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Title: Claire Ambler
Author: Tarkington, Booth [Newton Booth] (1869-1946)
Date of first publication: 1928
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 15 November 2018
Date last updated: 15 November 2018
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1578

This ebook was produced by
Al Haines, Mark Akrigg, Cindy Beyer
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.






CLAIRE AMBLER

by Booth Tarkington




    To J. N. F. and H. S. F.




TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Part I. The Birth of Thought

  Part II. Raona

  Part III. "Twenty-Five!"




CLAIRE AMBLER





PART I. THE BIRTH OF THOUGHT




CHAPTER I


Mr. Nelson Smock, arriving at his cottage in Maine on Friday afternoon
for his weekly recuperation from Wall Street, paused in the hall and
looked into the living room before going on in search of his wife. His
four children, three daughters and a son, were in the room; but none of
them paid any attention to him or even seemed aware of his presence.

This was because of their absorbing interest in a girl of eighteen who
sat upon a sofa facing the doorway, chattering to them. She was a
stranger to him, and his absent-minded definition for her was, "just
another of these summer flappers." He meant nothing intolerant; his own
daughters probably were listed under that head in the minds of casual
observers, he supposed; and he felt no disapproval of the young lady on
the sofa, though he did wish that his children might so far break the
thraldom in which she held them as to give him at least a greeting.

Only one of them, however, so much as turned a wandering eye in his
direction. This was his son, Nelson, a serious sophomore. Young Nelson
glanced toward the doorway, and undoubtedly his eye perceived that his
father stood there; but with this the youth's perception appeared to
stop; there was no evidence that the optic nerve conveyed any
information to the brain, and the eye returned with a visible ardour to
the young lady upon the sofa. The father was a little disappointed; he
felt that he worked hard to keep his children bountifully supplied with
all they asked for, and it seemed to him that they might well show
enough appreciation to welcome him after his five days of absence. He
realized, of course, that it was customary for them to see him return on
Friday afternoon; that they were used to both his absence and his
presence, as well as to himself and everything he could do for them;
whereas, on the other hand, the young lady upon the sofa was a newcomer
in their society and evidently appeared to them as a sparkling novelty.
Wondering why they thought her important, he looked again at her, but
discovered no more than he had before: she seemed indistinguishable from
a hundred others.

What he saw was a comely, childlike little face, pink and thin and
piquant, with light-brown hair cut short upon the back of the head, but
elsewhere left three or four inches long and waved. As for the rest of
her, there was a childlike body in a close, revealing, pale-green silk
tunic that left her arms bare from the shoulder and her legs apparently
bare from just above the knees down to her sleek white slippers, which
had three-inch heels. This latter nudity was only an illusion, however;
for thin silk stockings, as near the colour of her skin as possible,
almost impalpably protected her; but she was inconsistent enough to seem
desirous of more protection. From time to time she mechanically pulled
at the small skirt of her tunic to bring it down over the exposed
knees--a manifest absurdity, since the skirt, when sat upon, had no such
elastic possibilities. Plainly, this was only a gesture and an inherited
one, an ancestral memory or instinct alive in the race long after the
use for it has gone.

She had other gestures, too--a great many of them; some with arms and
hands, some with her shoulders and back, some even with her feet; and
all of her constant motion was immature and impulsive, or at least so it
seemed to a middle-aged observation from the doorway. Yet she was not
lacking in an April-like young grace nor in a youthful shapeliness; but
that was all the owner of the cottage could see--except the cigarette
airily waved in her thin young hand as she chattered. He was not
favourably impressed by the cigarette; but his daughters were smoking,
too; and he knew he had nothing useful to say, or even to think, about
that. As for the young creature's chatter, he could make nothing of it
at all; so he gave up this momentary problem and went on in search of
his wife. When he found her, not five minutes later, in a garden behind
the house, the picture of the girl on the sofa was already merged in his
mind with dozens of other new memories, all insignificant, and he did
not even ask who she was.

So lightly did the man over fifty almost instantly set aside as trivial
what had become the most important thing in the life of his only and
treasured son. Young Nelson sat upon a stool and looked humbly up to a
beglamoured and honoured sofa that was to him the seat of all beauty,
grace, and wit made incarnate and gloriously visible. For three roseate
days he had known the incomparable damsel, Claire Ambler, and although
both of them had at first been formal, not calling each other by their
first names until their acquaintance was well along toward half an hour
old, Nelson was sure, by the morning of the third day, that he had
fallen in love at sight. Now that it was afternoon and he had been for
hours aware of his passion, he saw only wonders before him, with no
imperfection anywhere.

In this he bore some resemblance to the girl upon the sofa; for she saw
no imperfection in herself. Yet no one thought her egotistical; she
often spoke of her faults, though without naming them. On the other
hand, she saw no definite perfections in herself; in fact, she had no
appraisement of herself either the one way or the other, and it may
truly be said that she did not think about herself. Probably it would be
as true to say that neither did she think about other people, nor about
anything. She had feelings that she believed to be thoughts; she had
likes and dislikes that she believed to be thoughts; she had impulses
she believed to be thoughts; her mind was full of shifting and flying
pictures that she believed to be thoughts; it was also full of echoes of
what she had heard and read, and these she usually believed to be
thoughts original with her. Words were fluent upon her lips without her
knowing or wondering how they got there; yet she was sure they expressed
truths and she easily became angry, or grieved, if they were challenged.

She knew what she did, but not why she did it; though she was ready with
reasons, and could even less well bear a challenge to her conduct than
one to her words. Thus, at seventeen, when she had her long and
beautiful tresses shorn away, she was irritated with her mother for
lamenting. Her hair was cut off, Claire said, because ridding herself of
such a burden was "sensible"; and she believed this, not knowing that
she bore the civilized disfigurement merely because it was borne by
other maidens of the tribe, as mechanical and unwitting as herself.
Again, she had been irritated with her father when he questioned the
scantiness of her skirt; for this brevity, too, was "sensible," she
said, being once more unaware that she had no motive except to follow
the fashion of her kind, and did but manifest a mob contagion.

It seemed to her a long, long time since she had been a child, so long
that she now had little interest in children--not much more than she had
in old people--and both children and old people, like workingmen in
flivvers, she felt, belonged to the duller and rather annoying classes.
The only interesting persons in the world were of about her own age; in
fact they were the only people who seemed to her actually alive; and yet
even they were not wholly alive in the full sense that she herself was.
That is to say, the universe consisted of herself and of impressions
made upon her. All other people, varying dimnesses and brightnesses,
belonged among the impressions. There were tombstones in the cemeteries
just as there were names and dates in books of history; but there could
have been no actual life, such as she knew in herself, until she came
upon the earth. All had been darkness until her perceptions began to
inform her that she was alive, and even her own childhood now seemed
shadowy. Full, broad light had not shone until a comparatively recent
time, when she was about sixteen. And at that, all parts of the earth,
except the spot where she was, had still but a vague illumination. She
did not really believe that the sun was radiant over China while she
slept.

To honest young Nelson, worshipping her, she seemed a living being,
indeed; but to her Nelson was a pleasantly coloured shape that made more
or less agreeable noises. His present expression, however, was entirely
agreeable to her, and she was in a degree aware of its yearning
significance. She was not wholly aware of what it meant, however,
because she did not realize what his feeling meant to Nelson himself;
she had no concern with that, nor, indeed, had she any perception of it.
She was aware only that it proved how effective her attraction was; it
would be useful to her at dances and elsewhere, and she hoped to produce
similar expressions upon the faces of other boys. Already she had
experience in the art of making them wear this look, and although it was
a look not always becoming to them and sometimes made them obviously
uncomfortable, it seemed to be, on the whole, the principal thing for
which Nature had intended them.




CHAPTER II


Nelson's father had failed to comprehend the interest of the group of
young people in what he thought of as the girlish chatter from the sofa.
It seemed to him that just as she looked like any other "summer
flapper," so also did she chatter like any other little creature of her
kind; and in this he had no perception of how "original" and special an
individual his children and their friends were finding her. This was to
be her first season here; but she had spent summers at other resorts,
and was giving them a lively account of the important people of these
places. She had intimately known several celebrities of the first
water--one of them, indeed, was a captain at Nelson's university--and
so, to these listeners, she spoke of grandees of their own world. If Mr.
Smock and some of his contemporaries had occupied the living room and
young Nelson had come in to find them listening to an elderly stranger
gossiping briskly of important financiers, the boy would have thought
the session as dismal as it was inexplicable, and perhaps might have
wondered how old men all contrived to look so much alike. He had never
in his life seen a girl in the least like Claire Ambler, he was sure;
never had he heard a voice so golden; never had he met a woman with so
large an experience of the world; never had he been dazzled by so much
brilliancy of mind.

He tried to express his bedazzlement as he walked home with her to her
cottage in the late afternoon sunshine. "You cert'n'y gave us all a good
time," he said seriously. "I couldn't begin to tell you the kick I got
out of it myself."

"How?" she asked.

"Well, I don't know; but anyhow I did. It's kind of like something new
coming into our lives here, or something like that. I mean the way you
talk; or what I mean, I mean the way you say things. You got a way of
saying things that's kind of got a kick in it. Anyhow, for me it has, I
mean."

She looked at him gravely, seeming much interested; but for a time made
no response; and, at intervals bumping into each other slightly, they
walked slowly on over the uneven country road.

"I mean it," he said. "Honest, I really do mean it. I mean there's lots
of kick in what you say."

She pulled a leaf from a hedge, put the stem between her lips, frowned
as in perplexity; then asked: "How do you mean?"

"Well," he said, "I mean there is. I don't mean it's only in the way you
say what you say; there's more to it than that. F'r instance, when you
say something, you say it in a way that's got a kick in it; but I mean
what you got to say's got a kick in it too. You see what I mean?"

"I don't know," she said thoughtfully, and gave him a meek glance. "Do
you mean you don't like the way I say things, Nelson?"

"No, no, no!" he protested, troubled to have given her this harsh
impression. "I mean just the opposite. I mean I like it so much I get a
big kick out of it. Honestly."

"Honestly?" she repeated; and the word seemed important to her.
"Honestly, Nelson?"

He was distressed and also a little aggrieved by what might have implied
a doubt of him. "I don't know what cause I've ever given you," he said,
"not to believe in my sincerity."

"But I didn't mean that, Nelson. I was only trying to get at just what
you meant."

"I see," he returned, mollified. "I wouldn't like to think you doubted
my sincerity, because I think if you aren't sincere you just about as
well mightn't be anything at all. Don't you believe in sincerity,
Claire?"

"Indeed, I do. If one isn't genuine, then what _is_ one?"

"There!" he exclaimed. "That's what I mean. I mean when you say things
like that. I mean that's when I get a kick out of the way you say 'em
and out of what you're saying too. Don't you understand what I mean,
Claire?"

Strangely enough, she still seemed to be a little uncertain. "I didn't
talk too much at your cottage, did I? Of course, as it was the first
time I've been there, and just meeting your sisters, perhaps you think
I----"

"No, no!" Nelson interrupted earnestly. "They were nuts over you,
absolutely nuts! I knew they would be. You're altogether differ'nt from
the rest o' these girls around here, Claire, and that's why."

"That's why what, Nelson?"

"It's why they're so nuts over you," he explained. "What I mean, I mean,
well, you've had so much more experience of life than they have. You've
been around lots more places, and about all _they_ ever been is just
this one old place--and home, of course, and school, and maybe a trip
abroad or somewheres. But what I mean about you, Claire, it wouldn't do
'em any good, prob'ly, if they _had_ been around like you have. What I
mean, they wouldn't know how to take in things the way you have. The
trouble with them is they wouldn't know how to. You see what I mean,
don't you, Claire?"

"I'm not exactly sure," she said. "But I suppose prob'ly that _is_ the
trouble with a certain amount of people. Do you know what I believe is
the trouble with most people?"

"What is?" he asked solicitously, almost breathlessly; for her tone was
deeply serious, and he felt that matters of grave import were before
them. "I've often thought about it; but I never did get it worked out in
my mind to suit me just right. You can see that most people _have_ got
something the matter with 'em; but you can't tell exactly what it is.
What do you believe it is, Claire?"

"Well, I've thought about it a great deal, too," she said. "I used to
feel it was a question there'd never be any answer to; and sometimes it
would make me--oh, I used to get absolutely morbid about it!"

"Did you?" he said gently, touched by the depth of her
conscientiousness. "I never got that way about it myself, prob'ly
because I haven't got a deep enough nature. You don't any more, do you
Claire?"

"No," she said. "Not about that, anyhow, because I'm older now and I
think I've worked out the answer."

"Have you? How?"

"Well, princip'ly by observation."

"I think that's wonderful," he said. "What was the answer, Claire?"

"Well, it's this," she said, and they walked more slowly. "I believe the
trouble with most people is, they never think."

"You mean----"

"Yes," she said. "I just don't understand their not doing it; but if you
turn over the people you know in your mind, how many of them can you
find that ever really think?"

Nelson became emphatic, as in a great enlightenment. "By golly, I
believe you're right! I believe you've got it worked out--that _is_ the
trouble with most people. They _don't_ think."

"It's so strange," Claire murmured, a little sadly. "You'd think they
_would_ think----"

"But they don't," Nelson said. "That's the trouble with 'em; they don't
think."

At this she appealed to him, as to a superior wisdom. "Why is it,
Nelson? I've wondered so much about that. You're a man, and you ought to
be able to tell me. Why is it they don't think?"

"Well, I suppose it's prob'ly because they won't take the trouble to.
Either that, or maybe because they simply don't know how."

"I believe you're right," she returned, and she gave him a quick little
glance of deferential appreciation. "I think that's rather a wonderful
idea, Nelson. Only a person that does think could work out an
explanation like that."

Nelson's colour heightened, he was so pleased to believe her kind
opinion of him warranted. It seemed to him that this was a beautiful
walk he was taking in delicious air and sunshine with a companion who
understood with him the deeper things of life, the things that he really
cared for. "The way I look at it is simply this," he said. "The trouble
with most people is they don't even realize there _is_ such a thing as
thinking. So--well, when you get with a person that does think, well,
you get a kick out of it."

"Yes," she agreed thoughtfully. "I think that's true."

"Of course it's true," he said; and he went on: "That's what I meant
about the way you were talking, up at the cottage. I knew you were a
girl that does think, and you don't often meet with one that does,
because what do the ordinary run of 'em care for? What do they talk
about? Why, nothing but what they _do_ talk about--just all this and
that, till you get absolutely sick of listening to 'em. All in the world
they got to go on is simply their sex appeal, and in the long run what
does that amount to? All you got to do is analyze it to see it doesn't
amount to anything more than just a part of their maternity instinct,
and you get awful tired of it. What I mean, you take two people that got
more than mere sex appeal, and suppose they meet in a place like this,
the way I've met you here, Claire, well, I mean there ought to be a
pretty good kick in it." He paused, and then, with increased
earnestness, he added, "I don't care for _anything_ that hasn't got a
kick in it. Do you feel that way, too, Claire?"

She inclined her head gravely, assenting. "Yes; I think life isn't worth
living, practic'ly, unless you get a kick out of it."

"I knew you'd feel that way," Nelson said in a low voice. "I knew you
would." Then, emotional after the confirmation of this affinity between
them, he walked on in silence, believing that she shared his feeling.

But here he pathetically failed in comprehension of his new friend.
Claire was wondering which of two dresses she would wear that evening to
a dance at the Beach Club; all the way from Nelson's cottage, she had
been trying to decide between them; she was only secondarily aware of
Nelson, though she had seemed to be giving him a stirred attention. Her
share of the conversation had been not much more than the repetition of
a familiar formula, yet he found it anything but mechanical. For in this
she was exercising an art possessed and habitually practised by most of
her sex. Nelson's own mother used a variation of it frequently, at
breakfast, when she gave a perfect response to her husband's discourse
without listening to it or disturbing in the least the housewifely
planning that then always occupied her mind.

Without speaking again, the two young people reached the driveway gate
of the house Claire's father had leased for the summer; and here they
paused. "Well----" Nelson said, a little huskily, for his emotion had
not subsided but increased. "I suppose we couldn't go on a little way
farther? Prob'ly you want to go in?"

"Want to?" she echoed, and, as she wished to look over the two dresses
before making a choice between them, she decided against any
prolongation of their walk. "I don't know why you should put it that
way, Nelson," she said. "One doesn't always do what one wants to."

"But it isn't near dinnertime yet. If you do want to, I don't see
why----"

"Men never see why," she said gently. "Because they can do what they
like with their own time, they always think a girl can."

He sighed. Her tone implied important duties that could not honourably
be evaded, no matter what her desires might be; and he understood that
her strong inclination was to extend their walk. "Well," he said, "I
wish you could; but if you can't----" He leaned against one of the
pillars of rough stone that served as gate-posts. "Anyhow, I'm glad
we've had this talk. There's not many girls I'd care to talk to the way
I do to you, Claire, because they wouldn't understand. In the first
place, what I mean, I _wouldn't_ talk to 'em the way I been talking to
you, and in the second place, if I did, they wouldn't understand what I
mean."

"Oh, yes, they would," she said generously. "Plenty of them would,
Nelson. You mustn't be so cynical."

"I'm not exactly cynical," he returned, much pleased. "But it's true. I
don't know another girl here that I'd talk to like this or that'd
understand what I mean if I did."

"Oh, Nelson! Not one?"

"Not a single one."

"Well, I do," she said. "Anyhow, if there aren't any around here I've
known girls other places that would."

He conceded a little. "Well, maybe there are girls other places that
would; but anyhow you're the only one here. That's the reason I wanted
to say something about--about----" He hesitated; then went on: "Well,
what I mean: You take two people that are the only two people that
understand each other in a place like this, and that really care about
the same things that the others don't care about, well, what I mean, I
think two people like that, if they were at a dance like to-night f'r
instance--and knew they cared about the same things the way we do--well,
we could walk down to the rocks and sit there most of the time, if you'd
like to. I hope you'd like to as much as I would, Claire. Would you?"

His tone was wistful, yet not without confidence in a favourable reply,
for Nelson felt that a definite and exquisite tie had been established
between them. He was surprised and troubled, therefore, when she did not
immediately reply to his question; and after a few moments he repeated
it, a little huskily. "You would, wouldn't you, Claire?"

Still she hesitated. That evening was to mark her first appearance
before a general collection of the younger summer inhabitants of the
place, and her ambition was by no means limited to the capture of an
individual. She wished Nelson to be an ardent suitor for her favour, and
by his ardour an incitement to competition--in fact, a herald or
advertiser for her; and she hoped to be kept too busy, even this first
evening, to leave the dancing floor at all. But as the most useful
diplomatic reply to his question was difficult, she fell back upon a
repetition of something she had just used.

"Girls can't always do what they want to, Nelson."

"What?" He was puzzled. "Why, you could go down to the rocks with me if
you wanted to, couldn't you?"

"Not to-night, I'm afraid."

"But you could!"

She shook her head sadly. "No--not if I'd promised my mother."

"But why should she----"

"She's old-fashioned, Nelson."

"Oh, dear me!" he said, much depressed. "But anyhow----"

"Anyhow we'll see a lot of each other," she interrupted cheeringly, and
she gave him a swift, bright look that lifted him to a state of adequate
consolation. "Gracious!" she cried. "If you knew all I have to do!" And
with that, she said, "G'by!" and flitted lightly up the driveway, while
he stood gazing after her in precisely the fond condition she wished.
She would see him again, she knew, in about four hours; and she now
economically put him out of her conscious thought just as a cook who has
set a dish in the oven to bake for some similar length of time, puts it
out of her mind and turns to other matters. She went briskly to the
selection of her dress, while young Nelson, having watched her out of
sight, reverently picked a leaf from the ivy that climbed one of the
gateway pillars, and then walked slowly homeward, sighing dreamily. He
had lived a long time, he felt, much of it occupied with dreary
illusions; and at last he was not only in love, but had found a nature
that corresponded to his own. The great harmony had been established
between them: she cared for the same things that he did.




CHAPTER III


He was all the more in a sighing condition because of Claire's devotion
to the tasks that called her indoors. He understood them to be useful
and altruistic--perhaps aiding her mother with household management,
possibly performing secretarial duties for her father; at any rate,
something better than the occupations of his sisters, who never did
anything, he was convinced, except for themselves. Everything about this
girl was beautifully admirable; hers was a deeper nature than that of
other girls; and she was so conscientious that she wouldn't even break a
promise unreasonably extorted by the old-fashioned prejudices of her
mother. Nelson recognized a noble loyalty; but he was a little gloomy
about it, too. He had a foreboding of rivalry; there were three or four
dashing contemporaries of his whom Claire had not met; and it was partly
with them in mind that he had suggested the departure to the rocks. In
particular, he felt an uneasiness about the effect upon her of two of
his close friends.

Platter Thomas and Bill Reek were "all right among men," Nelson thought;
but he did not like their manners with girls. Platter and Bill were too
informal; they were boisterous, coarse-grained, off-hand; and they were
incapable of making fine distinctions; they would not understand that
Claire Ambler wasn't the kind of person one slaps on the back. He had
seen Platter and Bill presented to a girl on the beach and immediately
take her into the surf and hold her under water as a means of
establishing, without intermediate tediums, a proper camaraderie. The
fact that girls seemed to be flattered by the attentions of the boorish
pair, Nelson attributed to a swift and commodious motorboat, their joint
property. The motorboat would not dazzle a girl who had seen so much of
the world as Claire had, he thought; and yet her very conscientiousness
might prevent her from declining invitations. Moreover, Platter and Bill
would be certain to tell her about the boat as soon as they met
her;--they never failed to drag in an apparently casual mention of it,
and he had a premonition that he was going to find them annoying.

Herein he was a true prophet; they were so annoying, in fact, that he
spoke of them to Claire before the evening was half over, and he showed
feeling: "I s'pose they been bragging to you about that old tub o'
theirs," he said severely, as he danced with her. "They never meet
anybody new they don't begin right away to blah-blah about it. I hope
you didn't flatter 'em by seeming to take any interest in it--I mean
after this afternoon."

"After this afternoon, Nelson?" she asked vaguely.

"Yes," he said. "You know. I mean our caring for the same things. You
know."

"Oh, yes," she returned quickly. "Of course."

"You meant it, didn't you, Claire?"

"Meant what?"

"Well--you know. I mean about our caring for the same things. Didn't
you----?"

"Yes, Nelson."

"Well, since we found that out, don't you think it makes a difference?
What I mean: when two people care for the same things, why, I shouldn't
think one of 'em would seem so excited about meeting a lot of new men,
and look in their eyes, and seem so eager and pleased when they cut in
when we're dancing together and everything like that. What I mean: if I
didn't remember this afternoon, the way you been behaving to-night I
wouldn't even know we _did_ care for the same things."

"But we do, Nelson."

"Well, then," he said reproachfully, "I think you might act more like
it, Claire. The way you been acting to-night I wouldn't know whether you
cared for the same things or just never thought about anything in the
world except mere sex appeal. You haven't promised you'll go out in
their old boat with 'em yet, have you?"

"Promised who?"

"Platter Thomas and Bill Reek."

"Which ones are they, Nelson? I've met so many and I get their names
mixed up."

At this he was relieved. "Well, I'm glad you do," he said. "So you
haven't."

"Haven't what?"

"Haven't said you'd go out in their boat."

"Let me see." A slight frown, as of perplexity, appeared upon her pretty
brow. "There were three boys who asked me to motor with them, and one to
go canoeing----"

"What!" Nelson interrupted. "You didn't----"

"Oh, yes," she said, remembering. "And there were two that talked about
motorboating. One wanted me to go to-morrow morning and the other in the
afternoon."

"Listen!" Nelson said. "You didn't promise you would, did you?"

Surprised, she looked up at his flushed and troubled face. "Well, they
all seem so nice and cordial----"

"All?" he gasped. "All! D'you mean you're going to do what _all_ of 'em
asked you to? After this afternoon?"

"But you don't want me to snub people, do you, Nelson? Just when they're
anxious to be friendly and make me feel at home in a strange place?"

"Listen!" he said. "You mean you told _all_ of 'em you _would_?"

"But what else could I do, Nelson?"

Nelson looked desperate. "You did, then! After this afternoon! You said
we care for the same things and then you go ahead and get yourself all
dated up like this!"

"But Nelson----"

"It's terrible," he said. "It's a terrible thing."

"But we do care for the same things, Nelson, don't you believe it?"

"Well, then, if we do, what makes you go and date yourself up for all
this----"

But here he was unpleasantly interrupted. A muscular hand descended
heartily upon his shoulder; Mr. Platter Thomas was "cutting in," and
claimed the lady for his partner in the dance. Nelson was left with a
sense of injury and no answer to an incomplete question. The sense of
injury seemed to be located at first at a point in his lower throat;
later, it spread to his chest, and then progressing rapidly, saturated
his whole person. Breathing heavily, he determined to "cut in" himself,
and insist upon a direct reply; but in this resolve he was anticipated
by competitors. Indeed, he was thrice forestalled; and, when his chance
came again, he had no more than said, "Listen! If we do care for the
same things----" before another brisk slap on the shoulder warned him
that his time was over.

He was unfortunate; he had bestowed his affections upon one who almost
instantaneously became the outstanding belle of that sector of the New
England coast. Claire was seldom able to dance more than the full length
of the room without a change of partners, and, from Nelson's point of
view, the worst thing about this was her visible enjoyment of an odious
popularity. Flushed, laughing, radiant, she turned sparkling eyes to
every new applicant, even though he might be one of the mere loutish
hobbledehoys of sixteen who cluttered the floor instead of being kept at
home and sent to bed, as they should have been, Nelson thought.

"Pups!" he muttered, watching two of these pursuing to "cut in," while a
third danced rapidly away with her, evading them and evading Nelson too.
"Pups!" And he said worse of them: "Mere filthy pups!"

For gradually, as the evening wore away, his disposition became soured.
Whenever he was able to dance with her for more than a moment, he tried
to obtain an answer to his question. "Claire, after this afternoon----"
he would begin, and once that was as far as he got with it. Again,
later, he said, "But if we _do_ care for the same things, Claire----"
and as she interrupted him there to say, "But you know we do, Nelson,"
he found only time to add, "Then why don't you act more like it?" She
was not put to the trouble of a reply, as the noisy young Mr. Reek
intervened.

True, as Nelson stood against the wall while she danced by with others,
she would often give him a lovely, wistful glance. "Don't you _know_ we
care for the same things?" this tender quick look seemed to say. But he
had begun to doubt her seriously, and at last, stung by a little mistake
of hers, he decided to hold himself aloof. This mistake was of no great
importance, except to Nelson; she was so careless as not to observe
until too late that he was standing beside his former friend, Mr.
Thomas, and as she danced by them, she flashed to Platter one of those
lovely little glances identically wistful. For an instant Nelson thought
himself the recipient; then the fatuous expression of Platter and
Claire's slight confusion were together all too enlightening.

Immediately Nelson became more completely than ever a mechanism. That is
to say, of course, he was like any other human being under the impulsion
of strong feelings, a stoked engine compelled to motion. The metal
engine will move as long as the fuel lasts; the engine of human
appearance will move as long as the feeling lasts; and the difference is
that the metal engine is (except for accident) guided by human
intelligence while the human engine is not. Nevertheless, just as rails
are provided for the metal engine, so are there tracks that the human
engine must follow--tracks thus travelled for thousands of years by the
mechanical humans stoked by common emotions. To Nelson it appeared that
of his own choice he became haughty and indifferent to Claire; he
believed that he selected this manner himself; for he had no means of
knowing that this and his subsequent performances, as well, were only
the operations of a machine running inevitably along over tracks so worn
that they are among the most ancient.

Thus, running smoothly on rails--though in his own belief the way was
rough and painful--he danced no more that night with Claire, nor so much
as looked at her, nor bade her even the most frigid or careless
good-night, nor any good-night at all; but in his own mind said farewell
to her definitely and for ever. He would have nothing more to do with a
girl who had only pretended to care for the same things that he did;
and, to make her fully aware of his indifference to her, on the
following morning, he risked his life.




CHAPTER IV


Almost any body of water with a depth of a few feet, even an inland
creek, will afford the means to those desirous of taking such a risk;
but an ocean is unquestionably the handiest thing for the purpose. The
North Atlantic, in particular, offers opportunity during the glassiest
calm of a summer day as well as when distorted by winter tumults; it is
necessary only to reduce to the proper degree the staunchness of the
craft in which one goes to sea. Upon this point there have been
arguments; many coastwise seafarers holding that no canoe whatever is an
appropriate vehicle for these waters; while, on the other hand, there
are records of notable ocean voyages made in canoes. But not in such a
canoe, all will agree, as that selected by young Nelson for his gesture
of indifference to Miss Ambler.

