text:
The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Chapter XI

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 uncompromising 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.
 * Chapter XI. 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 Mr. Radwalader must be an adept— if only we could —!”

“For my part,” observed Madame Palffy majestically, “I have no desire to overhear anything in the nature of double entendre.”

“Oh, shade of Larousse!” murmured Mrs. Carnby into her coffee-cup. “Where did the creature learn her French? Shall we take a little walk?” she added aloud, turning to Margery.

“Why, yes — with pleasure, Mrs. Carnby,” answered the girl, with a quick start. Her eyes had been fixed upon an indistinct form beyond the window of the dining-room, which was the person of Mr. Andrew Vane.

For a few moments they trod the winding gravel path in silence. Then, as a clump of shrubbery hid the house from view, she stopped impulsively, and laid her hand on the arm of her hostess. “Fairy godmother—” she began. “Now, my dear girl,” interrupted Mrs. Carnby, “don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for afterwards. I’m a very vain, weak, silly, gossipy old woman — but I am a woman, Margery, and that means that I often see things I’m not meant to see, and which I wish I hadn’t. Don’t give me your confidence just because you feel that I may have guessed—”

“I know you’ve guessed, Mrs. Carnby!” broke in Margery, “and, after all, it’s just as well, because I must speak to some one. I feel, somehow, as if I’d lost my way, and I think I’m a little frightened. 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 ridicule 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 were reasons for his not speaking: I guessed at his grandfather, and a very little thought showed me that it could do no harm to wait. I wanted him to be sure, just as sure as I was. I was even content to come away and leave him. I knew, you see, and I saw it was only a question of time. I never doubted for a moment how it would end, and so I wasn’t the least bit surprised when he came through the salon door, that Sunday in Paris. I thought — I was sure he’d come for me. I could have shouted, I was so happy, Mrs. Carnby! I had to turn away and pretend to be admiring some roses, I remember, because I felt that I was smiling — no, grinning — and just at nothing! Well—”

She paused, with a catch in her throat, and then went on determinedly.

“I’ve — I’ve been waiting ever since. We’re good friends, almost too good friends, but there’s something missing, something gone. I’m afraid you’ll hardly understand me if I say that ever since last summer in Beverly I’ve felt that he belonged to me — all of him — every bit. Now — well, I can’t feel that way any longer. It is just as if I were sharing him with somebody or something, and not getting the better or even the larger part. I’ve heard — well, you know how gossip goes! I’ve heard that there was another girl. He’s been seen with her, often and often. People might have spared me, if they’d known: but of course they didn’t; and so I’ve picked up fragments and fragments 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 confidence 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. “Suppose 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 whatchercallems — 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!”

“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 delusions 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 dangerous curiosity to pry into all the stages of their preparation, 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. Usually, 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 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!”

“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 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 oases 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 something I want to say.”

He pointed, as he spoke, to a small marble-columned 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 question, 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.

“Oh, pray don’t let’s discuss it. I’ve no right to question you.”

“No right?”

“No right at all, and, as a matter of fact, when I said that I didn’t mean to. Perhaps I was thinking of you, in part. I’m sorry I presumed. Only one doesn’t like to see one’s friends make fools of themselves — and that’s what most men do in Paris, isn’t it? Never mind. It’s like our golf at Beverly. I prefer to have you play the game, and keep your own tally.”

“The game?” demanded Andrew. “What game? What do you mean?”

“Oh, the game that all men play — the game in which we have no part, of which we must not even speak or hear, we women who respect ourselves. Don’t let’s talk of it. We’re supposed to be friends, and for that reason I’ll overlook what you don’t absolutely force me to see. That’s my part, isn’t it? — to pretend I don’t understand, even when I do? And I do — I do! I’m not cynical, but neither am I a fool. I’ve lived in Paris only a little while, but long enough to know that when one says ‘boys will be boys’ it sometimes means — oh, more than putty-blowers, and coming indoors with wet feet, and pulling out the parrot’s tail-feathers!”

She stopped abruptly, with a perception that she was overdoing her assumption of unconcern, that she was talking wildly, that her voice had taken on an unnatural strain.

“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, leaning 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, Margery? 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 forever. 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 anything 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 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 to marry him the selfsame thing that he demands of me. I demand that he shall be pure!”

