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 'Frightfully pleased. I've started well. Though it's difficult to keep her alive if one doesn't talk to her and flirt with her; but I manage it.'

'And Mademoiselle Ludérac? Did you see her?'

'Yes, I saw her.' Graham stretched across and took the cup of tea Jill gave him.

'Really and truly saw her? Not out of doors in a mackintosh and black shawl?'

'She was in a black apron, arranging the room.'

 ' Is she just a sort of housekeeper, then? Do tell me what you thought about her.'

'She's rather beautiful, I think,' said Graham. 'She has beautiful hands, and beautifully shaped shoulders.'

'And beautiful eyes. I saw them the other day. They seemed to be all I did see. They are the sort of eyes one could never forget. The sort one sees sometimes in a picture, that follow you, you know; as if they wanted to say something; and couldn't.'

'Well, I didn't notice her eyes.'

'Did you talk to her?'

'We exchanged a word or two. She was quite civil and correct. And she went up and got the old lady's cosmetics and painted her face for her. It was rather pretty to see. She's good to the old vulture.'

'Painted her! But how marvellous, Dick! How I wish I could have seen it. Like a big baby having its face washed?'

'Exactly. It was rather touching.'

'I'm glad you were touched, Dick. It's what you need, you know,' Jill assured him, smiling at him

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 'with that queer, hard heart of yours. Mademoiselle Ludérac is lovely then. I felt she would be, from the very beginning; from the moment I saw her mother's grave.'

But to this Graham returned, and with an effect of sudden harshness, 'Well, for my part, I must confess that I found her rather repellent.'

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ILL, next afternoon, said that she would go up to the Manoir with him and see if Mademoiselle Ludérac would have a walk with her.

'But I'm not going up to-day,' said Graham. 'It's not raining. Yesterday was an exception. I'm going up the mountains this afternoon.'

'I'll go alone, then. The old lady won't turn me out even if you don't come with me.'

'She'll fall upon your neck. But as for the young lady, you'll fail in your enterprise there, I warn you.' Graham was cleaning his palette and spoke with cheerful detachment; or what sounded like it.

'How do you mean, fail?' asked Jill, pulling on her silk cap.

'She's not a malleable young person. Not at all eager to make our acquaintance. She doesn't at all identify herself with her old patron's vagaries.'

'I don't care. I shall find out a way. I'm quite determined to know her,' said Jill. So she started forth alone.

She took the road to-day and reached the Manoir; but her hopes were again frustrated, for Joseph told her that Mademoiselle Ludérac had gone out. However, there was the old lady.

Madame de Lamouderie was evidently waiting and

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 her disappointment in seeing Jill alone strove vainly to mask itself in delight. All the same, as Jill said to herself, half a loaf must be better than no bread; and, after a swift readjustment, the old lady was prepared to make the best of it. Her eye passed with its expression of avid attention over Jill's dress, new to her to-day, and charming in its tones of rosy cedar, its deft mingling of silks and wools.

'You are an incarnation of the, Madame,' she told her. 'One understands your husband's devotion when one looks at you.'

'My husband's devotion!' Jill flushed a little, stared a little, and then laughed. That Graham should have expressed anything of his feeling for her to the old lady she knew to be impossible.

Madame de Lamouderie interpreted her silence as gratification. 'To see such a ménage restores one's faith in human nature,' she went on. 'You are too young, perhaps too innocent of life, to know how rare a thing it is for a wife, however captivating, to retain her husband's fidelity through years of marriage. But when I look at you, the miracle explains itself.'

'But we don't think fidelity a miracle in England,' said Jill, coolly if kindly.—'I wonder if you'd mind my smoking?'

'Mind? Not the least in the world. My daughter also smokes. All fashionable women smoke nowadays, as I am well aware.—So. He has returned to his mountains. I do not blame him. Why should he care to look at an old woman when he can look at moun-

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 tains? He is a remarkable man, your husband, Madame; very remarkable. Full of power, charm, seduction.—But he is severe, too; very severe.'

'Dick severe? Do you think so?' And Jill laughed, leaning back her head, holding her cigarette lightly and looking from beneath her lashes at the old lady.

Madame de Lamouderie leaned forward with a mysterious smile. 'He frightens me,' she confided. 'I tremble before him!'

'But how horrid of Dick! What has he been doing?'

'He has done nothing,' said Madame de Lamouderie. 'It is I who do things: wrong things. I commit blunders. He makes me feel it.'

'I can't think of Dick as a mentor!' said Jill. 'You must snub him if he behaves badly. You mustn't let him frighten you.'

'Ah; it is easy for you to say so, young and beautiful as you are. If I could recover, if only for an hour, my lost youth, the tables might be turned, that I own!' said the old lady ruefully. 'As it is, his are all the advantages, and he makes me feel it. He does not come to-day because I have displeased him. I did not think so before; but it is clear to me now.'

'But you are quite, quite mistaken,' said Jill, and there was only kindness in her voice as she thus reassured her. 'I know you haven't displeased him. He'd have told me if you had. He's frightfully keen on your portrait, too. The only reason he hasn't come this afternoon is that it's such a splendid day for landscape.

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 You know he told you he could only come when it rained.'

'True,' said the old lady, looking fixedly upon her. True. I perhaps torment myself needlessly.'

'I'm quite sure you do,' Jill smiled upon her. 'And really you mustn't take Dick so seriously. You'll turn his head.'

The old lady shook hers. 'No. Ah, no; I shall never turn his head.'

'Well, you mustn't expect me to regret that, must you!' laughed Jill, and at that the old lady, eyeing her again, laughed also, saying, 'Ah, I see that you are witty, as he is. And you do not frighten me. I will come to you always when I fear that he means to be unkind.'

'Agreed!' said Jill. 'Between us we'll keep him in his place.'

'Tell me,' said the old lady, happily now, settling herself in her bergère, 'more about yourselves; more about him. You will forgive my insistence. I am a lonely old woman and never again shall I see people like you and your husband. He intrigues me; I long to understand him. What is his history? What is his family? Will you tell me?—as if to a child who begged for a fairy-tale?'

'His family? Well, he had rather an unhappy time with his family. His father and mother didn't get on at all.'

'They are still living?'

'She is; but Dick's father died when he was a boy.

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 He was Scotch; a clever Scotch journalist; very brilliant and excitable. I'm afraid he drank more than was good for him. Dick says it was because she made him so unhappy.'

'She was unfaithful to him?' Madame de Lamouderie suggested.

'Unfaithful! Dick's mother! Great Scott, no!' Jill had to laugh at the idea. 'She's a pattern of all the virtues. It was merely, I imagine, that his ways weren't her ways, and hers weren't his. He was a bohemian, and she was an American; of a very old family that she thinks a lot of. I always feel there's something to be said for her. She was only nineteen when she met him, on a steamer, when she was going back to America after being educated in a French convent. He was frightfully handsome and he carried her off her feet. But then he wanted her to stay off her feet, as it were; and she's not that sort of person. She needs to have her feet well on the ground. With as many roots as possible,' Jill laughed again, amused by her own simile. 'Well, she's got them now! She's married to a dismal, moth-eaten old baron and lives in a mouldy old château in Burgundy. And that is really what she likes. He's very bien né and bien pensant, and Dick's father was neither.'

'An American? Very rich, then? A millionaire?'

'Oh, no. She doesn't like millionaires. She likes old families.—American old families don't seem to mean much over here, do they?'

'They do not, indeed. One never hears of them. It

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 is only of the American fortunes one hears,' said the old lady earnestly.

'I know. Well, from our point of view she certainly has something of a fortune; and that gave her the advantage when it came to bringing Dick up. She could do everything with him she liked; and the father could do nothing. He liked to wander about Europe with Dick, and see all sorts of queer people and read, and loiter generally, while Dick painted. Dick loved being with him. And she liked to keep him with her in Paris and Cannes and make him behave politely to old French dowagers in her salon. He was delicate, too. So that gave her another advantage. You wouldn't think it now, to look at him; but his chest was weak and the doctors said he must live a great deal in the south. Even now he doesn't do all sorts of things that most men do. He rides, but he doesn't swim. He plays tennis, but he never played cricket. He's really lived very little in England, though he went to Cambridge. He was just finishing at Cambridge when the war broke out.'

The old lady's mind evidently remained attached to the more illustrious parent.

'He is fond of his mother? He is often with her? Ile goes out much ''dans le monde? ' ''

'He's with her as little as he possibly can be! No, he's not fond of her. He makes the most dreadful fun of her. He's really unkind, I think, for she does adore him. She's rather beautiful, still, with great cold grey eyes and a great high nose. Dick always says she's all

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 nose and could smell out people's quarterings blindfolded!'

The old lady considered her. 'It is very unfortunate that ason should have so little reverence for his mother,' she observed.

'Yes. Itis. But Dick hasn't any reverence for anything.'

'Ah; he is a rebel; a libre penseur; one sees it in his face.—But a mother! In our eyes that is something set apart; something not to be criticized.'

'I know. It's awfully sweet of you. We're not like that,' said Jill. Though I myself get on awfully well with Mummy.'

She was thinking, with something of amusement, and something of indignation, of the deadly, relegating kindness with which her mother-in-law would place the poor old lady.  ' Déclassée, my dear Jill; quite déclassée, '  she would say, and Jill, who did not, as she would have said, give a hoot for the world, yet who had the shrewd sense of worldly values characteristic of her type, was well aware that such the old lady must be. It was apparent not so much in her situation as in her excesses and uncertainties of manner; her fumbling for an instinctive response that failed to come at a conscious bidding. Her innate pride, her innate dignity, still upheld her on the level way, as it were; but at an unexpected rise or fall of ground she tottered. 'Poor old thing,' thought Jill, lighting another cigarette and observing her hostess thoughtfully as she smoked; 'I'm glad we've come to make things a little

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 jollier for her.' And she had always, behind every impression of Madame de Lamouderie, the memory, like a breath of sweetness lingering on the air, of her awaking under Dick's hand. Poor, poor old Sleeping Beauty; for that there was one under all the folly and flattery she felt sure.