It was a dainty slip of a boat, pretty in pea-green and gold, fourteen
feet long, with green-and-white cushions: it belonged to the youngest of
Nelson's sisters, and she kept it upon an inlet to be used there as an
adjunct to moonlight and a banjo. Upon its bows, in gold letters,
twinkled the unromantic name, Peanut, never intended for salty
incrustations; but salt already dimmed the gold leaf, that morning, when
the Peanut spanked itself through the harbour mouth and fantastically
stood out to sea. The breeze was from the east, and Nelson knew that
Platter Thomas would take the Caliph--the Reek and Thomas
motorboat--straight into the breeze, because thus the consequent
splashing would be more impressive to a passenger. This was the
canoeist's unhesitating cynical conviction, and therefore, desiring to
prove to Claire his utter indifference to herself, he paddled straight
into the wind and was two miles off shore before the Caliph came in
sight.

Of course he expected to show her more than his indifference; he meant
her to see a greater man than either of the owners of the Caliph. And
here a little mystery is reached. It is difficult to understand why he
felt that going to sea in a fourteen-foot canoe proved his indifference
to her in particular; though his thought that the voyage would show her
his superiority to Platter and Bill is more comprehensible. If she
admired daring, his position, compared to that of people in a forty-foot
vessel, was admirably perilous; but to explain his feeling that a
special indifference to her was thus exhibited, it can only be supposed
that she was to understand herself included as a part of his life, and
he was certainly proving his indifference to that.

For the morning sea had become lively. That is, it was pleasantly choppy
for a forty-foot boat, heavy in mahogany and brass, but rather showily
rough for a canoe; and the roughness increased with the freshening
breeze. In fact, long before he heard the powerful exhaust of the Caliph
behind him, Nelson knew he was committed to the eastward course, which
took him always farther off shore; he was committed to it because he
didn't dare to turn round. He knew that he couldn't trust the Peanut
broadside in the trough, which was growing deeper and deeper, richly
green and crested with sparkling white; and, since he had no choice but
to go on, though the farther he went the more threatening was the sea,
his situation began to present an aspect dishearteningly like the
realization of a nightmare. He had intended his gesture to be
magnificent, but not suicidal; and now, as more and more it bore the
latter appearance, he heard with relief the exhaust of the Caliph
growing rapidly louder. The glittering motorboat overhauled him; then
slowed down and came to its lowest speed, moving alongside the Peanut
and not ten feet away. Platter Thomas and Claire sat side by side in the
control cockpit, and she was laughing merrily.

Nelson, paddling with tired arms, gave them only a cold and hasty side
glance; but there was more than one reason for him to keep his eyes
strictly ahead.

"Nelson!" Claire called. "You haven't any idea how funny you look! All
you need is a pussy cat and plenty of honey wrapped up in a five-pound
note! Where on earth'd you find that ridiculous little boat? Oh,
_look_!" She grasped her host's arm, and Nelson was well aware of this
impulsive friendliness of hers, even though he perceived it with the
tail of his eye. "Do see its name?" she cried. "It's called the Peanut."
And, thoroughly comprehending that she was the reason for the Peanut's
present voyage, she uttered peal on peal of girlish laughter.

Platter Thomas was more serious. "Yes," he said. "A peanut's about all
it is too." He addressed Nelson sternly. "Look here; you ought to know a
thing like that hasn't got any business outside the harbour. You ought
to know that much, anyhow."

Nelson did know that much; he knew it poignantly; but when Claire
laughed at him and grasped Platter's arm, his bitterness became more
acute than his anxiety. "Run along!" he said. "That old gas-tub'll blow
up if you ever get a back fire. Run along!"

"Look here!" Platter said. "You go on back where you belong. That
canoe's about a quarter full o' water right now, and if you stopped
heading her up long enough to bail, she'd capsize on you. Haven't you
got any sense?"

"Run along," Nelson said. "Run along and play you're a sailor!"

Platter was irritated. "Look out or I will!" he retorted; but, disturbed
by his more humane impulses, he made a magnanimous offer. "Listen! On
account of your not having any more sense than to come out here on that
shingle, I'll let you climb into my after cockpit; and then Claire and
I'll take you back inside the harbour, where you belong. You can stay
there and pretend you're out in the real ocean and have just as good a
time as you think you're having now. Hurry up and climb aboard; I can't
fool with you all morning."

"Run along!" Nelson said. "When you want to really learn something about
boats come around and ask me; I'll give you beginners' lessons free."

His tone, like Platter's, was not one of good-natured badinage, though
it assumed to be that; there was a goading superiority in it, intended
to exasperate. Small boys often take this tone with one another; and
older boys, even of eighteen or twenty, are so little older that
sometimes they use it, too--most frequently, no doubt, in the presence
of a courted, pretty young creature like Claire. Nelson and Platter were
really insulting each other, though affecting to engage in casual
raillery.

The fact that they did affect at least the air of raillery is an
indication that civilization is progressing: two young sprigs, rivals
for a maiden's favour in the sixteenth-century, would have made no such
pretense; daggers would have been tapped, but in spite of our increasing
civilization, young rivals still sometimes go to life-and-death lengths;
and Nelson deliberately went to that length now. He profoundly desired
the security--indeed, the salvation--of the Caliph's after cockpit; he
knew that if he rejected it and the motorboat departed, his position
would be critical; yet he did reject it. Flopping wildly upon the
rushing seas, into which he kept the Peanut headed by only the most
watchful effort, he nevertheless successfully concealed his real
desperation. "Run along!" he said. "Run along and pretend you're scarin'
the jellyfishes to death!"

Platter, stung, looked down upon him darkly. "All right," he said.
"Don't blame _me_ if you drown!" With that, he slid forward a strip of
brass upon the wheel; the Caliph's exhaust again began to roar and the
boat slapped forward into the chop. A moment later it was tossing the
foam from its risen bows and beginning to speed; Nelson and the Peanut
receded quickly as Claire looked back at them.

"Dear me!" she said, still laughing. "He certainly thought he was
razzing us, didn't he? How funny he does look--exactly like a
grasshopper on a cucumber rind! Such splashing and lurching! You'd
almost think he was going to upset."

"He will if he isn't careful," Platter said crossly. "Well, it'd be his
own fault. When you offer to help people at sea and they won't take it,
you're supposed to let 'em alone; it's a kind of an unwritten law or
something; but anyhow he's prob'ly all right. That's his sister's canoe
and he ought to know how much it'll stand. He'll turn around and go back
as soon as we're out of sight and he can't show off any more."

"I guess so," she returned; then she pointed to three small black
triangles lifted at the moment from the surface of the water. "Aren't
those sharks?"

"Yes, they are."

"They're going the other way, aren't they, Platter?"

"Yes, toward shore."

She laughed delightedly. "How thrilling! If they keep on they'll pass
right by Nelson. You s'pose he'll see them? You s'pose it'll make him
nervous?"

"Do him good if they did," Platter said severely, and then added, with
little hope for his former friend's chances of improvement: "But they
never do hurt anybody and I guess he knows it."

Here his surmise was correct. To the best of Nelson's information the
sharks in these waters had never attacked a living person and were not
maneaters; nevertheless there is a striking difference between knowing
such a thing on shore, or on a staunch vessel, and knowing it in a
fourteen-foot canoe undecided between swamping and capsizing. For the
three sharks did indeed hold their course toward the coast; Nelson did
indeed see them; and they did indeed make him nervous, though without
doing him the "good" so securely prophesied for him by young Mr. Thomas.

"You get away from here!" Nelson said angrily to the three triangles
when they were revealed to his view almost directly ahead of him, and
only a few short waves distant.

They continued to approach, placidly sinister.

The Caliph was now so far away that the two figures in the cockpit were
indistinguishable. The boat appeared to be no more than a small brown
arrowhead, flying upon two little white wings of spume; and Nelson knew
that he himself and the Peanut had become invisible to the Caliph. His
human loneliness upon the vast water all at once seemed a dreadful
thing; and the next moment, when he saw the three dark fins close
together and shining wetly in the dip of the wave just beyond the
Peanut's bow, uncontrollable panic seized upon him suddenly and
completely.

"I told you to get _away_ from here!" he shouted fiercely.

Then, forgetting his urgent need to keep his paddle every instant to its
proper service, he swept it forward through the air in a gesture
threatening the three ominous triangles. The bow of the Peanut
immediately swung round into the trough and the little boat, caught upon
its side, received a cargo of water and half capsized, half sank. Nelson
went down into the cold salt water, gasping, "Oh, my gosh!"

Mentally, he had an insufferably crowded moment beneath the surface. He
felt excruciating annoyance, hatred, and an anguish of revulsion. The
annoyance was with his own folly, which he had the pain of realizing
fully, under water; the hatred was for Claire; the revulsion was from
his own recent dramatic emotions--from all that had led him to offer
himself as a drowning breakfast for three sharks.




CHAPTER V


Then he got his head out of the splashing water and one hand upon the
side of the canoe, which was not wholly submerged. It gave him a slight
support, enough to sustain him when he paddled with his other hand. The
three triangles were not to be seen; but he had no need to fear them,
nor indeed, to fear anything; for, on such a day, there are more keen
eyes along that coast than landsmen at sea suspect. The waters there are
like the Sahara, where Arabs and camels appear miraculously from the
vacant expanses of sand. Both sea and sand, where the stranger sees
nought else, are incredibly peopled.

A beating in Nelson's ears grew louder and more definite; it was the
hard voice of a one-cylinder engine in a lobster fisherman's dory--a
dory of the colour of the sea, a dory much the colour of its owner. "I
see you when you come out the habbuh," he explained, as he helped Nelson
to climb aboard. "'My godfrey mighty!' I says. 'Them summuh people do
lean to fancy ideers about whut's a good vessel to navigate in.' Had my
eye on you and wan't surprised what happened. Didn't reckanize you,
Nelson. I wun't spread it on you if you tell me why you done it."

"Didn't have any sense," Nelson muttered, so abject was his mood. "Guess
I found out I never did have any."

In this he meant more than the rescuer perceived; he meant that he had
risked his life to impress a worthless girl for whom he now felt the
sharpest distaste, asking of destiny no greater boon than that he should
never see her again. He thought of her with something like horror; and
after they had emptied the Peanut and taken it in tow, he was glad to
leave the scene of his idiocy and to be heading for the sane and
undramatic shore. He wished to be far from the path of the Caliph on her
return to the harbour.

That fast and hardy motorboat, however, speeding back with almost the
accuracy of a bee over her outward course, passed within fifty yards of
the spot now so loathsome to Nelson, and made a troublous discovery. The
dory owner and Nelson had fished two of the Peanut's cushions out of the
water, but could not find the third, nor the paddle so carelessly
misused by Nelson. The Caliph, higher in the air, and with a greater
field of vision, found both. It was Claire who saw the green-and-white
cushion.

"Something ahead to the left," she said. "It's just under water; but a
little of it sticks out. Let's see what it is."

Platter throttled the engine down, then threw out his clutch; the Caliph
lost headway and lay heaving beside the water-logged green-and-white
cushion against which bobbed and snuggled a yellow paddle. Platter's
mouth opened dismally.

"My goodness!" he exclaimed. "Say!"

"What's the matter?"

"They're his. They're Nelson's."

"But you don't--you don't think----"

Platter swallowed heavily. "I told him he had no business out here in
that canoe. I told him he didn't. I told him he hadn't any sense. I told
him----"

"Platter! Do you mean he's _drowned_?"

"No," he said. "But--but--well, it begins to look kind of queer."

"Oh!" she gasped. "How awful! How _awful_!"

"It begins to look pretty queer," Platter repeated. "It certn'ly does."

They sat staring incredulously over the side of the boat at the bobbing
cushion and paddle; and for a long and disturbing minute neither of them
spoke again. Then she put a trembling hand upon his arm. "Ought
we--ought we to've made him come with us, Platter?"

"That's what everybody'll say, I guess," he answered huskily. He
coughed, and his tone became querulous. "You heard me warn him. You can
prove I did. You heard me tell him he had no business to be out here in
that----"

"Platter!" she cried, interrupting him, in sharpest distress. "You mean
you think if anything's happened they'll blame _us_?"

"I guess they will."

"But why? How could people be so terrible? We didn't have a thing to do
with it--not a thing! We _told_ him it was dangerous for him to be out
here in that canoe; we _begged_ him to get in our boat."

"Yes. I know; but they'll say----"

"It's just horrible!" she said, and she began to cry. "We tried to make
him come with us, and if something's happened to him it was absolutely
his own fault, and if people--if they could be so mean and
cruel--if--if----" Agitation overcame her; she failed of coherency and
could get no further with her meaning.

"Well," Platter said presently, "we don't know. Somebody _might_ 'a'
picked him up." But he gulped as he said it; and he added, "Of course it
does begin to look kind of queer."

"And they--they'll blame us?"

For reply, he made an ominous motion with his head, not trusting his
voice; and with that, Claire's weeping became an audible sobbing.
Platter sat silent, still gazing at the cushion and paddle; but after a
time this inaction became intolerable to him. He took a boat hook from
its fastenings; and with a little difficulty got the paddle and cushion
aboard. Then his passenger asked brokenly, "What you--what you doing
that for?"

"We got to," he answered. "We got to take 'em to--to his family."

She protested. "I can't! I just can't! Have we _got_ to?"

"Yes," he said doggedly. "We got to." He stared with sombre eyes at the
blue coastline; then drawing a long breath, he pushed forward the clutch
lever, and slowly advanced the throttle. The Caliph moved forward with
the running seas. "I guess if it's true the whole place'll go sour on
us," he said. "They'll treat us like a couple o' murderers all summer."
Then he added desperately, "Well, whatever they do, we got to stand it."

"I can't!" she sobbed. "I can't! I can't!"

But she knew that Platter spoke the truth. What awaited them on shore
must be borne; and in this realization Claire suffered a sharper pain
than any she had yet endured in the whole course of her life. For,
though she did not know it and felt that she had lived much and at times
suffered much, she had never, hitherto, borne anguish at all. She had
endured little achings and some mortification while her teeth were being
straightened; she had been through difficulties and discouragements at
school; she had wept softly at the funeral of a great-uncle when a
quartet sang "Lead, Kindly Light"; but, until to-day, the worst thing
that had ever happened to her was a light attack of scarlatina. She had
contracted it a week after she "came out," just before the Christmas
holidays, and she had wailed piteously to her mother that she was
"missing everything!" But though she had no suspicion that her life had
been a child's bed of roses, giving her no opportunity to learn anything
worth knowing, she was wholly unprepared to be blamed for the drowning
of a troubled suitor. For she knew well enough that it was on her
account that he had come out into the open sea in the Peanut.

In justice, it must be said that if Nelson had been less arrogant when
the Caliph offered him help, she might have spared more thought than she
did for the pathos of his struggles in the water and for the probable
grief of his family. But pathos does not attach itself to the memory of
an overbearing person; and so her shocked imagination was fully occupied
with miserable prophetic pictures of her own shattered summer. The
season's career, so triumphantly begun last night, was already a ruin;
she would be coldly looked upon; she would be pointed out with harsh
disapproval; and, what was sheerly unendurable, for the next week or
two--her mother's sense of good taste might insist upon longer--she
could not even go to any of the dances. It was conceivable that the
young people of this new place, at the outset so cordial, might "drop"
her; and, shuddering, she faced a pariah's tragedy.

"Platter!" she moaned. "I can't go back! Turn the boat around. I can't
go back!"

"Got to," he said. "We got to go through it."

At that, overcome by the thought of the bitter injustice awaiting her,
Claire again sobbed aloud. Platter, occupied with his own apprehensions
of injustice, proved to be unsympathetic.

"Hush up!" he said. "Gosh!"




CHAPTER VI


The Caliph sped into the harbour entrance and swished through the still
water to the floats before the clubhouse, where two attendants, dressed
like sailors, roped it in its accustomed berth. Nelson, still thoroughly
damp, had just landed from the much slower dory; and he paused upon the
veranda steps looking down icily upon the arrival of the Caliph. For a
moment neither Platter nor Claire saw him, and as she stepped out upon
the float Nelson perceived that she had been crying. Moreover, in the
cockpit there lay his paddle and the Peanut's cushion, and he understood
what must have been their significance to those who discovered them.

His severity was shaken; he saw that she still wept, and that her thin
young shoulders were hunched and bowed. Grief was there; was it for him?

Then she saw him, and her startled eyes grew round; a brightness came
upon her face. She rushed to him, running over the swaying floats as
fast as she could. She seized both of his hands and pressed them to her
breast. "_Nelson!_ Oh, thank heaven! Thank heaven!"

"What for?" he asked gruffly; but he was touched. Nay, he wavered. Once
more they seemed to care for the same things; once more she seemed
adorable.

In her agitation she spoke exactly what she felt and much too straight
from the heart. "What _for_?" she cried. "Why, we thought you were
drowned and everybody in the whole place would blame us for it!
Everybody'd 'a' said I was to blame; I know they would!"

The revelation was complete and so was Nelson's disillusionment. He
tried to pull his hands from her; but in the happiness of her great
relief she held them but the tighter, and then, in his renewed revulsion
he forgot to be a gentleman.

"So that's all you were thinking about! It didn't matter a darn thing
about my getting drowned and my father and mother and a few things like
that!" He used a terrible word. His great-grandfather, under similar
circumstances, might have caused a lady to faint by addressing to her
the epithet, "heartless coquette." Nelson's generation has less care of
its English. "Leggo my hands," he said. "You Prom-Trotter!"

Staggered, she released him; and then slowly, her cheeks burning and her
eyes fiery with the endured insult, she went through the clubhouse and
walked up the dusty hill-road toward her cottage. "Prom-Trotter!" She
had lost him, lost the impetus his competition would give the others,
and that could be borne; but the rage she felt--like the anguish that
preceded it--was intolerable. Anyone passing her would have thought the
hill too steep for her, though she could easily have taken it at a run.
She had grown pale, and her breast heaved with her tumultuous breathing.

"He dared!" she panted. "He _dared_!"

Again tears were hot upon her eyelids; she clenched her small hands, and
bit her tremulous lower lip to keep it still. Self-pity and hatred
filled her. "I wish he _had_ drowned! I wish those sharks----"

In her mind's eye she saw Nelson struggling in the cold salt sea and the
three grim fins approaching hungrily. "Eat him!" she imagined herself
saying. "Eat him!" This time, she willingly accepted the responsibility;
but she got no comfort out of it. She got no comfort out of anything;
she was fiery with anger, yet helpless in a keen misery.

Then a strange thing happened to her. As she imagined Nelson in the
water she seemed to see his scornful eyes looking at her with all the
bitterness that was in them just now when he insulted her. Suddenly, and
not knowing how it happened, she realized that Nelson was a person, a
being like herself, full of himself as she was full of herself. He was
not just some impressions made upon her senses, not just something for
her to use; he was as much a person, in fact, as she was. Moreover, in
this revelation she understood that he had suffered; that she had been
nearly the cause of his death; and that to die meant as much to him as
to die would mean to her.

She stopped short, looking up blankly at the warm noon sky above the
brow of the hill. "Oh, my goodness!" she whispered. "He was right!"

She was dazed, stricken with her bewilderment and her unhappiness; what
had happened to her appeared to her as nothing short of tragic. On the
contrary, she should have been full of a new delight; for the thing that
had just befallen her on the hillside was of a prophetic beauty; it was
the beginning of her life as a being independent of her mechanical self.
Out of her rage and pain and the hot pressure of old, old instincts and
urges, intelligence was being born.

For the first time in her life, she had just had a thought.





PART II. RAONA




CHAPTER VII


At Raona, that ancient Mediterranean town on a cliff ledge halfway to
the sky, there is one of those romantic hotels that once were
monasteries. The pedestrian comes to it by flights of stone steps
leading down from sixteenth-century streets; he enters a cloister where
there are oleander trees and an old pink-and-white-marble fountain; then
he crosses a groined corridor with a pavement of red tiles worn uneven
by centuries of monkish treading, and walks out into a sunny garden on
the top of a precipice. The garden is murmurous with bees, with the
faint swishing of the slow, turquoise sea a thousand feet below, and
sometimes, perhaps, with a quiet English voice reading the Odyssey to an
invalid drowsing in the tremulous shade of feathered palm trees. Nothing
could be more appropriate than such a reading, moreover; for the sea, so
far below, is the very water traversed by Odysseus as he sailed nearer
to Scylla and Charybdis; and Mr. Eugene Rennie, an American
villa-dweller in Raona, coming into the garden upon a bright March
morning in search of an enfeebled English friend of his, was pleased to
find him thus entertained by an attendant spinster.

"I mustn't interrupt you, Miss Orbison," the visitor said, as he seated
himself upon a painted iron bench beside them. "Really, this is just
what I persuaded your brother to come here for. It's gratifying to me to
find that on your very first morning you've discovered the exactly
proper thing to do. Won't you go on with the reading?"

The invalid protested. He was a long, eager-eyed, brown-haired man whose
extreme thinness of body was perceptible even under the heavy rug that
enveloped him to the waist. "No," he said. "My sister has had enough of
reading this morning, and so have I. Ulysses has been dead a very long
time and I have been nearly dead a longer, I think; I'd like to hear
something of people who are more alive. Last evening after you brought
us up from the station and got us installed in our cells, I contrived to
hobble into the refectory for dinner and so had a view of our fellow
guests in this extraordinary house of entertainment. It seemed to me I
never saw a crew of cosmopolites more provocative to my curiosity. Can
they actually be as interesting as they look, or is it the background?
The fact that we sleep in the cells of dead monks, and have tea in their
abbot's corridor, may lend an exotic tint to people who would appear
commonplace enough elsewhere; but they do seem coloured by romance here.
Who in the world are they all, Eugene?"

"Who are they all?" the American repeated, and shook his head. "I drop
in here for tea sometimes; but I usually don't know many of the hotel's
guests and so I can't tell you definitely much about them--which may be
the better for you, my friend."

"The better for me?" the Englishman repeated, a little perplexed. "How
'better'?"

"Because where you have no restraining information you can indulge your
fancy. Yonder, for instance--that fat, black-bearded man by the pergola.
Why does he wear thick white gloves in the warm sunshine? Since I can't
tell you anything about him, you are at liberty to imagine any past for
him you like. Obviously, that black-bearded man is a sleeked-up
scoundrel who made himself wickedly rich out of Arab slave raids with
Tippoo Tib thirty years ago, and it is the simplest thing in the world
to see that he keeps his gloves on to conceal a telltale scar."

The invalid laughed. "I should say he wears his white gloves to show the
rest of us how fashionable he is. But how about that sort of thing?" A
movement of his head directed Rennie's attention toward two dapper young
men who had just come into the garden and stood upon an upper terrace,
where they paused to look about them. "I think I've seen something
unpleasantly like those on the Parisian boulevards at night; and one
could imagine a slave-raiding future as well as past for them."

The slight frown on his forehead was repeated upon the brow of his
American friend. "I'm afraid one could," Rennie said, and his glance at
the two young men showed an increasing disfavour. "That pair I do happen
to know." Then, as if to confirm this information, the two dapper young
men simultaneously caught sight of him, and, removing their brightly
ribboned hats of soft white cloth, saluted him with a quick yet solemn
inclination of the body from the waist.

They were thin and rather small, of pallidly swarthy complexions and
shining black hair that was like jet shaped into waves. Each had a long
and pointed nose, thin cheeks and noticeably glistening eyes, to which
each had unnecessarily added the glitter of a monocle upon a black cord.
The English invalid, still frowning, mentioned this adornment.
"Monocles! Why in the world do they do it?"

The American laughed. "That's the fault of you Britishers. You carried
the monocle over the Continent and even to outflung relics of history
like Raona, and the impressionable Latin peoples, at first petrified by
it, afterward perceived its advantages as a symbol of distinction. Not
everyone can wear a ribbon in his buttonhole; but there are no
restrictions upon the single eyeglass. The two Bastoni brothers yonder
took them up last year when they began to attend the tea dances at the
Salone. That's a species of casino we have here, though we wish we
hadn't."

"Is that all they do--dance at the Salone?"

"Almost," Rennie answered. "They come from Cabrania near here, and all
I've ever heard of their doing, except dancing and mixing rather
nefariously in local politics, is selling their grandmother's jewellery.
Now and then, as a great favour and with great secrecy, they sell a
brooch or a ring--'family heirlooms'--to ladies they've danced with.
They buy the jewellery in Naples, I believe; but they dance
exquisitely."

"No doubt," the Englishman said. "They look as though they cut throats
exquisitely too. You speak of them as Latins; but they appear to me as
something rather Saracen."

"Yes, probably," Rennie agreed. "It's a mixed blood hereabouts; most of
the people have a Saracen mingling by inheritance."

"It seems so," the invalid said; and he grunted. "Wolfish look it gives
'em." He turned his head toward the sea. "I think there are other people
here I'd prefer to meditate upon. There, for instance."

He nodded toward the railing that enclosed the garden, and protected
absent-minded strollers from walking over the rim of the precipice. It
was a scroll of wrought-iron, black against the distant hazily twinkling
stretches of sea visible from where they sat; and an American girl,
slowly crossing the garden, paused and put her small gloved hands upon
the railing, leaning over it to look thoughtfully down upon the surf far
below her. Standing so, she was a graceful figure, and the Englishman
found her charming.

"How prettily she's put herself in the precise centre of the canvas!" he
said, for by chance she stood at the end of a short leafy vista, and was
thus, to their view, neatly framed in shrubberies and a low arch of
vines trained overhead. "She's like a lovely silhouette imagined by the
artist in wrought-iron who made the railing. The scrollwork seems to
spring from her, carrying on her own delicacies of outline; and with
that little green knee-long skirt fluttering against a faded blue sea
the colour of a Leonardo background, she's the most appropriate thing I
could imagine for a Mediterranean garden on a precipice. Yet how
completely she's an American, Eugene! One never mistakes your
compatriots for anything else. She has the American profile that the
most charming of your young ladies all contrive to obtain--especially
the straight little nose that has the piquant effect of turning upward
without actually doing it. I suppose, alas, she talks through it?"

"My dear Charles Orbison!" Rennie exclaimed. "How careful you British
are never to miss a chance of proving the stubbornness of your race!
Early in the nineteenth century you got the legend established among you
that we're all Yankees and all talk through our noses; so you'll believe
it forever, no matter what your ears tell you. As a matter of fact, the
young lady yonder has studied music in Paris; she sings really well, and
when she talks doesn't talk through her nose. Neither has she been at
the pains to learn how to chirp like a vociferous little bird in
imitation of ladies in your own island. I'm sure Miss Orbison will
forgive me."

"Quite," Miss Orbison returned serenely. "It's the most perfect
description of my own manner of speech. But since you decline to admit
that the pretty young creature yonder talks through her nose, I think
you must have been listening to her."

"Yes, a little. She's a Miss Ambler."

"'Amber' instead of 'Ambler' might have been better," Orbison said. "To
give the colour of the lights in her hair, I mean. I observe that she's
not only an American but an heiress as well."

Rennie laughed. "Of course all American girls abroad are heiresses! Why
do you think Miss Ambler particularly one?"

"The monocled Saracens," Orbison explained, with a gesture toward the
two Bastoni, who were descending from the upper terrace. "At sight of
her they became instantly a trifle more wolfishly glittering. They are
coming down upon her--but I must say she doesn't seem averse."

Miss Ambler, in fact, appeared to be delighted. Turning from the sea,
she waved her hand toward the two young men, smiled with eager
cordiality and called to them some welcoming words in Italian. That was
as far as she got in their own tongue, however; for she fell back upon
French as they came nearer her, and in that and some fragments of
English, the greeting was completed. Each of the brothers formally
kissed the back of her extended hand; then the little group turned to
the railing, and the girl began to chatter in phrases from the three
languages just employed, though the sound, and not the meaning of what
she said, was all that came to the trio looking on.

"Shouldn't you offer a maiden from your own shores a rescue, Eugene?"
the Englishman inquired. "That's too nice a little girl to be playing
Red Riding Hood so gayly."

