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 'Let me help you,' said Graham.

She started violently, sprang upright, and stood gazing at him in an astonishment too great for alarm.

'Let me help you,' he repeated, and he put out his hand to take the mallet as he spoke. It touched hers. With another start, as violent as the first, she drew back and the mallet fell, with a sufficiently heavy blow, on Graham's foot.

'That is a little too severe, you know,' he remarked, picking up the implement and glancing at her where she stood above him.

At his words her strange blush, pale, yet as violent in its suddenness as her start had been, flooded her face. For a moment she could hardly speak. Then she uttered: 'I am sorry. I did not mean to be so clumsy.'

'Perhaps that makes it all the more cutting,' said Graham, smiling slightly; but with no merriment. He was aware of a feeling in himself that was like cruelty, and of the dry dispassionateness that had sustained him last evening through Jill's story; and all the time he felt, rather than heard, the thrush's hard notes knocking at his heart.

He stooped and drove in the stake. 'So. Is that as you wish it? May I put your mallet in the shed for you while you tie your animal?—Thank you.' The bitter smile, the bitter voice, left her speechless.

He found, as he went round the cabin, that his foot was, indeed, unpleasantly bruised, but he held himself from limping and put the mallet in its place. When he returned, the goat was safely tethered and

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 the kid had laid itself down in a sunny nook among the bushes. Its little face looked up inquiringly at him as he passed it, innocently arch, with great limpid eyes and two soft buds on its forehead where the horns would be.

Graham and Mademoiselle Ludérac turned and walked side by side down the meadow. Both were silent; perfectly silent. Graham had clasped his hands on his stick behind his back and looked before him with an air of unconcern. Mademoiselle Ludérac, her arms tightly folded in her black shawl, turned her head away and seemed to watch the river. Above them towered the vast form of the promontory. Behind them the thrush sang loudly on, and the wind in the island poplars swept the branches against the sky to slanting lines of blue and silver.

As they neared the bridge, Graham glanced down at the stream and saw again the sharp blue edge of sky, the promontory beak. His dizzy panic gripped him for an uncanny moment and it seemed to him, while he looked, that they were entrapped between the two abysses and that escape was impossible. Then his eye fixed itself in astonishment, for deep in the stream, reflected on the far, high blue, a black blot was poised against the sky. From the stream he looked up at the sheer face of the cliff and saw that Madame de Lamouderie was standing at its topmost verge, looking down at them.

Leaning on her stick, there she stood. From their lifted faces, even at her distance, she must have seen

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 that they saw her, but she made them no signal, nor did she for a moment move. Strangely ominous, strangely intent, did she appear; like a bird of prey hovering above its quarry. Then, hurriedly, as if in retreat, she turned away and it was as if the sky engulfed her.

Graham glanced at his companion. She was very pale. She did not look at him. And from her pallor, from their silence, from the bird-of-prey scrutiny that had enveloped them, a sober certainty came to him at last, like a stone laid on his heart, and made a mockery of his long pretence.

They had come to the bridge and, laying her hand on the rail, Mademoiselle Ludérac paused before crossing. 'Madame de Lamouderie had hoped to see you this afternoon. Madame Graham told her that she might see you.'

'Yes, I was going to her.'

All he could think of now were her eyes into which he was looking. He did not remember his excuse for being with her on the meadow.

'You will not still come?' said Mademoiselle Ludérac after another moment. Her finger-tips were whitened by the hard grip of her hand upon the rail.

'Do you think she will still care to see me?'

He could say nothing, she could say nothing, that did not discover them to each other. He heard the breathlessness under her careful, measured tones as she answered: 'It is because you are late that she was there. She will care very much to see you.'

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 'Then, since I am late, I will follow you,' said Graham. 'It would take me another half-hour to go round by the road.'

She made no reply and they crossed the bridge and began the steep ascent. She went before him. He could not see her face; he could only see the proud poise of her shoulders, wrapped in the black shawl, the proud, white neck, the proud, dark head. She seemed to glide upward. So familiar was the rugged path to her foot that it found with easy precision every ledge and level, and they went so swiftly that when they reached the promontory road they were forced to pause for breath. But even here they did not turn to look at the great view spread below them. As if with the shared impulse of escape, they stood side by side, breathing deeply and looking up at the further ascent that wound its way among deep fissures in the rock; and suddenly, as they stood there, Graham heard, far away, the note of a chiff-chaff, and remembered Jill.

'Jill is not well,' he said. He put out his hand and pushed it against the granite wall, still looking up. 'She asked me to find you on the island and tell you that she could not come.'

Mademoiselle Ludérac stood silent for a moment. He had found the words too late to do anything for himself, but to her they might still be helpful. They were helpful. She thought them over and her voice told him that they gave her refuge. 'It is not serious, I hope?'

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 'No; not serious. It's influenza. The doctor is seeing her. She must take care of herself for a week or two.'

'Would it please her if I should go to see her?'

'I think not; she would be afraid of infection for you.'

'I do not fear it.'

'I imagine that complete rest is the best thing for her.'

She stood for another moment, as if irresolute, and then went forward swiftly. The path now was so steep that they had to lay a hand here and there upon the tangled creepers that draped its walls. Once her foot slipped and she caught herself from falling. Graham stood still, making no attempt to aid her.

They reached the rocky eminence where Madame de Lamouderie had stood. It was not so precipitous as it looked from below. The vineyards sloped up from it and among them stood the dilapidated cottage.

Mademoiselle Ludérac paused. 'I am going to see a sick woman.'

Graham lifted his hat.

She stood there and her eyes met his. She nerved herself. 'You will tell Madame de Lamouderie why you came to find me?'

'That Jill sent me? Of course.'

He was facing her, his hat in his hand, and, as he said the words and looked into her eyes, he felt a hot flush mount to his forehead and beat in his throat. It

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 was as sudden, as violent, as revealing, as hers had been. She stood there and observed it, helplessly, for another moment, then, with a murmured farewell, she moved swiftly away among the vineyards.

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HEN Joseph opened to him Graham felt himself observed with a sidelong glance. 'Madame la comtesse is in the garden,' he said. 'She had given up seeing Monsieur to-day.'

'I'll go to her in the garden, then,' said Graham.

He crossed the hall and went out. The air was full of the songs of birds in the sunny, sheltered spaces. The garden had lost the waiting aspect it had in the autumn. Perhaps, thought Graham, as he saw the black figure at the end of the path, this was the encounter it had been waiting for. Yet this encounter did not seem significant. He felt that he was to deal very easily with the old lady. As he approached her it was with astonishment, incredulity, she watched him.

He raised his hat, smiling: 'We've met before—though you would not acknowledge me.'

The old lady wore her broad black hat. She had risen from the bench set against the garden wall and leaned upon her silver-headed stick as she surveyed him, still with incredulity, and without the trace of a smile. If he were to deal with her easily that was simply because he was so indifferent to her. As an antagonist she was not to be despised. She was calm,

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 she was even majestic. He would have no coquettish plaints to withstand.

'I did not know that you wished to be recognized,' she said, after a moment. They had stood there in the sunlight, surveying each other.

'Why not, I wonder?' said Graham. 'I'm late, I know. But Jill is ill, poor child. She was to have met your friend on the island and asked me to go and find her there and explain why she couldn't come.' Thus, while the birds piped and whistled about them and the wind blew over the forest, did he cut the ground, so he imagined, from under the old lady's feet.

But she stood, majestically, and continued to survey him and a little vein of perplexity crept into his assurance. Had it been a trifle too bold? Had she detected in his voice a brazen note?

'Ah,' was all she said. And then: 'Shall we go in? You wish to continue your work?'

'Most certainly. If you will continue your kindness.'

Madame de Lamouderie laid her hand on his arm and they walked down the path and entered the house, in silence. At the foot of the stairs she stopped. 'I will be with you at once. I will take off my hat and be with you at once.'

In the drawing-room, where a fire was burning in readiness for his arrival, Graham placed his easel. Gloomily indeed the great eyes surveyed him from the canvas and the veil of perplexity, of uncertainty in him, ran more deeply as he looked at them. His story might avail to shield Mademoiselle Ludérac; but it

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 would not avail to shield himself. There had been that in his demeanour, as they had walked down the meadow between the swollen streams that must inevitably engage a vulture's attention. Well, after all, what of it? He and Jill were soon leaving Buissac.

Madame de Lamouderie entered with an unremitting calm. She had arranged her hair, unaided, under the mantilla, and her lips were accurately rouged.

'I am grieved indeed to hear that my charming young friend is ill,' she said, going to her chair. 'I thought, yesterday, that she looked feverish.' She drew the mantilla forward over her shoulder and arranged the laces at her wrist.

'I'm afraid she caught this cold several days ago,' said Graham. 'If I had realized it she should have been put to bed at once. The only thing for a cold, isn't it?'

'She came, through sheer kindness, to see me,' said Madame de Lamouderie. 'It is a heart of gold she has. And it is too true'—she had taken her pose and Graham began to paint—'too true that she should not have come out. Already she had been harassed, troubled. You heard, perhaps, that my unfortunate Marthe had been ill-advised enough to tell her the story of her mother's disgrace.'

'Yes. So I heard. I do not think Jill felt it illadvised.'

'I differ from her, then,' said Madame de Lamouderie with composure. 'Ill-advised, unsuitable, I consider such confessions to be, and confessions unasked

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 for: but reticence is a quality one does not often find among the lower orders. Your wife's interest had touched poor Marthe too much. She wished to make sure of it. Let that be her excuse.'

Graham made no reply. He painted in silence and Madame de Lamouderie, now, kept silence too.

When he paused the light had begun to wane. But he had done much. The old head looked out at him from the canvas with an astonishing vitality. He had thought so one-sidedly of his work that he was surprised to see how it had responded to the little he had to give.

'How do you like it?' he asked, turning the canvas to the old lady. She studied it, but, as he saw, with an attention as divided as his own had been. Even her vanity was in abeyance to-day. 'It is remarkable. It is magnificent. I am satisfied to have served your genius so well, Monsieur.—Is the sitting over for to-day? The light is altered, is it not? There is something of which I wish to speak to you.'