'Tell me,' she said after their little pause, and the talk of Dick's mother had brought another mother to her mind, 'were you a friend of Madame Ludérac's?'

Madame de Lamouderie had, perhaps, been brooding on the aberrations revealed in her idol, but the question recalled her, with an almost apparent shock. 'Madame Ludérac?' she repeated. 'Who has spoken to you of her?'

'Nobody,' said Jill, surprised but not disconcerted by the old lady's sharpness of tone. 'I saw her grave last autumn, in the cemetery, and it was so different from all the other graves that it interested me; especially after coming up here and seeing where she lived.'

The old lady was looking at her with the shock still on her face. Then, slowly, her expression softened and she sat meditating with deep gravity. 'No, I did not know her,' she said; but she said it gently.

'She died before you came to Buissac?'

'No; she died after I came; six years ago. I did not know her; but I saw her. She was mad,' said Madame de Lamouderie.

'Mad?'

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 to you. It is a sad history. It is sad for Marthe that it should be talked of.'

Jill was aware of feeling, for the first time, warmly fond of the old lady. 'No one has spoken to me at all. Would you rather not talk any more about it?'

'No,' said Madame de Lamouderie, after a moment. 'No; I do not mind telling you. You are not like those I mean: the vulgar rabble. She was mad; but it was the result of an accident; an accident to her head,' the old lady put her finger on her forehead above her eye. 'She was here for five years before her death; in Marthe's care. I first saw Marthe leading her among the woods;—she was hardly more than a child. It was terrible to see such a look on the face of a child. The mother leaned on her and she wore a black patch over her eye. She was as white as a ghost. All in black. Dieu!—it frightened me, the first time I saw them!'

It almost frightened Jill to hear her, and she remembered Dick's uncanny fear at the door after they had seen Mademoiselle Ludérac, white as a ghost—all in black—come round the corner of the house.

'But how wrong, how cruel, that such a thing should have been put on a child,' she said after a moment. 'Was there no older relation to help her?'

'No. No one. And the mother became frenzied if Marthe were not always beside her. They lived quite alone. They had no friends. All the village people feared the mad-woman and once stones were thrown at her and the child as they passed along the road.'

Madame de Lamouderie's face had sunken to such

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 gloom that Jill repressed her own exclamations of anger. She regretted having evoked such memories. Yet, at the same time, she felt what was almost a sense of joy. Her intuition, then, about Mademoiselle Ludérac was well founded. She was a wonderful person. More than before she resolved to know her. If the old lady was Dick's occupation, Mademoiselle Ludérac should be hers. She would make friends with the solitary, tragic girl. There might be, after all, a meaning for her in Buissac.

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Author:John Morison

Works

 * Come, let us to the Lord our God

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Author:George Rawson

Works

 * Come to our poor nature's night

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HEN she left the Manoir a little later, having promised the old lady that she would soon come again, Jill took the rocky hillside path and descended to the highroad. Standing there to lean on the wall and look down at the view, she felt that even without the promise of a new friendship one could hardly repine at a way of life that kept one in such places.

As she leaned there, her hand idly playing with the lichen-stained stones that crumbled on the parapet, Jill felt herself lifted and enfranchised by a sense of mysterious significance that came to her as much from the splendid scene before her as from the story of love and suffering she had just listened to. Life was like that, she mused, half consciously, while her gaze followed the grave, deliberate curve of the great river; it might break one's heart; but it was beautiful.

Her eyes, returning from the blue immensities of the horizon, rested on the island, and after that sweep round the universe it had a nested loveliness. It was a place for tranquil thought and compassed pacing, and Jill passed on through the gap in the parapet and down the rocky ledges of the little path till the bridge was reached and she found herself once more on the rich meadow-lands. She would explore the meadow

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 first, she thought, and she followed it to where, among rough bushes, saplings, and spits of sand, it ran out into the river. A little hut stood here with one tall tree growing beside it. A tethered goat was cropping at the thickets and Jill was enchanted by the sight of a family of grey wagtails—pale grey above, daffodil yellow beneath—disporting themselves with aerial flittings and jocund balancings in the shallows of the sandy shore. Then she walked back along the stream that divided her from the island, seeking a bridge over that. But there was none. To reach the island one had to round the projection of the promontory and return to the causeway, from where she could see Buissac, only half a mile away, lying tranquilly in the sunlight. Once reached, the island was a lovely spot indeed. It was lifted high above the meadow-land; high above the river. All the ground was covered with dense, bright grass that was soft under one's feet and among the straightly planted poplar groves one saw on every side the blue glimmer of water. The three white cows were picketed there, moving mildly forward, side by side. Jill went to the shore to look across the broad, swift current to the opposite bank of the Dordogne. Two waggons, drawn by cream-coloured oxen, were moving slowly along the road, piled with faggots, and a motor-car, small, vivid, glittering, looked like a dragon-fly skimming along the surface of the water. A row of motionless men, legs dangling, fished from a low wharf, and the voices of women kneeling at the water's edge to beat and knead their

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 hnen came to her ears, sweetened by distance to a bell-like cadence. One felt, rather than saw, how broad the river was from hearing their faint voices find over all shone the pale spring sunshine.

'No,' thought Jill, standing there, her hands behind her back, 'this is good enough.' To make up for anything, was the context in her mind. And it came to her that in loving it all like this, stupid, inartistic as she might be, she was sharing something of his deepest life with Dick.

As she turned from the river at last and entered one of the narrow aisles, she saw a tall black figure approaching her from the furthest end of the island.

For one moment she was seized by Dick's superstitious fear. The picture of the mad-woman the old lady had set before her returned to her mind and a presage of fate, inescapable, overwhelming, like Dick's tidal wave, curving its vast bulk above her. But in another moment the sense of loveliness that had been growing in her, ever since the old lady told her tale, dispelled dark visions. This was Mademoiselle Ludérac herself, and all the sights and sounds of the island had been the happy omens of their meeting. Jill stood and watched her as, all unaware, she came down the poplar grove. She was looking down at the grass; her head was bare, and she had a large white-and-grey cat in her arms. It was not until they were close upon one another that Jill went forward and Mademoiselle Ludérac then raised her head and saw her.

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 For a moment she stopped short. It came to Jill that if she had frightened them the other day it was possible that they had frightened her; but as she continued to smile blithely upon her, Mademoiselle Ludérac smiled back, and they met in the middle of the island, as if by an appointed plan; as if they had meant to meet and had sought each other at the trysting place. Without words, smiling, their eyes upon each other, they turned and walked back, side by side, towards the causeway. Introductions and explanations seemed quite unnecessary. 'It was meant to be like this,' Jill was thinking. And she felt that her sense of security was deep enough to sustain them both. Indeed, if Mademoiselle Ludérac were bewildered she did not show it.

'Do you often come here?' Jill asked.

'Yes; very often,' Mademoiselle Ludérac replied.

'I suppose the cows are Buissac cows. They couldn't get them down the path,' said Jill.

'No; they come from Buissac; by the road. But have you found your way here down the cliff?' Mademoiselle Ludérac questioned.

'Yes. And I've been up the cliff, too. We came by that way the other day.'

'Did you, indeed? It is known to very few strangers. It is a rough climb,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, who kept her eyes upon Jill with a sort of gentle wonder.

Jill listened to her voice rather than to her words. It was as beautiful as her face, she thought. The depth and tranquillity of the river was in it; and the bell-like

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 cadence of far distances. It was a voice, Jill felt, that could only have grown under such a sky and beside such a river. 'Let us sit down for a little,' she suggested when they reached the dyke. And they sat down on the warm, sunny stones and Jill contemplated her companion for some moments of silence.

In her demeanour, her gestures, her tones—as Jill was later on to hear them—of abrupt command, her impetuous, un-self-conscious speech, Marthe Ludérac gave an impression of noble breeding, while something in her aspect recalled Madame de Lamouderie's allusions to peasant origins. There was an archaic simplicity in the straight lines of her body, the contour of her braided head; a directness almost primitive in her gaze. Her eyebrows lay far apart, set high above the clearly drawn dark eyes, and this spacious setting gave to these a striking potency and candour. She had the small straight nose of the Latin race, the small firm chin, the classic oval of brow and cheek. Her mouth in repose was austere and beautiful, but her smile revealed small white teeth and a space of gum above them, and had in it a sudden helplessness like that of a very young child. Her smile, Jill felt, from the view of beauty, was her defect; yet she would not have had it otherwise. It brought her near as nothing else in her appearance did; and contemplating her with absorbed attention, she felt her to be like a strange bird whose life is passed in high thick forests but that may, through one small, confiding habit, be tamed into one's hand. She looked back at Jill while

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 Jill thus looked at her, and her hand caressed the head of her cat.

'Does he go with you on all your walks?' Jill asked, glancing down at the massive, tranquil visage of the animal. 'He must be very heavy to carry.'

'No; he is only with me because he is a bad beast,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, smiling. 'He knows that I do not want him and hides until I am well started and then I look down to find him there. He is not really heavy. I carry him easily. They are very like babies, animals, are they not?—and love to be dandled like this.—You are fond of them too?'

'I adore them!' said Jill, reaching out to scratch the head of the cat, which turned in sharp appreciation under her hand. 'What a battered warrior! You've been to the wars, poor old man, haven't you?'

'Yes; he is badly battered. His leg is broken, you see.' Mademoiselle Ludérac drew back her hand to show the distorted limb.

'What a shame! Was it a trap?'

'No; not a trap. He was chased by boys. They tied a saucepan to his tail and chased him with a dog. I was only just in time to save him.—One leg was broken by a stone, and the dog had bitten through the other.'

'Horrible little brutes!' cried Jill. 'Were you able to give them a hiding?'

'No; I was not able. I was occupied in running away with the cat,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac calmly. 'I do not know that it would have done any good to have beaten them.'

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 Jill allowed herself a smile. 'Yet you struck the curé!'

Mademoiselle Ludérac gazed, then flushed. 'I lost my temper on that day. You have heard of it?'