The girl’s voice broke suddenly, and she pressed her cheek against one of the marble columns of the little arbour, battling against the insistence of her tears.

“You must forgive me,” she said presently. “I have no right to speak as I have done, but — if you’ve guessed the reason, that is part of my humiliation and my shame. Will you go now? I want to be alone.”

“How can I?” said Andrew slowly. “How can I leave you, even for an hour, while you think as you do? It would mean that all was over between us forever.”

“All is over,” answered Margery, “as much over as if you or I had been dead for twenty years!”

“Listen to me!” exclaimed Andrew hotly. “And you shall have the truth, if that’s what you want. There is such a woman — yes! But she is no more a part of my life than that bird out there. She has been an incident, nothing more. You had only to ask me, and I would never have seen her again. You have only to ask me now—”

“Ah, stop!” broke in Margery. “Don’t make me despise you!”

“Margery!”

He had stumbled forward blindly into this abortive explanation, remembering for the moment nothing but his own knowledge of the truth. Now, as she 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 emotion 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.


text:
The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Chapter XII

Noon of the following day found Andrew once more in the Rue Boissière. He had not seen Margery from the moment when he had left her in the arbour. She had come in while the men were playing billiards, and gone directly to her room, pleading a headache, an excuse which was also made to cover her non-appearance in the morning. The two hours immediately following breakfast passed laboriously, the whole party hanging together with that kind of helpless attraction which characterizes the bubbles in a cup of tea. There was a general sense of relief when the big Panhard purred up the driveway, and Andrew, Radwalader, and Kennedy whirled off in it to Paris. Monsieur and Madame Palffy and the Listers were to follow almost immediately by train, and Mrs. Carnby was talking a continuous stream of the most unmitigated gossip.
 * Chapter XII. Reaction.

“If I had stopped to think that in an hour they would all be gone,” she told Jeremy, that night “I would first have screamed the General Thanksgiving at the top of my lungs, and then had the vapours — whatever they may be!”

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 constellation. 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 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 conceived 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 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. Temptation 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 thoroughbred terrier, the carrion in which his fellows rolled.

But it was to this very fastidiousness that Mirabelle had appealed: and because she so fully satisfied 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 infinitely 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 comprehending 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 suggestion 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 avoided treated as inevitable and by no means unjustified accessories of life; daily the insinuating tooth of epigrammatic banter gnawed at the stability of his former convictions; while the very offences which had always repelled him by their sordid 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 executive ability of man had been laid under contribution to produce the effect which now enthralled his senses. None of the ordinary restrictions and limitations 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, perfection. The labels on these cobweb-covered vintages, the dishes they enhanced, the flowers they rivalled in perfume, the music, the lights, the laughter, 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 experience of the ages had enabled her to accomplish. They had been prodigally dowered with the extremes of sensuous refinement; they were clothed, fed, housed, 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 understood. There were the soups and solid courses — the architecture, history, and artistic associations of the great city: there were, by way of whetting the appetite, the clean little hors d’œuvres, radishes, anchovies, and olives — the tea-tables of the Colony, the theatres, 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 midnight, the Allée at noon, and Mirabelle Tremonceau! The beauty and luxury of it all continually charmed his senses; the fever of it stirred hotly in his blood.

Lately, he had been conscious of noticing things about Mirabelle which had never been part of his analysis of another woman. To him, with one exception, a girl had been a face or a form, to be associated with, or brought back to memory by, a snatch of waltz-music, a perfume, or a particular effect of moonlight on water, or sunlight upon foliage. Margery Palffy was the exception, but it was not she who had taught him the faculty of observation which, of late, he had applied to her. Not from her had he learned to remark details — how the skin crinkled along her nose before a laugh came and after it had gone, how her chin cut in under sharply, and then swelled softly again before it met her throat. Now, for the first time, he was conscious that a woman is never wholly silent — that a whisper of lace or a lisp of silk speaks the movement that is unapparent to the eye. Already he had found that her frown can be mirth-provoking, and her smile of a sadness beyond description. Already he was become weatherwise in his understanding of the ripples of expression blown by the shifting winds of inner thought across her eyes. He knew when she was bored, by the barely perceptible compression of her lower lip, which told of a skilfully smothered yawn; when she was secretly amused, by the little curving line which showed for an instant on either cheek; when she was troubled or puzzled, by the tiniest 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 remembered 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 so — it had stung! He had relied, throughout, upon 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 explanation 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 torpedoed, 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, treacherous 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. 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 eyebrows 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.”

