristic of the creative
faculty. A year of editorial work was sufficient to
convince him that it was not possible for such a
temperament as his to be trammelled by fixed hours,
and strait-jacketed by observance of detail. He


Prologue.
resigned his position, on the plea of devoting himself
entirely to writing, and there ensued a period during
which he sunned himself in society's favour, and
received his share of flattery in return for several
trifles contributed to the magazines, but created
nothing worthy even of the infinitesimal effort which
he made. A man had to think, to arrange, to com-
pose, he told his wife. Rome was not built in a
day; and the mere manual act of transferring his
thoughts to paper was a trifle, when contrasted with
the process of incubation. So, month after month
dragged by, and little by little, as his novelty wore
off, John Vane dropped out of society's consideration
as a literary potentiality, and came to be regarded
as nothing more than one of many good-looking,
agreeable men-about-town, to whom, in the matter
of his wife and his worldly weal, the Fates had been
generous beyond the ordinary.
One of the first unmistakable signs of degeneration
was his now constant complaint that he was unappre-
ciated. The average man's share of applause is in
strict proportion to his deserts. In Vane's case
the allowance had been appreciably in excess of his
due, but it was exhausted at last; and flattery is a
drug which, with indulgence, becomes a necessity.
Deprived of it, he grew fretful and impatient, made
occasional abortive efforts at performance of the
great things formerly expected of him, and talked
savagely of prejudice when his manuscripts came
back from the editors, accompanied by polite notes


Prologue.
wherein the pill of non-availability was sugar-coated
with reference to the pleasure of examining his work,
and the regret with which it was returned.
For a time he had his wife's most loyal support
and sympathy. She liked to believe that what he
said was true, that literary excellence counted for
nothing in a commercial age, and that a man who
would not conform to silly superficial standards had
no chance of recognition. But Helen was a woman
to whom a goose was a goose, and a swan a swan, at
all times, and regardless of ownership. Moreover,
she had been a lover of the best in literature since
first she had been given the run of her father's library,
and had sat for entire afternoons curled up in a big
arm-chair, skipping the long words of Thackeray or
Charles Lamb. Her critical sense, thus perfected, was
now too alert to allow of any treachery to standard.
Intensely, loyal she was, but intensely just, as well;
and all her eagerness to believe her husband to be
what he claimed could not blind her to the medi-
ocrity, often the utter worthlessness, of his later
work. With revelation arose, naturally, an ardent
desire to aid him; and strict sincerity, which was her
most admirable quality, pointed to candour as the
only adequate means. With his resentment of her
counsel came her first disheartening insight into
the shallowness and perversity of his nature. That
he could accuse her of attempting to belittle him,
rank her as at one with those who misunderstood
him, hurt her more keenly than if he had turned


Prologue.
and cursed her. It was the parting of thier ways-
the first decisive step on the road which she was to
follow wearily for five years of discouragement and
disillusion.
With the waning of his popularity Vane renounced
Boston, as he had renounced his birthplace, and
they moved to New York. Here, for a time, he con-
tributed listlessly to the humorous weeklies and
the less pretentious magazines; but reputation of
the kind he sought was not to be won by mere facility
in rhyming or in writing around a dozen illustrations;
and, presently, he reverted to his old complaint of
prejudice and non-appreciation. Then a chance
acquaintance led him into speculation. Where
abler men failed, John Vane was swept into com-
plete disaster. In a transient panic, he was caught
long of a big line of stocks, tried to average too soon,
and was finally forced to let go his holdings at about
the bottom of the market.
It was ruin, absolute and utter; but Helen almost
welcomed it, in the belief that the spur of a necessity
he had never known before would goad him to the
achievement of better things. But the character
of John Vane was not the stuff whereof is made the
moral phoenix. He shrivelled before the fire of
defeat, and sank hopelessly into the ashes of sur-
render.
They moved from their luxurious apartment to a
cheap hotel, thence to a cheaper one, thence to a
boarding-house. The backward path was strewn


Prologue.
7
with unsettled bills, and loans never to be repaid.
Vane wrote spasmodically for the daily papers, and
for such of the magazines as would still accept his
work; and, on the pittance thus earned, and the
generosity of Helen's father, they contrived to exist,
in a fashion, for something over two years.
But, given the temperament of John Vane, the
next development was inevitable. At first Helen
sturdily refused to believe that a new demon had
entered the hell which he was making of her life.
She met him, at night, with an attempt at a smile,
deliberately ignoring his unsteady gait, his sodden
face, his hot, rank breath. But the evidence was
plain, constant, incontestable. Drink had gripped
him; and she knew too well that whatever of weakness
laid hand upon her husband never relinquished hold.
So another year went by, the gulf between them
widening and widening. Finally, he struck her-
and then, for the first time, that final degradation,
that ominous, unknowable end of hope and self-
respect, loomed, hideous and shadowy, through
the fog before her. Unable to interpret its signifi-
cance, she told herself, nevertheless, that it was very
near.
They were living in Kingsbridge, in a little frame
house into which a man who had known her husband
in his Wall Street days had come, in settlement of a
bad debt, and which he had offered them, for charity's
sake, at a paltry annual rental The same Samaritan
had given Vane a small position in his office; and the


Prologue.
latter now went to and fro, between the city and its
gruesome little neighbour on the Harlem, taking
leave of his wife with a curt, contemptuous nod, and
returning, bloated and foul-breathed, to pass the
evenings in a semi-stupor.
The chance had been too good to be disregarded;
but life under such conditions was no better than
sheer existence. The cottage was one of a squat, ill-
favoured row on a side street, within a stone's throw
of the railway station. They had found it equipped,
in a way, with cheap, yellowish furniture, worn and
faded carpets, and kitchen utensils distinguished by
the grime of many meals and the musty inheritance
of insufficient washings. About the house there
was a stale, moist smell of plaster, and the plot of turf
in the little front yard was dry and discoloured, like
the mats of imitation grass in the establishment of a
country photographer. Helen had striven to redeem
the desolation of the tiny living-room with the few
pictures and articles of furniture which she had con-
trived to save from the wreck of their former fortunes;
but the attempt was not successful. The rare prints
were out of place against the tawdry wall-paper, and
the few pieces of Sheraton and Chippendale to which
she had clung took on, in such surroundings, the
shabbiness of what was already there.
She was obliged to do her own marketing and cook-
ing and housework, as a servant, in thier strait-
ened circumstances, was out of the question: and
not the least part of her martyrdom was the pur-


Prologue.
chase of scrawny yellow fowls, and vegetables of a
freshness past, and their preparation in the dingy
little kitchen, which left an odour of frying lard in
the very clothes she wore.
Vane had left her, an hour before, on his way to the
city; and now, as the weight of depression became
intolerable, she took her hat, locked the door behind
her, and started for a long walk over the hill-roads
back of the town. This had lately come to be her
habit. It was something, to escape, even for half a
day, from the dispirited little suburb, with its sallow
frame houses, its patched fences, and its cinder-
strewn roadways, along which lean cats slunk guiltily,
and dishevelled fowls picked their way in search of
food. Up on the hills, the air of late November
was keen and chill, and grayed with a drifting smoke-
mist from distant fires of dried leaves. The brown
grass was veiled here and there with thin patches of
snow, stippled with faint shadows, cast by the filial
oak-leaves, which cling longer than any other to the
maternal bough. As Helen passed, squirrels darted
nimbly away to a safe distance, and then sat up to
watch her, with their fore paws held coquettishly
against their breasts. It was all very sane and
wholesome-all in wonderful contrast to her morbid
life in the shadow of John Vane's personality.
There had been no children-a fact which, in
happier hours, she had deplored, but for which she
was now profoundly grateful. There are things
which it is easier to bear alone. To share with an-


IO
Prologue.
other—and that other her child—the humiliation
of her ill-starred association with her husband, would
but have been to double the burden's weight. In
her own case the period of martyrdom was well-
nigh done. For his son and hers it would simply be
at its beginning-tragic in its boundless possibilities
of shame.
As the thought came of the motherhood thus
denied her, she wondered why she had been faithful
to John Vane. Once she had believed in him, and
so strong had been this faith that some shreds of it
yet remained, to bind her to him through all the
unspeakably humiliating days of his gradual but
inevitable degradation. Nor was her fidelity of
the negative, meaningless kind which is strong sim-
ply because unassailed. As a woman of the world,
she had, more than once, been brought into contact
with men lax in their scrupulosity, but scrupulous
in their laxity. She had had her temptations, her
chances of escape; and the price to be paid was not
exorbitant, in view of the relief to be obtained.
But upon these she had resolutely turned her back,
hoping against hope for the miracle which never
came. Even now, her father's door stood wide to
her, and every instinct of reason impelled her to a
separation. But Vane had not only killed her love
for him; he had destroyed her very taste for life itself,
under any circumstances whatsoever. She clung to
him now, not because she loved him, not because it
was impossible to do without him, but because he


Prologue.
II
had sapped her youth, her faith, her craving for any-
thing short of oblivion.
She stood for a long time, motionless, at a point
where a little stream tinkled pleasantly over the
stones beneath its first thin sheathing of ice. The
trees, saving only the oaks, were bare, and stood
stiffly, in close proximity, in the weird, white bril-
liance of contre-lumière; and for a few moments
the barren tranquillity of the scene was indescribably
restful. Then the light changed, as a slow cloud
crept across the sun, and, with the coming of the
resultant shadow, Helen, always exquisitely sensible
to the moods of nature, returned suddenly to a con-
sciousness of her extremity. It was not real, then,
this negative beauty, this serene simplicity of nun-
like, early winter; it was not real, her own un-
wonted calm! What was actual, material, inevitable,
was the personality of the man who dominated her
life like an evil spirit, using her as his chattel, abusing
her as his slave. Abruptly, the whole course of their
association spread itself before her, up to her last
glimpse of him, that morning, shambling on his way
to the miserable daily duty to which he had sunk.
And this was the life which she had been so eager to
share with him, the life which, in those early days, his
promises had made to seem so fair! Together, they
were to have seen the world—the wonderful, great
world, that had shone in the distance, like a Promised
Land, from the Pisgah of her girlish imaginings: Lon-
don, Paris, Rome, the Nile, Greece, India, and Japan.


12
Prologue.
997
They were to have seen them all-drunk, in com-
pany, of the wine of beauty and inspiration, doubling
their individual pleasures with the magic wand of
mutual comprehension, as he should turn the treas-
ures found along their enchanted way into such words
as men preserve to praise, and she, at his side, should
be the first to read and reverence. And now? For
the first time, the full splendour of the dream, the full
squalor of the reality, swept down upon her. She
saw him, diverted from his own ideals, and ignorant
of hers, taking the initial step upon his downward
way, no foot of which was ever to be retraced:
drunken, debauched, impotent to write one worthy
word, skulking, shamefaced and sodden, through
a world of sunlight and manly endeavour, like some
noisome prowler of the night, surprised, far from its
lair, by the dawn of sweet young day. She was no
more than a girl, and already it was too late. The
blitheness of life was gone, never to return. For a
moment she stood with her worn hands crushed
against her face, and then she stretched her arms
upward to their full length, and cried aloud, “Ah,
God! Ah, God !” to the chill, clear sky of the Novem-
ber day.
A voice at her side aroused her before she realized
that she was not alone. At the sound she turned
guiltily, and found herself face to face with a man
she had never seen. He stood quite near, hat in
hand, surveying her with cold, steel-blue eyes. In
that first instant, with a perception sharpened by


Prologue.
13
her mental anguish, she became suddenly as familiar
with every detail of his appearance as if they had
been intimates for years. He was tall and slender,
and unmistakably young; and, in singular con-
trast to his pallid complexion, his lips, under the
thin mustache, were full and red, with a strange,
sensual crookedness that was half a smile and half
a sneer. There was about him a curious, compellant
air of mastery and self-possession, as of one sure of
himself, and accustomed to control; and his first
words, under their veneer of polite solicitude, were,
in their total lack of surprise or idle curiosity, sig-
nificant of the trained man of the world, while the
quaint, foreign flavour of the title by which he ad-
dressed her was equally suggestive of the cosmopo-
lite.
“You are in distress, madame?"
Helen paused before replying. With the instinc-
tive delicacy of her sex, she realized that in the
approach of a stranger who had surprised her in
a betrayal of extreme emotion there was something
which she would do well to resent; and yet she was
come to one of those crises which every woman
knows; when the need of sympathy, even the most
casual, was imperative—when, albeit at the sacrifice
of conventionality, she was fain to seek support, to
grasp a firm hand, to hear a friendly, though an
unknown, voice. Pride, her stanch ally through
all the bitter hours of her despair, had weakened at
this the most crucial point, and, like a frightened


14
Prologue.
child, she would have run for reassurance into the
arms of the veriest passer-by.
"Perhaps,” she answered presently. “But, be-
lieve me, the expression of my feeling was purely
involuntary. I thought myself alone. There are,
ordinarily, few passers by this road."
He had replaced his hat now, and was no longer
looking at her, but down across the shelving slope
of hillside, spiked with slender trees, as close-set as
the bristles of a giant brush. When he spoke again,
his tone had curiously assumed the existence of a
relation between them, as if, instead of total strangers,
they had been old acquaintances, come together at
this spot, and exchanging impressions of the scene
before them.
"Strange,” he said slowly, “that you should be
in distress, when Nature, which always seems to me
the most sympathetic of companions, is wrapped
in so great repose. In my dealings with humanity,
I've frequently met with misunderstanding; but never,
in the attitude of Nature, a lack of what I felt to be
completest comprehension of my mood. She always
seems to divine our difficulties, and to have some
little helpful hint, some small parable, which, if we
read it aright, will point out the solution of our prob-
lem, or at least serve to soothe the momentary pang.
This little stream at our feet, for example: how it
preaches the lesson that while we must meet with
days that are cold, unsympathetic, drear, it's not
only possible, but best, to preserve, under the ice


Prologue.
15
in which adversity wraps our hearts, the life and
laughter which friendlier suns have taught us! I
wonder if that is not the secret of all human con-
tentment—to resign oneself to the chilling touch of
the wintry days of life, secure in the knowledge that
summer will return, the compensation be made
manifest, and the wrong turned to right.”
The rebuff which was on Helen's lips an instant
before was never spoken. It was one of those
moments when the intuitive assertion of dignity
and self-reliance lays down its arms before the need
of comfort and companionship. She did not look
at him, but in her silence there was that which en-
couraged him to continue.
“You don't resent my speaking to you in this
way?” he asked. “After all, why should you?
You are a bubble on this strange, erratic stream of
life, and I another. Bubble does not ask bubble
the reason of their meeting, at some predestined
spot between source and sea. Instead, they touch,
perhaps to drift apart again after a moment; per-
haps, as one often sees them, to unite in one larger,
better, brighter bubble than either had been before.
Neither cares a tittle for its chance companion's
previous history, or for what the other bubbles say.
Curiosity as to another's past is the prerogative of
small-spirited men, as is also the dread of adverse
criticism Now the commingling bubbles are one
of Nature's little parables, and my conception of
ideal sympathy."


16
Prologue.
His eyes were upon her now, and, strangely im-
pelled, her own came round to meet them.
“I'm not wholly sure that I get your meaning,"
she said, feeling that he exacted a reply. “Is it
that association and sympathy are merely the result
of chance?"
“Chance is only a word that we use to express
the workings of a force beyond our understanding."
He stooped and picked up a little stone, weighed
it momentarily in his palm, and then, reversing
his hand, let it fall. “One would hardly be apt to
call it chance," he added, “that, after leaving my
hand, that pebble reached the ground. If we under-
stood destiny as we understand gravitation, we
should not say that our present meeting was due
to chance, but rather that it was the logical outcome
of a natural law."
There was a long pause, during which he glanced
at her more than once, with the seemingly careless
but actually keenly observant air of a skilled physi-
cian studying a nervous patient. She was a little
frightened, she confessed to herself, as she gathered
her wits, staring at the bit of river which was visible
from where they stood, and the slopes beyond. For
weeks she had been prey to an apathy which was
only broken, at intervals, by an outburst of passion-
ate revolt. Now, in some inexplicable fashion, the
burden seemed to have slipped from her shoulders,
and the feeling of depression was replaced by one
of uplifting, of unreasonable exhilaration. The


Prologue.
17
sensation was vaguely familiar to her, and, groping
for a clue, she found its parallel in the preliminary
action of ether, which she had taken a year or so
before. Through the growing, not unpleasurable,
dizziness which came upon her thus, the man's
voice made its way.
“Let me try to explain myself more clearly," he
was saying. “Something-God, or chance, or des-
tiny, or whatever you choose to call it-led me
around that last turn of the road at a moment when,
if I'm not mistaken, a fellow being came to the
snapping-point of self-control. I can't think there's
no significance in our meeting. I believe I was sent
to help you. The question is, whether you're broad
and generous and courageous enough to take for
granted a formal introduction, and the gradual
evolution of acquaintance into intimacy, up to the
moment when you would naturally turn to me, as
your most loyal friend, for sympathy. And I think
you are.”
Once more Helen looked at him. Her mind was
curiously clouded, but the sensation gave her no
uneasiness. Instead, she felt that she was smiling.
“I think you will do it,” he repeated.
He was holding out his hand with the confidence
of one who knows it will be accepted, and, after a
moment, she laid her own within it. His fingers
closed firmly on hers, and, of a sudden, the world
drew in about her, graying, as under the touch of
fog. Her last perception was of his eyes fixed


18
Prologue.
full on hers with an expression of quiet amuse-
ment.
“I'm faint,” she murmured, “I am-faint-".
When she came to herself, his eyes still held her.
“In the strange, unknowable book of Fate,” he
said, “it was written, from the beginning of time, that
you and I should meet upon a dull hillside in late
November, and—and that all that has been should
be!”
Before she had time to answer, he had left her.
Briefly she stood, dizzy and perplexed, and then,
after one great leap, her heart seemed to shudder
and stand still. She was in the sordid little living-
room of the Kingsbridge cottage, and outside the day
was glooming into twilight !
Without power to move, she watched from the
window the man who had just gone, pass down the
path and through the gate, and, turning, wave a
farewell, before he hurried away in the direction of the
station. Then she was fully aroused by the en-
trance of the postman, and went slowly to meet
him at the door. There was only one letter, but
this was directed in her husband's unsteady hand,
and, as she opened it, the contents leapt at her like
a blow:
“ HELEN:
“Let me be as brief as you will think me brutal.
When this reaches you I shall already be far at sea-
with another woman. I have seen how you despised


Prologue.
19
me, and I think that you know this, and that I
hate you for it. I shall not ask you to forgive
me, for I, too, have many things to forgive. If you
had understood me, much that has happened might
never have been. But what is past is past. Let
us bury it and have done.
" JOHN."
For a moment, which seemed an eternity, Helen
stood, fingering the wretched sheet, and gazing straight
before her with blank, unwinking eyes. Then, with
a rush, came remembrance, and with it a great
wave of relief. Before she fully comprehended her
intention, she was at the gate of the cottage. But
there she halted, with a nameless sense of loss and
desperation. From the distance had come the
yelp of a signalled locomotive, and then a dozen
short, choking pants, as it dragged the reluctant train
into motion. He had gone!
“But he will come back!” she murmured, “and,
that he may come sooner, I will write."
It was only towards the end of her black, sleepless
night that she remembered that she did not even
know his name.
Late autumn slid gloomily into winter, and winter
into spring, before she realized that he would never
come. To her father she had written nothing of
Vane's desertion. For a year past, his name had
not been mentioned in their letters, so the omission
was no longer noted; and Mr. Sterling's remittances


20
Prologue.
enabled her to live in material comfort. She clung to
the forlorn little cottage with a vague feeling that
by it alone could she be traced when He should
come back for her; but took a servant, a slovenly
little wench, who moved in a circumambient odour
of carbolic acid, and amassed dust under beds and
sofas as a miser hoards his gold. .
Helen herself saw nothing, heeded nothing. Save
in the impulse which followed her reading of Vane's
letter, her mind was never wholly clear from the
shadow which had descended upon it at the moment
of that hand-grip on the hillside. Hour after hour,
day after day, week after week, she sat at the window,
motionless, listening for the creak of the gate, the
crunch of footsteps on the gravel path, which would
tell her that He had returned.
With spring the disillusion came, and she crept
back to the shelter of her father's house, but to no
change, save slow and listless surrender to the in-
evitable. Sometimes they heard her whispering to
herself—as she sat, with some book which they had
brought her, unopened on her knee-odd scraps of
sentences and broken phrases, without apparent
relevancy or connection. The family physician, a
friend from boyhood of Andrew Sterling, tapped his
forehead significantly at such times as these, and
the hands of the two men would meet in a grasp of
mutual understanding.
One night in late August her child was born, and
the west wind that brought a new soul to the Sterling
ned


CHAPTER I.
MR. CARNBY RECEIVES A LETTER.
MR. AND MRS. JEREMY CARNBY furnished to the
reflective observer a striking illustration of the cir-
cumstance that extremes not only meet, but, not
infrequently, marry. Mrs. Carnby confessed to fifty,
and was in reality forty-seven. As, in any event,
incredulity answers “Never!” when a woman makes
mention of her age, she preferred that the adverb
should be voiced with flattering emphasis and in her
presence, rather than sarcastically and behind her
back. She was nothing if not original.
Mrs. Carnby was distinctly plain, a fact which five
minutes of her company effectually deprived of all
significance: her power of attraction being as force-
ful as that of a magnet, and similar to a magnet's
in its absence of outward evidence. She was a
woman of temperate but kaleidoscopic enthusiasms,
who had retained enough of the atmosphere of each
to render her interesting to a variety of persons.
Prolonged experience of the world had invested her
with an admirable broad-mindedness, which caused
her to tread the notoriously dangerous paths of the
22


Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.
23
American Colony, in which she was a constant and
conspicuous figure, with the assurance of an Indian
fakir walking on broken glass-pleasurably appre-
ciative of the risk, that is, while assured by con-
summate savoir faire against cutting her feet. Her
fort was tact. She had at one and the same time a
faculty for forgetting confidences which commended
her to women, and a knack of remembering them
which endeared her to men. It was with the latter
that she was preëminently successful. What might
have been termed her masculine method was based
on the broad, general principle that the adult male is
most interested in the persons most interested in
him, and it never failed, in its many modifications,
of effect. Men told her of their love-affairs, for
example, with the same unquestioning assurance
wherewith they intrusted their funds to a reputable
banker; and were apt to remember the manner in
which their confidences were received, longer than
the details of the confidences themselves. And
when you can listen for an hour, with every evi-
dence of extreme interest, to a man's rhapsodies
about another woman, and, at the end, send him
away with a distinct recollection of the gown you
wore, or the perfume on the handkerchief he picked
up for you, then, dear lady, there is nothing more to
be said.
Mr. Jeremy Carnby infrequently accompanied
his wife to a reception or a musicale, somewhat as
Chinese idols and emperors are occasionally pro-


24
Mr. Čarnby Receives a Letter.
duced in public—as an assurance of good faith,
that is, and in proof of actual existence. As it is
not good form to flaunt one's marriage certificate
in the faces of society, an undeniable, flesh-and-
blood husband is, perhaps, the next best thing-
when exhibited, of course, with that golden mean
of frequency which lies between a hint of henpeck
on the one side and a suggestion of neglect upon the
other. Mrs. Carnby blazed in the social firmament of
the American Colony with the unwavering fixity of the
Polar Star: Jeremy appeared rarely, but with ex-
treme regularity, like a comet of wide orbit, as evi-
dence that the marital solar system was working
smoothly and well.
Mrs. Carnby was, and not unreasonably, proud
of Jeremy. They had lived twenty-five years in
Paris, and, to the best of her knowledge and belief,
he was as yet unaware, at least in a sentimental
sense, that other women so much as existed. Since
one cannot own the Obélisque or the Vénus de Milo,
it is assuredly something to have a husband who
never turns his head on the Avenue du Bois, or finds a
use for an opera-glass at the Folies-Bergère. Jeremy
was not amusing, still less brilliant, least of all popu-
lar; but he was preëminently loyal and unfeignedly
affectionate-qualities sufficiently rare in the world
in which Mrs. Carnby lived, and moved, and
had the greater portion of her being, to recommend
themselves strongly to her shrewd, uncompromising
mind. In her somewhat over-furnished life he


Mr. Čarnby Receives a Letter.
25
occupied a distinct niche, which no one else could
have filled; and in this, to her way of thinking,
he was unique—as a husband. After foie gras and
champagne, Mrs. Carnby always breakfasted on
American hominy, a mealy red apple, and a glass of
milk. She was equally careful, however, to take
the meal in company with Jeremy. He was part
of the treatment.
The Carnby hôtel was one of a number in the
Villa Dupont. One turned in through a narrow
gateway, from the sordid dinginess of the Rue Per-
golèse, and, at a stone's throw from the latter's
pungent cheese and butter shops, and grimy char-
bonneries, came delightfully into the shade of chest-
nuts greener than those exposed to the dust of the
great avenues, and to the sound of fountains plash-
ing into basins buried in fresh turf. It was very
quiet, like some charming little back street at St.
Germain or Versailles, and the houses, with their
white walls and green shutters and glass-enclosed
porticos, were more like country villas than Parisian
hôtels. The gay stir of the boulevards and the
Avenue du Bois might, to all seeming, have been
a hundred kilometres distant, so still and simple
was this little corner of the capital. Jeremy frankly
adored it. He had a great office looking out upon
the Place de l'Opéra, and when he rose from his
desk, his head aching with the reports and accounts
of the mighty insurance company of which he was
the European manager, and went to the window in


26
Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.
search of distraction, it was only to have his eyes
met by a dizzier hodge-podge than that of the figures
he had left—the moil of camions, omnibuses, and
cabs, threading in and out at the intersection of
the six wide driveways, first up and down, and then
across, as the brigadier in charge regulated the traffic
with sharp trills of his whistle, which jerked up the
right arms of the policemen at the crossings, as if
some one had pulled the strings of so many marion-
ettes with white batons in their hands. All this
was not irritating, or even displeasing, to Jeremy.
He was too thorough an American, despite his long
residence in Paris, and too keen a business man, not-
withstanding his wife's fortune, not to derive satis-
faction from every evidence of human energy. The
Place de l'Opéra appealed to the same instincts
in his temperament that would have been gratified
by the sight of a stop-cylinder printing-machine in
action. But, not the less for that, his heart was
domiciled in the hotel in the Villa Dupont.
On a certain evening in mid-April, Jeremy had
elaborated his customary half-hour walk homeward
with a detour by way of the Boulevard Malesherbes,
the Parc Monceau, and the Avenue Hoche; and it
was close upon six when he let himself in at his front
door, and laid his derby among the shining top-
hats of his wife's callers, on the table in the anti-
chambre. Through the half-parted curtains at the
salon door came scraps of conversation, both in
French and English, and the pleasant tinkle of cups


Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.
27
and saucers; and, as he passed, he had a glimpse of
several well-groomed men, in white waistcoats and
gaiters, sitting on the extreme edges of their chairs,
with their toes turned in, their elbows on their knees,
and tea-cups in their hands; and of smartly-
dressed women, with big hats, and veils tucked up
across their noses, nibbling at petits fours. He
turned into his study with a feeling of satisfaction.
It was incomprehensible to his mind, this seemingly
universal passion for tea and sweet cakes; but if the
institution was to exist under his roof at all, it was
gratifying to know that, albeit the tea was the finest
Indian over and, and the sweet cakes from the Mai-
son Gagé, it was not for these reasons alone that the
16th Arrondissement was eager, and the 7th not
loath, to be received at the hstel in the Villa Dupont.
Jeremy knew that his wife was the most popular
woman in the Colony, as to him she was the best and
most beautiful in the world. Before he touched
the Temps or the half-dozen letters which lay upon
his table, he leaned forward, with his elbows on
the silver-mounted blotter, and his temples in his
hands, and looked long at her photograph smiling
at him out of its Russian enamel frame. If the world,
which laughed at him for his prim black neckties
and his common-sense shoes, even while it respected
him for his business ability, had seen him thus, it
would have shared his wife's knowledge that Jeremy
Carnby was an uncommonly good sort.
He opened his letters carefully, slitting the en-


Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.
29
quite revolutionary in your ways. I think I shall
tell Armand that hereafter we shall begin dinner
with coffee, have salad with the Rüdesheimer, and
take our soup in the conser vatory.”
Mr. Carnby laid down his cigar.
“I lit it absent-mindedly," he answered. “Have
they gone?”
“No, of course not, stupid!” retorted his wife.
“They're all out there. I told them to wait until we'd
finished dinner. Now, Jeremy! why will you ask
such questions?”
“It was stupid of me," he admitted.
“And to punish you, I shall tell you who they
were,” announced Mrs. Carnby. “I might do
worse and tell you all they said. You're so-s0
comfortable, Jeremy. When I'm on the point of
boiling over because of the inanities of society I can
always come in here and open my safety-valve, and
you don't care a particle, do you, if I fill your study
full of conversational steam?”
Jeremy smiled pleasantly.
“You nice person!” added his wife. “Well, here
goes. First, there was that stupid Mrs. Maitland.
She told me all about her portrait. It seems Ben-
jamin-Constant is painting it—and I thought the
others would never come. Finally, however, they
did—the Villemot girls and Mrs. Sidney Kane, and
a few men—Daulas and De Bousac and Gerald Ken-
nedy and that insufferable little Lister man. Then
Madame Palffy. It makes me furious every time I


30
Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.
hear her called 'madame.' The creature was born
in Worcester—and do you know, Jeremy, I'm posi-
tive she buys her gowns at an upholsterer's? No
mere dressmaker could lend her that striking re-
semblance to a sofa, which is growing stronger
every day! Her French is too impossible. She
was telling Daulas about something that never
happened to her on her way out to their country
place, and I heard her say 'compartiment de dames
soủles' quite distinctly. I can't imagine how she
contrives to know so many things that aren't so.
One would suppose she'd stumble over a real, live
fact now and again, if only by accident. And her
husband's no better. Trying to find the truth in
one of his stories severely taxes one's aptitude
in long division. I saw him at the Hatzfeldts'
musicale night before last. Pazzini was playing,
and Palffy was sound asleep in a corner, after three
glasses of punch. I really felt sorry that a man
with such a wife should be missing something at-
tractive, and I was going to poke him surreptitiously
with my fan, but Tom Radwalader said, 'Better
let the lying dog sleep!' He positively is amusing,
that Radwalader man!”
Mrs. Carnby looked up at her husband for the
admiring smile which was the usual guarantee that
she had amused him, but only to find Jeremy's eyes
once more riveted upon the inkstand, and the cigar
between his thin lips again.
“My dear Jeremy," she said, “I'm convinced


Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.
31
that you've not heard one syllable of my carefully
prepared discourse.”
“My dear Louisa,” responded Mr. Carnby with
unwonted readiness, “I'm convinced that I have not.
The truth of the matter is,” he added apologetically,
“that I've received an unusual letter.”
“It must indeed be unusual if it can cause you
to ignore my conversation,” said Louisa Carnby.
“That is perfectly true,” said Jeremy with con-
viction.
His wife rose, came over to his side, and kissed
him on the tip of his nose.
“Good my lord,” she said, “I think I like your
tranquil endorsement of the compliments I make
for myself better than those which other men
invent out of their own silly heads! Am I to know
what is in your unusual letter?”
“Why not?” asked Jeremy seriously.
“Why not, indeed?” said Mrs. Carnby. “I
have taken you for better or worse. There's so
little 'worse' about the contract, Jeremy, that I
stand ready to accept such as there is in a willing
spirit, even when it comes in the form of a dull
letter."
Jeremy looked up at her with his familiar smile.
“Louisa,” he said, “if I were twenty years of age,
I should ask nothing better than the chance to
marry you again.”
“Man! but thou'rt the cozener!” exclaimed
Mrs. Carnby. “Thou’dst fair turn the head of a


32
Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.
puir lassis. There—that'll do. Go on with your
letter!”
"It's from Andrew Sterling,” said Jeremy.
“You'll remember him, I think, in Boston. He
was a friend of my father, and kept a friendly eye
on me after the old gentleman's death. We've
· always corresponded, more or less regularly, and
now he writes to say—but perhaps I'd best read you
that part of his letter.”
“Undoubtedly," put in his wife. “That is, if
you can. People write so badly, nowadays."
“Um—um—” mumbled Jeremy, skipping the
introductory sentences. “Ah! Here we have it.
Mr. Sterling says: 'Now for the main purpose of
this letter. My poor daughter's only son, Andrew
Sterling Vane, is sailing to-day on the Kaiser Wilhelm
der Grosse. He has been obliged to leave Harvard,
as his health is not robust, and I have thought that
perhaps the sea-voyage and some months in Paris
might put him in shape—""
“Good Lord!” broke in Mrs. Carnby. “Imagine
some months in Paris by way of rest-cure!”
“And so,'” continued Jeremy, “I'm sending
him over, in hopes that the change may be of benefit.
He is a singular lad-sensitive in the extreme, and
utterly inexperienced—and I am going to ask if,
"for auld lang syne," you will be so good as to make
him welcome. I don't mean, of course, that I expect
you to exercise any sort of supervision. The boy
must take care of himself, like all of us, but I would


Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter. 33
like to feel that, in a strange city, there is one place
where he may find a hint of home.”
Jeremy paused.
“Go on!” observed Mrs. Carnby.
“There is really nothing more of importance,"
said her husband, “except that I've also received
a note from young Vane. He's at the Ritz.”
“Of course!” ejaculated Mrs. Carnby. “Paying
two louis per diem for his room, and making semi-
daily trips to Morgan, Harjes'. They're wonderful,
these tourist bank-accounts. Their progress from
a respectable amount to absolute zero is as inevi-
table as the recession of the sea from high-water
mark to dead low tide—a steady withdrawal from
the bank, my dear Jeremy! How old might the
young gentlemen be?”
Mr. Carnby made a mental calculation.
“His mother was about my own age,” he said
presently. “I know she and I used to go to dancing-
school together. And she died in childbirth, if I
remember rightly. Her husband was a scamp-
ran off with another woman. I never saw him.
That would make the boy about twenty or twenty-
one."
“He will be rather good-looking,” said Mrs. Carn-
by reflectively, “with a general suggestion of soap
and cold water about him. He will wear prepos-
terously heavy boots with the soles projecting all
around like little piazzas, and a straw hat, and dog-
skin gloves with seams like small hedges, and turned


34
Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.
back at the wrists. They're all exactly alike, the
young Americans one sees over here. One would
think they came by the dozen, in a box. And when
he is sitting down he will be hitching at his trousers
all the time, so that the only thing one remembers
about him afterwards is the pattern of his socks."
“We ought to invite him to dinner,” suggested
Jeremy.
“Without doubt,” agreed his wife;“but to break-
fast first, I think—and on Sunday. One can judge
a man's character so well by the way he behaves
at Sunday breakfast. If he fidgets, and drinks
quantities of water, then he's dissipated! I don't
know why Saturday night is always fatal to dissi-
pated men, but it is. If his top hat looks as if it
had been brushed the wrong way, then he's religious,
and has been to church. I shall go out and inspect
it while you're smoking. If he does all the talking,
he's an ass; and if I do it all, he's a fool.”
“You're a difficult critic, my dear,” said Jeremy.
“You must remember he is only twenty or so.”
“To be twenty or so in appearance is a man's
misfortune," replied Mrs. Carnby. "To be twenty
or so in behaviour is his fault. I'll write to him
to-night, and ask him to breakfast on Sunday, tout
à fait en famille, and we'll try him on a-you don't
mind my calling you a dog, Jeremy?”
“Not in the least," said Mr. Carnby.
“Eh bien !” said his wife. “We'll have him to
breakfast on Sunday, and try him on a dog! If


Mr. Carnby Receives a Letter.
35
he's presentable and amusing, I shall make him my
exclusive property. If he's dull, I shall tell him
Madame Palffy is a woman he should cultivate
assiduously. I send her all the people who don't
pass muster at my dinners. She has them next
day, like warmed-over vol-au-vents. My funeral
baked meats do coldly furnish forth her breakfast-
table.”
“When you wish to appear most unmerciful, my
dear,” said Jeremy, "you always pick out Madame
Palffy; and whenever you do, I spoil the effect of
what you say by thinking of—”
“Margery?” put in Mrs. Carnby. “Yes, of
course, that's my soft spot, Jeremy. There's only
one thing which Margery Palffy ought to be that
she isn't, and that's—ahem!—an orphan.”