'I thought it splendid!'

'No; not splendid—stupid. If I had let her go at once she might have been saved.'

'You know—you won't mind my saying so—because I'm so fond of France,' said Jill, stroking the cat which had broken suddenly into thick, clotted purring—'it seems to me that your people are not as kind to animals as ours are. I was Scout Mistress in our village—you've heard of Boy Scouts—before the war, and one of the things we teach them is kindness to animals. There are cases of cruelty, of course; but people, on the whole, do hate it and try to help against it. Whereas here in France, they may be devoted to their own Tou-tou or Minet, but they don't seem to have any sense of responsibility towards other animals. The streets of Buissac are full of starving cats and dogs. And they net the birds to eat, and I'm told that in France chained dogs pay no tax—only dogs at large; and that's why one sees and hears all those miserable animals. In England it's against the law to keep a dog chained up all the time. And I don't believe any English boys nowadays would chase a cat with a dog.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac was looking at her with deep, sad interest. She meditated a moment before she said: 'We are more backward than you in those ways.'

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 'But why don't people get together and do something about it?'

Mademoiselle Ludérac smiled dimly. 'People when they get together in France only do so to quarrel,' she suggested, and she went on, giving Jill a new sense of her maturity: 'There is little margin in a place like Buissac for kindness to animals to grow up. That is what I tell myself. I feel with you;—I feel all you say;—but it is what I tell myself, for I think of it all, perhaps too much. Life is so hard for our people. And they have so little guidance. The Church teaches them that the beasts have no souls and are placed here for our convenience. What I tell myself is that, as conditions become easier and thought more free, it must improve. Men have improved in their treatment of each other. In the past, not long ago, they were as cruel to each other as they now are to the animals,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and as her eyes fixed themselves on Jill with a look of suffering Jill remembered the old lady's story and the stoning of the mad mother with her child. 'To read history is to feel one's blood freeze, one's heart stop beating. They broke each other on the wheel; they burned each other at the stake. When people were mad, they were flogged and bound and often thrown to rot in horrible dungeons. When they had committed crimes, they were tormented and tortured before they were allowed to die,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, a strange light in her eyes. 'I do not speak of times long past; not of the Romans who made a pastime of men's suffering, as many now

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 do of the sufferings of animals—but of quite recent days; of days within the memory of our grandparents.'

Jill was regretting her unguarded words. They had opened vistas that must have terrible associations for Mademoiselle Ludérac. 'Yes. That's all true,' she murmured. 'I'm sure what you say is true. It must all get better bit by bit.' She felt suddenly as if Mademoiselle Luderae were far older than herself, and at the same time her yearning to shelter and protect her was almost maternal in its tenderness and comprehension.

Mademoiselle Ludérac sat silent for a time, slowly stroking the cat from which Jill, in listening to her, had unconsciously withdrawn her hand. She said presently: 'You are kinder, I know, than we are, in England. But even with you the change is not complete. I have read of cruelty in England, too. Little rabbits let out of boxes and torn to pieces by dogs. Stags and hinds—creatures framed for fear—such gentle, such lovely creatures—hunted until they take refuge, sometimes, in the sea; and even then not allowed to escape, but followed and dragged back and slaughtered. And foxes;—foxes who are almost like our dear dogs; so clever; so gay and charming;—there are many in our mountains here and I have seen them play with their cubs; it is the prettiest sight. Yet it is the great national sport of the English to hunt them with hounds and horses until they are so exhausted that they can drag themselves no further, and then the dogs fall upon them and tear them limb from limb.

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 Oh, no; we are cruel in those ways—as in all else; but you cannot say while such things are done in England that the English, too, are not cruel.'

Insensibly, in speaking, her voice had lost its tranquillity and, listening with a bewildered and sinking heart, Jill knew that tranquillity with Mademoiselle Ludérac was an achievement rather than a characteristic. Her words came now impetuously, rapidly, heaping themselves up, as her breath gave way at the end of each sentence, as though, Jill felt, she were about to break into tears. And her own distress, her own discomfiture was so deep, that, trying to gain time, trying to think out a way of escape, she began again to stroke the cat, so that her hand touched Mademoiselle Ludérac's and, looking up with those potent, those dwelling eyes, Mademoiselle Ludérac smiled faintly at her, asking pardon, it was evident, for so much intemperateness.

Jill found her voice at last. 'I've got something to tell you,' she said. She hardly knew how to bring out her confession. The context in which her beloved sport had been presented to her so bewildered her that she had difficulty in grasping the exculpations. 'You'll think I'm like all the others. I am, I suppose.—I hunt foxes,' said Jill. 'I've hunted them all my life.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac gazed at her with no change of countenance.

'I've always tried not to think about the foxes, because I'm not really cruel; at least I think not. I leve

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 animals; I love those cubs, of course—and the foxes too, poor dears. But it is all so different. How can I explain it to you? There's nothing I've ever cared about as much as hunting. It's quite true. We all love it. We're born with the love of it in our blood.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac continued to gaze at her. She had faintly flushed; but she said nothing.

Poor Jill stumbled on. 'I suppose it's just a remnant of barbarism; but isn't that perhaps the excuse for it? Everything is so shut down and boxed in and built up nowadays and the old instincts in us need to be stretched out sometimes or they'll do us a mischief. Isn't it partly that? It isn't, I'm sure, the love of cruelty, or anything horrible; it's the love of the chase, and the risk and the excitement, and the darling hounds and horses, and being in the country all together;—sharing something splendid, all together.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac, gently, if automatically, stroking her cat, continued to give her, Jill felt, the benefit of complete attention. 'But is it not, in the end, the same as with the boys?' she said, after a silence had followed and grown long.

'The boys?'

'The boys who chase the cat.'

Jill stared. Then, under her sunburn, her colour mounted. 'Those hateful little brutes! Tying a saucepan to a poor cat's tail! Hunting it for the fun of seeing it run! That's not sport!'

'They hunt cats without the saucepan,' said Mademoiselle Ludesac, 'and is it not for love of the chase,

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 the excitement, and being all together? A boy alone will rarely hunt a cat. Ali I mean to say,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, her impetuosity folded to the considering calm, 'is that I do not know why you feel them cruel if you do not feel yourself so. The hunted cat and fox have the same feelings, whatever the sentiments of those who hunt them.'

Deeply disturbed, deeply disconcerted and even humiliated, Jill sat gazing on the ground. Her companion did nothing to make the situation easier for her; but neither did she do anything to make it worse. She merely sat there in her meditative silence, looking before her at the river and stroking the cat. Jill was never to forget the face of that white-and-grey cat, its tranquil eyes and its security from harm.

'Well, I suppose you are done with me now,' she said at last, speaking in a tone so childlike in its ruefulness that Mademoiselle Ludérac looked round at her in surprise. 'You don't care to have anything to do with a person like me;—a person you think cruel; a person you would really like to beat, as I want to beat the boys.'

A smile flickered over Mademoiselle Ludérac's face. 'But I do not want to beat you.'

'You would if it would do any good.'

'Ah, yes; if it would make you wish to stop hunting foxes, yes,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac with her smile; 'I should certainly want to beat you then. But it would not. It is the same as with the boys. Beating does not help.'

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 Jill brooded. 'I do wish I could promise you I'd never hunt again. But I can't. It would be like promising one would never look at another sunset, or never smell apple-blossoms again. When the time came the temptation would be too strong. One would simply have to creep out and have a peep, or put one's face into the branch of apple-blossom as one ran past it in the orchard.—You see, you can't really understand if you've never done it; never been brought up to it. I'd sooner be hanged than see a fox vivisected. I'd fight for it!—You'll think me mad. But it's like that. All topsy-turvy.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac's smile, while she listened to this singular confession, had melted, insensibly, to its helpless, startled sweetness. Hers was the very look of one who bends his face to the branch of apple-blossom, breathing in the dewy intoxication of its innocent young fragrance. And something of the apple-blossom was in Jill's being, to be recognized by discerning eyes. She was wild and sweet, civilized and primitive at once.

'You do not persuade me, not at all,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac. 'But you seem to me very charming.' And as she said this she blushed suddenly. It was strange to her, disconcerting, that was evident, to find herself allured to such familiarities.

'Do I really!' cried Jill. Her deep sense of security in regard to her relation with Mademoiselle Ludérac flowered again. Then you aren't going to turn me down?'

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 'Turn you down?'

'Give me up?—Refuse to know me;—because of the foxes?'

 ' Mais—chère Madame ' —Mademoiselle Ludérac faltered, but less now in confusion than uncertainty, 'you do not know me at all.'

'There's your mistake. I do. It doesn't take long to know some people—if one's got eyes in one's head. I know you better than you can possibly imagine,' Jill declared. 'And as a matter of fact, I was your friend before I ever saw you.'

 ' Mais—chère Madame ' —Mademoiselle Ludérac repeated. And now it was indeed with confusion. All her French standards of decorum, rationality, measure, were, it was evident, disordered by the unprecedented situation in which she found herself. 'We have never spoken together before to-day.—I do not even know your name.'

'My name is Jill;—Gillian Graham,' Jill informed her, rising to her feet and standing before her, her eyes narrowed to their happiest smile. 'And yours is Marthe Ludérac. And though I can't promise to give up hunting—if I ever have another chance to hunt—I can promise that I'd do a great deal to please you. There. How's that for an offer of friendship?' And Jill stretched out her hand.

But Mademoiselle Ludérac sat still on the wall, taking her cat to her side. Jill thought it was to free her other hand for a responsive gesture. Then she saw her fold her fingers together—as if really to control a

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 first impulse, and then that she laid the hand, thus softly clenched, against her breast. 'But you do not know me,' she repeated.

'But if I don't, I want to,' said Jill, standing perplexed, with her outstretched hand.

'You are like a child, chère Madame. You grasp at something because it is new to you. My life,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and her voice had found its way to a deep conviction, 'is not one in which you could please yourself. We do not belong to the same world.'

