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 Shrines. Come along. It's rather picturesque. A variant on Velasquez's ''Les Lanzas. ' ''

Reluctantly Jill followed him round to the high grille which yielded to his thrust.

They found themselves in a gravelled, orderly necropolis, a Galerie Lafayette, a Bon Marche of death. It seemed almost to display counters and to advertise good worth for the money. The poorer graves were sheltered by the high-perched tin tabernacles; the more opulent by stone chapels, railed across the front and displaying with sociable complacency their funereal altars, tablets, photographs, bead-wreaths, and vases filled with artificial flowers. There were streets of them, standing face to face. Some were solid and some were flimsy, but they all expressed the conviction that they were doing the right thing in the right way.

'It's like the gentleman with a ribbon across his chest who gets up, in evening clothes, and in broad daylight, at a French function, to make a speech,' Graham observed, sardonically gratified by a new experience. 'It civilizes death, you see, Jill; classifies it and introduces it to society. The tubs look industrial rather than rural, and are an invention, I expect, of the people who work in the quarries down the river.'

'I never imagined anything so horrible,' said Jill, standing to look from side to side with a dismay almost indignant. 'It will haunt my dreams.'

The cemetery was not all reclaimed from nature and dedicated to horror. In one corner—Jill observed it from where she stood—a broad space of grass still

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 grew green and thick and the chestnut branches, over the wall, dropped their russet fruits upon it. She moved away, drawn towards this oasis.

There, against the wall, she saw another grave; different from all the rest. It was marked only by a heave of sod and by the simplest headstone; and, deep in the grass, the chestnut branches sweeping low above it, it had a solitary yet cradled look. Graham joined her as she stood beside it.

At the head three glass vases held sprays of autumn roses; faded, yet with a lingering colour; and a wreath of heather at the foot was still fresh. Marthe Ludérac was the name upon the stone, and above it: Priez pour elle. The dates showed that she had died six years before.

Jill and Graham stood, strangely silenced.

'Why is she all alone like this?' Jill whispered. 'She has gone as far away from the others as she could.'

'She shows her taste in that,' said Graham. 'But she was forty. Not young. We can't make a romance about her.'

'No; not a romance. But a tragedy, perhaps,' said Jill. 'I have a feeling that she was dreadfully unhappy.'

'Most people are, my dear. Even the people over there, under their tin tubs, suffered, you may be sure.'

'I have a feeling that she suffered differently,' said Jill. 'It's because she suffered differently that she's here, quite by herself; with no family about her.'

'She was a stranger in the place, perhaps.'

'Perhaps. But someone who lives here must have

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 put the flowers. Marthe Ludérac. It's an unhappy name, I think.'

'I think it's rather a heroic name. Rather a cruel, strange name, too. It's gentle; and sword-like. Marthe Ludérac,' Graham repeated, while, in the calm sunlight, the chestnut branches rustled softly, over them and over the grave. 'A Marthe Ludérac might have been a provincial Royalist and fought against the Republican bands. She might have been drowned in the river down there—in a noyade; she might have been guillotined. It's a name to make history out of; there's a sound in it of disaster, and beauty.'

'But things like that couldn't have happened to this Marthe Ludérac,' the literal Jill objected. 'She died only six years ago.'

'Yes. She did. And she makes me uncomfortable. As you say, she was unhappy. Come; let's go away from her.'

They turned from the grave and retraced their steps, in silence, to the grille.

Now they took the road that led up among the chestnuts, for the grande route left the forest at the cemetery wall and swept in a noble curve round the promontory, far above the river. But in this narrow, stony track the trees grew closely overhead, and deep gullies, worn by the rains, ran on either side under crumbling banks of moss. Another turn showed them the forest, still climbing, while, on their left, the steep hillside dropped away, towards the river, in ledge after ledge of scantily growing vineyard. A dilapidated

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 thatched cottage stood among the vineyards and a rough mountain-path led down from it and disappeared over the edge of rock. On their right they saw a copse of dark sycamores and rising above them were the chimneys of the Manoir.

The sycamores must have been planted about it some fifty years before and had not liked their situation, for they all grew sadly and grudgingly, pressed closely together and spreading, on tall grey stems, a roof of disconsolate green that shut out the sky. The Manoir stood behind high plastered walls, and when they passed through the gate, that clanged a loud bell at their passage, they found themselves before the saddest house.

It was long and low and damp and sombre, with two rows of windows looking out at the sycamores and a tiled roof dark with moss and lichen. Green stains ran down over the ochre-coloured walls and in the flower plots before it were only pale, degenerate Michælmas-daisies. One might have thought it uninhabited but for the barking of a dog. He stumbled round a corner of the house, old and half blind, and retreated precipitately on seeing them standing there. But at an upper window a head that Graham recognized appeared. It was quickly withdrawn and a voice was heard calling shrilly: '' ' Joseph! Joseph! On sonne! Dépêchez-vous! ' ''

The voice descended, still calling, and running steps clattered and shuffled within as they stood before the door from which the paint had long since peeled and

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 blistered. '' ' Le thé! Le thé! ' '' called the voice in tones tragically imperative. '' ' Et n ' oubliez pas le lait! ' ''

Then, after an interval of silence, the door was slowly opened, and an old man, derelict, nondescript, morose, appeared in the doorway. He showed no sign of the excitement that reigned within and looked at them with an unmoved if unhostile gravity.

'' ' Madame la comtesse est chez elle? ' '' Jill inquired. After the sadness of the cemetery, she felt this scene restoring. It made her want to laugh and reminded her of 'Alice' and the frog gardener.

 ' Mais oui, mais oui, '  he answered, as one who knew, with her, that the fact was self-evident; and, standing back to let them enter, '' ' Entrez donc, Monsieur et dame. ' ''

He wore a tattered grey linen jacket, black-and-white checked trousers, black felt slippers, and, oddest touch, a frayed white tie very correctly placed. His face was sunken yet swollen, with folded lips and small bright eyes; his spare hair, combed carefully forward over his baldness, was still almost black, and he looked like an ancient though respectable rat emerging froma drain.

The hall they entered was high and empty. It was lighted by a glass door, through which one could see the apple-trees of a jardin potager, and by a tall window placed over the stairs. A faded, vast, pretentious battle-piece hung on a wall.

Joseph threw open a door and announced in impartial tones: '' ' Madame la comtesse descendra tout de suite. ' ''

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 The drawing-room in which Graham and Jill found themselves was unlike any room that they had ever seen before. It was so chill and pale and formal that it seemed as far from life as the cemetery had been; further, even, for the cemetery commemorated past life while this room seemed full only of the memory of a past where no life had ever been. Yet, long and spacious, the northern light shining in from four windows upon its polished floors, a frieze of pallid water-lilies running round its dim green walls, it had the charm of a perfect consistency. Two sofas, symmetrically placed, and a dozen stiff carved chairs were upholstered in grey satin sprigged with green and purple. On a round mahogany table, its one leg hideously carved, stood a stereopticon with its box of photographs, a casket of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and a large gilt cage where a grey parrot, a bit of apple in his claw, paused from the act of eating to look at them with sideways head. There were accurately placed bookcases of carved ebony holding books bound in black and red, and round the walls hung a series of faintly tinted landscapes painted in water-colour and framed in gilt.

Graham looked about him, intently, while Jill's eyes turned to the battered bergère and small attendant table that stood near the fireplace. A dog-eared novel, a paper-knife, and a pair of spectacles lay on the table and beside them was a bowl of common kitchen-ware with a spoon in it. This had contained, Jill felt sure, the old lady's luncheon, and so human, so helpless, was

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 the avowal of age and infirmity, poverty and loneliness, that the fireside group affected her as a voice speaking in the silence might have done; a voice speaking piteously.

From the bergère and the bowl she looked up at the marble mantelpiece. Above it a gilt mirror, reaching to the cornice, reflected all the light of the room, and on it stood a tall gilt clock, slowly ticking, two candelabra and two glass vases filled with sprays of fading autumn roses. As she saw them Jill's heart stood still.

She could not trace, for the moment of distress and mystery, the memory that so affected her. Then it came sharply. They were the same roses as those on Marthe Ludérac's grave, and arranged, surely, by the same hand. It must have been Madame de Lamouderie who had placed them there. She must have known Marthe Ludérac; and been fond of her; and sorry for her. And upon this background of mystery and pity and fidelity, as the door opened and the old lady entered, Jill first saw her.

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ADAME DE LAMOUDERIE wore her frayed and rusty black; but her hair had been hastily dressed under a black lace mantilla and instead of battered boots she wore high-heeled satin shoes. Her old lips were rouged, her old cheek smeared with white, and she advanced towards them, her ebony stick in her hand, with a very majestic manner.

Jill gazed at her; amazed; arrested. She was trying to see her as the friend of Marthe Ludérac and finding it difficult. It was Graham who guessed at the burning excitement that devoured her ancient heart and who interpreted the kindling of her eyes as they rested upon Jill. Her interest in art—he had seen it from the first—was as rudimentary as Jill's own; she had expected to see in his wife, perhaps, a raw, un-tempered young bohemian; and in Jill she recognized at once a denizen of the world; of the only world she cared about. She had not been able to place him; but Jill she placed at once, and her manner as she took her in, took in her mushroom-coloured silk, her hat and gloves and shoes, her air, burnished, finished, nonchalant, and kindly, became at once less majestic and more effusive; even a little too effusive. She greeted them; she begged them to be seated; and, smiling upon Jill, whom her great eyes continued to devour and to

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 appraise,' she said: 'I must apologize to you, Madame, for the hovel in which you find me. I am very poor—disastrously poor—and I have found what refuge I could.'

'But I don't call this a hovel,' said Jill, looking thoughtfully at her; she was still occupied with her sense of difficult reconstruction. 'I call it rather grand. We live in hotels, usually, and have no real home at all.'