'Yes. I can stay a little.' Graham was taken aback by the deliberate request. But if there was anything to face, it would, he felt, be better to have it over.

'Put away your things, then,' said Madame de Lamouderie, and when he had done this, perhaps a trifle sulkily, for her attitude put him singularly at a disadvantage, she pointed to the low chair opposite her own on the other side of the hearth. 'Will you sit there?'

Graham sat himself down and folded his arms.

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 'It is about Marthe and your wife that I wish to speak to you,' said Madame de Lamouderie, looking, not at him, but, contemplatively, into the fire. 'You will not be surprised at my decision, for what I have to say will show you that if your wife is very much your affair, Marthe is very much mine. It is, in a sense, under my protection that she has lived, for some years, now—in so far as I can lend it to her.'

And what had Jill to do with it? So unexpected was her approach to her theme that Graham knew himself still more at a disadvantage; but, his chin on one hand, his elbow in the other, he sat as if much at ease and observed his hostess.

'You knew,' said Madame de Lamouderie, 'that I had already told your wife something of Marthe's history.'

'Yes,' said Graham, 'I knew about that.'

'It was all that I felt it wise to tell,' said Madame de Lamouderie, 'for I was alarmed lest in speaking of one thing, I should, inadvertently, reveal another.'

'Well, that alarm was unnecessary, wasn't it, since Mademoiselle Ludérac has now told all her history to Jill?'

'No,' said Madame de Lamouderie, slowly shaking her head, while her great eyes rested on the flames, 'no; she has not told all. I do not allude to her unhappy mother's drama. It is of Marthe's own story that I am now speaking and it is not one that she would ever tell your wife.'

A little pause fell in the darkening room and Gra-

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 ham felt himself suddenly retreat, as if from a dimly seen tentacle stretched forth towards him. 'In what way does Mademoiselle Ludérac's story concern me?' he coldly questioned.

'It concerns you in that it concerns your Jill,' said Madame de Lamouderie and her eyes lifted themselves for a moment and rested upon him. 'Some intimacies it is not suitable that she should be exposed to. She is singularly young; singularly confiding and inexperienced. Marthe would never tell her; nor could I; but to you I feel that I owe a complete avowal, since it is through me that your wife met my protégée.—You will do me the justice to remember that it was never as other than a performer for our entertainment that I introduced her.'

Graham now leaned back and locked his hands behind his head and looked heavily across at the old lady, and after a pause she took up her theme with the deliberate gravity that had, throughout, marked her manner.

'You know now all that need be known of my poor Marthe's lamentable girlhood. Her youth, the flower of her age, was spent in caring for a demented mother. She had no guidance; no protection; no instruction. Her family were free-thinkers; atheists;—religion meant nothing in their lives. They had none of the standards, none of the prejudices, even, of the upper classes. When Marthe's mother died, she went to Bordeaux to seek for work. She was not known there. It would have been impossible for her to re-

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 turn to Angoulême. And this was before I knew her. I could recommend her to none of those who might have warned and guarded her. She was alone in a strange city. She was poor and embittered. She had no religious faith. Can you blame her, Monsieur, can you feel surprised (she has a potent attraction—as you have recognized)—when I tell you that she yielded to the solicitations of her youth and of her indigence? It was in the last years of the war. Bordeaux was full of weary, desperate soldiers. She took lovers among them; many lovers. Passion had its way with her. Under that chill demeanour she has a temperament of fire and she burned her youth away.'

Graham had not stirred. He still sat, his hands locked behind his head, his eyes on his hostess; and first there came a self-protective instinct that told him to make no sign of shock; and then a deep, sick intimation of acquiescence; of relief. This was separation. This was safety. Marthe Ludérac was like himself. Not set apart; not a celestial mystery. He could now turn his back on her. Jill was saved; and he was saved. But he must say something to Madame de Lamouderie, and as he found his voice at last he knew that it betrayed, not relief, but the bitterness of a disillusion deeper than any thought could reach.

'How, with such a means of livelihood at her disposal, did she come to turn to teaching? Or does she teach? Are her winters at Bordeaux passed with lovers?'

The old lady paused. The light was waning. He

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 could not clearly distinguish her features. They seemed to express a profound sadness; but he was not thinking of the old lady. He was thinking of himself and of what his voice betrayed. She slowly shook her head. 'It is over. I believe that it is over. There is great strength in Marthe. She has made me her promises. She came to know me. I did not shrink from her. I am not easily shocked by life. I have sympathy, Monsieur, for temperaments of fire. With my help she has been able to build up a new life.'

'But since she had embarked on that career,' said Graham, still trying for a light irony, 'it might seem more to her advantage if she were to continue it.—It's a dull life she leads here. The life of a musicteacher in Bordeaux must be dull. She is, as you say, most remarkably attractive; attractive enough to pick and choose. The profession of a courtesan, especially in France, offers very solid advantages.'

At that, immediately, with a repudiating, even a noble coldness, Madame de Lamouderie answered: 'You misinterpret me, Monsieur. Marthe was not a mere courtesan. She was not depraved. She was not mercenary. It was not to the rich only she gave herself; it was to the poor, also; to the poorest little poilu, if he could touch her heart. A man and a woman, I know it well, cannot see that question eye to eye; even when one is as old as I am and the other as young as you. Toa man, women are divided into the sheep and the goats; the innocent and the guilty. I do not feel it so. Marthe has lived the life that a not ignoble man

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 may lead. She has loved freely—as her heart led her to love. There are degrees of disintegration and she was far from having reached the lowest. And, strange as it may seem to you, I respect Marthe Ludérac. I respect her courage; her strength of will. I cannot forget the beautiful devotion to her mother, nor what blood it is that runs in her veins, urging her towards destruction.'

Though she spoke so rightly, and with such a ring of just disdain, Graham did not show her any sign of approbation. He remained, apparently, unmoved, and his expression even betrayed an offensive scepticism. And still he was not thinking of the old lady. She was a crow, merely, that croaked from the battlement, and all the omens seemed hatefully to assent to her loathsome ditty. It was something dark as well as something radiant that had drawn him to Marthe Ludérac from the beginning. Something fateful, boding, had hung round her figure from the first moment when he had seen her coming like a ghost, all white and black, round the corner of the house. From the first he had known her attitude towards him to be ambiguous. But his bitterness was for himself. That he should have found meanings so mysterious for a reality so miserable;—his Eurydice, shining and immortal in her grave-clothes, only a pitiful little courtesan. Madame de Lamouderie sat there, her eyes upon him, and in her presence he could not probe the darkness that opened within him. The faint, haughty smile fixed upon his face was the veil he held between them.

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 But the old lady, impersonal, dispassionate, was to-day armed with a terrible prescience. Her next words seemed prompted by an unerring instinct. 'I have told you all this because of your Jill. I have felt, watching the events of these last days, that you might wish to withdraw her, tactfully, from an unsuitable intimacy. Marthe herself, I have seen it plainly—and in looking back you will concede it to her—has done her best to withdraw. She has the instinct of what is fitting. But it is not only that. I have my own responsibility towards Marthe. I should feel that I failed in it unless I went further and spoke very frankly to you, as an old woman may to a young man. Marthe lives here under my protection. I have seen that upon you she produces the effect she produces upon other men. And I must ask you to take no advantage of the frailty now fully exposed to you.'

'Advantage?'

Under brows of thunder Graham's eyes darted their dark flames towards her.

The old lady did not quail. 'I have revealed to you—before, I trust, she herself revealed it—that to my protégée the seduction of the other sex is as potent as hers for them. May I trust you not to yield to the appeal of such a proximity?'

Graham stared, blackly, for another moment. Then, violently, he started up from his chair.

'Are you suggesting that I might feel drawn to purchasing Mademoiselle Ludérac's favours?'

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 him, and in her eye he seemed now to detect a malevolent beam.

'You put it clearly, my young man.'

'I don't think you quite realize to whom you are speaking.'

 ' Mais, mon cher ami, '  said the old lady, and her twisted smile distorted the lines of her mouth and the lid of one eye dropped until it covered the iris, 'I speak to a man—''tout simplement. ' ''

'I see. All right. You have made a mistake.'

Graham was turning from her, but her next words, spoken with no urgency, no change of tone, arrested his departure. 'I have made no mistake. You are a man, like another. You cannot pretend with me to be a sainte nitouche. You have had your mistresses; and perhaps as many as poor Marthe has had lovers. You cannot face me and tell me that because you have made a happy marriage you are incapable of desiring another woman.'

Graham faced her. 'I am in no humour for confessions. But of one thing you may be assured. Your protégée runs no risk from me. I am not a man to be tempted by a lady of such easy virtue.'

The old lady bowed her head. 'That is well. I thank you.'

And why should Madame de Lamouderie be treated as if she were guilty? He was aware of the question as he left her and the beam of recognized malevolence seemed to answer him. She had been glad to shatter his illusions, and whatever mitigations justice might

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 find for her behaviour, all that he knew now was that he wanted to get away from her: be rid of her.

And she understood it well enough. He must concede her that. She made no effort to delay him. Had he demanded some final verification from her, none more convincing than her silence now could have been offered. She adored him: but jealousy had not been her motive; or how could she have endured to see him go like this?

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EIL after veil, deepening as it descended towards the valley, the dusk was dropping between the forest arches. All the great wind had fallen and the twilight air was calm. As Graham walked down the winding road, a strange effect followed upon his anger and bewilderment. It was as if the evening, with death-like, gentle hands, soothed them away, and his soul was dispossessed of all the magic that had so tormented and intoxicated him. He had the feeling of awakening from a dream. There was hardly a root of living fact in his memory that might resist the chill, soft effacement. It had all been a dream; all except those moments on the island; so near that when he thought of them it was only as a knocking at his heart that they returned; a thrush's notes; a white hand from which the mallet dropped.