CHAPTER II.
NEW FRIENDS AND OLD.
In ordinary, Mrs. Carnby was one of the rare
mortals who succeed in disposing as well as in pro-
posing; but there were times when there was not
even a family resemblance between her plans and her
performances. She had fully intended that young
Vane should be the only guest at her Sunday break-
fast; but as she came out of church that morning
into the brilliant sunlight of the Avenue de l'Alma,
she found herself face to face with the Ratchetts,
new'y returned from Monte Carlo, and promptly
bundled the pair of them into her victoria. Fur-
thermore, as the carriage swung round the Arc,
and into the Avenue du Bois, she suddenly espied
Mr. Thomas Radwalader, lounging, with an air of
infinite boredom, down the plage.
“There's that Radwalader, thinking about him-
self again!” she exclaimed, digging her coachman
in the small of his ample back with the point of her
tulle parasol. “Positively, it would be cruelty
to animals not to rescue him. Arretez, Benoit!”
Radwalader came up languidly as the carriage
stopped.
36


New Friends and old.
37
“Where are you going?” demanded Mrs. Carnby,
after greetings had been exchanged.
“Home," answered Radwalader. “I met Madame
Palffy back there a bit, and couldn't get away for
ten minutes. You know, it's shocking on the nerves,
that kind of thing, so I thought I'd drop in at my
quarters for a pick-me-up."
“Well, if I'm not a pick-you-up, I'm sure I don't
know what is,” said Mrs. Carnby. “You're to
come to breakfast. You'll have to walk, though.
We're three already, you see, and I don't want
people to take my carriage for a panier à salade.
I hadn't the most remote intention of asking you;
but when a man tells me he's been talking for ten
minutes to that Palffy, I always take him in and
give him a good square meal.”
“You're very kind," said Radwalader. “Are you
going to play bridge afterwards? If so, I must go
home for more money."
“Nothing of the sort!” said Mrs. Carnby, em-
phatically. “There's a protégé of Jeremy's coming
to breakfast—a Bostonian, twenty years young,
and over here for his health. You must all go,
directly after coffee. I'm going to spend the after-
noon feeding him with sweet spirits of nitre out of
a spoon, and teaching him his catechism. Perhaps
you'd like to stay and learn yours?”.
“I think I know it,” laughed Radwalader.
“If you do, it's one of your own fabrication, then-
with just a single question and answer. 'What is


38
New Friends and Old.
my duty toward myself? My duty toward myself
is, under all circumstances, to do exactly as I dee
please.'”
"If that were the case, my good woman, I should
live up to my profession of faith, not only by accept-
ing your invitation, as I mean to do, but by staying
the entire afternoon.”
“That's very nicely said indeed,” answered Mrs.
Carnby. “Allez, Benoit!”
Twenty minutes later the whole party was as-
sembled in her salon. Carnby, caught by his wife
as he was scuttling into his study, was now do'ng
his visibly inadequate best to entertain Philip
Ratchett, who stood gloomily before him, with his
legs far apart, his hands in his pockets, and his
eyes on the top button of his host's waistcoat. He
was a typical Englishman, of the variety which
leans against door-jambs in the pages of Punch,
and makes unfortunate remarks beginning with
"I say,” about the relatives of the stranger ad-
dressed. Society bored him to the verge of extinc-
tion, but it is only fair to say that he repaid the
debt with interest. He was tolerated—as many a
man before and after him has been-for the sake
of his wife.
Mrs. Ratchett patronized, with equal ardour, a
sewing-class which fabricated unmentionable gar-
ments of red flannel for supposedly grateful heathen,
and a society for psychical research which boasted
of liberal-mindedness because it was willing to ad-


New Friends and Old.
39
mit that, at the dawn of the twentieth century,
the causes of certain natural phenomena remained yet
unexplained. Her entire conception of life. under-
went a radical change whenever she read a new
book, which she did at fortnightly intervals. She
was thirty, clever, and frankly beautiful; hence a
factor in the Colony. .
The fifth member of the company in Mrs. Carnby's
salon, Mr. Thomas Radwalader, enjoyed the truly
Parisian distinction of being an impecunious bachelor
who did not accept all the invitations he received.
He might have been thirty-five or forty-five or
fifty-five. His smooth-shaven, impassive face offered
no indication whatever of his age. He was already
quite gray; but, in contrast to this, his speech was
tinged with a frivolity, rather pleasant than other-
wise, which hinted at youth. Mrs. Carnby had once
described him as being “dappled with knowledge,"
and this, in common with the majority of Mrs.
Carnby's estimates, came admirably near to being
exact. Radwalader's actual fund of information
was far less ample than was indicated by the facility
with which he talked on any and every subject;
but he was master of the science of selection. He
judged others—and rightly—by himself, and went
upon the often-proven theory that a polished brilliant
attracts more attention than an uncut Koh-i-nur.
He made the superficial things of life his own, and
on the rare occasions when the trend of conversation
led him out of his depth, he caught at the life-belt


40
New Friends and Old.
of epigram, and had found his feet again before
men better informed had finished floundering. He
lived in a tiny apartment, on the safe side of nothing
a year, and kept up appearances with a skill that
was little short of genius. Gossip passed him by,
a circumstance for which he was devoutly grateful,
though it was due less to chance than to management.
Such was the company into which Mr. Andrew
Sterling had despatched his grandson-in hopes
that the change might be of benefit. As he came
through the portières, young Vane proved to tally,
in the main essentials of appearance, with Mrs.
Carnby's prophetic estimate. He was somewhat
more than rather good-looking, and essentially
American, with the soap-and-cold-water suggestion
strongly to the fore. Mrs. Carnby always noted
three things about a man before she spoke to him-
his hands, his linen, and his eyes. In the first two
Andrew Vane qualified immediately;. 'n the third
his hostess was forced to confess herself at a loss.
In singular contrast to a complexion dark almost
to swarthiness, his eyes were large and of an intense
steel-blue. He met those of another squarely, not
alone with the frankness characteristic of youth,
but with the strange calm of confidence typical
of men accustomed to the command of a battle-ship
or an army corps. Mrs. Carnby, in ordinary the
most self-possessed of women, gave, almost guiltily,
before the keen, clear eyes of Andrew Vane.
“He has no business whatever to have eyes like


New Friends and Old.
that, at his age,” she told herself, almost angrily.
“They ought to grow in a man's head, after he has
seen everything there is to be seen.”
The thought was involuntary, but it recalled to
her memory where she had seen their like before.
“Radwalader has them,” she added mentally.
“Good Lord! Radwalader! And this child hasn't
even graduated!”
During the brief interval between the general
introduction and the announcement of breakfast,
she studied her new guest with unwonted interest.
He was of the satisfactory medium height at which
a man is neither contemptible nor clumsy, slight
in build, but straight as an arrow, with narrow hips
and a square backward fling of shoulder which spoke
of resolution.
“He has ‘No Compromise' written all over his
back,” said Mrs. Carnby to herself. “I should
believe everything he told me, and not be afraid of
what I told him.”
Then she noted that he was eminently at ease.
There is something out of the common about twenty
that keeps its hands hanging at its sides, and its
feet firmly planted, without suggesting a tailor's
dummy. Andrew was talking to Mr. Carnby about
his grandfather and Boston, and from the first to
the last word of the short colloquy he did not once
shift his position. As he stood thus, in some curious
fashion consideration of his years was completely
eliminated from one's thought of him. He was


42
New Friends and Old.
deferential, but in the negative manner of guest to
host, rather than in the positive of youth to age;
and, at the same time, he was assertive, but with
the force of personality, not the conspicuity of
awkwardness. He fitted into his surroundings in-
stantly, like a wisely placed bibelot, but he dominated
them as well.
“That Paiffy," was Mrs. Carnby's final resolve,
"shall get him only over my dead body."
And so, unconsciously, Andrew scored his first
Parisian triumph.
For the first ten minutes of breakfast, Mrs. Carnby,
at whose left he sat, let him designedly alone. It
was her belief that men, like saddle-horses, should
be given their heads in strange territory, and left
to find themselves—this in contrast to the policy
of her social rival, Madame Palffy, who boasted of
being able to draw out the best there was in a new
acquaintance in the first quarter-hour of conversation.
In this she was probably correct, though in a sense
which she did not perceive-for few good qualities
survived the strain of that initial quarter-hour.
But if Mrs. Carnby's attention appeared to be
engrossed by Radwalader on her right, and Mrs.
Ratchett beyond Radwalader, she kept, nevertheless,
a weather eye on Andrew; and when, presently,
his spoon tinkled on his bouillon saucer, she turned
to him.
"I've been watching you,” she began," to see how
you would take to French oysters. It's a test I
.


New Friends and Old.
43
always apply to newcomers from America. If they
eat only one Marennes verte, I know at once that
they approve of forty-story buildings, and are going
to talk about 'getting back to God's country'; if
they eat all six, I know I may venture to hint that
there are advantages about living in Paris, without
having my head bitten off for being an expatriate.”
"It would seem your head is quite safe, so far as
I am concerned,” laughed Andrew, “for I finished
off my half-dozen, and thought them very good.”
“Then you have the soul of a Parisian in the
body of a Bostonian,” affirmed Mrs. Carnby. “A
liking for Marennes vertes is a survival of a previous
state of existence. Here's Mr. Radwalader, for
instance, who can't abide them, even after Heaven
knows how many years in Paris.”
“They taste so much like two-sou pieces that,
whenever I eat them, they make me feel like a frog
savings-bank,” said Radwalader.
“There you are!” cried Mrs. Carnby triumphantly.
“That would never have arisen as an objection in
the mind of any one who had known what it is to be
a Parisian.”
"Cr a frog savings-bank,” said Radwalader.
“No, I suppose not. I can't seem to live down
the fact that I was born in the shadow of Indepen-
dence Hall. But I'm doing so much to make up
for the bad beginnings of my present incarnation,
that I shall undoubtedly be a Parisian in my next.
Have you been here long, Mr. Vane?”


44
New Friends and Old.
“Three days.”
“Do you speak French?” put in Mrs. Carnby.
“No? What a pity! You've no idea what a
difference it makes.”
“I've only such a smattering as one gets in school
and college,” said Andrew. “Of course I didn't
know I was coming. over here. But, after all, one
seems to get on very well with English.”
“That's just the trouble, Mr. Vane," volunteered
Mrs. Ratchett. "So many Americans are content
just to 'get on’ over here. That isn't the cue to
Paris at all! It only means that you and she are on
terms of bowing acquaintance. You'll never get to
know her till you can talk to her in her own tongue."
“Or listen to her talk to you," observed Rad-
walader. “So long as we're using the feminine
gender—"
“Oh!” interrupted Mrs. Carnby. “A remark
like that does come with extreme grace from you,
I must say. Here,” she added, turning to Mrs.
Ratchett, and indicating Radwalader with her
fish-fork, “here's a man, my dear, who spent two
solid hours of last Monday telling me the story
of his life. And it reminded me precisely of a pea-
cock-one long, stuck-up tale with a hundred I's in
it. Radwalader, you're a brute!”
Carnby, with his eyes fixed vacantly upon a
spot midway between a pepper-mill and a little
dish of salted almonds, appeared to be revolving
some complicated business problem in his mind;


New Friends and Old.
45
and, as his wife caught sight of him, her fish-fork
swung round a quarter-circle in her fingers, like a
silver weathercock, until, instead of Radwalader, it
indicated the point of her husband's nose.
“That person,” she said to Andrew, “is either
in Trieste or Buda. His company has an incapable
agent in both cities, and whenever he glares at
vacancy, like a hairdresser's image, I know he
is in either one town or the other. With practice,
I shall come to detect the shade of difference in his
express on which will tell me which it is. Mr.
Ratchett—some more of the éperlans?”
Ratchett was deeply engaged in dressing morsels
of smelts in little overcoats of sauce tartare, assisting
them carefully with his knife to scramble aboard
his fork, and, having braced them there firmly
with cubes of creamed potato, conveying the whole
arrangement to his mouth, where he instantly
secured it from escape by popping in a piece of bread
upon its very heels. He looked up, as Mrs. Carnby
spoke to him, murmured “k you,” and immediately
returned to the business in hand. Radwalader and
Mrs. Ratchett had fallen foul of each other over a
chance remark of his, and were now just disappear-
ing into a fog of art discussion, from which, in his
voice, an abrupt “Besnard” popped, at intervals,
as indignantly as a ball from a Roman candle, or,
in hers, the word “Whistler” rolled forth with
an inflection which suggested the name of a
cathedral.


46
New Friends and Old.
“Tell me a little about yourself,” said Mrs. Carnby,
turning again to Andrew.
"If it's to be about myself,” he answered, “I
think it's apt to be little indeed I've been in
college almost three years, but I've been kept back,
more or less, by a touch of fever I picked up on a
trip to Cuba. It crops out every now and again,
and knocks me into good-for-nothingness for a
while. I'm not sure that I shall go back to Harvard.
You see, I want to do something."
“What?” demanded Mrs. Carnby.
“I'm not sure. I'm over here in search of a hint."
“And a very excellent idea, too!” said his hostess.
“Because, if you will keep your eyes open in the
American Colony, you'll see about everything which
a man ought not to do; and after that it should
be comparatively easy to make a choice among the
few things that remain.”
“You're not very flattering to the American
Colony,” said Andrew.
“That's because I belong to it,” replied Mrs. Carn-
by, “and you'll find I'm about the only woman in
it, able to speak French, who will make that admis-
sion. I belong to it, and I love it–for its name.
It's about as much like America as a cold veal cut-
let with its gravy coagulated—if you've ever seen
that!—is like the same thing fresh off the grill. But
I don't allow any one but myself to say so!”.
“You're patriotic,” suggested Andrew.
“Only passively. I'm extremely doubtful as to


New Friends and Old.
the exact location of 'God's country,' ana, even if
you were to prove to my satisfaction that it lies
between Seattle and Tampa, I'm not sure I should
want to live there. America's a kind of conserva-
tory on my estate. I don't care to sit in it con
tinually, but, at the same time, I don't like to have
other people throwing stones through the roof. But
about what you want to do?”
“I really haven't the most remote idea. I want
it to be something worth while-something which
will attract attention.”
“Nothing does, nowadays," said Mrs. Carnby,
“except air-ships and remarriage within two hours
of divorce."
“What are you talking about?” asked Mrs. Ratchett,
suddenly abandoning the argument in which it was
evident that she was coming out second best.
“My choice of a profession,” replied Andrew. “I
don't want to make a mistake. But everything
seems to be overcrowded.”
“Exactly," observed Radwalader. “It isn't so
much a question of selecting what's right as of get-
ting what's left. Haven't you a special talent?”.
“I'm afraid not,” said Andrew.
“And if you had, it wouldn't do you much
good in the States," commented Mrs. Carnby.
“Nothing counts over there but money and social
position. It's the only country on earth where it's
less blessed to be gifted than received.”
“I had thought of civil engineering,” said Andrew.


48
New Friends and Old.
“Civil engineering ?” repeated Mrs. Carnby. “But,
my dear Mr. Vane, that's not a profession. It's
only a synonym for getting on in society. We're
all of us civil engineers!”
She pushed back her chair as she spoke.
“We'll wait for you in the salon," she added,
"and, meanwhile, Mrs. Ratchett and I will think
up a profession for Mr. Vane. Jeremy, you're to
give them the shortest cigars you have.”
“I was once in the same quandary,” said Rad-
walader to Andrew, when the men were left alone,
“and concluded to let Time answer the question for
me. You may have noticed that Time is prone to
reticence. So far, he has not committed himself
one way or another.”
“I'm afraid I haven't the patience for that,” said
Andrew. “Besides, it's different in America. One
has to do something over there. It's almost against
the law to be idle.”
"Of course. The only remedy for that is to live
in Paris. You might do that. It's a profession all
by itself-of faith, if nothing else. Only one has
need of the golden means.”
"I think I am a homeopathist, so far as Europe
is concerned,” said Andrew. "I'm already a little
homesick for the Common.”
“It's a bad pun," answered Radwalader, “but is
there anything in America but—the common?”
“You can't expect me to agree with you there."
“I don't. I never expect any one to agree with


New Friends and Old.
49
me. It takes all the charm out of conversation.
You may remember that Mark Twain once said
that it's a difference of opinion which makes horse-
races. He should have made it human races. That
would have been truer, and so, more original. But
a homeopathist is only a man who has never tried
allopathy. You must let me convert you by show-
ing you something of Paris. If I've any profession
at all, it's that of guide."
“You're very kind,” said Andrew, “but you
mustn't let your courtesy put you to inconvenience
on my account. There must be a penalty attached
to knowing Paris well, in the form of fellow country-
men who want to be shown about."
"'Never a rose but has its thorn,'” quoted Rad-
walader. “If you know Paris well, you're over-
run; and if you don't, you're run over. Of the
two, the former is the less objectionable. When
we leave here, perhaps you'd like to go out to the
races for a while? If you haven't been, Auteuil is
well worth seeing of a Sunday afternoon.”
“I should be very glad," said Andrew.
“Then we'll consider it agreed. I see Carnby is
getting to his feet. He is about to make his regular
postprandial speech. It is one to be commended
for its brevity.”
“The ladies?” suggested Jeremy, interrogatively.
“By all means!” said Radwalader, as his cigarette
sizzled into the remainder of his coffee. “It's a
toast to which we all respond.”


50
New Friends and Old.
"By the way,” said Ratchett, as they moved
toward the portières, “I was going to ask you chaps
about membership in the Volney."
The three men gathered in a group, and Andrew,
seeing that they were about to speak of something
in which he had no concern, passed into the salon.
Here he was surprised to find three women instead
of two-still more surprised when the newcomer
wheeled suddenly, and came toward him with both
hands outstretched.
“How do you do?” she said. “What a charming
surprise! Mrs. Carnby was just speaking of you,
and I've been telling her what jolly times we used
to have last summer at Beverly. How delightful to
find you here! Mrs. Carnby's my dearest friend,
you must know, Mr. Vane."
“Miss Palffy is one of the few people to whom I
always feel equal,” observed Mrs. Carnby.
“I can say the same, I'm sure," agreed Andrew.
“That means that you and I are to be friends
as well, then," answered Mrs. Carnby, “because
things that are equal to the same thing are bound
to be equal to each other. Are you going out with
Jeremy, Margery?”
“Yes-our usual Sunday spree, you know. He's
a dear!”
She bent over as she spoke and buried her nose in
one of the big roses on the table.
“Lord, girl, but I'm glad to see you again!” said
the inner voice of Andrew Vane.


52
The Girl in Red.
of previous performances. I've always thought
that if I had to choose a wife, I'd prefer to do it in
the course of a game of blind-man's buff. The one
I caught I'd keep. Then the choice would at
least be unprejudiced. Shut your eyes, my dear
Vane, and stick your pencil-point through your
programme. Then open them and bet on the
horse nearest the puncture.” And he went through
this little performance himself with the utmost solem-
nity. “It's Vivandière," he added. “I shall stake
a louis on Vivandière.”
“And I, for originality's sake, shall choose Mathias,
with my eyes open," said Andrew, laughing, as
they took their places in line before the booth.
.“Well, you couldn't do better," observed his
companion. “He's a willing little beast, and not
unlikely to romp home in the lead. I'd beton
him myself, except that I'm so damnably unlucky
that it really wouldn't be fair to you, Vane. I
never back a horse but what he falls. I had ten
louis up, last Sunday, on a steeplechase, and the
water-jump was so full of the horses I'd chosen
that, upon my soul, you couldn't see the water.
It was for all the world like the sunken road at
Waterloo after the charge of the cuirassiers."
When they had purchased their tickets, Rad-
walader led the way to the front of the tribunes,
and, mounting upon the bench along the rail, turned
his back upon the course, and began to survey the
throng in the tiers of seats above.


The Girl in Red.
53
“This is my favourite way of introducing a new-
comer to Paris,” he said presently. “She never
appears to better advantage than when she is togged
out in her Sunday-go-to-race-meeting-best.”
With his stick he began to point out people here
and there, until, from a narrow gateway to their
right, the horses filed out upon the track, and they
turned, resting their elbows on the railing, to watch
them go by.
“That's Vivandière,” said Radwalader. "Poor
animal! She runs the best possible chance of break-
ing her neck. If the jockey so much as suspected
that I'd her number in my pocket, he'd probably
have taken out a policy on his life. There's Mathias-
the little chestnut. He looks in rattling good form.
I suspect you haven't thrown away that louis.”
“It wouldn't be a very ruinous loss, in any event,”
said Andrew.
Cadwalader was choosing a cigarette from his
case.
"I wonder," he answered, rolling it between his
fingers, “if you'd mind my asking you if you mean
that? To some people it would be a consideration;
to others, none whatever. It isn't conventional, or
even good form, to pry into a man's finances, but
we shall probably be going about together, more
or less, during your stay, and in such a case I always
like to know how a man stands in regard to expenses.
I don't want to embarrass you by proposing things
you don't feel you can afford, still less to be a clog
R


54
The Girl in Red.
upon you when you wish to go beyond my
means.”
He looked up, smiling frankly.
“Don't misunderstand me,” he added. “It's not
in the least an idle curiosity. I'm an old friend
of Mrs. Carnby's, and it would be a great pleasure
to do anything to make your visit a success. But,
if you'll trust me, I'd be glad to know how you
propose to live. You don't think me impertinent?”
“Not in the least," said Andrew. “I understand
perfectly. It's a very sensible point of view. And
I'll say candidly that my grandfather, Mr. Sterling,
has been very generous; so that, unless I'm totally
reckless, there's no reason why I shouldn't have
the best of everything." He paused for a moment,
and then added: “My letter of credit is for thirty
thousand francs."
“Thank you," said Radwalader. “It makes
things easier. I'd forgotten for the moment your
relationship to Mr. Sterling, or I shouldn't have
needed to take the liberty of speaking as I did. I
met him once in Boston, I think. Isn't he called
the ‘Copper Czar'?”.
“I believe he is,” replied Andrew. “But there's
not much in nicknames, you know."
“No, of course not,” agreed his companion.
“There goes the bell. For once, it's a fair start.”
Far away, beyond the thickly-peopled stretch of
the pelouse, a group of gaily-coloured dots went
rocking rapidly to the left, vanished for an instant


56
The Girl in Red.
back at him, as if uncertain whether to stop and
inquire after his injuries or go on alone. Abruptly
deciding upon the latter as the wiser course, she set
off at a leisurely gallop, to the accompaniment of
shrill, sarcastic comments from the crowd, and
an additional exposition of the jockey's astonishing
wealth of vocabulary.
“Voilà!” sighed Radwalader. “That was Vivan-
dière! What did I tell you? It's absolutely in-
human of me to bet on a horse. And look at Mathias!
He's twenty metres ahead of the rest, and going
better every minute. You've hit it this time, Vane.
There's one comfort. You'll win back my louis,
at all events. It's something to know that the
money's not going out of the family.”
The crowd was already shouting “Mathias! C'est
Mathias qui gagne!” as Andrew bent forward to see
the horses wheel again into the transverse cut.
Mathias was far in the lead, and seemed to gain
yet more at the hurdle. The race was practically
over, a thousand yards from the finish, and, as
Mathias flashed past the post, a winner by twenty
lengths, and Vivandière came ambling compla-
cently in, at the end of the procession, with the
stirrups bouncing grotesquely up and down, Rad-
walader replaced his field-glass with a deep sigh
of resignation, and the two men went back toward
the buletins to see the posting of the payments.
It appeared, when the figures snapped into place,
that Mathias returned one hundred and ten francs,


The Girl in Red.
57
which meant a clear gain of ten louis. Andrew had
“hit it” in good earnest.
“I think I shall adopt horse-racing as my pro-
fession,” he laughed, as they cashed the ticket at
the caisse. “Let's see: twenty dollars a race, six
races a day, seven days to the week—one hundred
and twenty-fourteen-eight-eight hundred and
forty dollars a week. By Jove! That's not bad, by
way of a start!”
“The start's the easiest part of it,” observed Rad-
walader. “Even Vivandière can manage that. It's
the finish that counts, and the finish of horse-racing
is commonly the penitentiary. It's the only pro-
fession where the hard labor comes at the end
instead of at the beginning.”
"I think I'll hang on to what I've won, then,”
answered Andrew. “If you've nothing better to
do, perhaps you'll help me to spend part of it on a
dinner to-night. You know all the best places.
And now, if you don't mind, I'd like to walk about
a bit, and see the people.”
“I accept both proposals with pleasure,” said
his companion. “We might dine at the Tour d'Ar-
gent, if you like. I haven't had one of Frédéric's
ducks in a little eternity.”
Back of the tribunes the crowd was greater now
than it had been at the time of their arrival. There
was the usual gay commingling of elaborate spring
toilettes, brilliant parasols, white waistcoats, gloves,
and gaiters, and red and blue uniforms; and, all


58
The Girl in Red.
about them, a babble of brilliant nothings. It was,
as Radwalader had said, Paris at her best. He
resumed his comments, which had been interrupted
by the race, punctuating each sentence with a nod,
or a few words, in French or English, to passing
acquaintances, and flicking the gravel with the point
of his stick.
“I envy you your first impressions, my dear Vane.
It's an old story with me, all this; but I remember
quite distinctly my first day on a French race-
course. It seemed to me the most wonderful spot
on earth. I'd always lived in Philadelphia, and
from Philadelphia to Paris is something in the
nature of a resurrection. For the first time in my
life, I saw people in possession of something to live
for, instead of merely something to live on. There
wasn't so much as a wrinkle of anxiety in sight.
Then and there, I adopted Paris as my permanent
abode. You know this town is a kind of meta-
phorical fly-paper. When once one has settled,
one stops buzzing and banging one's head against
the window-screens of circumstance."
“And flops over and dies?” asked Andrew. “It seems
to me that's the unpleasant part about fly-paper.”
“I'm not sure of that,” said Radwalader. “I'd
have to have the fly's word for it. All of us must!
die in one manner or another, and perhaps being
suffocated by a surfeit of sugar and molasses is not
the most disagreeable way. However, you are
only going to browse along the edges.”


The Girl in Red
59
“There are some stunning women here,” said
Andrew.
“That's singularly à propos,” replied Radwalader.
“Are there any in particular whom you'd like to
meet? I know about all of them.”
"Oh, do you?” said Andrew. “I hadn't noticed
you bow.”
For a fraction of a second Radwalader glanced
at his companion's face. Then-
“Hadn't you?” he said, with a short laugh. "I'm
afraid your eyes have been too busy with the women
themselves to take note of my salutations."
The next moment he doffed his hat ceremoniously
to a little black-eyed creature with a superb triple
string of pearls hanging almost to the waist of her
black lace gown.
“That's Suzanne Derval,” he explained, as they
passed. “She's one of the brightest women in
Paris.”
“And alone?” said Andrew.
“Her escort,” answered Radwalader, with an
almost imperceptible pause between the words,
“is probably placing his bet. As I said before, if
there's any one you want to meet—".
“Well, there is,” replied Ardrew, colouring a little.
“We passed a girl in red back there a bit. It's pos-
sible you know her. I'm afraid you think me a good
deal of a boy.”
“I'm afraid you think a good deal of a girl,"
laughed Radwalader. “No, my dear chap. Or,


бо
The Girl in Red.
rather, if your desire is an evidence of extreme youth,
then the majority of men are fit subjects for a crèche.
Come along, and we'll try to track your scarlet
siren.”
“We'll not have much difficulty,” said Andrew,
as they turned. “There she is now. Do you see?
By the tree-in red.”
"Oh," answered Radwalader, “oh, yes. That's
Mirabelle Tremonceau. Your 'red' is cerise, as a
matter of fact; but that's as near as the average man
comes to the colour of a woman's gown.”
“I can't imagine one spending much time in learn-
ing such things.”
“Anywhere but in Paris, perhaps not. Here the
knowledge is vital. It's part of one's education-
like being able to distinguish a Louis Quatorze chair
from a Louis Quinze, or a Fragonard from a Boucher
ten feet away. If you want to meet Mademoiselle
Tremonceau, I'll be very glad to present you.”
"I might wait here while you ask her,” suggested
Andrew.
“Eh?” said Radwalader. “Oh, yes—by all
means."
The girl was talking with an officer of chasseurs,
on the turf, a short distance away. She was tall
and slender, very pale, with magnificent violet eyes
and golden-bronze hair. From the gauze aigrettes
on her hat to the tips of her patent-leather shoes,
her costume was absolutely flawless. Her gown,
of cherry-coloured crêpe de Chine, pailleté with


The Girl in Red.
61
silver, breathed from its every fold the talismanic
word “Paquin," and the La'ique ornament of
emeralds and ruddy gold which swung at her throat
by a slender chain said as plainly “Charlier."
There was not a dot missing from her veil, not the
suggestion of a wrinkle in her white gloves, and
not a displeasing note in the harmony of the
whole.
“There's nothing wrong about the boy's judg-
ment,” was Radwalader's mental comment. “He's
picked out the prettiest and best gowned woman
in Paris. And it couldn't be better," he added,
with an odd little smile.
Mademoiselle 'Tremonceau greeted him with a
nod, a gloved hand, and a “Comment vas-tu?”
“B’en, pas mal, merci," answered Radwalader.
With his left hand he caressed his chin reflectively,
and, as if this had been a signal—which indeed it
was—the girl turned to the young chasseur, who
was staring at the intruder out of round, resentful
eyes, and dismissed him with a hint.
“You've had fifteen minutes of my time, mon cher.”
Then, as he retired, discomfited, she faced Rad-
walader again, and seemed to search his face for
the answer to some unspoken question.
“I want to present one of my friends," he said,
as if replying. “Mr. Andrew Vane—an American
who has been in Paris three days. We'll have to
speak English. Have I your permission?”
“You're strangely ceremonious of a sudden,”


62
The Girl in Red.
answered Mademoiselle Tremonceau. "I don't seem
to remember your asking permission before.”
"It was his suggestion," observed Radwalader
laconically.
For a moment the girl made no reply. Her
questioning look had observably become more keen,
and with one finger she picked at the turquoise
matrix in the handle of her parasol.
“Well?” she said finally.
“Galetteux," said Radwalader. “Go softly, my
friend."
Mademoiselle Tremonceau bowed with ineffable
dignity.
“You have my gracious permission to present
him," she said.
Whistling softly, as was his habit when pleased,
the air of " Au Clair de la Lune,” Radwalader ob-
served their meeting from the corners of his eyes,
and was struck, as Mrs. Carnby had been, by
Andrew's perfect repose. They spoke in English,
of trivialities—Paris, the weather, the crowd, and
the victory of Mathias--and, as the saddling-bell rang
for the fifth race, all walked out together to the
trackside. Here Radwalader left them, to place
his bet, and Andrew found two little wooden chairs on
which they seated themselves to await his return.
“You and Mr. Radwalader are old friends?”
asked the girl.
“On the contrary,” said Andrew, "we met for
the first time only this morning.”


The Girl in Red.
63
“Oh! And what do you think of him?”.
“I find him very agreeable,” said Andrew; "a
little cynical, perhaps, but clever-and cleverness, to
twist an English saying, covers a multitude of sins.”
“Yes, he's clever,” answered Mademoiselle Tre-
monceau. “There are the horses. Are you coming
to tea?” she added, after a silence, as Radwalader
rejoined them.
Radwalader turned to Andrew.
“The poet says that opportunity has no back
hair," he observed. “I think we might grasp at
this forelock, don't you?”
“Since Mademoiselle Tremonceau is so kind, I
should say, by all means.”
They watched the race in silence, and then-
"I can find room for you both in the victoria,"
suggested the girl.
“Better yet!” said Radwalader with alacrity,
"provided Vane takes the strapontin. The only
place where I feel my age is in my knees. Since
you've never occupied Mademoiselle Tremonceau's
strapontin, my dear Vane, you can have no idea of
the physical discomfort attendant upon being a
little lower than an angel. Think of my having
won—even a placé! Shall we go now? I abhor
the crush at the end. Give me a minute to cash
my ticket, and then we'll look up the carriage.”
“Do you speak French?” said Mademoiselle
Tremonceau to Andrew, as Radwalader strolled off
in the direction of the caisse.


64
The Girl in Red.
“I seem to be able to say what I want to when the
occasion arises,” he answered, “but I much prefer
English. I am trying to adjust myself to new con-
ditions, and I need all my energy for the task, without
undertaking a strange language at the same time.
You can have no idea how one's first visit to Paris
sends preconceived notions tumbling about one's
ears. So far, the Eiffel Tower is the only thing which
looked as I expected it would. There's a surprise at
every turn."
“For example?”
“Well, for example, French women. Even so far
as my own town of Boston we know you're beautiful,
and beautifully gowned, although nothing short of
personal experience can teach one to what an extent.
But I've always been brought up to believe that you
were so hemmed in by conventionality, so strictly
watched, that a chap wasn't allowed so much as to
say "Good-morning' to one of you, so long as you
were unmarried, at least, except under the eyes of
mothers and fathers and guardians. But it seems
that it's not so at all.”
As he spoke, Mademoiselle Tremonceau's lips
parted in a little smile, and as he paused, she slipped
in an apparently irrelevant question.
“Are you married, Mr. Vane?”
“Good gracious, no!” said Andrew. “I suppose
I may as well confess that I'm only twenty."
Mademoiselle Tremonceau looked off across the
track to where, in the interval preceding the next


The Girl in Red.
65
race, the restless thousands circled to and fro about
the betting-booths of the pelouse, in the manner of
a multitude of ants preparing to carry off a bulky
bit of carrion. Then she drew her veil tight, with
a charmingly feminine little moue which shortened
her upper lip, tilted her chin, and set her eyelids
fluttering.
“Twenty?” she echoed. “My age precisely.
Tiens! C'est plutô drôlatique ça! Here's Mr. Rad-
walader, at last. Did you get your payment? Only
twenty-two fifty? Well, that is your other louis back,
at all events. Don't you want to run along after
the carriage, so long as you know how? Mr. Vane
will attend to me, I'm sure, and we'll meet you at
the right of the main entrance. Here's the carriage
number. Simon is the brigadier in charge to-day.
Tell him it's for me, and you won't have to wait."
Radwalader undertook this commission with cheer-
fulness, although the pace at which he started
toward the gate was distinctly incompatible with
even the most liberal conception of “running along."
Evidently he was not unique in his abhorrence of
the crush at the end. Many were already making
their way from the pesage, and the crowd behind
the tribunes was densest about the sorties. Andrew
and Mademoiselle Tremonceau followed him, five
minutes later.
"I wonder if you mind my taking your arm?"
asked the girl. “I'm always a little nervous, going
vol.
out."