But, for the moment, there was no conviction in his tone. Her coming smote him with a vague uneasiness. It was something new, this — something for which he found himself wholly unprepared. He seemed to divine that a significant development was imminent, and that, in some sense not fully clear, his threshold was a Rubicon — which she had crossed!

In the antichambre Monsieur Vicot was scribbling his master’s name and his own initials in the receipt-book of a little, domino-shaped messenger-boy. Then, as young Mercury went whistling down the stairs, he turned the blue missive over and over in his fingers.

“I’ll be damned if Radwalader sees it!” he ejaculated, and thrust it in his pocket, where, for a vitally important period, it remained — forgotten!

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The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Chapter XIII

“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 disengaged. 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?”
 * Chapter XIII. Rhapsodie Hongroise, No. 2.

“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.

“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 time.

“Oh, la vie bourgeoisé!”

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 keenness of his razors; simulated a furious jealousy at the discovery of a photograph of Réjane upon his dressing-table; rummaged through the cups and plates and glasses in the vitrine; called him, whimsically, 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 association with the little details of commonplace existence. Andrew was conscious that, in this independence 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, intimately 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 inclination. Now he was suddenly aware that man’s completest happiness relies upon a partial subordination; 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 smitten 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 the alluring, he felt the need of something more. Was it Margery? Was it Mirabelle? At the moment 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 chattering 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 spangled with sunshine and gold.”

“And soon done with!” added Mirabelle lightly, turning her glass upside down upon the cloth.

She would have him take the largest and most comfortable chair by the window, while she chose the broad, flat sill at his feet. The glare of the sunlight was cut off from them by an awning, but its warmth came pleasurably through. A window-box of narcissus in full bloom breathed a perfume, as deadening as the juice of poppies, on the air. Now and again a cab rattled sharply down the incline of cobbles to the Place d’Iéna, and was blotted abruptly out of hearing on the muffling driveway of the square. For the rest, the world was very still, all distinct noises of the great and restless city being merged into one indeterminate blur of sound.

The curious instinct of silence, which so often gave the hours they spent together their especial character, fell upon them now. Once, as if some disturbing thought had startled her, Mirabelle turned suddenly and touched Andrew’s hand, but her own fell back before the gesture was actually complete. The light wind stirred the hair at her temples, and the long scarf of delicate Liberty gauze which she had thrown across her shoulders, and he took up a corner of this and pleated it between his fingers for a time in silence. He was the first to speak.

“Would you care to go out — to the Exposition or the Bois? You’ll be saying presently that you’ve had a stupid afternoon.”

Mirabelle shook her head, with a faint smile, and 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 position lost its grace, its ease, its assurance. Staring straight away before her, her eyes forgot to wink. Her whole bearing was that of an animal warned by the crackle of a trodden twig of some peril imminent and vital.

“I’m sorry you felt that you could come,” continued Andrew. “I’ve not had much experience of life, and it’s not for me to question you. But we’ve been good friends. I wish it could have remained that way. Young as I am, I’ve had disappointments — bitter ones. The people I thought I could trust—”

“Andrew!”

She had never called him by his name before. At the word, a curious little thrill stirred in him, and he closed his eyes, his mouth tightening at the corners.

“Forgive me,” he added, in a whisper.

“Is it possible,” said Mirabelle slowly, “that all this time you — haven’t known?”

“I’ve tried not to know,” he answered. “I’ve tried not to listen to what people said. It has all been so different from anything like that. You’ve been like the girls I know in my own country, like a comrade, like a chum. I’ve tried to keep myself from thinking of you in any other light. I’ve always been glad to be with you: yes, and I’m glad to have you with me now. And yet — I know that we shall both be sorry for this. To-morrow—”

“To-morrow!”