Why had he been so angry? The old lady had been right. She had seen the truth to which he had been blinding himself all these days and she had warned him. If she had been glad to warn him, if there had been vindictiveness in the impulse, that did not condemn her. He had given her too much to bear. If she were jealous, malevolent, untruthful, in this she had been right—to him; to Jill; and to her protégée.

Mademoiselle Ludérac's figure passed through his

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 mind, shrouded, featureless, sunken to the wraith-like anonymity of the protégée. He would remember the word. It had a talismanic quality. A thing to be protected; a thing needing protection. That was the old lady's rightness. She had seen that he needed a talisman and she had given him one. All the agitation, the fear, the loud knocking at his heart were gone, and he could see the protégée as she was, a nameless, lamentable, fate-ridden creature.

His thought traversed, but from far above, like a bird above a lurid landscape, the wretched story that Madame de Lamouderie had unfolded. His gaze rested on no aspect of it, though from one darkly smouldering spot the faded heat seemed to reach up to him in his altitude and scorch, ever so slightly, his indifference.—Her heart had been touched even by 'the poorest little ''poilu. ' ''—And remembering that, he remembered the start away from his inadvertent touch, that afternoon, of all her conscious flesh. She feared him, with reason; and she feared herself, with greater reason. From the beginning she had feared, as he had.

And now he hastened towards Jill; Jill who need never endure such complicities of comprehension. He was, at last, able to think of Jill as he had not thought of her for many days. He remembered yesterday and his weakness and wondered if it had really troubled her. She must have seen it as a passing whim or mood—things with which imperturbable Jill was familiar in him. No; Jill had not been touched. No shadow of his still-born infidelity rested upon her. Happy, inno-

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 cent Jill. Never had he loved her as he loved her now, urged towards her by self-scorn; and by that sense of a dark reek on the air, the taint in his nostrils for which Jill's limpidity, as of mountain freshness, would be the antidote. Dear normal Jill, of earth and air and water. Let him never again wander after the infernal brightness of strange goddesses. Let dear earth suffice him.

Jill was asleep when he went in. She lay on her pillow, her cheek turned to her hand, and looked, with her tossed locks and parted lips, like a very young child. He bent over her, tenderly smiling, while tears rose to his eyes.

When she awoke, she asked him no question about his afternoon. That would have been strange, were it not that she was really ill, and the fever ran high that night. But she smiled dimly and gratefully upon him while he nursed her, and he felt that if any shadow had lurked he would have seen it.

He hardly left her for three days. When he went out, it was to walk in the opposite direction from the Manoir, up towards the river gorges, and deep relief was in him for the blessed interlude. It was only as the fever left her, as the days passed on, that he began to wonder at her silence; and to ask himself if she wondered at his. Jill did not even ask him why he was not going on with Madame de Lamouderie's portrait.

She could sit up now in bed, and knit and write letters, and he read aloud to her. It might have been a very happy time had it not been for the sense of tension, even of breathlessness, that affected him. It was

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 at night, lying in the little room beside hers, that he seemed to recover, from his impressions of the day, a memory of tension in Jill, too, that only her smiling calm kept from being apparent when they were together. And, thinking of it at night, it became very strange to him to remember that she had never asked him one question about the Manoir and its inmates. It was as if her illness had washed from her mind the memory of what had too much discomposed it. Marthe Ludérac's story had too much discomposed her. That was what it came to. So Graham, lying awake at night, would tell himself.

Then, one evening, after tea, Amélie came up and said that Mademoiselle Ludérac was below and asked if she might see Madame.

It was hateful to Graham; it made him hate himself, to find that helplessly, involuntarily, he had started to his feet. He could not see her. That was the first thought that had come to him; before any thought of Jill. He could not see her. She would be hateful to see. Disgust and terror seemed evenly mingled in his impulse of flight. But Jill was looking over at him, strangely looking, and she said: 'Don't go. Stay. I want you to see her, too.'

The quiet and urgency of her voice reminded him of the afternoon when she had asked him to see Marthe Ludérac on the island, and he now wondered whether that had been to test his strength, and her own; to test the reality left to them. He stood still and leaned back against the mantelpiece. He stood in shadow so, for

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 the electric lamp by the bedside cast but a dim penumbra beyond the lighted circle where Jill sat in her pink silk jacket.

Mademoiselle Ludérac just glanced at him as she came in, bowed her head, and went swiftly to Jill and took her hand and stood beside her, half turned from him. She wore a long black cloak and a small black hat, and all that he saw of her face was the pale line of her cheek. But he saw her white hand, holding Jill's. He watched it while she and Jill spoke together.

'You are better?'

How her voice startled him. It was as if he had forgotten it.

'Ever so much better.—How good of you to come.'

'I should have come before, had you needed me.—It is for Madame de Lamouderie that I have come.'

'She's sent you?—It was better for you not to come, wasn't it?—It's such a tiresome thing to catch, dear Marthe.'

'No; she has not sent me. I have come quite of my own initiative.—No, it is not to stay.—I must go back to her'—Jill had indicated a chair—'or she will miss me and she must not know that I have been with you.—It is only this. Now that you are better, could Monsieur Graham'—Mademoiselle Ludérac did not look towards him as she thus named him, but it was with perfect calm that she spoke—'come and see her, do you think? She is very much troubled, though she tries to hide it. I have told her that it is

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 your illness that keeps him here, but she is very much troubled. It would touch your heart to see her. She has grown so thin and does not eat. Could he come, if only for a little while?' Mademoiselle Ludérac reiterated, and it did not seem strange to either of them that she spoke to Jill and not to Graham.

'But of course he will,' said Jill in her confident tone of reassurance. 'Poor old dear! Of course you will, Dick, won't you?—I'm quite all right now. You could go to-night, for a little while. It's as bright as day with the moon, isn't it? It will be so lovely in the forest.—You will go, Dick?'

'Yes. Certainly I'll go,' Graham answered.

He was looking at Mademoiselle Ludérac, who looked at Jill, and he found that he could look at her fixedly. For he saw now that, though there was to be a next chapter, it would be empty of her; even though it was not to be empty of Madame de Lamouderie. He would never find Mademoiselle Ludérac at the Manoir and he and Jill, indeed, could not have left Buissac without seeing their old friend.

'Oh—I thank you so much, so very much,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, continuing to look at Jill. 'It has made me unhappy to see her so shaken. It is a real devotion that she feels, and to be cut away from it, so suddenly, is perilous for her.—It is not kind to leave her so, when she cares so much—and without a word.'

And suddenly, listening to her, Graham was aware of a passionate resentment in Mademoiselle Ludérac's voice, and that she spoke through tears. It was natural

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 that she should feel this solicitude. It was creditable to her. So Graham told himself, in dry, dispassionate phrases, while his eyes rested on Mademoiselle Ludérac's hand holding Jill's in the circle of light, and from far away he seemed to hear the hurried notes of a thrush and a rushing wind among the poplar tops. Strange, uncontrolled creature, indeed. She was angry with him for his neglect of her benefactress. And Jill was murmuring: 'Oh, dear, dear Marthe! I'm so sorry.—We're both so sorry.—He didn't mean to be unkind.'

'No, no;—he did not mean it.—He will tell her that he did not mean it.—A thousand thanks,' Mademoiselle Ludérac murmured, withdrawing her hand as if alarmed by her own betrayal of emotion. 'I will say nothing to her. She may believe, may she not, that it is quite spontaneously that Monsieur Graham comes? He will not mention me?—'

'No, of course he won't mention you. She shan't be troubled in any way.' Jill, as she spoke, put out her hand to her friend. 'But when shall I see you again, Marthe?'

Arrested in her departure, Mademoiselle Ludérac stood and looked down into Jill's sad eyes; their jocund carving made them all the sadder. 'When you are better. When you are strong again,' she said.

'But I am better. I shall get up to-morrow. It's so lovely now. We must hear our birds, Marthe.'

'Yes. Soon. Some day soon. We must hear them,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and to Graham's ear it

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 was soothingly that she spoke, as a parent speaks to a child who must not know that it is leaving for a long, long journey. And would she kiss Jill? Yes. Jill drew her down and she bent still further and pressed her lips on Jill's forehead, but it was Jill who put her arms around her neck and kissed her on the lips, murmuring, 'Dear, darling Marthe!'

So she was gone, swiftly, silently, as she had come.

Graham stood still before the fire. He had a sense of overwhelming danger.

'You don't mind my promising for you, Dick?' Jill lay back on her pillows and spoke softly. She was tired. She wished to hide from him how tired; but he saw. 'You had to go, hadn't you?—Poor old creature. You ought to have gone long before. You really could have.'

'Yes;—oh, yes, I could have,' said Graham. He hardly heard what he was saying. His mind was fixed in a strange impulse. The sense of overwhelming danger was imminent and if he yielded to the impulse it would put an end—to everything. 'You see, the last time I saw her—she made me rather sick,' he said, and he turned from Jill and laid his hands on the mantelpiece and looked down at the flames.

'Yes—I know,' Jill strangely murmured. 'I mean—she made me rather sick, too, the last time I saw her.'

'I didn't tell you, because you were ill and I was afraid it would upset you. But I may as well now,' said Graham, his eyes on the fire and his mind fixed in

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 its impulse. 'She told me all Mademoiselle Ludérac's story. Partly jealousy, no doubt. But, partly, trying to be square, to us both. She felt I ought to know, because of your friendship with her protégée. She was really rather fine. And she is evidently devoted, heart and soul, to Mademoiselle Ludérac.'

Jill lay, very still, behind him.

'It's a wretched story,' said Graham, 'and it will make you feel sick, I'm afraid. But I think you ought to know. I believe she herself would like you to know. She's tried her best to keep you at arm's length, hasn't she?—Mademoiselle Ludérac has been a courtesan, Jill.'

There was no sound behind him for a moment. And then Jill's voice came.

'Madame de Lamouderie said Marthe had been a courtesan?'