66
The Girl in Red.
“With pleasure," said Andrew, adding, as her
glove touched his sleeve, “I was going to suggest it,
but I don't know French etiquette as yet, and I was
afraid I might be presuming."
He was unconscious that, as they passed through
the throng, many heads were turned, among them
that of the young officer of chasseurs, who drew the
end of his mustache between his lips, and gnawed
it savagely. A perfectly appointed victoria, drawn
up at the edge of the driveway, was awaiting them,
with Radwalader standing at the step.
It was close upon seven o'clock when the two men
emerged from Mademoiselle Tremonceau's apart-
ment on the Avenue Henri Martin, and, hailing a
passing cab, set off for the Tour d'Argent. Radwala-
der evinced no desire to talk, as they bowled across
to and then down the Champs Elysées, and Andrew
was conscious of being grateful for the silence. He
wanted to think. He did not wholly understand
the hour and a half which had just gone by. There
had been no sign of Mademoiselle Tremonceau's
family. Tea was served in a salon crowded with
elaborate furniture, and softly illumined by rose-
shaded electric globes on bronze appliques. Liv-
eried servants came and went noiselessly, through
tapestry curtains, and over an inlaid floor, polished
to mirror-like brilliance, and strewn with mounted
skins. The double marqueterie tea-table gleamed
with a silver samovar and candlesticks, Baccarat
glass, and thin, cream-coloured cups and saucers,


The Girl in Red.
67
with a crest in raised gold. Here and there, huge
Gloire de Dijon roses leaned sleepily from silver
vases, and, on a little stand, a great bunch of wild
violets breathed summer from a blue Sèvres bowl.
An indefinable atmosphere of luxury and languor
pervaded the room. From the girl herself came a
faint hint of some strangely sweet, but wholly un-
familiar, fragrance, which Andrew had not noted in
the open air. He watched her, fascinated, as her
slender white hands, with their blazing jewels, went
to and fro among the cups and saucers. Her every
movement was deliciously and suggestively feminine,
as had been her tightening of her veil, an hour
before, and exquisitely languid and deliberate, as
if the day had been a thousand hours long instead of
twenty-four. She said but little, Radwalader main-
taining a running thread of his half-banter, half-
philosophy, with its ingenious double-meanings and
contortions of the commonplace, whereby, in some
fashion of his own, he contrived to simulate and
stimulate conviction.
Andrew had found, presently, that he was grow-
ing sleepy. The abrupt change from the cool air of
outer afternoon to the perfume-laden atmosphere
of Mademoiselle Tremonceau's salon, the drone of
Radwalader's voice, the soft light, in contrast to
the sunshine they had left-all contributed to his
drowsiness. Once, for nearly a minute, the whole
room melted, as it were, into one golden-gray mist,
through which silver and glass and fabrics glowed


68
The Girl in Red.
only as harmonious notes of colour, and wherein
the face of his hostess seemed to float like a reflec-
tion in troubled water. Then, as suddenly, every
detail of his surroundings appeared to bulge at him
out of the haze, and stood fixed and clear. For an
instant he thought that Radwalader had raised his
voice. He seemed to be speaking very loudly; but,
when the first nervous start had passed, Andrew
realized that this was his own imagining, and that
neither of his companions had noticed his momentary
somnolence.
At the end, he had held Mademoiselle Tremonceau's
hand for a second beyond the limit of convention.
She made no motion to withdraw it, but looked him
frankly in the eyes..
“We've been neglecting you, haven't we?” she
said. “Mr. Radwalader and I are such old friends,
that we're inclined to selfishness, and apt to forget
that our talk is not as interesting to others as to
ourselves. Perhaps you'll come in to tea on Tues-
day, about five, and I'll try to prove myself a more
considerate hostess.”
"Thank you,” said Andrew. "I shall be very
pleased—though I suspect you are undertaking the
impossible.”
The fiacre was passing the Rond Point when Rad-
walader spoke.
“This is the hour when Paris seems to me supremely
to deserve her title of siren,” he said. “In spring
and summer, at least, I always try to pass it out of


The Girl in Red.
60
doors. There is a fascination for me, that never
grows stale, in the coming of twilight, when the
street-lamps begin to wink, and the cafés are lighting
up. Did you ever feel softer air or see a more ten-
derly saffron sky? And this constant murmur of
passing carriages, this hum of voices, broken, more
often than anywhere else on earth, by laughter-
isn't it life, as one never understands the word else-
where? Isn't it full of suggestion and appeal? I've
never been able to analyze the charm of the Champs
Elysées at sunset, more nearly than to say that it
seems to blot out one's remembrance of everything
in the world that is sordid and commonplace, and
to bring boldly to the fore the significance of all that
is sweet and gay. Can you imagine considering the
price of stocks or the drift of politics just now? I
can't. I think of flowers, and Burgundy in slender-
stemmed glasses, and tziganes playing waltz music,
and women with good teeth, laughing. I smell
roses and trèfle. I see mirrors, and candlesticks
with openwork shades, silver over red, and sleek
waiters bending down with bottles swathed in
napkins. I hear violins and the swish of silk skirts.
I taste caviar-and I feel that I have underesti-
mated Providence, after all!”
“There is no Paris but Paris, and Radwalader is
her prophet!” laughed Andrew.
“That suggests a religion,” said the other, "and
I suppose, all said and done, that Paris is my religion,
How did you like Mirabelle Tremonceau?”


70
The Girl in Red.
“Even more than I expected.”
“That's well—and very unusual. One almost
always expects too much of a beautiful woman.
Beauty has this in common with an inherited for-
tune—that it's apt to paralyze individual effort.
Looking into mirrors and cutting coupons don't
leave one much time for anything else. But she's
exceptional. You're right in liking her, and what's
more, you'll probably like her better and better as
time goes on.”
“She asked me if I was married,” said Andrew.
“Did she?” answered Radwalader. “Well-are
you ?"
“No, assuredly not."
“Engaged, perhaps.”
Instead of replying, Andrew glanced curiously at
his companion, his lips set in a thin, straight line.
Radwalader met his glance fairly.
“I beg your pardon, Vane,” he said immediately.
“That was unwarranted impertinence, which you're
quite justified in resenting. I'm too prone to trifling,
and the remark slipped out thoughtlessly. Pray
consider it unsaid.”
“With the best will in the world,” said Andrew
heartily. “There is nothing more admirable, I
always think, than a frank apology.”
In the words there was a faint, curiously sugges-
tive echo of the tone in which Radwalader was wont
to voice his glittering generalities.


CHAPTER IV.
MOTHER AND DAUGHTER.
MADAME RAOUL PALFFY would, in all probability,
have been intensely surprised and entirely incredu-
lous had any one informed her that hers was an
irritating personality. But the fact remained. She
was flagrantly complacent, and her placidity enraged
one immeasurably, and goaded nervous tempera-
ments to the verge of frenzy. Tradespeople had
been known to grit their teeth and swear almost
audibly at her; and at least two guards upon the
Métropolitain had lost their positions because her
leisurely manner of locomotion had moved them
irresistibly to breaches of the courteous treatment
enjoined upon them by the General Manager's
notice to the public.
Madame Palffy was a large, florid person with a
partiality for jet and crimson velvet, and whose pass-
ing, much in the manner of a frigate under full sail,
was apt to be fatal to fragile ornaments standing
unwarily too near to table-edges. About her there
was always a suggestion of imminent explosion, due
to her chronic shortness of breath, the extreme
71


72
Mother and Daughter.
snugness of her gowns, and the fashion in which her
pudgy palms, unmercifully compressed into white
gloves two sizes too small, crowded desperately
out of the little ovals across which the top buttons
yearned toward their proper holes. Harmoniously,
her face was fat, and dappled all over with ruddy
pink, with the eyes, nose, and mouth crowded to-
gether in the centre, as if for sociability's sake, or in
fear of sliding off the smooth slopes of her cheeks
and chin. Her hair, with its variety of puffs and
curls, appeared to have been laid out by a land-
scape gardener.
As for Raoul Palffy, all that one was apt to remem-
ber about him was the fact that he had married a
Miss Barrister of Worcester. He was as completely
eclipsed by this injudicious proceeding as if he had
been elected Vice-President of the United States.
He closely resembled a frog on the point of suffoca-
tion. With a loyalty worthy of a better cause, he
imbibed vast quantities of the wine of his native
Bordeaux, and became each year more shockingly
apoplectic in appearance. Out of his wife's sight,
he swelled magnificently, like a red balloon, and,
between ignorance and exaggeration, was hardly
on bowing terms with veracity: in her presence, he
was another man. It was more than anything as
if some one had taken a pin to the red balloon. As
a natural result of their relative assertiveness, the
couple moved, for the most part, not in the French
society to which Monsieur Palffy's connections war-


Mother and Daughter.
73
ranted their aspiring, but in that of the Colony,
where his wife's pretensions and her deplorable
mismanipulation of her adopted tongue were less
conspicuously burlesque. After twenty years of
Paris, Madame Palffy still said nom de plume and café
noir.
It was to renew acquaintance with parents so
curiously contrasted that Margery Palffy had re-
turned from ten years of almost continuous resi-
dence in the States. To say that she proved a sur-
prise to them would be to do but faint justice to the
mental perturbation with which they surveyed this
tall, self-possessed young person, who was, in prac-
tically every particular, a total stranger. Her
fatherwith his characteristic lack of enterprise,
had promptly given her up. He had neither the
faculty of rendering, nor that of inspiring, affection;
and this his daughter seemed, from the very out-
set, to understand, and tacitly to accept. They
rarely met, except at dinner, and then with such a
desperate lack of common interests as prevented
any interchange of conversation beyond the merest
commonplaces. Madame Palffy, on the contrary,
made an earnest, if inept, attempt to fill, in her
daughter's life, a place which she had long since
forfeited; and, to the best of her ability, Margery
strove to meet her half-way. But the gap made by
their years of separation was now too wide to be
effectually bridged. Madame Palffy was artificial
from the summit of her elaborate coiffure to the tips


74.
Mother and
Mother and Daughter.
of her inadequately ample shoes: her daughter, in
every detail of her sound and sensible make-up, was
a convincing product of all that is best, sincerest,
and most wholesome in American education. The
two could no more mix than oil and water. It was
to Mrs. Carnby and her husband that Margery
turned for sympathy, with an instant recognition
of qualities appealingly akin to her own: and these
two received her with open arms. For them, three
months had sufficed to render Margery Palffy indis-
pensable, and the same period served to prove to
the girl, not only her need of friendship, but that
here lay the means of its satisfaction. As Madame
Palffy complacently observed to Mrs. Carnby,
“I think that Margery feels that there's no place
like home.”
And as Mrs. Carnby replied, with extreme relish:
“I'm sure of it. It must be a most comforting
conviction!”
Margery Palffy, whose attitude toward the society
to which she was a comparatively recent recruit was
sufficiently indicated by her desire to be called
“Miss” instead of “Mademoiselle,” was accustomed
to reserve her Sunday afternoons for Mr. Carnby.
They would go to the Bois, to walk and watch the
driving, or take a bateau mouche to Suresnes and
return, or even slip out to Versailles or St. Germain.
Jeremy was a man of small enthusiasms; but he
shared with his wife a profound affection, of the
type which is always pathetic in the childless, for


Mother and Daughter.
75
this tall, slender girl, as fresh and sweet as a ripe
fig, grown on the family thistle of the Palffys. An
impulse, which, in the light of its results, could only
be regarded as an inspiration, had prompted Madame
Palffy to send her daughter, at the age of nine, to be
educated in the States. A sound and rational school
in Connect:cut, and ten vacations in the superbly
invigorating air of the North Shore under the care
of a sensibly indulgent aunt, had forthwith per-
formed a miracle. A thin, brown child, with an
affected lisp, was now grown straight and tall, with
an eye to measure a putt or a friend a hand which
knew the touch of a tiller and a rein, and a voice to
win a dog, a child, or a man. Margery Palffy was
very beautiful withal, with her russet-brown hair,
her finely chiselled features, and her confident smile.
She impressed one immediately as having arranged
'her hair herself—by bunching it all up together,
and then giving it one inspired twist which accom-
plished more than all the system in the world. Some
one—not her mother!—knew what kind of gown she
ought to wear, but—what was more important,
she knew how to wear it. One would have said that
her eyes were by Helleu and her nose by George du
Maurier. Men looked to their hearts when her
mouth was open, and to their consciences when it
was closed-tight-closed! A laugh to make them
worship her, a frown to make them despise them-
selves, a suggestion that she was capable of giving
all she would expect from another, a somewhat


76
Mother and Daughter.
stronger suggestion that she would be apt to expect
a considerable deal, very clean-cut, very sane, very
good form—such was Margery Palffy at what might
be called her worst. As for Margery Palffy at her
best, as yet even the most casual of Colony gossips
had never more than hinted at a love-affair.
Madame Palffy having attended two church ser-
vices, and observed with gratification that her new
bonnet was far more imposing than the bonnets, old
and new, of her fellow worshippers, had now sought
the seclusion of her Empire boudoir. She was,
above all things, consistent. In this sacred spot
she ventured to lay aside her society manner, but,
beyond this, she made no concessions to privacy.
Her lounging-gown would have been presentable at
a garden-party, and she devoted five minutes to
rearranging her hair, before sinking massively upon
the chaise-longue, and giving her thoughts free rein.
An unusually brilliant week had drawn to a close the
evening before. Madame Palffy's dinner-table had
groaned beneath its burden of silver and chiselled
glass; and her box at “Louise” had presented to the
auditorium such a background of white linen and
vicuna as had sent poisonous darts to the hearts of
a dozen ambitious and observant mothers.
The reason was not far to seek. From the moment
of her début, two months before, Margery Palffy had
been a tremendous success. Her beauty, her novelty,
her shrewd wit and unfailing gaiety, had swept
• through the Colony as a sickle through corn. Madame


Mother and Daughter.
77
Palffy smiled to herself as she reviewed the past
few weeks. Her daughter's had been a name to
conjure with.
But, almost immediately, the smile became a sigh.
Beneath her satisfaction in Margery's triumph, the
ambitious lady felt that there was something lacking-
and that something” was a complete understanding
of the girl herself. Since her return from the States,
her mother had been slowly and reluctantly forced
to the conviction that there was that in her nature
which it was beyond one's power to grasp, and her
apparent frankness and simplicity made the failure
to read her doubly hard to analyze. Her interest
in life and the society world about her was unques-
tionable. Fresh and unspoiled, she trod the social
labyrinth undeviatingly, received the flatteries, even
the open devotion, of half a hundred men with cau-
tion, and remained-herself. And Madame Palffy,
to whom social success was a guarantee of a status
so little lower than the seraphim as to make the
difference unworthy of consideration, looked with
growing admiration upon that of her beautiful
daughter, and treasured every evidence thereof
deep in her pompous heart. The difficulty lay in
the fact that Margery impressed not only the world
in general by her dignity, but abashed her ambitious
parent as well. Madame Palffy was content to
have her daughter talk in parables, if she would, and
be as impartial as justice itself; but afterwards, when
the lights were out and the guests had departed,


Mother and Daughter.
79
throughout, behaved in a manner nothing short of
exemplary. At the end of three months, during
which Margery's début had come and gone, the
wistful matchmaker was frankly in despair.
A beneficent Providence had begrudged Madame
Palffy a very liberal allowance of diplomacy, and,
this failing, she was now resolved upon a desperate
move, nothing less than a complete revelation of
her plans, and an appeal to Margery for confirmation
of her hopes. Whenever she considered this approach-
ing ordeal, she seemed suddenly to lose a cube-
shaped section of her vital organs. Just now the
sensation was oppressive: for she had taken the
decisive step that very morning, and requested
Margery to attend her at five o'clock; and, over
there on the mantel, the hands of her little ormolu
clock were galloping inconsiderately over the last
quarter before the fatal hour. Even as she glanced
apprehensively at its face, the tinkle of the five
strokes broke the silence, and she had barely time
to secure the lavender salts from her dressing-table,
when there came a tap at the door.
“Entrez !”
Margery had been walking, and with her entrance
into the room came an indescribable suggestion of the
open air. Her face was radiant, and the violets at
her belt, brought suddenly from the slight chill
without into the warmth of her mother's boudoir,
seemed to heave a perfumed sigh of relief. The
girl's brown eyes, aglow with youth and health,


80
Mother and Daughter.
the proud poise of her head, and her firm hands,
ungloved and guiltless of rings, were all in marked
contrast to the heavy woman throned upon the
divan, and languidly sniffing at her salts. It was
a confronting of nature and art, unmistakably to
the latter's disadvantage. Somehow, the hope-
lessness of her self-appointed task was more than
ever apparent to the ambitious Madame Palffy.
"And where do you suppose I've been?” began
Margery.
“Not to church, I know,” said her mother. “I
half expected to see you, but I was alone in the pew."
“No, not to church. Once a day is enough, surely.
I've been with Mr. Carnby to the Jardin d'Acclima-
tation.”
“Good gracious, my dear, what a plebeian expe-
dition! What were you doing—visiting the serres?"
“Nothing half so dignified. We were at the
menagerie, feeding the monkeys with gingernuts.”
Madame Palffy simply gasped. There are some
situations with which words are impotent to deal.
"Monkeys,” continued Margery, "are adorable.
They are sufficiently human to be typical, and then
there's the advantage that one can stare at them
to one's heart's content, without being thought ill-
mannered. I saw lots of our friends—Mr. Radwala-
der, for instance, as vain as life and twice as loqua-
cious; and one haughty young creature who held
himself aloof, despising the rest, and taking no pains
to conceal it. That was Monsieur de Boussac. His


Mother and Daughter.
81
manner was so unmistakable that I actually found
myself bowing, as our eyes met."
“Margery!”
“It's the solemn truth, mother; the Vicomte has
a dual existence.”
“But my dear child—the monkey-house! What
could Jeremy Carnby have been thinking of, to
take you to such a place?"
“He didn't. I took him.”
“But one never knows what one might catch
there-typhoid-or-or fleas, my dear!”
Madame Palffy shuddered, and returned to her
salts.
“Fleas, mother? I never thought of that possi-
bility, but if I had, it would only have been an
added inducement. Never having met a flea, I am
sure I should enjoy the experience. You know
what somebody says? 'Incomparably the bravest
of all the creatures of God.' And, above all things,
I adore courage.”
Here was an auspicious beginning to a serious
conversation! In sheer desperation, Madame Palffy
assumed her society manner.
“Margery,” she said, "you're quite old enough
to take care of yourself; though, to speak frankly,
you have a somewhat peculiar method of doing so.
Let us abandon the monkeys for the present. I have
something to say to you. I-I—".
She hesitated for an instant, and then proceeded
resolutely.


82
Mother and Daughter.
"I've been thinking of you a great deal, of late,
and you must forgive me if I speak unreservedly
to you. It's because of my affection for you, and
my deep interest in your welfare.”
She did not see the slight contraction of her
daughter's eyebrows, and it was well for her peace
of mind that she did not. It argued ill for a sym-
pathetic reception of her carefully formulated appeal.
“I'm sure, my dear mother, that it's very far
from my desire to resent anything you say. Why
should I? Has any one a better right to speak-er-
unreservedly?”
"I've been more than proud of you always,” con-
tinued Madame Palffy, "more than proud, my dear.
You've been a great comfort to me, and, if I do say
it, a wonderful success in the Colony. I remember
no débutante in ten years who has received so much
attention, and the fact that it has not spoiled you
shows how worthy of it all you are. And now," she
added, with an uneasy smile, “for la grande serieux.”
Again that curious drawing together of Miss
Palffy's eyebrows.
“Le grand serieux?" she repeated. She detested
feeling her way in the dark, and now groped dex-
terously for a clue. “That's usually taken to mean
something quite alien to our present conversation.”
“Not at all,” said her mother, catching at this
opening, “not at all alien, my dear. In fact, Mar-
gery, what I want to ask you is this. Er-have
you ever thought of marrying?”


Mother and Daughter.
83
“Yesoften,” said Margery promptly.
The two words were characteristic of their curious
relations, as Madame Palffy realized, with a little
inward sigh of despair. They answered her ques-
tion fully, and they answered it not at all.
“You don't understand me, perhaps," she went
on. “I mean, have you ever seen-here in Paris,
for instance—any particular man whom it has
seemed to you you might-er-love? Now—there
is De Boussac-".
"Ah!”
“Wait a moment, my dear. Let me finish. I'll
not conceal from you that it has been a dear wish
of mine to see you married to him. I've known
him since he was a baby. He's titled, rich, very
talented, and more than moderately good-looking.
His position is irreproachable, and his family goes
straight back indefinitely.”
She stopped nervously. The speech which she
had mentally prepared, descriptive of De Boussac's
desirability, had been some ten times this length.
In some fashion, Margery's eyes had shorn it of
verbiage, and reduced it, as it were, to its lowest
terms.
“But, my dear mother, this is the first inkling I've
had of any such idea. I can't imagine that Mon-
sieur de Boussac has ever breathed a word on the
subject. Don't you think the first mention should
come from him? I've no reason to suppose that he
cares a straw for me."


84
Mother and Daughter.
“He does I know he does,” broke in Madame
Palffy eagerly. “You're quite wrong in supposing
he's never spoken of it. Remember, these things
are managed differently over here. You have the
American idea. In Paris one speaks first to the
girl's parents.”
Margery shrugged her shoulders. A kind of
instinct told her that she must ask no questions if
she would be told no lies.
"And there's another objection," she said. “I
don't want to marry him. He may have money,
but money isn't everything. Indeed, it's entered
very near the foot of my list of the things to be
desired in life. As to position, my own is sufficiently
good to make his immaterial. We go back indefi-
nitely ourselves, you know; although, to be sure,
I've found some things in the family records which
seemed to suggest that it might have been better
not to have gone back so far. Last, but very far
from least, I don't love him, and, in view of the fact
that, if he really had the slightest feeling for me, I
should, in all probability, have known of it long
ago, I must say, my dear mother, that your sug-
gestion strikes me as having all the elements of a
screaming farce.”
At this point Madame Palffy applied a minute
handkerchief to her eyes, and began to weep softly.
“How cruelly you speak!” she moaned, “and I-
I meant it all for the best.”
Fortunately, Mrs. Carnby had never seen Madame


Mother and Daughter.
85
Palffy cry. As it was, she imagined that nothing
about that lady could be more irritating than her
smile. But Margery, under whose faultlessly-fitting
jacket beat the tenderest and most considerate of
hearts, was moved. She watched her mother in
silence for a moment, and then went across to the
divan, and, kneeling beside it, took Madame Palffy's
available hand in hers.
“I did speak cruelly," she said, "and I'm sorry.
Let me see if I can't put it more considerately, so
that you'll understand. Love is—has always been-
to me the most sacred thing on earth. I've watched,
as every girl must watch, for its coming, believing
that its touch would transform all life. There can
be, it seems to me, but one man in the world able
to do that, and I'm content to wait for him, without
trying to hurry the future, or aid fate or Providence,
whichever it may be, in the disposal of my heart.
I've been glad all my life that we were not rich
enough for our means to be an object. Of course,
poverty has barred many out from happiness; but
it pleases me to think that when a man seeks me,
there can be no doubt that it is for myself alone.
Not only that, but I've hoped that he would be poor
as well, and it's been my pride that, when I searched
my heart, I found that wish deep within it, without
affectation, without a hint of uncertainty. I'm
old-fashioned, I suppose, and out of touch with
the times; but I hold the faith that was before
riches or social position came into the world—I hold


86
Mother and Daughter.
to love, the love of a strong man for a pure woman,
the love of a good woman for an honest man! Let
me but start honestly, with no motive that I am
ashamed to tell, no thought governing my action
save reverence for those three great responsibilities
love, marriage, and motherhood, and I have no fear
of what may come.”
As the girl was speaking, Madame Palffy's sobs
grew fainter, and finally she forgot to dab at her
eyes with the morsel of lace. She was interested.
“It's this great reverence which I have for love,”
continued Margery, "that prompted me to answer
impatiently when you spoke of Monsieur de Boussac.
You didn't mean to hurt me, of course: I know
that. But, to me, it was as if you'd torn away the
veil before my holy of holies, and cast out the image
I had cherished there, and were thrusting a grinning
golden idol in its place. I want love to come into
my life freely-not to be invited to dinner, and
announced by the butler. There will be no ques-
tion in my mind when it has really come, no measur.
ing of the man with a yardstick. I shall feel that
he is for me, even before he asks me to be his. Above
all, the question must come from his lips, and the
answer be for his ears alone. No man loving me
as I would be loved would be content to employ
an ambassador.”
Here Madame Palffy came to herself, and moaned
again.
“I don't mean to reproach you, mother. I be-


Mother and Daughter.
87
lieve, and I'm very glad to believe, that you've
always had my happiness in view. But, in the
nature of things, there are many points upon which
our ideas are bound to differ, and this is one. You
thought it best that I should be educated in America,
and you mustn't be surprised to find me Ameri-
can as a result. Look back. Do you realize that
I've not spent six full months in Paris since I was a
little girl? Now that I've come back to you, I
can't readjust all my ideas in a moment. I want to
please you, dear, in any way I can; but I'm an Ameri-
can all through, and you—well, perhaps you're
more French than you realize, yourself. We must
try to grow together, but in many ways it will not
be easy. We must be patient with each other, dear.”
"I see what you mean," said Madame Palffy
mournfully. “We're as far apart as the poles.”
“Not quite that, I think," answered Margery, with
a smile, “but, in some respects, three thousand
miles. Let us try to remember that: it will make
things easier."
“It's a terrible disappointment to me," came
lugubriously from the handkerchief.
“I'm sorry," answered Margery,“very sorry. But
I'm sure that I could never love Monsieur de Bous-
sac, and sure that I could never even beiieve in his
love unless he himself should tell me of it. I think
we understand each other now, mother. If I'd had
any idea of this before, I might have spared you this
talk. But, painful as it has been, it has, at all


88
Mother and Daughter.
events, brought us nearer together. Don't let us
speak of it again.”
Then Madame Palffy unaccountably touched her
zenith.
"No," she agreed, rising majestically from the
divan, "no, we'll not speak of it again. It must
make no change between us. I love you very
dearly, Margery, and I wish I could have seen you
his wife, but if it cannot be, that's all there is to it.
Let's dress for dinner, my dear,” and, bending over,
she kissed the air affectionately, a half-inch from
her daughter's cheek. “You're a strange girl,"
she added, “and I don't pretend to understand you.
But choose your own husband. I shall like him
for your sake.”
As Margery left the room, Madame Palffy turned
to the mirror, and surveyed with a sigh the ravages
which this emotional half-hour had made in her
appearance. For the three following days she was
a mute martyr, and relished the rôle immeasurably.
Margery, dressing for dinner, hummed softly to
herself, smiling as no one of her Paris friends had
ever seen her smile.
“ 'Ah, Moon of my Delight, that knows no wane,
The Moon of Heav'n is rising once again'”—
Andrew Vane had played an accompaniment to
that a hundred times, in her aunt's big shore house
at Beverly.


90
The Good and Faithful Servant.
taste on his tongue which suggested a commingling
of fur, blotting-paper, and raw quinces.
Presently Monsieur Vicot opened his eyes once
more and fixed them upon the window, from which,
from his position, nothing was visible save sky of an
intense blue. Against this background a number
of small reddish-brown blotches swam slowly to
and fro; and among these, tiny whorls of a light
gray colour expanded and contracted with incon-
ceivable rapidity. At one time these symptoms
had caused him peculiar uneasiness. Now he
ignored them. They were less disturbing to his
equanimity than the remarkable twitching of his
fingers. For two years he had made a point of
keeping his hands in the side pockets of his jacket,
save when he found it absolutely necessary to use
them. He no longer made gestures. They are
desirable as aids to expression, but only when steady.
The majority of men, in waking, apply them-
selves to consideration of the day which lies before
them. It was Monsieur Jules Vicot's custom, on
the contrary, to undertake a mental review of the
night which lay behind. The review was not always
complete. Often there were gaps, and, more fre-
quently, he found himself completely at a loss to
account for his return to his room on the cinquième
of 70, Rue St. Benoit, and the indisputable fact that
he was in bed, with his clothes reposing, with some-
thing not unrelated to order, on the solitary
chair.


The Good and Faithful Servant.
91
Now, as he surveyed it, he assured himself for the
thousandth time that it was not a cheerful room.
Abundant sunlight, the recompense of Nature for
six flights of stairs, was its sole redeeming virtue.
For the rest, everything belonging to Monsieur
Vicot was applied to some use entirely foreign to
the original purpose for which it had been designed.
An ink-stand served him as a candlestick, his chair
was at once table and clothes-rack, a ramshackle
sofa played the role of bed, and a frouzy plush table-
cover was his rug. An astonishing accumulation
of cigarette-ends and empty bottles suggested sloven-
liness in the occupant. On the contrary, they stood
for his economical instincts. It is not everyone
who knows that twenty cigarette-ends make a pipe-
ful of tobacco, and that as many empty brandy-
flasks may be exchanged for a full half-pint; but
the knowledge, if rare, is useful.
“It is a pig-pen,” said Monsieur Jules Vicot to
himself, "and very appropriate at that!"
Then he set to work upon his matutinal review
of the preceding night. His recollections were more
than usually hazy. After a wretched dinner at La
Petite Chaise, rendered yet more unpalatable by
the proprietor's unpleasant references to certain
previous repasts, as yet unpaid, came a distinct
hour or so of leaning on the parapet of the Quai d'Or-
léans, in dreamy contemplation of a man clipping
a black poodle on the cobblestones below; then
another period, of gradually lessening clearness, in


92
The Good and Faithful Servant.
, a little wine-shop on the Rue de Beaune; then-
nothing.
“Well, I was drunk,” reflected Monsieur Vicot;
but again manifested his dissimilarity from the
majority of men by not committing himself in respect
to his intentions for the future.
He arose with an air of languor, yawned, looked
dubiously at one trembling hand, shook his head,
and then surveyed himself in a triangular bit of look-
ing-glass tacked against the wall.
Candour is oftentimes a depressing thing-par-
ticularly in a mirror. Monsieur Vicot's glass showed
him a clean-shaven face almost devoid of colour;
eyes, the blackness of which seemed to have soaked
out, like water-colour through blotting-paper, into
gray-blue circles on the lower lids; hair almost white;
a thin nose with widely dilated nostrils; a tremulous
mouth; and a weak, receding chin. It was a face
which might have been handsome before becoming
a document with the signatures of the seven car-
dinal vices written large upon it. Now it was evi-
dence which even Monsieur Vicot could not ignore.
He leered defiantly at it, mixed himself a stiff drink
of cheap brandy and water, and forthwith applied
himself to his toilet.
Seeing the result which he presently achieved,
one perceived him to be a man of a certain ability
under crushing limitations. With a broken comb,
a well-worn brush, which he applied, with admirable
impartiality, to both his hair and his coat, a morsel


The Good and Faithful Servant. 03
of soap, and some cold water, Monsieur Vicot accom-
plished what was little short of a miracle; and when,
a half-hour later, he emerged upon the Rue St.
Benoit and turned toward the boulevard, his appear-
ance was akin to respectability. Luck and his face
were against him, but incidental obstacles he con-
trived to overcome.
He took a mazagran and a roll at the Deux Magots,
fortified himself with a package of vertes, and swung
aboard a passing tram. At one o'clock he was
sauntering down the Rue de Villejust, with his
hands in his pockets. Suddenly he stopped, looked
intently for an instant at a certain window on a
level with his eye, and then went on at a brisker
gait. He had abruptly become cheerful, and that
for no apparent reason. There is, commonly, noth-
ing particularly enlivening in the aspect of a blue
jar in an apartment window; yet that, and nothing
else, was what had arrested the attention of Mon-
sieur Jules Vicot, and brought to his lips the tune
he was whistling now.
Mr. Thomas Radwalader occupied a rez de chaussée
on the Rue de Villejust, which differed from the or-
dinary run of Paris apartments in that its doorway
gave directly on the street, independent of the loge
de concierge, and, what was more important, of the
concierges themselves. Yet the latter held that
Radwalader was a gentleman of becomingly regular
habits. He kept one servant, a bonne on the objec-
tively safe side of fifty, who cooked and marketed


94
The Good and Faithful Servant.
for him; maintained, throughout his quarters, a
neatness which would have put the proverbial pin
to shame; and, in general, ministered to his mate-
rial well-being more competently than the average
man-servant. That she was not likely to wear his
clothes, use his razors, or pilfer his tobacco, was half
a bachelor's domestic problem solved at the very
outset. On the debit side of the account, she pot-
tered eternally, and was an ardent advocate of pro-
tracted conversation; but these tendencies Radwala-
der had managed, in the course of their five years of
association, to temper to a considerable degree, so
that now she was as near to perfection in her par-
ticular sphere as a mere mortal is apt to be. Her
name was Eugénie Dufour, and in her opinion the
entire system of mundane and material things re-
volved about the person of Thomas Radwalader.
In view of his avowed love of luxury, the latter's
quarters were distinguished by severe, almost mili-
tary, simplicity. Without exception, the rooms
were carpeted; but there were no draperies either
at doors or windows. The salon, of which the soli-
tary window opened on the street, was Louis Seize
in style, with straight-backed chairs, upholstered
in dark-red brocade, a grand piano which had be-
longed to Radwalader's mother, and a large print of
the period, simply framed, in the exact centre of
each wall-panel. There were no ornaments, save
a white Sèvres bust of Marie Antoinette on the man-
tel, two reading-lamps, and a few odds and ends of


The Good and Faithful Servant.
95
silver, ivory, and enamel, which had the guilty air
of undeclinable gifts, rather than the easy assurance
of chosen bibelots. Some books in old bindings, a
stand of music, and a tea-table with its service and
that was all.
Separated from this salon by double doors was
what had formerly been a bedroom, but which now,
for want of a better name, Radwalader called La
Boîte. This was his sanctum sanctorum, wherein
one might reasonably have looked to find the confu-
sion dear to the happy estate of bachelorhood. But
here again was evident, though in a lesser degree,
the austerity which characterized the salon. One
naturally expected a litter of periodicals, pipes, and
papers; but, on the contrary, the large table was
almost clear, and the interior of the writing-desk,
which stood open by the window, revealed only
symmetrical piles of note-paper, envelopes, and
blotters, and writing paraphernalia of the ordinary
office variety. In the chimney-place was a brazier
on a low tripod, and from this, each morning, the
worthy Eugénie removed a quantity of ashes—ashes
which had entered the room in the form of Rad-
walader's correspondence of the previous day. In
one corner stood a small safe, and on top of this were
boxes of cigars, and cigarettes of eight or ten varie-
ties, but all arranged as methodically as the con-
tents of the desk. The remaining wall-space was
occupied by book-shelves, in which no single volume
was an inch out of line.


96
The Good and Faithful Servant.
The opinion of Radwalader's concierges as to the
regularity of his habits was seemingly based on
fact. Eugénie lived with her brother in the Chaus.
sée d’Antin, and went to and fro every day, regard-
less of weather, on top of the Rue Taitbout-La Muette
tram. With characteristic regularity and prompti-
tude, she had never once failed, during the five years
of her service, to awaken her patron at eight o'clock.
Radwalader invariably replied with a cheerful“ Bien!''
and five minutes later was splashing in his bath.
His coffee was served at nine; his mornings, in general,
spent in La Boîte. He took déjeuner at one, and
then went out, returning only to dress for dinner,
which he rarely had at home. Midnight found
him again in La Boîte, bending over a book or some
papers at his desk. Then only it was that the door
of his safe stood open. In all this there was, assur-
edly, no evidence of aught but tastes so quiet as to
savour of asceticism. But then Radwalader was a
man who believed in a place for everything and
everything in its place.
His visitors were few, save only on Thursday after-
noons, when he was known to be at home. Then a
dozen or so of men lounged in his salon, which was
reinforced for the occasion by chairs from the other
rooms, and several little tables for whiskey and
tobacco. Eugénie did not appear. They were served,
when there was need of service, by a middle-aged man-
servant with a furtive eye and a hand that trembled
nervously when handling glasses and decanters; for


The Good and Faithful Servant.
97
which reason those of Radwalader's guests to whom
the situation was most familiar preferred to help
themselves. They reproached him, when more im-
portant topics were exhausted, with the apparent
decrepitude of this retainer, whose name was Jules;
but their host made it plain that he had good and
sufficient reasons for employing him. He had grown
up in his mother's family in Philadelphia, said Rad-
walader, first as page and then as butler. When the
Radwalader millions went by the board, Jules had
remained with the family through sheer loyalty,
accepting but half the wages he had formerly earned.
Once he had even saved Radwalader's life in the surf
at Atlantic City. Later he had taken to drink, gone
rapidly to pieces, and, at last, had been discharged as
a hopeless case. They had given him a reference, for
charity's sake, on the strength of which he had found
a place as travelling valet; but once in Paris, his old
weakness had returned, and so he had lost his position,
and never chanced upon another. Then Radwalader
had found him stranded, begging on the boulevards,
and, for the sake of the old days, had given him
clothes and money, and found him occasional em-
ployment, such as this Thursday service, by means of
which he contrived to eke out a living, such as it was.
At other times, when he was not drunk, he drove a
cab for the Compagnie Urbaine. (This last, the most
incongruous feature of Radwalader's explanation was,
curiously enough, the only one which had the slight-
est foundation in fact!)