'Damn worlds! What on earth has that to do with it! Do you mean you won't be friends with me because you're French and I'm English?'

'' ' Mais non! Mais non! ' ''

'Then why not? Is it because you're poor? So am I. But it can't be anything so silly as that.'

'You do not know what you are saying when you say that you are poor. But it is not that,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, almost with severity, as though to the charming but stubborn child. 'I have no friends. My life has been too hard for friends. I have nothing to give a friend. You are kind, but romantic, chère Madame, to imagine otherwise.'

'Do you really mean you don't want to see me any more? All it comes to is that you don't like me!' cried Jill, amazed herself to feel how deep was the wound inflicted by this refusal.

But rising to her feet Mademoiselle Ludérac said quickly, her eyes darkened in their look of suffering,

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 'No, no—you must not say that. That is not like you. That is not kind. It is not that I do not wish to see you—do not like you. But can you not recognize yourself that what you ask is impossible? I am rooted here, deep, deep in the soil. I shall stay here, always. It is my home. You are a stranger, passing by. I shall not forget you. I shall always remember you. But that is not friendship. A friend is something that one keeps;—that one keeps always. A friend is part of one's life.' She turned when she had said this, and went before Jill over the causeway to the road. Jill, following, felt like the child rebuked, though so gently rebuked. She felt, further, that it was perhaps just that she should be rebuked. How immature, headlong, even glib, her assurance must have seemed, Mademoiselle Ludérac's words revealed to her. And yet;—under it all, she went on believing that Mademoiselle Ludérac was to be her friend. She believed it more than ever.

On the highroad Mademoiselle Ludérac paused.  ' Au revoir, chère Madame, '  she said and she held out her hand. It might be in mere formality, yet some deep emotion strove with the schooled tranquillity of her regard.

 ' Au revoir, '  said Jill, taking the hand and looking back at her quietly.

'I thank you,' Mademoiselle Ludérac then said in a low voice. 'I beg you to believe in my gratitude.' And she turned and walked quickly up the road.

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 of this strange encounter held her thoughts—the moment when Mademoiselle Ludérac had not responded to her offer of friendship. In the light of her last words, of her last look, that refusal took on a new significance, and, remembering how the beautiful hand had been withheld, 'She wanted to give it to me—and wouldn't let herself,' thought Jill.

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ILL walked rapidly back along the river road with no eyes for the evening loveliness. She realized that tea-time was past when she saw Amélie sitting on the wall in front of the Ecu d'Or in an evening mood of unaccustomed leisure. Poor, hardly driven Amélie on this pleasant vantage-ground, swung one foot, as Jill used to swing hers, and watched with fond eyes the gambols of a shrill-voiced little girl who was playing in the road.

Jill paused to greet her. 'Has Monsieur come in?' she asked.

Monsieur had returned an hour ago, Amélie informed her, looking up at the generous anglaise with approbation.

'And he's probably had no tea, either,' said Jill. 'Well, we'll enjoy our dinner so much the more. What is there for dinner, Amélie?'

 ' Ecrevisses; and an excellent blanquette de veau, Madame.'

'Is this your little girl?' Jill inquired, looking down at the child who wore a large red bow at the top of its plain little head and showed very grimy drawers under its short petticoats.

 ' Mais oui, Madame; c ' est ma fille unique, '  said Amélie proudly.  ' Viens, Germaine, dis bonjour à la

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 ''dame. ' '' But Germaine only scampered away on her hob-nailed little boots.

'She looks very strong and happy,' said Jill. 'I didn't know you were married, Amélie.'

 ' Je suis fille-mère, Madame, '  said Amélie with an air of modest pride, as though the state were one of special merit.

'Hallo, you scoundrel! Where's my tea?' called Graham from above. He had come out on the balcony and leaned there looking down at them.

'Scoundrel yourself! Where's mine?—It's too late for tea; we are to keep our appetites for ''écrevisses! ' '' Jill returned. 'Well, au revoir, Amélie. I must see if a box of chocolates will tempt Germaine to make friends with me.'

Jill, going up the stairs and thinking of poor ugly Amélie and of her complacency, laughed a little. 'But how right it all is—for them,' she thought. 'They've each got their own little badge; their own little medal or pièce d'identité. They all grow, deep, deep, on their own soil. Grande dame; bourgeoise, or fille-mère. They each know their own place and are proud of it, more than any other people in the world. If you can't have a legitimate child, then make the best of an illegitimate one. Quite right, too,' Jill laughed, feeling that Amélie had justified Mademoiselle Ludérac still further, and pleased that it should be so. All the same, should she tell Dick of her discomfiture, or be contented, in silence, with feeling it was all for the best? She debated the point as she went along the passage

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 and out to the balcony, but, as he turned his head and smiled at her, she felt, as always, that she must share everything with Dick, even discomfitures.

'Come. Sit down. Let's have a smoke and a talk,' she said, tossing her cap and gloves on a table; and when they had placed their chairs she said resolutely, 'Well, I've been snubbed.'

'By Mademoiselle Ludérac,' said Graham. He dryly smiled as he lighted his cigarette.

'Yes. She's been telling me, after we'd had the most wonderful talk, that we can't possibly be friends because friends must be parts of one's life, and that as we are going, while she stays, we can't be parts.'

'Did she include me in this rejection?' Graham inquired. 'That would be rather uncalled for, since I've made her no offers.'

'No; of course she didn't include you. And of course I've been an ass; trying to rush things. But you'd be just as keen as I am, I'm sure; if you knew all I know now.'

'Should I? What do you know?' And as Jill wondered where she should begin, Graham added, 'Where did you see her?'

'On the island. That was so wonderful, too. It all goes on being like the fairy-tale, Dick; but with something so much deeper in it than a fairy-tale;—except that fairy-tales are deep,' mused Jill, looking away for a moment over the river. 'I went down after being with the old lady, and there she was, walking under the poplars with a cat in her arms; just like the patron

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 saint of Buissac, you know. What were those picture books one had when one was a child?—Boutet de Monvel's Jeanne d'Arc, and Chansons de France; it was like those. Everything was pale; the sky and the trees and the river; even her black dress looked pale; and she was bareheaded, like the little Jeanne d'Arc. It was. So queer, so beautiful. And she's had a saint's life, really. That came out in what the old lady told me. Her mother was mad, Dick.'

'Mad?' As she had echoed the old lady's word so Dick now echoed hers.

'Yes. But it was an accident.—I mean—Mademoiselle Ludérac isn't détrauqée, too. It was an accident and she wore a black patch over her eye and was very white and dressed in black. And she walked about the woods leaning on Marthe's arm. That was the way the old lady first saw them.—What's the matter, Dick?' Graham was looking at her strangely.

'Hadn't that woman who came round the house the other day a black patch over her eye?' he asked, and it was odd to hear how dry he kept his voice as he asked it.

'Why, Dick!—how absurd you are! What tricks your imagination does play you! That was Mademoiselle Ludérac herself, and I saw her two beautiful eyes as plainly as I see yours.'

'Yes. Of course you did. Of course I'm a fool.—But I seemed suddenly to remember, as you said it, that I'd seen it all before.'

'That's the way it works with you, my dear boy.

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 You really must take care,' Jill smiled at him tenderly, 'or you'll get barmy.'

'Not with you to take care of me,' Graham smiled back. 'Go on with your story. You're full of it, I see.'

'Well, I don't want to upset you.'

'Upset me? I'm not upset,' said Graham. 'I'm only interested in the tricks my imagination can play me. Go on, Jill.'

'Well, the mother couldn't bear to be without her and fell into frenzies if Marthe left her.—Imagine what a life for a child, Dick.—And they were stoned once, here, in Buissac. That is like a saint, too, isn't it?'

Graham kept silence.

'It explains everything; everything one felt about her from the first,' said Jill. 'The grave—mad people are buried alone like that, perhaps;—and her coldness to you. And the feeling she gives one that she is set apart. She told me that she had never had a friend.'

Graham determinedly reacted against his impressionable mood. He tossed away his cigarette and lighted another and inquired, 'Does it really make her more amiable that she should have been so very unfortunate? It seems to me that the old lady has shown a good deal of courage in taking up such an unpopular person. I shouldn't have expected it of her, somehow. It makes one like her better. But it doesn't make me like her protégée the better that she shouldn't count her as a friend.'

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 'Well, she doesn't seem like a friend, exactly, does she? though I could see that she was dreadfully upset over Marthe and her mother. She's a patroness rather than a friend.'

'All the same, Mademoiselle Ludérac sounds to me, and looks to me, like a very hard young person.'

'You wouldn't have said so if you could have seen her holding that cat and talking about animals this afternoon.—And about history, and how cruel people had been to each other.—Oh, Dick, it's very, very strange;—but she makes me feel things I never felt before. She made me feel it was cruel to hunt foxes.'

'Did she indeed. Confound her cheek!'

'It wasn't cheek.—And you don't think so yourself, though you have got a prejudice against her.—She's gentle—gentle—and dreadfully sad. It's as if she'd been through everything and come out on the other side. I can't explain. You'd feel it even more than I do if you were with her, because you are cleverer and deeper than I am. I know I'm right about her.—She gives me the feeling I've had sometimes when I've been out at dawn;—everything so still and just one star and a thin little moon in the sky.—When she looks at you she makes you feel like that. And she seems to be seeing much more than just yourself. She seems to be seeing something that explains you. She might not be able to show it to you; but when you're with her you feel it's there. And she makes you long, more than anything, to be the self she's seeing. It's like heaven, you know.'

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 Dick was looking at her tremulous, lighted face as though he, too, were seeing it with that deeper vision. 'You're a darling, Jill,' he said.

He had put out his hand to her and she took it, murmuring, 'She does upset me.'

'She upsets us both a little, perhaps, in different ways. Black magic with me, and white with you. No doubt she's a remarkable young woman; but it's you who are the darling. You lend her all the poetry that's in yourself.'

'Poetry! In me, Dick!' Jill had to laugh though his words had brought unaccustomed tears to her eyes.