'No; she didn't say it. I did. She said that she'd taken lovers. That when she went to Bordeaux, after her mother's death, she took lovers—indiscriminately; except for the fact that she wasn't merely mercenary. She was alone, and poor, and had no prejudices;—so Madame de Lamouderie put it. And if she felt drawn to a little poilu, she'd give herself to him as soon as to a rich man.' An extraordinary bitterness had come to Graham's voice.

'And you believed her?' came Jill's voice, after another moment.

'Yes,' said Graham. 'I believed her. Why shouldn't I believe her?'

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 'Because she's mad with love of you,' said Jill.

'I know that. She was glad to tell me, of course. But it wasn't jealousy. No; you'd have believed her if you had heard her. She was very angry with me for calling her penitent a courtesan. For she is reformed, it seems.'

'You believe it, because you've been like that yourself, Dick. You've been bad in that way and that's why you are able to believe it of Marthe.'

That was why, perhaps—Graham saw it in a sudden uncanny flash of insight, helped by Jill—he had heard that bitterness come into his own voice just now. The unchaste man can feel no spiritual tolerance for the unchaste woman.

'If it's true, in any way true,' Jill went on, weighing her words, 'it isn't in any way that you or Madame de Lamouderie could understand.'

'Draw it mild, Jill,' Graham muttered. 'I'm not such a satyr as all that.'

'No; you're not a satyr. But you believe that Marthe has been mauled about by horrible Frenchmen!—' Jill's voice broke at last; sobs came into it. He turned, slowly, to look at her. She was lying back on her pillow with burning cheeks, her eyes closed. And though the sobs had come she mastered them. Her chest heaved and was quiet again. 'Poor Dick,' she said.

It was so strangely that she said it that his heart stood still. She said it as if she understood all.

'I've made you ill. I've been a fool,' he muttered, not approaching her.

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 'No. I'm not ill. I'm better. I'm glad you told me. I shall get it straight,' Jill muttered.

'Don't try to have it out with the old woman, Jill,' said Graham, after a moment. He felt as if he were picking his footsteps, cautiously, past a fiery furnace that might open and devour him. He kept his eyes on Jill. But she did not open hers. It was, again, as if she understood. 'Let her alone. Let both of them alone. By God,' he muttered, turning to the fire again, 'I wish we'd never seen the place!'

'I don't. Because if we had never seen the place we'd never have seen Marthe.' Jill's voice was clear and unfaltering as she made this statement. 'I'm not afraid of Madame de Lamouderie. And you needn't be, either, Dick.'

'You still want me to go up and see her, then?' with what a feeble voice he spoke, standing there and looking down into the fire. Did not Jill despise him? He despised himself. 'You will be able to get up to-morrow. Let's go to-morrow, then, Jill. Let's clear out.'

But Jill was unfaltering. 'No. I will make it straight first,' she said. 'And of course you will go up to her. Because Marthe wants you to. Because Marthe's unhappy about her.—Now let me go to sleep for a little while.'

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HE drawing-room at the Manoir had not been put in readiness for his visit. That would have been to give Madame de Lamouderie a suspicion of the errand on her behalf. There were thin white tulips on the mantelpiece, but they glimmered, half effaced, in the shade of the oil lamp that stood beneath them; and there, in the circle of dreary light, sat the old lady, huddled together, like a disabled bat, under the folds of a long black shawl. Unaware, she sat, sunken in a drowsy, bitter torpor, and seeing her Graham remembered that he had once smelt a bat. The memory of the smell came back to him; bitter, sour, drowsy.

But the eyes that Madame de Lamouderie raised were not like a bat's eyes. He had walked up through the forest in bright, silver moonlight, and they made him think of the night; of melancholy, silver blackness.

The days of her loneliness had hollowed her face and strewn it with ashes; but her eyes were beautiful; and as he looked into them she was at once loathsome and attractive to his mind. She had struck at her own heart as deeply as at his.

 ' C ' est vraiment vous?—Je pensais ne plus vous revoir, '  was what she said.

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text:
Module:EB1922

require('strict')

local p = {}

local getArgs = require('Module:Arguments').getArgs local header = require('Module:Header')._header

function p._EB1922(args, argsWithBlanks) argsWithBlanks = argsWithBlanks or {} local tracking_cats = {} args.title = '1922 Encyclopædia Britannica' if args.volume then args.title = args.title .. ', Volume ' .. args.volume .. '' end args.section = args.section or mw.title.getCurrentTitle.subpageText if args.previous then args.previous =  .. args.previous ..  end if args['next'] then args['next'] =  .. args['next']  ..  end args.notes = args['override-notes'] or args.override_notes if not args.notes then args.wikipedia = args.wikipedia or argsWithBlanks.wikipedia args['other-projects'] = args['other-projects'] or args.other_projects args.other_projects = nil args.notes = '\'\'\'See also\'\'\' ' if args.wikipedia == '' then elseif args.wikipedia then args.notes = args.notes ..  .. args.wikipedia ..  if args.wikipedia2 then args.notes = args.notes .. ' and ' .. args.wikipedia2 .. '' end args.notes = args.notes .. ' on Wikipedia, ' end if args['other-projects'] then args.notes = args.notes .. args['other-projects'] .. ', and ' elseif args.wikipedia and args.wikipedia ~= '' then args.notes = args.notes .. 'and ' end args.notes = args.notes .. 'the disclaimer.' end if args['extra-notes'] then args.notes = args.notes .. ' ' .. args['extra-notes'] end return header(args) .. table.concat(tracking_cats) end

function p.EB1922(frame) return p._EB1922(getArgs(frame), getArgs(frame, {removeBlanks = false})) end

return p

title: Module:EB1922


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 Would not even Jill have seen that this was not a mere malignant liar, he wondered, as he stood there, silent, before her. Jill's face, with the closed eyes and burning cheeks, drifted across his mind. She had shut out the hateful vision he put before her; the vision of the old lady telling what she had told; the vision of himself, believing. But Jill had not said it was not true. She had only said that if it were true it was in a way that he and Madame de Lamouderie could not understand. That it was true, true in any way, was enough to keep him safe. So his mind ran, while he stood and looked deeply down into the black and silver eyes.

'Yes. It's I. Jill has been very ill, you know.—Why shouldn't you see me again?' he said.

She made no reply to that, and though he paused, waiting for what she might find to say, nothing came. She only continued to fix her great eyes upon him with an infinite sadness.

'And how are you?' he asked; coldly, but with formal interest.

Even to this the old lady did not, for a moment, reply. Then, slowly shaking her head, she answered: 'As you see me.'

Graham had taken the chair opposite her on the hearth, and stretching up his arms he locked his hands behind his head. So he had sat the last time he had seen her; when she had told him and he had believed.

He was thinking of Marthe Ludérac now, his eyes

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 fixed on the fire. He seemed to see her walking in the forest, her figure flitting from black to silver through the tree-trunks. It was a beautiful spring night. It would pour balm into her heart; and with a rush, as of wings, the harp notes of the Orpheus music went through his own.

'You look sad,' he heard himself saying; how long after the old lady's words he did not know.

'So do you,' she said quietly.

'Which is the saddest, I wonder,' Graham seemed to muse. 'Youth or age? Remembrance, or presage, which is worst?'

'But one does not escape presage when one is old. One can still fear, even when one is old,' said Madame de Lamouderie with her quiet.

'Can one really? But there can't be much left to be afraid of; if one has no superstitions.'

'There is still life to be afraid of.'

'With so little of it left?'

'But we do not feel life as duration. You well know that. A tragedy may be concentrated in a bare half-hour, as well at the end of life as at the beginning. One minute, if it is sufficiently terrible, may blot out half a century. What was the suffering on the cross? Three hours. Yet it has shadowed two millenniums.'

Graham lifted his eyes at that and looked across at Madame de Lamouderie. He looked long. His look plunged into the night of her eyes, plunged and sank and brooded there. What was it between him and this old woman? He distrusted her; he disliked her; it

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text:
Module:EB1922/doc

Implements EB1922.

title: Module:EB1922/doc


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 might well be that he loathed her; yet in that night they were near. And her soul rose up and seemed to swim from great depths towards him; a drowned, dead soul, resuscitated by his gaze. It clung to him. He seemed to feel it fasten itself upon him and hide in him; like a bat; a bat creeping into its refuge and huddling there. Or was it not, rather, like a silver star rising up from the depths towards the companion star of his soul, bent to look down into the darkness? Bat, or star? Which?

'I wish I understood you,' he said, half hypnotized by her gaze and by the tension of his thought.

'You do,' said Madame de Lamouderie.

'No.' He shook his head. 'No; I don't. Because you don't understand yourself.'

'Which of us does?'

'Some of us have things out with ourselves. Some of us never do. I don't feel that you do. I feel, now'—he was thinking, thinking, his eyes on hers—'that you are having them out for me; not for yourself.'

'That is because I love you,' said Madame de Lamouderie.

'Yes. I know,' Graham replied. 'But that isn't enough. You must find more substance than that.'

Something dropped away from her gaze then; as if the resuscitated soul drowsed back again, sank down, reëntered its oblivion. Perhaps the words she had uttered, and that he had so quietly accepted, woke her too fully to the temporal order of existence. He watched the star sink, sink, out of sight while, almost

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 with the shadow of an ashen smile, she said, 'It is all the substance I ask for.'

'You are my Undine, eh? I make or unmake you? Well; have it so, then. I can't make anything enduring out of someone I don't understand, you know.'

'Ah, but I do not wish to endure. When you pass from my life—as you soon must do—I know it well—my wish would be that my life, too, should pass, like the shadow when the sun has sunk.'

'I hope that's not true. I don't know when you speak the truth,' Graham muttered, for her voice moved him strangely. 'Let us go back to our theme. Remembrance and presage. Aren't there sweet things in remembrance, then?'