'This is a hotel to me. This is not my home. I rent it, merely, from a landlady who is also in summer my housekeeper, and who has just gone away—to Bordeaux; otherwise you would find me in a better state for welcoming you.' The old lady's eyes, as she spoke, fell on the kitchen bowl and she promptly picked it up and placed it out of sight on the other side of her chair. 'I spend my winter quite alone here, but for my maitre d'hôtel and a peasant woman who comes in to care for me.'

'This isn't your own setting, then,' said Graham; and Madame de Lamouderie's eyes left Jill to dwell on him with overt delight. 'I thought it all went with you.'

 ' Mais non; mais non, '  said the old lady, correcting his ingenuous error almost tenderly. 'If you knew France better you would recognize in this the setting of the enriched petite bourgeoisie as it climbs towards the haute. My own home, in childhood, was one of the most princely châteaux of Normandy, and for many years, in Paris, my salon was celebrated for its splen-

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 dour and beauty. I am not even of this province; although, on my father's side, we are related, many centuries ago, to the de la Mothe Fénelons.'

'Now I'm very sorry for that,' Graham smiled at the old lady, and Jill, looking at them both, felt again a sense of pity; 'for I thought that you belonged to that mountain-path with the vineyards beneath you and the menacing sky above.—Do you remember that you found my landscape menacing?—Nothing in Normandy is menacing; and that's what goes with your type, I assure you. I'd have liked to paint you there; or, if not there, then in this room, with the parrot in his cage beside you and your black lace mantilla. But if you disown it all like this, it leaves me without my picture.'

Jill felt sorrier than ever for Madame de Lamouderie as her great eyes endeavoured, almost tragically, to follow the significance of words so unexpected to her.

'Dick is only joking,' she assured her. 'He'd like to paint you anywhere.' And Jill spoke with conviction, for even she could see that the old lady was like a Goya.

'It's quite true!' Graham laughed. 'Though I'm not a portrait painter.'

Madame de Lamouderie looked from one to the other. As deeply as she had been disconcerted by the cruel suggestion that she had herself destroyed a possibility so marvellous, so was she now deeply relieved. She looked at Jill with gratitude and she smiled at Graham her half-provocative and half-supplicating

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 smile:  ' Vous êtes charmants tous les deux, '  she assured them. 'But who could think of painting an ancient harridan like myself when he has before him a Hebe like the one I see. Madame, you are the true tête de keepsake type.'

Again Graham dropped his slow 'Ha-ha.' Graham's laugh was a singularly ungregarious affair. It did not take you into his confidence; it excluded you, rather, from all participation with the sources of his mirth. 'You don't know what you are talking about,' he told the poor old lady. 'The tête de keepsake has sloping shoulders and ringlets and a rosebud mouth. Why are French people always four or five generations behind the English period?—You still read Byron, I suppose, and imagine English life like the life in Dickens. Jill isn't interesting æsthetically; but she's not as bad as a tête de keepsake, '  said the dispassionate husband, while Madame de Lamouderie's attention remained riveted upon him; 'Reynolds might have painted her, or Romney. But she isn't interesting in design or colour; while you are.'

Madame de Lamouderie glanced almost timidly at Jill as this preference was announced; but Jill was laughing.

'It's quite true. Artists, real ones, like Dick, never care to paint me. Only one ever did, and that was on a horse, and he did it because of the horse, not because of me: I went well with it. Character is what they like, you know, and I haven't any character.'

'But then, do they prefer a mummy to a beautiful

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 young woman?' asked Madame de Lamouderie, and, still laughing, Jill said that perhaps they did. She herself was quite satisfied to have no character if it preserved her from looking like some of the ladies whom Dick's friends chose to paint.

Joseph at this point appeared with the tea-tray, very accurately disposed, with milk in its jug and a plate of petits beurres. The old lady's hands trembled as she poured out the tea and, observing the unexpected viands, the parrot, after watching her for a moment, burst forth with a short refrain, half croaked, half chanted:

 ' What a lamb!' cried Jill, leaning round in her chair to gaze delightedly at him.

'Ah, he is a very clever bird, very clever indeed; he has said that verse ever since I knew him, and it is only when he sees food,' said Madame de Lamouderie, pleased by this appreciation of her pet.  ' Oui, oui, mon Coco, tu suras du thé.—A little biscuit soaked in milk will enchant him.'

'Oh, may I give it to him?' said Jill. 'He's too attractive. And I do adore animals.'

'And so do I,' said the old lady, preparing the little sop for Coco, who continued to watch her closely, his head on one side. 'So do I. They are my only remaining joy. Here, Madame; give it to him. He will take it so prettily in his claw.' And as Madame de La

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 mouderie handed her the saucer, still with a trembling hand, Jill felt that though she might be rather dreadful—and she felt her rather dreadful—there was something loveable about her.

'But do you mean it? Do you really mean that you would like to paint my portrait?' said the old lady, while Jill fed Coco, scrap—by scrap, through the bars of his cage. 'In my youth—at a time when you would have found me uninteresting in colour and design, Monsieur—the greatest artists of Europe disputed the privilege of painting me; but those days are long, long passed.'

'I'll come back and paint you in the spring,' said Graham.

'Oh—the spring! I shall not last till then.'

'Yes; yes, you will; you will last till spring for my sake,' said Graham, casting his glance of gloomy mirth upon her; and Jill saw that the poor old creature was bewildered by her felicity.

'But why spring?' she urged. 'Why do you go, just when I have found you both? It is our most beautiful season here, this month of October.'

'We're going south, worse luck,' said Graham. 'I had pneumonia last spring and Jill insists that I must have a winter on the Riviera.'

'Ah! Ienvy you. It is a paradise.'

'Not tome. I know it too well. I used to stay there when I was a boy with my mother.'

'He means that he doesn't find it interesting in colour or design,' Jill explained. 'This is the country Dick loves to paint.'

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 'And is it in England you live?' asked the old lady. 'You are recently married? You have children?'

'Married for five years; and no children,' said Jill. Children would not have done at all in her and Dick's life. 'We live in England when we live anywhere. Dick has a studio in London and we have three rooms over it. If you call this a hovel, I don't know what you would call our studio. They put the milk on the stair outside our door in the morning.'

'But you were not born in a studio with three rooms over it,' said the old lady, smiling caressingly upon her.' You were born—shall I tell you?, for I see it plainly—in one of your great, beautiful English countryseats with park and deer and village of retainers such as we read of—not only in Sir Walter'—and Madame de Lamouderie flashed a glance at Graham—'but in later writers, too. You have hunted the fox; you have been presented at Court; you have danced at great balls with the noblesse of your land.'

Jill was again laughing. 'Well, I have danced at a few balls; but the war put an end to most of those for me; and I've been presented at Court; and I certainly have hunted the fox;—that was a clever guess;—there's nothing I love so much. But all the rest is wrong; as wrong as can be,' Jill assured her, her jocund eyes upon her. 'No park; no deer; no retainers at all. Only a very small, very humdrum country-house:—I loved it, of course; because it was my home;—but it was quite ordinary and humdrum all the same.'

'Was? Is it yours no longer?'

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 'No; my father's dead now and my brother couldn't keep it up and sold it,' said Jill in a matter-of-fact tone. 'I haven't hunted for three years. I do get a mount now and then—when I go back.'

'It was I who put an end to it all for her,' said Graham. 'She'd be living in the country now and hunting and dancing with the noblesse if it weren't for me. You have before you an English romance. The beautiful young English heroine who falls in love with the needy painter and follows him to the studio where the milk is put outside on the stair in the morning. It's quite true, you know,' and Graham glanced affectionately at Jill as he spoke. 'She made as bad a match as possible in marrying me.'

The old lady gazed upon them, perplexed and rapturous. 'It was a mariage d'amour. And you have remained in love for five years. Do you realize that it is a rare feat that you have accomplished?'

'We find it a most normal occupation,' smiled Graham. 'But to change the subject—which Jill finds rather embarrassing—tell us about this room where you say you don't belong, but where you make such a subject for a painter. What sort of people do belong, then? Who put it all together and who lived here?'

'People of no consequence at all,' said Madame de Lamouderie, looking about her with a rather grim expression. 'A family called, tout simplement, Jacquard. A few generations back they were nothing but local peasants and they rose to be traders in Bordeaux.'

'But great French marshals began as plebeians

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 sometimes; so I've been told on good authority,' Graham reminded her with his smile.

'Ah—so they may have started;—but they did not end as ''boutiquiers! ' '' the old lady took up his challenge with equal gaiety. She was living. She was taking in draughts of life deeper than any she had tasted for years. She hugged the happy moment to her breast.

'It doesn't look like the room of what we should call ''boutiquiers. ' ''

'Ah, our bourgeoisie gains taste in time;—if you call this taste.—Do you admire those water-lilies?—those bookcases?—and—bon Dieu!—those horrible books that were never read and never meant to be read by anybody?—And the Jacquards did not remain Jacquard undiluted. They married well; too well. It was their ambition that undid them. Impecunious daughters of the haute bourgeoisie—of the petite noblesse, even, on one occasion—stooped to the alliance, and few families can bear the burden of a succession of dowerless wives. You would not admire this room, Monsieur'—and again a certain vindictiveness came into the old lady's voice—'if you had to spend your winters in it alone.'

'I think it's rather horrible, too,' said Jill. 'It looks like a room that's never breathed. How do you keep warm? It's a northern aspect, isn't it?'

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 lide. Branches are cut from the trees for my fire here, and sometimes I crouch over an oil stove, and sometimes, even, take refuge with Joseph in the kitchen. Oh, it is a miserable existence in the winter! But there are the animals. My landlady is fond of animals, and they are companions for me. A dog; a cat; a hare; all originally unfortunates; wounded, trapped, pursued; she finds them by an unerring instinct; even Coco was dying of a skin disease in a dirty shop in Bordeaux. We have cured him of that, and you see how intelligent he is. And I have books.—Not those.—She sends me books from Bordeaux. I devour them; romances, biographies, travels. So the time passes and in the spring she returns. Then it is not so bad. I have somebody to talk to.'

'And don't your southern windows look over the garden?' said Jill, always interested in aspects and utilities. 'May we see your garden before we go? The door at the end of the hall leads out, doesn't it?'