98
The Good and Faithful Servant.
"My best quality is gratitude,” Radwalader con-
cluded. “He saved my life; so I give him such of my
clothes as become unfit for publication, and pay him
five francs every Thursday for not being of the least
assistance. I'm afraid you'll have to put up with
him. It's a case of 'love me, love my dog.'”
And this, under its thin veneer of cynicism, was
taken as an indication of a very admirable instinct
on Radwalader's part, for which men admired him.
They continued to make fun of Jules; but, after this
defence of him, they nodded to him on entering, and
spoke to him by name.
Andrew Vane joined the gathering in Radwalader's
rooms on the Thursday following their Sunday at
Auteuil. It was observable that, without exception,
the guests were men who had done, or were going to
do, something out of the ordinary. No one of them
seemed to be in the present tense of achievement.
They talked slowly, choosing their words with notice-
able care, with an eye to their effect, and switching
ever and anon in a new direction, as irresponsibly as
a fly in mid-air. To Andrew the atmosphere was not
only that of another city, but of another world.
From art to literature, from literature to music, from
music to the stage, the talk drifted, punctuated with
names of men and things whereof he did not remem-
ber ever to have heard. Save for their air of having
but just stepped out of a barber's chair, they were
men of a general type familiar to him-well dressed,
evenly poised. The scene might have been Boston


The Good and Faithful INI
Servant. 99
or New York, save for one thing: in all that was said,
there was never the most remote hint of actual inter-
est. The opinions were like those of more than
usually brilliant schoolboys, putting into their own
phraseology certain fundamental axioms. The
speakers, with the sole exception of Radwalader, gave
the impression of being unutterably tired, and of
playing with words with the unique intent of passing
the time. Your American has but little leisure for
grammar, and less for eloquence; but in what he says
there is always present the vivifying spark of vital
and intimate concern. His theories are jewels in the
rough; but one is conscious of the ceaseless clink-clink
of the tool which is busily transforming them into
fame and fortune. The men in Radwalader's salon
were toying with gems long since cut and polished,
whose sole virtue lay in the new light caught by their
facets, as the result of some unexpected turn. Rad-
walader himself went farther. He combined the con-
fidence of the American in his future with that of the
Frenchman in his past. Andrew had thought him
cynical, but he gained by contrast with his compan-
ions. The others seemed merely to be giving thought
to what they said, but he to be saying what he
thought.
"I'm almost remorseful at having asked you to join
us this afternoon,” he began, when the introductions
were over. “Whenever I see a man in a strange
crowd, it reminds me of society's phrase at parting
'I've enjoyed myself immensely!' It has the distinc-


100 The Good and Faithful Servant.
tion of being the only polite remark which has any
claim to veracity. Usually, one hasn't enjoyed
anything else! Of course, for the moment, you feel
like a brook-trout in salt water. But it's a crowd
that I think you'll like, when the grossly overesti-
mated element of novelty wears off. Let me tell you,
in a word, who they are, and what they stand for.
That’s De Boussac at the piano, He knows four
major and two minor chords in every key of the gamut,
and contrives to fashion, out of the six, an accompani-
ment for anything you may ask of him. Beside him,
leaning over the music, is Lister. He's a would-be
playwright, with a mother who has gained the nick-
name of the 'Jail-breaker,' because she never finishes
a sentence. You'll meet her some day and be amused.
To the left is Rafferty-who's popular because, just
now, brogue happens to rhyme with vogue. Then,
Clavercil. He thinks he's not understood, without
realizing that his sole ground for dissatisfaction lies
in the fact that he is. He's a fool, pure and simple,
who inherited a fortune from his uncle-a bully old
chap who never made a mistake in his life, and only
the one I have mentioned, in his death. Next, Wisby
-who paints things as they are not, and will be
famous when the public gets educated down to him.
The man helping himself to whiskey is Berrith. He
wrote 'The Foibles of Fate' in the early '90's, and has
been living ever since on the dregs of its success—a
'one-book author' with a vengeance. That's Ford,
by the window, with the red hair. He's a crank on


The Good and Faithful Servant. 101
aerial navigation, and says his air-ship will be the
solution of the problem. I've already christened it
'Eve,' with an eye to its share in another fall of man."
Radwalader lowered his voice.
“On your right is Barclay-Jones. Barclay was his
mother's name, and when he came abroad he hyphen-
ated it with his father's. The combination always
reminds me of a rather stylish tug-boat with its tow-
line attached to a scow on a mud-flat. The man
listening to him is Gerald Kennedy, the singer. He
hasn't advanced beyond the Tommy Tucker stage
yet, but he's a good sort, an Englishman, a friend of
Mrs. Carnby and of the Ratchetts. On my left are
Norrich, Peake, and Pfeffer, in the order named.
Pfeffer is the only married man in the crowd. He
married in haste, and his leisure is employed to the
full. He gets his pin-money from his wife, and a
prick of the pin goes with every franc. Norrich is
on the staff of the Paris Herald. Peake, like Claver-
cil, is simply the disbursing agent of an inherited
fortune.”
Radwalader paused, lighted a cigarette, and smiled
at Andrew frankly.
“Finis!” he said. “Do you think me very un-
charitable? I hope not. It seems so much better to
get men's bad qualities out of the way and done with
at the start, and then to find out their good points,
one by one, in a succession of pleasant surprises.
It's a crowd you'll like, when once you get the point
of view. You've been used to poişe, and at first you


102 The Good and Faithful Servant.
won't like pose. But, after all, the difference lies
only in the eye-a pun's only permissible when it
tells the truth. We all pose over here. You will,
yourself, if you stay long enough. It's as contagious
as smallpox. And, by the way, I was talking with
Peake about you only yesterday. He's going to the
States next week, and wants to find some one to
occupy his apartment while he's away. If you're
not thinking of remaining at the Ritz, you couldn't
do better than to take it. It's a charming little
place, on the Rue Boissière, near the Place d'Iéna,
perfectly furnished, and with a balcony and bath.
Of course, the rent's no object to him. All he wants
is some one to keep it aired and clean.”
“It can't do any harm to ask him about it,” said
Andrew. “To tell you the truth, I've rather been
thinking of doing something of the kind."
“No sooner said than done,” agreed Radwalader,
and, leaning forward across Norrich, he added: “I
say, Peake, move up here, will you?
“I've been telling Vane about your apartment,”
he continued, as Peake drew close to them, dragging
his chair by the arms, “and he seems to think he
might like to have a look at it. He's over here for
quite a time, you know, and he certainly couldn't be
as comfortable anywhere else.”
“I hope you'll take the place, Mr. Vane," said
Peake. “I've always maintained that a man of my
tastes had no business in the States; but it seems I
have, after all. I think I told you, Radwalader


The Good and Faithful Servant. 103
my late, lamented Aunt Esther, you know. She
threatened to leave me nothin' but her good will,
and now she's popped off, saddlin' me with every-
thin' she had in the world.”
“That's what she meant by her good will, proba-
bly,” observed Radwalader.
“Pr’aps,” said Peake, with a little nod. “But the
c'lamity's just as great. She was a good-hearted
creature, but she belonged to the black-walnut and
marble-group period. Her sideboard weighed a ton,
and she had wax flowers in her 'parlour.' And I'm
to sell nothin', my good man! It's all to go to my
wife! Why, the very thought's enough to keep any
woman from marryin' me. Oh, my dear Radwalader,
I mourn my find, I do indeed.”
“But about the apartment?” suggested Radwala-
der.
“Oh! Well, all I can say, Mr. Vane, is that I'm
sure you'll be comfortable. It's a modest box, at
best; but it suits me, and will probably suit you.
‘Man wants but little here below'—a bath, sunlight,
a good bed, and cleanliness—that's all. You'll find
'em at my place. Radwalader'll get you a valet de
chambre, no doubt. I'd throw mine in, if I hadn't
already thrown him out. The wife of my concierge
is doin' for me till I go. I can't say more. Two
hundred francs a month. I'll be back by the first
of August–I can't miss Trouville, you know,
Radwalader—and the chances are I'll have to evict
you, Mr. Vane. I know I wouldn't leave that


104 The Good and Faithful Servant.
apartment except at the business end of a pitch-
fork!”
“It sounds like the very thing I want,” said An-
drew, with a smile at the other's eloquence.
“And there's actually some prospect of your getting
it,” drawled Radwalader. “What an exceptional
animal you are, Vane!”
“Come 'round to-morrow mornin' to breakfast,
both of you,” said Peake. “Then you can have a
look over the place, Mr. Vane, and judge for yourself.
If you like it, we'll clinch a bargain on the spot.”
“Very well,” agreed Andrew. “Shall I stop for
you, Mr. Radwalader?”
“By all means. About twelve."
“Then that's settled!” observed Peake, with an air
of profound satisfaction. “I positively must have
a whiskey, Radwalader. I'm quite exhausted. I
haven't talked so much business in a year.”
For an hour the conversation was general, and
presently thereafter Radwalader was alone. For a
time he stood by the salon table, idly fingering a
paper-cutter and scowling. Then he stepped noise-
lessly to the door, listened briefly but intently, and
abruptly flung it open and looked out into the anti-
chambre.
"Not this time!” observed Jules laconically, from
the dining-room beyond, where he was languidly pol-
ishing wine-glasses.
“I'm glad to see you profit by experience,” retorted
Radwalader. “Come here."


The Good and Faithful Servant. 105
The faithful servitor came slowly across the hallway,
glanced about the empty salon, helped himself liber-
ally from the whiskey decanter, swallowed the raw
spirit at a gulp, and flung himself heavily into a chair.
"Fire away!” he remarked. “I hope it's some-
thing worth while. I don't mind saying I'm hard
up."


A Revolt Suppressed.
107
smiling slightly, with his elbow resting on the arm of
his chair, and his hand raised and open. There was
not a quiver in his fingers, a fact which was duly
noted, as it was intended to be, by his companion.
“Have you lost your tongue?” demanded the lat-
ter presently, with manifest irritation.
“Oh, by no means, my excellent Jules,” answered
Radwalader, easily. “I was simply reflecting how I
might submit a few facts for your consideration in a
manner which would render a repetition of the com-
munication unnecessary. There seems to be some
misunderstanding. I think I'm not slow to appre-
ciate another's meaning. I make bold to suppose
that you desire to intimidate me?”
Monsieur Vicot fidgeted uneasi'y, discarded his
cigarette, lit another, shrugged his shoulders, and
gr pped the arms of his chair.
“I think it's time we understood each other,” re-
sumed Radwalader, still smiling. “It's long s'nce
we spoke of certain things—trivialities, maybe, such
as forgery, theft, and blackmail—”.
“As to blackmail—" put in the other, with an at-
tempt at bravado.
"Exactly,” agreed Radwalader. “You're about to
say that we're in the same boat. So we are, but not-
to quote the old epigram—but not with the same
skulls. I'm not a fool, my good Jules. You are. I
walk in the bed of running streams, you in fresh-
fallen snow. The inference is plain. My hold upon
you is in black and white, and deposited, as you


108
A Revolt Suppressed.
know, in my safe-deposit vault at the bank. It's as
comforting as an insurance policy. In case of my
sudden disappearance"
“Oh, chuck it!” said Vicot.
“Whereas your hold upon me," swerved off Rad-
walader pleasantly, “also as you know, is as sub-
stantial as the cigarette-ash you've just flicked upon
my carpet.”
“Chuck that, too,” put in Vicot, sullenly. “What's
the use of all this talk? You've the whip-hand, Rad-
walader, and you know it."
“Then remember it, by God !” exclaimed the other.
His assumption of smiling pleasantly was gone like a
wisp of smoke. He had risen suddenly, and, with his
fist clenched on the table-edge, was leaning over his
companion as if he would crush him by the very force
of his personality. His steel-blue eyes had hardened,
and at the corners of his lips hovered a sneering smirk
which suggested a panther.
“Then remember it,” he reiterated, "and remem-
ber it for all time! What I say, I say once. After
that-I act. You snivelling drunkard! You wretch-
ed, nerve-racked lump of bluff! You threaten me?
Did you suppose I'd forgotten that I could have sent
you to the galleys five years ago, just because I haven't
mentioned the fact since then? Do you imagine I
can't send you there now? Do you think I'd hesi-
tate for a wink about throwing you overboard, body
and soul, if I didn't find you useful? Do you fancy
I'm afraid of you? God! What a maggot it is!


A Revolt Suppressed.
109
Look at those hands, you whelp! I've seen you
grovel, and I've heard you whine, and what a man
will do once he'll do again under like conditions. It's
too late for you to pit your will against mine, my
friend! You gave yourself away five years ago, when
first I put on the thumbscrews, and I know at just
which turn of them you're going to whimper again!”
To all appearance, the white heat of Radwalader's
passion was gone as suddenly as it had come. With
the last words, his face resumed its normal expres-
sion of placidity, and, before he continued, he began
to pace slowly up and down the room, with his
thumbs in the pockets of his trousers. Vicot had
made no motion, save, at the other's contemptuous
reference to his hands, to fold his arms. Now he
sank a little farther into his chair, and, under lowered
lids, his eyes slid to and fro, following his companion's
march.
“If you didn't understand the situation before,"
resumed Radwalader, “it's probable that you do now.
As it happens, I don't fear God, man, or devil; but
even if I were as timid as a rabbit, I wouldn't fear
you! You're a convenience, that's all—an instru-
ment to do that part of my work which is a trifle too
dirty for a gentleman's hands. So long as you do it
to my satisfaction, I see fit to pay you, and pay you
well; and you're free to drink like the swine you are,
and go to the devil your own way. But the indis
pensable man doesn't exist, my good Jules, and the
moment you kick over the traces, out you go! I dis-


110
A Revolt Suppressed.
carded you last month because I don't like people
who listen at doors, even if I'm not fool enough to
give them an opportunity of hearing anything. If
I've chosen to call for you again, it's simply that I've
work for you, and assuredly not because I'm in any
fear of consequences. Pray get that into your head
as speedily, and keep it there as long, as possible.
There are plenty of others to take your place. As
for partners, you're as much mine as the coyote is
the wolf's, and no more. So you've said enough on
that point."
"What's the job?” put in Vicot, as the other
paused.
“If you haven't forgotten certain things in the
· past few weeks, you know what it means when I sit
close to one man and talk only to him whenever you're
in the room.”
“Never to forget his face,” answered Vicot, as if
responding to a question in the catechism. “Is it
another game of shadow?”.
“To an extent, yes. But it will be more in the
open than usual. You won't have to skulk. Do you
think you can accustom yourself to the change?"
“Get on!” said Vicot impatiently. “I suppose
it's the young chap?”
“Yes. He's to take Remson Peake's apartment,
in all probability—or some other. And you, my ex-
cellent Jules, are to be his valet de chambre.”
“Humph!” commented the other, without any
evidence of surprise. “And the pay?”


A Revolt Suppressed.
III
“What's usual from him, I suppose,” said Rad-
walader, “and from me double.”
“Say three hundred francs a month, all told?”
“About that.”
Radwalader seated himself again, and, leaning for-
ward, continued more earnestly, making a little
church and steeple of his linked fingers.
“First, visitors—their names, or, if not that, their
appearance, as accurately as possible. Next, let-
ters—both incoming and outgoing—particularly the
latter. Steam them, and take copies whenever it
seems best. Keep an eye especially on anything re-
lating to—well, to women in general. If any come
to the apartment, make good use of your remarkable
faculty for eavesdropping, which was so lamentably
misapplied here. Keep your hands off his tobacco
and wine. Be respectful. Get him to talk as much
as possible, and remember what he says. Stay sober
-if you can. And report to me immediately if any-
thing important turns up.”
“When do I begin?”.
“I can't tell. In a few days, probably. I'll let
you know.”
Vicot rose slowly.
“What a blackguard you are, Radwalader!” he
said, almost admiringly.
“That's not the greatest compliment I've known
you to pay me,” drawled Radwalader. “Imitation is
the sincerest flattery.”
The other poured himself another half-glass of


I I2
A Revolt Suppressed.
whiskey, set it on the table-edge, and stood looking
down at it.
“And I was once a gentleman!” he said.
“Oh, don't get maudlin,” answered Radwalader.
“We were all of us something unprofitable once. The
main fact, by your own confession, is that, as a gen-
tleman, you couldn't make enough to keep body and
soul together; and that, as a scalawag, you can turn
over three hundred francs a month. The world is
full of gentlemen. They're a drug on the market.
But accomplished scoundrels are rare, my good Vicot."
“You'll have a deal to answer for one of these
days, Radwalader.”
· Radwalader shrugged his shoulders.
One never has to answer so long as there are no
questions asked,” he said flippantly. “You'd better
take your tipple and go home. Preaching doesn't
become you in the least degree.”
"I want to know,” said Vicot slowly, taking up his
glass, “what you mean to do. I've pulled many a
chestnut out of the fire for you, Radwalader, and if
I haven't burned my fingers in doing it, I've soiled
them enough, God knows. You haven't any scruple
about calling me names, and I take your insults be-
cause I'd starve to death if I didn't. But I've a con-
science, and it cuts me, now and again."
“Bank-notes make good court-plaster," observed
Radwalader.
“Yes, but there are some things which I've done
that I won't do again. I don't want to be mixed up


A Revolt Suppressed.
113
in another affair like that of young Baxter. Do you
ever think of that morning at the Morgue?”
"I wasn't made to look backward,” said Radwala-
der. “Providence put my eyes in the front of my
head, and I know how to take a hint.”
“Well, I think of it—often," said Vicot, with some-
thing like a shudder “He repaid me in my own
coin, that boy. If I shadowed him in his life, he
shadows me in his death. Even brandy doesn't blot
him out of my mind. When I shut my eyes at night,
I can see him, sitting in that ghastly chair, with his
face, all purple, looking through the cloudy glass-
as truly murdered by us who stood looking at him, as
if we had pitched him into the lake at Auteuil with
our own hands!”
“Oh, rot!” exclaimed Radwalader. “You know
what that means, don't you? Other men see centi-
pedes and blue rats: you see Baxter, that's all. Cut
off the liquor, and you won't know there ever was
such a thing as a Morgue. Baxter was a silly ass.
He tried to do things with ten thousand francs that
a sane man wouldn't attempt with a hundred. I let
him go his pace, and I was as surprised as the next
chap when I found how short his rope was. I held
his notes for double the amount he had in the begin-
ning. Did I come down on his family for them, after
he chose the easiest way of evading payment? Not
a bit of it. I burned them."
“Policy," commented Vicot briefly.
“Is the best honesty,' supplemented Radwalader.


114.
A Revolt Suppressed.
“He was daft on baccarat, and if he had to lose, why
not to me as well as another? And a man who drowns
himself for ten thousand francs isn't worth cons der-
ing."
He crossed to the piano, and, seating himself, let
his fingers stray up and down the keyboard through
a maze of curiously intermingling minor chords.
Then he began to hum softly, looking up, with his
eyes half-closed, as if trying to recall the words.
After a moment, he struck a final note, low in the
bass, and, with his foot on the pedal, listened until
the sound died down to silence.
"I want to know what you mean to do," reiter-
ated Vicot obstinately.
“Well, you won't, and that's flat. The job is for
you to take or leave, as you see fit. Only I want
yes or no, and, after that, no more talk. I'm a hard
man to make angry, but you've done it once to-day,
and that's once too often for your good. Why, what
are you thinking of, man? You've known me for five
years. Did you ever see me hesitate or back down?
Did you ever find a screw loose in my work, or so
much as a scrap of paper to incriminate me? Did
you ever know me to leave a footprint in the mud
we've been through together-or let you leave one
either, for that matter? A man like you would land
in Mazas inside of a week, if he tinkered with business
like mine, without a head like mine to guide him!
Look here. You've been useful to me, Vicot, and,
though you've been paid enough to make us quits,


A Revolt Suppressed.
115
I'm not ungrateful to you in my own way. Continue
to stick by me and I'll stick by you. Throw it all
over, if you will, and you can go your way, with a
handsome present to boot. But let me hear any
more of such drivel as you've given me to-day, and,
as God lives, my man, I'll smooch you off the face of
the earth, as I'd smooch a green caterpillar off a
page of my book! You'd be a smear of slime, my
friend, and nothing more—and I'd turn the page,
and go on reading!”
Radwalader had not raised his tone, as on the
former occasion, or even risen, but his voice rasped
the silence of the salon like a diamond on thin glass.
“Is it yes, or no?” he added.
Vicot swallowed the spirit in his glass, and looked
across at him with his eyes watering and blinking.
“You know which," he said.
“Say it!”
“It's yes," said Vicot sulkily; “but if I wasn't the
cur I am, I'd tell you to go to hell-you and all your
works!”
Radwalader closed the piano gently...
“If it affords you any satisfaction to hear it,” he
answered, rising with a yawn, “I think it likely that
the injunction is entirely superfluous. We sha'n't
gain anything by prolonging this interview. It's
four minutes to six, and I must dress for dinner.
When I want you, I'll stick the blue jar in the win-
dow. Meanwhile, here's fifty francs on account. I'll
get Mr. Vane to pay you in advance.”


CHAPTER VII.
A PLEDGE OF FRIENDSHIP.
THE following week found Andrew fairly installed
en garçon, with a man-servant, recommended by Rad-
walader, presiding over his boots and apparel, and a
fat apple-cheeked concierge preparing his favourite
dishes in a fashion which suggested that all former
cooks of his experience had been the veriest tyros.
It had taken but a week at the Ritz to disgust him
with the elaborate pomposity of life at a fashionable
hotel, and, in its unpretentious way, Remson Peake's
apartment was a gem. A tiled bath, with a porcelain
tub; a bedchamber in white and sage-green, with
charmingly odd, splay-footed furniture of the Glas-
gow school; a severely simple dining-room, with cur-
tains and upholstery of heavy crimson damask; a
study with furniture of marqueterie mahoghany, a
huge divan, and a club-fender upon which to cock
one's feet; a pantry and a kitchen like a doll's—it
was complete, inviting, and equipped in every detail.
For Andrew it had a very special charm. His whole
life had been, to a great extent, subordinate to the
presence and personality of his grandfather. Even
college had not brought him the usual accompani-
117


118
A Pledge of Friendship.
ment of rooms at Claverly or Beck, for-and it was
to his credit-he had never so much as suggested
leaving Mr. Sterling alone in the big house on Beacon
Hill. But even an influence as kindly as this gentle,
indulgent old man's may irk. Now, for the first
time, Andrew found himself the practical master of
his movements. And Remson Peake's apartment
had the rare, almost unique, quality of disarming
criticism. One had no suggestions to make. One
would-given the opportunity-have done the same
in every particular.
And so, the faint qualms of homesickness having
worn off in the course of his initial fortnight in the
capital, Andrew found himself supremely contented,
and discovered a new charm in life at every turn.
Radwalader was the essence of courtesy and consid-
eration, invariable in his good humour, tireless in his
efforts to amuse and entertain the young protégé of
his good friend Mrs. Carnby. Paris, he told Andrew,
was like a box of delicate pastilles, each of which
should be allowed to melt slowly on the tongue: it dis-
agreed with those who attempted to swallow the whole
box of its attractions at a gulp. So they went about
Andrew's sight-seeing in a leisurely manner, taking
the Louvre and the Luxembourg by half-hours, and
sandwiching in a church, a monument, or a celebrated
street, on the way; for it was another theory of Rad-
walader's that a franc found on the pavement, or in
the pocket of a discarded waistcoat, is more gratify-
ing than fifty deliberately earned.


A Pledge of Friendship.
119
“It's the things you happen on which you will en-
joy,” he said, “not those you go to work to find, by
taking a tram or walking a mile. Unpremeditated
discoveries, like unpremeditated dissipations. are
always the most successful. There's nothing so flat
as a plan.”
As was to be expected, Mrs. Carnby was not able to
monopolize Andrew. Mrs. Ratchett took him into
her good graces, and, as was usual with her where
men were concerned, contrived to make him think of
her between his calls. And there were many others-
women characteristic of the American Colony, whose
husbands were never served up except with dinner.
It was as Mrs. Carnby told him:
"If a bachelor has manners, discretion, and pre-
sentable evening dress, he need never pay for a din-
ner in Paris, so long as the Colony knows of his exist-
ence. And remember this. Nothing is dearer to a
woman's heart than a man at five o'clock. She will
excuse anything, if you'll give her a chance to remem-
ber how many lumps you take and whether it's
cream or lemon. Attend to your teas, my young
friend, and you can do just about as you like about
your p’s and 's!”
Madame Palffy, too, seeking whom she might en-
tertain (which, in her case, was equivalent to devour-
ing), collected young men as geologists collect speci-
mens of minerals. The analogy was strengthened by
her predilection for chipping off portions—the darker
portions of their characters, and handing these


120
A Pledge of Friendship.
around for the edification of her friends. She cul-
tivated Andrew assiduously, though it was not for
this reason that he dropped in so frequently at tea-
time. Margery, with her clean-cut beauty, appealed
to him in a very special sense. They had in common
many memories of the free, open-air, sane, and wind-
blown life of the North Shore; and now, when they
idled through portions of “The Persian Garden,"
which had been the fad at Beverly, it was by way of
getting a whiff of sea air, and an echo of the laughter
that had been.
Often he found himself looking at her admiringly.
She had the knack of satisfying one's sense of what
ought to be. Her dress was almost always of a
studied simplicity which depended for its effect en-
tirely upon colour and fit, and could have been bet-
tered in neither. Not the least factor in her striking
beauty was its purity, its freedom from the smallest
suggestion of artificiality. She was singularly alive,
admirably clear-eyed and strong, and in her fresh
propriety there was always a challenge to the open air
and the full light of day. She had, even in the ball-
room, an indefinable hint of out-of-doors. The con-
trast between her personality and that of Parisian
women-of Mirabelle Tremonceau, for example—was
the contrast between the clean, dull linen of a New
England housekeeper and the dainty shams of an
exhibition bedroom; between a physician's hands
and a manicure's; between the keen, salt air of the
North Shore and that of a tropical island. Her


A Pledge of Friendship.
I 21
fe nininity impressed where that of others merely
charmed. The majority of women are pink: Mar-
gery Palffy was a soft, clear cream.
Nevertheless, Andrew seemed to feel, rather than
to see, a subtle alteration in her. A few months had
given her a new reserve, almost an attitude of dis-
trust, which puzzled and eluded him. Their talks at
Beverly had been different from these. There, they
had spoken much of the future, of what they hoped
and believed: here they skirted, instead of boldly
boarding, serious topics, and were fallen uncon-
sciously, but immediately, into the habit of chaffing
each other over meaningless trifles. He was baffled
and disconcerted by the change. There was much
which he had come to say. He had rehearsed it all
many times, and remembering the charming lack of
constraint which had characterized all their former
intercourse, to say it had seemed comparatively easy.
But now he was like a man who has been recalling
his fluent renderings, at school or college, of the
classic texts, but, suddenly confronted with the same
passages, cannot translate a word.
Again, the presence of her family depressed him
with something of her own visible distress, humiliated
him with something of her own evident shame.
There was no such thing as making allowances for
either Monsieur or Madame Palffy. From the mo-
ment of one's first glimpse of them, they were hope-
lessly and irretrievably impossible. Not that they had
the faintest suspicion of this. They were supremely


122
A Pledge of Friendship.
self-satisfied, and moved massively through life with
a firm conviction that they fulfilled all requirements.
Madame, with her frightfu. French, was as complacent
in a conversation with a duchess of the Faubourg as
was Monsieur, with his feeble and flatulent observa-
tions upon subjects of which he had no knowledge, in
a company of after-dinner smokers. It was impossi-
ble to exaggerate their preternatural idiocy. A bale
of cotton, suddenly introduced into polite society,
could have manifested no more stupendous lack of
resource than they. It was only when tempted with
the bait of gossip-most probably untrue—that they
rose heavily to the surface of the conversation instead
of floundering in its depths. Half the Colony detested
them, all of the Colony laughed at them, and none of
the Colony believed them. In short—they were Mon-
sieur and Madame Palffy. There was no more to be
said.
Had Margery been farther from him, curiously
enough she would have been far more readily ap-
proached in the manner which Andrew had planned.
He was far from comprehending that it was her vital
and intimate interest in him which showed her that
he would note all the defects of the deplorable frame
wherein he thus found her placed. The very fact
that they had known each other under different and
happier conditions forced her to assume the defen-
sive now that other circumstances were patent to
his eyes. She was intensely proud. There must be
no chance for him to pity her. So, she assumed a


A Pledge of Friendship.
123
gaiety which she was far from feeling, and sought in
the by-ways of banter a refuge from the broader and
more open road of surrender. On her side and on
his it was a more mature case of the painful embar-
rassment incidental to the early stages of a children's
party. They had played unrestrainedly together, as
it were; but now, in the artificial light of a society
strange to both of them, were stricken dumb.
From the strain of this baffling position Andrew
sought relief in the company of Mirabelle Tremon-
ceau. Here was no constraint, no unuttered solemni-
ties to come up choking into the throat. She was
very beautiful, very inconsequent, very gay; but the
same light insouciance which in Margery distressed
and humiliated him, because of the unsounded deeps
which lay below, attracted and amused him in Mira-
belle, by simple reason of its essential shallowness.
She was altogether different from any woman he had
ever known; but her novelty meant no more to him
than a part of that charmingly sparkling and intoxi-
cating wine of Paris of which he was learning to take
deep draughts. Never for an instant did it alter the
strength of the original purpose which had brought
him from America; but it went far toward lessening
the keen disappointment which Margery's apparent
disregard of that purpose caused him. In the latter's
presence he was exquisitely sensitive to the possible
significance of every word. He thought too much;
and the sombre current of these reflections too often
darkened the surface of conversation, turned her un-


124
A Pledge of Friendship.
easy and unnatural, and sent him away in a fit of
the blues. With Mirabelle, on the contrary, he never
thought at all. Since he had nothing to ask of her
beyond what she had already granted him—the priv-
ilege of her friendship and the fascination of her pres-
ence-he enjoyed these to the full. It was his con-
suming desire for another and more tender relation
with Margery that caused him to be blind to the prom-
ise of that which existed—almost to despise it.
Minutes grew into hours with unbelievable celerity
in the company of Mirabelle Tremonceau. With
something akin to intuition, all unsuspecting as he
was, he said nothing of her to Mrs. Carnby, to Mar-
gery, or even to Radwalader. At the first, there
was but one who could have told him whither he
was tending—but Thomas Radwalader had all-suffi-
cient reasons for holding his tongue. Yet, back of
his slight infatuation, there lay in Andrew's mind
a little sense of guilt. He could not have laid finger
upon the quality of his indiscretion, but he felt
indefinitely that all was not right. He recognized,
or seemed to recognize, in Mirabelle a fruit forbidden,
but told himself that it was a passing episode. He
was confident that the way would yet lie open for
the attainment of his heart's desire, and meanwhile
he would amuse himself and say nothing. Your
ostrich, with his silly head buried in the sand, is not
the only creature that fatuously underestimates both
its own desirability, and the perspicacity of those
interested in its movements. Twice, in the after-


A Pledge of Friendship.
125
noon, Andrew had driven with Mirabelie in the
Allée des Acacias. She gave him the seat at her
right, and people turned to look at the passing
victoria, as they had turned and looked on the after-
noon when she took his arm at the gate of Auteuil.
But better than driving was the time passed,
daily, in her apartment on the Avenue Henri Martin.
It was on the fifth floor, running the whole width of
the house, and with a broad balcony looking down
upon the rows of trees below. A corner of this
balcony was enclosed by gay awnings, and made
garden-like by azaleas and potted palms. Made-
moiselle Tremonceau had a great lounging chair, and
a table for books and bon-bons; and Andrew sprawled
at her feet, on red cushions, with his back against
the balcony rail, his hands linked behind his head,
and his long legs stretched out upon a Persian rug.
All this was the most unexpected feature of his new
life, and hence the most attractive. It was as far
as possible removed from a suggestion of metropol-
itan existence. May was already upon them, and
the air above the wide and shaded avenue was inde-
scribably soft and sweet. The roar of the city mounted
to their high coign only in a subdued murmur, as of
the sea at a distance. Birds came and went, twitter-
ing on the cornice above their heads. The sun
soaked through Andrew's serge and linen, and sent
pleasurable little thrills of warmth through the mus-
cles of his broad back. A faint perfume came to him
from the roses on the table. A delicious, indefinable


126
A Pledge of Friendship.
languor hung upon his surroundings. He was vaguely
reminded of afternoons at Newport and Nahant-
afternoons when everything smelt of new white
flannel, warm leaves, and the fox-terrier blinking and
quivering on his knee-when the only sounds were
the whine of insects in the vines, the rasping snore
of locusts in the nearest trees, and the snarl of passing
carriage-wheels on a Macadam driveway. He could
close his eyes and remember it all, and know that what
had been, was good. He could open them, and feel
that what was, was better!
As is always the case, when sympathy is pregnant
with prophecy, Andrew's acquaintance with Mira-
belle Tremonceau had grown into friendship before
he realized the change. At first he had made ex-
cuses for the frequency of his calls; but at the end
of three weeks the daily visit had come, in his eyes
as well as hers, to be a matter of course.
So it was that three o'clock would find him upon
her balcony, or in a cushioned corner of her divan;
and whereas, at the outset, he had been but one of
several men present, he discovered of a sudden not
only that for four days had he found her alone at
the accustomed hour, but that she refused herself to
other callers when the maître d'hotel brought in their
cards. He was not insensible to the compliment,
but it was one he had experienced before.
That afternoon, the maître d'hotel had not even
taken his name, but ushered him directly through
the salon to the Venetian blind at the window, and


A Pledge of Friendship. 127
lifted this to let him pass out upon the balcony.
Mademoiselle Tremonceau was in her great chair,
with a yellow-covered novel perched, tent-like, upon
her knee. She smiled as he came out, and gave him
her hand. Andrew bent over and kissed it, before
taking his seat. It was a trick of the Frenchmen
he had met at Mrs. Carnby's one of the things which
are courtesies in Paris, and impertinence elsewhere.
The girl's hand lay for an instant against his lips.
It was as soft as satin, and smelt faintly of orris, and
her fingers closed on his with a little friendly pressure.
“You were expecting me?” he asked, as he dropped
upon the cushions beside her.
“I'd given you up,” she answered. “It's ten
minutes past three.”
"Am I as regular as that?” he laughed. “I was
lunching at my friend Mrs. Carnby's, and we didn't
get up from table till long after two. I came directly
over.”
Mirabelle looked away across the house-tops with
a little frown.
“What is it?" asked Andrew. “Anything gone
wrong?”
“Oh no! My thoughts wouldn't be a bargain at
a penny. Tell me—have you seen Mr. Radwalader
lately?”
“Last night. We went to the Français."
“You continue to like him?"
"I think we should never be intimate friends.
Apart from the difference in our ages and opinions,


A Pledge of Friendship.
129
“I wonder," said Mirabelle slowly, “if I'm one of
the happy few.”
“Decidedly!” said Andrew heartily.
“Do you mean,” she continued, “that you care for
me as you care for these other friends, that you-
that you respect me, and that you'd defend me—if
necessary?”
“Decidedly, decidedly! I hope I've proved the
first two, and I hope there'll never be any cause to
prove the last. But if there is, you may count on
me."
Mirabelle looked at him for a moment, and then
leaned back and closed her eyes.
“Thank you,” she said. “You don't know what
that means to me."
“Why, how serious you are over it!" laughed An-
drew. “Does it seem to you so very wonderful? To
me it appears to be the most natural thing in the
world.”
“Ah, to you, perhaps,” answered Mirabelle. “But
to me-yes, it does seem very wonderful. You see
I've never had it said to me before!”


CHAPTER VIII.
A PARLEY AND A PRAYER.
May was close upon the heels of June before there
came a change; but one afternoon, as Andrew paused
in his playing, an atmosphere of new intimacy seemed
to touch him. He had been alone with Margery for
half an hour, and something in the music-or was it
only fancy?-told him that her thoughts were occu-
pied with him. She had greeted him with a little air
of weariness—but not unkindly—and, as he took
her hand, she looked at him with some indefinite
question in her eyes. The impression made by this
gained on him as they talked, and, more strongly, as
he played. Once or twice he was upon the point of
turning abruptly and seeking the clue; but he had
been so long perplexed, so long uncertain, that he
hesitated still. If only she would give him an open-
ing, if she would but come, as she had often come at
Beverly, to lean above him, humming the words of
some song into which he had unconsciously drifted,
then had he had the courage to turn, to grip her hands,
to ask her ....
“I wonder if we would, even if we could,” she said.
“What?” asked Andrew.
130


A Parley and a Prayer.
131
“How should you be expected to know? I've been
a thousand miles away—thinking of Omar. I mean
whether we would 'shatter it to bits, and then re-
mould it nearer to the heart's desire.' ”.
Andrew swung round on the piano-stool, slowly
chafing his palms together. He did not dare trust
himself to look at her. For the first time since they
had met in Paris, he caught an echo of the old life in
her tone.
“I wonder if we could, even if we would,” he
answered. “I think so—perhaps. Whatever set you
thinking about that?”
“I'm sure I don't know,” said Margery, with a
short laugh. “Sometimes, in my own little way, I'm
quite a philosopher! I was just thinking that if any
of us were given the chance to change things every-
thing-shatter 'the sorry scheme of things' into bits,
as Omar says—we should perhaps make an equally
sorry bungle of the task of reconstruction. We're
always saying 'If!’; but when it actually came to the
point, do you suppose we'd really want anything to
be different?”
Again that singular, appealing query in her eyes.
It was the old Margery at last, simple, serious, and
candid. There was a responsive light in Andrew's
face as he replied:
“Some things, no doubt. I don't think I could
suggest a desirable change in you—except one. Will
you let me tell you?”
Margery nodded.