Misunderstanding, she turned to him, and slipped 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 unconsciously, 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 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 understood and did not understand? Bending slightly forward, he looked down through the ironwork railing 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 varnished hat on the back of his head, reading a newspaper; 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 — 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 suddenly 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 conflicting thoughts which beset him, to ride, for example, 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 — “Rhapsodic 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 Rhapsodic began. It was as solemn as a dirge in its adagio movement, till the high treble began to flutter 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 and over the main theme. This variation was presently 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 rendering 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 interrupted 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 soft road. The suggestion, at first merely a fancy, grew upon him as he played. This was the gallop of which he had felt a need! He could almost see the wiry mare snapping in the wind, smell the horse and the saddle, and hear the stirrup-leathers squeaking against his boots. In spirit, at least, he put into the music the exultation, which is near to delirium, of a ride at nightfall or at dawn. The earth, which never sighs save when falling asleep or waking, sighs then, and her breath is sweet. Scents and sounds step to the roadside, and are gone again in a moment. The wind whips and whistles. And the triplicate hoof-beats pound, pound, pound out of life all that is stale, morbid, and unclean, so that it becomes a crystal dome inverted on a perfume-breathing garden, and one man whirling through space like a god, with a laugh on his lips!

Hurdles rushed at Andrew out of the music, and he rose to them, and, clearing them, would have shouted, but that the music shouted for him. He felt the familiar shock of landing, the infinitesimal pause before the recover, and then — away, away! It was life, youth, the surge and hammer of red blood through every vein, the certainty of strength and the sovereignty of success, the ineffable wine of life, filling the cup to the brim, and splashing over into the sunlight, in drops like rubies sheathed in silver.

As suddenly as it had begun, the mad, blood-stirring gallop was over. The stream tinkled and was still. The motif was repeated softly, incompletely, 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 closing 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 startled. 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 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.


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The Transgression of Andrew Vane/Chapter XIV

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.
 * Chapter XIV. Fate is Hard—Cash!

Mr. Sterling’s letter, a model of prim penmanship, ran as follows:

“: I have yours of the 12th inst., and am gratified to learn that Paris is surpassing your expectations. Although it is a city not ordinarily 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 among them. If you were inclined to dissipation, you would manufacture, if not find, it in a one-horse prohibition town in one of the back counties of Maine: and if you were otherwise disposed, not Paris itself would be competent to prove your undoing. So I am not averse to your project of remaining until Christmas. I have great confidence in you. If you will look back, you will realize that I have not burdened you with advice since the days when it was necessary to warn you against over-indulgence in ice-cream, or send you away from the breakfast-table for a more effective application of the nail-brush. That has been because I have seen in you something which I believe to be a guarantee against your ever falling into any misdoing which would be a discredit to the name you bear. I mean the fine healthiness of mind which eschews by instinct whatever is ‘common or unclean.’ You will have your fling, as I had mine, and as it is right you should. You will learn for yourself the lessons which no one else can teach you; but I think your attitude will always be that of a gentleman. There are ways and ways of doing things — even of sowing wild oats — and among these are the way of the gentleman and the way of the fool. You have never been the latter, and I have no reason to believe you will begin now.

“Among the commonest formulas of parental advice is that which exhorts a young man never to do or say anything which a mother or sister could not hear: and this deserves, to my way of thinking, just about the amount of attention which it ordinarily 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 anything 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 execution, 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 departure, which provided for a possible expenditure of a 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 for a much smaller sum upon your birthday.

“That birthday is still somewhat more than three months distant, but a present which I had contemplated 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 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 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 girlishness, 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 immeasurably 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?”

“Not a bad guess,” replied Andrew, somewhat gravely, as he rose, and tendered Radwalader the picture.

“That was my mother,” he added.

“Oh, I beg your pardon!” exclaimed Radwalader, with that ready assumption of contrition wherewith he contrived so skilfully to repair his infrequent faux pas.

“No harm done,” answered Andrew. “Are you engaged for dinner? I’ve ordered a table at Armenonville, and meant to send Jules over to your place to ask you, but the time has gone faster than I thought. Gad! it’s almost seven. I have been mooning, in good earnest. Will you go?”

“With pleasure. I dropped in on the chance that you might have nothing to do.”

Radwalader laid the miniature on the table.

“It’s a very beautiful face,” he added. “I wonder if I ever saw her. It’s not impossible. I remember meeting your grandfather in Boston.”