'Ah, it is nothing, the garden—nothing; but it has the southern aspect, that is true; and our bedrooms look over it; we preferred that to the larger, colder rooms on this side of the house. They are kept closed. They are haunted, I always feel. I never enter them. But you will not go so soon?'

'It's getting rather late. I'm afraid we must. You will see us again in the spring.' Jill was very sorry for the old lady and something in Graham's detached and smiling demeanour seemed to her a little inhuman. But Dick often struck her as rather inhuman. She

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 determined that he should not be allowed to forget his promise about the portrait.

Madame de Lamouderie rose from her chair and took her stick. But she did not really need a stick, Jill observed. Though so old she was surprisingly upright and she moved forward on her high heels with a beautiful ease and majesty.

Graham looked about them as they went; he was more interested in the Manoir than in his old friend. 'That window up there is oddly placed,' he said, at the foot of the stair. 'It reminds me of a window in a Méryon.'

'It is a very difficult window to clean,' said the old lady. 'Almost impossible, as you will recognize. Joseph has to mount a ladder from the landing.' She opened the glass door and the sunny stretch of the garden was before them, a straight path, running between gnarled fruit-trees, from where they stood, to a bench placed against the wall at its farthest end. It was melancholy, meditative; yet not unhappy; it was too well tended for that, as Jill's practised eye recognized at once. The ancient trees were pruned; the borders dug; the autumn flowers that grew on either hand looked like the flowers of fifty years ago, but their soil was carefully weeded. Over the high walls was the chestnut forest. 'I should spend all my time in this garden if I lived here!' Jill exclaimed.

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 mystery that dear, familiar Dick at times roused in her. It was, she thought, as if he were a changeling and heard the distant carolling of a strange ancestry:—the fairy-tale, again. But everything to-day was fairy-tale, and she did not know now whether she could so confidently have told Dick that it was a happy one. There was something very strange in the still, sunny garden; in the still, black form of the old lady, there beside her; in Dick standing a little apart and gazing up the garden path as if he expected to see someone walking down it towards him.

'And here is another pet, you see,' said Madame de Lamouderie, pointing with her stick at a commodious hutch that stood in the sun against the house. 'Our hare; he has lost a leg; but he is quite tame, like Coco, and comes to one's call.—Yes; it is not bad, the garden; not bad. But it is too much for one woman and an old man like Joseph.'

'Does she work in the garden? Is she young, your landlady?' asked Jill, looking down at the old hare, who, stretched at full length against the sunny wall, was dozing, head back, with an air of heraldic dignity. 'I like her for taking care of so many unhappy creatures. I imagined her an old lady.'

'Like me?' Madame de Lamouderie leaned on her stick and shook her head, smiling. 'No, we are not all old here. Marthe is till young.'

'Marthe? Is her name Marthe?'

'Yes; her mother was a Jacquard,' said Madame de Lamouderie; 'but her name is Marthe Ludérac.'

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T must have been her mother, then,' said Jill.

They had walked for some time in silence. They had passed the cemetery and were on the descent of the grande route among the lower ledges of the chestnut forest, and her mind had all the while been full of Marthe Ludérac.

'Whose mother?' asked Graham.

'The landlady's mother. Her name is the same. Didn't you hear?'

'The same as whose? No; I didn't.'

'As the grave's. Of course. That is it. The roses were the same and she's only been gone a few days.'

'My dear, what are you talking about?' Graham inquired, roused from his reverie and with a mild exasperation.

'I can't help feeling it all very queer. Didn't you notice—you seemed to notice everything, Dick;—I never saw you stare so;—on the mantelpiece in that dismal room?—They were the same roses, arranged in just the same way, as those on Marthe Ludérac's grave. I saw them at once and thought she must have been a friend of Madame de Lamouderie's and that Madame de Lamouderie must be rather a dear to keep flowers on her grave like that. And just now, when I realized that her landlady was young and asked her

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 name,' she said: Marthe Ludérac. You must own it's queer.'

Dick listened, but rather vaguely. 'I can see nothing queer about it. Why shouldn't the daughter put roses on her mother's grave—and on the mantelpiece as well? It's the natural thing to do if you have a dead mother—and roses;—and a mantelpiece. What of it, Jill?'

'I don't know. I only feel it a little creepy. The grave all alone like that; and the dismal house, and the one-eyed, one-legged animals, and that poor old woman with her princely châteaux and porridge-bowl.'

At this Graham began to laugh and looked at his wife as he had not looked at her since they had entered the Manoir. It was as if her preoccupation exorcised his own. He linked his arm in hers. 'Go on, Jill. Tell me some more. I like to see your imagination having a run; it runs so seldom—sane creature that you are.—Now I've not been seeing people at all. I've been seeing that tranced room—the colour of sea-water; those stairs with the high, uncanny window over them; that garden that remembers—and waits;—in its sleep; for it went to sleep fifty years ago.'

'Oh, Dick;—you are a treasure!—to see it all like that—and make me see it, too. Yes, of course; I was feeling it down at the bottom of my mind; only it was all, with me, a background for the people; for Marthe Ludérac and the old lady. You're quite right. It's a coup de foudre. She's dreadfully in love with you, and

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 I was afraid she was going to cry as she clung to your hand like that just now when we left her. She's afraid she won't see you again, of course; but she shall; she shall,' said Jill, fumbling for her cigarettes, since Dick had her by the arm, and getting out her matches.

'You wouldn't mind coming back? I don't know, really, about the old lady; it needs a Goya and a Manet rolled in one to do her with the parrot beside her; but I could go on painting this country for the rest of my life.'

'Well, I shouldn't like to spend the rest of my life here, I confess,' said Jill. 'But I do want you to come back and keep your promise. I want to see Marthe Ludérac, too. And she'll be here in the spring. She's young and sad and kind; rather a wonderful person, I feel. And Madame de Lamouderie feels a little glum about her. I wonder why. Perhaps because of the noblesse blood that she doesn't think a Jacquard has aright to. Perhaps it was because of the noblesse blood that the mother didn't care to be mixed up with the gravel and the tin tubs and moved into the grass—and almost into the chestnut forest.'

'Perhaps it was. Pretty good, Jill. But the old lady interested me more than the young one, and she doesn't interest me much except for her looks.'

'Oh, you must be kind to her! You mustn't flirt with her and lead her on and then not really care.'

'She knows I'm ragging her.'

'She's afraid you are, but hopes you're not. There's something one does like in her, Dick, in spite of the

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 boasting and flattery; something endearing. The way she smiled at Coco and looked at the hare.'

'I don't dislike her. I feel as if I understood her; better than you could ever do, Jill—for I am somewhat devilish too, while you belong to the angelic category—better than she does herself. If she were twenty I'd probably fall in love with her. She's that kind of woman. She's never existed apart from her sex.'

'Do any of us?' Jill mused, ruefully. 'Perhaps you wouldn't care about me if I were eighty.'

'Yes, I should, Jill. Yes, I should,' Graham bent his dark head to smile into her eyes. 'That you're a woman lends you charm; but it's incidental. If you were a man you would be my greatest friend. That's the test.'

'Your greatest friend? When I don't understand the things you live for?—when there's only one side of your life that I touch at all?'

'It's the only side where I need to touch humanity. All I need is someone to rest with and play with and be myself with. You're the perfect comrade; as well as the perfect wife, Jill.'

It was sweet to Jill to hear this, and to know how true it was. She had reflected more than once of late that, if happy married life consisted in each one going his own way, the trouble with her and Dick was that, while he had so very much of a way, she herself had, nowadays, none at all. Her only way was the English country way that Dick, as he had truly said, had taken

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 her from; gardening; games; and hunting. She thought of hunting now, as she and Dick went down through the chestnut forest and came out upon the river level in the waning evening light. Hounds—darling hounds—and dear horses, and familiar faces that represented not so much individuals as types who did the same things as oneself; and had done so for generations. All the woodland lore; all the crafty knowledge of gate and wall and ditch; all the unvoiced awareness of beauty everywhere, in earth and sky. It was the only real life, of course, from her point of view, in its cool, cheerful comradeship, its risks and endurances; its ecstasies of flight over wide spaces. The artist's life always seemed to her like a queer make-believe in comparison; like a child's game without basis or consistency. Not that Dick was like the others;—those weedy, tiresome young men talking, talking—heavens! how they talked!—of planes and stresses in the London studios. Dick cared for them all as little, really, as she did. He was not gregarious. Under the paints and canvases he was the same sort of person that she was; silent, indifferent; out-of-doors. But it was funny to spend your life butting your head against a wall, as it were; for to try to capture, to express nature, came to no more than that; did it?—Jill sometimes tried to think it out. Was not nature something transcendent which one entered and partook of? Was not art like trying to dip up the sea in a tea-cup? A branch of bramble, whitened by hoar frost and glanced at as one waited in the woods on a morning of cub

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 hunting, seemed to have more in it than all their pictures put together. Once or twice, it was true, in looking at a great picture, Jill had felt herself brushed for a moment by a sense of mystery; by the sense that here indeed something had happened, something been shown to her that, face to face with nature, by herself, she would never have seen. Dick's pictures, strange, queer, even ugly as she found them, had given her that feeling once or twice; especially this last picture he had just finished of the great river and the plains and cliffs seen from the mountain-pass. But the picture could never give all that went with the visual experience. It did not give the feeling of the wind upon one's cheek, or the scent of bracken in the air, or the sound of birds and insects, of brooks and branches stirring; it was less; not more; so why try? why butt one's head? So Jill came back to it again. And it was amusing to know that where they all felt Dick great and waited expectantly for him to tell them something of his secret, to her his meaning and his worth consisted in being like the branch of bramble.

It was not till after dinner when, for their last evening, they had gone outside to the balcony, that Jill's thoughts again turned to the Manoir and its occupants.

'Isn't it odious to think of that poor old woman all alone up there, Dick?' she said, looking over the mysterious spaces of the river to the darkling cliff.

Dick's eyes rested on her. He was not thinking of the old lady. He would never think of her unless she

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 were before him for him to look at. 'It's nice of you to be so sorry for her,' was what he said.