"She won't be eaten," his friend rejoined. "She's twenty-one, and as for
my offering a rescue, American girls don't encourage rescues on the part
of middle-aged strangers--though I'm not wholly a stranger, it's true.
Her mother brought letters to me and they've been to dine with me once
or twice since they came to Raona three weeks ago. Mrs. Ambler is a
widow; the daughter yonder is her only child, and both of them are
seeing this part of Europe for the first time with an eager inexperience
I should call quite perfect."

"That may be," Orbison said. "But surely even the most inexperienced
mother would make some excuse to call her daughter away from two such
young men as that."

"No; she wouldn't," the American returned. "Mrs. Ambler would never call
her daughter away."

"You don't mean the mother might encourage your Saracen friends?"

"No: but she wouldn't be at all alarmed about them and probably thinks
them 'delightfully foreign.' Besides, she's an American mother and far
too well trained ever to call her daughter away."

"I dare say," Orbison murmured discontentedly. "But after all, a girl of
twenty-one is still something of a child, and if she has a mother
trained not to interfere--well, I hope your patriotic confidence that an
American girl is equal to anything may be warranted, Eugene."

He paused, listening to the cheerful sound of Miss Ambler's chatter. She
was eagerly hurrying forth upon the air an overcrowding multitude of
words, emphasizing most of them, yet breaking them continually with
interjected syllables of laughter, and accompanying them with an almost
uninterrupted pantomime of gestures. And this voluble pantomime of hers,
as the invalid noted, was not descriptive; her gestures pictured
nothing; but were merely motions expressing liveliness, good will, and
the desire to be entertaining. "Great heaven!" he said with sudden
vehemence. "Wouldn't you give a great deal to know just what's inside
that pretty little head of hers? That child's as animated for those two
sleeked wolves as if they were young Bayard and young Galahad. Why does
she make such a to-do over them? Is it because Americans on foreign
shores are helplessly unable to distrust even sinister appearing
strangers? Or is it----"

But here he interrupted himself with an exclamation. "Hello! I think she
is to be rescued; but surely the rescuer isn't her mother. An Italian,
isn't she?"

The lady of whom he spoke had just come into the garden from the hotel,
and was descending the steps to the lower terrace, evidently with the
purpose of joining Miss Ambler, upon whom the gaze of her dark eyes was
fixed. She was a pale woman not young: and though she was dressed all in
black, the effect she produced was more graceful and friendly than
sombre. Her gaze was serious, but smilingly so; and there was even
vivacity in the gesture with which she caught both of Miss Ambler's
hands in her own, when she reached her.

The Bastoni brothers seemed to become graver and more glistening; but
the pale lady apparently had no consciousness whatever of their
presence, and, retaining one of Miss Ambler's hands, she at once moved
away with her to another part of the garden, engaging her in a busy
conversation seemingly of cheerful import. The two Bastoni, thoroughly
chilled, stood motionless, gazing after them; and then, with monocles
gleaming icily, they turned and walked solemnly back into the hotel.

Rennie chuckled. "They've had to give up the hope of eating Red Riding
Hood for this morning, at least."

"Who was that very charming lady, Eugene?" Orbison asked.

"She's called the Princess Liana--a widow. I'll see that you meet her
immediately, Charles."

But the invalid, who had leaned forward in his long chair, sank back
smiling, and with a gesture of his thin hand, waved away his friend's
badinage. "Too late," he said. "As bad a back as mine exempts one from
all but the impersonal fascinations. Why did she rush in where a trained
American mother wouldn't, Eugene? Has she an eligible son?"

At that, in appreciation of his friend's perspicacity, Rennie laughed
outright. "She has a son, yes--a splendid one. You guessed it like a
shot."

"Of course!" Orbison said, and peering through the shrubberies, he could
see the Princess Liana and the girl seated upon an iron bench at the
other end of the garden. "I believe that pretty little American head is
just about the most piquant one I ever saw," he said. "It's not
beautiful, perhaps; but it's as flashingly pretty a thing as the world
can show. And what's inside it? You needn't laugh at me, you two! What's
left for me except to speculate upon such matters? An invalid's place in
the world is a seat in the stalls to watch the play and try to
comprehend the characters of its people. I have to confess there's one
character I see from time to time that always baffles me--it's the young
American girl of that kind yonder. To me she's the most mysterious
creature the universe has produced. I have a good enough working-idea of
Kaffirs; of Arabs, Jews, Bengalese, Afghans, Turkish Beys and Argentine
millionaires; I think I know pretty well what goes on in the mind of a
communist girl agitator from Warsaw, or in that of a cabaret dancer from
Budapest; but when I look at these slim and lively maidens of your
tribe, Eugene, it's as though I were confronting a species from another
planet. What does she feel? What thoughts has she?"

"What does anyone feel? What thoughts of our own do we understand?"
Rennie suggested. "One has to go to Vienna to find out anything about
that; and then what he gets, principally, is an old definition in new
words."

"I don't mean I'd be interested in a psychologist's chart of her," the
Englishman said grumblingly. "But I do wish I knew what goes on in that
young head!"




CHAPTER VIII


This Platonic desire of his proved to be not at all an invalid's mere
whim; and, to the pleased amusement of his sister, he omitted no
opportunity to gratify it. In the afternoons, when the tea tables were
set along the walls of the long, dark monkish corridor, Orbison would
come hobbling forth from his cell and direct her to find places as near
Miss Ambler's as possible; he had the matre d'htel change their table
in the great refectory to one next to that of Miss Ambler and her
mother; and when he was prevented from sitting near the Americans for
after-dinner coffee, cordials, and music in the corridor, Miss Orbison
accused him of becoming querulous.

"He swears," she informed Mr. Eugene Rennie one morning in the garden, a
week after his interruption of the reading of the Odyssey. "Whenever I
miss a chance to get him near Miss Ambler he uses the most fearful
language he knows, and he knows a great deal."

"I don't," Orbison protested, from his long chair. "I may know it--I
mean, I don't use it."

"Dear me!" she cried. "I shouldn't like Mr. Rennie to hear what you said
to me last evening when you thought we weren't going to be near enough
the young lady for you to listen to her chatter during the after-dinner
music. We did finally get near enough, though, Mr. Rennie; and he was so
absorbed in listening to her, he didn't even apologize to me. I do
wonder what Miss Ambler and her mother think of us, the way we haunt
them! Probably they'll expect Charles to propose, in case you introduce
him. I really think you'd better do that, Mr. Rennie; I'm sure he's
pining to meet her."

"I am not," Orbison said brusquely. "I can listen to her and puzzle
about her much better without the pleasure of her acquaintance. She has
a pretty voice; but what she _says_ with it--good heavens!"

"You don't find it edifying?" his friend inquired.

"My dear man! I don't find it anything! That's the point--I don't find
it! I listened to her for an hour last evening and I give you my word
nobody in the world could be astute enough to know what she was talking
about! The great mystery is, what in the name of a name could she,
herself, think she was talking about? It's impossible; she couldn't tell
you, I swear."

"Whom was she talking to?"

"Your two Saracen friends behind their monocles, her mother and a
Japanese gentleman they'd picked up somewhere. Of course the mother
didn't listen; she embroidered and appeared to be able to detach herself
from the daughter's chatter enough to give the music an absent sort of
attention. Miss Ambler began to talk with the utmost vivacity before
they sat down, and she never stopped. I could only conclude that she was
carrying the custom of her own country into foreign parts. Am I correct?
In your great democracy is it regarded as the duty of a pretty young
lady to be incessantly voluble as the proper entertainment for members
of the opposite sex?"

"To a degree, I believe so," Rennie answered gravely. "You found not
even the germ of an idea in any of her conversation?"

"'Germ?'" the Englishman exclaimed. "It was full of germs! The trouble
seemed to be that all the ideas remained in a germinal state; though she
had the air of possessing the most vigorous convictions upon them. She
asked one of the Bastoni if he'd ever done any big-game hunting, and
without waiting for his answer, said she had always been 'perfectly wild
to see a rhinoceros charge' because they were such 'thrilling' beasts;
but she wouldn't care to eat one; then she asked the other Bastoni if he
believed in vegetarianism, and told the Japanese gentleman she adored
rice, and asked him if there was a Japanese form of Fascismo and what he
thought of the League of Nations. She didn't give him any chance to tell
her; but said that the League could never deal with the Soviets and she
thought perhaps there was something in the idea that religion is the
opium of the people. She abhorred every form of 'Victorianism' she said,
including Tennyson, and believed that by the time her own children were
grown up, 'birth control' would be 'regulated by law.' Immediately upon
that, she said she was reading Dante's Inferno 'in the original';
thought its 'medievalism' was 'perfectly rapturous,' and declared her
belief that democracy has proved an utter failure and is producing 'no
art worth the name,' though there probably is 'some advance in science.'
And 'modern interpretive dancing' is an 'advance,' too, she thought; but
the world would be really '_so_ much more picturesque without steam and
electricity!' Altogether, she made me dizzy. The action of her mind
makes me think of a flea upon the open pages of an encyclopedia."

"You spent the whole evening being dizzied by the flea, Charles?"

"No; I didn't have the chance. Your friend, the Principessa Liana, came
in and carried her away to some kind of party, as I gathered, at a
villa."

"At any rate you've made enough progress toward knowing what's in the
'pretty young head' to discover that Miss Ambler is like a flea."

"You call it progress," Orbison exclaimed, "to be made dizzy! All I've
discovered is that listening to an American girl is the last way in the
world to find out what are her constituent parts. All I get by
listening----"

But his sister interrupted, cautioning him to lower his voice. Two young
people had just come down from the upper terrace and were walking
slowly, in a deep preoccupation with each other, toward one of the iron
benches by the railing. They were Miss Ambler and a slender, tall, dark
boy of a manly and serious, yet gentle, appearance. That is to say, in
the eyes of the two gentlemen, his seniors, observing him, he seemed to
be a boy; but he was twenty-four, and his good looks were of that keen
outline, almost imperial, still seen at its finest, sometimes, as the
ancient heritage of a son of northern Italy.

Miss Orbison glanced at him appreciatively. "What a romantic-looking
young prince and what pretty looks they're giving each other!" she
whispered. "Surely that's the princess's son you said was splendid, Mr.
Rennie?" Then, upon his nodding, she turned to Orbison and laughed. "You
have before you the very answer to your puzzle, Charles. Isn't it plain
that you're looking at what would occupy all the space in any young
girl's head, even an American's?"

"No," he said. "Only the space in her heart." And his tone was so gloomy
that his sister looked amazed.

"Dear me!" she murmured. "I thought this was to be a purely Platonic
investigation. American girls as piquant as this one seem to be high
explosives, only to be studied by experienced experts long accustomed to
observing them, like Mr. Rennie. Or perhaps I'm mistaken, and Mr. Rennie
is himself painfully disturbed by this advent of a Renaissance
princeling. Springtime in Raona may be contagious. Are you as stricken
as Charles is, Mr. Rennie?"

She spoke in a lowered voice, almost whispering, for Miss Ambler and her
romantic companion were passing close by, just then; and Rennie did not
hear the question. He, too, had been amazed by the gloom in the
invalid's voice, and sat gazing upon him in delighted surprise. The
American knew that in the reluctant opinion of his friend's physicians
this was the last springtime Orbison would ever see; but if he could
still be depressed by the preoccupation of a pretty girl's heart, it
seemed that at least he was so far continuing to be most cheeringly
alive.




CHAPTER IX


Mr. Charles Orbison might well have been asked if a gentleman wholly
mystified by a young lady's mind could be expected to understand her
sentimentally; his impulsive diagnosis of what filled the heart of Miss
Claire Ambler in Raona was mistaken.

As she sat with Arturo Liana upon the green iron bench looking out upon
the classic sea where Greek had fought Greek, and Roman triremes had met
Carthaginian galleys, the girl of twenty-one did indeed thrill with
romance; but not with a romance particularly concerned with the young
gentleman beside her. Neither was the thrill she felt caused by the
tremendous history of the spot where she sat, though she knew that in
their flesh Plato, the Apostle Paul, Mark Antony, and Cicero had looked
upon it; and, in majestic legend, so had Trojan fugitives. Near at hand,
upon her right, the groves of the Cyclops climbed the buttresses of the
snow-mantled volcano that rose two miles into the air like a god's
prodigious tent pitched at the edge of the sea; and, both left and
right, from this ledge above the precipice, her eye commanded vast
sweeps of surf-edged coast, haunted in every cove and ravine with
antique tragedy. Before her, across the straits that led to Scylla and
Charybdis, there shimmered in the haze of distance, like a mountain
landscape in a dream, the high, blue-cleft shores of old Calabria; and
below her--far, far below the garden--the sea was stained to that
brilliancy of turquoise colour Claire found unbelievable even when she
looked at it.

Overhead, behind the monastery and the town of Raona, there were other
incredibilities. Against the sky rose peak and crag and pinnacle of
rock, whereon, "like the lead at the point of a pencil," she thought,
were ancient little walled towns and the broken towers of stone Saracen
and Norman castles. Necromancy must have got them there, it seemed; for
human energy, even in medieval passions of fear, would have been too
feeble--though, of all the magic about her, what she thought most
necromantic in beauty was the Greek theatre that crowned the skyward
lift at the end of the long cliff of Raona.

She had been there, the night before, in the moonlight with Arturo
Liana; but the thrill of the romantic she felt then, as now, was not
caused by Arturo, nor was it primarily the work of the epic beauty
surrounding her. Two months earlier, in Rome, she had gone to the
Palatine Hill to write a letter beginning, "Seated upon a block of
marble in the banquet hall of Csar," and necessarily the picture
suggested to the mind of her correspondent must have had Claire in the
foreground with Csar somewhat remote. Thus, as she beheld the august
and tragic beauty of Raona, her foremost happy thought was, "Here,
surrounded by marvels, am _I!_"

What romantically thrilled her, then, was her own presence among the
marvels; a thrill by no means unpardonable and not unknown to travellers
older than Claire; nor need it be held to her discredit that at times
she had the pleasantly tingling impression of herself that she was the
central marvel of all. She always knew when people were looking at her,
although she was pleasantly accustomed to their doing so. Gentlemen in
the Louvre had turned from Velasquez portraits to look at her; and here
in Raona, when she walked abroad, she was stared at almost violently.
When she passed by them, tourists temporarily forgot this most
heroically beautiful of all earthly landscapes; and when she came into
the hotel refectory for lunch or dinner she well knew that she was
politely and covertly watched to her seat by every eye in the place.
Demure, thoughtful-looking, and apparently unaware, she made no effort
to restrain herself from appearing a little more unconsciously graceful
for her observers' benefit--it is true that she did a great many things
for her observers' benefit. Indeed, it would not be straining the point
to say that most of what she did in the way of gesture and look and
talk, when observers were present, was for their benefit. In fact, she
sometimes did a little of that for her own benefit when she was alone.

But in particular she had been steadily aware of the observation of a
gaunt and crippled Englishman; and he would have been astonished to
learn that she had never once failed to know when he was looking at her
or listening to her. Even more he would have been amazed by the number
of things she had done and said because she knew she had his attention;
and probably it would have been the climax of his surprise to learn that
her recent conversation with the Bastoni and the Japanese gentleman was
intended to reveal to him, in some measure, the variety of the treasures
of her mind.

Moreover, as she sat upon the green bench by the garden railing now,
with the romantic-looking young Italian beside her, she was really
giving a little performance, so to speak, for the Englishman's benefit;
though not by the slightest glance in his direction did she seem to take
cognizance of him, and she knew that from where he sat he could not hear
what she said. But she thought the sound of her voice reached him, and
she was careful to keep it musical, just as she kept her posture and
gestures graceful, and appeared all the while to be deeply absorbed in
the young Liana. Her absorption in him had markedly increased when they
came out of the hotel and into the scope of Orbison's view, for Claire
had long since discovered her absorbed look was the most becoming
expression she knew how to wear.

She wore it now--for its effect upon both gentlemen, of course, but more
for its effect upon the one at a distance than for that upon the one at
her side; and in this there was an ironical fatality that haunted her.
She could never understand it, and often gasped in her hopeless
puzzlement over it. No matter what the comparative merits and beauties
of any two gentlemen might be, she was forever doomed, so it seemed, to
find herself more interested in the one at a distance than in the one at
her side.

If they exchanged places her interest perversely changed, too, and her
performances helplessly directed themselves at the man who had moved to
a distance; he at once became the more attractive to her. "Attractive"
was her own word, and may be recorded as the most generously elastic in
all her vocabulary; for, although a gentleman at a little distance was
more "attractive" to her than one close at hand, it might be said that
she was indifferent to no man whom she could possibly contrive to
include under that definition. She even sheltered the Bastoni under it,
partly because of their monocles, it is true; and her treatment of all
"attractive" men seemed to indicate that she felt not only a spontaneous
enthusiasm for the least of them but a duty to all of them--the duty,
apparently, of offering them a focus for their attention, or, it might
be, for their devotion.

Thus, though Arturo Liana, being at her side, was now in her eyes
principally a picturesque adjunct of the scene she was playing to the
gentleman at a distance, she was far from indifferent to him. On the
contrary, she was not only interested in offering him a focus for
devotion, but she was honestly interested in something fine and a little
mysterious that she perceived in him. "You _are_ mysterious," she told
him, remembering how deeply she had often pleased young gentlemen at
home by such a charge; and she was laughingly frank enough to mention
this now. "I've told boys that before, just to flatter them; but it's
really true about you. You're mysterious as thunder."

"I am mysterious?" he repeated; and, although when he spoke English it
was usually with an almost undetectable imperfection, he delighted her
by adding, "As sunder? How is sunder mysterious?"

She laughed outright and corrected him. "Thunder, not 'sunder.' Can't
you say 'thunder'?"

"Is it necessary?"

"Dear me!" she cried. "Isn't anything I ask you to do necessary?"

"Indeed I fear it is," he said seriously, almost ruefully. "Thunder. Is
that right? I am as mysterious as sunder--as thunder, I wish to say.
How?"

At that she seemed to become serious too. "Well, in the first place you
look as if you were keeping some great thought to yourself."

"Am I so bad? You mean an appearance of egotism?"

"No. Not anything like that. What I mean, it's as if you had a high
ideal you'd never be willing to talk about. I mean you look as if you
were engaged in a great Cause, or something. Are you?"

"Am I?" He smiled, and then replied with a gallantry in which there was
obviously enough genuineness to excuse it: "I am engage' in sitting on a
bench with Miss Claire Ambler. With that privilege, how could I be
engage' in anything else?"

"There you go!" she protested. "Whenever I try to find out what your
mystery is, you say something like that. You always do it, too, when I
mention Baron Bastoni or his brother; but maybe that's only because you
feel a social difference between you and them."

"Social?" The young man's shoulders, rising slightly, disclaimed the
imputation. "There is an English word, 'snob.' Modern Italy believes it
is bourgeois to be a snob. We will be brother to any man who is brother
to us in what he thinks. I do not care anything social, one way or the
other, about the Bastoni. I am not a snob."

"Mr. Rennie told me the other day what you do care about," she said.
"You care about Fascismo."

"Yes," he said gravely. "Well?"

"Is that why you hate the Bastoni? Because they are against it? The
baron told me that almost all the people about here are against it."

"At least," he said a little sadly, "they are agains' me. I am not very
popular in Raona, Miss Ambler. In the firs' place, I am
_forestiere_--from the north--the people look upon me as a foreigner as
much as they do you; only they would think of you kindly in that way,
and of me unkindly. In the secon' place, they think I am here to meddle
with them; it would not be too much to say they think I am something
quite like an intriguer and a spy. The Bastoni have been successful to
assist that impression."

"Do you think so?" she asked doubtfully. "They seem so quiet and
nice-mannered I can't imagine it. Why should they do such a thing?"

"We are upon opposite sides. You see, I am one of the men who believe
Italy is being save' by a leader and his great ideal; and any of us is
ready to make a sacrifice to help bring all the people to serve the
ideal. The people in the country and villages here are backward and very
independent; they don' like it, and the Bastoni wish to get some power
out of that. But probably you can hardly tell what I am talking about,
Miss Ambler?"

"Oh, yes, I can," she said promptly. "You mean the Bastoni are trying to
keep the Fascisti from getting better organized here, and they think
you're doing the organizing; Mr. Rennie told me. But I don't see why
anything like that should make a personal feeling, as it does seem to
do, between you and the baron and his brother. At home, in America,
everybody's either a Republican or a Democrat, and of course they all
vote against each other and call each other terrible names. But it
doesn't really mean anything--they're just trying to get the farmers
excited and fool the public. But even the ones that do the most of it
against each other know it's all just a gorgeous bluff and they get
together and joke about it. Why couldn't you do that here? It would be
so much more comfortable; it seems to me you take things too seriously."

"Perhaps we do," he said; and he smiled, not finding any fault in her
complete lack of comprehension. "It would not be easy to explain to a
person from a country where everything is so comfortable. I am afraid we
are worse than serious; for more than two thousand years we have even
been passionate in our politics, and you see that makes it quite a
habit."

"Then it seems to me time you got over it."

The young man was not displeased with her for her flippancy. On the
contrary, he gave her a look of appreciation from his fine dark eyes and
laughed apologetically. "Well, you see, a habit more than two thousand
years old--it is a little difficult to change! Would you consent to
teach us, Miss Ambler?"

She instantly returned his glance, and then looked out over the sea.
"You wouldn't pay much attention, I'm afraid," she said, with just the
right proportions of amusement and wistfulness that she had learned to
put into her voice when she wished gentlemen to be interested in finding
out what she felt about them.

"No?" he said; and he responded perfectly to the sentimental mechanism
she had set in motion. "If you will teach I fear I would pay no
attention to anything else."

"Wouldn't you?" she asked, suddenly grave and sweet.

"Never! I never would!"

"Wouldn't you?" she said again, in a low voice. And with that she turned
her head and gave him a quick, wondering look, a little startled, that
seemed to say, "Will it be you--some day?"

This bit of performing was by no means all spurious--it was a mixture,
being partly spontaneous and genuine, in spite of herself, as it always
was when she did it; and yet, of course, it was essentially a forward
movement in her instinctive perpetual campaign to be a focus. But having
made it, she felt that she had brought matters to a point a little
further advanced than was desirable, at least for the time being; so she
rose rather abruptly from the bench and leaned upon the precipice
railing to gaze down at the sea.

"I think the Blue Grotto they have here is even more wonderful than the
one at Capri," she said briskly. "My mother likes the Capresi one and we
have the most fearful arguments about it." She turned about, facing him.
"Which do you like best, Arturo?"

Arturo's colour had heightened; but now he looked a little mystified:
"You didn't say if you would teach me."

She laughed gayly. "Oh, that! How to make people in this country
understand not to take politics passionately? Well, I have an uncle at
home that tried to be a senator, and he gave a dinner to the man that
beat him--they said it was the funniest dinner ever given. Shall I ask
Baron Bastoni to give you a dinner, Arturo? Do let me! We'd get that
nice Mr. Rennie to be the toastmaster. He's so benevolent and witty----"

She went on chattering while Arturo, who had risen when she did, stood
looking at her helplessly and rather plaintively. Within her, she was a
little derisive of his dejection. "He's really quite beautiful," she
thought; "but he does look almost foolish just now--wanting to go on
with it and not knowing how to make me! But that _other_ man----" As she
stood with her back to the railing, the tail of her eye was taking
ardent note of this magnetic other; and suddenly she decided upon a
decisive step forward with him. Seeming to perceive for the first time
the presence of Mr. Eugene Rennie, she gave him a surprised, sunny
little nod; then let her kindled eyes rest for a slow moment upon the
man in the long chair. She meant to exchange a first direct look with
him--a look permitting him to guess that she hadn't minded his changing
his table in the refectory--but Orbison chose this most special of
moments to light a cigarette and he was entirely preoccupied in that
worthless action.

"Good gracious!" Claire thought emotionally, "Just how slow are you
intending to be? I'm not going to stay in Raona all my life! Aren't you
ever going to do anything about it?"




CHAPTER X


Her indignation was not lessened as days continued to pass and Mr.
Charles Orbison still did nothing about it. Their first words and even
their first glance remained yet to be exchanged, and under this strange
provocation, Claire's imagination began to be seriously affected. At
night she dreamed of him; by day she found herself thinking of him
almost unremittently; and presently she realized that she had never
before been so continually conscious of any man. She had fantastic
thoughts about him; but she had no fear that she was fantastic in her
conviction that he, on his part, was still continually observant of her.

Yet this perfectly sound conviction itself increased her fantasies: "Why
don't you let me alone?" she said to him, during one of the imaginary
conversations she frequently had with him. "I could have a much better
time in all this gorgeousness of Raona if you'd just let me alone. The
trouble is I can't quit thinking about you until you quit thinking about
_me_! Don't you see the thing is going too far?" And, indeed, by this
time, she suspected that if the Englishman sat upon the bench with her
and Arturo Liana looked on from a distance, she might be, for almost the
first time in her life, more interested in the man at her side.

In her musings upon his unexampled behaviour, she sometimes murmured her
thoughts, or even spoke them aloud; and thus, one afternoon, as she sat
with her mother in the ancient cell that had been made into a small
salon for them, she said dreamily, "Why doesn't he have Mr. Rennie ask
us?"

Mrs. Ambler looked up from her embroidery in surprise. "Why doesn't who
have Mr. Rennie ask us what?"

"That Englishman--Mr. Orbison. Why doesn't he have Mr. Rennie ask us to
his villa to dine, or for tea, sometime when he's going there himself. I
should think he would, since he's so anxious to meet us."

"Claire! What gives you the idea the poor man wants to know us?"

"Poor man?" Claire said sharply. "Why do you call him that?"

"Good gracious! He's a hopeless invalid, isn't he? He's the most
tragically shattered----"

"What!" the daughter cried. "Haven't you any eyes? He's the most
magnificent-looking human creature I've ever seen!"

"What an idea! Why, he's a walking wreck, child--not that one doesn't
feel awfully sorry for him. He just manages to get along with two canes,
and he's thin as a shadow. Our _valet de chambre_ says there's something
the matter with his spine."

"Yes, there is." The colour had heightened in Claire's cheeks, and her
eyes shone. "Do you know why? That's from a hand grenade in Flanders. I
asked Mr. Rennie and he told me."

Mrs. Ambler nodded sympathetically. "Of course that does help to make
him look magnificent, as you say; especially since anyone can see he's
probably suffered terribly--and still does, I'm afraid. Yet he seems
very much alive--that is, his head does. He has a kind of haggard
eagerness very appealing; it's as if he knew he couldn't get much out of
life, but did hope to get that little. I didn't realize you were
interested in him; it's rather surprising in a girl of your age,
especially with such a remarkable young man as Don Arturo hovering
about."

"What's my age got to do with it, Mother? Arturo's wonderful, but I've
seen others like him."

"Where? Indeed you haven't! He's the most charming young man I ever
knew; and I've known more than you have, my dear! Mr. Rennie says he's
the finest young man in Italy. His mother is lovely too."

"Yes," Claire said thoughtfully. "But I think she manoeuvres a little."

"To make you like him? Well, that's natural, and a great compliment to
you too. I think she's far from being mercenary; and her son hasn't a
bit of that. No one could look at him for a moment and believe such a
thing."

"No," Claire admitted. "It's true. He isn't that sort in the least, and
I think he's splendid of course. I only meant I've seen others more like
him than I have like Mr. Orbison. I've never seen anybody at all like
Mr. Orbison. He's older, too, and that's rather
fascinating--particularly when a girl's seen so terribly many fledglings
of about her own age."

Mrs. Ambler sighed. "Oh, dear! What makes you think the poor man wants
to meet--us? I haven't seen him show the slightest symptom."

"He had his table changed to the one next to ours, didn't he?"

"It's nearer the door and he doesn't have to hobble so far with his two
sticks."

"Mother!" Claire exclaimed, and she uttered a sound of pity. "He doesn't
mind! He goes on fairly long walks with that dowdy sister of his, in
spite of his two sticks. I've about made up my mind to ask Mr. Rennie
to----"

"You mustn't," her mother interrupted in alarm. "Claire, please! We
don't know Mr. Rennie well enough, and I'm sure he'd understand what
you're up to."

"'Up to'?" the girl repeated, with an almost perfect air of wondering
incredulity. "Mr. Rennie would understand what I'm 'up to'? What in the
world are you talking about?"

"Oh, dear! Whenever you begin to be hypocritical with me, I know there's
no chance of doing anything with you."