The old lady accepted the change of key. She looked away from him. She seemed to ponder, and, again with the ashen smile, she said, 'Yes; there are sweet things. I sometimes think for hours of my childhood. When one is old I imagine that one's childhood is always sweet to one. One lifts oneself up, up, on the tips of one's toes—and there, far away, over all the mists and morasses, it is just visible; so bright; so small; so long. Looking back it seems as Jong as all the rest that comes between.'

'Tell me about your childhood,' he said. And sitting there, wrapped in her long black shawl, obedient, acquiescent, blissful, weaving with skill and industry any spell that might keep him near her, she told him.

The small, bright kingdom with its long, long days rose up softly before him. The cathedral of a great

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 beech forest in Normandy, with pale pillars through which, in March, one saw the pale blue sea. It was there she took him first. Daffodils were scattered thickly along its aisles; the woodmen ranged their faggots; children's clear voices rang, and little Belot, the white-and-gold spaniel, ran with them, barking; for the forest was part of their home and half a mile away, at the top of its tapis vert, the high Louis Quatorze château, pale pink, pale grey, with pigeonniers set at each angle of its garden, watched over them. In the village, down in the valley, the peasants still wore coifs, crimped, winged, folded. Riding her dappled horse in a flowing skirt and plume, Maman passed along the golden edges of the plain. Old Blaise the farmer took them through the basse-cour to see the new litter of little pigs; so young that their tiny ears seemed braided back and tied behind, like the hair of demure little convent girls, though their eyes were already sharp and wise as they glanced up sideways, sucking at their happy mother. The farmer's daughter gave them fresh bread, and cream out of a great brown earthern pot; bread, pearl-coloured, glutinous, delicious, with a thick brown crust like the edge of thatch on one of the cottages. Irises grew along the thatchridges, and their roots, boiled with the linen, sent the breath of wafted violets through your dreams at night.

In the school-room sat the young literature master, stately, sad, and ridiculous, with a collar like Monsieur de Lamartine's. He would come to the salon after

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 dinner and read poetry aloud to Maman and Grand'mère and the aunts and cousins, while they embroidered. It was one of the great-aunts, always in black satin with lace falling from a black cap on her portly shoulders, who found a young wife for him, and they had been married from the château. Their son had made a great name for himself; and their daughter had been called after her—who was the great-aunt's favourite—Cécile Léonore. In the salon Maman had a golden cage full of tiny tropical birds, piping, chirruping, trilling, like mice, like tinkling, thread-like brooks. Tempted beyond her strength one day, small Cécile put a hand into the fluttering rainbow and seized a cordon-bleu. Maman found her holding it. There was a penitence that day of bread and water. But the penitence was nothing to the horror that had shot through her little chest as she had stood looking at the bright, warm, still creature lying dead on her palm.

In the garden on a soft June morning, Papa led her by the hand; so tall, so elegant; with favoris, and close-fitting trousers strapped under his shining shoes, and high stock collar. He named all the roses to her and picked a small pink bud and gave it to her and kissed her and said, 'It is like my little Cécile.'

And as the old lady talked, by the dying fire, the radiance of those vanished days rested on her. Her eyes were soft; her lips sweet. She was happy, happy and self-forgetting, Graham saw, and almost forgetful of him, though it was for him she wove her spell; so that, for the first time, beauty came to him from her. He

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title: Template:EB1922/testcases


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 was with her in her childhood; he was with the little Cécile Léonore, as he listened.

The clock in the hall, the brooding, mournful clock, struck ten. It was time to go. 'Yes. I'm afraid it's late. I must go back to Jill,' he said. He rose and stood above her.

'Shall I see you again?' she asked. It might have been indeed that she had reached the end of things and saw her sun sink.

'Yes. Yes,' he promised gravely. He wished he could keep her happy; without presage; with remembrance; with little Cécile in the beech forest. 'There's the portrait. We have that still to finish.'

She gazed up at him. 'We are to finish it?'

'We must finish it.' He saw that they must. For the first time, to-night, he saw that he owed her something.

'Good-night, then,' she said. She asked no question of when his time would be. And she said no word—ah! never a word, of Marthe Ludérac.

'Good-night.'

She rose to her feet and took her stick and prepared to go with him to the door.

'Shall I ring for Joseph?' he asked.

'No; Joseph is in Buissac, with his niece's family. And I will not wait for his return. I am tired. Would you lend me your arm to my room? The stairs at night are difficult for me.'

He gave her his arm and led her out. A night-light burned dimly in a saucer at the turning of the stair.

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 He led her up and she sighed in going, stretching out her hand for the rail. She had aged terribly, he felt it anew, in these last eight days, and on his hard heart there fell a blow of pity, of self-reproach.

At the top of the stair he pushed aside a swinging baize door that gave on a dark passage; airless, thick with the smell of beeswax.

'Now to the right. There is a little flight of stairs,' said Madame de Lamouderie, and as they turned a corner the moonlight flooded in from a small high window and showed him the way. The passage beyond the three stairs, leading down, turned to darkness again, but an open lighted door was before them. The old lady's room waited in readiness for her. When he led her to the threshold he saw that two candles were burning on the toilet-table, a table all looped with muslin over pink and tied with wide pink ribbons. What a picture that would make, the old black figure before the pink, bedizened toilet-table.

And there they paused on the threshold, and Madame de Lamouderie was looking up at him.

'If you would kiss me, once.'

He did not give himself time to think. Had he thought, he might have been guilty of a graceless retreat or a lame apology. Immediately he said, 'But I am honoured,' and though, as he bent to her, he had time for a horrid vision of gripping old hands seizing him, withered old lips searching for his lips, he found, as he kissed her forehead, and then her cheek, holding her by the hand, that he had wronged her indeed. She stood mute; still; as if under an accolade.

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OW Madame de Lamouderie's door was closed and he was in the dark still house; alone. He felt his way along the passage to the moonlit window and then stood perplexed. Was it to the right or left one turned? With hands outstretched, feeling his way, he went forward cautiously, waiting to meet the three ascending steps; but he did not find them and the passage seemed longer than he remembered. A door gave gently to his hand.—Yes; there had been a door.—He pushed it open and saw before him, not the staircase, but a small, white room lighted by one candle. On a bed against the wall a cat lay sleeping. There was a shelf of books; a vase of flowers; a holy-water shell with a sprig of box above it. Opening on a square of mystic blue was a high window, and standing looking out, her arms leaned on the sill, was Marthe Ludérac. She wore a night-dress of thick linen, like a peasant's, and her unbraided hair fell to her waist. Her feet were bare. She did not hear him. So intent was her gaze into the moonlit night that she was unaware of the draught blowing past her into the room. Not until the candle flared and flickered did she lift her arms and turn to look at it; and then she saw him standing in the doorway.

Graham did not move or speak and she, too, stood

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 silent, gazing at him. She was wonderful in her straight hair outlined in light on the blue rectangle of the window. Her face against its background of dark gold was of a pale blue tint and all her form gold and azure. She was like a saint in an illuminated missal. And she was like a young peasant, too, with the unbound hair and the coarse white linen night-dress that came up to her neck and down to her wrists and ankles. It was at last as if he could see her; as if she were a picture set there for him to look at; only even now it was not her face he saw; it was the picture. Then his eyes were drawn to hers. At last he dared to gaze into her eyes. Was it the saint's cold, transfixing repudiation he met there? Or was it the mute, animal acquiescence of the peasant? He could not read the meaning of Marthe Ludérac's gaze; but she stood there, silent, motionless.

Graham shut the door softly behind him and came towards her. The stealthiness of his query was in his tread, and as he thus shut them in, as he thus advanced, she made no sound, no gesture. Then he stretched out his hands to take her and she sprang back from him.

At that every doubt, every thought in Graham merged into the impulse of pursuit. A dark torrent of blood seemed to sweep before his eyes and to obliterate her azure face; but, as he seized her, as it sank before him, he received the meaning of her gaze; and it was not this.

Ah—but this was now his meaning. This was now the meaning of his pounding pulses. She could retreat

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 no further; she had fallen back against the window-sill, and the blue and gold saint, the peasant in her coarse night-dress, was helpless under his kisses. Ravenously he kissed her. Her body was cold and strong under his arms. The cold moonlit air blew in upon them from the window.

Then he heard her saying, as with all her force she resisted him,  ' Sortez:—sortez:—sortez— '  in a suffocated voice.

Terror and fury were in the voice, though it spoke with no divided will, though the hands that thrust him from her were as strong, as untremulous as a peasant's.

He yielded to them, but fell at her feet and clasped her round the knees. 'Tell me that you forgive me.'

Her hands—against his head, against his shoulder—thrust him from her. They felt like iron. This was no courtesan. This was his Eurydice.

'Only say that you forgive me. I am mad with love of you.'

'' ' Sortez! Sortez! ' '' she repeated.

But Graham, hiding his face against her side, clasping her round like a drowning man, muttered savagely: 'You must forgive me. You must say it. You love me and you must say it. I will do all that you tell me. I will even go away—for ever. But I will not leave you now unless I am forgiven.'

'I forgive you. It was my fault as well. Only go,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac.

His arms fell from her. He stumbled to his feet.

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 She would not let him look at her. Her hands were on him and thrust him before her to the door. All was not lost. All was gained. She loved him. It had been of him she had been dreaming as she stood at the window looking out. All her proud silence had meant but the one thing; she loved him; how passionately her silence and her terror showed. But as he heard her turn the lock against him, he felt like a criminal thrust out from sanctuary and abandoned to his fate.

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ILL was walking up through the wet woods above the Manoir. It was still early and the air fresh with rain which had fallen heavily all night. The clouds had rolled away at dawn, leaving a vast immaculate sky. And now the sun streamed forth over the drenched and dripping world with almost summer sultriness.