'If she weren't so horribly alive, one wouldn't mind so much.—Aren't you sorry for her?'

'I don't suppose I am. I feel it's a law of nature that an old woman like that should perish rather miserably.'

'But it makes me sorry to think that a vulture should perish miserably.'

'A vulture, perhaps; but not an old woman who's like one. She's never created beauty, or sought truth, or known love; so how can she expect to have anything?'

'You are rather horrible, you know, Dick. Your heart is so hard. Why should you think she's meant nothing more than that? Anyone so alive must have.'

'I don't know that. A vulture is very much alive. Her vitality may all have gone to greed and passion and vanity.'

'She's wanted to be loved, of course; who doesn't? And she's wanted to be happy. She's been dreadfully unhappy; one can see it; and disappointed; and ravaged generally. And now she's like a motor-car shut up in a garage with its engine going and its headlights on, and it makes me uncomfortable to think of her—however wrong she's been.'

Dick was still looking at her. He had said to Madame de Lamouderie that afternoon that she was not æsthetically interesting and Jill had not minded in the least, for she knew how much Dick liked looking at her.

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 She was something quite apart from art, for him; just as he was for her. She was his branch of bramble. And now, after a moment, he put his hand behind her head and bent it back and kissed her neck and cheek. 'I like you very much,' he said.

And Jill, leaning against his shoulder, yielded to his caresses, smiled, thinking that it was a happy thing, after five years of marriage, that one's husband should still be one's lover. That was what made it all worth while.

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T was in early April that Jill and Richard Graham came back to Buissac. Jill drove the car along the winding valley road, its bordering poplars sharp and silvery against an apple-green sky. Behind them the sunset was apricot-coloured; and the cliffs were a cold mauve. Jill liked to drive and Graham liked to be driven; he said that he could not see anything at the steering-wheel. He sat, now, his scarf up around his ears, for the hood was down, gazing; silent. For hours, while they drove, he would sit like that, saying not a word, and Jill, as if she heard, through closed doors, a great orchestra playing, was vaguely aware of the splendid rhythms and harmonies that wreathed and unwreathed themselves in his mind. There was something sad in listening to an orchestra behind closed doors; yet something rather uplifting too. Even if one were left out, one was uplifted. She had not known the mingled state now for a long time.

Dick had disliked the Riviera as much as ever and had done no work there at all. In the intervals of tennis and dancing—and no one she had ever met, Jill considered, danced so divinely as Dick—he had sat in solitary, sunny corners above the sea and read metaphysics. Jill asked him to read aloud to her, when she found him thus, and stared at him with incredulous

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 eyes after a page of 'Appearance and Reality.'—'Help! Help!' she cried. 'How perfectly devastating! How do you stand it? What's it all about?'

'You have to start young, Jill, to see that,' said Dick. He had laid his book face downward on his knee to look at her, and put his arm around her shoulders. He didn't care about her sharing philosophy a bit more than he did about her sharing art. All he wanted of her was her presence.

'What good does it do you?' asked Jill.

And, laughing, rising, stretching himself, Dick had answered, 'God knows! I only hope I may, too, if I go on looking.'

Dick was looking for something; that was what it came to. It was because of some inner quest that he had that remote, preoccupied, brooding gaze. How strange it was! Why couldn't people be satisfied with what was here and now?

She had not had to remind him of his promise to Madame de Lamouderie. After his long inaction his thoughts turned spontaneously to the Dordogne country where inspiration needed no seeking. Never, as he had told her, had he seen a country so tuned to his nature, so apt for his expression; and they were coming back to the Ecu d'Or because, of all the provincial inns they had stayed at, none had compared with it for economy and excellence.

The Ecu d'Or did not depend upon the precarious and seasonal supply of tourists—rare at the best in this district. The restaurant that opened, beneath the

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 balcony, upon the road, was filled every day by local clients, and as Jill and Graham drove up in the sharp, spring evening air, it was uproarious with melody and laughter. Some recent fair or festival must so have crowded it and at the central table a sprawling youth, his soft black hat tipped over his ear, his arm uplifted, entertained his friends with a song, its nasal terminal e ' s prodigiously prolonged:

came the refrain.

Graham laughed as they heard it. 'Irreverent dog! He makes light of national divinities like the nuit d'amour! It's good, you know;—the roguery of his phrasing.'

Jill's lip curled a little. 'One does get fed up with them sometimes,' she remarked. And she suddenly realized that she was feeling fed up. It was a new, yet an old adventure beginning again, and for once it found her jaded and unresponsive. She did not want to laugh.

Monsieur Michon, pink of face and black of eye, was hurrying forward to greet them, and Graham handed out the lighter luggage to Amélie, her gaunt face glazed, as usual, with fatigue and perspiration. As usual, Dick refused to allow her to charge herself like a beast of burden with the heavier valises and they made their way upstairs while Madame Michon, emerging from the kitchen to smile and bow, called up to Amélie

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 that Monsieur et Madame were to have the rooms they had so much appreciated last year.  ' C ' est bon de vous revoir, Madame, '  she said to Jill.  ' Vous aimez donc notre petit Buissac?' and Jill had to say she did, though feeling that she so little loved to-night the noisy restaurant, Monsieur Michon's affability, or Madame Michon's mole with the crisp black hairs gushing out of it.

While Dick went to put away the car and while Amélie descended to fetch hot water, Jill leaned on her window-sill and looked out over the river. It was strange how she was thinking of England this evening, thinking of its quiet, its decorum, its dullness; and with yearning. How far away it seemed! How unattainable, almost! And what was she to do with herself now? Try to read and understand 'Appearance and Reality,' perhaps.

Graham had remarked, more than once, that the reason the food was so good at the Ecu d'Or was because they had not attempted baths or hot-water pipes, and Amélie soon appeared with the two steaming brocs.

Jill turned to smile at her. She had elicited from Amélie on her last stay that her wages were piteously small and had told her that she could easily find her a good place with friends in Paris; but Amélie was not able to leave une vieille Maman. Jill now asked after this impeding relative and heard, with regret, that she was in thriving health.

'How would you like, Jill,' Dick asked from the ad-

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 joining room, when he had come up and was splashing happily, 'to take a house here?—if you're fed up with this place.' Dick was often unaware of one's moods, but he never forgot an expressed feeling.

'Oh—it's not the Ecu d'Or I mind,' said Jill, getting out her little black crêpe-de-Chine dress. It was a delightful garment and had served her well for a year. One turn and it was over your head, and one tie and it was adjusted. She slipped on her pearls, for Dick liked to see her in them. 'It's France itself, sometimes, you know. We are such strangers here; and if we lived here for a hundred years we'd be strangers just the same. I suppose the place is still full of starving cats.'

'Let us hope that most of them have died during the winter,' said Dick cheerfully. 'People are much nearer the bare bones of existence here than with us. They're starved themselves, as I think I've said before.'

'Monsieur Michon isn't starved; or Madame either. It's a country of fat men and thin animals,' said Jill bitterly.

'The Michons aren't peuple. You don't see many fat peasants. I like it, you know. I like the bare bones; the sense of having got away from smugness and civilization. A place like this is still essentially mediæval.'

'Yes; and I suppose they left their dust lying in heaps along the road in the Middle Ages, too.'

'Worse than their dust.'

'Well, nothing could be worse than that headless corpse of a dog we found on the river-path. It had

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 lain there for months and no one had troubled to take a spade and bury it.'

'They have no sense of public responsibility. They're individualists to a man. Even when they seem to have acquired it—in the big towns—it's only because an energetic mayor, with his eye on the Chambre des Députés, dragoons them into efficiency. I like it, as I say, if it doesn't leave too many dead dogs about.'

Monsieur Michon, in the stuffy little dining-room that smelt of beeswax and sour wine, was waiting to serve them himself and, as usual, the dinner was excellent. Monsieur Michon hovered near while they ate, eager to impart the history of each dish he found appreciated. The fish came from the river—and came that very afternoon; it was a fine fish, n'est-ce-pas;—and could he give Madame a little more of the sauce piquante? The chicken had been fattened in their own basse-cour and he brought the crisp salad and dressed it on the table before them so that they should observe his dexterous minglings and turnings.

'Do you know whether Madame de Lamouderie is well?' Jill asked, realizing that Monsieur Michon might find her silence unsympathetic, and feeling better, after the chicken.

'Ah, la vieille dame. I have not seen her all winter,' said Monsieur Michon, standing beside them ready for conversation over the pastry and wine. 'She is there, I know; but she never comes down into the village. Only Monsieur Trumier—the old servant. Madame

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 Blondel, at the mercerie, is Monsieur Trumier's niece, and he often comes to see her and her children. But the old lady, no. It has been a cold winter. She will have found it long. But now that Mademoiselle Ludérac has returned it will go better with her.'

As she heard the name it seemed to Jill that she remembered something long forgotten; that she reëntered the sense of expectancy, of fairy-tale; sad or happy. She saw the solitary grave under the chestnut branches; the bare, sad room at the Manoir and the fading autumn roses.

'Does Mademoiselle Ludérac come down often?' she asked.

'She comes sometimes; yes; she comes. She is a very eccentric young lady,' said Monsieur Michon dispassionately.

'In what way eccentric?' It was Jill who questioned. Graham had ordered a glass of the cognac that he remembered as so excellent and was turning the stem of his glass slowly while he watched the light shine in it.

'She cares nothing—nothing at all for human beings, but has a mania for animals,' smiled Monsieur Michon. 'Did Madame not see many old useless animals up at the Manoir?—She finds them; she collects them—Dieu sait comment. They seem to know by instinct when she goes by. I have seen her pass with a mangy dog in her arms, a dirty old dog, full of vermin, which crawled out from a heap of refuse down by the river when she looked over the wall one day. He had

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 been thrown down there to die, no doubt; and better to have left him.—But no. She carried him up to the Manoir and tended him and fed him, we may suppose, and Monsieur Trumier shot him to make a good end of the story. She does not carry her mania so far as to keep them all alive. When they are too old and ill, they are shot; dogs, cats, goats, what you will;—we heard of a sheep one day.—It is a strange occupation for a young lady.'