"Why, yes, there is," Claire said surprisingly. "I won't ask Mr. Rennie;
I've just decided not to."

"Then it's because you've decided on something worse. What that poor man
and his sister desire is rest and seclusion, and heaven knows he needs
it! I think you ought to let him alone."

"Good heavens!" Claire cried, and she laughed a little excitedly. "What
on earth do you think I intend to do, Mother?"

Mrs. Ambler's reply was almost too frank. "I think you've just decided
on a more picturesque way of meeting poor Mr. Orbison than by asking Mr.
Rennie."

"What nonsense!" the daughter exclaimed, as she rose from her chair by a
window overlooking the garden. "All I've decided to do is to go up to
the Salone for the afternoon tea dance. Arturo hates the place and made
a fuss about my going there; but it's perfectly all right. Giuseppe
Bastoni will be waiting to take me by the time I get my hat on; the
baron's going to meet us there, and they both do dance beautifully.
Don't worry about my disturbing poor Mr. Orbison!"

"I might as well not, I suppose," her mother sighed. "Especially since I
know now what you've decided to do at the first opportunity--and that
you'll probably make the opportunity, yourself!"

Claire was already in the adjoining room, engaged before a mirror. "You
wicked person!" she called through the open doorway. "You mean I'll make
the opportunity to meet Mr. Orbison in a more picturesque way, don't
you? I should think you'd be afraid to put such ideas into my head,
especially in the most picturesque place in the world, where one really
_ought_ to do picturesque things! Of course you understand that if I did
anything like that now, after your suggesting it, the whole affair would
be absolutely all your fault." And a few moments later, as her mother
remained persistently silent, Claire added gayly, speaking loudly in
order to be sure that her impudence was understood: "Did you hear what I
said? I said 'the whole affair,' Mother. Once you put such things into
my head, you never can tell where they'll end!"




CHAPTER XI


The Salone is one thing not beautiful in Raona, though the gay little
modern building is inconspicuous and may be pleasantly approached
through a cypress-bordered garden. What should not be in Raona is the
interior of the Salone; the manufactured throbbings of a "night club"
are misplaced upon the majestic cliff that looked down upon the passing
of Odysseus.

Arturo Liana hated the Salone, yet he was there, this afternoon, at a
table near the door, and alone. At the opposite end of the room an
orchestra of red-coated men produced adroitly suggestive tango music, to
which the silent dancers moved with what seemed to Arturo a snaky
accuracy. Most of the women were pale under heavily applied artificial
complexions that the red lamps failed to make plausible; the men were
pale, too, and there was no merriment in this sleek dancing, but, on the
contrary, a trancelike gravity--a gravity as of pallid masks covering
intricate and sly emotions. Slyness seemed the very air of the place; it
was the key of the music; it was in the curiously revealing dresses of
some of the women as well as in their eyes; most of all, Arturo thought,
it was in the eyes of that sly enemy of his, Giuseppe Bastoni, with whom
Claire Ambler was dancing.

Alone, of all the dancers, the young American girl seemed to be dancing
merely to dance and not for the sake of something covert. She laughed
and chattered to her partner; her blue eyes, under her silver-gray
helmet of silk, were bright with pleasure in the rhythms measured by her
feet that moved so lightly in their twinkling slim black slippers. She
was gay as a child is gay; and in all this vulpine slyness, she was the
only frank and natural young creature. It hurt Arturo to see her
there--as he knew she knew it did, which made his hurt the keener; and
yet he saw that she could go anywhere and everywhere untouched by what
was about her. It was probably an American quality, he thought; but he
nevertheless wished that she were not so willing to go anywhere and
everywhere, or at least, would be kinder to one adviser in such matters.
She had been a little brusque when he advised her, that morning, not to
go to the Salone.

However, she unexpectedly atoned for her brusqueness now. She had not
seen him when he came in, nor while she danced; but with the stopping of
the music, she and her partner were left just before Arturo's table. She
turned and uttered a little cry of pleased surprise.

"Arturo! I didn't dream you'd deign to come here after what you---- How
lovely! Wouldn't you like to offer Giuseppe and me some tea at your
table?"

Arturo had risen, and he bowed rather ceremoniously. "I should be very
glad."

Claire sat down at once; but Bastoni, with a bow more ceremonious than
the young Liano's, begged to decline. "I mus' speak wit' my brozzer," he
said; and through his monocle there flickered at Arturo a cold glance
oddly contemplative. For a moment Claire was puzzled to find herself
feeling uncomfortable. There seemed to be, somewhere about her, a
tensity that might have consequences; but Arturo stood imperturbable,
looking straight before him and not at Bastoni; then he sat down and
Bastoni went quietly away.

"I'm afraid he doesn't like it very much," Claire said thoughtfully. "I
told him and the baron I didn't want any tea. Well, it won't matter;
I'll be nice to them later. Why in the world did you scold me for
wanting to come to this interesting place? The music's really great, and
these extraordinary foreign types--I wouldn't have missed it for
anything! What's the matter with it?"

"Nothing, as you see it. You only see it as interestingly foreign. There
are undercurrents--undercurrents that I know."

"Are there?" Claire laughed as she cast a lively glance about the room.
"There's one that I see. Every woman in the place is covertly looking at
you and hoping you'll dance with her. Do you see that?"

"No," he said. "But a few of the men are looking at me by no means so
flatteringly."

"Are they? Arturo, at your age I should think it would be much more fun
to drop politics and just have a great time. You're so serious!"

"I fear so," he said, and shook his head ruefully. "How can I be
anything but serious when you behave to me in such a manner that you
do?"

"I? Why, I think I'm perfectly heavenly to you!"

"Too much so, indeed! But that is in my own appreciation of you. I spoke
of how you behave toward me. You snub me for my advice and you come to
this absurd and unworthy place with such people as the Bastoni. Then you
immediately drop them when you see me sitting alone here and
unhappy--and I am glad to say that fellow will now be twice as much my
enemy as before--and you come to sit with me. But pretty soon you will
go and dance with one of those fellows again; so it is all too much up
and down!"

"Arturo!" she cried; and she added disingenuously: "I haven't an idea
what you're talking about!"

He smiled sadly. "I was so flatter' that you call me 'Arturo'--until I
found you call the Bastoni, also, by their firs' names."

"But that's nothing! At home we _all_ do that--with everybody."

"Yes, I understand," he said. "That was what remove' my happiness in it.
It was only one of the downs that come between the ups. You will let me
explain what I mean by the ups and downs? I think you know very well
what thoughts I have about you; but I cannot speak clearly of them to
you until you let me see they would be agreeable to you. Well, you will
not let me find that out. One hour you lif' me up to where I begin to
think you will be not displeased if I speak of what I feel; and the next
hour, you send me down to where I find nothing but a confusion in my
mind. You see, I am a little baffle' and not very happy; it seems to me
I have no advantage over even the Bastoni. So far as I can tell you have
this same treatment for any man whatever."

"Good gracious!" Claire exclaimed. "You _are_ a serious boy! And you
must think I'm a very uninventive sort of person, if I have only the one
trick to show all gentlemen! Indeed, I'm _not_ the same to the Bastoni
that I am to you! They're only fun for me, don't you see? They amuse me
because they're so foreign and different--I really let 'em hang around
partly to listen to their funny accent. Mother and I scream over them
when we're alone! They haven't had the advantage of a year in London
that you had, Arturo. I don't think they've ever been out of Raona."

"Oh, yes," he said dryly. "They go to Naples sometime'."

"Well, that doesn't help their English accent much!" Claire laughed.
"You don't think I really care anything about them, do you?"

"You came here with them when I begged you not to do it."

"Just for fun, yes," she said, and then, seeming to become serious, she
leaned toward him across the small table. "You don't really mind, do
you?"

He looked at her steadily. "Will you let me take you back to your hotel
now?"

"I couldn't be that rude to them, I'm afraid," she said, and then, as he
laughed shortly, and with some bitterness, she said quickly, "Why don't
you stay and dance with me too?"

"No," he answered. "I will not dance here, even with you. Later, I think
I could offer you something better. There is another orchestra in Raona;
it is just of mandolins and violins and guitars, and I am afraid they
play rather sentimental music; but they know how, and the sentiment is
pure. They are giving a moonlight concert in the Greek theatre to-night.
Will you come with me?"

"It sounds lovely," she said; then she thought that if she went with him
she would not be where Orbison could watch her in the corridor after
dinner. Therefore she began to look conscientious. "I'm afraid my mother
expects me not to go out this evening. I'm afraid I really ought to
spend it with her; but you could dine with us, couldn't you? Won't you,
Arturo? You will, won't you?"

She entreated him in a pretty and coaxing voice; Arturo was pleased to
forget the concert, and accept. "You are very kind," he said. "I can
hope that to-night will be one of the ups; so I will go now and dream of
it. You are about to be ask' to dance again."

The older Bastoni, in fact, was already bowing before her as Arturo
spoke; and Claire jumped up gayly; but gave her table companion a soft
glance and a little nod, for au revoir, over the baron's shoulder.
Arturo, standing, responded formally, and summoned a waiter to bring his
account.

"Liana not stay long," the baron remarked. "I did not ever see 'im in
our Salone before. 'E iss very--how you say? Severe? Yes. 'E iss severe
young mans."

"Oh, no," Claire laughed. "He isn't severe."

"Not?"

"No; he just looked so to-day," she said, and she added thoughtlessly,
"It was only because he didn't want me to come here and he was a little
cross."

"'E advice you not to come?" Bastoni asked in a casual and commonplace
tone. "Wit' my brozzer?"

His voice was so well modulated to the note of a mild and indifferent
inquiry, made merely for the sake of saying something, that she failed
to perceive a particular significance in his question. Dance music
always made her as light-headed as she was light-footed, her mother
sometimes told her with no great exaggeration. "Arturo says this is a
terrible joint," she laughed. "I think it's huge fun, myself. There
aren't any places like this in Naples, are there?"

"Naple'?" Bastoni said in the same tone of commonplace inquiry. "Liana
tell you I go to Naple'?"

"Yes. Don't you?" she asked, a little surprised; and he misinterpreted
the slight widening of her eyes--it seemed to him that she was laughing
at him secretly. As Eugene Rennie had told his friend in the hotel
garden, the Bastoni sometimes sold a ring or a brooch or a necklace to
the foreign ladies with whom they danced. The jewel was always
represented as an unobtainable antique, a Bastoni heirloom, and after an
adroit temptation, the sale was made with the air of indulgent protest.
Moreover, the two brothers had hoped to interest Miss Ambler and her
mother in the possession of several such heirlooms, though they had even
greater hopes than this; but the baron knew that the Neapolitan origin
of the jewellery was no longer wholly a secret between him and his
brother--the Raonese are devoted gossips, and the truth concerning the
Bastoni heirlooms was something of a joke in their cafs. Familiars in
Raona, especially Italians, like Liana, might easily know all about it;
and the baron guessed that Arturo, for his own purposes, had betrayed
him and had warned the American girl. In the morning, evidently, he had
begged her not to go to the Salone; then he had come there himself and
told her that the brothers dealt in spurious antique jewellery, made in
Naples. Arturo was objectionably dangerous politically; but this
personal interference was too much.

"Nossing to see in Naple'," Bastoni said, placidly gliding in the tango.
"I sink Tunis more interessing. You been Tunis? Not? Zis fine floor for
dance on. You sink so?"

Claire nodded gayly, unaware that she had come in contact with one of
the undercurrents Arturo had mentioned. All the while, this afternoon,
beneath the surface of her thoughts, she was engaged with an
undercurrent of her own; and whatever she said to Arturo or to the
Bastoni was but inconsequent prattle, wholly without any fruitful
significance, she would have sworn. What preoccupied her, happily, and
with the forerunning excitement of the approach to an adventure, was
that idea she had so merrily charged her mother with putting into her
head. In the most picturesque place in the world an intelligent girl
oughtn't to find it difficult to arrange a picturesque way of meeting a
disabled gentleman, she thought.




CHAPTER XII


Without a definite plan for converting her idea into action Claire
Ambler left everything to the spur of the moment; but she had determined
to spur the moment. She therefore made herself befittingly picturesque
for dinner that evening, in a beaded dress as shining as pale-blue
armour, and almost as heavy in spite of its scantness; and she added to
this the splendid faded gorgeousness of a fine old Spanish shawl. Thus,
when she came into the ancient refectory with Arturo and her mother, she
was at least as vivid as she could have cared to be. "Like a florist's
window," said Eugene Rennie, who was dining with his English friends.
"Flowers, too, can carry that much colour and only make you glad to look
at them."

Then, as she reached her table close by, Claire paused before she seated
herself and, instead of merely nodding, she prettily made him an odd
little curtsy. "Extraordinary child!" he murmured to his two companions.
"I think I join you, Charles, in wondering what goes on in 'that young
head.' Something charming evidently. Certainly that impulsive little
curtsy was charming."

Claire, also, thought it was charming, and with good reason. Not ten
minutes earlier she had made this same impulsive little curtsy--the last
of a series--to the mirror in her own room; but she had not reproduced
it for Mr. Eugene Rennie's benefit. "Well, did you like it?" she was
saying mentally to Orbison, as she began to talk vivaciously to Arturo
Liana. "If you didn't, what's the matter with it! Anyhow, though I don't
know just what it'll be, I'm going to do something you will like, pretty
soon!"

But the opportunity her mother had prophesied she would make was
obviously not to be contrived during the hour she sat at dinner;
picturesque conjunctions are not easily available at such times.
Moreover, when she and Mrs. Ambler and Arturo came out into the long
corridor afterward, for coffee, she was disturbed to see nothing of the
trio who had occupied the next table and preceded them, by a few
minutes, from the refectory. She looked about her blankly; but a little
later, when coffee had been brought and Arturo was presenting a lighted
match to the end of her cigarette, she caught sight of Orbison at the
other end of the corridor. He was wrapped in a long ulster, with a heavy
woollen muffler about his throat, and with his American friend beside
him he was hobbling toward the passage that led to the cloister and the
great outer gates. This was the first time the invalid had gone forth in
the evening, and Claire jumped to a conclusion.

She stared, neglecting the match, though Arturo held it for her until it
scorched his fingers. "They must be--they're going up to the Greek
theatre!" she said under her breath.

"Who?" her mother inquired.

"What?" Claire said hazily.

"I understood you to say somebody was going up to the Greek theatre."

"Yes," the girl returned quickly. "Everybody is. There's a concert and
it's a glorious night--the most wonderful full moon--I saw it from my
window even before dinner. Mother, you wouldn't mind, would you?"

"Mind what?" Mrs. Ambler asked, surprised by the unusual stress her
daughter put upon this petition. "What do you mean?"

For a moment Claire looked slightly confused, and she glanced hastily at
Arturo. "Mother, I know I ought to stay here with you; of course I
practically promised to----"

"Why, no," Mrs. Ambler said. "When did you?"

"This afternoon. I really did mean to spend the evening here with you;
but Arturo asked me, and I know he'd like to go. Would you mind if we
went to that concert at the Greek theatre?"

"Why, certainly not," the mystified lady returned. "Why should I?"

Claire jumped up instantly. "Get your hat and coat," she said to Arturo.
"I won't need more than this shawl. It's the most heavenly night!"

"Heavenly" was a word she repeated as they walked through the stone
streets of the old town, and she said it again as they began the ascent
of the great ruins of the theatre. "We must go clear up to the top," she
said. "Oh, this heavenly place and this heavenly night!"

Other figures were climbing with them, shadowy and murmuring, no one
speaking loudly among these gigantic and august relics. "The people are
like ghosts of the ancients," Arturo said in a low voice. "They climb so
quietly and they are all so dim, they might be the shades of those old,
old audiences who came here on such a night two thousand years ago. How
still and mysterious it is! There could be thousands of people here in
these tremendous shadows and we would not know it."

"It's heavenly!" she sighed again; and at last they came out upon the
stone platform of the huge gallery the Romans had superimposed upon the
Greek structure. Here they were at the top of the theatre--upon its
crest and upon the crest of precipices, with an incredible world about
them, and the sea, shining and soundless, far, far below. Claire looked
across the classic strait to the mountains shimmering there in luminous
haze, then to left and right at the unending crescents of coastline
based with white, twinkling surf and crowned with the diamond-point
lights of mountain villages; but, nearer and seeming so close at hand
that it was startling, the vast triangular symmetry of the volcano
reposed, ivory-coloured, in the sky; and when Claire saw above its snows
a faint rosy glow upon the rising masses of smoke, she found her sighing
not eloquent enough. "I must do one of two things," she said. "I must
either sing or I must cry!"

She said it in a whisper, for although vague groupings of motionless
people could be seen here and there among the antique tiers of seats,
and upon the heights of the ruinous gallery corridor, there was a
silence over the place. Deep in the shadow, far below, upon the ancient
stage where the sonorous measures of Euripides had once been spoken by
masked lips, there was a cluster of tiny golden lights, the lamps of the
orchestra; and presently these native musicians began to play.

As Arturo said, what they played was sentimental; but it was pure, and
they knew how. They were of a race that has music in its heart and art
in its fingers; so now this orchestra of a dozen violins and mandolins
with half as many 'cellos and guitars and a flute, played old moonlight
themes, sonatas, serenades, and gentle nocturnes, but played them so
that a listener who had long since tired of them might well have thought
he had never heard them played before. The brilliant night was still,
save for this music floating up to the motionless, shadowy groups of
people on the lofty platform of the open gallery; no other sound could
they hear in all the endless space of land and sea revealed to them from
that height; and thus the whole world seemed to have been hushed into a
spellbound listening.

Claire stood leaning upon a massive and rugged cube of fallen masonry.
"I've never known anything like this before--never!" she whispered to
Arturo. "I never thought there could be a moonlight night when the moon
wasn't the most beautiful thing in it. To-night it's just a lamp to give
illumination. Do you suppose they'll play the Pastorale? I've learned
it, and if they play it I'm afraid I couldn't help singing it. I
honestly believe I couldn't keep it under!"

She had been in earnest when she said that she must either sing or weep;
a song was in her throat, and like those Raonese musicians down by the
small golden sparks, she "knew how." Somewhere among the mysterious,
still figures of the listeners was the man of whom she so continually
found herself thinking--because, perhaps, he thought of her; but just
for this while she had forgotten that she deliberately intended a
picturesque meeting with him. An overpowering sense of beauty was upon
her; wings seemed to flutter ineffably in her breast; and almost
unbearably she wanted to sing with the music that came lifting and
lifting to the height where she stood.

She was trembling.

"It will be beautiful if you sing," Arturo said. "There is no reason you
should not."

Down in the deep semicircular shadow of the amphitheatre they began to
play the Pastorale; and then--at first almost without the listeners'
being aware of it--a lovely sound came from no one could say where; it
grew clearer, and was heard over all the great space of the theatre, yet
was never loud. It seemed a natural part of the beauty of that
night--this voice out of the silvered heavens overhead, singing the
melody of the Pastorale.

No one except Arturo Liana and the singer herself knew who sang; least
of all was she guessed by the man to whom she sang; but she had in store
for her the stirring experience of hearing him describe what she had
done.




CHAPTER XIII


She sat by her open window, breakfasting languidly, when she discovered
that he was just below her. His long chair had been placed in the
sunshine of the upper terrace beneath the window, though she did not
know this until she heard his sister giving him a morning greeting
there.

"You don't think you were indiscreet to venture out into the night air,
Charles?" Miss Orbison said; and a scraping upon the gravel indicated
that she dragged one of the iron chairs with her, and came to sit beside
him. "You don't look the worse, I'm sure."

"No. What difference would it make if I did?" he returned, with a short
laugh. "When one's certain to be worse before long in any event, what
difference is it if one's worse a day or two sooner?"

Miss Orbison protested gently. "Ah, don't say that, Charles!"

"No. Perhaps it's just as well unsaid. It's better to leave the most of
what we know about some things unsaid, of course; so forgive me. At any
rate, last night made me glad I'd hung on at least till then. I was no
end sorry you hadn't overlooked your cold and come with us."

"Really! It was quite what Mr. Rennie said it would be, then?"

"Quite! You could add something to that, if you cared to."

"Really! What was it like, Charles?"

"I couldn't possibly tell you," he said. "It was one of those things you
have to see and hear yourself; you'll get only a feeble water colour of
it from me. I think a chap like Beethoven might have put it into music;
but I doubt if Robert Browning could have done it in verse."

"Really! It was as impressive as all that?"

"'Impressive,'" he said, and laughed again briefly, in his discontent
with her word. "Would you say that of the volcano yonder? Last night I
thought it was the tent of Zeus and that the god himself was in bivouac
there. We sat where Cicero had sat, I think; and long before him, Plato.
It seemed to me I could see processions of all the dead Greeks who had
sat in that theatre; they came sweeping up out of the sea and down out
of the sky on the shafts of moonshine. They were shaped of that light,
themselves, and they took their old places in the theatre they must have
dearly loved, since they built it upon the most magnificent site in the
world. You'd have thought then that only a great chant should have come
up to us from the stage; that anything less wouldn't have been bearable.
No, it wasn't so. The music was transfigured, translated out of itself
into something almost intolerably beautiful. And then, when they played
the Pastorale, there came a sweet, carolling voice from the air--a
woman's voice singing as a nightingale sings, not singing to be heard,
but just out of its own heart--and sang the Pastorale with them. You
couldn't tell where she sat or stood, or in what part of the theatre she
was; and you didn't want to know: she was doing simply the loveliest
thing a human being ever did, and you had no wish to see her or even to
learn who she was. What she did, itself, was enough. For me----"

"Yes? For you, Charles?" his sister asked, as he paused.

"For me," he answered, "it was the final loveliness in the hour of
greatest sheer beauty I've ever known in my life. One doesn't want to
touch such a thing at all."

"No," Miss Orbison said sympathetically. "Of course not, Charles."

But the girl near the window above them held to a different way of
thinking; she was not of the age when such a thing is to be left
untouched. She sat for a little while, breathing rapidly, her eyes
brilliant and her colour deep, in her delight; then, as the sister and
brother fell silent, devoting their attention to the landscape, or to
reverie, she moved silently out of her chair, and stole to the mirror
across the room. Smiling rapturously upon it she let her finger tips
rest upon their reflected fellows: "You certainly did something!" she
whispered to her counterpart. Then she let her green Chinese wrapper
slide down from her, and began to dress.

Before she had quite finished she heard Miss Orbison speaking again, but
not from beneath the window; evidently she was at a little distance.

"I'll be back before lunch, Charles," she said. "You can call to one of
the gardeners to fetch Agostino if you need anything. You're sure
you----"

"Of course," her brother interrupted a little irritably. "I sha'n't need
you. I'm not flat on my back, yet. Do go along!"

Miss Orbison went, and Claire stepped noiselessly to the window. Orbison
was reclining just below in the warm full sunshine, with his heavy rug
pulled close about him; and no one else was upon the upper terrace or in
the pergola that bordered it. Gardeners were at work among the flower
beds beyond the terrace; and a group of German travellers stood talking
by the railing above the precipice; but at that distance their voices
were not heard more loudly here than the droning of the bees among the
flowering vines that grew upon the old stone walls of the hotel. Smoke
massed itself placidly upon the shoulders of the volcano; hazy cliffs of
lilac rose from a pale-blue sea, and the air seemed gilded with the
southern morning sunlight. No young heroine of a romantic drama could
have wished a stage better set for her entrance.

Claire selected the prettiest pair of patent-leather slippers that she
owned, and, seated upon a stool before her dressing table, thoughtfully
put them on. "Now where you going to take me?" she whispered excitedly
to her feet, when they were thus becomingly encased.

But, as she well knew they would, they took her to the pergola upon the
upper terrace. She appeared there a few minutes later, bright-eyed,
high-coloured, altogether charming, with a small red book in her hand;
and, after a musing and impersonal glance about her, which appeared to
reveal nothing to detain her interest, she seated herself upon a bench
beneath the shading vines. She sat in profile to the Englishman, and
only a few paces distant from him; she had no doubt of his attention,
nor that he knew she was conscious of it. Her lively heart made her
aware of its beating; but she turned over the pages of her book with a
steady, graceful little hand; and then, with her downcast eyes upon the
turning pages, she began to sing the Pastorale in a low, sweet voice, as
if little more than humming the melody to herself. Yet she made it clear
enough, she was sure.

When she had sung it through, her colour was even higher than before,
and she held her book so near to her eyes that she seemed almost to bury
her blushing face in it. This was something she had not expected--a
moment of fluttering panic--but she bravely lowered the book and slowly
turned her head to face him.

Orbison was looking at her intently, with that eagerness in his haggard
eyes her mother had said was "as if he knew he couldn't get much out of
life but did hope to get that little."

For a long moment they looked at each other; then she rose and went
slowly toward him until she stood at his feet.

"I'm glad you liked it, Mr. Orbison," she said. "It was meant for you."




CHAPTER XIV


He made a movement to rid himself of his rug and rise; but she stepped
forward quickly. "No--please! May I sit here a little while?"

"Yes--you may," he said, with his short laugh. "On the whole, I think
you may!" Then he added, as she took the chair his sister had left
beside him, "What were you glad I liked?"

"Don't you know?"

"You were humming the Pastorale. Did you mean that?"

"Yes, Mr. Orbison."

"You were at the Greek theatre last night, I suppose?"

"Why--yes. I was there."

"How did you know I liked it?"

She made a gesture toward the open window above them. "That's my room. I
heard you telling your sister."

"I see," he said. "But what did you mean by saying the Pastorale was
meant for me? That's what you said, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps you meant your humming it just now was meant for me?"

"Yes--but I meant last night."

"Why, how could that be?" he asked, and he stared at her, seeming
puzzled. "I don't know a dozen people in Raona; and certainly not anyone
who could sing the Pastorale like that. Most assuredly, I don't know any
woman who would be thinking of me when she did it. What do you mean,
Miss Ambler?"

Claire stared at him incredulously; then she realized that a free, full
voice in the moonlight over a Greek ruin might seem so much a part of
the transfiguring night that it would not be recognized when it sang
just audibly in the daytime and in another place, even though it sang
the same song. The piquant little drama she had just played for him was
a failure.

"You American ladies do like to mystify us slower mortals, I've
observed," Orbison said. "How could that unknown singer have meant her
song for me, Miss Ambler?"

"I----" She hesitated. She had an impulse to burst out at him: "I was
your unknown singer! I guess I ought to know who I sang for, oughtn't
I?" The words were almost upon her lips; but she withheld them. "All
right, then!" she thought. "You wouldn't see it when I took the trouble
to show you, I'm not going to be banal enough to tell you; so you can
just find it out for yourself! It gives me a secret that I know and you
don't; and that's an advantage over you, anyhow." This was her feeling,
and it appeared to imply that she engaged in some form of contest. All
her affairs with gentlemen, in fact, seemed to involve this sense of
contest, which was so persistent that it could be present even now, when
the gentleman was an invalid.

"You don't answer me," he said.

She smiled vaguely. "Well--didn't everyone there last night have the
feeling that the song and all the rest of it had a special meaning for
himself alone? I'm sure I did. That's what I tried to convey by saying
it was meant for you. Every one of us could think so, couldn't we?"

"Dear me!" he said. "I suppose we could if we had the necessary amount
of egoism. But when that wonderful lady sang last night I got entirely
away from my own egoism for a while. You see it's rather necessary for
me to think of myself as little as possible. I fix my attention upon
other things when I can; and that reminds me--I'm in great fear that I
owe you an apology."

"Do you? What for?"

"I think you know."

"No; I don't."

"Yes," he said. "I think you do. You see, it happens that I've become
merely some broken machinery about ready to be tossed out on the junk
pile----"

"Mr. Orbison!" she cried, protesting; and she leaned toward him, her
eyes shining. "You haven't any right to speak of yourself like that."

"Haven't I? It's what I am, my dear young lady."

"No! I know how you got your hurt. Heroes aren't broken machinery, Mr.
Orbison!"

"Oh, dear me!" he laughed. "You're very old-fashioned. But what I was
trying to say is that even when one can't take part in life any longer,
one can't help watching it. Life for an invalid becomes a looking on at
the lives of others--at least it does for the kind of invalid I've found
myself to be. Well, I've been looking on at you, Miss Ambler, and I
think I should ask your pardon for it."

"Do you?" She looked at him gravely. "Why?"