Two days had passed since the evening when Marthe had come; two days and three nights; but Jill had not seen her again. She had spent the hours of daylight out of doors; but she had not gone to the Manoir. Every morning she got into the car and drove far, far away, seeing new country and all the glory. On the first day it had been inland she had sped, up and over the tablelands, through the great birch woods where sheets of wood anemones grew in the dappled shade of swaying catkins; and yesterday she had followed, high up, the course of the swollen, passionate river and found a ruined castle standing at the bottom of a ravine with torrents wildly wreathing at its foot. She had spent the afternoon there in a strange solitude. An eagle had floated over her as she lay on the grassy ledges of masonry. She had watched a pair of tits building their nest in a hole near by and a flock of tiny mountain sheep, wandering down the valley, looked up at her with little mush-

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 room-tinted faces. She had lain there and thought of Dick.

For these two days she and Dick had hardly spoken to each other. She did not know how he passed the hours; though he went away every morning with his canvases. He had not shown her his work, nor had she asked to see it; for she suspected that Dick's painting was to him what the ruined castle was to her; a place where he could be alone.

But though their days were thus solitary, the nights had brought them near; terribly near, to Jill's apprehension. Their beds stood side by side; by stretching out a hand they could touch each other. And in the middle of the night Dick would speak to her.—'Jill—I'm not sleeping. May I come to you?' A strange voice.

Then, like a little boy, afraid at night, creeping to his mother, he would come beside her and lay his head on her shoulder and she would hold him close. So they would lie, saying nothing, and she knew that she was a refuge to him. But he did not sleep; nor did she; and lying there, her arms around him, she would look over his head at the moonlit square of window and listen to the river roaring outside, and try to remember the days, the years, when they had been happy together. For now they were unhappy.

It was not lack she felt in Dick; it was a terrible, a suffocating sense of overflow rather than lack. He took refuge; and yet the longing in him was to give rather than to receive. He asked nothing of her, ex-

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 cept refuge; he wanted nothing. All that he wanted was to hide in her and to make her feel his love. And nothing in her life had ever hurt like this love and its helpless pity.

She had come this morning to find Marthe. She was determined before they left Buissac to wrest some form of recantation from Madame de Lamouderie; but first she must see Marthe, and she went early to the Manoir to be sure of finding her.

And at the door Joseph told her that Mademoiselle had gone out.

'Gone out?' said Jill. Standing there, looking at Joseph, she knew that he shared her sense of something strange and wrong in this unaccustomed absence. It was in the morning that Marthe had her harp, and all her household tasks.

'Mademoiselle had a bad night,' he volunteered. 'She did not sleep. She has gone into the woods. Médor is with her; she said that a walk would be good for her and Médor. She will be back at eleven to read to Madame la comtesse.';

If she and Dick were unhappy, so was Marthe.

'I will try to find her,' said Jill.

Joseph led her to the gate in the wall and indicated the way that led upwards through the sycamores. When the sycamores were passed, there was a belt of chestnut forest and then the path ran through lighter woodlands of ash, beech, and hazel that climbed the side of a steep valley. The young green leaves sparkled in the sunlight, and Jill saw, down in the valley cleft,

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 the wild, tawny tresses of a mountain rivulet. What wild, sweet beauty everywhere; and with what a heavy heart she saw and heard it! Marthe's heart was heavy, too.

Suddenly, at a turn, the path ran out into a narrow road where a stone bridge crossed the valley, and sitting on the low parapet, her arms laid out along her knees, her eyes fixed on the ground, was Marthe.

Something unspeakably strange came to Jill from her attitude. She was exhausted. Standing within the shadow of the woods to gaze at her, Jill seemed to feel the cold sweat on her brow, the thread-like beating of her sick heart. Or was she reading her own despair into Marthe's demeanour? Was Marthe only very tired after the sleepless night? Was she only listening, as she rested there with Médor beside her, to the wood-wren?

Jill's eyes were drawn up to the little bird. It was poised, high on the branch of a tall tree above Marthe's head, and its wings drooped and shivered in an ecstasy of pleading as it sang out, passionately, the last reiterated notes of its refrain. But Marthe was not listening. In the silence that followed the bird's last cadence, she lifted her eyes and saw who it was who stood there; and Jill felt a cold, dark, heavy gaze rest upon her. 'Then it is true,' she thought. 'Madame de Lamouderie has told her that we know; and the story is true.'—'But not true as Madame de Lamouderie, as Dick, would understand,' came the answering thought, once

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 more, beneath the piercing grief of the acceptance. And she must know Marthe's truth. So she smiled at her. She went forward and sat down beside her. 'You have found the wood-wren by yourself,' she said, smiling on into Marthe's eyes. And now that she thus looked into those beautiful eyes the sense of something heavenly once more flooded her heart. She took Marthe's hand. 'It seems to me that I have not seen you for years and years.'

It was with difficulty that Marthe found her thoughts and her words. 'I imagined that you had left Buissac,' was what she said.

'Without saying good-bye? Oh—come now!' said Jill. She wanted to cry, for that Marthe should have thought this gave the full measure of their calamity; but she uttered her school-girl 'Come now!' and continued to smile into Marthe's eyes.

The bird, silenced for a moment by her approach, resumed its singing; the melodious little ditty, full of the plaintive sweetness of spring, followed by the piping of the strangely urgent, reiterated notes. They sat and listened, hand in hand, and Marthe looked up at him, with her.

When he had finished, she, too, smiled and murmured, '' ' Le petit ange. ' ''

'Yes. That is it exactly. A little angel. And always so lonely; by himself; on tall trees,' said Jill, feeling a strange happiness come to her, from the bird's song, from Marthe's smile.

'But he sings to something,' said Marthe, still smil-

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 ing into her eyes. 'He is solitary, but not alone; like an angel in that, too.'

'Yes; that's it. And I like it so much better than angels in choirs, don't you? Solitary angels—but all singing to something.—Why do I always have such lovely thoughts when I am with you, Marthe?'

'Because you are you, Jill.'

They were sitting hand in hand, looking at each other, and the warbler had again begun to sing over their heads. 'Tell me, Marthe,' said Jill, contemplating her friend, 'have you had lovers?'

Without start or blush, Marthe Ludérac looked back at her. 'Why do you ask?' she questioned.

Madame de Lamouderie had not told her. 'I heard something—in Buissac,' Jill found.

Marthe continued to look at her. 'In Buissac?' she repeated.

'Yes.' Jill nodded. 'Nothing very definite, dear Marthe. But enough to make me—wonder.'

'It would give you great pain if it were true?'

Jill tried to think. It had already given her great pain. 'I should not be less fond of you, but it would give me pain.'

'Why?' asked Marthe Ludérac.

'Why?' Jill repeated. It was strange to be asked why. 'Perhaps because I think of you as set apart.'

'As too unhappy ever to be loved, you mean?'

'No;—no, Marthe. As too beautiful.' Jill struggled to make her thought clear to herself as well as to Marthe. 'Too beautiful to be loved—and then left.

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 A lover leaves you, doesn't he? He doesn't love enough. That's our English feeling, perhaps. If you love a great deal, it can't be lightly. It's something grave. It lasts.' Jill's voice was trembling a little.

'But life may part lovers,' said Marthe Ludérac, and her voice now was cold and dark and heavy, as her gaze had been. 'Love need not be light to know itself measured. What is more grave than to be doomed to part?'

'Yes. That is true.' The sickening grief was creeping over Jill again, but still she struggled to accept Marthe's truth. 'Only—you must hide, mustn't you?—for that kind of love. You must lie. It must be difficult, I mean, to keep it beautiful.'

She had dropped her eyes to the hand she held and she could not raise them. They were heavy with the tears of her acceptance. And more than the bitter grief for the spoiled past was in her. When she heard that cold, dark, heavy voice, it made her think of Dick. As if far, far away, the warbler was singing still; but the happiness was gone.

Then she heard Marthe say: 'I have never had a lover.'

For a moment Jill was almost overwhelmed. Tears blinded her. She turned to her friend. She could not look at her, but she put her arms around her neck and whispered, 'Oh, Marthe—forgive me!'

'My friend. My dear, dear Jill,' Marthe Ludérac murmured. But she had taken Jill's arms and she gently put her away.

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 'Do you forgive me?' Jill whispered, clinging to her hand, and it seemed to her that with the question she had cut Marthe still more deeply, for her voice was quick and short as she answered: 'There is nothing to forgive.' She held Jill from her and turned her head away and fixed her eyes upon the ground, and Jill heard that she was breathing quickly. 'There is nothing to forgive,' she repeated. And they sat thus, for a moment, in silence.

'Let me tell you then,' said Marthe. 'I did not know that echoes of that old story had reached Buissac. Yet it is natural that it should be known. It is natural that it should be believed—of me. It was at Bordeaux, after my mother's death, during the last winter of the war, that I took a soldier into my room for the night.'

'Was he ill? Unhappy? Had he nowhere else to go?' Jill asked, timidly, for Marthe had paused and in her voice was a world of haughty solitude.

Marthe Ludérac glanced at her for a moment. 'You guess the truth, at once; the truth that no one else would care to believe. He was very unhappy and he had nowhere else to go. He was a little permissionnaire and he came on that cold, wet night into the restaurant where I ate. A cheap, poor place; it was my first winter in Bordeaux and I had difficulty in living. All the tables were full, so I beckoned him to come to mine. He came so timidly, like a gentle, frightened dog. I saw how unhappy he was. He had a young, good face, thoughtful, sensitive—with grey

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 eyes far apart. He was a student; not of the soldier type. At once we understood each other, at once he trusted me; and while we ate he told me of his plight. He had come back from the front for his three days and had found his wife with a lover. He had not a word of anger for her. He said that he had never satisfied her. He had never been the man she needed. But there was no more home for him, and all the night before, and all that day, he had walked the streets, dazed with grief. And next morning, at dawn, he must return to the war. So I took him back to my room where there was light and warmth and my bed, and there he slept all night, exhausted, and I sat in the chair, and slept a little, too. When the day came, I heated water for him to wash, and made his breakfast for him and went with him to the train, so that he was not alone among all the others who had wives and mothers and sisters to say good-bye to them. He was killed ten days later. I heard it, long afterwards, from a comrade to whom he gave my address.'

'Oh, my dear Marthe,' Jill murmured. 'Of course it was like that.'