'I don't think it strange at all,' said Jill, but she was too much absorbed by what Monsieur Michon had told to speak indignantly; her eyes dwelt on him. 'I think it only too natural;—for there are a great many unhappy animals in Buissac.'

'Ah, Madame, there are unhappy people, and animals, everywhere,' said Monsieur Michon with a touch of dryness. 'For my part I think it more natural to devote oneself to one's own kind. The beasts do not feel as we do. And they are there for our use and convenience.'

Jill was now aware of indignation. 'They are only there like that because we are stronger than they are. They have just as much right to live as we have;—more right than a lot of us!' she exclaimed, while Graham, peeling an orange for her, listened with a smile.

'Well, Madame would then agree with Mademoiselle Ludérac,' said Monsieur Michon; and, a further memory coming, he laughed a little.—'She is a very eccentric young lady. She struck Monsieur le curé one day!'

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 'Struck him?' It was Graham who questioned, his face lighted by amusement. 'What for?'

'It was during a dispute over an animal—bien entendu. Monsieur le curé is irascible—and Mademoiselle Ludérac is not a favourite of his.—She is not pratiquante; though once a year she goes to High Mass with the old lady. It was his cat she had found; his own cat; very thin: soon to be a mother; and it had followed her crying. When Monsieur le curé met her, carrying it up to the Manoir, he was very angry. They came to bitter words. He tried, I believe, to take the cat from her. She resisted. Finally it was blows. All the village saw, though I, unfortunately, was absent on that day. The cat escaped in the scuffle and was never seen again; but Monsieur le curé always affirms that she managed to find it and to conceal—or kill it—up at the Manoir. He said that he had never possessed such a mouser. Madame Céleste, his housekeeper, depended on it. A cat does not catch mice well, Madame, if it is fed.' Monsieur Michon felt that Jill's sympathies were not with the curé.

'I hate their killing mice!' Jill exclaimed. 'I'm so glad it escaped. I'm glad she struck the curé, too.' And, laughing again, with a bow for a charming lady's extravagance, Monsieur Michon returned to his clients in the café below.

'How perfectly glorious!' Jill exclaimed. Her mood of apathy was gone—'It puts a new heart into one to hear anything like that. The starving cats of Buissac have a patron saint.'

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 'A warrior saint. Yes. She sounds a terrifying young person,' said Graham, still laughing and handing Jill her cleverly separated orange. 'Though I'm glad, too, that she struck the curé. I remember him. A fat old scoundrel; bloated with sacramental wine and wafers. But I'm afraid your heroine is a little détraquée, Jill. Monsieur Michon evidently thinks so.'

'Monsieur Michon would think Joan of Arc détraquée. I can't bear Monsieur Michon.'

'He's the same type as the curé, isn't he;—only gone into another business; dans la libre pensée, as he would put it. I hope the curé had an umbrella while he fought,' said Graham, still amused by the thought of the combat. 'That would complete the picture. One of those distended black cotton umbrellas they carry. And he'd stick it under his arm while he wrestled for his cat.'

'Poor, poor little creature! Soon to be a mother!' said Jill, thinking of their cherished family cat at home and her tenderly supervised accouchements. 'Yes. I can see the umbrella;—and I can see the cat, with its round, horrified eyes.'

'My dear Jill, life isn't long enough—we're not strong enough—to begin to think of all the cats.'

'Never mind. I'll think about Mademoiselle Ludérac's cats. And I shall go up and see her to-morrow,' said Jill.

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HEN the next afternoon came it brought a chill spring rain, and as Jill in her raincoat started for the Manoir, Graham joined her. It was too wet for painting.

At the kitchen door Jill paused to ask Madame Michon if the road to the Manoir past the cemetery were the only way. 'I seem to remember a little path running down from the vineyards.'

'Madame has a good memory,' said Madame Michon, drying her arms as she came forward from dish-washing. Even when engaged in the most menial tasks, Madame Michon maintained an air of panoply and conquest. Her hair was richly undulated and her bosom solidly sustained by stays that gave every advantage to the opulent curves of her figure. 'There is another way; but it is a rough climb. Do you see, at the end of the village, where the road turns up the mountain?'—Madame Michon led them to the door and pointed:—'there is a causeway built out to what we call the island. What you can see from here, with the groves of poplars, is indeed an island, for the water goes all round it; but when you come to it you will find a long stretch of meadow between it and the mainland. The people graze their cattle there, and grow their hay; it is the finest meadow in

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 the commune. You descend to it and follow it, round the promontory, and you will find a bridge crossing the stream that flows at the foot of the cliff. From there you climb to the grande route, and from the road straight up to the vineyards. You cannot miss the path. It runs straight up from the meadow to the Manoir.'

'And who uses it? The Manoir people?' Jill asked.

'No; Monsieur Trumier brings down their grapes, at the vintage, by the road—and they have no cattle. It is used only by some poor folk who live in the cottage below the Manoir and graze their sheep and goats on the island. Indeed it is fit only for goats and Madame would do better to keep to the road.'

'No; because the road leads past the cemetery, and I don't like cemeteries,' said Jill.

'Ah, Madame is sensitive,' Madame Michon smiled. 'And it is true that cemeteries have lugubrious associations. But ours is well arranged;—on peut même dire coquet, '  said Madame Michon. 'Madame has not yet visited it?'

'Yes. I've visited it. It's certainly very neat,' said Jill.—'' ' Coquet! ' '' she repeated, as they set out.

Graham smiled sardonically, but made no comment on Madame Michon's laudatory term.

The peninsula that ran out from the foot of the mountain had been built, they found, when they reached the end of the village, into a breakwater, half natural and half artificial. It was broad enough to allow of the passage of a hay-cart and sloped down to the rich alluvial meadow that must once have been

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 the river bed. Two arms of the river enclosed the meadow, dividing it on one side from the cliff and on the other from the island proper, whose rocky outer shores, continuing the breakwater, followed the great sweep of the river round the promontory. Jill paused on the causeway to look at the sluices which regulated the currents.

'You see it can all be irrigated in dry weather,' she said, her country eye gratified by the promise of admirable crops. 'And this dyke is so high that I don't think any flood could ever go over it. What splendid hay they must have! How cleverly it's all contrived!'

'As well contrived as the cemetery, isn't it,' said Graham, looking up at the beetling cliff.

'Just as well. But it does them more credit.'

'I don't like contrivances. They show a bee-like brain.'

'Not a bit of it. They show new ideas. Bees do the same thing over and over. The people of Buissac can make this and the cemetery, too. There are our cows, over on the island.'

'Let's go to the island. I like the island, but I don't like the meadow,' said Graham. 'The cliff looks like a tidal wave above it.'

'We haven't time for the island to-day. We must find the bridge. I don't see it.'

'It's on the other side of the promontory, Madame Michon said.—No, it's not pleasant being down here,' Graham remarked, as they descended and went forward on the meadow. 'I feel that the tidal wave will

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 curl over at the tip and come surging down upon us. It's a horrible thing, really, a great height above you.'

'Nonsense, Dick.—There's nothing horrible about it.—Look at the cows under the poplars if you don't want to look at the cliff.'

But Graham said: 'One can't look at cows when the cliff is there.'

They rounded the promontory and found the bridge, a mere plank and handrail, laid across the inner stream. Then, when they had crossed the bridge, it was bare cliff-side they climbed, and then, as Madame Michon had told them, they crossed the grande route, breasted the steeper ascent, and soon found themselves among the vineyards. 'And here we are on the tip of your tidal wave,' said Jill, when, at the top, they paused to look around them. From here the island was lost to view. It was only grey sky, grey river, that they saw, and the rain-dimmed hillsides opposite.

'Yes. The very tip.—And what a dismal day!' said Graham. 'A sort of end of all things.'

'A beginning of all things;—it's full of the spring. Don't you smell and feel it? The vines are budding, and we might hear a chiff-chaff at any moment. I love this sort of day; it's so soft and kind. What an old pessimist you are, Dick.'

Graham put his arm through hers. 'That's why I married you.—Come on.—What I feel now is that we'll find the old lady lying dead in the Manoir.'

'No; she's kept alive, to see you again, as you told her she would do,' said Jill.

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 They approached the Manoir through the vineyards and in a few moments saw the high roof and green-stained walls through the sycamore branches.

'It's happier now the leaves aren't out to hide it,' said Jill.

'All the same, it's an uncanny place,' said Graham. 'Was ever anything so still? Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came.—You're like Childe Roland, Jill.'

'Well, I'll blow my horn, then,' said Jill. Graham had read 'Childe Roland' to her and she had liked it. She put her hand to the door in the wall and pushed it open; but the bell did not clang above their heads. It still hung there, they saw; but the chain was broken, so it was in silence that they approached up the mossy path.

'What a pity we're too late for the snow-drops,' Jill whispered. They've been everywhere.'

As they stood at the door debating whether to knock or ring, a young woman came in the rain round the corner of the house. She wore a black mackintosh and one hand held a black knitted shawl under her chin; the other carried an earthenware dish. She had a pale face and dark eyes and she stopped short on seeing them and stood looking at them for a moment, as an animal stops to look when confronted by an unexpected object. There was something in her gaze that made Jill think of an animal; it was so grave and so unconscious; and after the pause of contemplation she turned and disappeared as she had come.

'Can it be Mademoiselle Ludérac?' Jill whispered.

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 Graham did not reply at once. He was looking at the place where the young woman had been. 'I don't think so,' he then said. 'It looked like a peasant woman.' He had a curiously perplexed expression and it was curious to hear him say 'it' as if speaking of an animal; an unknown, beautiful animal that had crossed their path.

'I think we'd better knock,' said Jill, after they had stood in silence for another moment.

'What about going back?' said Dick, looking at her, still with the curious look; though he smiled.

'Going back?'

'Yes. What if Childe Roland didn't blow the horn?'