"You're very kind," he said. "Nevertheless, I think I should. Ever since
I first saw you one morning here in the garden, I'm afraid you've been
the central figure in all my looking-on in Raona. What's more, I've had
the feeling that you knew it; that you were entirely conscious of it;
and so----"

"Yes, it's true," she interrupted. "Yes, I knew you were watching
me--and thinking of me, a little, too, perhaps. Were you?"

"Yes," he said, as a faint colour came into his pale cheeks. "Not
thinking of you a little, though. You see as an invalid----"

"As an invalid?" she repeated; and she laughed. "If you did it only as
an invalid, perhaps you might owe me an apology, Mr. Orbison! But
anyhow, your watching me--so much--and my knowing it--so well--does seem
to bring us together as already comfortably intimate, doesn't it?"

"Yes, I hope so."

"Well, then, when you watched me--and thought a little about me--what
did you see and what did you think?"

"You'd really like me to tell you?"

"If you think I can stand it--yes."

"Well----" He paused, frowning. "Last night Mr. Rennie and I talked
about you all the way to the Greek theatre--and you know I walk slowly!
You see, you mystify me and----"

"No!" she exclaimed. "Isn't that lovely! Do I? How?"

"In every way; but in particular about a detail of your conduct that Mr.
Rennie and I were discussing, Miss Ambler."

"Indeed? So you weren't just talking of me; you were discussing me! What
was the detail of my conduct you had the debate about?"

He shook his head dubiously. "I'm afraid you won't like it. Mr. Rennie
had been dining with the Principessa Liana. The apple of her eye, it
appears, is her youngest son, who's spent the last two winters with her
here at their villa. I'm afraid the princess doesn't think you've been
making Don Arturo very happy, Miss Ambler."

"Doesn't she?" Claire said quickly. "Does she consider that my special
privilege?"

"No more than you consider it a special privilege for me to be talking
to you about it," he returned. "But you remember you asked me to tell
you?"

"Yes. I invited it. Please go on. What else did Mr. Rennie say?"

"He said he feared young Liana was taking things rather hard. He's a
serious youngster, and once or twice I've been a little sorry for him,
Miss Ambler."

"You have?" Claire said; and she looked at him darkly. "I suppose you
mean when you've seen him with me?"

"No." Orbison shook his head. "When I've seen him not with you. When
he's with you he looks anxious; but when he's away from you he looks
like Hamlet!"

"Of course you mean you consider me responsible for how he looks. Is the
way Arturo looks the reason I mystify you?"

"It's part of it, yes," the invalid answered. "In the first place, one
can't easily imagine so splendid-looking a young man as that being
allowed to look like Hamlet. One would think----"

"That I'd fairly jump at such a chance!" Claire finished for him, as he
hesitated. "I mystify you because I don't jump, I suppose?"

"A little, yes; but there's something more. You meant for me to speak
out, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"Well, one always wonders whether or not American girls are as
democratic at home as they are abroad. It's the most curious thing--you
seem to think all 'foreigners' equally desirable as acquaintances and
escorts if they're able to make what seems to you a presentable
appearance. What I could never puzzle out----"

But she interrupted him again, and this time she laughed. "Oh, now I see
what you're talking about and I know what you and Mr. Rennie were
discussing--and probably what's worrying the Principessa. You mean the
baron and his brother, Giuseppe. You're talking about my distressing
Arturo by playing around with the two Bastoni, aren't you?"

"I suppose so; yes."

She nodded, laughed again and went on: "You and the princess and Mr.
Rennie--and, incidentally, my mother--can't understand how I could waste
my time going places with the Bastoni and letting them hang about me
here, when there's such a splendid young man as Arturo available. That's
it, isn't it? In the first place, you wonder why I don't accept him, and
in the second, why I annoy him by seeing something of two men he
despises. Well, since that's my mystery, I'll clear it up for you, Mr.
Orbison. You've been such an attentive audience, I think I owe it to
you. I haven't accepted Don Arturo because he hasn't proposed to me."

"What! But his mother----"

"She didn't tell Mr. Rennie her son had proposed to me, Mr. Orbison."

"But----"

"Oh, dear me!" she cried, and her laughter sounded gayly desperate. "I
don't deny he wants to. I haven't let him."

"But that's the same thing, isn't it?"

"No, it isn't. If I'd let him go that far it would mean I intended him
to, and I don't. I think that's clear enough on this point, Mr. Orbison.
About the Bastoni, the honest truth is that I think they're terribly
amusing--I like to dance with 'em and they speak the funniest English I
ever heard. Arturo's nice, but he isn't funny--and they are! That's all
there is to my mystery, Mr. Orbison."

He stared at her from under deeply frowning eyebrows; and she was amazed
to see that he was serious; she had thought he would laugh with her.
"You----" he said. "It's astounding! It's like a----" He stopped,
frowned even more harshly, and then asked: "Would you care to hear what
you remind me of?"

"I'm not sure," she replied. "You don't look as if it were anything very
encouraging. But perhaps--since you've begun it----"

"You remind me of a child I saw in Flanders one day. She was a little
bright-eyed dancing sort of fairy creature and she'd got hold of some
things it amused her to play with. They were new shells, charged with
high explosives, and she was having a beautiful, light-hearted, good
time with 'em."

"Good gracious! I don't believe poor Arturo is very likely to explode,
Mr. Orbison."

"No; he's a gentle boy--patient and self-contained, I should say, no
matter what he suffers. You don't understand my reference, naturally.
There are things beneath the surface in Raona, Miss Ambler. It isn't as
if you were playing around with American young men--or British, either.
I wonder if you could attach some seriousness to the princess's anxiety
for her son. Mr. Rennie does. He told me that Don Arturo was in a
position here that possibly involved the element of personal peril and
that your playing around, so to speak, might add to it."

"What!" Claire's eyes opened widely; she was indignant. "I think I never
heard anything much more absurd in my life! Is that his mother's
idea--and Mr. Rennie's--and yours? That in my playing around I play them
off against each other?"

"No, no," he said hurriedly. "That wasn't implied--not exactly."

"'Not exactly'!" she exclaimed, her eyes flashing. "That means it was!"

"No. I don't imply it was in your intention; but it might result in the
same effect as if it were."

"How?"

"The Bastoni might interpret themselves as in a manner competitors with
Don Arturo for your favour. They might believe themselves his rivals."

"Oh!" she cried. "What utter nonsense!"

"So far as your intention is concerned, it is," Orbison said. "I don't
doubt it. But Mr. Rennie has an idea that the two brothers do regard
themselves somewhat in that light. And since they are young Liana's
bitter enemies politically, and the passions of people here are very
different from the kind you've known elsewhere, Miss Ambler----"

"Good heavens!" she cried. "What on earth have I to do with all that? Do
you think the Bastoni want to marry me? _Both_ of them? They've been
just ordinarily polite, in their way, like anybody else. I know they're
against Don Arturo politically; even our _valet de chambre_ talks about
that, and says they're determined not to let Arturo organize Fascismo
here; but that's nothing I could have the slightest effect upon, even if
I tried. I don't think the Bastoni have a personal feeling about Arturo,
anyhow. He was hurt with me yesterday because I went to the Salone with
Giuseppe, and then he came there and I soothed him down; but he looked
so disapproving that the baron noticed it and spoke of it to me. I told
him what was the matter and the baron didn't think anything of it; he
began to talk of other things right away. If he felt anything personal
he'd have shown it then, because----"

"Pardon me," Orbison interrupted. "You say you 'told him what was the
matter.' Do you mean you told him that young Liana had asked you not to
go there with them?"

"The baron asked me if Arturo had advised me not to go to the Salone
with his brother. Well, Arturo didn't want me to go there with anybody;
he hates the place."

"But what did you tell the baron when he asked you that about his
brother?"

"Why!--I said 'Yes,' of course."

"You did?"

"But good gracious!" Claire cried. "Why shouldn't I? I've just told you
it didn't make the slightest difference. We were dancing, and I doubt if
he even noticed what I said. As a matter of fact, I'm positive he
didn't. I'm not wholly an idiot, Mr. Orbison!" She spoke with agitation
and there was a smarting threat of tears in her eyes, in spite of her.
This was not at all the conversation she had expected to hold with the
invalid gentleman when she had bravely left the pergola to speak to him;
and she was bewildered, even chagrined. "I really am not an idiot," she
said. "I'm not--even though I see you think I am!"

"No, no----"

"You do!" she said huskily, her emotion increasing. "Of course you do!
You think I've done harm."

He lifted a thin hand in protest. "No, no! I hope you haven't."

"Ah! That means you do think so! That's what your watching me and
thinking about me, ever since you came here, amounts to! I asked you to
tell me what you thought of me, and I get what I deserve for being a
bold enough idiot to ask you such a question! You've looked me well over
and you've decided I'm a fool!"

Distressed, for she spoke passionately, he gently touched her forearm.
"My dear Miss Ambler!" he said. "Don't you remember we began our talk
with an apology from me for being so intrusive as to think of you at
all?"

She looked at the emaciated fingers placatively just touching her arm;
and suddenly the tears that had threatened filled her eyes; but she
smiled upon him through them. "You didn't owe me an apology for that,"
she said. "I've been doing as much thinking about you as you have about
me."

He looked startled. "What? No--you mustn't----"

She leaned toward him a little. "I'm not the kind of fool you think I
am," she said. "But there are some things nobody can help!"

Then, not permitting a second anti-climax to mar the conclusion of this
interview that had begun with one, she jumped up and walked quickly back
into the hotel. Emotions varied and conflicting wrung her, yet at the
same time thrilled her. They were altogether genuine and far from
shallow; but what actually controlled her, in spite of them, was her
sense of dramatic effect. Claire's exits were always excellent.




CHAPTER XV


She knew that her exits were excellent, even though, unlike her
entrances, they had to be made on the spur of the moment. An entrance
could always be planned, as she had planned hers this morning. She might
have written it for herself: "Enter heroine with red book of poems in
her hand, and sings aria, Rupert listening."

In her room, still blushing and with eyes still wet, she sat down to
wonder breathlessly how much Orbison would think she had implied by her
final words to him; but even in this she was nevertheless conscious of
her duality as both an emotional person and a stage director. It was a
consciousness that annoyed her; and sometimes, when it became acute, as
it did this morning, it almost dismayed her. All her life--even when she
was a child--she had seemed to be not one person but two. One was an
honest person and the other appeared to be an artist. The honest person
did the feeling and most of the thinking; but the artist directed her
behaviour and cared about nothing except picturesque effects. When
Claire was nineteen and her father died, she had been truly
grief-stricken; but the artist was present at his funeral; and she
sometimes remembered with amazement that it was the artist who made her
bow her head at the cemetery. This was a recollection she always hurried
out of her thoughts, lest the amazement become shame.

"Heaven, please tell me," she said now, in her cell bedroom in Raona.
"What's the matter with me? What am I? Can't I ever in my whole life do
anything natural?"

For it seemed to her that she was in love with the broken Englishman.
"Something about him," as she thought, had roused a depth of feeling she
had not known before; his worn, fine face, retaining the haggard
outlines of what had been a conspicuous manly beauty, was always before
her, whether her actual eyes beheld it or not; the thought of him
haunted her with pain and a strange joy; and she wanted him to know it.
There had been days when Orbison, lying pallid in his chair in the
garden, seemed almost to be dying; and she had wished to go to his side
and kneel and say, "Let me die with you, dear." But even that was the
picturesque impulse; she knew she would have knelt gracefully, and that
even with the man she loved she could not evade her damnable artist's
stage directions.

"I'm terrible!" she moaned to herself; and looked in the mirror. "But
maybe it's because of that."

She meant her extraordinary prettiness. Perhaps her duality was caused
by her comeliness--girls born to be pretty might be doomed for that very
reason, to behave picturesquely. "Ah! If he knew me as I really am," she
thought, "he wouldn't care for me; he'd be horrified instead." Then she
had a brightening idea. "Probably every other good-looking girl in the
world has these same two natures." And now she smiled to the glass.
"Except the stupid ones!"

She was not really despondent; she was excited, and happily so.
Moreover, in her thought, "If he knew me as I really am he wouldn't care
for me," there was a significant assumption, although she did not pause
to make it more definite. Nevertheless, it was therein contained: "Not
knowing me, he does care for me!"

Yet she had said to him: "You've looked me well over and you've decided
I'm a fool!" She had wept when he touched her with his hand, so pitiably
thin; but the tears that filled her eyes then were already in them,
because he had insisted upon talking reproachfully to her about Arturo
Liana and those foolish Bastoni. That did not distress her now; she had
let the Bastoni play around because they were funny and danced well, as
she explained; and she was sorry if that had distressed Arturo, but
there was no harm in it, she was sure; and since Orbison seemed to wish
it, she would snub the Bastoni and be so nice to Arturo that he'd
forget. She did not really believe the Englishman thought her a fool
because he compared her to a fairy child playing with explosives; and
her strong impression was that a girl's picturesqueness suffers no
damage by a gentleman's persuading himself that other gentlemen are
becoming explosive on her account.

Her eyes, still upon the mirror, grew large and bright with a stirred
appreciation: the image before her was of a personage, that wonderful
lady who had given him, he said, the final loveliness of the hour of
greatest beauty he had known in all his life. Claire had resolved never
to tell him that she was the lady, and she was determined to maintain
her resolution. Her only problem, therefore, was to think of the best
way of letting him find it out for himself.

She had not thought of any way at all when she and her mother went into
the refectory for lunch; but she had the pleasure of seeing that his
colour heightened--as she was aware her own did--when she nodded to him.
Miss Orbison joined him in returning her salutation; Claire murmured her
mother's name to them; and, when the meal was finished, the four people
walked together out into the garden and together drank their coffee at a
table placed beside Orbison's long chair. Mrs. Ambler noticed that it
was a relief to him to get back to this chair.

"I should think you'd have luncheon brought to you here outdoors," she
said. "The chairs in the refectory are so uncomfortably stiff."

He shook his head and smiled. "No. One clings to ordinary habits, doing
what other people do as long as one can. Besides, this really isn't a
proper place to eat--not from a porcelain plate, at least; I'm afraid
they'd not understand if I asked for vine leaves. Do you know the whole
story of Raona, Miss Ambler? Do you know the beginning of it?"

"No," she said, looking at him with a full straight gaze, not lacking in
a mysterious gravity. "I don't even know the end of it, Mr. Orbison."

At that, his glance swept away from her quickly, and he pointed down the
coast to their left. "The first Greeks landed just there," he said; and
he told her of the storm that had driven the mariners back down the
strait and forced this landing. She hung upon his story, never looking
away from him, while Mrs. Ambler and Miss Orbison produced embroideries
and plied their needles, listening, too, in the dreamy manner of sewing
ladies. He talked of antique peoples as if they were human and
comprehensible, not dried data of a dried historian; and, having one so
intently gazing a listener as never before inspired him, he told her of
the Greek fighting down the coast, of the coming of the war fleets of
Alcibiades, sweeping the sea before them, of the perishing of that navy
and of the strange death of Archimedes, and of Plato's sailing back to
Athens after his wicked last repartee to the tyrant Dionysius.

"How lovely!" Claire cried at this, and she clasped her hands together,
delighted with the ancient witticism. "I always thought Plato must be
about the same as the square of the hypotenuse, or metempsychosis--until
this afternoon. I'd never have believed there was anybody in the world
who could make me wish I'd known him, Mr. Orbison!"

Miss Orbison looked at her watch. "Dear me! It's almost tea-time
already. Charles, you do have a silver tongue!"

"I think you mean it's metal because it can be used so long without
wearing out," he said; and glancing over his shoulder, he shook his
head. "There's a gentleman I fear thinks it must be of iron; I hadn't
noticed him. He has the air of a long-suffering poet, waiting a chance
to speak to Miss Ambler."

The gentleman was Arturo Liana. He stood by the precipice railing,
fiddling pensively with his straw hat and a walking stick, too patiently
courteous to interrupt by a closer approach. Claire was not pleased to
remember that she had determined to be nice to him; for now, at last,
the man at her side had become infinitely more to her than the man at a
distance. She gave the invalid a softly reproachful glance eloquent of
her meaning: "All right," she said to him, entirely in this ocular
demonstration. "I'll obey you and be an angel to him; but it's foolish
and drags me miserably away from you."

What she said with her voice was less pathetic, though she sighed as she
rose. "I suppose so. Probably wants me to take a walk. Oh, very well!"

She gave the man in the chair another look, one that meant, "You're
doing this!" Then she turned away, and, rearranging her expression to a
more welcoming aspect, walked briskly toward Arturo. She did not reach
him, however, without being intercepted.

Giuseppe Bastoni rose from the bench where he had been sitting beyond a
clustering shrubbery, and stepped forth to stand bowing before her.

"Miss Ambler--you please?"

She stopped. "Yes?"

"I please like to invite you. You will come to dance? Music at Salone
nice good zis assternoon. You please enjoy to come?"

"No," she said; and she intended the coldness with which she spoke and
looked at him to be observed by the person whose suggestion she thought
she was obeying. "No, I believe not."

Giuseppe stared through his monocle. "No? You don't like?"

"Not to-day."

"No? You don't like to come because we go to Naple' sometime, my brozzer
an' me?"

"I haven't any idea what you mean," she said. "I must go on; I'm keeping
Mr. Liana waiting."

"Oh, yes! Meester Liana!" Giuseppe stood aside, and bowed deeply. "You
don' like keep Meester Liana to wait. Oh, no! Excuse!"

He turned at once and strode out of the garden, while Claire, continuing
upon her way to Arturo, glanced brightly back over her shoulder at the
man in the long chair.

"You see?" she seemed to ask. "Are you satisfied with me?"

But he did not appear to be satisfied; and she was puzzled. "Good
gracious!" she thought. "Isn't there any pleasing you at all?"

Apparently there wasn't, for he frowned heavily; and the unfortunate
Arturo paid for it. She was anything but angelic to him during their
walk.




CHAPTER XVI


Arturo complained of this gently as they stood in the cloister for a few
moments at parting, upon their return. Twilight had fallen, the air was
still; the only sound they heard, except a gurgle of water in the pink
marble fountain, was a lonely melody played upon a reed pipe far away
and high above them, on a cliffside rising behind the narrow town. It
was the Pastorale; and Arturo's sigh was as wistful as the tune.

"You were so kind last night," he said. "It was heaven for me, even
before you sang. To-day you drop me over the precipice again. I never
can know what I do to displease you."

"Nothing at all, Arturo."

"Then why do you treat me so?"

"Good gracious!" she exclaimed. "It seems to me I treat you pretty well.
You saw how I snubbed that poor little Giuseppe Bastoni, merely because
you were waiting to speak to me. I thought he made it pretty plain that
he was offended, and of course that's the end of me for both him and his
brother. Well, I did that for you, didn't I?"

"But if you did, you seem to resent that you did it," Arturo said. "You
have found some fault with everything I have said. If I say, 'It is fine
weather,' you say, 'It is bad weather'! When I ask why you believe so,
you begin to whistle and you whistle for half an hour!"

"Then don't ask me why I believe it's bad weather. That's simple, isn't
it?"

"Ah!" he said. "The sun could be so bright if you would let it! Why
can't I please you a little?"

Claire looked at him seriously. "You do."

"I can't think so to-day. Yesterday I could. It is an eternal
up-and-down!"

"No," she said. "I like you as well to-day as I did yesterday. I'm
always pleased with you, Arturo."

"Is that all?" he asked. "Just 'pleased'? Just you 'like'?"

"Oh, dear!" she said, and she shook her head despairingly. "There it is!
Whenever I give you the chance, you say things like that! Don't you see
that I spend half my time with you trying to keep you from asking such
questions?"

"Yes, I do," he answered. "I am afraid it is what you have wish'."

"What is?"

Arturo looked at her steadily, with dark, sad eyes. "Yes, I think it is
true. You have wish' that I should want to ask such questions but that I
should not ask them. I think you like men to be in love with you but not
to trouble you by telling you. Isn't it true?"

"What!" she cried; but even in her own ears the indignation she put into
her voice had a sound somewhat enfeebled. Confronted with so simple yet
exact a statement of fact, she was at a loss; and, indeed, she felt both
helpless and foolish. She could find nothing better to do than to employ
a stencil that she herself knew was too worn with coquettes' usage to be
an adequate defence. "I never heard anything so unjust in all my life!"

"Then you do wish me to tell you?"

"To tell me what?" she said impatiently; but in the same instant she
understood her mistake and that he would reply, "I love you!" She
stepped back from him quickly, her hands fluttering in hasty gestures of
negation. "No! I don't mean that; I don't mean to ask you such a
question. Arturo, please----"

"Then what I said of you is true."

"Oh, dear me!" And with that, she uttered some little incoherent sounds
of petulant distress; then fell back upon another and even more useless
stencil: "Arturo, don't you understand?"

"I am afraid so," he said quietly; but there was something in his voice
that made her catch her breath. "You needn't be disturbed. I will not
say what you fear I would say. I will never say it."

"Arturo----"

"That is all," he said.

Then they stood facing each other, not speaking. Her stencils had not
aided her; she knew herself accused but defenseless before the
accusation; and helplessly, in her confusion, she found nothing at all
to say. She had a sensation as of becoming smaller; and Arturo as he
stood before her, slender but vague in the twilight, with tragedy in his
dark and gentle eyes, was like a tall judge of her.

The white columns of the cloister and the outlines of the marble
fountain, in the wan light, were to remain in her memory as a background
like the architectural shapings of a shadowy judgment seat where she had
been unable to clear herself of a true charge. But Arturo was an
unreproachful judge. Orbison had spoken of him as Hamlet; and just such
a sorrowful dignity invested the young Italian in this parting with the
American girl; for a parting it was--a final one. Foreseeing Providence
has been kind in not making us, also, foreseeing; and so we do not know
what is to remain most keenly in our memories. Claire's thoughts were
more annoying than acutely painful and were principally occupied with
herself; she no more knew that for years afterward she was unavailingly
to remember Arturo Liana as he stood looking at her now in the gray
cloister than she knew that this was the last time she would ever see
him.

He bowed to her gravely, and left her. "Oh, well----" she murmured; and
she sighed a deep sigh, in which naturally a little anger mingled with
other emotions; for she could not be put at a disadvantage and remain
wholly unresentful. "Well, it's what I get!" she thought, meaning that
she had been punished for obeying a too virtuous gentleman's
suggestions. Then, going into the long corridor in the interior of the
hotel, she discovered this gentleman seated alone at a small tea table
where he was lingering with some cold cups and saucers and the end of a
cigarette.

She immediately placed herself in a chair opposite him at the table.
"Well, what was the matter?" she asked.

"When, Miss Ambler?"

"When I did what you'd told me I ought to do."

"My dear young lady!" he objected. "I have too many culpabilities of my
own; I don't tell people what they ought to do."

"You told me," she said sharply. "Certainly you did. And I do wish you
wouldn't call me a 'dear young lady,' Mr. Orbison. You're not my uncle;
you're not old enough."

"I'm afraid I am," he said, smiling. "At least I'm afraid I feel so."

"No, you don't," she returned quickly. "You haven't been watching me
like an uncle--not a bit--and I haven't been like a niece being
watched!"

"I beg your pardon," he said with some awkwardness, and returned to her
opening question. "What was the matter when?"

"I think you're evading. You know perfectly you did tell me what you
thought I ought to do--what you and Mr. Rennie and Arturo Liana's mother
thought I ought to do. You told me this morning and infuriated me. You
said that if I had any decency I'd be nice to Arturo and drop the baron
and Giuseppe."

"No, I----"

"Yes, you did, absolutely. So I've done it. You saw me freeze Giuseppe
Bastoni when I left you this afternoon to join Arturo. You were
looking--I saw you were; and I snubbed Giuseppe the worst I know how. He
knew I meant it, and he and his brother will understand perfectly that
it's permanent. I think he was in a cold rage when I went by him. Then I
looked back to see if I had done what I meant to, which was just to
please you, and I saw I hadn't. You looked like the _siroc_! Does it
make you bitter to have a girl try to please you?"

He did not reply at once; and she took a cigarette from a silver case
lying open before him on the table, and lighted it herself, as he seemed
unaware. "Well, does it? What was wrong with what I did?"

"I'll tell you," he said thoughtfully. "I didn't propose a line of
conduct for you this morning. You said I'd been watching you and asked
me what I saw. Among other things, I said I hadn't been able to
understand how any girl could give such fellows as the Bastoni any
ground for conceiving, however mistakenly, that they were perhaps rivals
with so splendid a young man as Arturo Liana. But whatever harm there
was in it had been done; I didn't suggest an attempt to undo it by
making those two wolfish creatures more poisonously young Liana's
enemies than ever."

"What?" she cried.

"Why, yes," he said calmly. "That was what you must have accomplished.
Don't you see it?"

She looked at him almost fiercely. "I did exactly what you as much as
told me to. You've just admitted you reproached me with giving the
Bastoni a chance to think they were Arturo's rivals. Well, I snubbed
Giuseppe, practically in Arturo's presence. Now you attack me for making
him his enemy instead of his rival. No, I don't see it!"

"I'll try to make it clearer, Miss Ambler. The truth is, the Bastoni
have the reputation of being pretty bad hats. You naturally wouldn't
have known that; but there's no doubt of it; and there are quite a
number of other bad hats in the place they come from and the villages
between Raona and there. You know most of the landowners don't go to
their own estates unless they're heavily armed and guarded by the
_carabinieri_; it isn't altogether a safe neighbourhood except for
foreigners like us--they let us alone because we increase the revenue.
Well, the Bastoni know what their own reputation is; and that they're
fairly notorious among the Italians for selling spurious antique
jewellery to foreigners and as associates of the other bad hats--and
young Liana is an Italian. Don't you see what conclusion this Giuseppe
would come to in his mind? You'd formerly been most gracious to him and
his brother. Then abruptly, with Liana present, you snub him and go to
Liana. Of course he'd think Liana had been saying things about him to
you and ruined him with you. That's why I seemed disturbed when you
looked back at me. Don't you understand, Miss Ambler?"

Claire's head drooped and so did her eyelids; she slowly crushed her
cigarette down into an ash tray upon the table. "You do think I'm a
fool," she said in a low voice. "It seems a little unjust when I did
only what I thought you wanted me to do. _I_ didn't want to do it. Do
you think I wanted to go away from you and walk with Arturo? I suppose
you'll tell me now that you didn't suggest my being nice to him,
either!"

"No," Orbison said. "I didn't."

She looked up slowly. "No?"

"I didn't suggest your doing anything at all," he insisted. "Certainly
not that you be 'nice' to a young man obviously suffering on your
account--not unless you meant to accept him. Naturally, if you didn't
mean to do that, your being 'nice' to him would only increase his
torture."

"Well, then," she said, smiling suddenly. "I've pleased you about that,
at least. I was the very devil to him! When we got back from our walk
just now we had rather a scene; he virtually denounced me as a trifler.
Then he stalked off, and I don't know when he'll be back. That is to
say, my being 'nice' to him because you suggested it merely made us both
wretched and on that account I'm sure you're pleased with me at last,
Mr. Orbison!"

"Pleased with you at last!" he repeated in a tone ironically rueful; and
he laughed. "Much you bother yourself whether I'm pleased with you or
not!"

"No," she returned. "That won't do." She put her forearms on the table
and leaned toward him, keeping her gaze gravely and unwaveringly upon
his. "I'm serious; it won't do. You know how much I care to please you
and I know you know it."

"I don't," he protested; and as his pallid cheeks once more showed
colour in response to words of hers, pain came into his eyes, and he had
the look of a man who struggles, but struggles feebly, through lack of
strength. "I don't know anything of the kind. It's nonsense, and you
mustn't----" He contrived to utter another laugh. "You are an
astonishing young woman, I must say! Is your conception of ethics based
solely upon the pleasing of the nearest available man?"

"Go on," she said, not moving, nor letting her eyes fall from his. "'The
nearest available man,' you say. Very well--insult me all you please! We
both know that pleasing you is all I care about; but something you don't
know is that I've already pleased you more than anyone else ever did.
_I_ know it, though; and do you think that while I have that in my mind
I'll ever give up going on trying to please you? Do you?"

He seemed to struggle with an increasing pain. "Upon my word, I don't
know what you're talking about."

"Yes, you do," she said, and her eyes grew brighter; her voice was
tremulous but happy. "We both know."

"Indeed I--I----" Stammering, he made an effort to rise from his chair;
but he had no strength, and, in difficulties with the table, could not
at once get upon his feet. His sister, coming into the corridor at that
moment, ran to help him.