“You’d hardly have met my mother, though. She died when I was born — twenty years ago. You’d have been quite a boy.”

“A boy well out of knickerbockers, then! You flatter me, Vane. Is it possible that you don’t know I’m tottering on the ragged edge of fifty?”

“One wouldn’t believe it, then. Come in while I brush up a bit.”

He led the way into the bedroom, and Radwalader, following, applied himself to the consumption of a cigarette. For three weeks he had been observing 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 pronounced as that which a separation of years might have enabled him to perceive. It was with difficulty 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 boyish 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 thitherto 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. His cards had long since been dealt and sorted. Now he chanced a lead.

“I was at Poissy yesterday.”

“Ah?”

Andrew appeared in the doorway of the bathroom, diligently towelling his head. As he looked up, his eyes, so curiously like Radwalader’s own, were not less coolly non-committal than they.

“How is Mrs. Carnby?” he added.

“A good bit out of patience with you, I gather,” said Radwalader. “You’ve pretty well deserted her of late, haven’t you?”

Andrew was drying his fingers, one by one, with somewhat exaggerated attention.

“One can’t serve God and Mammon,” he observed, with that new flippancy of his. “I won’t stoop to the pettiness of fencing with you, Radwalader. You’re not blind, I take it. You must know as well as I why I don’t want to go to Poissy, and why, if I did, they wouldn’t care to have me.”

“Yes,” said the other, “I suppose I do. If I didn’t, it wouldn’t be for lack of hearing you talked about. Gossip is tolerably busy with your name, these days.”

“Gossip is rarely busy with one name,” retorted Andrew dryly.

“Obviously. I didn’t mean to ignore Mademoiselle Tremonceau: as you say, a lack of candour between us would be merely petty: but I wasn’t quite sure how far you were prepared to concede me the license of a friend. These are ticklish subjects, even between intimates. I’m not inclined to meddle, but I’ve thought more than once of asking you if you thought the game worth while.”

“I make a point of not thinking about it, one way or another,” said Andrew. “Why should I? I’ve youth, health, money, the sunshine, Paris — and her. Why should I think? It’s nobody’s business but my own. Don’t be a prig, Radwalader.”

“God forbid!” ejaculated Radwalader. “I see I’ve been mistaken. I had an idea that it was somebody’s business, other than yours — very much so, in fact. Of course, if it isn’t—”

He stopped abruptly, and made a little signal of warning. An instant later Monsieur Vicot entered the room, and began to lay out Andrew’s evening dress. His presence was an effective check upon further conversation along the direct line they had been pursuing, and, as Andrew hurried through his dressing, Radwalader plunged into generalities.

In another fifteen minutes Vicot opened the apartment door for them, and, as they passed out, closed it and stepped into the salon. The first object which met his eye was the miniature of Helen Vane, lying, face downward, on the table where Radwalader had left it. He picked it up and set it, upright, on the mantel, under the brilliant light of an electric bulb. Then, idly curious, he leaned forward and stared at it.

In the soft gloom of the July evening Armenonville 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. Electric 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. Moreover, 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 Riché, informing him for whom the order was to be prepared.

Among the things which Andrew had unconsciously 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 supercilious 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 Camembert cheese, taken at the flood — the which, in Camembert, is of as good omen as that in the affairs of men.

Around them the brilliantly-illuminated 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 subject 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 conversation, 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 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 understanding 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 introduction, 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, Tartuffes, and Parkhursts of their hour. Paris finds time to smile at many such. Over and around them flowed the smooth current of Parisian savoir vivre which they could not hope to understand, still less to emulate.

“I feel,” said Andrew slowly, “as if I had lived here all my life. Do you remember telling me, that day at Auteuil, that things one ordinarily disregards in America are part of one’s education in Paris? I’ve learned the truth of that. I don’t think I should be apt to mistake cerise for red, as things are now.”