'But Dick!' Jill tried to laugh, not quite succeeding, 'are you frightened?'

'Perhaps I am. Or perhaps I'm superstitious.'

'Do you think it was a ghost?' smiled Jill, and her own lips felt a little queer.

'Well, it may have been, you know.' Graham had Highland blood and it had played him, Jill knew, a trick or two before this. She would not tolerate the mood. 'Well, we'll face it, then,' she said, and she lifted her hand with determination to the knocker.

But before she had sounded it, the door swung open. It seemed, as if her words had been a spell, to have opened of itself and even Jill's calm English blood gave an unpleasant turn. Then she saw that behind the door was Joseph.

 ' Entrez, Monsieur et Dame,' he said.

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 you know?' said Jill. In spite of Joseph her blood was not quite comfortable; he was not reassuring, somehow; older, more derelict, more disintegrated than ever. But she now saw that he wore a peasant's blouse and had on sabots clogged with mud.

'Mademoiselle saw Monsieur et Madame and told me to open,' said Joseph in his flat, impartial tones.

The explanation, when given, was self-evident. Jill and Graham stripped off their wet coats and Joseph ushered then into the salon.

There, beside a wood fire that burned brightly, sat the old lady in her bergère; fast asleep. Joseph did not announce them to his unconscious mistress. He glanced at her cursorily, and muttering, 'Mademoiselle rentrera tout-à-l ' heure, '  closed the door and left them.

'Poor old thing; how she'll hate being caught like this,' Jill whispered. 'Shall we sit down and wait?'

 ' Tout-à-l ' heure is non-committal. It's not nearly tea-time yet,' said Graham. He glanced around him as he spoke; uneasily. 'I'll wake her, I think. It would startle her to wake and find us sitting here looking at her.—She'd feel as if we were ghosts.'

And still he paused and still he looked around him. 'Is that a harp? It wasn't here last autumn.'

The tall object, standing in its green baize case at the further end of the room, was certainly a harp. 'Who plays it, I wonder?' said Jill. 'No; it wasn't here. Can it be Mademoiselle Ludérac's?'

'I don't like it; whoever plays it,' said Graham.

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 'And there's still time to go back, Jill. We could ask Joseph not to tell the old lady, and she'd never be the wiser.'

'But Dick—leave Buissac!—How too nonsensical you are! And it's not only her; we've come to see Mademoiselle Ludérac as well.'

 ' I haven't come to see her,' said Graham. 'But since you'll have it so—' He went forward and laid his hand gently on Madame de Lamouderie's shoulder.

She raised her head, opened her eyes and looked up at him; fixedly; quietly. She wore no paint; nor any lace on her white hair. She was beautiful, Jill thought, watching her awaken under Graham's touch. There was something innocent, even lovely, in her look. '' ' Que me voulez-vous? ' '' she said in a tranced voice.

'A cup of tea,' smiled Graham. 'And a promise that I shall paint you as the Sleeping Beauty.'

The old lady still sat leaning back in her chair, motionless; gazing at him. 'Everything you wish—everything you wish,' she murmured. 'How have you found me? I have waited long for you.'

'Clever princes always find their princesses,' said Graham; but he was troubled and cast a questioning glance on Jill, standing behind him.

She came forward to his rescue. 'It's spring, and we've come back, as we said we should,' she told the old lady, whose eyes, still tranquil from their dream, turned on her. 'Don't you remember Richard and Gillian Graham?'

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 The old lady looked at her with a sort of astonishment. Then she struggled suddenly to her feet. 'Dieu—Dieu—Dieu!' she uttered.  ' Non! It is not possible!' She seized Jill's outstretched hands. '' ' Que vous êtes bons! Que vous êtes charmanis! Je ne sais pas où je suis—tellement vous me rendez heureuse! ' '' She did not know where she was. It was evident. She held them by their hands and looked from one to the other with ecstatic eyes. '' ' Que vous êtes bons! ' '' she repeated. 'You have come back! and I did not think that I should ever see you again.—It seems to me that decades have passed since you were last here;—as if you came to me from far, far away; from my youth.—''Mais asseyez-vous donc; asseyez-vous;—que je vous regarde bien. ' ''

They could see, when they had taken the chairs, one on either side of her, which her trembling hand indicated, that the poor old lady had not worn well. She looked very much older than they remembered her as looking and had something of the dreadful aspect of a waxen image galvanized suddenly to precarious life. But as they talked to her, and told her that they were to stay in Buissac for weeks—perhaps for months, the banked fires crept forth again; the smiles came, arch, provocative; the light of hope, of zest, of avidity, flickered in her great black eyes. They could note, too, that though taken unaware and somewhat dishevelled by her siesta, she was yet much neater and fresher than in the autumn. Her hair was carefully dressed in large puffs on the top of her head; the black lace fichu at her

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 neck was gracefully knotted and a very clean handkerchief lay on the small table, with a bowl of violets beside it.

'Ah, it is too good to be believed! I can hardly understand it yet,' she said. 'That you have come; that you are to stay; that I am to see you with peace and quietness of heart.'

'Where's the parrot?' asked Graham. 'He is to go into the portrait, you know.'

'The portrait? Do you really mean to paint my portrait?'

'I've come back to Buissac to paint it.' The old lady's happiness seemed to have infected Graham and to have dispelled his clouds and, again, as she saw him smile upon her and saw her smile of adoration answer him, Jill felt the stir of trouble, of pity. It was almost as if Dick were a resplendent, careless sun-god and the old lady a hapless, rapturous Semele doomed to be shrivelled by such rays.

'But Coco is dead,' she told him. 'Can you paint me without Coco?'

'Dead? Parrots never die.'

'Ah;—Coco died, however. Yes. It is too true. And of old age, I fear; like the rest of us. Joseph found him lying on the floor of his cage one morning; cold and stiff. So it will be with me before so long.'

'Nonsense. You're not going to die in your cage,' Graham reminded her. 'You are going to die on a mountain-pass on an autumn morning, with the vineyards below you and the menacing French sky above.'

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 Madame de Lamouderie's eyes lighted with the rapturous recollection. 'You have not forgotten! Nor I! Nor I! Not one word of our meeting have I forgotten!—Ah, Madame, your husband is a remarkable man; you will not deny that, I know.—One has only to glance at him and one sees genius on his brow.—So it was with me that day. I saw him painting there; silent; absorbed; unaware; I looked and looked. Then I made bold to speak. I could not pass him by. One does not twice in a lifetime meet young geniuses painting by the wayside. A menacing sky? Ah, it is you who are menacing;—you and your work.—If the sky looked to me in nature as it does on your canvas, I do not know that I should care to die under it. How should I face such a sky, when I cannot face my curé!—No; I do not face him, I am such a sinner.—Once a year the poor man climbs up to hear my confession (for I tell him that I am too old to go to his church—and that is a falsehood, to begin with; but a confessional fills me with dismay);—and I tell him to place himself on a chair; so;—while I sit here; so;—my back to him. And then I tell him all my enormities;—such enormities as an ancient, caged old woman can commit;—lies, evil tempers, gluttony; envy; malice;—what you will.—And while I tell, I see the poor cure stealing glances round over his shoulder at me—to be sure that he has heard aright.—A fat, red man with a hand on each knee.—Sometimes,' said the old lady, flown with the evident success of her recital, 'I tell him sins I have not committed to see what he will do!'

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 'Was that the same cure that Mademoiselle Ludérac struck?' asked Jill, when they had done laughing.

Madame de Lamouderie's triumphant smile vanished and she looked at her, arrested. 'Mademoiselle Ludérac? You know her? She has already spoken with you?'

'We don't know her at all. We were only told how fond she was of animals;—you told us that, too;—and how she tried to save the curé's cat.'

The old lady still looked disconcerted as though the mention of her landlady's name had damped her spirits. 'They are not friends;—not friends at all, Marthe and the curé. But it is not fair to say she struck him. Marthe is very gentle. He hurt the cat in trying to get it from her and it was only then that she raised her hand against him.' And suddenly the old lady laughed. 'I should have liked to see his face! He is a pompous man and it was, I feel sure, a good, bold blow. He shows a forgiving spirit in coming to hear my confession after that episode. And indeed we never speak of it.'

'And aren't we to see her? Aren't we to make her acquaintance to-day?' Jill asked. 'I love animals, too; and I feel I should like Mademoiselle Ludérac.'

The old lady gazed at her, sobered once more, and Jill realized that her expression was like nothing so much as that of a child who has been asked to share a box of chocolates with a companion.

'But yes, certainly; of course you will make her acquaintance—since you will so often make me glad

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 by coming here,' she said slowly. 'But to-day she will not, I know, be persuaded to come in. She is not at all accustomed to the world. She is very farouche; very sauvage—how do you say, very shy and timid indeed,' said the old lady, helping herself out with the English words. 'And she would not interest you, Madame, oh, not in any way. She is a simple country girl; a simple, good little bourgeoise. She does not know of any of the things that interest gens du monde, like ourselves. She does not know the world at all.'

'But I have heaps of friends who are not gens du monde, '  said Jill, looking at the old lady with the thoughtfulness that was, as far as she was concerned, her nearest approach to displeasure. 'In fact I don't think I know many gens du monde at all;—except Dick's mother,' and Jill cast a glance of shared amusement upon her husband. 'She's very, very du monde; more than we always care for, isn't she, Dick?'

'Far more,' said Graham, tersely.

'And if Mademoiselle Ludérac is timid she'll have to get used to us,' Jill went on, while the old lady's eyes turned with their manifest anxiety from one to the other. 'Since we shall probably be here all spring, she'll have plenty of time. Perhaps she'll take me for some walks, in the mornings, while Dick paints you.'

The arrest in the old lady that followed these words was even more pronounced than the first had been, though Jill soon saw that they had induced relief and not dismay. 'But she will be honoured;—charmed, indeed, if you will indeed bear with her.—It will not

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 interest you to go with her often;—that I must warn you; but once or twice; for her to show you some of our little-known points de vue;—yes; that will indeed be a treat for the excellent Marthe.—But the mornings?'—again anxiety clouded her face. 'It is in the mornings that she has all her work, here in the house, to do. And she practices her harp for hours. She rarely gets out then;—unless it is into the garden or basse-cour. And I myself am a late riser.—Must the portrait be for the morning?'