"Charles!" she cried. "You might have fallen! Why didn't you ask Miss
Ambler to help you?"

Claire answered her, but kept her eyes upon the flushed and panting
invalid. "He knew I wouldn't," she said. "Not to help him get away!" And
at that the stout and hearty Miss Orbison, after a sharper glance at
both of them, looked seriously disturbed.




CHAPTER XVII


Claire was to see this troubled look upon the ruddy face of the English
spinster repeated frequently. "What's the matter with that woman?" the
girl asked her mother one day in their small salon. "She looked so
reliable and solid when they first came here--not that she looked happy,
of course, if you caught her off her guard when her brother wasn't
looking--but anyhow she hadn't that fretting expression you see about
her eyes and mouth so much lately. It can't be because Mr. Orbison's
health is worse, because it isn't; he's just the same."

Mrs. Ambler sighed. "I shouldn't think one would need to seek far for
the reason a sister would look troubled with a brother in that shattered
condition--especially when the brother's as lovely a man as hers is.
I've discovered that since we've begun to see so much of them. He is
lovely."

"Yes," Claire said absently. "But I meant something different--that
expression she's got just lately."

"I haven't noticed it."

"Perhaps she only has it when she looks at me. Mother, you don't
think----"

"I don't think what?"

Claire had paused, gazing out of the window dreamily; and her mother
repeated the question.

"What is it I don't think?"

"You don't think that sometimes--they avoid us?"

"Good gracious!" Mrs. Ambler exclaimed, highly amused. "They don't get
much chance! You've taken pretty good care of that, I must say! We go to
the refectory when they do; we come out to the corridor when they do; we
go out to the garden with them; we're everywhere that they are, at the
same hour and in the same place. If we were a house party of four we
couldn't well see more of them, and so how could they avoid us, even if
they did want to, poor things!"

"Yes; but that's the point: Do you think they want to?"

"I haven't seen any sign of it. They're always cordial and he's always
interesting. Where'd you get the idea?"

Claire shook her head. "I don't know, unless it's that troubled
expression she has when she looks at me. Once or twice I've thought she
wanted to speak to me alone--she had that manner--but she doesn't. Then
of course there's another thing rather queer."

"What is it?"

"Well--it could hardly be a coincidence."

"What couldn't?"

Claire looked at her mother searchingly. "Have you noticed how much more
constantly she's with him than she was at first?"

"Is she?"

"She's with him absolutely all the time he's out of his room. She used
to leave him, for an hour or so, quite often; but now she never does.
It's as if she didn't want to leave him alone--alone with anybody else.
I haven't been alone with him since I don't know how long!"

"My dear child! Why should you be alone with him? It strikes me you say
some pretty personal things to him under conditions that might almost be
called semi-public! I don't know _much_ more you could do if you were
alone with him; and the poor man himself looks troubled enough when you
do it, as it is!"

"Yes, but----" Claire said dreamily. "Do you think perhaps she has a
kind of sisterly jealousy of me?"

"No, I don't," Mrs. Ambler replied with emphasis. "She isn't that type
at all. She's a good woman, generous I'm sure; and she thinks of nothing
in the world but her brother's welfare. By the way, speaking of welfare,
the season here is getting rather late. Don't you think it's about time
we were on our way back to Paris, as we planned? We've already been here
a month longer than we intended to be when we came."

"Oh, Paris!" the daughter said impatiently. "I don't care if I never see
Paris again!"

"We can't stay here into the very hot weather. Nobody does."

"Yes, but----" Claire murmured, and sat frowning. "Surely she can't
think that keeping me from ever being alone with him would do his
welfare any good. I've told her myself that I'd do anything in the world
for him."

"You told her that, Claire?"

"Yes," Claire said, and her softened eyes grew bravely moist, even under
her mother's direct gaze. "I told her I'd give my life to be of any use
to him. Then why does she----"

Mrs. Ambler, herself troubled, shook her head. "I don't know, Claire."

"I'm sure she believed me. It's true--I would give my life in an
instant. Mother, she _must_ have believed me!"

This insistence implied a doubt that need not have existed; the
Englishwoman had believed her, and at that same hour was forth upon an
errand she would otherwise have spared herself. Having left her brother
drowsing in his cell, Miss Orbison trudged sturdily through the long
stone great street of Raona, passed under the archway of the ancient
town gates, and went on for some hundreds of paces beyond the ruined
medieval walls. Then she paused at the panelled green doorway of an
enclosed garden, and pulled vigorously upon an iron chain. A rusty bell
that hung upon a wrought-iron hoop above the door rang as heartily as
she seemed to desire.

When the door opened, a swarthy little maid in an old-fashioned Raonese
peasant's costume appeared, a brilliant scarf about her dark head, a
striped red-and-white shawl over her black bodice, gay embroideries
encrusting her long green skirt. She stood smiling and bowing archly in
the doorway. "_Buon' giorno, signora._"

"_Il signore  in casa?_" Miss Orbison asked.

"_Si, signora. Prego!_" Then the little creature, barefooted, ran up the
garden terraces to the white villa above, and disappeared within a
Saracen doorway. This was the entrance to the studio, Miss Orbison knew,
and by the time she had ascended to it, Eugene Rennie had come out of it
to welcome her.

"You're painting?" she asked. "I'm interrupting?"

He would have liked to tell her the truth, which was that he wanted to
go on working; but having taken note of her expression, he said that he
had finished for the day; and they sat down together upon the wide
marble steps of the topmost terrace.

"Something about Charles?" he said.

"Yes."

"He's no worse?"

"Of course every hour he's an hour worse," she said with a tremor in her
voice; but she controlled it manfully. "He doesn't look worse, hour by
hour--he couldn't well do that--but no matter how he looks, the end of
his suffering is always just that much nearer in sight. The pain is
never unbearable, and often he's hardly conscious of it--perhaps because
he's so used to it. The doctors told me precisely how it would be, and
everything's confirmed them; I never doubted they were right. If only
that specialist hadn't told _him_!" She stretched her gloved hands
convulsively in her lap, then sighed loudly and relaxed them. "But
there! It's done, and we have to make the best of it; but that isn't
what I've come to you about."

"You know I'll do anything," Rennie said.

"Yes, I know you will. I'm afraid I'm here to ask you to do something
difficult."

"What is it?"

"Do you remember one morning when you and Charles and I were watching
Miss Ambler and Don Arturo Liana as they sat by the railing of the hotel
garden, and Charles looked so absurdly depressed?"

"Yes; he seemed gloomy about Arturo's filling Miss Ambler's heart. I was
delighted."

"I was rather pleased myself, Mr. Rennie. I thought it would be good for
him to take a little interest in her, like that."

"Don't you think it has?"

"No," she said. "If it had remained a little interest we'd have been
right to be pleased." She shook her head. "It hasn't."

"No?" Rennie looked puzzled. "You don't think he's serious about her?"

"I'm afraid he's dangerously liable to be serious about her."

"'Dangerously,' Miss Orbison? You mean it might be dangerous for him to
care for a rather flirtatious and light-headed young creature who
doesn't care for him?"

"No. It's because she does care for him."

Rennie looked astonished. "You think she does?"

"She's as much as told me so, and she was in earnest. She cares for him
as deeply as it's in her nature to care at her age, I'm quite positive;
and that's what is cruelly dangerous for Charles."

"You think he could be really in love with her, do you?"

"He's trying with all his poor broken strength not to be," she answered
unhappily. "Do you understand why he tries not to be in love with her?
Do you understand why he _mustn't_ be, Mr. Rennie?"

"A little--perhaps," he said doubtfully. "But it's the very breath of
romance to believe that the happiness found in mutual love makes even
tragedy celestial."

Miss Orbison projected an audible sniff from her nostrils. "Yes; it's
the 'very breath of romance,' and it's a wicked nonsense for human
beings to believe it enough to act upon it! Don't you see that Charles
understands, and that he's trying to save himself?"

"From what?"

"From agony, Mr. Rennie. From an absolutely useless and futile agony.
We'll look at it in a plain way--a matter-of-fact way, if you
please--without any romance. He'd got through the worst of it when we
came here; he'd no chance but to accept, and he was fairly well resigned
to it. He'd been through his rebellion and he knew rebellion was no
good. Sometimes you could see a little of it left--in his eyes, or in
some impatient thing he said; but he'd nevertheless accepted what he
knew was absolute and inevitable. He has it fixed in his mind that the
end will be in the autumn; October, he thinks--he's spoken of it several
times. Well, he'd made himself almost placid about it. He'd loved life
in the natural way most of us love it; but after all he felt he hadn't a
great deal to live for. The war had shut his career off short; and for
people near his heart he had only some friends--and me." She paused for
a moment and her stout shoulders stiffened. "Well, a man can bear to die
and leave a sister, Mr. Rennie."

Rennie nodded sympathetically. "Yes."

"If he had fallen a little in love with this pretty young thing," she
went on, "and if the girl hadn't cared for him, it wouldn't have
mattered; it might even have helped him not to mind dying. But for him
to see that she adores him--and I'm afraid she does--for him to
recognize the fact that he cares for her and to find life offering him
what he'd believe a glittering, glorious happiness in almost the moment
when he has to be done with life forever--oh!" Miss Orbison cried. "That
would be horrible, Mr. Rennie!"

"Yes," Rennie said. "I think it would. The pain would outweigh the
happiness."

"'Happiness,' Mr. Rennie? Charles knows it wouldn't be happiness at all;
he knows it would be an unspeakable anguish to take this new beautiful
thing into his life only to be wrenched from it! He's trying so hard to
spare himself that. He can bear dying; but he can't bear dying
unbearably! He's doing everything he can to avoid believing that the
girl cares for him and that he cares for her. You see, it's her caring
that is the peril. If he could believe her what we thought her at first,
just a light-hearted young coquette flirting with these queer Raonese
men and handsome boys like Liana, and not seriously troubling her head
about _him_, he could still keep his grasp upon the resignation he feels
slipping from him. It's she who's getting it away from him. I've done
all I could to help him, to give her no opportunities to make him see
what he tries so hard not to see. But she makes it more and more clear
in spite of me, and in spite of Charles, Mr. Rennie."

"You depict her as pretty brazenly forward, Miss Orbison."

But the sturdy Englishwoman was just. "No," she said. "Those things are
different nowadays--customs have changed and anyhow, you see, it's
rather chivalrous of her. I don't think she understands much about
Charles; she doesn't know his time is so short; but she sees that he's a
cripple and wouldn't ask anybody to marry him. She does the courting
because of that and because she wants to make the sacrifice. I haven't a
doubt she'd eagerly and happily devote her life to nursing him,--indeed
I think she'd do anything for him. And she must do something for him,
Mr. Rennie. She must!"

"What do you want her to do?" he asked.

Miss Orbison rose. "I want her to let my brother die in peace, Mr.
Rennie. Will you ask her? Will you make it clear to her? I've tried--but
I couldn't even begin; I'd have done nothing but cry if I'd tried to go
any further with her. Will you do it, Mr. Rennie?"

In return, he asked her a question as serious. "Do you think it's
possible for anyone to make such a thing clear to a girl of twenty-one
in love?"

Miss Orbison looked up at him desperately. "We've got to _try_, haven't
we? Will you try?"

"Yes," he said. "I'll go this afternoon."




CHAPTER XVIII


He watched her short, strong figure as it descended the long flight of
steps that separated his garden terraces and led to the green doorway.
When she had gone out, he could see her gray felt hat below the top of
the wall as she strode on toward the old gates and the town; and he
sighed for her and the stout heart she carried so bravely in her stout
body. Then he sighed for himself and the disturbing errand she had set
him upon, and went indoors to change his clothes.

When he came forth again, he paused at the top of the steps. The point
was high, and commanded the immense sweep of that great crescenting
mountain coast. Below him the gray road wound out of the towered and
cubed and angled stone masses of the town, and passed toward the vast
corrugations of the volcano's buttresses; there were stolid hamlets
built of old lava among the convulsive shadows of these harsh slopes;
and halfway to the nearest there was a haze of dust upon the road. It
was moving toward Raona, and within it there were glints of glitter and
colour. Rennie distinguished the uniforms of mounted _carabinieri_. He
stood looking down as they drew nearer, and he saw that two of the
_carabinieri_ rode in advance of a mule cart, with three others riding
upon each side of it and two more just behind. Following them, a dozen
or more men joggled along upon mules or donkeys, and a straggling little
crowd of barefooted peasants ran in the dust--attendant spectators
anxious to miss nothing.

Looking down from above, Rennie could see, upon a mattress in the cart,
a bandaged figure; and seated upon a stool beside it, a man in gray
linen clothes smoked a cigarette. The American recognized him as a
friend of his, a Raonese surgeon. Moreover, beside the driver sat a
priest.

Rennie ran down the steps, and, as this cortge passed, he detained one
of the runners, a villager whom he knew.

"Luigi! For what reason so much excitement? Who has been hurt?"

Luigi wiped his wet brow with a bare forearm. "An accident," he said,
panting. "An accident of a peculiar appearance, it might be thought.
This morning some of our people found Don Arturo Liana lying at the foot
of the Salto. The Salto is a very bad little cliff--it is little but
wicked, and foreigners should not use that path."

"Liana!" Rennie exclaimed. "Was he badly hurt?"

"Yes, badly. His mother was sent for and she came with the priest, the
_carabinieri_ and the doctor from Raona, four hours ago. She has gone
ahead in her automobile and they are taking him to the hospital in the
cart because he must be kept lying down. Don Arturo talked to the
_carabinieri_ and to the doctor; I heard him myself, through a window.
He told them he was walking to a meeting at Castrogirone last night, all
alone. Ah! I think he should have been more careful! He said he met some
men on the path, but in the darkness he could not tell who they were; he
said perhaps they had too much wine. Don Arturo is a brave fellow; I
willingly say as much as that for him. He is a foreigner from the North;
but he understands the customs of our country and of course he would not
tell the _carabinieri_ who pushed him off the path."

"So!" Rennie said. "Who _did_ push him off the path, Luigi?"

Luigi opened his eyes until they showed an extreme amount of white below
and above their topaz irises. "'Pushed,' signore! Who spoke of any
pushing?"

"You did."

"No, no!" Luigi protested. "When a man has such enemies as those
belonging to Don Arturo Liana, no one is foolish enough to say the young
gentleman was pushed from anywhere! Excuse, signore!"

Rennie let him go and he ran away, his brown bare feet flitting lightly
over the gray dust. He had caught up with the ragged end of the
procession before it passed through the gates; but the American went
more slowly. Inside the town, he walked first to the wine shop of old
Onorati, who had the habit of knowing the truth of whatever happened in
Raona; but of course Onorati would not speak plainly to a foreigner of
Don Arturo's fall from the Salto.

"Some will swear one way; some will swear another," he said. "The only
thing it is safe to swear is that Don Arturo ought not to have walked so
far alone after the dark!"

"No," Rennie returned dryly. "That is evident."

"Evident? Perhaps. He is in politics."

"So? You think it was political?"

"Who can say? Somewhere there was a whispering----" Onorati stopped, and
shook his head.

"Yes? What was the whispering?"

"It could not be true, I am sure; but there was some foolish whispering
that Don Arturo had talked a little recklessly of some gentlemen; but I
heard nothing that would permit me to guess who the gentlemen are."

"What had he said of them?"

"Nobody knows."

"To whom did he talk?"

Onorati rubbed his right cheek and then his left cheek. "Ah, yes! I
remember hearing that it might have been to some foreign ladies at the
convent."

By the "convent" he meant the hotel that had been a monastery, and
Eugene Rennie, on his way there, stopped halfway down a flight of stone
steps, and made a sound as of a dolorous kind of laughter. Then he
questioned himself upon this very sound. "Why the devil will a man do
that?" he asked himself. "How is it that one is able to see something
grotesquely humorous even in a tragedy? In this one, probably because
the character of the heroine makes it a tragi-comedy--with the emphasis
on the first half of the word, I'm afraid. _Avanti_, then, for my own
miserable part in it!"

The concierge informed him that Miss Ambler was in the garden, and
Rennie went there at once to find her. Miss Orbison had just brought her
brother out to his chair. He was standing, leaning upon the back of it,
and beside him was the American girl. Miss Orbison had paused with an
unfolded rug hanging from her hands; and all three of them wore the
pained and incredulous look of people who have just heard startling
news. This, in fact, was their condition, for the Princess Liana stood
facing them.

Rennie halted where he was.




CHAPTER XIX


She was naturally a pale woman, of a uniform whiteness of complexion
that Rennie, who was an old friend of hers, had never seen varied; but
he saw a variation now. Her whole face showed colour; it was flushed to
a tint between rose and rust; and she held this emotional face high,
too, with her chin lifted and her slim neck straight upon her slim
straight body. She was speaking to Claire in a loud voice.

"My son send me," the princess said. "I would not have come myself. They
wish' to give him an opiate for his suffering; but he say to me he will
not take it if I will not promise to come to speak to you immediately.
So I speak to you his message. He wish' me to tell you that what has
happen' to him is from politics. He say you mus' not think there was any
other cause. He say you might be afraid there was some other reason; he
say you mus' not belief so. That is what he send me to tell you and I
have told you, Miss Ambler; so now I will go back to him."

"Oh--please!" Claire cried. "Will you let me go with you? Would he let
me see him?"

"No!" the princess answered sharply. "You could not see him. What do you
think? A man all beaten and crush' wish' to be coquetted with? _I_ would
not let you see him, Miss Ambler. You have made him unhappy enough and
you have done him harm enough; I hope from the deeps of my heart that he
will never in his life see you again!"

She turned quickly, and as she walked toward the doorway of the hotel,
she came near Rennie. He stepped forward, and she gave him her hand.

"We are not going to let him die," she said. "They have already promise'
me that."

"I heard you say Arturo was beaten----"

"He was. When they finish', they threw him down from the Salto. Everyone
know' who is responsible. But there will be no court. Arturo has some
friends who know very well what to do!"

Then, with a sombre flash of her dark eyes to his troubled blue ones,
she went on; and he joined the group at the invalid's chair.

Claire was weeping. "You know it's true!" she said accusingly to
Orbison. "Anybody with any intelligence at all knows he wouldn't have
sent that message to me if he'd believed it himself! _She_ didn't
believe it! She made it plain enough, didn't she? She meant that her son
sent me that message because he wanted me not to be so wretched as I
would be if I thought I'd been the cause, and to make me understand that
my name wouldn't be involved. Didn't she mean just that? She made it
plain enough how she hates me, didn't she? Yes! And _you're_ making
something else pretty plain, Mr. Orbison!"

"I?" Orbison leaned more heavily upon the chair. "What am I making
plain?"

Claire came close to him, facing him; she disregarded the others. "You
know!" she said. "You've thought from the first I was getting him into
trouble. You said so, and you as much as said I was a little fool. You
did!"

"No--I----"

"You did!" she said passionately. "You thought it! You've thought all
along that I was nothing but a little fool and now you think it's
_proved_! That's what you're making plain to me, Mr. Orbison, just as
she made it plain how she hates me! Do you think I don't _see_ it?"

Orbison answered her sharply. "There's a rather badly smashed young man
down yonder in that hospital on the road to the sea," he said. "It seems
to me you might be more concerned with him than with other people's
opinion of you."

Claire stepped back from him so quickly and awkwardly that it was almost
as if she staggered, while her right arm and shoulder oddly made a
semblance of the gesture of one who strives to shield his head from
harm. And with that she began to weep aloud. "Oh!" she said. "I see! You
hate me for--for not _wanting_ you to think I'm just a little fool!
Well--all right!" She began to walk away; but she did not go all the
distance to the hotel doorway. She stopped, came back toward Orbison;
and, in a broken voice, pathetically sweet, like that of a quietly
sobbing child, "I don't care!" she said. "You--you did like _one_ thing
about me. I never meant to tell you, but you did like one thing I did. I
did it for you. You said--you said it gave you the--the loveliest moment
in the--in the greatest hour of beauty you'd ever known. It was--it was
I that sang at the Greek theatre for you. And anyway, you _did_ say--you
_did_ say you liked _that_!"

Then, her slender shoulders heaving with the sobs that came faster and
more convulsively as she went, she ran to the doorway and disappeared
within that portal of the ancient house of refuge from the world.

Miss Orbison helped her brother to let himself down into his chair,
where he reclined, sighing, with a hand over his eyes; but immediately
she made a sign to Eugene Rennie, and walked to a little distance.

"I thought what you promised me might not be necessary," she said
hurriedly, as the American joined her. "I thought the poor foolish
little thing had done it herself and saved us the trouble, when Charles
spoke to her like that. He did make it pretty plain that he saw how
absurdly self-centred she was, I must say! I thought then there might be
no need for you to speak to her; but since she told him she was the
person who sang at the Greek theatre, I'm afraid you must do it. He's
talked of it again and again; nothing in his life ever made such an
impression on him as that voice, and now he knows it was _hers_--well,
I'm afraid you must go ahead, Mr. Rennie. You'll try to make her
understand?"

"Yes," he said dejectedly. "I suppose so."

He waited an hour; then he went to the door of the cell used as a salon
by Mrs. Ambler and her daughter, and knocked.

Claire was there alone.

"My poor dear child," he said as he came in. "Do you think you could
stand a lecture on invalids and what's good for them--from a fellow
countryman?"

She looked at him gently. "My mother's been wanting us to go away," she
said. "That's what you mean, isn't it?"




CHAPTER XX


The little salon was between the two bedrooms, and both mother and
daughter slept with their doors open, because of a nervousness Mrs.
Ambler felt about her heart. This was an organ without defect; but she
was ill-persuaded of its soundness, and customarily spoke of various
indigestions she had suffered as "heart attacks." She was apprehensive
of such an attack coming upon her in the night, and wished to be able,
even with a voice stricken possibly almost to a whisper, to summon her
daughter.

Thus, that last night of theirs in Raona, Mrs. Ambler not only could
have spoken to Claire in little more than a whisper, but she could also
hear a sound as small as that from her daughter's room; and, waking
suddenly, toward morning she did hear such a sound. She listened for a
little while; then she spoke.

"Claire, are you awake?"

"Yes."

"Are you crying?"

"No."

"It sounds like it."

"Well, I'm not," the daughter insisted.

"I shouldn't think you would," Mrs. Ambler said. "I should think you'd
be glad to leave a place where they do such awful things as those
ruffians did to poor young Mr. Liana. And you needn't cry over him,
either. He's perfectly certain to get well."

"I told you I wasn't crying."

"I think you're very foolish. You know you adore Paris."

"I'm not crying!"

"Very well," Mrs. Ambler said. "How long have you been awake like that?"

"Like what?"

"You know perfectly well what I mean. For heaven's sake, stop that
crying and try to get some sleep!"

Claire's voice became petulant. "Please let me alone, Mother!"

Mrs. Ambler sighed and let her alone. No one else could have known in
the morning how desolately her daughter had wept, most of the night.
Above all, no one would have guessed such a thing of Claire at noon when
Miss Orbison came for her and took her to the invalid's cell to say
good-bye to him.

He sat by the open window listening absently to the talk of his friend
Rennie; the air out over the garden beyond them was bright with the
strong spring sunshine; but nothing anywhere was brighter than the eyes
of the American girl as she came in and gave them greeting. She was
charming, in her lively Parisian travelling dress of blue silk, as
knowingly scant as any other of her dresses; her slim and rakish black
slippers glittered below the fine long shapes of silk stockings that
left some doubt of their being stockings at all; her silken blue helmet
disclosed just two small curved glints of her fair hair before her
hidden ears; and at her waist she wore a cluster of diminutive fresh
pink roses.

She spoke first to Rennie: "So sweet of you to send me these!" She
touched her bouquet as she sat down between the two men. "The nicest
possible bits of Raona one could take away! I'll keep them, Mr. Rennie;
and when you come to New York, some day, if you want a reminder of your
lovely garden here, I'll show them to you."

"Dear me!" Orbison said. "That's another advantage owning a villa gives
a chap over one who merely sojourns at a hotel--a villa can have a
garden. There isn't a florist in Raona, unfortunately."

"Mr. Orbison!" Claire laughed. "I'll remember you without your sending
me a going-away _corsage_!"

"I hope so."

"You know darn well I will!" she said gayly. "I've certainly been brazen
enough in showing you the devastating impression you made on me from the
first. I've really pursued you in the most unmaidenly way, and I'm
afraid I'd keep right on doing it if we were going to stay any longer.
Fortunately for you, my mother's been simply dying for weeks to get back
to Paris, and yesterday evening she reached such a climax of rebellion
she just broke my spirit and I gave in. Lucky for you, I did!"

"No," he said. "I don't think that's very lucky for me, Miss Ambler."

"What? Not even after the scene I made yesterday afternoon because you
scolded me for something I darn well deserved to be scolded for? You
don't think you're lucky, even after that?"

"No," he said slowly. "Not even after--anything!"

For an instant, as he said this, she looked startled; then she laughed.
"Well, then _I'm_ the lucky one to be going, Mr. Orbison."

"Why?"

"Well, you see," she answered merrily, in the manner of a little belle
who coquettes with her grandfather, "if I stayed much longer I might be
getting _too_ serious about you! Just think how far it's gone with me
already!"

"Has it?"

"'_Has_ it!' Dear me! Didn't I confess to you yesterday I sang the
Pastorale that night at the Greek theatre absolutely for you? I did!
Absolutely! If you don't believe me, you can ask my mother. I told her
when I came home that night; and this is the honest truth, Mr. Orbison.
I said, 'That nice Mr. Orbison was there and he hasn't taken the trouble
to meet us; I think maybe he would if he knew I sang the Pastorale just
to make him!'" And with that her laughter tinkled out in childlike
merriment. "But it didn't make you. After all my trouble! If I hadn't
eavesdropped when you were talking to your sister I'd never even have
known you liked it at all!"

"'Liked it,'" he repeated. "I'm glad you eavesdropped, because you know
what I felt about it better than if I'd said the same things to you. It
was the most beautiful thing that's ever been in my life; and it remains
that, Miss Ambler, as long as I have any life. I hope you'll always
remember my"--he faltered, then finished huskily--"my gratitude for it."

Then, though only during an instant, her eyes wavered from their
careless-seeming gayety. There was a flickering in her expression as of
some portended sharp change in it; but the instant passed. "Well, I'm
glad," she said; and she flashed to him the side-long insouciant glance,
merry and brilliant, of the confessed coquette admitting the worst of
her coquetries and impudently claiming the worst of them to be pretty.
"Of course Arturo Liana was _with_ me there, and _he_ felt a little
gratitude, _too_, Mr. Orbison!"

Orbison's troubled expression altered into something like a wondering
dismay; but he contrived to laugh. "Everybody was grateful. You mustn't
think I took so beautiful a thing as that all to myself just because you
said it was!"

Claire seemed to be as light-headed as she was light-hearted. "Murder!
What I _said_? My mother tells me, I don't know how many times a day,
that if I had to be held responsible for everything I _say_, I'd be
guillotined! But don't you think I didn't mean a great big _part_ of it,
for you, Mr. Orbison; I did, honestly! Honestly, I thought of you while
I was singing it and wondered if you liked it, and _that's_ true anyhow,
absolutely!"

She jumped up briskly and put forth her hand to Miss Orbison. "Good-bye.
If you ever _do_ come to New York, remember, you've promised on your
word of honour to let us know. Mr. Rennie----"

"I'm going to be at the station," he said. "We'll say good-bye there."

"How lovely of you!" She turned to Orbison, and he took her extended
hand in his cold long fingers. "Good-bye," she said cheerfully. "You've
been absolutely sweet to Mother and me; I'm going to read Plato and
everything. I hope you won't forget us quite."

"No," he murmured. "I'll never----"

"You're lovely to say so," she said. "We won't forget you either. I
never will, Mr. Orbison. Good-bye--and thank all of you for everything!"

Her cheeriness continued till the door had closed upon her and the
continuously accompanying sound of half-laughter with which she
expressed her high cordiality. But Rennie thought her voice had shaken a
little when she said, "I never will, Mr. Orbison"; and Orbison himself,
as he sank down upon his chair, had a disturbing impression that her
hand had trembled within his loose and feeble clasp.

He sat staring out of the window, while his friend, watching him,
thought the look upon his face the most deeply puzzled, and yet the most
melancholy, he had ever seen upon it. Eugene Rennie's own look, as
Orbison did not observe, was one of growing doubt and sharp
compunction--the look of a man who finds himself involved in what he
fears may prove to be, in the end, a grave mistake.