'You've been an embodiment of poetry ever since you began to talk about her. Your state of mind is poetry.—You're a queer people, you English, Jill. Here you are, a hard-headed, matter-of-fact, unimaginative, hunting girl; yet, give you a chance, push aside the woodland stone, and it's the well of English poetry that bubbles up out of the moss. There's always askylark waiting to sing in your sky.—She may be the silent sky, Jill;—but you are the sky with the skylark in it.'

Jill gazed at him and she murmured, 'Great Scott, Dick!' He made her extraordinarily happy. And he made her sad, too. Was it like the great landscape that afternoon, with the sense it brought of the accepted tragedy in all beauty? No, not quite that. The moment, as she sat there, holding Dick's hand, meeting his loving gaze, was beautiful and not to be forgotten; but Dick was sad. There was something

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 autumnal in his look; something of remembrance. Like an autumn day, thought Jill, when one tries to capture and hold fast the beauty that is vanishing out of the world; so that when winter comes one shall not forget.

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RAHAM and Jill were having their petit déjeuner next morning, each in their little bed and each—a special favour of Madame Michon's—with their own tray, when Amélie brought in a letter from the Manoir and told them that Monsieur Trumier waited below for an answer.

'At this hour! What time can they get up!' Jill exclaimed. Graham said that the old lady had probably written from her bed.

The letter was very ceremonious. It asked if they would give Madame de Lamouderie the great pleasure of spending the evening with her. It was, as they would know, a poor hospitality she had to offer, but their kindness would overlook deficiencies and Mademoiselle Ludérac had promised a performance on the harp. Mademoiselle Ludérac, she reminded them, was a professional, and they could not fail to be pleased by her proficiency. It was signed in full panoply:  ' Veuillez agréer, Madame, l ' expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués. .'

It was difficult to believe, Graham reflected, that it was written by the old lady who talked about biting into peaches.

'Isn't it grand!' laughed Jill. 'And why not have asked you when you went up to-day?'

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 'She isn't sure I am going up to-day, and I'm not, as it happens. It's not raining.'

'Oh, poor old dear; that's two days without you. She'll think you've given her up. You must be specially sweet to her to-night, then.—For of course we'll go, won't we? I long to hear Mademoiselle Ludérac play the harp.'

Jill spoke in English, but Amélie, who waited at the door, volunteered at this that Mademoiselle Ludérac was très forte on the harp; one could hardly go past the Manoir without hearing her.

Jill said that they must wear their best bibs and tuckers; and though the evening brought a sudden fall of rain, she still insisted on this tribute to the old lady's hospitality. 'Nothing would please her so much. I'll manage to get the car up the road,' she said.

So, watched with great interest by the personnel of the Ecu d'Or, they crept under the raised hood at eight-fifteen, Graham with the collar of his coat turned up about his ears, Jill wrapped in her furs. The rain rattled on the hood as they sped along the highroad and in the chestnut forest the long, adventurous beam they cast before them brought happy fancies to Jill's mind. What spells of loneliness and melancholy could withstand the gaiety and enterprise of a modern car? 'I'm much more like a car,' she thought, 'than like a skylark;—and a car can do something for Marthe Ludérac;—take her away, perhaps, who knows?—while a skylark can do nothing.'

In the narrow, upper road, the stones were loosened

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 by the rain and torrents poured down the ditches on either side. It required all Jill's skill and hardihood to drive without mishap; but the car purred softly on, pausing, meditating, tacking carefully from side to side, and soon the Manoir lights showed orange-coloured squares among the sycamores; for to-night the Manoir had opened its eyes to look at them.

Joseph was at the door as they drew up. There was a lamp in the hall and a lamp on the high turn of the stair. One saw for the first time the acanthus-leaf moulding of the cornice and the flat, dry greens and fawns and umbers of the battle-piece hung on the wall. Joseph still wore his checked trousers, but had on, over them, a correct, if moth-eaten, tail coat, and his white tie was starched and immaculate. In his eye, as he helped them off with their coats, Jill thought that she detected a glint of melancholy pride. For Joseph, too, this was a great occasion.

The pale green drawing-room, all enclosed and luminous, gave Jill the strangest feeling. To step into it was like entering the tank of an aquarium, like sinking away from life and change into timelessness. Though lighted, it was dense—the tall lamp near the alcove, the three pairs of candles, on piano, bookcase, and mantelpiece, only lending, as it were, transparency to the aqueous medium. The daffodils, in their symmetrically placed vases, looked like submerged flowers, and so dim and dazzling was the scene that, for a moment, one hardly saw the figure of Madame de Lamouderie standing among the flowers and candleflames.

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 She was alone. The harp, unveiled, glimmered in a corner, but Mademoiselle Ludérac was not there; and, like a stately, furbelowed old fish, their hostess glided forward, her manner majestically attuned to the significance of the occasion. How many years was it since she had given an evening party? How many years, Jill wondered, since she had worn that looped and flounced silk skirt, that tightly fitted bodice trimmed with jet? Bravely décolleté in its original state, friendly fingers had adjusted the black net sleeves and black lace tucker and tied the velvet bow under the old lady's ear. She held a fan with broken, gilded sticks, her festive head was draped with the lace mantilla, and, in the monotonous room, her painted lips were like a brilliant flower.

 ' Charmée—charmée de vous voir, '  she murmured, in the odd, mincing tones that Graham had heard from her before; but the artifice broke down; the currents of her delight swept all ceremony from her voice. '' ' Vous êtes bons! Vous êtes charmants! ' '' she exclaimed. '' ' Et Dieu!—que vous êtes beaux. ' ''

They had each taken her by a hand and, thus held, she looked at them, and over them, with lustrous eyes.  ' Que vous êtes beaux, '  she repeated.

 ' Et que vous êtes belle, '  said Jill.—'Isn't she marvellous, Dick?'

Graham bent his high, dark head, and kissed the old lady's hand.

'Ah, ''infidèle! ' '' she said, and her voice trembled; 'here are two whole days that you leave me disconso-

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 late! Two days, empty; desolate; but for the charity of this adorable creature.'

'But it's when it rains that I come to you,' said Graham.

'And it never rains in Buissac!' cried the old lady. 'Never! never! I see that I shall come to curse the sunlight!'

'It's raining now,' said Graham. 'And have you forgotten your great floods?'

'You make me forget everything! You turn my head!' Madame de Lamouderie retorted. 'Sit here; sit beside me,' she went on. 'No; I jest. I do not expect you. I have too little to offer you; I know it well. In my old happy days I could have entertained you differently. Princes, diplomats, poets, all that Europe had to give, would have bowed in my salon over your little hand, ma chère petite; and all the most beautiful women of the court of the third Napoleon would have been mad with love of this wicked husband of yours.—Yes, he is wicked!' She threatened him with her fan. 'Does one not see it in his eyes?'

'I'm thankful we didn't know you then!' laughed Jill. 'I don't want beautiful women to be in love with him!'

'Ah; you need have feared nothing from them; nothing,' Madame de Lamouderie declared while her eye travelled ravenously over Jill's dress. 'Their despair would have been a further tribute laid at your feet.—This is the first time I have seen you with your head uncovered.—Oh, the thick russet hair cut short! It

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 is terrible to see; yet it becomes you. It gives you a provocative, a boyish aspect. And the beautiful bare arms;—and the breast so white under the sunburned throat. Your eyes are blue, are they not?—Though now, in this light, they seem so dark.'

'Bluish grey. Quite ordinary eyes'—laughed Jill, a little embarrassed by this inventory. 'I see the harp is ready. When does the concert begin?'

'Oh, the concert does not begin until we ask for it.—Not until we have talked; and had our coffee.—Marthe prepares the coffee now.'

'Did she tell you that we met, at last, yesterday?' asked Jill, seeing that the old lady's joyous mood to-night included her protégée. 'I was so glad. I liked her so much.'

'Yes. She told me. She told me that you had been charming to her; and to her cat. You must not turn my poor Marthe's head, chère amie. A humble little teacher of music; a simple little bourgeoise. It would not be kind to give her hopes you could not fulfill.'

'But it's she who's turned my head!' cried Jill, and she forgot discretion. 'I don't think she's a bit humble. I think she's wonderful. She's the most wonderful person I've ever met.'

At this large statement, Madame de Lamouderie sat for a moment silent. 'Wonderful?' she then repeated in a small, low voice.

'Yes.' Jill was now resolved to rub it in. 'Wonderful and beautiful. Dick thinks so too, don't you, Dick?

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 —You might as well talk of turning the moon's head.'

The old lady turned grave eyes on Graham. 'You think her beautiful?'

'I don't know about beautiful; but she's like a Saint Cecilia,' said Graham, and Jill looked at him gratefully.

'A Saint Cecilia?'

'Yes. With her harp, you know. A saint and a Roman lady. That's what she made me think of the other day.'

'But Marthe is not a lady. She is a teacher of music,' said poor Madame de Lamouderie.

'Well, I only said she looked like one, you know,' Graham observed, and Jill, troubled, saw that he was more intent on tormenting his old friend than on praising Mademoiselle Ludérac. 'Just as I look like a gentleman, though I'm only a painter.'

'Only a painter! You are of an incomparable distinction!—You are a genius; a great genius!' cried the old lady, deeply perturbed, 'and genius ennobles. It is not the same as a poor, small métier, like giving lessons on the harp for hire. And Marthe is bourgeoise in birth; almost peasant. I feel the peasant too much at times.'

'Well, saints have been peasants,' Graham continued, with a cruel blitheness, to corner her.

'But Marthe is not a saint! You are idealists, dreamers, to think so! She has a very violent temper! As I have found to my cost!'

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 'All real saints have bad tempers,' said Graham, 'especially when they are faced with such sinners as you and me. How else are they to deal with us?'

At this Madame de Lamouderie gazed at him in an uncertainty half painful, half delicious. Pain predominated. 'But she has not dealt with you? You have not met her? You were not with her on the island?'

'No; I've not met her. I've given her, as yet, no grounds for dealing with me,' said Graham, slowly laughing. 'That you often have, I'm sure you'll own if you search your conscience!'