“Did you ever think of the irony of these ''toilettes de demi-mondaine? ”'' asked Radwalader, looking from one to another of the superb gowns at the neighbouring tables. “You know, they’re society’s fashions of the day after to-morrow. I wonder what our dear lady of the Parc Monceau, or Mayfair, or Fifth Avenue, or Back Bay, or Nob Hill, would say if she knew the source of that trick of sleeve, or that contrast of entre-deux, which she fondly imagines was born in the mind of a Doucet for her and her alone. It came into being, my dear Vane, in a stuffy, overfurnished little apartment in one of the suburbs, as a patron of questionable merit by a charming creature with more ideas than reputation, and was first worn at the little Mathurins — or here — by Ninon Gyrianne: at a theatre where my lady would not be seen, by a woman whom she would not receive! Or, if not that, La Girofla stood sponsor for it at Deauville or Monte Carlo, and was duly complimented in the potins of Gil Bias. Quelle farce, mon Dieu!”

The two men were eating at the leisurely rate which is the most invaluable lesson Paris teaches the American. Andrew’s lips curled in a little sneer.

“It’s all a farce,” he said, “and, God knows, I’m the biggest mountebank of them all. When I look back six weeks, it’s another Andrew Vane I see — a better one.”

“But not a happier one, I fancy,” suggested Radwalader.

“Why not? Do you think, after all your experience, that Paris brings happiness? Distraction, perhaps — amusement — knowledge — but happiness? Oh no!”

He looked down, appearing to reflect, and then went on in another tone:

“I’ve been meaning to have a little talk with you, Radwalader, and what we were saying, back there at the apartment, seemed to open the way. I’m going to be pretty frank, and, on the score of friendship, I hope you’ll be the same.”

Radwalader nodded, narrowing his eyes.

“It’s about Mirabelle Tremonceau. Believe me or not as you will, it was all innocent enough at first. She was something new in my life, something entirely new. I can’t say I fell in love with her. There were reasons why that wasn’t possible at the time; 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 anything I’d ever known. There wasn’t a sign of anything 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 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 anything 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 flung away from her, with every drop of my damnable pride at the boiling-point, and came back to Paris, and — to the inevitable. 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 running his way now.

“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 bothered with what doesn’t concern me. But I like you, Vane — I do, heartily. I’d be more sorry than a little to see you in trouble. What’s more, I feel to a certain extent responsible, as I was the one to introduce you. Well, then — suppose you leave the whole affair to me. I know the world, and especially Paris, and more especially Mirabelle Tremonceau. Leave it in my hands. Even if she’s ugly about it, I can probably get you out, all clear, for fifteen or twenty thousand francs, where it might cost you fifty if you undertook to engineer the thing yourself. What do you say?”

“Say?” repeated Andrew, with a little, mirthless laugh, “why, simply that you don’t understand. Mirabelle wouldn’t accept money from me.”

“Oh, not money, like that,” said Radwalader, “not money out of a purse — ‘one, two, three, and two make five. I think that’s correct, madam, and thank you!’ No, I grant you — probably she wouldn’t. But a Panhard, or a deposit at her bankers’, or diamonds — that would be different.”

“No — no,” said Andrew, shaking a single finger from side to side. “You’re all wrong. You don’t get the situation at all. When a woman loves a man—”

“Love?” broke in Radwalader. “Piffle! Leave it to me, my dear sir, and in twenty-four hours I’ll prove to you that Mirabelle Tremonceau’s spelling of the word ‘love’ begins with the symbol for pounds sterling!”

“And Margery?” faltered Andrew.

“I saw Miss Palffy at Poissy,” said Radwalader. “She’s still staying there, you know. Now, if you’d told me that she loved you, I’d have believed you. She was looking wretchedly, I thought.”

He paused for a moment, to give the words their proper effect, and then played his highest card.

“Did you receive a telegram from her after you left Poissy?”

Andrew stared blankly at him, moistening his lips.

“A telegram?” he said. “A telegram?”

“I thought you didn’t,” replied Radwalader, “and told her so. It seems she sent one, and was surprised you hadn’t answered.”

“A telegram!” said Andrew again. “Do you realize what that means, Radwalader? Why, it would have made all the difference in the world! A telegram? No, of course I never received it! And I’ve been — I’ve been—”

His voice broke suddenly.

“My God! Radwalader, but fate is hard!”

“Fate, in this instance,” remarked Radwalader, “is hard — hard cash. Don’t let any false quixotism blind you to that. Vane. I’ve shown you the way out. Think it over, and when you’re ready, come to me.”

He crumpled his napkin, and rose. He had played. Now it was for Mirabelle to trump the trick.