A Parley and a Prayer.
133
that you're going to say music, or flowers, or the play.
Instead, you cut out remorselessly everything which
one naturally associates with a woman's way of
amusing herself, and give me an answer which sounds
as if it came from one of the lads at St. Paul's. That's
the way they used to talk, exactly. It was all rush,
vim, get-up-and-get-out, with them. If you know
what I mean, they breathed so hard and talked so
fast that it always seemed to me as if they'd just
come in from running in a high wind."
“Yes," agreed Margery, with a nod. “I know.
That's what I like. That's what I call the glad-to-be-
alive atmosphere."
There fell a little silence. Andrew's fine eyes were
tiptoeing from point to point of the big, over-fur-
nished salon with a kind of amazed disgust. He
had not known that there were so many hideous
things in the world. Madame Palffy worshipped at the
twin altars of velvet and gilt paint. Much of what
now encumbered the room and smote the eye had
been picked up in Venice, at the time of her ponderous
honeymoon with the apoplectic Palffy. That was
twenty years before, when the calle back of the
Piazza were filled with those incalculable treasures
of tapestry, carved wood, and ivory; now in the
palazzi of rich Venetians—if, indeed, they are not in
Cluny. But the Palffys were as stupid as they were
pompous. They moved heavily round and round
the Piazza, and furnished their prospective salon out
of the front windows of smirking charlatans. The


134
A Parley and a Prayer.
irreparable and damning results of their selection, as
Andrew now surveyed them, had been modified-or,
more exactly, exaggerated-by the subsequent pur-
chases of two decades in the flamboyant bazars of
the Friedrichs Strasse, in the "art departments” of
the big shops on Regent and Oxford streets, and in
the degenerate galleries of the Palais Royal. Madame
Palffy's idea of statuary was a white marble grey-
hound asleep upon a cushion of red sarrancolin: and
her taste ran to Bohemian glass, to onyx vases, and
to plaques with broad borders of patterned gilt,
enclosing heads of simpering Neapolitan girls—these
last to hang upon the wall. There were spindle-legged
chairs, with backs like golden harps and seats of
brocade wherein salmon-pink and turquoise-blue
wrestled for supremacy; and in front of the huge
mantel (logically decked with a red lambrequin) there
was a velvet ottoman in the form of a mushroom,
whereon, when Monsieur Palffy sat, his resemblance
to a suffocating frog became absolutely startling.
The rest of the furniture was so massive as to suggest
that it could have been moved to its present position
by no agency less puissant than a glacier; and, for
the most part, the upholstery was tufted, and so
tightly stuffed that one slid about on the chairs and
sofas as if they had been varnished. The room con-
tained four times as much of everything as was
appropriate or even decent, and this gave all the
furnishings the air of being on exhibition and for sale.
One's imagination, however, was not apt to embrace


A Parley and a Prayer.
135
the possibility, under any conceivable circum-
stances, of voluntary purchase.
Presently Andrew's eyes came back to Margery. It
was evident that she had been watching him: for she
smiled whimsically.
“Well?” she suggested.
“Can you guess what I was thinking?” he asked,
with a slightly embarrassed laugh.
"In part, I imagine," said Margery. “Wasn't it
something like this: that, as a matter of fact, I have
pretty well shattered my scheme of things to bits,and
remoulded it—and that the new arrangement is not
altogether a success?”.
“I don't seem to see you in these surroundings,” re-
turned Andrew evasively. “At Beverly you seemed
to 'belong': you were all of a piece with the life.
Here—well, it's different. That was why I asked
you that question, and that was why I thought there
was something about you which I wanted to see
changed-or restored. You know we used to be very
open with each other, very good friends in every sense
of the word; but now something's come between us.
I've felt it all along; and I thought perhaps it was
that you'd stopped caring for the things that used to
mean most to you—that new interests, and perhaps
your success and the compliments that people pay
you, had cut the old ties, and that you had new ideas
and ideals. I've felt-I've felt, Miss Palffy, that I'd
forfeited even the small place I had in your life.
You've been holding me at a distance, haven't you?


136
A Parley and a Prayer.
I've thought so. I asked you that question to see if
I was right or wrong, and to my surprise I find that
you are apparently the same as ever. You still love
all that made the sympathy between us. Well, then,
the fault must be in me. Tell me: what have I done,
that you treat me almost as a stranger?”
“I'm sorry, very sorry,” said Margery earnestly.
“If I've given you any such impression, believe me,
it was quite without reason or even intention. I've
always looked upon you as one of my best friends.
Surely, I've not been holding you at a distance: that
must have been a fancy of yours. You must know
that you're always welcome here, that I'm always
glad to see you. Please believe that."
But the little restraint was there!
“I can't quite explain what I mean,” said Andrew.
“You see, Paris is a queer sort of place. It upsets
all one's notions. There's so much that's strange and
interesting and new all about us that we're apt to
find the old things growing dim. I know, in my own
case, that I'm wiser for these few weeks, and per-
haps ”—he laughed unevenly—"sadder! Forgive me
for thinking that it might have been the same with
you. This big city is so full of fascinations of one
sort or another, that one can hardly be blamed if one
is distracted at the first. Until I' saw you that Sun-
day at Mrs. Carnby's, I'd never realized what a differ-
ence a few months might make. Your voice brought
back-a lot! I forgot that it was all in the past, that
we couldn't pick up things as they were in Beverly


A Parley and a Prayer.
137
-the sailing, the bathing, the horseback rides, the
golf, and all the rest. Those months had made you
a woman and me a man. Much that we used to do
and say was done and said and finished with, forever.
But I did hope that the spirit of the thing would
remain; that we'd 'grown parallel to each other,' as
Mrs. Carnby says, and that we'd be nearer together,
instead of farther apart, for the separation. But no!
It sn't a fancy on my part. There's something
changed. Do you remember Wordsworth? “There
hath passed away a glory from the earth'-and, Miss
Palffy, there has, there has ! I know I'm not wrong-
something's come between us, and that something is
just what I've said-Paris! Isn't it?”
“Yes!” she answered, with her eyes on his.
But Andrew Vane, the blind, did not understand.
Margery rose, almost with a shudder, crossed the
room, and stood at the window opening upon the
balcony. Below, a whirling stream of cabs, bound in
from Longchamp, split around the island in the cen-
tre of the place, merged again upon the opposite side,
and went rocking and rattling on, up the Avenue
Victor Hugo, toward the Arc. In curious contrast
to this continuous and flippant clatter, the harsh bell
of St. Honoré d’Eylau was striking six.
"I hate it!” said the girl. “I couldn't attempt to
make you understand how I loathe Paris, and how
home-sick for America I am. Here I can't express
it, but the shallowness and the insincerity and the-
the immorality of these people gets into one's blood.


138
A Parley and a Prayer.
It's all pretence, sham, and heartless, cynical impur-
ity. At first I didn't see it, I didn't understand. I
was dazzled with the lights, and the fountains, and
the gaiety. I was lonely-yes: but when I remem-
bered all there was to see and do, remembered that
here is the best in art and music and what not, I
thought I should be happy. But it's the beauty of
a tropical swamp, Mr. Vane—there's poison in the
air! You wouldn't think I'd feel that, would you?-
but I do. It's all around me. I can't shut it out.
I meet it here, there—everywhere. It sickens me.
It chokes me. It's just as if something that I couldn't
fight against, that was bound to conquer me in the
end, struggle as I might, were trying to rob me of all
my beliefs, and ideals, and trust in the honour of men
and the goodness of women. I hate it! I'd give-
oh, what wouldn't I give!—to be back in America,
on the good, clean North Shore, where things—where
things are straight !”.
She turned upon him suddenly, her eyes full of a
strange trouble that was almost fear.
“Do you see?” she added.
“Yes,” said Andrew slowly. “I think I see.
That's what I meant; that's how I thought you
would feel. I'm sorry. You're right, of course:
Paris is no place for a girl-like you."
“It's no place for any one who loves what's clean
and decent,” said Margery hotly. “It's no place
for a man! I'm not supposed to know, am I, about
such things? And perhaps I don't. I couldn't tell


A Parley and a Prayer.
139
you exactly what I mean, even if I wanted to. But
I feel it here.” She laid her hand upon her throat.
“I feel the danger that I can't describe. It strangles
me. I'm afraid. I'm afraid for its influence upon
any one for whom-for whom I might care. I'm
afraid for myself. It's nothing definite, you see, and
that's just where it seems to me to be so dangerous.
Do you remember when we were reading Tennyson
at Beverly—“The Lotus Eaters'?”.
She paused for an instant, and then, looking away
from him again, recited the lines:
""For surely now our household hearths are cold:
Our sons inherit us: our looks are strange:
And we should come like ghosts to trouble joy.
Or else the island princes over-bold
Have eat our substance, and the minstrel sings,
Before them of the ten years' war in Troy,
And our great deeds, as half-forgotten things,
Is there confusion in the little isle?
Let what is broken so remain.'"
There was something in her voice more eloquent
than the music of the words. Andrew came forward
a step, as if he would have touched her; but she
looked up and met his eyes.
“And you're afraid—?” he began.
“I'm afraid," she answered, “that we've come to
a land where it seems always afternoon; and that if
we don't take heed, my friend, we may not fight a
good fight, we may not keep the faith.”
She made an odd little weary gesture.


140
A Parley and a Prayer.
“Will you play some of the ‘Garden' now?" she
asked. “I think I should like it. I'm just the least
bit blue."
Andrew hesitated, but the words he wanted would
not come. He turned back to the piano, fingered the
music doubtfully for a moment, and then began to
play. There was no need to voice the words. They
both knew them well, and they fitted, as, somehow,
the verse of Omar has a knack of doing.
"Strange, is it not, that of the myriads who
Before us passed the Door of Darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the Road
Which to discover we must travel too."
“I'm glad I know you,” he broke in impulsively,
with his fingers on the keys. “You're a good friend."
Margery made no reply.
“My grandfather, who's the best old chap in all
the world,” continued Andrew, playing the' following
crescendo softly, “is the only other person of whom
I can feel that as you make me feel it. He always
calls me ‘Andy. I rather like that silly little name.
I wonder—"
He swung round, facing her.
“I think we're both of us a trifle homesick, Miss
Palffy. I wonder if you'd mind—calling me—that?"
He looked down for a second, and in that second
Margery Palffy moistened her lips. When she spoke,
it seemed to her that her voice sounded harsh and dry.
“I shall be very glad, if you wish it-Andy."
“Thank you. And 1—?”


A Parley and a Prayer.
141
“If you like-yes. After all, as you say, we're
friends and a little homesick.”
“Thank you, Margery.”
Andrew resumed his playing, turning a few pages.
“Ah, Love, could you and I with Fate conspire
To grasp the sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits and then
Remould it nearer to the Heart's Desire?”
Behind him, the girl, unseen, unheard, was whisper-
ing a word for every chord. Once, her hand went out
toward the smooth, close-cropped head, bent in eager
attention above the score.
“Ah, Love!” said the music.
“Ah, love!” whispered Margery Palffy.
“What a lot there is in this!” exclaimed Andrew,
crashing into two sharps.
“Yes.”
Once more, to Margery, her voice seemed cold and
hard.
“The good old days at Beverly—what?” said
Andrew.
“Yes.”
Andrew dawdled with the andante.
“Ah, Moon of my Delight, that knows no wano"
“I must be going,” he said, and rose to take her
hand.
"I wonder," he added, retaining it, "if you know
that I would give the world to ask you just one
question and be certain of the answer?”


142
A Parley and a Prayer.
“Not now,” said Margery steadily, "not now,
please. I have many things to think of. Listen.
I'm going down to Poissy—to the Carnbys', to-
morrow. I know they mean to ask you over Sunday;
and then, my friend, you can ask me—whatever you
will. No, please. Good-by.”
From the window she watched him stroll across
to the little island in the centre of the place, there
pause to await the coming of the tram, and then,
mounting to the impériale, light a cigarette. Pres-
ently, with hee-hawing of its donkey-horn, the tram
swerved into the avenue again.
The girl leaned her cheek against the heavy cur-
tain. The tram dwindled into the distance—toward
the Arc—toward the brilliant centre of Paris—toward
danger! Then, in a still small voice, she prayed:
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those
who—who trespass against us. And lead us-lead
us not into temptation: but deliver us from evil ..."


CHAPTER IX.
THE WOMAN IN THE CASE.
In the sun-spangled stretch of shade under the
acacias of the Villa Rossignol four drank coffee and
talked of Andrew Vane. Mrs. Carnby had remained
in Paris three weeks beyond her usual time; first,
because the weather had been no more than bearably
warm; and second, because the decorator who was
renovating the salon of the villa had been somewhat
more than bearably slow. The first of June, however,
found her at Poissy, and the Villa Rossignol once
more prepared to receive and discharge a continu-
ally varying stream of guests with the regularity of
a self-feeding press.
There was something very admirable about the
hospitality of the Villa Rossignol. In the first place,
there were fourteen bedrooms; and in the second,
a hostess who never made plans for her guests; and
in the third, no fixed hour for first breakfast. People
came by unexpected trains, and, finding every one
out, ordered, as the sex might be, whiskey and cigar-
ettes, or tea and a powder-box, and were served, and,
in general, made themselves at home, till Mrs. Carnby
143


144
The Woman in the Case.
returned from driving or canoeing. And seemingly
there was always a saddle-horse at liberty in the
stable, no matter how many might be riding; and
a vacant corner to be found, inside or out, without
regard to the number of tête-à-têtes already in progress.
In a word, Mrs. Carnby knew to perfection how lais-
ser aller and whom laisser venir—the which, all said
and done, appear to be the qualities most admirable
in an out-of-town hostess, by very reason, perhaps,
of their being the least common.
So, at all events, thought Mrs. Carnby's three guests
as they took their coffee-cups from her and, sipping
the first over-hot spoonfuls cautiously, shuffled a
few topics of conversation, in an attempt to find one
which invited elaboration. They were consumedly
comfortable: for breakfast had been served on the
stroke of one, with five members of the house-party
absent. The remaining three were grateful for a
punctuality which was not concerned with the great-
est good of the greatest number.
“It was so wise of you not to wait breakfast,
Louisa,” observed Mrs. Ratchett, and her voice re-
sembled as much as anything the purr of a particularly
well-bred kitten; "I was as hollow as a shell an hour
ago. By this time I'd infallibly have caved in."
“It's nothing short of imbecile to wait for people
who're out in an automobile,” replied Mrs. Carnby.
“Whenever any one brings a machine down here, and
takes some of my guests to ride, I have all the clocks
in the house regulated, and order Armand to announce


The Woman in the Case.
145
Ww.
breakfast and dinner on the stroke of the hour. It's
only just to the sane people who may happen to be
visiting me.”
"In the present instance," put in Radwalader, “it's
to be supposed that the others will have sense enough
to get breakfast at the spot nearest available to that
of the breakdown.”
“The breakdown? You take a deal for granted,
Radwalader," said Gerald Kennedy, gazing up into
the shifting foliage of the acacias.
“I, too, have been en auto,” answered Radwalader,
"and am familiar with the inevitable feature of a run.
At this moment Andrew Vane is in his shirt-sleeves
and a pitiful perspiration, violently turning a crank
and talking under his breath. Or else he's flat on his
back, under the car, with only his feet sticking out.
Can you believe otherwise, after the evidence of those
five vacant chairs?"
“How sensible we are, we four!” smiled Mrs. Rat-
chett.
“Ours is the conservatism of the lilies of the field,”
supplemented Radwalader. “We spin not, therefore
neither do we toil.”
“I fancy Vane is regretting having left his chauf-
feur to breakfast in the servant's hall,” said Kennedy.
“And I, that, if anything, Vane is the better
mechanician of the two,” said Radwalader. “The
boy's aptitude is really quite astounding. He learned
that machine in an hour, Pivert tells me, and now
knows it better than Pivert himself. He's only rent-


146
The Woman in the Case.
ing it by the week, you know; but old Mr. Sterling
will be called upon for the purchase-price, if I'm not
mistaken, before he's a month older.”
“One might be justified in remarking,” said Mrs.
Ratchett,“that Andrew Vane is—er-going it—don't
you think?—in a fashion little short of precipitous.”
“Wein-Weib—Gesang,” murmured Kennedy, with
his eyes in the trees.
“I know he sings," commented Mrs. Carnby," but
I hadn't heard of his drinking."
“Or, of his—oh yes I had, too!” Mrs. Ratchett
caught herself up abruptly, with a suspicion of a
blush. “Some one told me he was fast going to the
-er-"
“Cats?” suggested Kennedy amiably.
“Gerald, you're indecent!” exclaimed Mrs. Carnby.
“And remember, I won't listen to gossip about my
guests-except Madame Palffy. For the moment, Mr.
Vane's reputation is under the protection of mine."
Radwalader leaned back in his chair, and yawned
without shame,
“Vane is developing, that's all,” he said. “It's
a thing rather to be desired than otherwise. Paris
does such a deal for the raw American, in the way
of opening his eyes. Vane is just beginning to
'learn how.' I've no doubt that in Boston he ate
his lettuce with sugar and vinegar, and thought it
effeminate to have his nails manicured. Now that
he's acquiring the art of living, pray make some
allowance for the crude colouring of his exquisses. The


The Woman in the Case.
147
finished picture will be a creation of marked merit,
I warrant you. I've seen a good bit of Vane, and
he can be trusted to take care of himself.”
“The question is whether he can be trusted to
have other people take care of him," said Mrs.
Ratchett viciously, looking at Radwalader over
the edge of her coffee-cup.
“I don't think you dangerous, dear lady."
“Radwalader is always so unselfish,” said Mrs.
Carnby. “He escapes embarrassing situations by
walking out on other people's heads.”
“I deserved it,” laughed Mrs. Ratchett. “But I
really wasn't thinking of you, Radwalader. I
heard there was a lady in the case of Mr. Vane."
“I credit him with more originality,” said Rad-
walader. "No, believe me, the facts are no more
than must be expected in a young man who has
been tied to apron-strings for an appreciable number
of years."
“Not that old Mr. Sterling wears aprons,” observed
Mrs. Carnby.
“And not that I was referring to old Mr. Sterling.
I had in mind the very estimable United States of
America, which wash so much dirty linen in public
that it would be something more than surprising if
there were not a supply of particularly starchy
apron-strings continually on hand-in Boston in
particular. Vane has been taught her creed, which
is to make a necessity of virtue. His daily fare has
been a rechauffé of worn-out fallacies. I haven't a


14.8
The Woman in the Case.
doubt but what he's been instructed that an honest
man is the noblest work of God, and I've no idea
that he's ever understood till now that vice is its
own reward, or how immaterial it is whether a
thing is gold or not, so long as it really glitters."
He turned a tiny glass of fine into his coffee, and
continued, stirring it thoughtfully:
“What happens when you turn your stable-bred
colt out to pasture for the first time? Doesn't he
kick up his heels and snort? Assuredly. And we
don't take that as an evidence, do we, that, all in
good time, he won't run neck and neck with the best
of them, and perhaps carry off the Grand Prix? I
always believe in cultivating charity, if only for
one comfortable quality attributed to it. Let's be
charitable in the case of Vane. He's only kicking
up his heels and snorting.”
"If you're going to assume the mantle of charity
with the view of covering the multitude of your
sins—!” suggested Mrs. Carnby.
“We'll have to send it to the tailor's to have the
tucks let out,” said Radwalader, with infinite good
humour. “Exactly, dear friend. Forgive me my
little sermon. You see, the physician doesn't preach,
as a rule, and I'm afraid the priest is equally unapt
to practise. You must pardon me my shortcomings.
I can't very well be all things to all men-much less
to one woman. And, while we are on this subject, it
may interest you to know that Vane has chosen his
profession: he's going to be a novelist.”


The Woman in the Case.
149
“Do you mean that he's going to write novels?”'
asked Mrs. Carnby.
Radwalader appeared to reflect.
“No," he said presently. “I think I mean that
he's going to be a novelist. I stand open to correc-
tion,” he added, with an affected air of humility.
“By no means," answered Mrs. Carnby. “Proba-
bly I don't understand. It sounds to me a good
deal like saying he's going to be a German Emperor
or a Pope—that's all.”
“Nevertheless, I'm quite sure that's what I mean.
He has read me several chapters of a novel upon
which he's at work, and I must say that they dis-
play a knowledge of women which, in a man of his
years, is nothing less than remarkable.”
“That's not impossible," put in Mrs. Carnby. “I
had a letter, only yesterday, from a woman who
knows him, and it appears that he's as good as
engaged to a very charming young American.”
“However,” said Radwalader mildly, “I think
the knowledge of women displayed by Vane in the
chapters he was so good as to read to me is hardly
such as one would expect to deduce from the fact
that he is as good as engaged to a very charming
young American.”
“His choice of a profession must be a very recent
resolution," said Mrs. Carnby. “To be sure, until
to-day, I haven't seen him in a week.”
“An eternity in Paris,” said Kennedy. “Extra-
ordinary people, the Americans! Not content with


The Woman in the Case.
151
two to beat about the bush in this fashion?" she
broke out, after a moment. “You know perfectly
what I mean, Louisa—what one always means, in
short, by 'a woman in the case'!” a
“Yes, of course I know," agreed Mrs. Carnby
frankly. “The women one speaks of as being in
cases are always more or less disreputable. Well,
there is a woman in the case of our young friend-
and a very engaging woman at that.”
"Engaging appears to be a habit with Mr. Vane's
flames,” said Mrs. Ratchett. “It's a little hard on
the one in America. And pray where did you see
her?—the other, I mean.”
“Oh, here, there, and everywhere. Vane made the
mistake, at first, of trying to carry on his little affair
sub rosa. People are always seen when they try not
to be, you know. Lately, I believe, they've been
going about quite openly, so it has been almost
impossible to keep track of them.”
“But how do you arrive at the conclusion that
the lady—"
“Isn't respectable? I've walked up the Opéra
Comique stairway behind her, my dear, and there
was no mistaking the social grade of her petticoats.
They were entirely beyond a reputable woman's
means. And you're quite right. It's downright
hard on the other one. She's like my own daughter
-Margery Palffy is.”
“Margery Palffy! Why, how very surprising! I
thought you said the girl was in America."


152
The Woman in the Case.
“No-I said 'a charming young American.' And
it's really not surprising at all. My letter was from
Mrs. Johnny Barrister-Madame Palffy's sister-in-law,
you know. She always took charge of Margery during
the summer vacations. They've a big house at Bev-
erly, which I've never seen, and heaps of money.
That's how Mr. Vane met Margery, I suppose: he
seems to have had the run of the house. Molly
Barrister mentioned him casually, but quite as if
the engagement were a matter of course-quite as if
he had come over here on purpose to see Margery.”
“The lady with-er—the petticoats," suggested
Mrs. Ratchett, "strikes me in the light of evidence
to the contrary.”.
“One can never tell,” said Mrs. Carnby. “He
wouldn't be the first man to drive tandem. There's
apt to be a leader, you see—a high-stepping, showy
thoroughbred, that attracts all the attention, and
does none of the work: and then, an earnest, faithful
little cob, as wheeler. After a time, a man gets
tired of the frills and furbelows, sells the leader to
break some other fellow's neck, and settles down.
Then you'll see the earnest little wheeler as much
appreciated as may be, and dragging the domestic
tilbury along at a rational, bourgeois rate of speed.
One can never tell, my dear.”
“All that,” observed Mrs. Ratchett dryly, “doesn't :
ring true, Louisa, and—what's worse—it isn't even
clever. You're fond of Margery Palffy.”
“It's froth!” exclaimed Mrs. Carnby, “the kind


154
ni
The Woman in the Case.
finishes a sentence," plunged abruptly into one of her
disconnected prolations, addressing herself to Mrs.
Carnby:
“Of course, we are most reprehensibly late—but
you see—I don't understand about these things-
Mr. Vane said—it's so difficult to comprehend-
but it was something that the gravel-or was it the
dust?-at all events—and I always say that meals
above all things—but then accidents are simply
bound to occur—I do hope you didn't wait—and it
was delightful—my first experience—but of course
we had to—there was no telling how long—though
fortunately—and I'm quite fagged out, dear Mrs.
Carnby—as I say to Jack—when one is young, you
know—but when one gets to fifty-four—though I
don't complain-I think one should never regret-
and I enjoyed the drive-or does one say ride?-
it's so difficult ”
She paused for breath, and Madame Palffy took
up the tale.
“It was fascinating, fascinating,” she said,
"and most exciting. I reached St. Germain quite
en déshabille. Mr. Vane kindly took Margery on
the front seat. Mrs. Lister and I sat behind, and
Mr. Lister on the floor, with his feet on the step.
It was flying.”
And she waved her fat hands, and sank ponder-
ously into a chair.
“My most humble apologies, Mrs. Carnby,” said
Andrew. “It couldn't really be helped, and I pro-


The Woman in the Case.
155
vided my crew with sufficient nourishment to keep
them alive till dinner.”
“You're forgiven," replied his hostess, “only don't
do it again. After all,” she added, looking Andrew
wickedly in the eye, "your crime, like dear old Sir
Peter Teazle’s, carried its punishment along with it."
“Now I come to think of it,” observed young
Lister vacuously, “she's his second wife, Madame
Palffy—or is she? Do you know the Flament-
Gontouts, Mrs. Carnby? No? They live up in the
Monceau quarter. She was an American, a Boston-
ian. Her maiden name was Fayne-sister of Clarence
Fayne, the painter, who married Mary Clemin, the
daughter of Anthony Clemin, who used to own the
Parker House”
He did not appear to be addressing any one in par-
ticular, which was fortunate, as no one had ever been
known to vouchsafe him the compliment of atten-
tion. He spoke with as much variety of expression
as an accountant making comparisons, and invariably,
as now, upon the subject of birth, marriage, and
death-a hopelessly dull young man.
"He write plays?” said Mrs. Carnby, when the
purpose of his presence in Paris had been explained
to her. “Never! But he may have written the
thirty-sixth chapter of Genesis.”
“I'm afraid that's quite cold,” said Mrs. Carnby,
as, in compliance with a request, she handed Andrew
a cup of coffee, “but it's your own fault.”
“Never mind,” he laughed. “Coffee is one of the


156
The Woman in the Case.
few things which are more or less good all the way
up and down the thermometer from thirty-two to
two hundred and twelve.”
Mrs. Carnby looked at him critically, as he stirred,
and told herself that he came up strikingly well to
many standards. His hair was neither too short nor
too long, he was perfectly shaved, his stock was
tied to a nicety, his clothes were on friendly terms
with him, his hands were excellently well-kept-
and an hour before he had been tinkering with a
motor!—and his teeth were even and studiously cared
for. He was an aristocrat, a patrician, from his
head to his heels—and it would be a pity, thought
Mrs. Carnby, to have him go the way of what Mrs.
Ratchett had called “the rest of them”—the way of
Tommy Clavercil, for example, whose late affaire
had been so crudely mismanaged that he was no
longer invited to the best tables in the Colony, or
the way of Radwalader's young acquaintance,
Ernest Baxter, who ended up in the Morgue. And
then there was Margery-
Mrs. Carnby's eyes came round to her, instantly
narrowed, and dropped. There are moments when
the souls of us come to their twin windows, and look
out, and shout our secrets to the veriest passer-by.
Margery was looking at Andrew Vane—and Mrs.
Carnby saw !
“Good Lord!” she thought. “Then at least half
of the story's true—and I'm afraid that's about
fifty per cent. too much!”


158
The Woman in the Case.
Mrs. Carnby leaned back in her seat, drawing the
dust-cloth smoothly over her knees.
“Don't you think,” she said deliberately, “that
you had better tell me your real reason for wanting
to go back to St. Germain-and wanting to go back
alone?"


CHAPTER X.
THE FAIRY GODMOTHER.
THEY were mounting the steep incline of the
Route de Poissy before Andrew replied. He had
been staring fixedly ahead, absorbed apparently in
the business of guiding the automobile around the
sharp turns of the side streets, before they struck
the wide main road. It was almost as if he had not
heard the remark at all; but Mrs. Carnby knew
better. And she was one of the discerning persons
who never build els on telling observations. Despite
the tension with which the following pause was
instinct, it was Andrew, not she, who first spoke.
“That was a very singular speech, Mrs. Carnby.”
“On fait ce qu'on peut," said Mrs. Carnby. “You're
a very singular young man, Mr. Vane."
"I have my failings, of course,” said Andrew, a
trifle coolly. “I'm only human, you know. We're
all of us that.”
“Unfortunately, you're not only human,' my
dear young friend; you're masculine as well. And
we're not all of us that, thank Heaven!”
“Aren't we talking a little blindly?” suggested An-
drew.
159


160
The Fairy Godmother.
“Yes, possibly,” agreed his companion, “but
some things aren't easy to say. Do you remember
that when one of the old prophets undertook to haul a
monarch over the coals for his misdeeds, he would
always begin with a parable? I think, in this
instance, I shall follow the established precedent.”
“I was afraid you were going to begin by saying
you were old enough to be my mother," retorted
Andrew, with a faint smile.
"I always skip unimportant details,” said Mrs.
Carnby. She observed with satisfaction that, with-
out increasing the speed at the top of the incline,
Andrew had turned from the direct route to St.
Germain into one of the forest by-roads. Evi-
dently he was in no haste to curtail the conversation.
“I'm waiting,” he observed presently.
“Where I used to spend my summers, on the
South Shore," said Mrs. Carnby, with her eyes on
the interlacing foliage overhead, “it was the custom
of the natives to make collections of marine trophies
from the beach and the rock-pools, and work upon
them sundry transformations, with an aim to alleged
artistic effectiveness. They glued the smaller shells
and coloured pebbles on boxes and mirror-frames;
and painted landscapes on the pearl finish of the
larger mussels; and tied baby-ribbon around the sea-
urchin shells; and gilded the dried starfish. You
know what I mean—the kind of thing that comes
under the head of 'A Present from North Scituate'
or 'Souvenir of Nantasket Beach. But you may,


The Fairy Godmother.
161
perhaps, have remarked the appearance of one and
all of these objects while they were as yet where
nature was pleased to put them on the sand,
that is, or in the tidal pools. Do you remember the
sheen of the pebbles, the soft pinks and grays of the
starfish? Is there anything comparable to these,
in the artistic combination of all the gilt paint and
baby-ribbon in the world? It seems to suggest, as a
possibility, that nature knows best; and that in
lacking the simple touch of sea-water they lack the
one thing which ever made them beautiful at all. It
opens up a whole tragedy in the phrase 'out of one's
element.' That's my parable.”
“You'll remember,” said Andrew, falling in with
her whim, “that the transgressing monarch rarely
understood what the prophet was driving at in his
parable. I, too, must follow precedent."
“Shall I speak plainly?" asked Mrs. Carnby,
laying her hand for an instant on his arm.
“Very, please. There seems to be something
rather serious back of all this."
“Eh bien ! You're a young man, Andrew Vane,
to whom fate has been uncommonly civil. Your
family is rather exceptionally good, on-er—on both
sides. Your means are, or will be, some day, almost
uncomfortably ample. You're more than passably
good-looking, and you're surprisingly clever. Your
health is magnificent, and, finally, nature chose
America as your environment.”
“A mixed blessing, that last!”


162
The Fairy Godmother.
“Five words, with Thomas Radwalader in every
letter!” said Mrs. Carnby. “I should think you'd
find the role of phonograph rather unsatisfying.”
“I thought you liked him,” said Andrew, flushing.
“And I like the obelisk!” nodded Mrs. Carnby;“but
that doesn't necessarily imply that I should like half
a hundred tin facsimiles set up in its immediate
vicinity, and making the Place de la Concorde look
like a colossal asparagus-bed! There are only three
ways in which a man can be distinguished, nowa-
days. He must be unimaginably rich, unspeakably
immoral, or unquestionably original. You're not
the first, as yet, and you've just proved that you're
not the last.”
"I'm not the second, I hope?"
Mrs. Carnby pursed her lips, and wrinkled her
forehead.
“Perhaps not unspeakably immoral,” she said,
“but immoral-yes, I think you're that. Of course,
there are many different conceptions of immorality,
and mine may be unique. Let us come back to my
parable. What I mean is this. You were born
with every natural good fortune, and your breeding
and education secure to you every social advantage
which one could possibly desire. You've been
placed, like the sea-urchins or the starfish, in a
situation preëminently befitting you. You're Ameri-
can in every detail of your sane, clean make-up, my
friend, and you've been given America, the sanest,
cleanest country on God's globe, in which to develop


The Fairy Godmother.
165
he chose to do. The intrusion of intrigue and dissi
pation into these forest fastnesses was hideously
incongruous.
“There's cruelty in what you have said, but I can
see that it's not wanton cruelty, and that there's
kindness as well.”
Andrew was speaking slowly, thoughtfully; almost,
thought Mrs. Carnby to herself, as if he, too, had
been touched by the softening sympathy of the
forest. But she shook off the mood which had been
stealing over her, as being wholly inadequate to the
demand upon her fund of resource. What was
needed, far from being the influence of elemental
nature, was the keenest, if most worldly, diplomacy
of which she was mistress. She straightened herself,
and began to put on her gloves, working the fingers
with the patient care of one who understood that,
with a glove above all things, it is le premier pas qui
coute. Inwardly she was keying taut the strings
of her self-possession. She realized that emotion
would be as fatal to her purpose as would sheer
frivolity.
“Under your words,” continued Andrew, “I can
see that there must lie a more or less intimate
knowledge of many things which we have never
mentioned-many things which I did not suppose
you would ever—"
"Find out? You really are young, aren't you?
Why, my dear Mr. Vane, any given woman of average
intelligence can find out whatever she chooses about


166
The Fairy Godmother.
any given man, provided always she hasn't the fatal
handicap of being in love with him. Not that I've
been spying upon you, understand. It's hardly a
matter of vital concern to me if you go completely
to the dogs; but Margery would probably give her
heart's blood to hold you back. Therefore, people
iell me all the facts, and keep her in total ignorance.
That's the way of the world. Why, my good sir, I
could probably tell you at this moment how you've
spent fifty per cent. of your time for the past week,
and, between them, the other women back there at
the villa could account for another quarter. With
gossip all things are possible.”
“I didn't think I was of sufficient importance to
call for such strict surveillance,” said Andrew.
“You're not! That's precisely what you must
learn about the American Colony. It's what things
are done, not who does them, that makes four-fifths
of the gabble. A man's a man, and a woman's a
woman, and an intrigue's an intrigue. You could
tag them exhibits A, B, and C, and the Colony would
find almost as much to talk about as if you gave
the full names. What's not known is made up.
It's necessary to find tea-table topics, and necessity
is the mother of invention. You can have no idea,
unless you're in the thick of the gossip, how absorb-
ing any one person's affairs can be, when there's
nothing better to talk about.”
She admitted frankly to herself that she was talk-
ing to gain time, giving Andrew a chance to find his


The Fairy Godmother.
167
line of reply. It was going to be important, that
reply, at least for Margery Palffy. Mrs. Carnby
would undoubtedly have been at a loss to give a
word-for-word rendition of the duties of a sponsor in
baptism, either fairy or otherwise, according to the
Book of Common Prayer. She recollected vaguely
certain references to the pomps and vanities of the
world, and realized, with a little inward smile, that
she was warring more earnestly against these—and
the rest—in her adopted goddaughter's behalf than
ever she had considered it necessary to do in her
own.
“As it happens,” she continued, “there's been no
one else to claim the centre of the stage for the
past few weeks, and therefore the lime-light has been
turned upon you, as being the latest novelty—and
a highly enterprising one at that! I think it mani-
festly impossible that you could have performed all
the exploits credited to you, even had you given all
your time to the task, with no allowance for eating and
sleeping. But I think, too, that you would be sur-
prised to find how extremely realistic gossip can be
at times, and how much that you think is known
only to yourself or to a few is, in fact, the talk of
half the Colony. You remember dear old Sir Peter
Teazle? I seem always to be quoting him. He
knew such an infinite deal, and guessed so much more.
'I leave my character behind me,' he said, in parting
from the scandal-mongers. Now, that's so true of
Paris-only more. My dear Andrew Vane, not only


168
The Fairy Godmother.
do you leave your character at the tea-table you
are quitting, but you'll meet it, more or less torn
to shreds, at that to which you are going: and, if
you were at the pains, you might find it, in a like
state of demoralization, at a dozen others in the
same arrondissement ! I wish I could make you
understand that. It seems to me to be so important
to the conduct of life to know not only how we stand,
but in what manner we fall.”
"As yet the charge against me seems to be a trifle
indefinite,” suggested Andrew.
“On the contrary," retorted Mrs. Carnby, “I
mentioned the young person's name quite distinctly
-the one, you know, whom you saw by chance at
the Pavillon Henri Quatre, and whom you were
going back to meet.”
“I can't pretend to misunderstand you,” began
Andrew, “but of course any reflection upon Made-
moiselle Tremonceau—”
“Now, my dear man, pray don't be comic!” burst
in Mrs. Carnby. “That sort of thing is as grotesque
in these days as the doctrine of original sin. And of
all places in the world—Paris! Oh no! A spade's
a spade here, believe me, and when one is demi-
mondaine, like Mirabelle Tremonceau, one is per-
fectly understood. She knows, and you know, and
I know. Don't let us argue over the indisputable.”
"I didn't know, at first,” said Andrew gravely,
"and, if I have guessed recently, you must not take
that to mean that our relations have changed in the


170
The Fairy Godmother.
amateurish, nowadays, is to be grotesque. And, of
course, it doesn't make any difference how innocent
your relations may be. So long as Mirabelle Tremon-
ceau is a figure in the calculation, there's no reason
why people should not believe anything they choose.”
“You mentioned Miss Palffy,” ventured Andrew.
“Have you heard that she—that 14"
“Indirectly. That, frankly, is why I have taken
the liberty of meddling in your affairs. It really
isn't quite fair on the girl to bungle things. So long
as you're going to work to gallicize yourself, pray
make a thorough job of it. Don't copy the French-
man's license, and neglect to imitate his discretion.
I abhor half-made methods."
“But Miss Palffy—"
“Is heels over head in love with you, Mr. Vane.
That much I know. I don't ask about your feelings.
As a matter of fact, they haven't much bearing on
the main issue, which is that I don't mean to have
her disappointed in her estimate of you, for want of a
friendly warning from an old woman who has seen
many a young man spoil his life just because he took
serious things too lightly and trivial ones too seri-
ously.”
"I wonder how much of this is serious advice,
Mrs. Carnby,” said Andrew suddenly, and with a
perceptible ring of irritation in his voice, “and how
much of it banter, with more than a suggestion of
contempt. Apparently you're urging me to a change
of course; actually, only to a change of method. I


The Fairy Godmother.
171
know you can't approve of my friendship for Made-
moiselle Tremonceau, and yet you're not asking me
to give it up, but only to put it out of sight and hear-
ing. Isn't that-excuse me—but isn't it rather
like trafficking with one's ideas of right and wrong?
If one's doing no harm, why not go on? If one's to
blame, why not pull up short?”.
“Oh, nobody pulls up short, in these days,” said
Mrs. Carnby, “except habitual drunkards who have
been pronounced incurable. One mustn't ask too
much of people. It's like the servants: the old-
fashioned kind used to brush the dust into a dust-
pan, wrap it up in newspapers, and see that the ash-
man carried it off; now they sweep it under the beds
and sofas, where it can't be seen. One mustn't
complain of knowing it's there, so long as it isn't
actually in evidence. Autre temps autres mours.
It's a long cry from Hester Prynne to Mirabelle
Tremonceau. Besides, pulling up short all by oneself
is one thing, and pulling a woman up short into the
bargain is quite another. She might object, the little
Tremonceau.”
“She hasn't the shadow of a claim on me.”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Carnby, wrinkling her
eyes amusedly at the corners, “of course not.”
Inwardly she added, “Two and two make four!”
“Whereas Margery—"
“Whereas Margery," echoed Mrs. Carnby, “will
play a part which convention has made absolutely
iron-clad. She will continue to love, as she loves


The Fairy Godmother.
173
show off,' as the children say. After all, she's the
most beautiful cocotte in Paris, and the most sought
after. One couldn't have blamed you for being
flattered. But if you're really fond of her, one can't
very well do anything except be glad that it's impossi-
ble you should always be so."
“Why impossible?” demanded Andrew. “I'm
bound to confess that it seems to me to be quite
within the range of likelihood that I should always
be fond of her. Why impossible?”
"It's hard to explain—that,” said Mrs. Carnby,
“but those women don't wear. They seem to be
only plated with fascination, and in time the plating
wears off, and you come back to the kind with the
Hall-mark. I'm perfectly at ease about that. I've
known too many cases of its happening. Oh, I
know how it all is now! The polish is absolutely
dazzling, and you can't imagine that it will ever
be different. That's a symptom of the earliest
stages, but the disease will run its regular course."
“You rather touch one on the quick, Mrs. Carnby.
I think perhaps neither of us realizes what an ex-
tremely unusual conversation this has been.”
“I shouldn't call it commonplace,” said Mrs.
Carnby, “and I think you've stood it beautifully.
But I want to ask you one more question. Do
you love Margery?”.
“With all my heart and soul and strength, Mrs.
Carnby!”
“Then, my dear young friend, it's time to think


174
The Fairy Godmother.
what you're about. There's only one thing for
you to do. The path lies open before you—and I
think you'll have the courage and the good sense,
to say nothing of the common decency, to follow
it!”