Miss Orbison had no such expression. She was serious, but not doubtful;
and she began briskly to talk casual commonplaces with the anxious
caller.

He stayed with them half an hour longer; then got to his feet, saying
that it was time for him to be on his way to the station.

Orbison, who had not spoken since Claire left the room, turned his head
and stared vaguely at his departing friend.

"We didn't find out, Eugene," he said.

"Didn't find what out?"

"We didn't find out what was in that pretty little head. And now we'll
never know; but I'm sure--I'm sure----"

"Yes?"

"In spite of all her lightness and her self-centred youthfulness----"
Orbison paused again; then he said, "I'm sure it was something fine and
sweet--in spite of anything!"




CHAPTER XXI


The station at Raona is by the water, and the road down from the great
cliff to the sea level is one that in a photograph seems to be an
interminable gray ribbon strewn back and forth upon the landscape.
Rennie drove down in a donkey cart he owned, and he was late. When he
arrived upon the platform the passengers were all aboard and the train
was slowly beginning to be in motion. He looked up and down the length
of it, disappointed.

"Mr. Rennie! Mr. Rennie!"

Claire had seen him, and she called loudly from the open window of a
_wagon-lit_ compartment.

"Mr. Rennie! _Here_, Mr. Rennie!"

He looked again, then catching a glimpse of a waving hand, saw framed in
the open window the face he sought. Upon it were the glistening streaks
of heavy tears; but her eyes were wide and staring with an anxiety more
poignant than her grief. The train was moving faster.

"Mr. Rennie!" she screamed. "Mr. _Rennie!_"

He ran toward her, and for a few seconds maintained a pace as rapid as
the train's. She leaned from the window and seized his uplifted hand.

"Did I get by with it?" she gasped.

"Yes! God bless you!" he cried, and their hands were parted swiftly.

He stood at the end of the platform and waved his white handkerchief to
her; but in a moment, as she looked back, his receding figure dwindled
and grew tiny, as if he were a mechanical toy at the end of two long,
converging horizontal rods--a little doll man, diminishing and waving a
doll's white handkerchief. Above him the vast and broken blue landscape
climbed into the sky, and a hazy curve of the cliff disclosed the gray
monastery set upon its precipice. Thin as a spider's guy lines, the
garden railing ran at the edge, and tiny dark figures stood there, the
size of exclamation points. "Ah, good-bye!" Claire cried. "Good-bye..."

Her mother pulled her back into her seat. "Do you want to get your head
taken off?"

"It seems so strange," Claire said, and uselessly applied a soaked
handkerchief to her eyes and nose. "It's so _strange_, Mother. I don't
understand it!"

"For heaven's sake, stop crying! It only makes you talk as if you had a
cold in the head. What don't you understand?"

"It's so strange there'll be _people_ there--in that garden--year after
year--just as _we_ were. They'll come there and never know anything
happened there.... There'll be people there, looking down over that
cliff at the sea a hundred years from now. It's so strange----"

"Yes, of course there'll be people there," Mrs. Ambler said. "Probably a
thousand years from now; they were there a thousand years ago, and three
thousand for that matter. It's an everlasting sort of place. Do you
think it does any good to cry about it?"

But she knew what her daughter was crying about, and her sharpness was
tactful. She said no more, but took up a book and read, apparently
paying no attention to anything else. Claire was silent, sitting
motionless, and, as the afternoon waned, her mother, glancing at her
almost imperceptibly, saw that her eyes were dry. She was pale, but her
breathing was quiet and not troubled by the little starts and catches
that had beset her during the first hour of their journey.

The train stopped at the seaport town of Castrovecchio; and when it went
on again they heard American voices in the next compartment--voices of a
mother and her son, it became evident. A little later, a youth of
twenty-four or thereabouts appeared in the corridor, lounging, enjoying
a cigarette and looking out of the window opposite the Amblers' open
door. He was tall, of an athlete's figure, comely of face, well-advised
in dress, and his air was that of a carefree and generally amused
person. After a time his observation wandered, and he was aware of the
girl sitting in the compartment outside of which he took his pleasure.
His awareness of her, indeed, was vivid, almost fervent. He looked full
ready to be cordial.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "Does my smoking annoy you?"

"Not at all," Mrs. Ambler assured him.

"Are you sure?" he asked earnestly. "Does it annoy you in the least?"

"No. It doesn't come into the compartment; it blows the other way."

"Well, I'll be glad to throw my cigarette away," he said. "I will if it
annoys either of you." He looked anxiously at Claire and added: "Are you
sure it doesn't annoy either of you?"

Claire did not even look toward him.

"Well," he said, still hopefully earnest, "if you're sure you _both_
don't mind it----"

At that, Mrs. Ambler was a little amused with him and a little
embarrassed; then, looking at her silent and motionless daughter, she
was stirred by a faint anxiety. Claire's eyes, staring straight before
her at the wall of the compartment, seemed to express a dangerous
hostility.

"No, no! Neither of us minds it at all," Mrs. Ambler said hastily;
whereupon, after coughing and murmuring, "Well----" he moved away. They
heard him speaking a few minutes later when he had rejoined his mother.
The train had stopped at a village, and in the silence his voice, though
not loud, was more audible than he knew. "Americans, yes. Frostiest
looking girl I ever saw!"

He was not wholly discouraged, however; for after they were in motion
again, he reappeared in the corridor, and the two ladies were conscious
that upon the slightest sign to indicate they knew of his existence he
would offer them the entertainment of conversation. Mrs. Ambler timidly
considered offering the sign; but a glance at her daughter dismayed her.

"See here," the mother said, when the young man had again been frosted
into a departure. "I hope you aren't going to keep this up too long,
Claire."

"Keep what up?"

"Now, now!" Mrs. Ambler protested. "There wouldn't be anything out of
the way in letting that good-looking boy talk to you. He seems very nice
indeed, and as he and his mother are probably going all the way through,
I don't see----" She paused. "It might help you to get out of yourself a
little."

"I don't want to be got out of myself."

"Now, now!" Mrs. Ambler said again, and she smiled, though not
unsympathetically. "You don't think this is going to last, do you,
dear--at your age? How long do you suppose it will be before you'll be
interested in seeing something of pleasant young gentlemen again?"

"I never will," Claire said. "Never."

"But if only on your own account you ought----"

"No," Claire interrupted. "On their account is what I mean."

"Good gracious! You haven't become precisely poison to gentlemen, my
child!"

"Yes," Claire said, in a dead voice. "That's all I am."

Her mother urged no more, and the unhappy girl sat staring frozenly at
the polished wall before her. Her thoughts were long and sorrowful, and
after a while they became bitter, as well. The persistent youth returned
once more to the corridor, and although he affected a manner of interest
in his cigarette and the landscape, she was unable not to be conscious
of his ever-hopeful consciousness of herself. "Idiot!" she thought,
addressing him. "Miserable sleek-haired little idiot! Thinking your
awful prattle could be endured for an instant! Haven't you got eyes?"

She blamed him fiercely for not seeing her as she pictured herself to
herself. In the autumn she had seen Clothilde Berin, the Parisian
actress, play an abysmal tragedy. Mlle. Berin was a tall black-and-white
woman with gloomy black eyes under black brows, and, in the final scene
of the drama, she sat, in black mourning, staring hollowly straight
before her, over the heads of the audience, into an eternity of pain.
And thus, to Claire, it seemed now that she herself appeared. She forgot
her charming little dress, her pinkish gray stockings, her jaunty blue
hat, and even her roses from Raona. What she imagined the young man in
the corridor would see--if he had eyes!--was a long, black-haired,
black-eyed, black-clad woman with a dead white skin, staring forever
before her. Couldn't the idiot recognize a tragedy when he saw it?

Then, with horror, she realized that her two natures were in conflict
again; the tricky and malicious artist was at work within her even now,
when she was in the midst of the deepest suffering she had ever known.
In spite of her true anguish, she was thinking of herself as
picturesque; and she was indignant with a cub of a boy, whom she had
never seen before, because he did not perceive how picturesque she
really was! And thus she reached the bottom of her despair. "No wonder I
do such harm!" she thought. "My very soul is artificial--and hideous!"

But at night she lay in her berth in the train that still sped roaring
northward--endlessly northward--and the desperation of her will to
return was so great that, conscious of her own absurdity, she entreated
the iron tracks beneath her to change their course, curve backward and
bring her again, in the morning, to Raona.

"I've _got_ to go back," she whispered to the soggy little pillow. "Ah,
I want to _see_ him again! I'll only just look at him. They'd let me do
that, wouldn't they?"

Then she knew what she had given up. The morning could not bring her to
Raona but it need bring her no despair of her soul. The artist within it
had behaved not so badly, after all.





PART III. "TWENTY-FIVE!"




CHAPTER XXII


The endless processions of automobiles, with black tops shiny in an
autumnal drizzle, filled the long avenues of Manhattan, and, creeping
busily between quivering halts, were like armies of beetles on the march
through gloomy ruts in wet stone. Not unlike detached smaller beetles
upright and gesticulating to the greater were the traffic directors in
gleaming black oilskin, while other imperious coleoptera stood at the
awning entrances to apartment houses, and, as the electric lights came
on in the late afternoon, outlined themselves in dark wet glitterings
that became flashingly active when automobiles drew to the curb. At such
times there seemed to be a deposit of larv; the hard and darkly shining
sides of the cars opened, emitting plastic beings to be taken in charge,
apparently, by the attendant beetles at the awning ends, and, upon the
fashionable avenues, the larv were of a superior, tenderer
kind;--delicate things, exquisitely swathed, they were handled sweetly
and hygienically with deferential white gloves.

This is not to say that the deference was anything more than a hopeful
sale of so much manner for proportionate _pourboire_. The giant beetle
at the awning of the Abercrombie Apartments on Park Avenue had in his
heart no true deference for the larv deposited with him, though they
were among the most richly and softly wrapped in all that thoroughfare.
"Tea!" he said mockingly to an official friend, who paused beside him in
a relaxed interval. "They call it 'tea'! If you'd see 'em comin' away
from all these 'teas,' about an hour or so from now, you'd like to get
hold of a little of that kind of 'tea' yourself, Charlie."

The policeman laughed admiringly. "Cost about eight dollars a quart from
a bootlegger, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, and more. It's a shame," the doorman said bitterly. "You'd be
surprised how much of it they get away with. Yes, and even young girls!
It's the worst waste we've ever had in this country. Now before
prohibition----" But here he interrupted himself; a French automobile
drew out of the traffic to halt by the awning; he stepped forward
cordially and opened the door. "Yes'm," he said, not replying to any
inquiry. "It's a nasty afternoon. Very nasty, indeed, ma'am, and it
looks like a nasty evening, too. Yes, ma'am, indeed it does so!"

The policeman glanced with a favourable interest at the emerging figure;
for he knew that his friend spoke so freely of the weather to only those
whom he regarded as important clients. This one, moreover, had every
appearance of being such a client; she presented to view the slender
elegance, completed, not immature, of a gracefully experienced young
lady of the world, and, better still, she was to be distinguished from
previously arriving clients by something even more ingratiating than her
superior comeliness. Most of the others, too much like larv, came out
of their cars in a dead-eyed coma; apparently they had to be passed
inside the building and relieved of their swathings before being roused
to complete consciousness;--this one was already brilliantly alive; her
blue eyes were twinklingly aware of everything and took note of both the
doorman and the policeman as fellow-beings worthy of cognizance.

"Mr. Winge tells me he thinks it may be the climate, William," she said
to the former. "Mr. Winge is almost sure the climate has something to do
with the weather."

The policeman was charmed with her. "They ought to make more like that
one," he said, when she had gone briskly into the great, lighted
doorway. "Who was she talkin' about? Her husband?"

"No; she ain't married. This Winge is only a dumb-bell lives here her
and I joke about. He ain't got no chance with her at all."

"I hope not," the policeman said. "You'd hate to think of one like that
marryin' a dumb-bell. About how old is she, you think?"

"Miss Ambler?" the doorman returned thoughtfully. "Well--prob'ly
somewhere around where either they marry a young feller or else don't,
and wait a while and marry a man that's lost his wife."

"Is she so?" his friend said, amused. "I expect from her looks, though,
she don't feel no great call to be troublin' her head over that!"

****

But his surmise was not at all a correct one: Miss Ambler had been
troubling her head about that a great deal of late. In fact, at this
very moment, in the elevator of the Abercrombie, she was almost acutely
troubling her head about it and she had some special promptings to
painful thought upon the subject. The least pressing of them, it may be
explained, as a key to her present state of mind, was the fact that a
previously patient suitor had delivered an ultimatum: he was to have a
favourable answer by nightfall of to-day or he would henceforth treat
her as a stranger, none of her proposed middle-grounds being possible
for him. She found herself able to endure the prospect of his
alienation; but a more serious matter was involved: she was twenty-four,
which is bearable;--what began to take her breath was the imminent
approach of her birthday. She had only a fortnight left; then she would
be twenty-five.

Here was a disturbing numeral. For a girl the difference between
twenty-four and twenty-five has a disproportionate importance. In
certain uncomfortable suggestions it may be equal to the difference made
by a whole decade in the life of a young man: for her, the difference
between twenty-four and twenty-five may be what the difference between
twenty-five and thirty-five is for him. In Claire's mind, at
twenty-four, there was a Rubicon before her; and to cross over, unwed
and even unbetrothed, into twenty-five, was almost crossing over into a
definite spinsterhood. Or, if it were not crossing into a spinsterhood
so definite as to be absolute and permanent, it was crossing into that
period of limbo wherein a maiden waits, ageing, until perchance she
marries the relict widower of a former girl-friend and brings up
children not her own. The doorman had defined Claire's age shrewdly
enough.

She had shivered a little upon leaving twenty-three for twenty-four, as
if at the touch of an October breeze in August; yet autumnal gayety was
easily possible for twenty-four. Twenty-four was not so bad of itself;
its sinister quality resided in its border, and, as she approached
nearer and nearer that border, she more and more often incredulously
murmured the dread numeral to herself, wondering and dismayed to find it
upon her lips.

"Twenty-five!" she thus whispered in the elevator. "Twenty-_five_!"

The elevator man did not hear her. What he said was only a coincidence;
her apartment was upon the eighteenth floor. "Eighteen, Miss Ambler?"

"Twenty, Henry, please."

He nodded affably. "Mrs. Allyngton's, I expect. She seems to be having
quite a tea this afternoon. Quite a tea at Mrs. Allyngton's this
afternoon, Miss Ambler." And he added, in an admiring tone, though his
purpose was merely to make a little more conversation with this favoured
resident: "I was pretty sure you wouldn't miss it, Miss Ambler. I told
Joe; I said 'She'll be back here in time for it,' I said. 'You'll see,'
I said. 'She ain't goin' to let 'em leave _her_ out when there's
anything going _on_!' I told him, 'Not Miss Ambler!' I told him."

His passenger made the appreciative murmur of laughter required by
genial manners; but as she stepped out upon the twentieth floor she was
less pleased than she appeared. "Twenty-five!" she whispered again. But
it seemed that even before twenty-five was actually reached, a girl had
to exert herself to keep people from leaving her out. Her exertions must
be somewhat noticeable since they roused the admiration of the elevator
man.




CHAPTER XXIII


In a corner, and a little apart from the general hilarity of Mrs.
Allyngton's "tea," Claire sat asking herself why she made the exertions.
At almost twenty-five, she was able to occupy her mind seriously with
this puzzle and at the same time to produce the amount of chatter
necessary to prevent the two gentlemen attending her from suspecting
that either she or they were less lively than the liveliest of the
party. Simultaneously she could take stock of everyone in the place,
observing swiftly how well or ill such a one was "looking"; who talked
to whom; how Mr. So-and-So's flirtation with Mrs. Thus-and-Thus
progressed; what every woman wore and that the painted table Mrs.
Allyngton had added to the "Regency treatment" of the apartment was
probably spurious.

Most of the women present were young wives about Claire's age; some of
them were several years younger; two or three were a few years older;
and she had known nearly all of them in their previous state of
candidacy for the matrimonial condition. They had passed out of the
preparatory period, and she hadn't; so that her relation to them was a
little like that of a student, still in school, to former classmates
who, after a thrilling Commencement, have become graduates gloriously
preoccupied with their new world. Companion initiates in an experience
superior to hers, they seemed to have fulfilled their destiny, and to be
at last properly and completely alive; while she, avoided by this
common, happy destiny, was left outside, not yet really alive and never
to be, indeed, if that destiny should still avoid her or she reject it.
The latter alternative was the kinder, and already she knew that some of
these friends were beginning to say of her: "It isn't for lack of
asking."

She was still with them but no longer of them, though they were
obviously as fond of her as ever. They were always pleased to have their
husbands dance with her; and she foresaw that as the years went by they
would find an "odd man" for her whenever they could. At present she was
still almost too amply able to supply the "odd man," herself; and here
she felt another difference between her condition and that of the
graduates: it seemed to her that in spite of their superior advantages
she understood men--even the husbands of some of her friends--better
than they did. Apparently, marriage often involved a kind of blindness.

One of the men now chattering with her, over his third cocktail, was in
reality, Claire thought, a total stranger to his wife, a pretty woman
twittering with a group at Mrs. Allyngton's piano. This man had tried to
kiss Claire the first time he found himself alone with her, and the only
reason he hadn't tried again, she knew, was that she had thereafter
successfully avoided being alone with him. Two or three of the other men
present, she had cause to be aware, would do the same thing if she gave
them half a chance to hope that they could "get away with it." Another,
an immaculate fat man, had annoyed her with confidential witticisms of
double meaning until she stopped him. These were but sporadic
indications of the nature of the beast, as she realized; but they
certainly meant something; and her deduction was that most men were
grosser and more predatory than their wives suspected. Without effort,
she attracted men--attracted them sometimes to her own discomfort; but,
in general, and as a woman, she believed that she did not really like
them.

She attracted men, but she no longer attracted boys; she had been
through the experience of perceiving that. With her mother, she had
returned to the Maine coast for the past two summers, and had found
herself "too old" for the Beach Club dances. A person of fifty, seeing
her beside one of the girls who prevailed at these dances, could not
have decided which was the elder: to his eye Claire showed not any
outward sign at all of her maturity; but the dancing boys knew instantly
that she was "too old" for them. Youth has its own divinations; and, for
these boys--some of them her own age--Claire was already an "old girl."

"Twenty-five!" she thought, now, biting again upon this sore tooth.
Twenty-five would make her an "old girl" indeed; but it should not make
her marry. She knew well enough why these women at Mrs. Allyngton's had
married these men. Some of them had married in a kind of contagion
because they were of the marrying age and because "all the rest" were
getting married. Some of them had dallied, then married almost in a
panic, grasping at anything as they saw "twenty-five," or worse,
approaching; she had been a bridesmaid for "old girls" thus frantically
marrying and had shed tears, really of rage, for them.

Angered but vague, she supposed the whole affair of marriage to be
"something probably biological." The young had to get out of the nest:
the boy learned to forage for himself; but the girl's part was
ignominious: she had to find a forager--and ride him! A whole epoch in a
woman's life was devoted to the competition, the struggles against her
companions to obtain a forager;--hysterically affecting gayety all the
while, she must scramble and fight to get him, never letting him
perceive that it wasn't he who did the scrambling. The elation of newly
engaged girls had sometimes made Claire sick with pity for her sex: it
seemed to her that what she read in the roseate look of the maiden
betrothed was, "_I've got mine!_"

Having got theirs, they were generous to Claire: they wanted her to get
hers, though she needed no forager and could still choose which one of
several she would take, if she wished. She had been fortunate enough to
have the foragers scrambling for her, indeed; and what she was resolved
to resist was the contagion: she was bitterly resolved not to be married
because "all the rest" were married or getting themselves married.
Almost despairingly, she asked for a better reason.

A dozen of "all the rest" were here in Mrs. Allyngton's apartment, this
afternoon, and, as she looked at them, she wondered that such a
contagion could reach her from them; for undeniably she felt it. She was
intimate with them, and several of them still thought of her as "best
friend"; but the intimacy was merely habit, she perceived--a habit
sprung from chance propinquities and parental associations. She and
these best friends of hers had shared experiences: they had stepped
together into the arena and had formed the intimacies of a band of young
gladiators. When they found themselves pitted against one another they
had fought according to their own code, though most of them had
half-forgiven some rather tricky wounds;--but what Claire had come more
and more keenly to realize was that she had little true congeniality
with any of them. Why then did she bore herself by remaining intimate
with them? Why did she still make exertions not to be "left out"? Why on
earth had she bothered to come here this afternoon?

For Mrs. Allyngton's "tea" was only the daily "cocktail party." The
"conversation" was but the noise that mechanically grew louder and less
coherent as the chemical action of gin inevitably operated the
mechanical action of vocal organs. Daily these people met somewhere to
put themselves through these same chemic mechanics: they seemed to need
to drug themselves in order to bear one another's society, and since
they were as dull as that, Claire thought, what wonder their lives were
as chemic mechanical as their parties! Well, why in the world did she
still go to the parties?

She couldn't answer her own question; but she was certain that she
hadn't come, this afternoon, because Walter Rackbridge would be here.
Mr. Rackbridge was he who had delivered the ultimatum expiring at
nightfall of this same day, and the last person with whom she desired to
hold converse. Yet here he was, a comely, thin, dark bachelor of thirty
with a haggard eye; and, upon his arrival in Claire's corner, the two
attendant gentlemen at once intelligently went forth to riot mildly in
other regions. She was left tte--tte with him and in an unhappy mood.




CHAPTER XXIV


"You've decided," he said immediately. "Which is it, Claire?"

She shook her head, looking at him sadly. "Thoughtful of you, Walter, to
ask me that--here!"

"Isn't it?" The young man's face, not hopeful before she spoke, became
gloomier; for correctly he assumed that what she said was an
unfavourable portent. "I suppose you think I might have been more
tactful to inquire by telephone?"

"No," she returned, and she laughed ruefully. "My idea of tactful is
that you'd have made no inquiry at all."

"I see. I should just have let it run on, remaining your undemanding
servant forever. Well, I'm afraid tact will have to go by the board."

"I dare say. And you with it, Walter?"

"If you send me by the board with it, yes."

She shrugged her shoulders. "Oh, no! I'd never send you. That's in your
own hands: if you go it's because you want to."

"Claire," he said quietly, "I think you've told other men just that same
thing. Probably some of them have been weak enough to keep on hanging
around rather than incur the kind of reproach you imply."

"What 'reproach'?"

"That they didn't care enough for you to be content with your liking
them. That's a pretty old story, it seems to me, and so far as I'm
concerned it's not helpful. I think you're the cruellest person I've
ever known, Claire."

"Do you?" she said; and her expression, as she looked wearily away from
him, caused his own to become one of desperation.

"Yes, I do--banal as you think me for saying so." He was not altogether
successful in stifling an actual groan; it became audible, and that
there might be no doubt of his suffering, a dew, not of the heat,
appeared upon his forehead. "You've been genuinely brutal to me almost
from the first," he said. "You're the most adorable thing in this world,
and you know perfectly well that any man in his senses must see that you
are. You knew at the very start that _I_ thought so; you didn't care at
all for me and yet you deliberately made yourself as enrapturing to me
as you could. You've always done that: you're doing it even now at the
very moment when you intend to tell me I've got to give up my last hope
of you."

"Now?" she asked scornfully. "What am I doing now?"

"You're looking your most beautiful!" He laughed painfully. "You
couldn't even bring yourself to the decency of dressing unbecomingly or
in any way looking less charming--and I couldn't possibly find a more
damning thing to say of you."

"Oh, dear!" she murmured. "I think you've said this to me several times
before, Walter."

He caught his breath; then he said quietly, "Yes, the only novelty about
this is that it's the last time. Don't think I'm unaware of the answer
you're going to give me. It's 'no.'"

She continued to look away from him, and did not speak.

"Isn't it?" he said, in a voice a little tremulous, after a silence.
"Isn't it 'no'?"

She turned and looked at him with a sorrowful gravity. "I told you more
than a year ago that I could never be in love with you, Walter. You've
been pretty nice to me and you know well enough how much I like you. I
like to be with you--when you're sensible enough to be just
friendly--and I like to hear music with you: I even like spending
several hours at a time with you--again when you're just friendly. Well,
that's all, and I can't help it. You say it's not enough, and I can't
help that, either. You say I've got to promise to marry you or you'll
take yourself permanently out of my orbit. Very well, I'm not going to
be married merely for the sake of being married."

"And if you married me," he said gently, "that's all it would be?"

She was sorry for him; he was miserable, and she knew that he had cared
for her, truly and well, a long time. Moisture appeared in her eyes.
"Yes, it would," she said. "I'm sorry I ever let you get started,
Walter. That was my fault, it's true; because I could have stopped you;
but I hadn't learned enough to do such things then. I confess to you
that I wanted to charm all the men I could. There--I'm letting you see
what I've really been like; it ought to be useful to you."

"Useful!" he groaned. "It only makes me see that you're lovelier than
ever--for owning up to it." He took a step away, as if to leave her;
then turned back. "Well--nothing's likely to make any difference for me?
It's all over, is it?"

"Unless you'd like it to stay as it is."

"I can't," he said. "I've tried; but I've either got to win you or leave
you--and I can't win you. Well----" He contrived to form the semblance
of a smile. "Good-bye--dear."

"Good-bye," she said, in a low voice; and to her sudden surprise she
found this parting sharply painful: she had expected to be relieved, not
hurt, by it. She put out her hand impulsively. "Good-bye--dear!" she
said in little more than a whisper.

At that, he started and looked at her intently; but she released her
hand from his, said hastily, "No! Just good-bye!" and, crestfallen, he
turned away.

He did not go far. Their hostess was already upon them, convoying a
middle-aged gentleman and a girl of eighteen; and before Walter could
evade this anti-climax, Mrs. Allyngton had seized him by the arm. "I was
just coming over to break up the tte--tte," she said. "Miss Ambler,
this is Mr. Sherman Peale. Walter, this is Miss Peale. There's some
music coming and you can dance with her pretty soon, and in the
meanwhile be witty for her. You can, sometimes, you know! Claire, I'm
going to leave Mr. Peale with you; that's what he wants."




CHAPTER XXV


That was what Mr. Sherman Peale wanted, as Claire already understood. He
was a grayish, meagre man with a brown face and alert bright eyes that
had seen a great deal, but were as lively and unjaded as those of his
eighteen-year-old daughter who now turned aside with the unhappy Walter.
Claire catalogued Mr. Peale as an "interesting" man, for which rating
she had previous information from the public prints. He was an exploring
anthropologist and had just returned to face batteries of interviewers
after a long immersion in the steamy jungles of the Orinoco, a river of
apparently no interest to him at the present moment. With a
breath-taking clarity he explained what did interest him.

"I saw you the moment my daughter and I came into this room, Miss
Ambler," he said. "Yours was the one face that stood out, and I knew you
were the one person here I wanted to know. I've been living entirely
among savages for several years and I'm afraid I've thus relapsed into a
habit of primitive frankness of speech lost by our own race some
thousands of years ago. Can you stand it?"

"I think perhaps," she said, "I can even equal it."

At that, his youthful eyes glinted forth sparklings of pleasure. "Well,
suppose you give me a sample of your own."

"Of my own frankness?" She laughed, and then, with a light audacity, she
said, "I saw you as you came in, Mr. Peale, and humbly hoped for a
little notice." And, though she should have blushed to say it, this was
the mere truth: she had observed the advent of the distinguished
gentleman, and had instantly thought, recognizing him, "There's a man
I'd like to know!" The reason she should have blushed was that this
thought of hers had been in her head during her rejection of Walter
Rackbridge: the unfortunate Walter might well have been entitled to all
of her thoughts for those few crucial moments. But no one had quite all
of Claire's thoughts at any moment whatever; she was never wholly free
of that "double" sense of hers, that curse of "seeing" herself as
somebody else, even when she truly suffered. And thus, even while she
had rejected Walter and had said to herself of Sherman Peale, "There's a
man I'd like to know," she had simultaneously been her own audience,
seated aloof and observing the actress. Moreover, as audience, she had
said: "Walter goes. That brown-faced man coming in and looking at me,
could that be He?" And she had let the brown-faced man become aware for
an instant of her eyes upon him; so here he was--of course!

"You'll get the notice, Miss Ambler," he said, delighted. "I hope you
can stand it as well as the frankness."