'No; not of course,' said Marthe Ludérac, and her softened look hardened again to the haughty solitude. 'I am not a woman of whom "of course" can be said. I am not a woman who would not take a lover for those reasons you gave. Pride might keep me from him; but not the thought of parting. Life is so dark, so short; if the brightness were there, I do not say that

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 I should not take it. With my poor little permissionnaire; no. But there might have been another man.' And now her eyes met Jill's and the pale, violent blush that Jill had seen before suddenly swept like a tide, from brow to chin, over her silver face. 'I have often longed for love,' she said, looking steadily at Jill. 'Passionately I have longed. Can you imagine what it is to have a heart full of love and always, everywhere, to find oneself shunned? Animals are all that I have ever had. That is why I am perhaps a little foolish about them. There is so much to give, and they must receive it all.'

'But I am here now,' said Jill in a trembling voice. She felt as if she were adrift on a stormy sea. 'I mean—you are loved now. Anyone who knows you must love you:—and you are known.' And as she heard herself say these stumbling words the very air seemed loud with an unuttered name.

And as if she heard it—or feared too much to hear it—Marthe Ludérac rose and said, rapidly, impetuously: 'I wish you had never come to Buissac. I wish you had never seen me. I mean sorrow only;—sorrow; sorrow,' she repeated, fiercely. 'It is the worst of all;—worse than being always alone;—to feel that one can only bring sorrow to those one loves.' She walked away down the woodland path, and it was as if she were leaving Jill for ever, lest she should hear that name.

Jill followed her. 'But you don't, you don't,' she said. She hardly knew what she was saying. 'And if

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 you do—I am glad all the same.—I am glad to have known you, whatever happens.'

Making no reply, Marthe Ludérac went on ahead.

The path ran steeply down among the trees. Below them they heard the rushing of the mountain torrent and saw its passionately hurrying gleam, now here, now there, among the spangled branches. Marthe Ludérac, though she went so swiftly, not turning to look behind, did not forget her friend, for she would pause, when a branch crossed the way, to hold it back for Jill, but Jill knew that the unspoken name separated them as truly as if Graham had walked between them.

Suddenly the Manoir roof appeared below among its sycamores. Marthe stopped short. 'It is my hour for reading. Will you come in?'

Jill hesitated. 'No; not this morning. This afternoon, perhaps.'

It was Marthe now who paused. 'Your husband does not come this afternoon to paint her portrait?'

'I don't know,' said Jill miserably. They stood there; she was still behind Marthe.

'Then, as if forcing herself, Marthe Ludérac turned round and faced her friend. 'That story. Does your husband know?'

Jill took breath. Her eyes on Marthe's were wide. 'Yes,' she said.

'It was he who told you of it?'

'Yes.'

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 'It was she who told him? Ten days ago?'

'Yes.'

'And she spoke of lovers? Not of one only? Not of the little soldier only?—She said that I had taken lovers?'

'Yes,' said Jill. 'But she made him believe that she was sorry for you.'

At that a terrible look crossed Marthe Ludérac's face. It blanched with fury. So white, so flashing was the look that had the old lady stood before her she would, Jill felt, have been consumed.

'Perhaps she believed it,' Jill heard herself faltering.

Marthe Ludérac looked down upon the ground. 'Yes, she may have believed it. I was turned out of the house where I lodged. The two women who kept it are known to the curé here.'

'She is not safe to live with, Marthe,' said Jill in a low voice. 'You must know that already, I think. She's your wounded cat and you took her in from pity; but she bites your hand.'

'Yes,' said Marthe Ludérac. She looked away, down at the Manoir roof; looked for a long time; and Jill saw the passion falling away, pulse by pulse, from her face. It was cold and still as she said at last: 'You remind me of justice.'

'Of justice?—You mean you will turn her out?'

'No; I do not mean that. She is the wounded cat. That is the truth.—That is the truth,' Mademoiselle Ludérac repeated, fixing her eyes on the ground.

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 'And we know why she bit my hand. We know that, do we not?'

'Yes,' said Jill, in the lowest voice.

'I shall say nothing. I shall do nothing,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac. 'I do not think it is she who has surprised me.'

'Oh—but, Marthe!' Jill broke down the barrier that rose between them. It was there; a wall of ice; but she broke it down and seized Marthe's hand. 'Don't misjudge Dick! She is so clever—so horribly clever! She knew how to do it! She knew how to drop in the poison! He has been so miserable.'

Marthe stood still, as if stricken to the heart. 'I do not misjudge him.'

'I mean—See him—Let him explain'—Jill heard herself, unbelievably uttering, while she saw, at last, clearly, that this was what she wanted; for Dick; for Marthe. They must see each other. They must understand.

Marthe did not speak or attempt to draw away her hand. She left it lying in Jill's, inertly, and they Stood there, not looking at each other.

From below, like the sound of a sunken bell in a drowned city, they heard the notes of the Manoir clock, faint and mournful, striking eleven.

'I must go,' Marthe muttered. 'She will be waiting for me. Good-bye.'

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HILE Marthe Ludérac and Jill were in the woods, Graham was painting in the valley road. He had gone out at eight, walking a long way up the valley and finding no subject that could chain his thought. Then he returned, and not far from Buissac set down his easel and began to paint the turn of river that happened to be before him, framed on the right by the distant jut of the promontory. As the hour of eleven approached, a temptation, daily renewed, daily beaten off, assailed him; and this morning he yielded to it. He left his painting materials at the Ecu d'Or and walked up to the Manoir. If he arrived thus, after the reading had begun, she could not escape him. Even if she left the room directly, he would have seen her. He felt now that he could not go on living unless he saw her.

With a sense of the inevitable that was like an hallucination, he entered the pale drawing-room and saw the two women before him; and he fixed his bright, fierce gaze upon them, challenging their right to question his presence. Madame de Lamouderie sat in her chair on one side of the fire and near her, between her and the window, sat Mademoiselle Ludérac, with her book.

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 Graham walked up to them. He took Madame de Lamouderie's hand and bent over it; he bowed to Mademoiselle Ludérac, and he said: 'I felt that I must see my portrait this morning and hear the end of "Dominique." I hope it's not finished yet.'

Madame de Lamouderie was, apparently, too astounded for utterance and no word came from Mademoiselle Ludérac. The only sound that answered him was a low growl from old Médor on the hearth-rug; and there was indeed a strangeness in Graham's voice that the dog's ear might well recognize.

He waited, however, for no reply. He fetched his easel and his chair, placed them; set out his colours, and looked from his canvas to his sitter. And as she met his eyes, half hypnotized, perhaps, the old lady seemed to acquiesce in his audacity. Her head took its prescribed attitude; she folded her hands, placing the right, with its old seal ring and dimmed old diamond, uppermost, as she had been told to do. And then, after a moment's interval, Mademoiselle Ludérac resumed her reading. From where he sat Graham, to-day, could see her without turning his head.

He listened, while he painted, half unconsciously, and his mind was drawn to the words she read by her voice rather than by their meaning. For she had reached the burning love-scene where, for the first and last time, Dominique takes Madeleine into his arms: and it was with difficulty that she read. Alien to his sympathies, and almost to his comprehension, as were the standards that sustained and separated the

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 lovers, Graham listened with a growing anxiety and astonishment, so terribly did the human truth of helpless passion flame through the chill, retrospective style. How could she read this scene, he asked himself; how could he listen? Was it not their love, their embrace that she read of? Steadily, slowly, her voice went on, but with a betraying bitterness as though the words touched her lips with gall and wormwood, and Graham, as he heard that bitterness, felt that a hot flush mounted to his forehead. A small, snake-like smile curled the corner of Madame de Lamouderie's lips as she watched them both.

The burning scene was over. Madeleine had escaped. The hero, following the fashion of his day, managed to faint: '' ' Je tombai roide sur le carreau. ' '' It almost took one back to Saint-Preux and Julie. 'Never mind. He knows what he's about, Fromentin,' thought Graham, and he took breath and looked hard at his canvas, and there came to him, as an after-taste, the visionary quality of the book; passion looked back on from a far distance; danger remembered in security; youth seen from middle age; and no depiction of present anguish could have had that savour of tears; tears never again to be shed; never to be forgotten.

'How is Madame Graham?' asked Madame de Lamouderie with a harsh suddenness.

'She is quite well again, thank you. Haven't you seen her?' Graham found a bright, hard voice.

'No, I have not seen her. You have been more fortunate than I, perhaps, Marthe?'

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 Mademoiselle Ludérac glanced at her from her book. 'I met her. Just now.'

'You are indeed fortunate in your meetings, Marthe; but too secretive. I should have asked you for news of our charming friend had I known you so favoured,' said Madame de Lamouderie, while the snake-like smile curled up towards her nostril.

Poor little Cécile Léonore of the beech forest; to what vast distances was she not sunken! Graham could well interpret the glassy stare of the great black eyes. Since they had last met, since he had given her that farewell kiss, the very firmament above her had altered and every star was now against her. He looked at her with a quelling eye as though he faced a tigress. He even dared to smile at her. 'Be good this morning,' he said, 'and we shall make great strides.' But it was with effrontery he spoke, for how could she fail to read his gaze? 'Yes; I am changed to you,' was what it said. 'Yes, she has changed me. Because of her I now know you to be false. And I am desperate with love and you must bear with it that it should be so, since we understand desperation in love, you and I.'

And even as these words passed through his mind he saw that they liberated him. She read him. He could not conceal himself from her. So let him at last drink to his fill of the longed-for beauty. He turned his eyes from Madame de Lamouderie and looked deliberately at Mademoiselle Ludérac and her face as she sat in profile to him was at last his own. He saw her. He saw her to his utmost need. The daffodil was within

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 s his hand, a flame that he possessed and sheltered.

She did not even glance at him. She raised her book and began to read again.

Still leaning back in his chair Graham had not taken his eyes from her face.

'Is that the end?' asked Madame de Lamouderie.

Mademoiselle Ludérac sat there under her eyes and under Graham's eyes.