CHAPTER XI.
SOME AFTER-DINNER CONVERSATION.
Night in the garden of the Villa Rossignol was
as night is nowhere else. The cool dusk softened
the somewhat stilted formality of the flower-beds
and winding walks, and mercifully blurred the uncom-
promising stiffness of the paved terrace, flanked by
marble urns, and giving, in three broad steps, upon
the lawn. At this season the air was neither warm
nor chill, but so deliciously adjusted that, as it
moved, its touch on the cheeks and forehead was
like that of a woman's fingers. The stillness was
emphasized rather than disturbed by a tiny tinkle
of water, falling from ledge to ledge of a rockery
hidden in the trees, and the sound, hardly less liquid,
of a nightingale, rehearsing, pianissimo, snatches of
the melody that midnight would hear in full. The
darkness seemed to drip perfume: for the little
seats and summer-houses, cunningly hidden here
and there among the bosquets, were veritable bowers
of roses, and the new grass and foliage had that
fresh June smell which July, with its dust and
scorching suns, so soon turns stale.
175


176 Some After-dinner Conversation.
The women were on the terrace now; the men
inside. Through the windows of the west wing,
open from floor to ceiling to the soft night air, the
big dining-table gleamed with linen, silver, and
crystal, in not ungraceful disarray, and above it hung
a thin haze of blue-gray smoke, through which the
shirt-bosoms and white waistcoats of the men stood
oddly out, seeming to have no relation to their
owners, whose faces were cut off by the deep-red
candle-shades from the light, and so from the view
of those outside. Now and again their laughter
came out through the windows in rollicking little
gusts, and immediately thereafter the haze of smoke
was reinforced.
“What an amusing time they always seem to have,
once they're rid of us!” said Mrs. Ratchett, almost
resentfully. “If one could be a fly, now, and perch
in comfort, upside down, upon the ceiling—”
“One would get a vast deal of tobacco-smoke
into one's lungs,” put in Mrs. Carnby, "and a vast
store of unrepeatable anecdotes into one's memory.
I really can't approve of your project, Ethel, and
I'm convinced that, to your particular style of
beauty, it would be most unbecoming to perch-
particularly upside down!”
"Oh, the men!” exclaimed old Mrs. Lister, with
a kind of ecstatic wriggle. “What do you suppose ?-
but of course we shall never know—I dare say we'd
be quite shocked—but it sounds entertaining—and
they say, you know, that the cleverest stories—and


178 Some After-dinner Conversation.
I've always been very sure of myself till now, very
confident of my ability to judge what was the right
thing to do, and to get on without advice. But
now—it's different. I'm unhappy."
Mrs. Carnby slid her arm across the girl's shoulders.
“Go on, my dear,” she said. “I didn't mean that
I wasn't willing to listen-only that I wouldn't like
to feel that I was surprising your confidence.”
“First of all,” said Margery, “and in spite of
everybody's kindness to me, I'm afraid I hate this
new life, which is so different from everything I've
learned to know and love. I hate all this pretence
and posing which we're carrying on, day after day,
among people who smirk before our faces and ridi-
cule us behind our backs; and I'm coming to hate
myself worst of all. I want my life to be better
than that of a butterfly among a lot of wasps! In
America I hadn't time to stop and think whether I
was happy or not, and I've read somewhere that
that is just what true happiness means. Everything
was very natural and simple over there. I used
to wake up wanting to sing, and life seemed to begin
all over again every morning. And then, without
the least warning, came to me—what you've guessed,
you know. I was sure of it at once. There was
nothing said, but one feels such things, don't you
think?-feels them coming, just as one feels the
dawn sometimes, even while it's still quite dark?
I had a little hint or two—just enough to make me
confident and happier than ever. I knew there


180 Some After-dinner Conversation.
ments of talk, and every one has cut me like a knife.
In the midst of all this, he came to me and asked
me-no! he asked me nothing, but I knew what he
meant. I put him off. I felt that I must have
time to think. But the moment for decision has
come. He may ask me again at any time. What
shall I say? Fairy godmother, what shall I say?
I want to trust him! I want to stake my confi-
dence in him against all the gossip in the world.
And yet if he's only asking me because he thinks I
expect it, if he really doesn't want me"
“He does want you!” said Mrs. Carnby. "I could
shake you, Margery. You're so far off the track, and
at the same time you make it so hard to show you
why. Let me see.”
She hesitated, biting her lips.
“Look here,” she continued suddenly. “Sup-
pose you had a baby brother, for example, and you
loved him better than all the world, and you knew
that, in his baby way, he felt the same love for you,
and you should carry him, all of a jump, into the
next room, and plant him down in front of a ten-foot
Christmas-tree, all blazing with candles and glass balls
and whatcherсallems-cornucopias—would you be
surprised if he hadn't any use for you for at least an
hour? No, you wouldn't—not a bit of it! You'd think
it quite natural. Well, there you are! You are yourself,
and baby brother's Andrew Vane, and the Christmas
tree's Paris: and you'll just have to wait, that's all,
till he's through blinking and sucking his thumb!”


Some After-dinner Conversation. 181
“Oh, Mrs. Carnby!” said Margery, laughing in
spite of herself. “Can't you see that, much as I
am afraid of Paris for my own sake, I'm more afraid
of it for his?”
“My dear,” said Mrs. Carnby, with a change of
tone, “nowadays one's forced to take rather a
liberal view of things. There are only a few delu-
sions left, and love's not one of them more's the
pity! The best flowers, Margery—and I grant you
love is one of the very best—are brought to perfection
by methods which it's not always pleasant to follow
in detail. There's a deal of hacking and pruning
and fertilizing and cross-breeding with ignobler
growths to be gone through with before one obtains
a satisfactory result. It's like the most inviting
dishes served up by one's chef: if we had the danger-
ous curiosity to pry into all the stages of their prepa-
ration, I doubt if very, many of them would stand
the test and prove so tempting, after all. That's the
way with a man. When he brings us his love, we
have to accept it, without inquiring too closely
how it has come to be. You won't think me vain if
I say all men can't be Jeremy Carnbys? When
they know how to love, more often than not it's
because they've learned; and as to how they learned,
it's for our own good not to be too inquisitive. Usu-
ally, my dear, it means another woman, and not a
woman one would be apt to call upon, at that."
“Mrs. Carnby!”
“Yes. Don't be provincial, Margery. I've no


182 Some After-dinner Conversation.
patience with the whitewash business. It's better
at all times to look things squarely in the face, even
if doing so makes--er—your eyes water! There's
hardly a woman happily married to-day who hasn't
been preceded, and rather profitably preceded, I
venture to say, by another woman-and not a very
good woman either. She's there in the background,
but we have to ignore her, and by the time we notice
her at all it's more than likely she has ceased to be
important. She's been the method of preparing
the dish, that's all, the fertilizer which has made
the rose of love possible. She has taught the man
what neither you nor any girl in the least like you
could teach him—the things which are not worth
while! We get the better part. She has burned
up the chaff. We get the wheat.”
Margery had tightly locked her hands.
“Fairy godmother,” she said, “you don't want
me to believe that, do you? You don't want me
to be only the whim of a man's changed fancy, the
thing on which he practises all he has learned from-
from-"
“I would to Heaven I could make a man fit for
you!” answered Mrs. Carnby, drawing the girl close
to her, “but, since I can't do that, I want you to
see things in their true light, and to learn that charity
begins in the same place which is called a woman's
sphere, and that love, from her standpoint, is little
more than forgiveness on the endless instalment
plan!”


Some After-dinner Conversation. 183
“But Andrew,” said Margery eagerly.
“Andrew Vane is only a man,” said Mrs. Carnby
sententiously. “He can't be made out a seraph
even by the fact that you-er—”.
“Love him,” supplemented the girl brokenly. “I
see what you mean. I would have given anything
in the world to have saved him from this, and it's
too late, already.”
“Nothing of the sort!” exclaimed Mrs. Carnby.
“Now's the time when he needs you most. If you
couldn't win him away from any woman that ever
lived, good or bad, you wouldn't be Margery Palffy!
Bless me! I must be getting back to the others,
my dear. Now don't take this too much to heart.
It's all coming out right in the end. These things
are only temporary, at worst. Be brave, Margery."
“Oh-brave!” answered Margery, flinging up her
chin. “Yes, I shall be that. Don't fear but that I
shall know how to handle the situation now. And-
thank you, fairy godmother. I'll wait here a few
minutes, if you don't mind, and just—think!”
As she walked toward the villa again, Mrs. Carnby
compressed her lips.
“Now there's a deal of common sense in that girl,"
she said to herself. “She must have inherited it
from her grandparents!”
But, with all her shrewdness, she had never more
hopelessly complicated a situation
For a time Margery lingered, compelled by the
need of reflection and the beauty of the night. All


184 Some After-dinner IIII
Conversation.
about her the blue-black darkness, eloquent with
the breath of the roses and the fluting of the now-
emboldened nightingale, sighed and turned in its
sleep, as if it dreamed of pleasant things. Paris,
with its frivolities, its sins, its sorrows, and its snares,
was like some uneasy, half-forgotten dream. The
brand had touched the girl, but as yet it had no
more than stung, it had not seared. The sword
quivered, but the thread yet held. The merciful
garment of the calm, sweet night yet smothered,
like sleep before awakening, the bitterness of full
reality. The moment was one of those cases in
the desert of disillusion which, with the crystal
clamour of falling water, the cool shade of wide-
spread foliage, and the odour of fresh, moist
earth, alone make tolerable the journey of the
caravan.
So it was that Margery was able to speak naturally,
with the knowledge of having herself well in hand,
as a step crunched on the gravel near by, and Andrew
flung his cigarette upon the path, where it spawned
in a quantity of tiny points of light, which gloomed
immediately into nothingness.
"How extravagant you are! Surely you must
know by this time that I don't mind smoke in the
least. I was just about to go in."
“Not yet, for a moment, please,” said Andrew.
“Let's come into this little arbour. There's some-
thing I want to say."
He pointed, as he spoke, to a small marble-col-


Some After-dinner Conversation. 185
umned seat in the shrubbery, buried under a great
hood of climbing rose-vines in full bloom. For an
instant only the girl hesitated. Then she led the
way resolutely, gathering her light shawl more
closely about her shoulders, with something like a
shiver, despite the warmth of the still June evening.
For a little they sat in silence. When Andrew
spoke, it was with an abruptness which told of
embarrassment.
“You remember, perhaps, what you said to me
the other day in Paris—about fighting a good fight,
and keeping the faith? Will you tell me just what
you meant by that? It's been haunting me, lately.
When you said that the influence of Paris made you
afraid for those--for those for whom you might
care, did you mean-me?”
He laid his hand on hers, as he asked the ques-
tion, but she drew away slightly, and he straightened
himself again, with a little puzzled frown.
“Please don't ask me to answer that,” she said,
after a moment. “Whatever I meant, it can make
no difference now.”
“No difference, Margery? Do you want me to
understand that you were not in earnest—that
you really didn't care?”
“I haven't said that,” answered the girl wearily.
“I said it could make no difference now, now that
the mischief's done.”
“I'm afraid I don't understand you,” said Andrew
slowly.


Some After-dinner Conversationny
. 187
“I don't understand you in the least,” said Andrew
deliberately, “or at least I'm sure that what you
seem to be saying isn't what you really mean. I
can't believe that after all that has been-after all
I have hoped was going to be—why, Margery, I
came out here—no, I came all the way from America,
to ask you,”
“Don't !”
Margery had risen with the word, and now, lean-
ing against one of the marble columns of the little
arbour, was looking away into the gloom.
“I want to believe in you,” she added. “Leave
me that, at least. Play the game, Andy—play the
game!”
“The game—the game—the game!” exclaimed
Andrew. “What is all this you're saying, Mar-
gery? What are you accusing me of ? Is it possible
you don't know I love you—that I've always loved
you, ever since first I saw you? I'd have asked you
long ago, at Beverly, but my grandfather begged
me, almost commanded me, to wait. We were
both so young. He wanted me to make sure. And,
although I knew that I should never change, I felt
he was right. I wanted you to have your chance,
to come out, to see a little bit of life, before I tried
to bind you to any promise. And when I heard
that you were not coming back to America this year,
that you had come out, and were the beauty and
the belle of the Colony here, I knew that it was time
to make a try for you, unless I was to lose you for-


188 Some After-dinner Conversation.
ever. So I came over here to tell you this—to ask
you to marry me. And now-in Heaven's name,
what is it, Margery? What has changed you?
What do you mean by all this? If there is any-
thing I can explain—"
The girl turned to him, with a little, piteous
gesture.
“Have I asked you for an explanation?" she
said. “Do I need one--since I know? You say
you'd have asked me long ago. Well, then, I
ask you—why didn't you? Why didn't you ask
me before it was too late? Why didn't you ask
me while yet you had something to offer me which
I could have accepted gratefully—your innocence,
your purity, the best of all that was in you, and to
which I had a right, do you hear?-a right! Why
didn't you speak then, before you'd thrown all these
away, sold your birthright, and become like all the
rest? Do you come to me now—now, with another
woman's kisses on your lips, and God only knows
what of the impurity she has taught you in your
heart? Do you come to me like that, and expect
me to welcome you, to accept the fact that I am
your second choice after a woman whose name you
would not mention to me—”.
“Margery–Margery!”
“Do you deny it? Do you deny that you were
with her—when?-yesterday? Oh, be true at least
to one thing, whatever it be—if not to the faith you
owed me, if all you've been telling me is true, then


Some After-dinner Conversation. 189
to the woman you've preferred before me-to your
mistress, to your mistress, Andrew Vane!”
Andrew fell back a step, putting up his hands as
if to ward off a blow.
“It was for this,” he faltered, “ that you told me
to come here to ask you anything I chose ?”.
“You know better than that!” said Margery
firmly.
“Then Mrs. Carnby has been telling you—"
“Mrs. Carnby has told me nothing except what I
knew-or, rather, tried not to know-before. It
isn't from her I learned. The truth has come to
me bit by bit, and I've fought against it as
it came, trying to believe in you to the very
last.”
“And you think—"
“Yes—yes! I think-I know! How quick you
were to refer to Mrs. Carnby! She knows, of course-
everybody knows-even I! Well, I don't want to
criticise you or blame you. You've forced me
into it by making me part of all this. Now, all I ask
of you is to respect me, to leave me out of what you
choose to do in future, and not to mock the name of
love with this pitiful fancy for me—a fancy so trivial
and so idle that it couldn't even hold you back
from transgression. I ask you to go back to her,
or, if you're tired of her already, at least not to come
to me. I'm different from these other women, who
can laugh at such things, and gloss them over, and
forget them. I demand of the man who asks me


Some After-dinner Conversation. 191
checked him, a sickening sense of what his words
must signify to her swept down upon him, and he
covered his face with his hands.
“I don't know how to put it,” he murmured. "I
don't know what to say.”
“You have said quite enough,” replied Margery.
Her voice was quite cool, quite steady now. "I
have asked you once to leave me. Will you please
go now—at once?”
Andrew dropped his hands, and searched her face
with his eyes. There was no trace in it of any emo-
tion beyond a slight contempt.
“Do you mean,” he asked, “that this is the end?”
“The end?” she repeated. “The end-er-of
what ? "
With that he left her.


Reaction.
193
But ids—the knowled that mo
It was something the same feeling which had
prompted Radwalader to remark, as they rolled
away from the villa:
"I wonder if General Sherman had ever been to a
house-party with the Listers when he made that
remark about war.”
Then, as Andrew made no reply, he relapsed into
silence. He possessed that most precious gift of
the Gods—the knowledge of when not to talk.
But it was when Andrew was once more alone in
his familiar quarters, and had flung himself moodily
into a chair, that the full force of his situation
returned upon him. In twelve hours the whole world
had changed. He realized for the first time that,
as a matter of fact, there had never been in his mind
the shadow of a doubt that the way lay clear before
him, that the attainment of his wishes had been, in
his calculations, no more than a matter of time.
He had relied upon Margery's constancy like a
mariner upon that of the North Star, and it was
as if that luminary had suddenly flung away from
him into some new and wholly unfamiliar constella-
tion. The man who offers his hand in friendship
and is stabbed in reply is not more aghast than was
he. He was bitterly hurt, bitterly resentful. He
had taken Mrs. Carnby's reprimand as something
to which, if it was not wholly deserved, he had at least
laid himself open: but that was a very different
matter from the scornful and passionate rebuff
which he had received from Margery herself. The


194
Reaction.
first had almost afforded him a sense of relief. Like
a child who is conscious of some slight transgression,
the rebuke had seemed to set things square, to wipe
out his fault, and give him absolution and a chance
for a fresh start. But what followed, so wholly out
of proportion to his knowledge of the 'truth, left
him only conscious of a monstrous and unpardonable
injustice. Complete innocence is never so jealous
or so resentful as is the half-innocence in which
lurks a hint of self-accusation, a suspicion of actual
guilt. He had stood ready, with a kind of fierce
and proud submission, to accept such blame as could
be rightly laid at his door; but this very attitude of
partial contrition flamed into anger the moment
the scale was tipped too far in his disfavour. He
did not see that the main factor in his revolt was
the same as that in his acceptance of Mrs. Carnby's
words—a sense of disloyalty, that is, to what he knew
in his heart to be the true and manly course. He
was very young, and moreover he had fallen, to at
least an appreciable extent, from the high estate
of his best ideals. Conscience impelled him to
accept with humility as much of censure as he con-
ceived that he deserved; but the savage pride of
youth commanded him not to yield a single foot
of ground beyond that which, by his folly, he had
forfeited. He had been wrong; that he was willing
to acknowledge: but his punishment had fallen too
suddenly and too hard. Other men had done
worse-infinitely worse—and had prospered. As


Reaction.
195
for him, it was already too late to turn back. He
was learning, albeit rebelliously, that standards of
conduct are the boomerangs of the moral armament.
The expert may juggle with them with comparative
security; but the novice who recklessly flings them
into space and then seeks to resume his hold upon
them is apt to suffer a rude blow in the attempt.
Facilis descensus—but the way of retreat is choked
with briers and strewn with boulders, and never
wholly retraceable.
Essentially, Andrew Vane was very clean, with
an instinctive revulsion from whatever savoured of
animalism or sensuality. Among a certain class
of men at Harvard he had been called, for a time,
(Galahad” Vane; with that impulse to sneer which
is irrepressible in those who resent what they find
themselves forced to respect. There was something
peculiarly appropriate, however, about the name
thus bestowed in ridicule: for that fine sense of
nicety which is a safeguard more sure than abstract
principle had held him instinctively aloof from
whatever was simply sordid or unclean. Tempta-
tion of the baser sort, which left its furrows on the
sand of natures less refined, washed harmlessly over
the sturdy rock of his self-respect. The illicit was
inseparably associated in his mind with vulgarity.
To seek a pleasure which necessitated keeping one
eye on the police and the other on one's purse smote
him, even in suggestion, with a sickening sense of
degradation He passed by, with the sniff of a


196
Reaction.
thoroughbred terrier, the carrion in which his fellows
rolled.
But it was to this very fastidiousness that Mira-
belle had appealed: and because she so fully satis-
fied it he at first misunderstood the situation utterly.
It came to him clothed in a refinement, a daintiness,
an atmosphere of soft lights and flowers and savoir
faire et vivre which spoke eloquently to all that was
sensuous in his nature, and stirred nothing of what
was merely sensual. That was the French of it.
The national deftness which is able to make plain
women beautiful, and ordinary viands. delicacies,
finds its parallel in the national ability to smother
the first approach of impropriety in disguises infi-
nitely varied. And Mirabelle herself was more than
content not to urge the issue. For the first time in
her experience, she was unable to scent an ulterior
motive in a man's admiration. She appreciated the
simplicity of Andrew's attitude, without fully com-
prehending its significance. Back of it, no doubt,
lay the as yet undeveloped progressions in a routine
all too familiar: but she was grateful for the respite.
But a chance word, now and again, had stirred of
late the serenity of their curious relation. He put
away the thought which forced itself upon him, but
it returned invariably, and each time with a sugges-
tion of more eloquent appeal. The subtle influence
of Paris, which undermines the bulwarks of principle
and prejudice by insensible degrees, was at work.
Daily he heard the things which he had instinctively


Reaction.
197
avoided treated as inevitable and by no means
unjustified accessories of life; daily the insinuat-
ing tooth of epigrammatic banter gnawed at the
stability of his former convictions; while the very
offences which had always repelled him by their sor-
did vulgarity were now accomplished all about him,
light-heartedly, to the clink of crystal glasses, the
soft pulse of waltz music, the ripple of laughter, and
the ring of gold. All that is most lavish and most
ingenious in the imaginative power and the execu-
tive ability of man had been laid under contribution
to produce the effect which now enthralled his
senses. None of the ordinary restrictions and lim-
itations of life raised a finger to check this pagan
prodigality of license. Economy, responsibility, and
every more serious consideration stood aside from
the path of sovereign pleasure. The world had given
of its best with a lavish hand, for here was not only
the gold to pay for, but the wit to appreciate, per-
fection. The labels on these cobweb-covered vin-
tages, the dishes they enhanced, the flowers they
rivalled in perfume, the music, the lights, the laugh-
ter, all spoke one language—a language forgetful of
the past, heedless of the future, but eloquent as the
tongue of Circe of the present joy of living. These
men and women were civilization's latest work—the
best, in the sense of ultra-elaboration, that the expe-
rience of the ages had enabled her to accomplish.
They had been prodigally dowered with the extremes
of sensuous refinement; they were clothed, fed, housed,


198
Reaction.
and diverted by the ultimate attainments of human
invention and skill; they demanded that life should
be a festival, and every detail of existence the child
of a most cunning imagination and a consummate
faculty of execution: and this was the spot where
was given them what they asked. The goddess of
luxury, in whose ears their prayers were poured, and
at whose feet their gold was piled, could do no more.
They had climbed the capstone of her pyramid, her
sun had touched its zenith, and her last word was
said!
So, as Andrew considered his present state, he was
aware of the force of Radwalader's remark that in
Paris a man had something for which, instead of
merely something on which, to live. Life took on a
new aspect. In Boston it had been wholesome,
monotonous, gray, silver, and brown: in Paris it was
heady, infinitely varied, gold, purple, and rose-pink.
In another of his fanciful moods, Radwalader had
described it as a sapiently ordered dinner: and this,
too, now that his eyes were opened, Andrew under-
stood. There were the soups and solid courses—the
architecture, history, and artistic associations of the
great city: there were, by way of whetting the appe-
tite, the clean little hors d'auvres, radishes, anchovies,
and olives—the tea-tables of the Colony, the the-
atres, the talks with Mrs. Carnby and the women of
her set: but there were, as well, the wines and
sauces piquantes—the races, the restaurants at mid-
night, the Allée at noon, and Mirabelle Tremonceau)


200
Reaction.
contraction of her eyebrows. In his recollection
dwelt such trifles as the nicking of a full instep by
the edge of a slipper, the falling away of lace from a
lifted wrist, the sudden swell of rounded muscles
beneath the ear when the head is turned aside, and
the imprint of pointed nails and the jewels of rings
on the fingers of a discarded glove. If he had re-
membered the noses, eyes, and mouths of other
women, his memory now caressed the veins in her
wrists, the little wisps of hair low in her neck, the
interlinking of her long lashes, the shadow from
chin to ear, and the silvering touch of sunlight on
the down of her averted cheek. Such things had
his study of her taught him. Trifles, all! Yet does
a man ever forget that woman, through his intimacy
with whom these perceptions were first born, like
golden threads newly discovered in the warp and
woof of some familiar fabric? And that woman
was Mirabelle Tremonceau.
So it was this—all this—Paris, and her luxury,
charm, and infinite, bewildering appeal — with
which he had merely toyed, because, at the back
of his appreciation, lay ever the thought of what
Margery Palffy meant to him, and what he had
come to ask of her! What had been his reward?
Because he had been neither one thing nor the other
he was treated as the outcast he had not dared to
be. He had no more than fingered the nettle,
instead of grasping it boldly, like a man, and som
it had stung! He had relied, throughout, upon


Reaction.
201
something which did not exist–the loyalty of those
for whose sake he had striven to keep himself, in all
essentials, clean. When he came to them, prepared
to admit his little follies, they had slammed the
gate of injustice in his face!
Of a sudden, the scene in the garden at Poissy
leaped back at him, and he rose and began to pace
the room. They trusted hearsay, did they? They
gossiped about him, each to each, among themselves ?
They cast him off, as he had been a pariah, without
a chance to justify himself, to give them the explana-
tion which he had been ready to offer, but they
unprepared to believe? Well, then, they should
have their fill! He had tried to enter what he
supposed was a friendly port, and had been tor-
pedoed, raked fore and aft at the very haven's
mouth, and sent about his business like the veriest
privateer. But there were friendly harbours! There
was still Radwalader_his friend! There was still
Mirabelle! How ready they were to believe her
guilty, between whom and himself there existed
nothing but a friendship wholly pure!
Now, the curious chivalry of youth had him
firmly in its grasp—the curious, unreasoning, treach-
erous chivalry which has not learned to discriminate
as yet, but which cloaks its own essential selfishness
in a fierce allegiance to the thing of the moment,
blind to all larger issues, lance in rest to tilt at wind-
mills, hotly insistent upon the immaterial present,
scornful of the future, contemptuous of the past.


202
Reaction.
This girl at whom they were all so eager to cast a
stone, this girl who was his friend, and whose only
friend he seemed to be—was it not to her that he
owed his utmost loyalty, rather than to her who
had so readily rejected him upon no better pretence
than that of hearsay? Because others refused to
grant him the confidence in his integrity which they
fully owed him, was that any reason for his proving
uncharitable, too?—for siding against Mirabelle and
with them?
Andrew clenched his fingers savagely.
“She is my friend!” he said aloud, “my friend!
As for the rest, if they want proof of my depravity,
by the Lord they shall have it to the full!”
The Tempter was very near now, glorying in the
preliminary moves of Vanity, his stanch ally.
The bell whirred sharply, as Andrew paced the
salon to and fro, and, a moment later, his servant
tapped and entered.
“Well, Jules?"
“Une dame, monsieur,” announced Vicot suavely,
and then-Andrew found her hand in his. There
was a suggestion of challenge in her eyes as she
lifted them to his, and, before she spoke, her eye-
brows went up questioningly and her even white
teeth nicked her lower lip.
“You're not angry?”
“Angry?” said Andrew. “Why should I be?
I'm surprised, perhaps: I wasn't expecting you.
But angry?-no, certainly not. I'm very pleased.”


CHAPTER XIII.
RHAPSODIE HONGROISE, NO. 2.
“It was a whim, if you like,” said Mirabelle, a
little unevenly, as she stripped off her gloves. “I
hadn't seen you for four whole days, except for
that little glimpse at St. Germain, and I was tired,
cross, and a little lonely. So I took the chance of
your being back and of finding you alone and dis-
engaged. Perhaps, if you've nothing to do, you
will let me stay to breakfast. I told Pierre that I
would send down word if he was not to wait. Will
you ask your man to say so?”
“Certainly."
Andrew touched the bell, gave the message, and,
when Jules had gone, stood for a moment by the
table fingering his letters. Mirabelle had removed
her veil and hat, but was still at the mirror, touching
the trifling disarrangement of her hair. Their eyes
met in reflection, and suddenly both laughed. Then
he went over to her side.
"It's very good to see you again," he said, but
with a slight trace of embarrassment in his voice.
Mirabelle gave his shoulder a tiny pat.
204


Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2. 205
“L'ami!” she said simply.
Abruptly her mood changed, and she wheeled
upon him, all eager animation.
“So this is your little house, great baby! You
must show me everything. It's a picnic, this: we
shall be two children. Paris? Ça n'existe pas! Il
n'y a que nous deux au monde!”
She perched upon the tall fender, swinging her
feet, and humming a little tune.
“Oh, la vie bourgeoise!”
Subtly her gaiety infected him, and he laughed
again, this time without a hint of embarrassment.
This was another Mirabelle, a Mirabelle he had not
known. In some unaccountable fashion, her mood.
stripped her of a decade. She was, in very truth, a
child, with a child's light-hearted mirth, a child's
shiningly excited eyes, a child's imperious demand
to be amused.
They went over the apartment together, pausing
for all manner of comment. She took an almost
infantile delight in bringing into prim order the
chaos of neckties thrown carelessly into an upper
drawer; smoothed her golden-bronze hair with his
silver-backed brushes; washed her hands at his
basin, and flicked the shining drops of water at him
from the tips of her slender fingers. She mocked
the vanity indicated by a dozen pairs of patent-
leathers; tested, with a feigned shudder, the keen-
ness of his razors; simulated a furious jealousy at
the discovery of a photograph of Réjane upon his


206
Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.
dressing-table; rummaged through the cups and
plates and glasses in the vitrine; called him, whim-
sically, gran' père, mon oncle, and vieux garçon;
laughed, frowned, scolded, teased, and petted; and
was, in short, the incarnation of a gay, reckless,
toi-et-moi-et-vogue-la-galère femininity.
Little by little, the charm of her humour gained
upon him. To the man in whose life woman has
never played a thoroughly intimate part there is
something indescribably alluring in her near asso-
ciation with the little details of commonplace ex-
istence. Andrew was conscious that, in this inde-
pendence which he had so lately learned to value,
there had been lacking a something which was now,
for the first time, supplied. A phrase occurred to
him—“the better half.” Yes, that was it—the
curious inspiration with which an interested, inti-
mately concerned woman infects such sordid items
as neckties, cups and saucers. Until then, the
main charm of his new manner of life had lain in its
sheer independence of all save his personal inclina-
tion. Now he was suddenly aware that man's
completest happiness relies upon a partial subor-
dination; upon a certain dependence upon another,
if still a kindred, point of view. As he watched
Mirabelle come and go, as he heard her comments, as
he felt the magnetism of her presence, he was smit-
ten with a vast sense of loneliness—with a perception
that, in reality, no man is sufficient unto himself. In
this first flush of life, in this new enjoyment of Paris


Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.
207
the alluring, he felt the need of something more.
Was it Margery? Was it Mirabelle? At the mo-
ment he could not have told which, if indeed it was
either. Once he risked a compliment.
“How pretty you are! It makes one want to kiss
you!”
“Don't!” she said shortly. “Please don't talk
like that. It spoils everything."
He drew back to look at her, puzzled, but it
seemed that she avoided his eyes.
“Not-not just now,” she added. “You don't
understand.”
Almost immediately, she was laughing and chat
tering again.
Then came breakfast, and—what is rare even in
Paris—a breakfast perfect in its very simplicity. A
bisque as smooth as velvet, sole cardinale worthy of
Frédéric himself, a casserole of chicken, with a salad
of celery and peppers, Burgundy tempered to an
eighth of a degree, no sweets—but a compensating
cup of coffee, eau de vie de Dantzic, with its flecks of
shattered sunlight gleaming oddly in the clear
liquid, and cigarettes, which Mirabelle refused with
a moue which hinted at temptation. Andrew
toasted her, across the table, with mock ceremony,
in the gold-shot liqueur.
“It's like your life, l'amie," he said, squinting at
the last few drops, “smooth and sweet and all span-
gled with sunshine and gold.”


Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2. 209
then altered her position, drawing up her feet and
linking her fingers across her knees. The change
brought her close to the arm of his chair, and she
looked up at him long and steadily, and then shook
her head again.
“No," she answered, “I shall not say that. The
Exposition? The Bois? I suppose there are such
things, but I'd forgotten them. I like it here. I
am happy."
With that strange new understanding of his, it
was not alone her smile which he noticed, but the
slow, irregular fall of her eyelids, and the deepening
of a tiny shadow when the lashes rested on her
cheek. An atmosphere for which he was at a loss
to account seemed always to envelop him when he
came into this girl's presence. He was conscious of
the same not unpleasant languor which had come
upon him on that first afternoon in her salon, after
the return from Auteuil, but now it was not due, as
then, to drowsiness. Rather, it was a blotting out of
every consideration save that he was with her.
America, Poissy, even Paris, humming there below
them, seemed to belong to another world, and that in
which he was living for the moment, to be made up
of sunlight, and silence, and perfume.
“I'm almost sorry,” he said presently, “that you
came."
The girl made no reply. A singular change,
which was not movement, seemed to stiffen and
straighten her. Without actually altering, her posi-


Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.
211
her hand into his. A moment she hesitated, and
then bowed her face against his arm.
“Then you do know!” she continued. "Ah, my
friend, I have hoped that it would not come to this."
Her voice had suddenly gone wistful. She was
the child again, but the child hurt, penitent, and
near to tears.
“Believe me, l'ami, I hoped it would not come
to this. I'm so careless, Andrew. I don't think-
I forget. You see, we are different, nous autres.
What are little things to other women are great
things to us, and what are great things to them,”
Then she looked into his eyes. Almost uncon:
sciously, her fingers touched his arm.
“I wish I could make you understand," she added.
“Even with me, there is only one thing that can
justify "
She paused for a breath, with a gesture toward the
open window.
“It was to get away from all that that I came-
to forget-to be alone with you—just we together-
two children-to have something different. I'm so
tired of it all, Andrew_and—there has never been
any one like you. I didn't think what it would
mean. Ah, my friend—”.
She sank back upon the cushion, with a little
sigh.
Suddenly Andrew's heart contracted, seemed to
mount into his throat, and, repulsed, beat wildly
against the bars of its prison. He felt the tremor of


212
Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.
its pulsing in his wrists, in his temples, in his ears.
He knew that he was colouring deeply. He strove
to tighten his lips, but they parted in spite of him,
and the breath shot through with a little hiss. Then
he came to himself, and saw that the girl's eyes had
closed, and that her hand on the arm of the chair
had gripped the silken scarf. Folds of it, sharpened
to the thinness of paper, came out between her
fingers, and her knuckles showed like little bosses of
tinted ivory through the pink flesh.
What was it? The hand of a passing spirit,
wholly unfamiliar, had touched him; a voice never
heard before had whispered something in his ear.
What was it—what was this thing which he under-
stood and did not understand? Bending slightly
forward, he looked down through the ironwork rail-
ing at the street below. A solitary cab leaned
maudlinly over the kerb, the driver slewed around
in his seat, with his elbow on the roof, and his var-
nished hat on the back of his head, reading a news-
paper; and the horse nodding, with his nose in a
feed-bag. Two children were marching resolutely,
hand in hand and out of step, their nurses following,
with the gay plaid ribbons of their caps flapping
about their hips. The pipe of an itinerant plumber
whined and squeaked unmelodiously, and the horn
of a passing automobile hiccoughed in the distance.
Inconsequently there came to Andrew the memory
of a sudden awakening from a nap on the beach at
Newport. For a moment, everything in sight-


Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.
213
people, houses, boats, the sand, the sunlight, and
the sea-had been garbed in startling unreality, in
a new, strange light.
The restlessness of a curious dissatisfaction sud-
denly laid hold upon him, and he rose and began to
pace the salon once more. He would have given
something to fling himself out of the chaos of con-
flicting thoughts which beset him, to ride, for exam-
ple, five miles at a gallop, as he had been wont to do
at Beverly, with the wind tearing at his hair and a
thoroughbred lunging between his knees.
Presently he became aware that Mirabelle was
watching him curiously, and was puzzled to find that
for the first time he was not ready to meet her eyes.
He seated himself at the piano, and for a moment
fingered the music on the rack, without actually
taking in the title="Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.”
Then he smiled, with a little nod as if he had been
greeting an acquaintance on the street, and his hands
fell upon the keys.
Majestically, with ponderous bass notes and a
deeper comment of short, staccato chords, the Rhap-
sodie began. It was as solemn as a dirge in its
adagio movement, till the high treble began to flut-
ter into the motif, and dragged it upward, with a
brilliant run, into a suggestion of running water.
Plunging again into the bass, the music marched
firmly on, varied with higher chords, until, through
the monotonous throb, a bird chirped, twittered, and
trilled, and cadenza followed cadenza, plashing in


214. Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.
and over the main theme. This variation was pres-
ently gone again in a swiftly descending arpeggio,
and the adagio reasserted itself, beating out across
the salon with the lingering quality of tolled bells,
freeing itself at last by another run into the crystal
sparkle of the treble, where the motif was repeated,
ringing with fresh vigour. The bass replied with a
brief word now and again, correcting the new ren-
dering of the air that it had taught, or patiently
repeating a whole phrase. But, petulantly, the
treble threw off the sombre spirit of what had gone
before. Again it thrilled with bird-music, and ran
into the gay babble of brooks, punctuated rarely by
a deeper chord, as if the water swerved round a
stone, and slid, murmuring, across a level, before
swinging again down a shelving reach. But, almost
immediately, a new element stole in-a tremulous
flutter of one note, potently suggestive of mad music
to follow. Faster-faster! The flutter was inter-
rupted by a dripping of stray notes, an octave
lower, dotted, presently, with a tiny tinkling above.
Then, without warning, the whole plunged into a
mad vivace movement, that galloped like a living
thing, was interrupted by whimsically coupled notes,
gabbling up and down, and then seemed to lengthen
and bound forward as if it had been spurred. There
was a thunder of chromatics-hoofs pounding on a
long bridge—then the tinkle of water broke in again
-right at his elbow-lingered briefly, and was gone,
and the hoofs were thudding on a muffling stretch of


216
Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.
was still. The motif was repeated softly, incom-
pletely, as if regretfully, in adagio, then paraphrased
in a brilliant staccato movement, which mounted,
plunged madly down from treble to bass, hesitated,
and whipped out of existence in a group of crashing
chords.
“I never knew you could play like that!”
Mirabelle had risen, and come across to the piano,
and the words were spoken in a voice barely above
a whisper. The room seemed to Andrew to be clos-
ing in around him, and out of its dwindling distance
floated her face, more beautiful than he had ever
seen it, but very pale and with eyes wide and star-
tled. He did not answer directly. Thoughts as
confused as the wisps of a dream but half recalled
went racing through his brain. For an instant he
strove to control himself, strove to remember,
strove to forget. Then, as it were, a great tide of
oblivion to all but the intoxication of the moment
swept down upon him.
“You said,” he began, “that only one thing
could justify What is it? What did you
mean?”
He stood up as he spoke, came quite close to her,
and took her hands.
“What did you mean?” he repeated. “Tell me
Mirabelle."
As she did not speak, he took her hand and drew
her toward him, with a kind of dull wonder in his
eyes. What he saw in hers he had never seen in a


Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.
217
woman's before—a mist not wholly moisture, and
tenderer than tears.
“Mirabelle!”
“Je t'aime!" she murmured. "Je t'adore!"
She would have drawn back, but he took her in
his arms. From the gold-bronze hair which touched
his cheek came a faint perfume, and through the
thin silk he could feel the hammer of her heart. So
for a long moment he held her, with his lips on hers.
It was like kissing a rose—a rose that smelt of orris.


CHAPTER XIV.
FATE IS HARD—CASH!
As Andrew took his mail from the hand of Jules
one afternoon, some three weeks later, his eye was
caught by a packet directed in the precise script of
old Mr. Sterling, and this, together with a letter in
the same hand, he separated from the mass of other
material, and gave his immediate attention. There
had grown in him a singular craving for all that
could remind him of his life at home. As he slit the
envelope, a draft upon his bankers came first to
his hand, and he glanced at it, with a short whistle,
before laying it on the desk. It was for fifteen
thousand francs.
Mr. Sterling's letter, a model of prim penmanship,
ran as follows:
“MY DEAR ANDY: I have yours of the 12th inst.,
and am gratified to learn that Paris is surpassing
your expectations. Although it is a city not ordi-
narily recommended as a sojourning-place for young
men, I have seen enough of the world to know that
it is not the surroundings which are significant, so
much as the temperament of the individual placed
218


220
Fate is HardCash!
just about the amount of attention which it ordi-
narily receives. I know the type of man whom you
have always chosen, and, in all likelihood, always will
choose, as a friend: and if you will avoid doing any-
thing which you would be ashamed to tell that kind
of man, I shall be satisfied.
"As you wish to remain in Paris for some time
longer, and as Paris is preëminently a city where
money is a sine qua non, I am disposed not only to
approve your plan, but to make it possible of execu-
tion, with a certain degree of liberality. You should
know, if you do not know already, that I have made
you my heir. When I am obliged to shuffle off
this mortal coil, you will come into something over
eighty thousand a year. There are responsibilities
attached to such an income, and not the least of
them is the knowledge of the social obligation which
it imposes. There is nothing more deplorable than
the spectacle of a young man squandering what he
can't afford to spend, unless it be that of an old one
grudging what he can. While far from counselling
wanton extravagance, I wish you to form those
habits of generosity and open-heartedness which your
position makes incumbent upon you. Repay with
liberality the courtesies extended to you; and keep
on the credit, rather than the debit, side of the
social account. Take your share of the legitimate
pleasures of life as well, paying as you go.
“To the letter of credit given you on your depart-
ure, which provided for a possible expenditure of a


Fate is Hard-Cash!
221
thousand dollars a month for the six months of your
contemplated stay, I now add a draft for fifteen
thousand francs (F. 15,000), to cover the additional
three months during which you propose to remain.
In view of this, you will not think me unreasonable
in foregoing the customary remittance of a much
smaller sum upon your birthday.
“That birthday is still somewhat more than three
months distant; but a present which I had contem-
plated making you on the occasion, being already
completed, I am forwarding it by this mail, with my
best wishes and affection. It is a miniature of your
mother—whom it is your greatest misfortune never
to have known-painted, from a photograph, by
Cavigny-Maupré during his recent visit to Boston:
and it is appropriate that you should have it at a time
when you are absent—with sincere regret, as you
please me by saying—from the grim old house where
you have been an unspeakable comfort to, and
where awaits you an affectionate welcome from,
“Your grandfather,
“ ANDREW STERLING.
" Andrew Sterling Vane, Esq., Paris, France."
“Dear old man!” said Andrew to himself, with a
little smile of affection, before laying the letter
aside. “Dear, generous old man!” Then he turned
to the package which contained the portrait of his
mother.
Cavigny-Maupré had excelled himself in this the


222
Cash!
Fate is Hard
most recent in his long series of masterly miniatures.
The tranquil and beautiful face of Helen Vane, as
it had been before the blight of disillusion dimmed
its ethereal sweetness, looked out at Andrew with
serene and steadfast eyes. There was no attempt at
striking colouring, no trick of effect. The artist,
with the instinct which never played him false, had
aimed to preserve the touch of simplicity, of girlish-
ness, which the old photograph had given him as his
cue. The result was a singularly appealing beauty,
which his more ambitious productions, with all their
emphatic brilliancy, utterly lacked. Before he could
have analyzed the impulse which prompted him,
Andrew had touched his lips to the picture, and in
the act of performing this simple homage his fine
eyes grew moist. For this was his mother-the
pale, gentle-eyed dream-mother he had never seen,
but who had given her life for his, and who, perhaps,
with the searching vision of the immortals, was
watching him wistfully from beyond the immeasur-
ably distant stars!
So, at the dinner-hour, Radwalader found him-
sunk deep in his chair, with his eyes half-closed,
and the miniature in his hand.
“Hello!” he said. “Come in."
“You look like a drawing by Gibson," observed
Radwalader lightly, “over the title 'Day Dreams'
or 'A Face from the Past,' or something of the sort.
The old, old story, eh, Vane? Mooning over the
loved one's portrait?”


224
Cash!
Fate is Hard
der, following, applied himself to the consumption of
a cigarette. For three weeks he had been obsery-
ing Andrew with a new attention. He was always
quick to note symptoms; but in the present instance
he found himself, to his surprise, unable to analyze
them with his accustomed readiness. The change
which he saw was singularly subtle, albeit as pro-
nounced as that which a separation of years might
have enabled him to perceive. It was with diffi-
culty that he could bring himself to believe that
barely a day had gone by without their meeting. It
seemed impossible that Andrew had not gone and
come again, passing, in the interim, through some
vastly significant experience. Radwalader found
him less open, while habited with a new assurance;
less enthusiastic, while subject at times to an almost
feverish gaiety; more alive to the minutest details of
the new life which surrounded him, but with a
tendency to scoff replacing his former merely boy-
ish interest. There were times when Radwalader
would have called him unqualifiedly happy; others
when there was no such thing as believing him
otherwise than wretched. He was thinner, smiled
less than formerly, and took for granted much
which had hitherto excited his eager comment, his
amusement, or his dislike. Over all he wore a new
reserve, a worldliness beyond his years. In all
this, while there was much which Radwalader did
not fully understand, there was much which he had
expected, much which he had deliberately planned


Fate is Hard-Cash!
227
ville glittered and twinkled among the trees, and
flung handfuls of shivered light on the wind-ruffled
waters of the little lake. As they approached, they
had a glimpse of tables brilliant with spotless napery
and sheen of crystal and silver, and of heavy-headed
roses leaning from tall and slender vases. Solicitous
waiters, grotesquely swaddled in their aprons, were
turning every wine-glass to a ruby or a topaz with
the liquid light of Bourgogne or Champagne. Elec-
tric lights glowed pink in roses of crinkled silk. The
Pavillon was a veritable fairy palace, as unstable, to
all appearance, and as gossamer-light as the fabric
of a dream swung miraculously within a luminous
haze.
The table reserved for them was in an elbow of
the piazza and so, a little apart from the others;
and the maître d'hôtel led them toward it with an air
which was hardly less impressive than a fanfare.
It was his business to remember the faces of young
foreigners who thundered up at midday in twenty-
horse-power Panhards expressly to command a
table, and incidentally to tip him a louis. More-
over, there was Radwalader-Radwalader, who knew
by his first name every maître d'hôtel from Lavenue's
to the Rat Mort, and from Marguery's to the Pavillon
Bleu, called Frédéric himself “mon vieux,” and
sent messages to the chef at Voisin's or the Café
Riche, informing him for whom the order was to be
prepared.
Among the things which Andrew had unconsciously


228
Fate is Hard—Cash!
assimilated from Radwalader, was something very
nearly equalling the latter's instinct for ordering a
dinner. It was that, even more than the louis or
the Panhard, which inspired respect in the super-
cilious mind of the maître d'hôtel. So they had
caviar, sharpening the twang of their halves of lemon
with a dash of tabasco; and langouste à l'Américaine,
with a hint of tarragon in the mayonnaise; venison,
with a confection of ginger, marmalade, and currant
jelly, which not every one gets, even for the asking,
at the Pavillon d'Armenonville; a salad of split
Malaga grapes and hearts of lettuce; and a Camem-
bert cheese, taken at the flood-the which, in Camem-
bert, is of as good omen as that in the affairs of
men.
Around them the brilliantly-illumined tables were
filled with diners. The true Parisian monde, long
since departed for Aix or Hombourg, had given
place to the annual influx of foreigners and the
lighter spirits of the half-world, men and women
both. Here were minds which skidded from sub-
ject to subject with the eccentricity of water-spiders
on a roadside pool. The latest comedies, the latest
fashions, the latest scandals—they came and went,
verbal drops sliding over the acute edge of con-
versation, each touched with prismatic hues of
humour, irony, or cynicism. The hum of chat
was a patchwork of English, French, German,
Spanish, Russian, and Italian. Europe was talking
-talking the gossip of the day-pouring it like liquid


Fate is Hard-Cash!
229
silver into the moulds of many languages, wherefrom
it took the oddest forms of epigram.
Here and there, members of the American Colony
were entertaining friends from the States, arrived
that afternoon from Calais, Cherbourg, or Le Hâvre,
with the odour of bilge-water yet in their nostrils,
and the terra, misnamed firma, rocking unpleasantly
under their senses. At an adjoining table, a huge
American collegian, labouring heavily against the
head-wind of many cocktails, addressed his waiter:
“Ziss my las' night ’n Paruss, gassun. Jer know
w'a' I've done t Paruss? Ziss w'a' I've done t
Paruss."
He made the gesture of one wringing a half of
lemon, and casting it contemptuously aside, and
looked up, proudly, for approval. Later he would
be tenderly removed—“a river ark on the ocean
brine."
But these—the transient Americans were the
least significant factors in the scene. They had come
to prey, and would go away to scoff. They were a
grade above the herded tourists to whose understand-
ing the Colonne Vendôme is an edifice closed for fear
of suicides; but among them were women who
would write books on Paris, upon the strength of
three months' residence and six letters of introduc-
tion, and men whose diligence in exhuming the
most sordid evidences of metropolitan degradation
would enable them to speak, thenceforward, with
authority upon French depravity—the Hams, Tar-


232
Fate is Hard-Cash!
but I found her beautiful, amusing, and the soul of
kindness. I liked her, and—well, I drifted along
from day to day, without any particular plan, one
way or another. It may seem incredible that I
thought her like any other girl I knew, but I did. I
suppose it's not an especially novel story-Paris and
the young American.”
“Goliath and David,” commented Radwalader.
“Exactly-except that David won out, and I
haven't. I began to hear things; but, even so, I
continued to like her, and to go there. I didn't half
believe what I heard, in the first place: it was all so
different—the surroundings and all that—from any-
thing I'd ever known. There wasn't a sign of any-
thing of the sort, as far as I could see; and I was
more sorry for her than anything else, when I finally
caught on. I had the kind of feeling one has for a
chap that's being overhazed at college. Everybody
was damning her, and all the time she was treating
me as her friend-and nothing more. I felt that it
was up to me to stick up for her, and I did-even
when Mrs. Carnby chimed in, and told me I was
acting like a fool. You see—”.
He hesitated, fingering his fork, and appearing to
reflect.
“I said I'd talk straight with you," he added,
"and I will. There was only one person whose
opinion made any difference to me, and I felt I
could trust her all through. I dodged the question
when you spoke of it, back there, but of course you


Fate is Hard-Cash!
233
were right. It was somebody's business-Margery
Palffy's. I'd been as good as engaged to her for a
year—that is, she knew and I knew—and it never
dawned upon me that she was going to think any-
thing except—well, that! You see, I knew I hadn't
done anything wrong, and I went to her, as bold as
brass, that last night when we were all at Poissy,
and asked her definitely. You can imagine how I
felt when she came back at me with–I don't need
to tell you what she said. It was the same old
business that other people had been hinting at, but
it was straight from the shoulder, and showed me
that she thought I was as unworthy of her as a man
could well be—as unworthy of her as I am now! It
was the worst kind of a facer. It drove me mad,
Radwalader-I want you to remember, all the time,
that I didn't deserve it—and I Aung away from her,
with every drop of my damnable pride at the boiling-
point, and came back to Paris, and—to the inevi-
table. For three weeks I've been living in heaven
—and in hell!”
“In heaven,” said Radwalader quietly, “because
of Mirabelle; and in hell because of—”
“That's it–because of Margery Palffy! Try to
understand me. If I thought I loved her before, I
know it now. If it were possible to go back-but it
isn't—it's never possible to do that. It's too late,
that's all there is about it.”
Radwalader smiled easily. The cards were run-
ning his way now.


234
Fate is Hard-Cash!
“Surely, you're not tied up as tight as that,” he
said. “You've been a trifle hot-headed, yes; but
in all you've told me, there's nothing more than
what a vast majority of the men you know have
done, and nothing more than what a vast majority
of women have forgiven and forgotten. It's never
too late to mend. Cut loose, my dear Vane-cut
loose from Mirabelle, and go back to the girl you
· really care for. You'll have to deny a few things,
of course, and swallow some humiliation; but don't
get tragic over it. In affairs like this, the first
course is humble-pie, but the pièce de résistance is
invariably fatted calf!”
“Cut loose from Mirabelle?" repeated Andrew.
“Cut loose from Mirabelle?”
“Obviously. There's one infallible way, my
friend."
Radwalader raised his right hand lightly, and
chafed with his thumb the tips of his first and second
fingers.
“Money?” demanded Andrew.
“Of course! And you may thank your stars that
you're in a position to command it. Many a chap
has gone under because he couldn't pay the piper
when the bill came in. You can; and there's no
reason under heaven why you should let this matter
trouble you. Wait a moment!”—as Andrew was
about to speak—“let me explain. I'm not the sort
that cuts into other people's affairs as a rule. I
detest meddling, and ordinarily I don't want to be


“As it was in the Beginning ...” 239
with all its codes and creeds, established by the lim-
ited experience of the men inhabiting it. But what
would be effected by the abrupt entrance into society
of a messenger from another planet, infinitely wiser,
infinitely more advanced, was brought to pass by
Radwalader's words. The status quod reeled on its
foundations. The alternative which Andrew had
accepted, and which had dulled, if not actually done
away with, the acuteness of his disappointment, now
appeared in its true light as the veriest sham, a
sedative worse than useless—enervating-stupefying
-poisonous. The bare suggestion was enough. Not
for a moment did he doubt the significance of this
message which had never reached him. It could
mean but one thing—forgiveness and recall. All
there had been to say upon the other count, had been
said in that half-hour in the arbour. Her hand had
been stretched out to stay him from the precipice
down which he had plunged-stretched out too
late! The knowledge tore in an instant the mask
from his vanity, and he stood confessed—a coward.
What was it she had said?“A fancy so trivial
and so idle that it could not even hold you back
from transgression.” And he had resented that,
resented it only to furnish proof, when the actual
temptation came, that it was true!
He knew himself now for what he was. How
scornful he had been of these accusations, how
certain of himself, how small in that great loyalty
of his which stood for nothing, how ready to believe


240 “As it was in the Beginning ..."
himself infallible! The merest profligate of those
whose follies he had despised in other days, was no
weaker, in the end, than he. He looked up blindly
to where the stars winked faintly through the lace-
like foliage, and cursed the distant roar of Paris
which came dully to his ears. Paris—Circe! and
he no better than the transformed comrades of
Ulysses! He was a coward—a fraud—à sham;
he found himself, in this moment of bitter self-
reproach, untrue even to the flimsy conception of
duty which, when it put him to the test, he had
debauched. He thought of Mirabelle, and in think-
ing hated her! With all her beauty, all her perfect
mimicry of breeding, all the little significant hints of
colour and perfume with which she so skilfully clothed
with charm whatever pertained to her, she had
never struck below his ready appreciation of whatever
was suggestive of refinement and eloquent of femi-
ninity. It was her novelty which had principally
charmed him; but novelty is the butterfly of the
sensations—the most brilliant, the shortest-lived of
these emotional ephemera. Mrs. Carnby had struck
the key-note in her cool analysis of the demi-monde:
“These women don't wear. They seem to be only
plated with fascination, and in time the plating
wears off, and you come back to the kind with the
hall-mark.”
Now the scales fell from Andrew's eyes, and he
knew that what she had said was true. Compared
to Margery—the Margery he had loved and lost,


“As it was in the Beginning ...” 241
what was this Mirabelle to whom he had yielded
her place? Beautiful, yes! But the perception of
beauty, like beauty's self, lies only skin-deep. Now,
with Radwalader's suggestion that the way of retreat
lay open, came the reaction, inevitable in such a
nature as Andrew Vane's, from an emotion purely
extrinsic. He was tired of her. The plating had
worn off.
Suddenly he remembered that he had promised
to see her that night, and, with an abrupt percep-
tion of the opportunity thus offered, he pulled him-
self together, and swung off rapidly toward the
Porte Dauphine. As he walked, inhaling the fra-
grance of the evening air, a new sanity seemed to
descend on him. He promised himself that this
should be the end. However the effect was to be
accomplished, he was determined to break the
relation, kindly but firmly; and at whatever risk
to regain, if not his self-esteem, at least his freedom.
As to what should follow, he did not care—or dare-
to ask. The unknown significance of the lost message
soothed him like an irrational caress. Was it too
late? Is it ever“ too late to mend”? He neither knew
nor cared. Given his freedom, he would chance
the rest. Fate was hard. A thought checked him.
“Fate is hard-cash!”
“Whatever I believe,” he told himself, “I don't
believe that.” And then, in the illogical manner of
man, added:“I don't care what it costs me—this is
the end!”


242 “As it was in the Beginning ..."
He found Mirabelle in a corner of her great divan,
and the room softly illumined. She wore a be-
witchingly dainty lounging-gown of iridescent silk,
in the folds of which peacock-blues and greens
played and rippled into each other in constant com-
minglings.
“Embrasse-moi,” she said, looking up at him.
She glanced at him curiously as he straightened
himself again and dropped upon the cushions at
her feet. In a woman, the manner of a kiss per-
forms the midwife's office to the beginnings of clair-
voyance.
"I wonder,” said Andrew presently, "if you
know that people are talking about us, ma chère?”
Mirabelle commented upon this intelligence with a
tilt of her eyebrows.
“Yes," continued Andrew, "it seems that our
doings are become public property, and our reputa-
tions are in jeopardy.”
“Yours, perhaps,” remarked the girl. “As for
mine, mon ami, ça n'existe pas."
“Don't!” said Andrew suddenly. “Please don't!”
“After all,” said Mirabelle, “what difference?
They talk, these good people, whether things are so
or not. It's the women, of course. If my clothes
were not d'un chic, they would pass me over as un-
worthy of consideration.”
: "This time,” said Andrew, "it seems the ground
of complaint is not clothes alone. I'm told that
I'm affiché.”


“As it was in the Beginning ...” 243
“So you are, I suppose. You were that from the
moment I took your arm at Auteuil, that first after-
noon. Do you object? There are many who would
be glad to say as much.”
Andrew bit his lip. It was going to be harder than
he had thought. He had come to say—he could
not have told exactly what. His whole relation
with Mirabelle had come so stealthily into being,
and had been distinguished by a novelty, a goût
piquant so subtle and alluring, that he had hardly
been conscious of its development into something
definite and established, until the thing was done.
His thoughts went back to that afternoon, in his
own apartment, three weeks before, when first he
had kissed her. That had been the turning-point-
the crisis when the whole wide world tipped upside
down. His entire point of view had undergone an
instantaneous readjustment as his lips met hers,
and before him had opened the gate of a new world
-a garden lavish of unfamiliar fruits and strange
flowers, breathing a heavy, languid, deadening
sweetness. He had entered, as one turns aside
from the beaten road to explore some little vista of
unprecedented beauty, with a vague convincement
at the back of his brain, that the divergence was for
a moment only, and that, so soon as his curiosity
should be satisfied, he would turn back to the high-
way and go forward again, richer by an experience
which it was not necessary to mention, and which
would be as immaterial in its bearing upon the main


244 “As it was in the Beginning ...”
issues of life, as a flower plucked and tossed aside in
passing, or a tune whistled in a moment of light-
heartededness.
Now-it was singularly hard to cut to the pith of
the sensation—the gate which had opened so in-
vitingly seemed to have closed behind him. What
was still more curious, he found, of a sudden, that
these fruits and flowers which had tempted him by
reason of their novelty, were now as familiar, as
seemingly essential, as if they had always been feat-
ures of his environment. The garden itself was no
longer a place wherein he walked as a transient vis-
itor, idly inspecting, but one in which he stood as
proprietor. The tendrils had climbed and clung
about his feet. The moment for retreat had come,
and lo! he could not move!
As they talked, he grew still more conscious of the
fact that this task of disentanglement which he had
planned, was one beset with unexpected difficulties.
Mirabelle had practically disregarded the inclined
plane of suggestion by which he had sought to lead
up to the main issue, and, with a little air of pro-
prietorship, had begun to map out her plans for the
coming week—plans in which Andrew figured as
naturally, as much as a matter of course, as did her
carriage or her meals or her gowns. For the first
time, he realized to what an extent she had a claim
upon him. For the first time, the curb replaced
the snaffle. For the first time, the bit made its
presence fully felt. Andrew stirred uneasily.


“As it was in the Beginning ...” 247
sham and an imitation and a mockery. You were a
gentleman-not a rasta, like the others. I thought
your instincts couldn't play you false, and that I
saw that they prompted you to regard me, here in
my own home, as a woman and a friend, not merely
as a mistress and a toy. From the first, you never
presumed, you never let the thought of what, at
worst, I might have been to you, come forward to
shame the thought of what I was, at best! I said
to myself that you cared for me—for my mind-my
heart-and that what was most to others was nothing
to you. When you kissed me first—that afternoon-
ah, mon Dieu! I thought it was not the kiss of pas-
sion, but the kiss of love! At that moment you
knew fully what I was—if you'd not guessed it
before, but you asked for-nothing! Instead you
played, and your soul was in the music. I've never
heard such playing. It was pure-pure-pure!
Ah!,”
She opened her eyes slowly, without looking at him.
“And I was happy-happier than I've ever been:
because, I said, there must still be a little some-
thing in me of all I thought I'd lost. I'd not loved
you before that day. It was while we were there
together that it came. I would to God you'd let
me go then-let me go with the memory of a look
which I'd never seen in a man's eyes before-the
look which said . Respect.""
For a moment there was silence, and then Mira-
belle laughed shortly.


248 “As it was in the Beginning ..."
“That was what I was fool enough to think-all
that! Quelle idiote! Nous voilà, cher ami, at the end
of the chapter. Your glove is worn: you must
replace it. Your flower is wilted: you must have
another for your lapel!”
Now she looked full at him, her lip curling.
“It is like the Moulin,” she added. “Combien
est-ce que tu me donnes, beau brun?"
Andrew swung himself to a kneeling posture.
“What are you saying?” he demanded hotly.
“My God! Does what has been between us mean
nothing to you? Have I ever suggested–have I
ever said a word to justify such a monstrous thing?
14"
“Just now you kissed me, thinking of another
woman!” exclaimed Mirabelle. “Did you suppose I
didn't know? Why, I've loved you—that's how I
knew! Do you realize what all this meant? You
could have made me good again. I would have
left all this—forgotten it-blotted it out! I could
have gone away quietly into the country, and lived
my life out, without a regret. I could almost have
been content never to see you again-never to hear
from you, if I could have remembered—what once
was true—that you respected me! Forgive what I
said just now. It was coarse—unworthy of all that
has been. But you don't understand. I wish I'd
not said what I did; and yet, at times, I feel that
way-I mean, as if it were all the same—at the
Moulin Rouge or here—they for an hour, I for a
Moulin mean, as if it wereu, at times, I fee


“As it was in the Beginning ...” 249
month, but each flung away presently, like the dregs
of wine. I've laughed at the knowledge that that is
how it is; always laughed-until the shadow of the
thought fell on you!”
She slid her cool fingers into the hand he started
to raise in protest, and held it close against her
cheek.
“Then it maddened me. You see, everything
has been different with you from what it was with
the others. I'd never have believed that I could care
for any man as I have for you—and perhaps I
shouldn't have cared for you as I have, if you'd
come into my life in any other way. But you asked
to be presented to me, and waited for Radwalader
to get my permission; you talked to me as to a
young girl of your own monde; and if at first I didn't
understand what that meant, I soon saw that it was
because you didn't know! Is it any wonder that I
came to love you?—you who alone of all men yielded
me the exquisite homage of respect? I dreaded
the moment when the change must come—when
that deference which intoxicated me like a new
wine should be touched with a growing spirit of
license, which from you would have been intolerable!
From day to day I watched you; but even when I
knew that you suspected what I was, my eyesmon
Dieu, how keen they were!—could see no change in
you—and that was the greatest surprise of all.
And when, in that moment of madness, I as much as
told you, and you were gentle with me, what had


250 “As it was in the Beginning ...”
been love for your treatment of me became, all at
once, love for just—you !”.
With an almost imperceptible pressure she drew
him closer to her. As she went on speaking, her
fingers touched his temples and his hair in a succes-
sion of tiny, soft caresses which were like the embryos
of spoken endearments.
"Mon bien aimé! Never will you be able to com-
prehend what you thus came to mean to me. I
have always been vain, lazy, passionately desirous
of all that is softest, sweetest, most palatable in
life ; and these things I have had—but at what a
price! Then you came, and with you a flash of hope!
I made myself believe, I don't know what! Marriage?
Yes, there was even that in my mind; and there
was, as well, the idea of going away, as I've said,
into the country, and letting the four winds and the
sunlight of heaven wash and wash and wash me,
through all the years of my life, until I should go
out of this world as white as I came in! Ah! I
don't know what it was, that little flash of hope,
except that it seemed to say that escape was possible,
and it was to your hand I clung, seeking the outlet.
But that was only for one night-for just that one
night! With the next day, with all the sights and
sounds to which I am accustomed—the Allée at
noon, Armenonville at tea-time, Paillard's at mid-
night-I saw what the end must be; and, since then,
I've watched, as only a woman watches, for that
first little hint of its coming which only a woman


“As it was in the Beginning ...” 253
terized their relation was intensified rather than
diminished by this touch of tragedy.
Mirabelle rose suddenly, looking down upon
him.
"I understand," she said; "but there is one thing
I would like to ask you. This other woman-do
you love her? Will all this procure you what you
want?”
“I don't know," faltered Andrew. "Perhaps
not."
“Then why~"
“Oh, how can I explain to you?” he exclaimed,
rising in his turn. “It's just this-I must make an-
other try, and to do that I must be free! You have
the right to ask—what haven't you the right to ask!
I'll tell you the truth—that's all I can do now. The
girl I asked to marry me flung me off because
because"
“Because of me?"
She bent forward, staring at him, as if she would
wring the truth from his hesitation.
“Yes—because of you.”
“And when was this? When was it, I ask you?
Was it-before?”
“Yes.”
“Then she had no grounds for what she said?
She was wrong-she misjudged you—and then you
came back to me!”
“Yes."
“Why-why?"


“As it was in the Beginning ...” 255
“Yes," said Mirabelle; and, with a little sob, he
bent and kissed her hand.
When he had gone, she stood irresolutely, her lips
parted and her eyes very bright. Then she wheeled
and walked slowly toward the mantel. A photo-
graph of Thomas Radwalader leaned there against
a slender vase. As it met her eyes, she snatched
abruptly at it, tore it into twenty pieces, and scat-
tered the fragments in the air.


CHAPTER XVI.
A DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE.
“HE's gone for a couple of days,” observed Vicot
bluntly, as he opened the door of Andrew's apart-
ment to Radwalader, about noon of the following day.
“He left a note for you. It's on his desk.”
“I'll come in and read it," answered Radwalader,
with his customary lack of manifest surprise. “It
may require an answer.”
He pulled off his gloves in a leisurely manner, as
he entered the little salon, and stood looking down
at the note addressed to him.
"Perhaps,” he added, "you'll save me the trouble
of opening this by giving me a brief epitome of its
contents."
“He didn't honour me with his confidence,” said
Vicot. “And he left the note sealed.”
Radwalader turned the envelope, flap up.
"I see you've been careful to restore it to its orig-
inal condition," he remarked. “You're skilful at
this kind of thing, my friend-uncommonly skilful.
I fail to perceive the slightest evidence of your tam-
pering.”
256


258 A Declaration of Independence.
“I've gone back,"” he read slowly, "for an-
other try.'”
“Well?” inquired Radwalader pleasantly. “Are
you any the wiser?”
“What does it mean?” asked Vicot, looking down
at him.
“It means," said Radwalader, “that the game is
up.”
“Damnation!”
“My good Jules!” protested Radwalader, “par-
don the license of an old friend, who begs to suggest
that your interruption is in most execrable taste!”
“What are you driving at?” exclaimed Vicot
impatiently. “What does it mean, all this palaver?
There's something back of it. You can't hoodwink
me, Radwalader.”
“Far be it from me to attempt the impossible, my
astute Jules. Quite justly, you demand what I'm
driving at, and, quite frankly, I've told you. The
game is up. Mr. Vane has outplayed us. He's
managed to get out of this pretty little tangle in a
fashion at once ingenious and unexpected. I con-
fess myself beaten. He's gone back to the girl he
intends to marry.”
Radwalader paused for an instant, as a thought
struck him.
“And he would have gone back long ago," he
added, "if he had received a certain telegram which
was sent to him three weeks ago. If that particular
telegram was not intercepted en route, it should have


A Declaration of Independence. 259
reached him; if that particular telegram was in-
tercepted en route, it should have reached me.
Well?”
Vicot stared at him blankly, his hand groping in
his pocket.
“A telegram?” he repeated, and then drew out
the blue missive which had arrived, almost simul-
taneously with Mirabelle, three weeks before.
“I forgot,” he stammered.
“You ass!” exclaimed Radwalader. “It's lucky
enough for you that your carelessness didn't inter-
fere with my plans. As it is, I don't see that it makes
much difference. Vane has been too sharp for us,
all around. For once in my life, I've made a mis-
calculation. He's out of the net, right enough, and
the best we can do is to abandon the chase and
apply ourselves to something more profitable. I'm
glad to think that, however unsatisfactory, from a
financial point of view, the venture may have
proved to me, at least you have not suffered—”.
“Enough of that!” broke in Vicot. “Get to the
point!”
“Why, the point is simply this. On the return of
Mr. Vane, you will present, in due form, your resig-
nation from his employ, and resume your careful
surveillance of my window in the Rue de Villejust.
When you shall observe it to be ornamented with a
certain unpretentious blue jar, you will know that I
am once more at home to you. I think I can
promise you that the next case deserving of our


260
A Declaration of Independence.
joint attention will not be so barren of result as this
one, which we are now with reluctance forced to
abandon. You might go back to driving a cab,
meanwhile,"
“I'm to leave Mr. Vane's employ,” said Vicot, less
in the tone of inquiry than in that of reflection.
“I'm to leave Mr. Vane's employ."
“Quite so, my perspicacious Jules.”
“Well, then-I won't!” said Jules Vicot.
He seated himself upon the edge of Andrew's
desk and folded his arms.
“Radwalader," he added, “many's the time I've
listened to you. Now it's your turn to listen to
me.”
Radwalader, following the impulse of a momentary
whim, folded his arms in turn.
"Mon cher confrère," he said amusedly, "I shall
listen with reverent attention to whatever you may
have to say."
“I know too well,” continued the other, "that I
can't appeal with any hope of success to your sense
of pity—because you haven't any. Wilfully or
otherwise, you have contrived to stifle the prompt-
ings of feeling which weaken-or is it strengthen?-
other men. You're trained to perfection. But
there must be one thing which even you are unable
to forget-I mean the time when we were young
and clean, when we smiled by day as we dreamed of
what lay before us, instead of shuddering by night,
as now, as we dream of what lies behind."