"I think I can. Has it begun?"

"Decisively!" he rejoined; and he went on at once: "After a man has been
cut off a long time from his kind, he comes back to them as a lonely
stranger. My wife used to go with me upon my expeditions; but since her
death I've gone alone. Coming back to New York has seemed to me the
loneliest of all my expeditions, though it might surprise you to hear me
say so, Miss Ambler. I've moved among crowds of people ever since I
landed, two weeks ago; I've been obliged to make speeches at science
association dinners--even at other dinners. I've been in a whirl of
lunches and parties and reporters and celebrities; I've even danced
until three in the morning. Yet I've never felt so alone in my life; it
may be nostalgia for swamps and savages, but I don't feel that I've been
in actual human contact with a fellow-being since I left South America.
When I saw you I had a queer thought, and as you say you can stand
savage frankness, I'll tell you what it was. I thought, 'There's someone
who would understand me.'"

"It might be overestimation," Claire said. "But how could you feel quite
so alone with a daughter like that to go about with you?"

"Kitty? Good heavens! To me she's the greatest stranger of all. I left
her a little schoolgirl of fourteen in her aunt's charge, and I've come
back to find a curiously sophisticated adult person whose very
vocabulary is less open to me than that of some primitive tribes who
express themselves principally in grunts and squeals. Bless me! I'm
afraid I shall never become acquainted with Kitty. That good-looking
youth with her now already knows more about her, I haven't a doubt, than
I ever shall."

Claire's eyes followed his glance to where his daughter sat with Walter;
and to the girl of almost twenty-five Miss Kitty Peale was no such
mystery as her father found her. She was a slim little fair creature,
exquisite peach-bloom in a knowing small gray hat, an amber-coloured
blouse and skirt, the latter perhaps eighteen inches long, pale yellow
silk stockings naturally much in view, and beautiful amber shoes from
the Rue St. Honor--superb small works by an artist in footwear and
worth preserving in a collection. She was not inappreciative of them,
herself, and, as she chattered to Walter, sometimes slightly elevated
one or the other of them, bestowing a momentary glance of thoughtful
pleasure upon it from beneath her lovely ashen lashes. Her stockings
pleased her, too, undoubtedly; though she frequently tweaked the little
skirt down to cover part of a knee-cap. She had many such little
fluttery and impulsive gestures, and her voice was also fluttery and
impulsive. She uttered laughter and little outcries as of surprise
throughout her talking, so that she seemed continually to have an
obbligato accompaniment of mirth and wonderment.

"Ah, me!" Claire thought. "That's just what I was like, then. Poor
Walter!"

But, to her surprise, as she glanced at him, Walter seemed less downcast
than she had expected. His equanimity was the more puzzling to her
because she could hear perfectly what the child was loudly prattling to
him. "So you're actually Charlie Rackbridge's cousin! I know him awf'ly
well, really! I think he's perfectly peachy wonderful--just as a boy in
college, I mean of course. I went down to both the games he played in
before he broke his collarbone; but of course I'm not wildly collegiate;
Charlie's peachy in his own place, I mean! I never _dreamed_ I'd meet a
cousin of his this afternoon." Here she looked wistfully for one second
into Walter's eyes; then, with an air of mockery, tapped his arm with
the tips of her fingers. "And _such_ a cousin!"

"She's a terrific little belle, I'm afraid," her father said to Claire.
"She has a squadron of boys hanging about and seems to spare no one. She
tells me she prefers 'older men,' and I suppose she means young
gentlemen about as old as the one she's proceeding to enthrall just now.
I haven't a doubt she'll annex him before she leaves his side and will
probably tell me, after we go out, that she has an engagement with him
for the evening. She'll break several previous ones, incidentally, but
she'll patch all that up later somehow. I'm sure I don't know how she
does it."

Claire thoroughly knew how Kitty did it; and she shivered slightly,
remembering how she herself had done it. "There, but for the grace of
God in making me almost twenty-five, walk I!" she thought; and then
hearing what Kitty said next, she was startled.

"I saw you the minute I came into the place," Kitty chirped loudly. "And
I wondered right away who you were."

At this, Claire perceived that in one detail, at least, even the grace
of God had not granted to twenty-five any superiority over eighteen.
Kitty was beginning with Walter just as her father and Claire had begun
with each other. "Good heavens!" the girl almost twenty-five said to
herself. "Did _I_ do it like this at eighteen? Am I _still_ doing only
the same things I did then--endlessly repeating them as long as I can
stay in the ring?" And, dismayed, she wondered if there was any real
difference between her present situation with Mr. Sherman Peale and
Kitty's with Walter Rackbridge. Hadn't Kitty probably asked herself, at
first sight of Walter, "Is this He?" She indeed probably had! And just
as Claire was already certain that if she chose she could make Mr. Peale
take any amount of interest in her she thought desirable, wasn't the
eighteen-year-old girl capable of a like certainty in regard to Walter?
"Not that Walter would," Claire thought; and then, hearing his response
to Kitty's overture, she had another surprise.

"I'm glad you wondered," he said gravely. "I think I'd like to be
wondered about--by you--very much."

Claire stared at him incredulously, for he seemed to mean what he said;
and she remembered how quickly desolated gentlemen are caught,
sometimes, on the rebound. This thought disturbed her, not because she
was at all a dog in the manger, or could be jealous of another's seizing
upon what she, herself, rejected, but because she had a liking for
Walter that was almost a fondness, and she admired him. His native
talent and a genius for work had made him one of the best young
architects in New York; he was kind, generous and able--a man much too
good to be caught on the rebound by an eighteen-year-old bit of
peach-bloom. And here Claire consoled herself with a difference between
eighteen and twenty-five. "Never a thought in that little head except
about herself--not one! She's making poor old Walter believe she's
thinking of him; but eighteen _can't_ think of anything except itself.
The poor thing ought to know better than to trust her--she might
actually marry him! Such things have happened often enough."

Ah, that peach-bloom! Dangerous to any man of any age, if it wished to
be Claire knew. Peach-bloom! Alas--twenty-five!

The explorer was speaking to her. "There's another thing I'd like to ask
you if you can stand."

"Well then, ask me. I'll answer you."

"I'm asking because of my loneliness," he said seriously. "You see, a
civilized thinking man is naturally lonely among savages, no matter how
much he may find to interest him. Well, I discovered long ago that he
can be quite as lonely in civilized quarters of the world, and I've just
been making a re-discovery of that uncomfortable fact. The truth is that
I'm a peculiar man; I've never been at all like anyone else I've ever
known, and, naturally, as queer a person as I can't expect many people
to understand him, nor can he hope to find many true companions. Yet
that's what I've yearned for all my life, understanding and
companionship. I'm as abrupt as I am frank, Miss Ambler; I always make
up my mind about people at my first glance and I've already told you I
saw understanding in your face. What I want to ask you is if you think
you could stand seeing something of me. Do you think you could?"

She laughed. "We might mutually have some burdens to bear, if I could,
Mr. Peale."

"No," he said, leaning toward her earnestly. "I'm serious. Perhaps I'd
better tell you a little about myself." And with this he began an
autobiography that seemed to Claire to be one of perfect candour yet
strongly favourable to its subject. Half an hour later, when musicians
had begun to play in the next room, Mr. Peale's memoirs had not reached
his adult period. Nevertheless, in spite of his nave self-absorption,
Claire did not consider him a fiasco; the narrative was vigorous and
undeniably interesting; moreover, she saw that she had no further need
to exert herself. All she had to do was to listen with a deeply
understanding expression and, if she did this often enough he would
presently wish her listening to be continuous. Before they parted,
to-day, he would ask her how soon he could see her again: she set his
proposal of marriage--if she chose--at about a month in the future; less
than that--if she chose. But she did not choose; for already she knew
the brown-faced man was not He. There was no He; no true mate awaited
her or ever would come out of space to claim her--twenty-five was all
that claimed her!

She jumped up to the first dancer who presented himself, and departed
from Mr. Peale with a word of apology so quickly spoken that he had no
opportunity to ask her when he might continue his narrative. He meant to
"cut in," and hovered in the offing, waiting to do so; whereupon,
finding herself swept near a door, she said hurriedly, "That's all; I'm
going home," slid from her partner's arms and out into the hallway. But
just as she effected this evasion, Miss Kitty Peale dancing near her
with Walter, was claimed, and left him for another.

Kitty somewhat recklessly allowed it to become evident that she was
reluctant to make the exchange, and as she was borne onward her eyes
lingered upon her previous partner.

"Don't forget," she called sweetly. "Eight-thirty to-night."

And Claire, as she went toward the outer door of the apartment, heard
Walter's response, a single word: "_Forget?_"

The incredulity he expressed was sufficient.

"Idiot!" Claire said reminiscently, as she waited for the elevator; and
when she had reached her own apartment, and, after a dexterous avoidance
of her mother, was in her own room, she said "Idiot!" again.

She looked at a little clock of lapus lazuli and gold upon a table, and
sat down before a mirror to remove her shoes: she must undress, then
dress for a dinner. "Dress, undress, dress, undress!" she murmured
wretchedly, half-aloud. "Undress, then dress again. And what the devil
is it all _about_?"

She had taken off one shoe; she held it in her hand and sat staring at
it, her head bent over it, until she noticed a tiny drop of water upon
the shining black surface of its long, curved heel;--a tear had fallen
there without her being aware of it in her eye.

She hurled the pretty shoe across the room, so that it struck noisily
against the wall. "Oh, my gosh!" she whispered in sharp despair.
"Twenty-five! I can't stand it and it can't be stopped! Nothing in the
world can _stop_ it! Twenty-_five_!"




CHAPTER XXVI


She had been twenty-five for a month and a week; it was bearable as is
everything that must be borne; but it was still incredible. "My
twenty-sixth year!" she said to herself. "That's the same as the
twenty-seventh--or twenty-eighth----" And she thought of herself as
"outside of life" now, forever. "I've chosen not to live," she thought.
"What's the difference between that and suicide?"

Her mother had gone to a concert; Claire was alone in the apartment and
she stood at a window, from this high cliffside looking forth upon tower
and abyss illumined by the prodigious night flares. The new skyline,
staggering with the new sky-scrapers, rose even above her, overwhelming
the stars with the blatant giantism of the new New York. She felt its
huge provincial commonness, its stupendous materialism and its frantic
magnificence; but in the main it seemed to her a Titanic honeycomb of
lighted cells, with open doors through which flitted hordes and hordes
of girls breathlessly hungry for the approval of men who sat in the
cells appraising stodgily, or, roused by some cunning appeal, succumbing
to it with repulsive flaccidity. Yet all these were ephemera;
sky-scrapers, hungry girls and the men they sought already partook of
the dust they would soon become. She had learned how suddenly the
quicksilver years run out, carrying youth and life itself with them.

She turned from the window, took up a book and sat down with it in an
exquisite but comfortable Louis Sixteenth chair. "What on earth _is_
this stuff?" she inquired petulantly when her eye, not her mind, had
read a paragraph blindly the third time. Then she left the book upon the
chair, went to the "concert grand" piano, and sang half of a song in her
rich and moving voice; but she stopped in the middle of a note; her
hands dropped from the keys. Frowning, she rose and began to pace the
floor.

"I ought to have gone out," she said aloud. "I don't believe I should be
alone to-night. I feel as if I might be going to do something crazy."

Then, upon the instant, she did the thing she feared she might do. She
went to the telephone and called Walter Rackbridge at a club. He was
there; his voice indicated surprise when she let him know who spoke to
him, and it was significant that she had to let him know this. For the
first time he failed to recognize her voice.

"Are you busy just now?" she asked, with some sharpness.

"No, not for an hour or so. I have an appointment later. Why?"

"I thought if you cared to come and see me----"

"You mean now?"

"Yes, if you----"

"Why of course, if you wish," he said politely. "I'll be there
immediately."

He was there within ten minutes, in fact, and when he came in, still
obviously surprised, he found her seated in the pretty chair and
apparently reading. She looked up languidly; then, as he sat down,
facing her, she murmured a word of thanks for his coming. "Good of you
to be so obliging, Walter."

"Not at all," he said cordially. "You wanted to see me about something?"

Her eyes opened wide with the full look she gave him then. "I'm not
sure," she said slowly, "that it's necessary to add 'about something.'"

He was mystified; plainly so. "You wanted to see me?"

"Yes."

"What about?" the simple creature inquired.

At that, she looked away and shook her head ruefully; but made no reply.

"Ah----" he began uncomfortably. "I suppose you--I haven't seen you
since--well, I suppose you wanted to talk to me about something."

"Is it inconvenient for you to be here?"

"Not at all. I have to turn up at a party after the theatre."

"You 'have to'?" she asked. "You mean you promised to? You mustn't let
me keep you."

"There's plenty of time," he assured her, and then, in silence, waited
for her to explain why she had summoned him. No explanation appeared to
be forthcoming; she sat looking before her at the fireplace where above
a nether ruddiness small blue flames wavered upon the anthracite coal;
but she did not speak, and appeared to have settled definitely into this
brooding contemplation. More and more puzzled, he continued to wait,
until it began to seem to him that he was engaged in a form of endurance
contest. If he was, he failed to win it, for finally, after coughing
slightly several times, he said, "Oh--by the way----" then stopped.

"Yes?" she said. "'By the way'--what?"

"I've been seeing quite a little of Sherman Peale lately and I've
wondered if you appreciate what an extraordinary person he is."

"What?" she said lifelessly. "Oh, yes; I believe I do. Why?"

"He doesn't think so," Walter explained. "He's rather mystified by your
treatment of him, though I'm sure you haven't meant to be rude."

"Rude?"

"Hasn't he written you twice asking when he could see you?"

"Yes. Three times. Another note came to-day 'in case the others had
miscarried,' he mentioned."

"And you haven't answered any of them? I imagine he's a little taken
aback."

"Do you?" she asked, still gazing absently at the fire. "How did you
find all this out? Did Mr. Peale tell you?"

"No. His daughter told me. She was secretly terribly amused, and laughed
about it. I'm afraid she doesn't take her father very seriously?"

"No," Claire said. "What does she take seriously?"

"I'm not sure. Why?"

"Because there's only one thing she can."

"Only one thing she can take seriously? A person, you mean?"

"Yes," Claire said; and now, as she spoke, she turned her head and
looked at him with a clear and friendly regard. "I hear you've been
everywhere with her lately and by this time you probably feel that you
know her pretty well. Don't you?"

"Why, yes; of course."

Claire shook her head. "You don't. Nobody does. She doesn't, herself.
She last of all, indeed!"

"You think so?"

"I know so," Claire said quietly. "She's eighteen. I know what I was
like at eighteen and it's what I've been more or less like ever since,
until I found twenty-five coming down on me. Of course I was a little
less like eighteen with every advancing year, yet sometimes I feel that
I've only lately quite got over being Miss Kitty Peale. Well, you see, I
know her, and she's not good enough for you, Walter."

"Why, what----"

"Wait a moment. A girl of eighteen can't take you seriously; she can't
take anything seriously, except herself; she can't think of anything
except herself. It isn't her fault; she doesn't know how. She can't be
in love with anyone but herself; and that isn't her fault, either; she
merely doesn't know how. All she can actually _see_ is herself. She
wants to have everybody in love with her that she can possibly get into
that condition; but she really doesn't understand that her lovers are
human beings, her fellow-beings--not even when she singles one out and
believes that she adores him. It's only another way of adoring herself.
I've really given you more feeling, just as your friend, than Kitty
Peale is capable of giving you, even if she should let you marry her.
I'm giving you so much friendship at this very moment, Walter, that I
dare take the risk of asking you if you couldn't see her as she is, for
your own sake, and cease to be one of her squadron. Her father told me
she has a 'squadron' of boys about her. They'll content her and they
won't get much hurt, but you might--especially if she should decide she
wanted you to marry her."

Walter stared, and his colour heightened visibly. "See here," he said.
"Do you mean you're advising me to stop seeing her?"

"Yes. I take that risk."

"I think you might very well call it a risk!" he said bitterly.

"I'll define it if you like," she rejoined, giving him a wan and rather
wavering smile. "I told you I would never take you myself and I never
shall. I know now that I'll never be married--never--not ever at all,
Walter. And since I won't take you, myself, you want to know how it gets
to be my affair that you may wish to marry someone else. How dare I warn
you to keep away from another girl, against whom there's nothing in the
world to be said except that she's in the very perfection of the
peach-bloom age? Well, I do warn you, because I know what trouble I made
for a few boys and men when I had that age, myself, and I dare the risk
of what you'll think of me for my warning. You'll very likely only think
me a jealous dog in the manger." She rose suddenly, went to the other
end of the room and stood with her back to him. "Well, if you care to
think it, go ahead and think it!"

"What do you want me to think?" he asked, not moving from his chair.

"Anything you like!"

His reddened brow was corrugated by a frown of reflection; he shook his
head ruefully, baffled, and then he was startled for she turned and
spoke sharply to him.

"That's all I have to say. I think you'd better go."

"Go?" he repeated, and his bewilderment was so great that he could only
inquire, feebly, "Go where?"

"Back to your club," she said angrily. "Or to keep your engagement with
Miss Peale. Or anywhere you like!"

He got up and came to her. "What is it you want me to do, Claire? Do you
mean that though you won't have me you're advising me not to marry
anybody else?"

"Good heavens!" she cried. "Would that be so hard for a man? Plenty of
women bear it. Couldn't you?"

"I don't see why I should," he said. "There's no reason in the world why
I shouldn't marry if I wish to. Why shouldn't I now--if I wish to?"

"You poor goose!" she cried. "Because you'll only be marrying on the
rebound after I refused you! Because you'll only be falling for
peach-bloom that'll be gone forever in an hour or so! Because you'll
have been caught by a self-centred little monkey's knowing how to say
'The first time I saw you I wondered who you were!' Wait till you find a
woman who can take some interest in you for yourself and not in your
merely being in love with her! Then marry her, marry her as quickly as
you can, in heaven's name!"

"But if I should never find her?"

"Well, couldn't you bear it?" she said fiercely. "_I_ bear it! Couldn't
you?"

"Never marrying?"

"Don't you know how much easier that is for a man? Don't you
understand--don't you see----" Then, without warning and almost to his
horror, for he had never seen her weep, she dropped down upon a sofa and
burst into tears. "Don't you know," she sobbed, "don't you know that for
a woman it's the same as suicide?"

He sat beside her and took her hand; but she jerked it away. "Let me
alone!" she cried. "I told you to go! I want to be left by myself."

In high distress he rubbed his forehead. "Look here," he said. "This is
terrible; I've never seen you like this and never dreamed you could be.
What's the matter?"

"Nothing, I tell you, if you'll just go!"

"But there _is_ something the matter," he insisted thoughtfully. "Your
nerves are probably to blame and you oughtn't to let them get unstrung
like this. You ought to----"

But, crying out, she interrupted him. "Ah! Will you please go back to
your club before you tell me to see a nerve specialist?"

"All right; if you want to be let alone, I'll go." And with that, he
rose and went decisively toward the door; but paused before he reached
it. "You knew that when one girl asks a man not to let himself be
carried away by another girl he's likely to think her merely jealous,
didn't you?"

"Oh, glory!" Claire groaned. "I told you I took that risk knowingly."

"It's a long time--a long, long time"--he said, and his voice had become
a little tremulous;--"It's a long, long time since you cared to have me
in love with you. But you take enough interest in me now for myself to
risk anything I might think of you."

"What?" she said in a low voice; then she lifted her head from between
her two hands where it had been drooping; and with wet, wide eyes, she
stared at him. "What?" she repeated more loudly; and a third time she
said the word, louder still. "_What?_"

He came and stood before her. "You care enough for me on my own account
to take that risk. How much more do you expect to care for anybody?"

Startled, disturbed to the depths of her being, wretched, yet vaguely
illumined by what at first seemed a mirage of happiness, she rose and
moved as though to put a greater distance between them; but after one
step away, she halted--she put a gentle and trembling hand softly upon
his shoulder.

"I don't know," she said uncertainly. "I don't think I ever could know.
Do you think it's enough, dear?"




CHAPTER XXVII


At about twelve o'clock on the night before her wedding, Claire came
into her room, and, after locking the door, went to a chest and took
from it a large oblong case of stamped brown leather. She set it upon a
chair beside the chest; then, after a moment of frowning, sank down upon
the floor beside the chair and opened the leathern case. It contained
various objects, now worthless, and she took them out, one by one, and
dropped them into a waste-basket that stood beside the chest.

There were some packets of letters, tied with narrow ribbons; there were
a few withered flowers, singly and in little clumps, and there were
ribbons that had been tied about bouquets of orchids, of roses, of
violets; there were college pins, scarf pins, a green silk handkerchief,
a club hat-band, and sheafs of photographs. Most of the photographs were
of the heads of young gentlemen; but some were of groups of boys and
girls together; and in most of these a younger Claire appeared. There
were "snapshots" of her with girls and boys in sail-boats, in
motorboats, or on beaches or rocks by the sea; and in a number of them
she was seen with the same boy always beside her. Later pictures showed
another boy occupying this favoured place; and in others other boys were
seen there. Then there were little photographs taken abroad; and in
several of these a young Italian cavalry officer was a romantic figure.
Claire solemnly threw him into the waste-basket along with the rest.

At last the leathern chest was cleared of everything except a single
photograph and a foreign envelope of thin bluish paper. She brought
forth the photograph and looked at it long and intently; it was not a
portrait; it was a landscape, singular and beautiful--a long ledge of
cliff whereon were gardens and walled villas and Greek ruins and an old
Mediterranean town, with a snow-capped volcano rising beyond and the sea
washing the foot of the cliff. This photograph did not share the fate of
the others; she replaced it gently in the case, and then, with fingers
that moved slowly and gently, as in some reverent ceremony, she brought
forth the bluish envelope and took from it two sheets of paper. One of
these was thin and bluish, like the envelope; it was the conclusion of a
letter the previous pages of which had been lost, or destroyed; and the
other sheet showed a writing in faded ink by a different hand.

Claire read the fragment of the letter first; she had read it often and
often before. Part of the sentence at the top of the page was missing,
having been written upon one of the lost sheets; and what she read began
abruptly:

"Therefore I thought you might care to have the verses. His sister is
anxious that I should send them to you and she speaks often and warmly
of her gratitude to you. Please never doubt that you did the kindest and
best thing; it is she who asks me to tell you that. I have made a copy
of the verses for her, and the enclosure is the original, just as she
found it among his effects. He had a fancy for writing in Elizabethan
forms sometimes, though he laughed at his use of them, himself, and said
he had no doubt he used them incorrectly. I thought them charming, and
it seemed to me he had a distinct gift that way. He had not shown these
that I send you to anyone--not even to his sister--nor had he spoken of
them at all; but we both perceived that the reference was to you. My
surmise is that they were written here at Raona, probably soon after
your departure--or, even, perhaps, a little before--and I hope that they
and my sorrowful news may not make your remembrance of our beautiful old
cliff too sad a one for you to return to us some day. For my own part,
my heart is heavy just now, dear Miss Ambler, and I fear yours will be.
We shall not look upon his like again--yet Raona stands here forever and
waits your sight of it once more."

She put the writing back into the bluish envelope as gently and slowly
as she had brought it forth; then she took up the other sheet and read
the verses, as she had read them so many, many times before.

    "O, Ladye, scorn mee!
    Ladye, let mee be
    Contente wyth lyfe or death,
    Soe I may goe forth wyllinglye
    When that the thread He sonderethe.

    "O, Ladye scorn mee,
    Gayze on mee mockynglye,
    Be kynde and passe mee bye!
    Suffere mee not to love thee, Ladye,
    Lest I so hayte to die!"

She read slowly, her head bent far over the faded writing, and that fair
and charming head of hers was bowed low indeed when she had finished.
Her hands, rising to meet it, held the sheet of paper in them so that
the writing came against her cheek. "Ah, good-bye--good-bye--good-bye!"
she whispered brokenly.

She would never read either the letter or the quaint little poem again;
or take them again from the leathern case where she replaced them; but
she would always know they were there, and so, finally, in spite of that
dutiful farewell whisper of hers, it was not quite good-bye.




CHAPTER XXVIII


The church was not a large one, and the decorously expectant
wedding-guests filled it comfortably. A soprano voice had sung nobly
from a gallery, long white ribbons had been drawn, and now the organ
palpitated profoundly into every ear a majestic vamping. Through a door
just opened at the left of the altar, the clergyman in his gown could be
seen, and, behind him, the bridegroom and his supporting comrade,
composing themselves for the imminent confrontation and erasing from
their countenances every token of either emotion or intelligence. All
that they allowed to remain visible was accurate tailoring accompanied
by the pallor of stage-fright.

The organ developed the heralding signal of the great nuptial approach;
the air of the interior trembled to those bars of music so familiar that
they seem to invest their composer, not in his chosen solemn mantle, but
in the mocking garb of a comedian. To these helplessly satirical
measures, the clergyman slowly advanced, followed obscurely by the two
sartorial vacancies, while from the rear, dressed as twins, eight
embarrassingly self-conscious gentlemen were seen to be approaching
rhythmically. After them, eight lovely young women, all in heliotrope
and as rhythmic and self-conscious as the eight gentlemen twins, though
more becomingly so, passed through stained shafts of light from a
pointed window, seeming to float dazzlingly in many colours for a moment
before they turned to heliotrope again and paced slowly to their
appointed stations.

Then the bride came down the aisle, alone. She walked with her head a
little advanced but her face uplifted; and about her grave and tender
eyes, and upon her lips, there appeared the faintest foreshadowings of
an ineffable smile. Through the fine lace of her veil, there were glints
of her fair hair like gold seen in a mist: never had she been so
graceful; never had she looked so lovely. And when she passed through
the coloured light of the great window, and her bridal white became a
drifting rosiness in aureoles of amber and softest blue, a breathed
"_Ah!_" of pleasure was multitudinous upon the air. For she seemed then
just such a glimpsed vision of angelic beauty, wistful yet serene, as a
devout eye attuned to miracles should have beheld in that place.

She suspected this, herself, for she had seen the bridesmaids passing
through that light before her. "I hope it's doing as well by me," she
thought. "With this beautiful cream-white it ought to do even a lot
better. Thank heaven everything's all right so far! I sha'n't begin to
let my smile be more definite just yet--not till I reach the third pew
from the end--and I mustn't forget to turn my head to the right and let
a gentle little corner of the smile go to poor Mother after I've given
Walter that look. He's there, waiting, of course; I'll be able to see
him in a moment, poor thing! I'm getting married to him and this is my
wedding--my _wedding_! It doesn't seem to be that. Why don't I realize
it? How on earth does it happen? How does it come to be my wedding--if
it really _is_! Am I in love with him? Is it because of that? Was it the
contagion, after all? _Am_ I getting married because 'all the rest' were
getting married? What _is_ my reason for it? Have I just been _crazy_?
Good heavens, _is_ it happening _now_?" And that "double" sense of hers
was never more strongly with her than then, as she came down the aisle
to be wedded. As audience, she saw herself distractedly asking these
belated questions and at the same time stage-directing her every
movement and expression. But at the third pew from the front, where she
intended to look up and seem to become happily conscious of Walter, then
to smile exquisitely upon him, there was a moment when the audience
within her, and the stage-director, and the actress as well,
disappeared.

Walter should have advanced a step to meet her and take her hand; but he
did not move. He stood stock-still; and, though he appeared to be
looking at her, she saw that he was but dimly aware of her. His eyes
were glassy and he trembled from head to foot; she perceived that he was
almost helpless, dazed with stage-fright. And at that, a quick emotion
rose within her: she was filled with pity, with tenderness and with
amusement.

She put out her hand to him, and as he took it gingerly, she grasped his
unnerved fingers strongly, and from her bright eyes gave him, not the
look she had intended and rehearsed, but one more truly eloquent, wholly
impulsive and impromptu.

"You dear goose!" it said so clearly that he understood it completely.
"What's the matter with you? I'm here to see you through this, don't you
understand? I'll see you through it all right, and I'll see you through,
everything--_everything_--all right. That's what I'm here for. Don't you
_see_?"

He did see: colour came into his stricken cheeks; something of his usual
manliness returned to him, and, as he moved forward with her to the
altar, his eyes became human again in the look of passionate gratitude
he gave her.

She was uplifted with the happiness of a great reassurance; once more
she knew that she had forgotten herself and remembered him.


THE END






[End of Claire Ambler, by Booth Tarkington]