'I'd rather come in the afternoon,' Graham assured her. 'And it will only be on rainy days, for I have my landscapes to think of in fine weather.' And Jill, seeing relief dawn again on the strained old face, smiled inwardly, thinking: 'Yes; never fear—you poor old thing; you shall have him all to yourself.'

Joseph, at this point, tidied up, in his felt slippers and white tie, appeared with the tea-tray, and as he set it down on the centre table it revealed the influence of a superior and supervising hand. It was laid with a fine white cloth and besides the biscuits there was a plate of fresh pastries upon which the old lady's eye fastened with a glad avidity. 'Ah! Marthe has been baking! Here is indeed a treat for us!' she exclaimed. And then Joseph, standing at the door with his weary impartiality of demeanour, announced, before leaving: 'Mademoiselle begs to be excused from attendance at tea. She is very much occupied this afternoon.'

'' ' Bien. Bien,'' Joseph. C ' est bien, '  the old lady repeated, dismissing the unnecessary information as quickly as

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 possible. And pouring out their tea, she began, with her released and happy volubility, to tell them again about herself; about her salon in Paris; her sons, who had been  ' garçons charmants, '  but  ' très, très dissipés ' ; her one remaining child, a princess; a Russian princess, who had had to flee before the Bolsheviks to a refuge offered by a relative in South America. 'I shall never see her again, never,' she declared. 'And when we meet it is not always happy. She is like her father; she has a violent temper and is d'un égoïsme effrayant.—I am alone in the world; quite alone. And no one cares whether I live or die.'

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T was three days later that Graham, carrying his easel, canvas, and painting utensils, went up to the Manoir. The day was fine and he had told Madame de Lamouderie that he would not come unless it rained; but he had spent the morning far down the river, painting from the bank, and, coming in late for lunch, as he often did, found Jill departed in the car. She would not be back till tea-time. So the moment seemed opportune for beginning the long-promised portrait of the old lady. But deeper than the sense of the opportune, the mood was upon him to test again upon his own nerves, unfortified by Jill, the uncanny quality he felt in the Manoir and its occupants; its unknown occupants. The old lady he did not feel uncanny. He understood her too well for that.

It was a lovely, melancholy spring day and a solitary thrush was fluting and calling in the chestnut forest. Most of the thrushes would have been shot and eaten during the winter, but that gave a wilder, sweeter potency to this surviving song.

Wild daffodils grew among the glades, and a powdering of violets rested like a soft blue cloud along the roadside. Already the mood of the other day seemed exorcised. His blood ran peacefully. How strange it was to know oneself at heart still so much the child of

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 fears and visions. Thinking of the other day and of the foreboding that had seized him, took him far back into his childhood, linked him with the wild-eyed little boy who had rushed down from his room to take refuge with his father on a winter night, and who could never tell or explain what the dark fear—or presence—had been that had wakened him. But no; it had not been fear the other day. Not fear exactly.

Behind the reddening branches of the sycamores the Manoir to-day, freaked with swaying sunlight, looked like the happiest sort of Sickert; that, at best, was not very happy, to be sure; but the Manoir, too, seemed exorcised. If magic there were, it was no longer a dark magic. And no figure came round the house as he stood on the doorstep; no blind old dog. No woman with a pale face framed in black.

Joseph opened to his knock, and Joseph, too, showed signs of revival, looked as if the spring had penetrated to his doleful bones. Madame la comtesse, he told him, was upstairs in her room; he would apprise her of Monsieur's coming. Mademoiselle was in the salon. And so saying he ushered him in and Graham found himself face to face with Mademoiselle Ludérac.

She had, apparently, but just come in from a country walk, for a basket of the wild daffodils stood on the table and a number of vases, most of them already filled, were ranged about it. She was coming down the room, two vases in her hands, and for a moment she stopped short on seeing him, rather as she had stopped

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 the other day when she had found him and Jill standing in uncertainty before the door. Then, bending her head in a grave acknowledgement of his presence, she went on with her task, expecting, evidently, neither to be spoken to nor to speak.

Graham was disconcerted by her demeanour. It was not that—though the silence in the presence of a visitor might have suggested it—of a mere housekeeper; not at all that of 'my landlady.' Rather, he felt, while he stood near the window at the other end of the room and watched her as she quietly moved here and there, placing her daffodils, it was the demeanour of a châtelaine when some man of affairs, unknown to her, is ushered in to wait for those who have cognizance of his business. She might be sauvage, she might be farouche, and in her attire and appearance she made him think of the young peasant woman; but she made him, in her demeanour, think still more of the châtelaine, and, as he watched her, these meagre analogies were enlarged by a host of vague, floating associations. Something in her tall form, in the close lines of her hair, bound in a braided knot, reminded him of the statue of a Roman lady. She wore a black sateen apron buttoning at neck and wrists, and her long white hands, as she placed the vases, took beautiful attitudes of fluent, tranquil grace. One could see those hands laid with mastery on the majestic strings of a harp; her harp stood in the corner; and, with the element of majesty in the picture she now evoked, it was a Saint Cecilia he saw, Saint Cecilia, the Roman lady,

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 who lighted her pale tapers in a chamber dedicated to early Christian rites.

And while he saw all this, he seemed not to see her face at all; though he was aware of it as a whiteness, inaccessible to analogy; and it seemed to drift like a soft but dazzling light at which one could not look fixedly.

He heard Madame de Lamouderie's precipitate heels tapping down the stairs. They paused outside the door and it was almost, Graham felt, as if the enamoured old lady stood there for a moment to quiet the strong beating of her heart. Then she entered, with outstretched hands.

'Is it possible! You have come to do my portrait! Though it does not rain!' she cried, and she cast a glance at Mademoiselle Ludérac, but did not speak to her. If Mademoiselle Ludérac consented to remain in the place of the mere landlady, Madame de Lamouderie would leave her there. And she seemed, with her tranquillity, to consent; she carried two vases into a little alcove at the end of the room.

'I have not met your friend,' said Graham. He had felt, subconsciously, a sense of resentment while he watched Mademoiselle Ludérac, and he did not know, now that he became aware of it, whether it attached itself more to her or to her old protector.

'You have not met Marthe!' cried Madame de Lamouderie, as if it surprised her.  ' Mais comment donc! She has not introduced herself! Come here, Marthe; come, ma cherie. I wish you to know Monsieur

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 Graham; Monsieur Richard Graham, the celebrated painter of whom I have spoken to you. All Europe rings with his fame, so that you will not forget that this is a great day in your life. Mademoiselle Marthe Ludérac, Monsieur; my very dear young friend and companion. And I am to present you also to Madame Graham. I specially wish you to know Madame Graham.—It does not disarrange your plans that Monsieur Graham should come in the afternoons and paint my portrait here?—We will be very careful;—very quiet and tidy,' smiled the old lady with an odd effect of cajolery.

The young woman stood looking quietly, even appeasingly upon her, almost, Graham thought, as though she reminded her that with her, Marthe Ludérac, she might be reasonable. Never indeed had he seen his old friend in such a flurried humour. She was almost mincing, though so exuberant.

'I shall be charmed,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac in a gentle voice.

'Then come, Monsieur. Where will you place yourself? Where shall I sit? Am I dressed as you would have me?'

'Can I assist you?' Mademoiselle Ludérac asked as Graham, with an uncharacteristic clumsiness, overturned his easel in placing it.

'Oh;—thank you; thank you a thousand times.—I can manage perfectly,' he answered, and he felt, still more resentfully, that of the three Mademoiselle Ludérac was the only one who was natural and composed.

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 'And Marthe—our dear Coco; dead!' exclaimed the old lady, as she seated herself in the. 'Monsieur Graham so specially wished to paint me with Coco beside me.—Is it not a disaster?—We have an assortment of animals, here, Monsieur, as I have told you; all Marthe's pets;—a hare; a dog; a cat; two cats now, are there not, Marthe?—would not one of those do as well?'

'I'm afraid not,' said Graham, smiling, and feeling himself somewhat restored as he set his canvas in its place and laid his utensils on the table. 'I don't see you with a hare in your arms; or a cat either. Coco, in design and colour and character, was what I needed; and since he has gone I shall do you without appurtenances.—But one thing you still have that I should like; the black lace for your head;—and, may I be frank?—the rouge for your lips. We need that for the Goya almost as much as your black eyes.'

The old lady trembled with excitement and gratification.

'Marthe'—she whispered, 'could you?—'

'But most certainly,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and, smiling appeasingly as her eyes met the black eyes of the Goya, she left the room.

'She will get them,' whispered the old lady. 'She will give me all I need. She is my good angel.' So flustered was she, it was evident, that she hardly knew what she was saying.

Mademoiselle Ludérac returned with the lace mantilla, a box of powder, a stick of rouge, and a mirror,

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 which she gave into the old lady's hand; but: 'No, no'; whispered Madame de Lamouderie, 'will you do me, Marthe?' And, still slightly smiling, but quite without mockery, Mademoiselle Ludérac, kneeling beside her, traced carefully, and with a practised hand, the red along the lips, and softly patted the withered cheeks with the powder-puff. Then, when she had adjusted the mantilla: 'Let me see,' the old lady said, still whispering; and Mademoiselle Ludérac again handed her the mirror so that she might survey herself therein. She looked for a long moment and gave it back with a sigh, whether of discouragement or satisfaction Graham could not tell. The little scene riveted his attention.

'Are you pleased with me?' the old lady asked humbly.

'You are beautiful,' said Graham, and he looked steadily at her, more aware, as he looked, of the tall form of the young woman beside her than of his sitter.

 ' Elle me rend belle. She is a magician. She does it for me when I go to Mass,' said the old lady, and her eyes left his for a moment to glance up in gratitude at Mademoiselle Ludérac.

'All is then well?' said the young woman.