262 A Declaration of Independence.
“Severe," commented Radwalader, “but strictly
accurate. Continue, my Jules.”
“You can't make me angry, Radwalader. I'm
changed a good bit in these past few weeks. I've
been going easy on the drink for one thing, which
may account for the fact that my head has cleared,
and that I see a number of things in a very different
light.”
For an instant his eyes gleamed with a kind of
eagerness.
“I wish you were easier to talk to, Radwalader,"
he added, his voice suddenly grown timorous with a
hint of the old whimper. “With all your cold.
bloodedness, you're the only—”.
“When you've anything worth saying, I'm as easy
to talk to as the next man,” said Radwalader. “It's
only when you begin to lament through your nose
about the past, and remorse; and to quote 'I remem-
ber, I remember the house where I was born,' that I'm
not the pink of polite attention. I confess I can't
stand that kind of thing; but, for this once, let it go.
I'll hear you out.”
“Well,” continued the other, “one thing I've
found out is that there is less tragedy than comedy
about an old man looking back shamefacedly upon
his past."
“That's the first sensible thing you've said,”
observed Radwalader.
“The tragic spectacle,” added Vicot, “is that of
the young man looking forward hopefully to the


A Declaration of Independence. 263
future. Now the old man and the young man I
describe have been in close proximity for several
weeks, and the old man has learned that his own
security isn't worth much, one way or another, when
compared with the young man's security.”
“The old man gets ten in modesty.” Radwalader
carefully entered the mark in an imaginary report-
book.
“The old man sees," pursued Vicot, “that a
certain person whom he has been fearing is really
of infinitely minor importance, after all.”
“Grand merci !"
“This person has been jumping out of dark corners
and shouting ‘Boo!'—that's all. Even if he should
tell all he knows about the old man—but he won't, no
matter what happens: that's another thing the old
man has learned—it wouldn't make any difference.
Do you see? It wouldn't make any difference at
all!”
He peered at Radwalader triumphantly, but the
latter noted that under his folded left arm Vicot's
right thumb twitched ceaselessly against his sleeve.
He hugged himself upon perceiving this, and nodded.
“Shrewd old man!” he said. “Pity he didn't
find all this out sooner.”
"Well, soon or late,” went on Vicot, “the knowl-
edge is his now, and it's bound to be useful not to
himself, mind you, but to the young man! Do you
begin to see? If this person is going to hound this
young man, and ruin his life as he has ruined others,


CHAPTER XVII.
A DOG AND HIS MASTER.
For a long moment after this announcement,
Radwalader stared at the speaker curiously. Vicot
had straightened himself, and met his eyes with a
kind of boldness which he had never shown before.
“He is my son!” he repeated presently. “Sit
down, Radwalader. You may as well hear the whole
story. My name's no more Vicot than yours is.
It's John Vane, and twenty-five years ago it was as
respected as any in Boston. I'd everything to live
for, as the saying is, and I might have realized it all;
but, except for about a year, just after I left college,
I never seemed to get a grip on things. I had money
- perhaps that was the trouble. Everything came
my way for a time; but I mixed myself up in specu-
lation, and it wasn't long before I found myself
ruined. I-I was married. My wife stuck to me,
even after I began to drink, but after the liquor'd
had a chance to make me about what I've been ever
since you've known me, and I saw that she was
beginning to despise me, I grew-or thought I grew-
to hate her. We were living in a wretched little
house in Kingsbridge, the drink was gaining on
268


A Dog and His Master.
271
knowledge of the case, to have been simply because
you didn't know anything worth telling. I thought
I was going to need your services, but, as it hap-
pened, I didn't. Things went very well by them-
selves.”
“But it was only last night,” continued Vicot, after
a moment,“that I realized what this boy meant to me.
After you'd gone out to dinner, I picked up what was
lying on that table. I'd never seen it before. Either
it had just come, or else he's kept it locked up. Do
you remember what it was? It was that picture-
there!”
He flung out one hand passionately, pointing at
the miniature on the mantel behind Radwalader.
“Look! I found that—the picture of my wife and
the mother of my son!”.
Radwalader rose slowly, turned, walked across to
the mantel, and bent forward to examine the pic-
ture. As Vicot continued, the vague expression of
interest on the other's face deepened to one of eager
scrutiny. His eyebrows came together, as of one
who strives to recollect, and then a small, sneering
smile began to curl the corners of his lips.
“That settled the question. As I say, I've made
a rotten failure of everything, but there's one chance
left! When I saw her picture, I saw my duty, and
I was glad—my God! how glad I was! So now I'm
resolved. You can do as you please. You can say
what you will. You can flay me alive, if you like,
or send me to the galleys, or ruin me in any fashion
smile become to recollect, and 12 logether, as


A Dog and His Master.
279
“I?" repeated Vicot. “What have I to do with
it?"
“This much: that, while you've been planning to
keep him out of my power, the very thing that would
have done so once and for all has been lying in your
pocket. A moment ago you laid a telegram upon
the table. It's still there. Open it!”
Slowly, wonderingly, Vicot tore the blue paper
open and read aloud the five words which it contained:
“Come back to me. MARGERY.”
Radwalader slipped his hands into his pockets.
“Exactly," he said. “Do you see?”
“But you said, only a little while ago," stammered
Vicot, “that the game was up—that you wouldn't do
anything more.”
“Only by way of shutting your mouth,” said
Radwalader coolly. “Since then there've been
developments. When I said that, I was, as I've
already told you, anxious to get rid of you. Now,
well, you won't blab in any event, because the small
sum of money which it will cost Vane to get rid of
Mirabelle is nothing compared with what it would
mean to him if you forced me into pitting my knowl-
edge of his origin against your accusations of me.”
"And so,” cried Vicot furiously, "you're deter-
mined to hold this over him. You'll hound him
and hound him-damn you!—till perhaps you'll
drive him desperate—till you drive him to kill himself
—and end up in the Morgue, like young Baxter—and
then you'll go and look at him, staring out through


280
À Dog and His Master.
the glass and you'll smile and light a cigarette
and whistle 'Au Clair de la Lune'! You hell-hound!”
He flung himself forward, as if he would have
seized the other by the throat, halted suddenly as
Radwalader's right hand came from his pocket, and
stooped, staring cross-eyed into the shining mouth
of a revolver, held without a tremor six inches from
his contorted face.
“Get back, you dog!” said Radwalader; and at
the words, as if he had been a dog indeed, Vicot
shuddered, went limp, and sank whimpering at his
master's feet.
“Now listen to me as well as you're able,” con-
tinued Radwalader. “If you stir hand or foot in
this matter, you're a lost man. It's no longer the
old story: you know what's at stake now! I don't
know what this madness of yours may lead you to,
but I've myself to protect, and you may rest assured
I'll do that, no matter at what cost. If, through
some distorted and drunken idea of protecting him,
you betray me, I'll hound you—since you talk of
hounding—as never was a man hounded before. I'd
sacrifice not only you, not only Vane, not only the
memory of his mother, but myself into the bargain.
If I pull down all Paris about my ears, I'll beat
you, do you hear?—I'll beat you, my man-I'll
beat you!”
As he finished, Vicot dragged himself to his elbows
and looked up. His face was ghastly, and wet with
ridiculous, insensate tears.


A Dog and His Master.
281
“All right, Radwalader," he whined. “Do as you
please, only for God's sake don't let this get out. If
you must have the money, get it from him, but don't
ruin his life-don't let him know. I won't breathe a
word-I swear I won't—and I'll do whatever else
you ask of me—anything—God knows I will!”
He was on his knees now, clutching at Radwala-
der's coat.
“Now it's all right, isn't it?” he asked. “It's all
right between us? You won't tell, and I won't
tell. We understand each other, Radwalader,
don't we?-ha, yes, we understand each other, you
and I!”
“God!” said Radwalader, flinging him off. “Is it
a man or a worm?”
Briefly he stood, looking down at the thing which
writhed and whimpered before him, and then touched
it curiously with his foot. A moment later, the
outer door closed behind him with a sullen slam.
For a long time-for five hours and more-Vicot
lay where he had fallen. At first he choked and
sobbed, repeating fragments of his miserable appeal,
but gradually even this incoherent murmur died
down to silence. The long summer afternoon stole
by; and from the street outside came the com-
mingled sounds of a busy thoroughfare—the rattle
of wheels, the cries of venders, the clamour of chil-
dren playing: and still he lay, as motionless as one
dead. It was only when the sunlight swung in hori-
zontally through the window on the Rue Boissière,


286
Fair Exchange is no Robbery.
tired of me, and he's given me my congé, and that's
all there is to it.”
She looked down, fingering the lace on her gown,
as if to dismiss the subject.
“You asked him?” began Radwalader.
“I asked him-nothing! And I shall ask him-
nothing! That was what I came to tell you. I
gather from your expression that it's not pleasant
news. I'm sorry to disappoint you; but the truth
isI'm tired of this kind of thing. I'm going away
for a little rest, and I don't care to be troubled by
money matters.”
Mirabelle was letting her contempt for the man
before her grow dangerously apparent in her voice,
and he winced under it, and then flushed darkly.
“What rubbish is this?” he demanded, almost
roughly. “Is it a joke?”
“Oh, as far as possible from anything of the kind,”
retorted Mirabelle. “I was never more in earnest.
You wished me to engage with you in blackmailing
Mr. Vane, and you'll probably be kind enough to
remind me that I've done this kind of thing before.
I don't deny it, but,"
For the first time her voice broke slightly.
“There are reasons,” she added, “why I cannot
do it now."
Radwalader bit his lip. For a moment his temper
well-nigh claimed the upper hand, but he was shrewd
enough to match this curious unconcern with some-
thing quite as non-committal.


290 Fair Exchange is no Robbery.
content. I'll not disturb you. Au revoir, ma
chère!”
“Ah!” said Mirabelle brokenly. “How little,
with all your cleverness, you understand a woman!
Where she can be happy in her lover's happiness, no
matter at what cost to her, she must be unhappy in
his distress, no matter how free from personal suf-
fering she herself may be! You asked me if I loved
him. Well, then-yes! I don't mind saying that,
because you'll never understand how or why. How
should you? How should you know that, to a
woman, a man is not so much a personality, as the
author of all the new impulses and emotions which
he brings into her life? You say he's tired of me,
and I answer you that I'm more than repaid by
what he's taught me of truth and manliness and
gentleness and respect. That's why I could give
him up-because I knew that his best happiness lay
apart from mine. That's why I had to desert you,
because I could not be party to any plot to shame or
to degrade him. What I gave, I gave freely and
fully. Ah, try—try to understand! I've been a
faithful partner to you, haven't I? You yourself
say I've never broken my word or made a false move
in the games we've played together. I've been
loyal to you, no matter what degradation it cost me,
because I knew you trusted me. At first, as you
know, I didn't see what I was helping you to do. I
encouraged the boys you brought to me, and cast
them off when you gave the word. And afterwards,


292 Fair Exchange is no Robbery.
for ten-twenty-thirty thousand francs.' Et cetera,
et cetera, et cetera! Eh bien-non! I do not choose
to have it so with the man I love. There are other
fish for you to catch. Let me have this one's life.
That much you owe me. As you call yourself a
man, pay me and let me go!”
She had risen with the intensity of her appeal, and
now, white with passion, Radwalader flashed to his
feet at her side.
“By Heaven, Mirabelle—!”.
“And by Heaven, Monsieur Radwalader! What
then? Are you going to threaten me? Do you
take me for a Jules Vicot, at least? Do my hands
tremble? Do I shrink before you? Ah, that might
have been possible at first: for I don't deny that I've
feared you at times; but now—zut! It's not the
first time, my Radwalader, that the pupil has out-
stripped the master. You've taught me too much
for your own good. Voyons! A secret is safe just
so long as one person knows it, and only one. But
no man is secure, from the moment when he confides
to others that he's not what he pretends to be. But
you?-you are different. For two years past, to
my knowledge, and probably for many more, you've
been building up a house of cards. It's growing
very tall, Monsieur Radwalader, very dangerously
tall. You think the foundations strong, but they
weaken with every card you add. Allons! Enough
of this brawling. You know what I demand.”
“And if I refuse?” suggested Radwalader.


294 Fair Exchange is no Robbery.
perhaps, but as yet not mortally, by the shafts of
scandal. Now, let us see. You desire to snatch
him from the—what is it?-pit?-pitfall?-ah! trap
—which I am preparing for him. How do you go
about it? You first associate my name with several
most unpleasant terms of reproach, and then pro-
ceed to drag the combination before the public, and
say, 'Here is the intimate companion of the man I
lover' What does that mean? The man you love-
you! What a happy revelation for the friends and
family of Andrew Vane, who has been dawdling in
your arms, while another woman as much as held
his plighted word! I won't dwell on it. It's a sub-
ject by reference to which I've never sought to
humiliate you—but you've driven me to touch upon
it. Believe me, my friend, if it's indeed your wish
to save Andrew Vane from disgrace, you should
devise some project more promising than a public
proclamation of the fact that you've been his mis-
tress these few weeks past. You tell me you've
nothing to fear and nothing to lose. You'll add,
perhaps, that the fact's already public property, but
it isn't. It's public gossip, which is a very different
thing. The plain fact is this: from the instant
when you associate your name with his, he's ruined
absolutely and irretrievably."
Mirabelle bent forward to look at him, almost
curiously.
“Are you a man or a devil?” she said.
"A man, ma chère, and, in my own way, not an


Fair Exchange is no Robbery. 295
unreasonable or ungrateful man. To prove that,
you shall have what you ask. You can see what
trumpery rant you've been talking, and you probably
regret it already. Once for all—and as you should
have known—if threats of exposure could have
effected anything, I'd have been the talk of Europe
long ago. Please don't try it again. It's a waste
of time and a trial of temper, and, to me at least, such
scenes are always disagreeable. Now to the main
issue. I will do what you wish-on one condition.”
“I accept it,” said Mirabelle promptly.
“That's rash, and I release you from the pledge.
Wait till you know what the condition is. As you
say, there are other fish to catch, and, quite frankly,
I need your aid in catching them. So you will give
up your dream of rustic retirement, and remain
exactly as you are, and what you are, and where
you are. Also, the business relations between us”
“Ah, no-no !”
“The business relations between us are to con-
tinue in force, except that on the books of the firm
we shall close the account with Mr. Andrew Vane.”
For an instant the little house back of Boissy-St.
Leger hung on Mirabelle's vision—the rose-garden,
the wide outlook on the valley of the Marne, the
poplars stirred by a west wind, sweet with the breath
of Fontainebleau. Side by side with these rose the
contrasted mirage of crowded cafés, race-courses,
and theatres, the half-contemptuous court of women-
weary men, the unspeakable slavery, heartache, and


296
Fair Exchange is no Robbery.
humiliation of the life she had lived and which she
loathed. Then she looked straight into Radwala-
der's eyes. She had no need to ask if this was final.
They knew each other, these two.
“There shall be no other woman to come between
him and the one he wants to marry?" she asked.
“No other woman.”
“Vicot shall have no share in his life at all?”
“No share.”
"And you will never mention what he has done —
in Paris—with me?”
“Never."
There was silence between them for a moment, a
silence pricked only by the strokes of midnight.
"As you said, fair exchange is no robbery," sug-
gested Radwalader.
“If I agree? "
“You have my word. Honour among thieves!”
“Soit!” said Mirabelle. “God help me—have
your way!”
For an instant she stood motionless, and then,
with an imperious gesture, commanded his service
as if she had been the empress she appeared, and he
the lackey.
“My cloak, monsieur!”


CHAPTER XIX.
REDEMPTION.
AT Poissy the three weeks had worn listlessly
away. Margery yet remained, though the time
originally set as a limit for her visit had passed.
Monsieur and Madame Palffy were staying with some
friends in Dresden, whom Mrs. Carnby had never
seen, but whom, under the present circumstances,
she whimsically described to Jeremy as being “in
danger, necessity, and tribulation.”
Truth to tell, she had been forced to fall back upon
her own invention for means of amusement. She was
chafing under a sense of helplessness in a situation
which she seemed totally unable to grasp, and a fierce
impatience against the social conditions which make
it possible for a man to shut off the women most
deeply interested in him from the most significant
features of his life and conduct. She had spent a half-
hour in Margery's room on the morning of Andrew's
departure, and there had heard as much as she
cared to about the conversation in the arbor. Upon
this problem she had brought to bear all her trained
powers of persuasion, and at the end had the
297


298
Redemption.
satisfaction of bringing Margery to a less intolerant
attitude. The matter of inducing her to telegraph
Andrew a recall she had found more difficult.
“I wouldn't deceive you, my dear,” she said. “I'm
absolutely convinced of the truth of what I say when
I tell you that you've misjudged him. Oh yes
I know the appearances are all against him. I thought
just as you do, until I had the courage to ask him
out and out about the matter; but, when I did, I
soon saw that the circumstances were unusual-
extraordinarily so. He's been reckless, and, if he
cares for you as he pretends to, highly inconsiderate.
But I believe, as firmly as I do in my own existence,
that in the main essentials he's innocent. Of course,
he's been going around with this woman-even he
doesn't deny that; but the very fact that he admits
it seems to me to prove that it hasn't been as bad as
you suppose. One may go a long way with a woman
without going too far. Why, Margery, I could bite
my tongue off when I think what I said to you last
night. Just think!—I imagined I was straightening
things out, and giving you your cue! Instead, it ap-
pears that I was only giving you a wrong idea, and
putting everything into a hideous mess. Why, you
didn't give him a fighting chance! You piled on
him every accusation that came into your head, and
then sent him off before he had a chance to explain.
Why didn't you ask him one straight question, if
that was what you wanted to know? He'd have
answered you—yes, and told you the truth! If


Redemption.
299
there's one thing Andrew Vane is not, it's a liar. I
was sure of that before I'd known him two minutes."
“But there wasn't any need to ask him,” broke in
Margery. “He said of his own accord that—that
there is such a woman.”
“And what else?” demanded Mrs. Carnby.
“That she wasn't any more to him than a bird that
was singing near us; that he'd never see her again if
I asked him.”
“And you sent him away after that ! Good heavens,
my dear, that was the moment of all others when
you should have said 'I believe you!' For he was
telling you the truth-I'll stake my intelligence
on it. It was the supreme evidence of his reliance
upon you, the supreme test of your love. And you
failed. Appearances? Yes, of course! And what
are appearances? Nothing in the world but a per-
petual reminder that we're not omniscient. Mar-
gery—you've got to call him back.”
Margery made no reply.
"You owe that much to him, and you owe it to
me. We've both of us been in the wrong, and you
must give us a chance to set things right. If you
can't take him as he is, then ask him to tell you
exactly what his relations have been with this woman,
and act on his answer as you see fit. I can't criti-
cise, you for doing as you think right, if only you're
acting on the truth; but the truth you must have!
At present you're depending upon a lot of hearsay,
upon the criminally thoughtless cynicism of a gos-


300
Redemption.
sipy old woman, and on your own rash conclusions.
My dear girl, you know I love you love you better
than anything in the world, except Jeremy? Well,
then, do this for me.”
“Very well,” answered Margery wearily, “but
it's no use, Mrs. Carnby.”
That morning she telegraphed Andrew to come
back to her—and there was no reply.
Thereafter the subject had not been mentioned
either by the girl or her hostess. For the first time there
lay a little barrier of restraint between them, which
Mrs. Carnby, with all her tact, found it impossible to
pass, or even clearly to define. Her customary confi-
dence in herself stood back aghast. Any further
interference, she knew, might well be set down as
idle meddling. She had done her best—and failed.
Day by day she saw Margery grow paler and
thinner. The old gaiety was slipping from her,
flashing forth at more and more infrequent intervals,
like the flame of an untended lamp, brightening
more feebly, ever and anon, before it dies away.
But there was nothing to be said or done. The
little touches of endearment and sympathy with
which women often fill the place of words, passed
between them, but too often these negative inter-
preters of their hidden thoughts caused the girl's
eyes to fill. At Mrs. Carnby's earnest entreaty, she
prolonged her visit, and was glad of the seclusion
of the villa, the long idle days, the evenings at bil-
liards or backgammon with Jeremy, and the still


302
Redemption.
herself, not him, she blamed for his silence. She
had indeed not "given him a fighting chance." She
had insulted him, and, at the end, sent him about his
business with a heartless sneer. Mrs. Carnby's
words came back to her—"love is little more than
forgiveness on the endless instalment plan!”—and
she had not been willing to forgive him, even when
perhaps there had been nothing to forgive. She
would turn restlessly, watching the dawn brightening
against her window. Ah, kind God, what would
she not forgive him now! What difference could
anything that had been make, if only she could
hear his voice again, and see him bending over the
music of “The Persian Garden,” and know that for
all time he was hers!
“Each morn a thousand roses brings, you say:
Yes—but where leaves the rose of yesterday?”
Mrs. Carnby was not alone in her perception of
the change in Margery. Jeremy mentioned it, one
night, as they were dressing for dinner.
"I hope there's nothing gone wrong with Margery,
Louisa.”
“I hope not,” retorted his wife, dragging savagely
on the comb.
“Then you've noticed?”
“I've noticed-yes. It's the Tremonceau woman."
“The—”
“The most beautiful cocotte in Paris, my poor Jer-
emy. Thank God, you have to be told these things!


306
Redemption.
in the course of a conversation they had on the last
evening he was here—a mistake which imperilled the
happiness of them both, and which it was of the
utmost importance to set right. At the time, per-
haps, he showed himself to be the victim of an unjust
accusation; but since, he has shown himself to be a
cad. If you've never known-but I'd not have
believed it of you—that Margery was in love with
him, and that he's pretended to be in love with her,
then it's time you did!”
“What a pity!” observed Radwalader. “I wish
I'd known all this before: I might have done some-
thing. But, after all, it's just as well. It wouldn't
have done for Miss Palffy to humiliate herself; and
the little Tremonceau—"
“Is his mistress?" put in Mrs. Carnby.
“Of course," said Radwalader, with a skilful sigh.
“There's no doubt whatever about that.”
“I'd have wagered a good bit on his innocence!”
“When you wager anything on the innocence of a
young man who's been the close companion of Mira-
belle Tremonceau for six weeks or so," answered
Radwalader, “it's nothing less than a criminal
waste of money.”
“Then he's not only a cad,” said Mrs. Carnby
angrily, “but a liar as well; and, as I've said already,
I’m through with him!”
She was more than astounded when, two morn-
ings later, a telegram was handed her at the break-
fast-table. It was from Andrew, and requested


Redemption.
307
permission to come down at once and spend one
night.
“I think I'll leave you to answer that,” she ob-
served to Margery, who was alone with her at table,
Jeremy having gone up to town by the early train.
“The boy's waiting.”
She tossed the despatch across the table as she
spoke.
She was more astounded still when Margery
looked up at her with the first spontaneous smile
which Mrs. Carnby had seen upon her lips for many
days.
“Please ask him to come,” she said.
“Oh, my dear!” exclaimed Mrs. Carnby,“ do be
careful! Remember how much has happened. If
only you'd let me advise you!”
“You've advised me once already, fairy god-
mother,” said Margery, laughing.
“Heaven help me, so I have!” replied her hostess.
“Do you mean it, Margery?”
“I was never more in earnest,” answered the girl,
turning suddenly grave again.
So Mrs. Carnby sent the required answer.
All that morning she was more puzzled than ever
she had been in the whole course of her life. It was
certain that the girl's mood had changed. The
doubtful shadow in her eyes had given place to a
clear glow of confidence, and her laugh was free
from any suggestion of restraint. That in itself was
curious. Depression, melancholy, even resentment,


308
Redemption.
were to be expected as a result of the news that
Andrew Vane was on the point of entering her life
once more. Of late he had shown himself in a more
unfavourable light than ever; and yet in her eyes, her
smile, her light-hearted animation, there was some-
thing akin to a suggestion that he had been fully
exonerated from suspicion, rather than freshly and
more significantly subjected to it. She was em-
phatically happy-and Mrs. Carnby could not com-
prehend. The thought, indeed, came to her that
the explanation which Andrew had denied her, these
three weeks past, had been given to Margery, in
some fashion as yet unexplained. But this theory
was wholly incompatible with his bearing when he
arrived at noon. He looked wretchedly ill, and was
prey to a visible embarrassment. He took her hand,
but did not meet her eyes, and the credit she was
beginning to accord him gave way, once more, to
anger. As a result, her greeting was conspicuously
cool. After dinner he and Margery played bil-
liards, while Jeremy dozed, with the Temps over his
placid face, and Mrs. Carnby did more to ruin a
piece of embroidery than she had done to further it
in the past six months. Suddenly the good lady
retired to her room, with a violent and fortuitous
headache. She had relinquished any attempt to
fathom the situation: she had frankly thrown up
the sponge!
“Shall we take a walk in the garden?” asked
Andrew.


Redemption.
309
When they were alone with the silence and the
stars, his hand sought hers.
“Margery!”
“Andy!"
“I've simply come to say good-by, my dear. You
were quite right. I'm not worthy of you. I'm
going back to the States as soon as I can get away.
All I want you to remember is this. I've been care-
less—reckless—wholly at fault from the beginning to
the end—but I've loved you always, my dearest-
always—always! I won't go into all the miserable
details. Paris has made a fool of me, that's all.
I'm not the first idiot to throw away his chance of
happiness because of the big city over there, and
I'm not the first to pay the penalty I deserve. Once,
perhaps, I had the right to demand something at
your hands; but now I've no right to ask for any-
thing. I ask for nothing! I've come to beg for
your forgiveness, and to say good-by. Will you
forgive me, Margery?”
“I want to ask you just one question," said Mar-
gery steadily. “When I accused you of—of that-
the other night, was I right or wrong?”
“Wrong," said Andrew Vane; “but now”.
Suddenly she leaned toward him, stopping his
speech with her soft and open palm.
“I've thought of another question,” she said.
“Do you love me-now?”
“Love you?” answered Andrew. “Ah, Mar-
gery!”


310
Redemption.
“Then I wish to hear no more. The past is the
past, do you hear? I love you! I've learned much
in these few weeks. I love you, and I need you.
You can't leave me now. I've been so weary for
you, my love! Ah, whatever there has been between
us in the past, don't let anything stand between us
now!”
“But you don't understand," faltered Andrew.
“Things have changed. There is much that you
have to forgive me—much that I have to explain—"
“As to what I have to forgive you," answered
Margery, “I think there is also much for you to for-
give me; and as to what you have to explain-oh,
explain it later, Andy—explain it, if you like, when
we—"
“Are married!” exclaimed Andrew. “No! Things
must be made clear now. I've transgressed, my
love–transgressed beyond hope of forgiveness.
What would you say if you knew—?”
“I know already!” answered the girl. “I know
more than you think-and I forgive it all. Oh,
Andy, don't make it too hard for me! Help me-
won't you?”
Suddenly, with a realization of what all this
meant, he opened his arms, as to a child, and, like a
confiding child, she went into them.
"I love you,” she whispered. “That's all-
love you!”
“My love my love my love!” said Andrew.


312
The Shadow.
reply, but he drove briskly enough, once they were
under way. Though the day was warm, he wore
his fawn-coloured coat, with the triple cape, and had
turned up the collar about his ears. His white
cockaded hat, a size too large, was tipped forward
over his nose, and between it and his coat-collar, in
the back, showed a strip of bright red hair. For
features, he had a nobbly nose, with a purple tinge,
and a mustache like a red nail-brush.
From time to time Radwalader looked up from
his reading to remark their progress, and invariably
he smiled. The Place de l'Etoile, freshly sprinkled,
and smelling refreshingly of cool wet wood; the
omnibus and tramway stations, with their continual
ebb and flow of passengers seeking numbers; the
stupendous dignity of the Arc, and the preposterous
insignificance of three English women staring up at
it, with their mouths open, and Baedekers in their
hands; the fresh green of the chestnuts on the
Avenue de Friedland; the crack of a teamster's whip,
and his “Ahi! Houp!” of encouragement to the
giant gray stallions, toiling up the steep incline of
the Faubourg St. Honoré; the crowds of women at
Félix Potin's, pinching the fat fowls, and stowing
parcels away in netted bags; the “shish-shish-
shish” of an infantry company shuffling at half-step
toward the gateway of La Pépinière; the people
terrassé before the restaurants on the Place du Havre
-it was all very amusing, very characteristic, very
Parigot. More than ever, Radwalader felt that he
marcels awa infantry of La Pepe


314
The Shadow
had a strangely demoralizing effect upon the driver
of the yellow cab. He drew on for perhaps twenty
feet, and then deliberately clambered down from
his box, and followed his late client to the ticket
office, at the foot of the eastern stairway. Here,
with some ingenuity, he remarked, “Même chose."
“Poissy première ?”
"Oui.”
In the first-class carriage of the Poissy train, a
little, oblong pane of glass, above Radwalader's head,
enabled him, had he been so minded, to glance into
the next compartment-enabled the single occu-
pant of the next compartment, who was so minded,
to glance, as they started, into his.
In the Cour du Hâvre an infuriated agent apos-
trophized the deserted vehicle:
“Sale sous-les-pieds ! He amuses himself else-
where, then, ton drôle ! ”
The which was strictly true.
As the train rumbled through the illuminated
tunnel, the driver of the yellow cab did a number
of things with the most surprising rapidity and deci-
sion. He threw his varnished white hat out of the
window, and followed it immediately with his triple-
caped overcoat. He stripped off his fawn-coloured
trousers, thereby revealing the unusual circum-
stance that he wore two pairs-one of corduroy.
The former hurtled out into the smoky tunnel, in
the wake of the hat and coat, and the climax was
capped by a like disappearance of the red hair, the


316
The Shadow.
I thought she'd never get you—I don't know what
I mean, Andrew Vane! Go along in, both of you,
and sing about your roses and jugs of wine and
nightingales and moons of delight. I can see that's
all you'll be good for, from now on!”.
And so, shamelessly, they did-all over again,
from “Wake! for the Sun” to “flown again, who
knows!”
“It's tied up in double bow-knots with our hearts,
all this 'Persian Garden' music,” said Andrew.
“Do you remember how we used to rave over it at
Beverly? And I loved you even then—from the
first night.”
Standing behind him, Margery touched his hair.
And so evening came again, drenched in star-
light and rose-perfume, and stirring rapturously to
the voice of the nightingale.
“I want to speak to you.”
Radwalader touched Andrew's arm as they rose
from the table, and led the way directly through
the open window into the garden, and, through the
garden gate, into the Avenue Meissonier beyond.
Once there, he fell back a step, so that they were
bide by side.
“Let's walk toward the river," he suggested,
laking Andrew's arm.
A single lamp swung at the archway of the rail-
road bridge, but along the villa walls and under the
trees of the Boulevard de la Seine beyond, the
shadows were very dark. Once, as they passed a


318
The Shadow.
son after all ! Mrs. Carnby was the first to con-
gratulate me. Will you be the next?”
“Do you mean that Miss Palffy is going to
marry you?” asked Radwalader, coming to a full
stop.
“Just that,” said Andrew; "though why she
should, after all this—".
“Oh, rot!” laughed the other. “You've been no
worse than other men, and so long as you've owned
up—"
“We'll never agree on the question of whether I
deserve her or not,” put in Andrew. “Never in the
whole course of my life shall I forgive myself this
folly. But we won't talk of that. The fact remains
that I'm forgiven, and that she's going to marry me.
Oh, Gawd!”
He looked up at the sky and bit his lip. He was
desperately shy of slopping over, and, for a moment,
desperately near to it.
Presently he continued. They had rounded
L'Esturgeon now, and were walking along the south-
ern side of the Pont de Poissy, close to the rail.
Radwalader's pieces were all in place for the open-
ing of the new game.
“When a chap's only been pulled out of a horrible
mess by the merest chance, and when, into the bar-
gain, he's been engaged to the one-and-only for some-
thing under twenty-four hours, he is apt to do
considerable slobbering. I hope you'll give me
credit for sparing you all I might say, Radwal-


The Shadow.
319
ader, when I confine myself to saying that I'm in
luck."
“And that, you most certainly are,” said Rad-
walader cheerfully. “I'm glad you're so well
out of your scrape, Vane, and I congratulate you
heartily.” A pressure of his fingers on Andrew's
arm lent the phrase the emphasis of a hand-shake.
“Miss Palffy is charming—so clean and straight, and,
to say nothing of her beauty, with such high stand-
ards. To be quite frank with you, I'm a bit sur-
prised that you got off so easily. But, since you
have, there's nothing to be said, except that she's a
stunner, and I can understand now how much all
this has meant to you. What a thing to have stand-
ing between you, eh? If Mirabelle had been ugly, I
fancy you'd have paid her about anything she chose
to ask.”
"If I'd been sure of getting Margery!" said
Andrew.
“Of course-yes. That's what I mean. With
Miss Palffy as an object, there could scarcely be a
limit to the hush-money one would put up to clear
away any obstacles that might exist.”
"I expect not,” said Andrew nervously. "I
couldn't lose her now-I simply couldn't. It would
kill me.”
“I once knew of such a case," said Radwalader
musingly. “Chap just about to marry the girl,
and he found out that there was something very
crooked about his birth—that he was illegitimate,


322
The Shadow.
Andrew chopped thoughtfully at the plaster.
“I don't seem to understand what you're driving
at,” he said presently, “but, somehow—well, I don't
like the sound of it, Radwalader. Of course, I
know you don't mean it that way, but it sounds rather
--rather unfriendly, if you'll allow me to say so. Oh,
damn it all!"
“What?” asked Radwalader, surprised at the
sudden exclamation.
“There goes my knife. I ought to have known
better than to hew at this stuff with it. I suppose
that's the last I shall ever see of it—and a new one,
too. Why—that's queer! Did you notice? There
wasn't any splash.”
He peered over the rail.
“Hello!” he added, “here's a ladder-leading
down."
“There's a little garden down there,” explained
Radwalader, peering over in his turn. “I remember
now. It's on part of the foundations of another old
house, and the chap who lives in this one grows
flowers there, oddly enough, and goes up and down
on the ladder. Your knife's down there, somewhere.
Jove! but it's dark!”
But Andrew already had one leg across the rail-
ing, one foot on the top round of the ladder.
“This is easy," he said, “and I have my match-
box, too. You see-well, Margery bought the
knife only this morning in the bazar, and I wouldn't
lose it for the world. And, by the way, Radwalader,


The Shadow.
323
forget what I said just now, will you? It wasn't
very decent."
Then, with a short laugh of embarrassment, he
descended into the shadows.
The shadows! They were very deep below there,
until broken by the flicker of Andrew's match. Then
the shadows under the doorway of the old house, up
by the top of the bridge, were deeper, and—what was
this?-one shadow moved—moved—drew near to the
man who leaned upon the rail, whistling “Au Clair
de la Lune."
“All right!” called Andrew. "I have it. Now
we come up again.”
“Go slow," advised Radwalader. “You'll find
it darker than ever, after the match. Why-
what—"
A hand on his shoulder had spun him round, but
he had no more than recognized the white face grin-
ning into his, no more than time to comprehend the
words, “You've whistled for the last time, by God!”
before the steel-shod butt of a revolver crashed three
times in succession on-and through his forehead.
“Once for me!” said Jules Vicot, between his
teeth, “and once for my wife, and once for your son!”
He hurled Radwalader from him, ran a few feet,
turned at the rail to see the smitten man writhing
and groping blindly on the cobbles of the driveway,
and then, emptying the entire contents of the re-
volver in his direction, vaulted with a laugh into
the swirling Seine below.


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