Gazing fixedly at him, the old lady was as suddenly reassured as she had been dismayed. 'Ah, you play with me! You love to mock and play! Was I not right to say that you were wicked? I too, let me warn you, have my malice! Perhaps you will feel it one day!'

'I've felt it already. We are well matched,' said Graham.

The door now opened and Mademoiselle Ludérac herself appeared. She was carrying a tray of cakes and Joseph followed her with the coffee, set out with much state-liness in tall white-and-gold china.

Graham rose and went to help her.  ' Merci; je vous remercie, '  she said. But she kept the tray and placed it herself on the table beside the stereopticon. She wore a thin black dress of a bygone fashion, the long skirt giving to her figure a Byzantine elongation; and her face and throat and arms showed as pale as silver in the unearthly light.

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 She stood then, at the table, handing Joseph the cups to pass as she poured them out and Graham, again asking permission to make himself useful, followed with the cakes. Jill fancied that she saw in Dick's demeanour a touch of ironic formality; but if Mademoiselle Ludérac saw it, too, she gave no sign of discomfiture. She remained calm, punctilious, aloof.

When Graham had returned to his chair beside Madame de Lamouderie, Mademoiselle Ludérac came with her cup and sat down by Jill on one of the little satin sofas. Despite the rigours of the day before, Jill felt that their relationship had, insensibly, advanced in intimacy. Mademoiselle Ludérac looked at her very gently, and as Jill's frank eyes met hers her lips suddenly parted in their helpless, childlike smile. She could not conceal, since Jill was so glad to see her, that she, too, was very glad to see Jill.

'It pleases you to come to our little entertainment?' she asked, casting a glance towards the old lady, who eagerly conversed.

'It's perfectly enchanting.—Was it your idea?' asked Jill.

'Mine? Oh, no; I am not a hostess. It is Madame de Lamouderie's. And how much pleasure you and your husband have given her, you can perceive.'

'Yes,' Jill glanced at Graham and his old friend; 'isn't it wonderful, at her age, to be able to care so much? With most old people one feels that one can do nothing for them, except try to make them com-

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 fortable; whereas with her what one can do is to treat her as if she were young.'

'It is true; comfort, with her, counts for very little compared to life,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac.

Her eyes were travelling over Jill's face and dress as she spoke, not ravenously, as the old lady's had done, but as a child might gaze, in spring, at a bank of primroses.

'Do you like my dress?' Jill asked, interpreting the soft, surprised pleasure; 'I got it in Cannes this winter. I didn't expect to need it again till I was back in England.'

'It is beautiful, most beautiful!' said Mademoiselle Ludérac. 'Like the petals of arose. And all complete; the rose-coloured stockings and the little silver shoes. No; Buissac has never indeed seen such a picture.'

'How would you like to wear a pink dress and silver shoes?' asked Jill. 'They would become you.'

'Me? Oh, no!' Mademoiselle Ludérac was amused by the incongruous idea. 'Not for me, such toilettes. Even if I were not too old.'

'Too old? I am older than you are!'

'Impossible, Madame!'

'How old do you guess me to be?'

'You look not over twenty-one.'

'I'm twenty-nine,' Jill informed her. 'And I guess you to be twenty-five.'

'But it is extraordinary. You have the face of twenty-one.' Mademoiselle Ludérac gazed at her. 'So fresh, so untouched. Yes; I am twenty-five, and

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 a little over; twenty-six, to be exact. So you are my senior.'

'Very much your senior. I am an old married woman! I have been married for years and years!'

'Have you indeed?' Mademoiselle Ludérac glanced at Graham.

'Five whole years. And I think when one's happily married it seems to have been for ever. One can't remember oneself not married, as it were.'

'That would bear out the pretty belief that happy marriages are made in heaven,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac with her smile.

It came to Jill, then, how unlikely it was that Mademoiselle Ludérac would ever be happily married; it was as unlikely as that she would ever wear a pink dress and silver shoes. Poor French girls, who had no friends, did not get married. Yet how redeemed from its desolation would the Manoir not have been could Marthe Ludérac have married and had a young family about her.

'Did you live here always when you were a child?' asked Jill, carrying on her thought. 'Were you a country girl like me?'

'We always came here for the summers,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and, though her gaze remained as gentle and as steady as before, Jill saw that it was altered. 'But I lived, too, in Angoulême.'

'In Angoulême! That wonderful old city, with the cathedral on the hill and the terrace looking over the plain!'

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 'You know it? Yes.' Mademoiselle Ludérac continued to gaze, but her look was now definitely troubled. 'That was my winter home. But I did not love it as I did Buissac.'

'Have you always studied the harp?' Jill changed the subject, seeing that it had been inapt. 'Did you study in Angoulême?'

'No; I was too young then. My mother taught me when we came back to live here,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac.

Jill again turned aside; Mademoiselle Ludérac could not wish to dwell on that tragic figure. 'I've never heard the harp played as a solo instrument. I suppose you love playing?'

'Yes, indeed.'

'And giving lessons?'

'That depends on the pupil. What I enjoy most,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac with an air of relief, 'is playing with other instruments; with an orchestra. It is then that the harp can speak with its own voice; for there is little music written for it as a solo; only arrangements; such as I will play you to-night;—if you care to hear.'

'But it's what we've come for; to hear you.—You play at concerts, then? You must be frightfully good.'

'I am not so very good. But I have engagements sometimes, in the winter. It is my greatest joy—to play with the orchestra,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and she added, her relief in having left the theme of her past carrying her into a girlish spontaneity

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 'Last winter I played in César Franck's 'Psyché.' Do you know it?'

'I've never heard of it even. Is it lovely?'

'It is celestial music,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and in the little pause that followed these words, her eyes, with their wide setting, resting upon Jill, made her think not so much of the dawn as of the hour before the dawn; remote, windswept, starry.

Graham, though he talked so briskly with his old lady, had evidently been lending an ear to their conversation, for he now looked round at them to say: 'When does the concert begin?'

'Ah, he is wicked, wicked, this husband of yours!' Madame de Lamouderie addressed Jill. 'He delights in turning all my best sentiments against me.'

'' ' Le diable dans votre bénitier, am I not? ' '' said Graham. 'Come; you must let me hear a little César Franck; that will exorcise me.' He rose and strolled over to the sofa where Jill and Mademoiselle Ludérac sat.

Jill always liked Dick best of all in his tweeds; perhaps because, oddly enough, he looked less like an artist in them than in his evening clothes. His significance was exaggerated rather than effaced by evening dress, and with his rough hair and dark, compelling face, he was arresting and even overwhelming. So, evidently, the old lady had found him; he had gone like wine to her head; and Jill wondered, glancing at Mademoiselle Ludérac as he stood there above them, whether she did not find him overwhelming too. Her

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 expression, in seeing him approach, had changed; but it did not seem to be in any admiration. It was rather, Jill felt, as though there were a kind of instinctive hostility between them. That might simply be because, to a French girl, unused to social life, the presence of any man was intimidating. But she did not look at all intimidated. And Dick most certainly was not black magic to her. Nor was she so to him. That was all Dick's nonsense, thought Jill, glancing up at him and seeing how cold and firm was the gaze he fixed on the young woman.

'Shall I begin, Madame?' Mademoiselle Ludérac inquired, looking over at her patroness.

'Ah—if our guests wish you to;—by all means, begin; begin, I beg of you!' cried the old lady. 'She plays divinely!—I asked her to play to-night knowing that it was the only offering I could make to you.—Great critics have lauded her;—you cannot deny it, Marthe!—With time she will be famous, and you will be glad to think that you heard her on the threshold of her career.—She is a marvel! a marvel!' cried the old lady, while Mademoiselle Ludérac, who had risen and gone to her harp, stood making no comment on these extravagances.

'Here; come and sit beside your bénitier, '  Madame de Lamouderie continued, motioning Graham back to his chair. 'It is not well to be too near the harp. Ours is the best place. It is a very penetrating instrument.—My mother played the harp when I was a child—and sang;—like Corinne. Madame de Staël, indeed,

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 was a friend of my grandmother's;—a witty, but a very ugly woman; how she should have attracted so many lovers remains a mystery; and I have always suspected that they would have preferred the attachment to remain platonic! My mother had the most beautiful arm in Europe, and perhaps she chose the instrument for that reason. It displays the arm as no other does.—I saw a woman play the flute once! Bon Dieu! what a spectacle! Her mouth all twisted to one side and her eyes squinting down her nose as though she were endeavouring to perceive a smut upon it! She was already laide à faire peur, however—like Madame de Staël—so it was of little consequence. Begin, then, my child; begin! We are ready for you! But let it be something romantic, passionate.—Not any of your mournful religious elegiacs.'

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ILL had followed Mademoiselle Ludérac to the other end of the room. 'I shall sit here, to be near you while you play. A little place all to myself,' she said.

The room was L-shaped and in the alcove-like turn there was a small table set with daffodils. Jill drew a chair to it and sat down. From here she could see Mademoiselle Ludérac in profile and look down the long room to watch the effect of the music upon Madame de Lamouderie and Dick. They seemed suddenly a long way off; Dick sitting there and nursing his foot across his knee, and the figure of the old woman, ravaged, absurd, yet beautiful, leaning for—ward to look up at him.

Mademoiselle Ludérac was tuning the strings of her harp, her head laid against them, and Jill's eyes were drawn to a portrait that hung above the daffodils on the inner wall of the alcove. It was evidently an enlarged photograph, a three-quarter length of a little girl, tinted, and framed in an oval gilt frame. The child was dressed in the elaborate white muslins of the eighties; blue knots of ribbon perched on her shoulders, a blue sash around her waist, a blue bow tied on the summit of her head. Her golden hair was cut across her forehead and long golden curls, disposed, one felt, by a proud maternal hand, fell about her small

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 decorated body. The face was a rounded, nondescript child-face with something at once sweet and sullen in the expression of the mouth; but the dark eyes held Jill's attention. Resentful, mournful, unchildish eyes, set so unevenly (one seeming with its heavy gaze to sink into the cheek and one to rise, plaintively, into the temple) that they made her think of the suffering, uneven eyes of Eleanora Duse whom she had once seen act. Suddenly, as she looked, she realized that this must be Mademoiselle Ludérac's mother in childhood, and it almost frightened her to see her there. She moved her chair so that she should not face the portrait. She had found no resemblance in it, yet had had time to feel, in those dark eyes, a familiar, a tragic potency.