'All is well?' Madame de Lamouderie questioned, her eyes on Graham.

'All is perfect; quite perfect,' said Graham, taking up his charcoal. He was wondering whether Mademoiselle Ludérac was going to remain with them and

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 he felt that if she did so he would not be able to draw one significant line.

But, moving away, placing the two tall vases on the mantelpiece, she took her basket, passed a cloth over the table where the water had spilled, and went out, closing the door softly behind her.

Neither Graham nor Madame de Lamouderie spoke for some time after she had left them. Graham drew quickly, with bright, intent glances, and the old lady gazed with rapt docility at her painter. But as her breaths quieted, and her excitement dispersed itself in a general glow, her expression insensibly altered and he saw that his own old lady was returning to him, an old lady very different from Mademoiselle Ludérac's, or even Jill's; it was with him that she was her reallest self, and when her eyes met his it was as if there were a sense of complicity between them, a sense of entering a realm of experience from which such innocents were shut away.

'You look, as you sit there,' she told him, 'like a dear friend of my youth. A charming man; a finished homme du monde, but artist to his finger-tips. He had marvellous collections;—bronzes, gems, enamels; it was known throughout Europe. A splendid emerald I once possessed was his gift to me;—with my husband's sanction, ''bien entendu. ' ''

Graham smiled but made no comment, and after a moment the old lady took up her tale. 'My husband and he had business enterprises together—alas, all unsuccessful; all ruinous. And he was my husband's

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 second in several affairs of honour. He was, in fact, l'ami de la maison and at one time I thought that he aspired to the hand of my second daughter. But he confessed to me one day that he could never love the daughter while the mother was before his eyes. It will be difficult for you to believe it now, Monsieur, but in my youth I was beautiful.'

'I think I remember your telling us that all the greatest painters in Europe competed for the privilege of painting you,' said Graham. His was the faculty of saying ironic words with such detachment and courtesy that they seemed a tribute rather than an offence. The old lady, at all events, did not take these amiss.

'He, for a man, was what I was for a woman,' she went on, the melancholy yet pleasing retrospect softening her voice. 'Tall; superb; haughty. He had your eyes, your noble brow and chin. He had your gloom and fire. He was greatly feared, and greatly loved. Never again have I seen such an Apollo; till now.'

'And your husband was not jealous?'

'Ah, Monsieur,' said the old lady, 'he was furiously jealous. His jealousy wrecked my life.'

'I don't blame him,' said Graham, and he dropped his slow 'Ha-ha!'

'I should not be here to-day if it had not been for his insensate jealousy.' The old lady enlarged her theme while she basked in Graham's gaze. 'Not that Monsieur de Larbier was my only admirer.'

'Your husband should have felt that there was safety

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 in such numbers,' said Graham, and he continued to laugh softly to himself.

The old lady, even in her most dramatic moods, rarely lost her warning sense of the ridiculous, and she cast upon him now a quick, measuring glance. 'Ah, Monsieur, it does not follow, you know, that there is always safety in numbers,' she rejoined, and with such a change of tone, with so much of edge and malice in her gaiety that Graham for a moment was disconcerted. 'Not unless they have the husband's sanction,' he found, and the old lady, her eyes and lips consenting to any sous-entendu he might choose to attribute to the word, replied with a '' ' Précisement. ' ''

'And now, you know,' said Graham, still laughing, 'I must ask you to tell me no more engrossing stories for a little while; I can't do you justice and listen to you at the same time.—You will reward me for my industry and self-denial,' he added, seeing her face fall like that of a child reproved, 'by telling me, one by one, as the days go on, about all your admirers, sanctioned and unsanctioned.'

Madame de Lamouderie's mouth twisted to one side as it attempted to discipline its answering smile and she sat very silent indeed, while Graham, looking intently from her to his canvas, set down his lines and shadows. But silence, he soon realized, was to her a disintegrating element. Under his severely impersonal gaze she collapsed into a rather dreadful rigidity. Unless he let her talk he would not capture the meretricious drama, the tragic coquetry, the pitiful beauty of

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 her fluid face. This haggard old owl, drooping on its perch, was an incubus rather than an inspiration. Not more than twenty minutes passed before he smiled upon her and told her that now she could take up her reminiscences. His smile was reflected back to him like sunrise from a bleak, grey cliff.

'But may I not now come and look?' she begged.

'You'll see nothing yet,' he warned her.

But she got up and came, leaning on her stick, to stand behind him and look at the strange pattern, simple, forcible, significant, displayed on the canvas. She stood there then, speechless; unable to summon one word of flattery.

'Well?' Graham turned his head to smile at her.

'It is a marvel!' she gallantly brought out.

'Not yet. But it will be good.'

'It is a work of genius! In so short a time!' the old lady continued.—'But—Dieu!—Am I so horrible as that?'

'Horrible!' Graham smiled his indignation. 'I call it already beautiful!'

'With the great black mark at the side of the nose; the black caverns under the eyes; the fissures in the neck!—Bien! It is so. I am old. I am horrible. You show me the death's head I am soon to be reduced to,' said the poor old lady with dismal acquiescence.

'But I shouldn't have cared to paint you if you hadn't been old. You are beautiful—in the way I care for—because you are old. You are like a silver medal exquisitely engraved by life;—every line shows what

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 it's given; what it's taken away.—And the ivory, black, grey of your colouring; what is the russet and pink of youth to compare to it? One looks at a young face as one does at a peach. It means nothing.'

'Ah;—it means something you wish to take into your hands; to bite into,' said the old lady, and her glance, half mocking, half provocative, drifted down and rested on him. 'Do not tell me that you are so disinterested in peaches. You are not an old man with all that life has taken from him showing in his face.'

'Oh, peaches are all right, in their way'—again she slightly disconcerted him. 'They are fit for biting into,' he said; 'but that's not an æsthetic occupation.'

Madame de Lamouderie, at this, gave a high, quavering laugh. 'Ah—we are not æsthetic, then, we women! To be bitten into! That is all we ask.'

Graham maintained, with calm, the decorum that his companion seemed determined to assail. 'Of course it is; quite rightly; while you are young. That is why you are so uninteresting when you are young except—if you will pardon me—from the point of view of appetite.'

He was calm; he was decorous; but he saw that he made the old lady very happy. She stood looking down at him, leaning on her stick; and no conversation could have pleased her better.

'You have bitten into many peaches?' she now inquired. 'You also will tell me of your histories?'

'I am a faithful husband, Madame,' said Graham,

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 with a certain dryness. 'Faithful husbands have no histories.'

'Ah, but seductive young painters—before they become husbands—before they are rangés—have them.'

'A husband as happy as I am forgets them.'

She felt, perhaps, the dryness.  ' Bien, '  she said, as though she committed a lesson to memory.  ' Bien. You are a very happy husband. You do not need to tell me that. I will ask no more questions about forbidden fruits.' And she went back to her chair.

'All these smudges, these marks you object to,' said Graham very kindly, 'are only exaggerated indications of shadows and outlines. They won't look like that when I begin to paint, I promise you. You'll be surprised, I promise you, when you see your portrait. The Sleeping Beauty will recognize her waking self.'

Shaking her head a little and again with the slightly twisted smile, the old lady said, '' ' Vous êtes charmant. ' ''

When Graham, an hour later, left the Manoir, the early evening was gathering, purpling the vistas of the chestnut forest. He smiled a little to himself, as he went, lighting a cigarette and thrusting his hands into his pockets; a tall, dark-headed figure, full of grace and power, moving swiftly through the evening. He saw his portrait—what it was to be; and already he could smile at that; already it was witty, cruel, beautiful, what he was doing. And he smiled in thinking of the old lady. What he had said of her to Jill, last autumn,

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 was true, comically true; though Jill would never know it. He did not dislike her; not at all; he even enjoyed watching her antics as he would have enjoyed watching a dappled panther at the Zoo, when the dinner hour approaches and it leaps restlessly about its cage. But the memory of her and of her smiles made him feel that it would be specially pleasant to see Jill again. He wanted a draught of that fresh spring water. And, deeper than the reaction from the panther in its cage, he knew, as he walked down the winding road, a sense of relief, of escape. He had not seen Mademoiselle Ludérac again.

So he went quickly. But at the cemetery walls he paused. He paused, looking up at them, and went round to the gates and stood there, with head bent, considering; and then went in. He did not glance to right or left as he threaded his way rapidly among the mausoleums and in a moment he had reached the unspoiled space of grass that sloped down to the forest.

There was the solitary grave and it glimmered as if with pale tapers. It was just as he had known it would be after seeing her daughter lighting them in the room where this Marthe Ludérac once had lived. He stood and looked down at the wreath of daffodils laid upon the foot and the three tall vases at the head, filled with the flames of spring; and the spell, the presence, fell so strongly upon him that he seemed to see Mademoiselle Ludérac standing there, on the other side of the grave.

Jill had spread their tea at the window opening on

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 the river. Tea was always an easy, pleasant ceremony on their wanderings and one never omitted. He and Jill had managed to make tea in the most unlikely places. Something about the pretty, domestic neatness of it all, the waiting caddy, the singing kettle, the plate of petits beurres, showed him that she had been confident of his return and as he went to her and kissed her he said: 'It is good to find you here.'

'Where else should you find me!' smiled Jill, looking up at him.

He kissed her again and ran his hand over her bright, short hair. 'Rather jolly, all the same, our life, isn't it, Jill?' he said.

Jill had been feeling depressed, had been thinking about England, but the mood was dispelled by Dick's loving gaze.

'I should rather say it was!' she replied. 'It sometimes almost frightens me to think how happy we are, when so many other people come such croppers.'

'Well, we're rather an exceptional couple, aren't we,' said Graham, going to his chair. 'We are exceptionally attractive, for one thing, so that it requires no effort for us to remain fond of each other. And we know how to arrange our lives, to cut out the inessential things that suffocate so many people, and to keep the essential.—Solitude; nature; work.'

Jill wondered what her work might be; but since, even at home, she had nothing that could accurately so be described, she only said: 'How did the portrait go? Was she pleased to see you?'

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