'That is the end,' she said.

'But there is another chapter.'

'It says no more of them. They are parted,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and now she raised her eyes and looked at Graham, a poised, sword-like look; and his eyes, at last, dropped before it.

'Ah, that we do not feel credible, do we!' said Madame de Lamouderie, her face distorted with its sneer. 'Lovers in romances may assert that they do not see each other again and that the embrace is not renewed; but in life such resolutions are always broken; is it not so, Monsieur Graham?'

'I hope so, for their sakes,' said Graham.

'Bravo! Bravo! You are honest. Do you not admire such honesty, Marthe? Courage, after all, even

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 brutality, are all that is needed with us weak women. Is it not so, Marthe?'

For a moment Mademoiselle Ludérac sat silent. Then, without a word, she rose and left the room.

Graham, automatically, took up his brushes. He looked at the old lady and, deliberately then, with a malignant amusement for her plight, touched in the sneer that twisted her lip and nostril. Only for a moment did she control herself, only for a moment wait to note what his next move would be.

'You have driven her away, you see,' she said. 'The last thing you wish to do, is it not?'

'The last thing,' said Graham, smiling, as he placed a cruel accent. 'But we were both at fault. Our conversation isn't really fit for her ears, is it?'

'Not fit for the ears of your Saint Cecilia? Is that what you would say?'

'Precisely.'

'And it was her you came to see? In spite of my warnings?'

'It was her I came to see;—very much in spite of your warnings.'

'Why do you not follow her then?'

'Because she is my Saint Cecilia and I do not wish to displease her.'

'You will not displease her. That I can promise you. I can promise you, Monsieur Graham, bold and brutal as you are, that she is as eager as you are for that embrace.' But as she saw the look of rage that crossed his face, her own look altered. The sneer dropped.

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 She drew herself upright. A baleful splendour of demeanour fell upon her. 'Mademoiselle Ludérac is her own mistress and mistress of this house,' she said, weighing her words and braving his eyes. 'I am powerless to do more for her safety than I have done. One thing only I must demand. Itismy right. That I shall not be put into the position of a pander, a go-between. I forbid you, categorically forbid you, to carry on your intrigue under this roof. My relation to your wife is my authority. Even you will hardly dispute it. Do not carry on your intrigue under this roof. The woods at this season offer many convenient bowers for lovers.—But perhaps I need not tell you this.'

Graham resumed his painting. 'You know,' he remarked, after a silence, and with a singular calm, 'it's a pity to do what you are doing. I understand you. I've an immense tolerance for you. Even your lie of the other night, I can swallow. I ask you now to be merciful to yourself. You know what she is as well as I do. She's a holy saint. And it's hard for you and me to believe in her, I own. But why not face it? Why not grant me the right to worship her? Why not be content to help me to come here and look at her?'

For a moment his calm, his terrible detachment, checked and arrested even the heaped-up waters of the old lady's fury. Then they broke forth and she contained herself no longer. 'Not in my presence!' she cried, and leaning forward she thrust her face at him. 'Not in my presence! I will not bear it! To be ignored for that little peasant! To be put out by that little

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 prostitute! It was not a lie! Ask her if it was a lie!—She will not deny that she took soldiers into her room at Bordeaux. I am a liar, am I? I am to be content to be a liar and despised by you, while she is to be your holy saint? No! Monsieur Graham! No! One at a time, if you please!' And stumbling out of her chair, knocking over the easel as she pushed past him, Madame de Lamouderie hastened, with all the galvanized rapidity of her passion, out of the room, and as she went Graham heard that she was sobbing.

He sat still where she had left him for some moments. 'Poor old devil,' was the thought that came to him.

The canvas lay face downward on the floor; as he picked it up, Madame de Lamouderie's head came upside down and the gaze of the eyes, thus inverted, had a startling malignancy. Righting it, he examined the canvas. No damage had been done; but should he ever finish it now? Should he ever again see the Manoir? He wondered for a moment, standing and looking round the pale, mysterious room, where Eurydice, Saint Cecilia, had first appeared to him, printing its aspect on his mind. Then he put away his work, as if, indeed, he were to return, and went into the hall.

Joseph stood there, waiting for him. 'Mademoiselle is in the garden and asks that Monsieur should go to her there.' These were the amazing words he uttered.

As he passed through the garden door, Graham felt that Joseph shot a dark glance after him.

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O step from the house into the garden was like passing from a vault into some strange, fierce resurrection. The great sun flaming in the midday sky was like the sound of trumpets. Aromatic odours exhaled in ardour through the quivering air. So hot, so bright, so clamorous was the outer world that Graham for a moment paused and looked about him in a sort of stupor.

Then, at the further end, he saw Marthe Ludérac sitting on the bench against the garden wall. She was waiting for him, and he remembered that autumn day when he had first seen the garden. This was the presence, this the consummation, for which it had waited. She rose as he approached her and stood there to receive him.

Cold and white she stood, under the hot sunlight; remote; repudiating. Ah, but how unavailingly she fixed those haughty, unappealing eyes upon him. Her eyes, her hands might repulse him and oceans might flow between them; and years; but they were for all time intimate. They knew each other. Under the blue window with the moonlit air blowing in upon them she had been as close as a consenting lover. He remembered how close; and so did she; he remembered

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 his kisses; as she did. Not all her will could obliterate those moments.

Bareheaded, he stood in the path before her and every least detail of her sunlit face was his. The barrier in his heart, and in hers, was down, and his senses were unafraid of her. A bitter ecstasy filled his heart.

She spoke to him. 'I have asked you to come. It is not for my sake. It is for your wife. I love her. For her sake I ask you to pursue me no longer.'

It was a strangely worded request.

'I've not pursued you,' said Graham. Old Médor, lying beside the bench in the sun, lifted his head as he heard his voice and uttered a low, uncertain growl. 'Not unless you call this morning pursuit. All the rest has been chance. You know it.'

'I do not know it,' said Mademoiselle Ludérac, and he was now to hear how fierce, under its quiet, her voice could be. 'You came before in the morning, when you were sure of finding me. You came to seek me on the island—though you had no need to give me the message. You have pursued me from the first, and though it was by chance that you found your way to my room the other night, it was not by chance that you entered and insulted me.'

'No—no;—you can't say that. That's unworthy of you;—unworthy of us both,' Graham muttered, eyeing her. 'Even then you understood. Even then you forgave; because you longed for me as much as I longed for you.'

Marthe Ludérac's face took on an arctic pallor. 'I

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 understood you then. What you say of me is true. But I did not know what I know now; that you came to me believing me to be a light woman.' And with no change of tone, though more swiftly, more scornfully, she added, glancing beyond him, 'Control yourself, I beg. Madame de Lamouderie is at her window watching us.'

Let her watch them! He blessed her malignancy. It had brought him here; set him in this miraculous solitude face to face with Marthe Ludérac. He saw now why she had sent for him. She would have risked no such encounter had she not thought herself securely armed against him.

'So you heard that. I wonder where,' he said. 'No; I don't mind her; but I'll be careful. That story parted me from you for ten whole days. Whether I really believed it or not I can't say. I think I tried to believe it, because it seemed to part us; to save us. And I've struggled—though you may not believe it of me. Then I found you again, and when I saw you, on that night, it made no difference. Had it been true, or false, my conduct would have been the same.'

Now she was alone with him indeed; more surely alone, despite the watcher at the window, than the other night, for every shield against him was gone. And as he put the truth before her, her eyes, for the first time, under the pressure of his gaze, faltered. She looked away from him. She was terribly white.

'So there's an end to all disguises,' Graham said.

'Let us walk,' said Marthe Ludérac, after a moment.

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 They turned and walked down the central path towards the house. Old Médor, casting a reproachful glance at his mistress, got upon his feet and limped at their heels. At the open door, where he had remained standing, Joseph discreetly withdrew, and there, at her upper window, sitting in full view, was Madame de Lamouderie, and her ancient face, marked like the moon's with cavernous shadows, looked like a skull set up to stare at them. Let her stare. Something dark and dangerous in Graham's nature rejoiced in the sinister fairy-tale background of his love. Here he walked in the sunlight with his heavenly Eurydice and all Hades might yawn before them, all its furies shriek, for any faltering they could bring to his exultant heart.

'So there's an end to all disguises,' he repeated; and they paused at the end of the path, invisible now to the watcher above. They are gone. There's nothing between us.'

He was looking straight into those wonderful longsought eyes; eyes of wide, windswept, lonely dawn, with its slender moon, its morning star. Never on earth had there been eyes like Marthe Ludérac's, and to believe them attainable was as if in the fairy-tale one stretched forth one's hand and found that one could touch the silver moon. 'So why keep up defences?' he said, and he almost smiled at her. There had been no tenderness between them. His smile was hardly tender now. It possessed rather than caressed her.

'We keep them up for Jill,' said Marthe Ludérac.

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 The helpless physical closeness of the other night was as nothing compared to this avowal.

'You mean—it's only because of Jill?'

'How should it not be?'

'We belong to each other—but for Jill?'

Marthe Ludérac turned away her eyes and made no reply.

'It's not as if I didn't love Jill,' Graham muttered. 'It seems to me that I've never loved her so much.'

'That is because you feel her menaced,' said Marthe Ludérac.

They went on then, up a mossy side path where the sun seldom fell.

'Listen to me,' said Graham. The path was narrow, their shoulders nearly brushed as they went, their hands could, with a slight gesture, touch; but they walked on evenly, sad Médor following. 'That may be true. But we must face the truth. You've changed my life, as I've changed yours. We are all menaced. But what Jill would want first of all from us is the truth. And the truth is that you and I belong to each other. You must come away with me. Jill is young and strong and she has her home and friends. I've taken her away from everything she loves; it's my life, not her own she lives. It will be horrible for her; but it won't all be loss; and she'd rather lose me than keep me, loving you.—We must leave Buissac together. At once.'

They had reached the further end of the garden and were come to the wall again and out into the sun. 'It is

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