Mademoiselle Ludérac had tuned her harp to her satisfaction and was now seated in the majestic pose, foot outstretched to the pedal, arms laid along the strings, that the playing of the instrument involves. She glanced at Jill, and there was something dark, preoccupied in her expression.

'She must have seen me looking,' thought Jill.

'Passionate? Romantic?' Mademoiselle Ludérac addressed Madame de Lamouderie. That might be a Chopin Nocturne, then. But shall we begin with a Mozart Sonata?'

'Yes; by all means. He is cheerful, light-hearted, Mozart. There was a picture of him as a child in a room at my home; a small boy, at the harpsichord, with powdered hair. Ah, there are no such musicians now-

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 adays.' And the old lady sighed, perhaps dismissing an impulse to claim Mozart as a protégé of her family's. Mademoiselle Ludérac bent her head against the harp for a moment, and Jill felt that in the power and sustenance of her communion with it she put aside the discords of her life. Then her fingers swept the strings, and the bright, unearthly tones filled the air with magic. In her corner, Jill listened. This was unlike any other sound, with the heart-plucking depth of its bass, the thin clarity of its treble; it was all depth and light; like golden fruits falling into deep translucent water; and the form of the music came to her metamorphosed into the visual aspects about her; the daffodils reflected in the mirrors, the candleflames all steadily pointing upwards, the watery greys and greens of the room, Marthe Ludérac herself, with her intent, dark head, her rhythmic, silvery arms. It was a golden magic, and it dispelled the sadness that, for a moment, had filled Jill's heart. It made one strong again; serene and confident. It was beautiful to see and hear and she could not distinguish the two beauties.

'Ah, bravo! Marvellous!' cried the old lady when all three movements had been played. 'Beautiful indeed;—but too long.—Let it be Chopin, now, Marthe.—Chopin is my passion. My mother knew him well; he wrote one of his symphonies under her inspiration!' cried the old lady flown with excitement. Even Jill knew that Chopin wrote no symphonies; but Dick made no comment on the absurdity.

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 The starlit melancholy of a Nocturne flowed from Mademoiselle Ludérac's fingers. Tears, languor, protestation, a folding, cloud-like acquiescence were in it, and Jill saw that she seemed to yield herself to it, yet to hold herself aloof; resolute and dispassionate.

'Ah, it breaks one's heart, that music!' cried Madame de Lamouderie. 'It makes one wish to weep all the tears of one's body.' She looked at Graham; but he was not listening to her. From under gloomy brows he gazed at Mademoiselle Ludérac. The old lady laid her fan against his arm. 'Does it not break even your hard heart, Milord Byron?'

Dick looked round and down at her; coldly. It was still as if he did not hear her, though he smiled response.

'My heart?—It does something to me. But Chopin leaves my heart intact.'

'What experience is there that does not leave your heart intact! You are of stone!—Of cold, hard marble!'

Graham still smiled, but he made no reply and Jill saw a shade of dissatisfaction cloud the old lady's radiance.

'Is that enough?' Mademoiselle Ludérac glanced over at them again.

'Oh, no! Not nearly enough!' cried Jill, and Graham said, looking at Madame de Lamouderie and not at their musician: 'May we hear some César Franck?'

'But by all means! César Franck, Marthe. He is dreary; like a consecrated wafer; beneficent, perhaps;

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 but insipid. Marthe, however, would ask nothing better than to play him all the night!'

'Oh, do go on all night!' laughed Jill. 'We'd ask nothing better, either, would we, Dick!'

'No,' said Dick, holding his foot across his knee and looking at Mademoiselle Ludérac; 'we wouldn't.'

'I play very little of César Franck for solo. You will not have to listen all night,' Mademoiselle Ludérac smiled at Jill. 'This is a voluntary for the organ; yet the harp will take it.'

It was, indeed, over all too soon, strange and lovely, like a fleeting glimpse of the fields of paradise—like paradise, Jill felt, seen through a veil of ice. Perhaps only so could one see it. 'Oh, that's best of all!' she cried.

'Do you know Gluck's' "Orféo"?' Mademoiselle Ludérac asked, while her fingers swept the magically singing, magically sighing strings. 'That is like heaven, too.'

'Oh, play it, do,' said Jill. 'I only know ''Ché faro. ' ''

'I will play that; first the Elysian fields, and then the lament of Orfeo for his lost Eurydice.'

Was it like heaven, Jill wondered, listening to the far-away, trance-like measure? She closed her eyes and seemed to float in dreams. Gliding fields of asphodel went past her, white mists and slowly dowing, silver streams. 'It's all too peaceful to be really happy,' thought Jill. 'It's like a dream, a beautiful dream; and one loves it, yet wants to wake out of it, too.'

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 The last sweet notes dropped softly and there was a pause. Jill opened her eyes and met the eyes of Mademoiselle Ludérac turned, for a moment, upon her: 'Now listen,' they seemed to say.

It was as if one saw the colour of the sky changing; as if the mists parted and the figure of human suffering appeared. It was all memory, this lament of Orpheus; sweet, passionate memory; memories of lost beauty, of summer when winter is come; of love and parting. It spoke to Jill of her love and Dick's, and of how they, too, must one day part for ever. She had closed her eyes again in listening and when it was ended such a pang of grief came to her that it seemed to her for a moment that everything was really over and she and Dick long dead. She looked across the room at him. There he sat; they were still together, and she sought his eyes for reassurance. But he did not see her. He had folded his arms now and sat there, his head bent forward a little, gazing darkly at Marthe Ludérac.

'Yes, yes—for to-night that is sufficient!' said Madame de Lamouderie with palpable fretfulness.

The music had made her sad, too; and Dick was not thinking of her at all. 'It is too mournful, that "Ché faro." I do not like your Gluck; I like passion; brilliancy. "La Traviata"; "Théodora";—but no; I confuse; that is the play; Sardou's play.—Did you ever see our great Sarah in the days of her triumphs?' With her fan laid on his arm she drew Graham's eyes to her and she went on, eagerly: 'No, you were too young.—But what a tigress—what a cooing dove!

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 Not beauty; she had no true beauty; it was, essentially, the versatile face of the Jewess; but what a vehicle for every passion; and, preëminently, for the passion of love.—Ah, and she could draw upon experience, Sarah! In my own monde, how many men have I not known to whom she granted her favours!'

Poor old lady. How terribly out of key she was! And did she not guess as much from the look that drifted down upon her from Dick's cold eyes as he leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head? But perhaps Dick, still, was not listening to her. He had cared for the music as much as she herself had; more, of course, for he was so much deeper than she was. And had he not begun to see, too, something of what she saw in Marthe Ludérac? What a triumph that would be! But the 'Ché faro' still made her feel miserable. She joined Mademoiselle Ludérac, who stood beside her harp.

'I can't tell you how I loved it,' she said.

Mademoiselle Ludérac smiled. 'I saw that you loved it.—Some day you must hear César Franck's 'Psyché,' she said.

'Is it anything like the Gluck?'

'There is a resemblance; yes; as if of colour.'

'What you said: something celestial?'

'Yes. Something celestial. Only in the "Psyché" there is so much more of that quality.'

'But it's dreadfully sad,' said Jill, after a moment, standing and watching Mademoiselle Ludérac adjust, here and there, a string of her instrument. 'The

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 celestial is dreadfully sad. As if everything was left behind.'

'Everything is left behind—in the celestial,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac.

Jill stood and thought. She had never in her life thought so deeply. 'Everything of earth, you mean. Not everything we care for, surely.'

'Perhaps everything we think we care for,' Mademoiselle Ludérac suggested, glancing up at her, and Jill felt the dreadful sadness flowing in upon her.

'But then—how can we feel it celestial?' she questioned, a tremor in her voice. 'We care for the celestial.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac's eyes were now upon her and they dwelt as Jill had not felt them dwell before. Something else came to her, as she met their gaze. Had she found it for herself? Or had Mademoiselle Ludérac shown it to her?

'That is the secret,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac. 'You have said it.'

'The secret?'

'It is what we care for most. That is all we know. But is it not enough to know?—We cannot think it. We cannot see it. It is ineffable. Yet we possess it.'

Jill gazed at her, groping in a mystery never before apprehended, yet feeling, in the darkness, a hand laid upon hers. 'I seem to understand things I don't really understand, when I am with you,' she smiled faintly. 'Is it living with great music that makes you seem to know so much more than other people?'

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 Mademoiselle Ludérac smiled faintly, too, at that.

'Or is it,' Jill went on, since she received no answer, 'that you have suffered more than most people?'

At this question a deep flush swept over Mademoiselle Ludérac's face, a flush deep, yet pale; intense, yet faint. To see it was like hearing the notes of the harp whispering together after they had been struck. Jill was almost frightened; but then all their strange, sudden talk, spoken in such low tones while they stood alone together, almost frightened her.

'I think it is like that,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac. Her flush had faded and she looked at Jill quietly. 'I think it is true that if I know more than others it is because I may have suffered more.' Her gaze was like the hand in the darkness, and after a moment she added, smiling with a singular sweetness, 'You have never suffered. Yet it was to you I played. You understand so much.'

'May I look at your harp?' Dick's voice broke in suddenly, very strangely, upon them, and they both started as they heard it and saw him standing there beside them. 'What a beautiful instrument it is.—May I look at it?'

 ' Volontiers, '  said Mademoiselle Ludérac. She stood aside as if her harp were a prize dog or cat, at a show, that a stranger had asked to examine. But now they might talk to each other; Dick might now come to know her a little. Jill left them standing there and went over to the abandoned old lady.

'We must be going, I think,' she said, bending down

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 to Madame de Lamouderie and taking her by both hands. She was feeling very sorry for her; why she did not quite know—for after all she had had Dick all the evening. 'The lights at the Ecu d'Or will be out soon!—It's been too delicious.—You must ask us again to an evening concert.'

'Ah, one can have too much of music!' said the old lady crossly, and over Jill's bare, festive shoulder, her eye went to where Graham bent his head to examine Mademoiselle Ludérac's harp.

'But we will have a great deal besides music!' Jill rallied her. 'Tell me, can't I come some morning to take you for a motor-drive? The country here is so marvellous, and you can't really have seen it unless you've seen it from a car.—May I come to-morrow?'

'But my portrait?' said the old lady, mournfully now, still holding Jill by the hands and still looking over her shoulder at the other two.—Jill could hear that they were not speaking at all.—'Is it to be abandoned?'

'But of course not! It's in the afternoons Dick comes for that;—and only when it rains!'

The old lady debated the point, with evident trouble. 'And Marthe? What will she be doing? Alone here.'

Jill felt like laughing. 'But surely she's accustomed to being alone.'

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 Joseph in the house would be a very different matter.—There are mauvaises langues in Buissac!'

'But what of her winters in Bordeaux? She lives all by herself in winter.'

The old lady kept some unspoken suspicion, that was evident as she said: 'Motors—they are not for my age. In my youth it was a coach-and-four I drove in, and in Paris my equipage was renowned for its brilliancy;—ah, what horses I had! Beautiful creatures, jet black and with red rosettes at their ears! That is the conveyance I care for! Motors confuse and distress me. Hardly does one recognize a scene before it is gone. One feels that one leaves oneself, dismembered, along the road!—One leaves oneself stuck to the landscape behind one!—like those distressing insects that cling to our lamps on summer nights!—you know them? Insects with long red bodies. One tries to withdraw them from their predicament—and the body comes off in one's fingers while the face and front feet remain attached to the lamp! So motoring affects me!'

The wonderful old creature had managed to amuse herself, and as she saw Jill's laughter she laughed, too, if ruefully. 'Aren't they dreadful! I know! I know!' said Jill. 'And such mournful faces, poor things. Why should they be so silly!'

'Ah, we are not unlike them,' said the old lady, darkly now, as another analogy offered itself. 'We are not unlike those insects. We, too, burn ourselves at the lamp of love! It is the destiny of women!

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 Marthe!' she cried suddenly. 'Marthe! Here is Madame Graham who wishes to say good-night to us. We are keeping her! We must not forget our manners!'

Mademoiselle Ludérac came to them at once, but with no appearance of haste or contrition, and Jill, feeling angry and amused, turned to Graham. 'I'm trying to get someone to consent to have a motor-drive with me. Madame de Lamouderie doesn't like motors. Will you come?' she asked Mademoiselle Ludérac. 'Will you come for a drive to-morrow?'

Mademoiselle Ludérac stood silent and perplexed.

'But how can you go, Marthe? What can we do here, without you?' said Madame de Lamouderie, though, now that her protégée was before her, her tone towards her had altered. It was almost pleadingly that she spoke. 'You have the ménage in the mornings and your harp;—and it is in the mornings that you read to me. You will not abandon your old incubus for new friends?' said the old lady with a twisted, wheedling smile.

'But she can go with me in the afternoon,' interposed Jill. 'Dick is with you then, so you won't miss her.'

The old lady's expression changed at that.

'At what time is the reading?' Graham inquired, and they were none of them giving Mademoiselle Ludérac a chance to reply to Jill's invitation.

'At eleven—and again at seven!' cried the old lady, reviving in his presence. 'In the mornings she reads what I choose, and in the evenings, when I tend to go

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 to sleep, I submit to her choice;—grave, edifying books! Poetry, and history;—I do not care for them! I go to sleep easily in the evening, do I not, Marthe?' she said, taking Mademoiselle Ludérac by the arm and looking up at her cajolingly. 'But at eleven she is brave, resigned. I like my books spiced and salted! I am not afraid of our ''gros rire gaulois! ' ''

It was all intended, Jill saw, as a pretty display for Graham.

A crushing blow was to fall upon her. Was it in malice, Jill wondered. Did Dick enjoy tormenting his poor old admirer? 'Nothing could be more opportune for my work, then,' he announced. 'I shall come to-morrow morning while Mademoiselle Ludérac reads spicy, salted books to you. You won't have to reproach me, so, with making your portrait dreary.'

The poor old lady, still holding Mademoiselle Ludérac by the arm, gazed at him with bodeful eyes. 'Dreary? Am I then so dreary?'

'Anything but—when you are allowed to be yourself. But when I forbid you to speak, and stare at you for half an hour on end without a word, I lose you;—I completely lose you,' said Graham, with an air of kindness, smiling down upon her.

'But it will disturb you, to have someone there reading. You do not like to be overlooked.'

'I shall ask Mademoiselle Ludérac to turn her back on us; like your cure. I shall not hear her reading. I shall be too much absorbed in you.'

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 'But—when you are not painting,' the poor old lady faltered—and Jill, amused at her predicament, yet surprised by Dick's whim, felt that it was as if he held her impaled on a pin—an unfortunate old insect indeed—and watched her vainly gyrate—'shall we not talk together?'

'That will be for you to decide,' said Graham. 'If you find the book very salted, you may not care to have the reading stop, even when I am not painting. I, of course, should find your conversation more interesting, and perhaps more salted, than any book.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac stood between them, tall, silent, very Byzantine in aspect. She looked at neither of them. She seemed to dissociate herself from the situation. And indeed the old lady's predicament was one from which she could not openly rescue her.

'So to-morrow, at eleven,' said Graham, smiling and raising Madame de Lamouderie's hand to his lips. 'Rain or shine. I feel a new confidence.'

'And may I come for you, for a drive, to-morrow afternoon?' Jill said, meeting Mademoiselle Ludérac's eyes at last.

'A thousand thanks, chère Madame;—but I have my practising in the afternoon, again, and to-morrow Joseph and I will be very busy in the garden,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac.

'May I come and garden with you, then? I love gardening,' said Jill, and her gaze gaily challenged, gently mocked her friend's retreat. For it was ridic-

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 ulous of Marthe Ludérac to pretend that she was not her friend.

 ' Vous êtes trop bonne, Madame, '  said Mademoiselle Ludérac. She evaded challenge and mockery.

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O, next morning, Graham walked up to the Manoir. It was still raining heavily and the weather gave to his change of programme a further relevancy. Impossible, in any case, to work out of doors to-day.

As he went, his coat turned up about his ears, his hands in his pockets, his eyes downcast, it was over the relevant aspects of his present undertaking that his mind was moving; lightly, as it were, and with careful footsteps. It was all absolutely relevant. It had been as easy to show frankness to Jill as to show duplicity to the old lady. He had said to Jill last night that he wanted to see something more of Mademoiselle Ludérac and Jill had completely understood, completely approved. Jill, it might even be said, urged him on. She wanted him, most insistently wanted him, to know and appreciate Mademoiselle Ludérac. So that was all right, thought Graham, turning off the highroad at the cemetery wall and beginning the steep ascent among the chestnut forests.

The grave, dark forest, its vistas swept by slanting rain, pitched his thoughts in a different key and set them to a different tempo. They went more heavily; they found their way, and their way was not always clear to find. But was not that all that his present enterprise really came to? He wanted to see Mademoi-

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 selle Ludérac. For he could never see her, never in the sense of possessing his vision; this was the lack, the failure that urged him on. There, among the rainswept vistas, he stopped and pondered. No; he could not see her face. To his potent, creative memory, the experience was a new one. Mademoiselle Ludérac was an aspect of nature and never before had nature evaded him. She was an aspect of nature and he had needed only, until now, to look upon such a one in order to possess its secret; for in the aspect was the secret and its discovery, its expression, was the artist's task and ecstasy. They were there, waiting in memory for his summons, because he had chosen to look at them, those significant aspects;—yet Mademoiselle Ludérac, whom he had chosen to look at for an hour, he could not summon. When he tried to see her, all that came clearly were her hands. It was as if her hands, helplessly, had allowed themselves to be mastered by his vision. He could see them placing the daffodils as if before a shrine; he could see them laid in mastery upon the harp; taking curious heraldic attitudes when thumb and little finger plucked at difficult chords; dissolved, while the arpeggios flowed from under them, into multiplied delicacies, or lay flat upon the strings, with a sudden mysterious urgency, to hush their golden whispering.

Why could he not see her face? He knew what it was like; accurately. He could have catalogued it; but he could not see it. Was it because of her eyes that he could not see her? When he looked at her, they met his

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 look and gave him nothing; nothing;—not even retreat; not even denial. The nature he summoned was passive; it yielded itself up to his quest. Mademoiselle Ludérac's eyes, though they neither retreated nor denied, met his force with an equal potency.

All about her, last night, golden forms had been ranged, falling into a halo around her remote, melodious figure; daffodils, the colour of light, candleflames, the colour of daffodils, and the golden strings of her majestic instrument. The picture she made was there, waiting for him, and he would have possessed it had he but the key;—her eyes, her face. No;—he walked on and on;—he could not evoke it. He could only feel, not see it. Her gaze flowed from her eyes like the music from under her fingers, giving him a sense of breathlessness, of pain. It was as if he sought to take a daffodil into his hand and found that it was a flame.

But not only the opposing forces of her soul had thus baffled and blinded his memory. The music had been there and he could not listen while he saw, or see while he listened. With a sense of relief yet of haste, or pursuit, his thought plunged down another labyrinth. It had been the music, then, rather than her eyes. It was slight, it was thin, that music for Eurydice, but as he had listened it had brought back an old anguish. What was the sense of a lack in things that had haunted him since boyhood? This thirst for the reality under the appearance? Again and again he had evoked from enigmatic earth her essential harmonies, only to find when, in weariness and joy, he sought to

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