XX

It was not till the motor had actually got out of Havre and was well

along the dusty white road to the château that Davenant began to have

misgivings. Up to that point the landmarks--and and the sea-marks--had

been familiar. On board the _Louisiana_, in London, in Paris, even in

Havre, he had felt himself on his accustomed beat. On steamers or trains

and in hotels he had that kind of confidence in himself which, failing

him somewhat whenever he entered the precincts of domestic life, was

sure to desert him altogether now, as he approached the strange and

imposing.

"Madame est à la campagne."

A black-eyed old woman had told him so on the previous day. For the

instant he was relieved, since it put off the moment of confronting the

great lady a little longer.

He had, in fact, rung the bell at the frowning portal in the rue de

l'Université with some trepidation. Suggestions of grandeur and mystery

beyond anything he was prepared to meet lay within these seemingly

fortified walls. At the same time it gave glory to the glamour in which

the image of Olivia Guion always appeared to him to think she had

passed and repassed these solemn gates at will, and that the stately

Louis Quinze _hôtel_, of which the concierge allowed him a glimpse

across the courtyard, had, on and off, been her home for years. It was

one more detail that removed her beyond his sphere and made her

inaccessible to his yearnings.

From the obliging post-office clerk at the bank on which he drew--a

gentleman posted in the movements of all distinguished Americans on the

continent of Europe--he learned that "la campagne" for the Marquise de

Melcourt meant the château of Melcourt-le-Danois in the neighborhood of

Harfleur. He was informed, moreover, that by taking the two-o'clock

train to Havre he could sleep that night at the Hôtel Frascati, and

motor out to Melcourt easily within an hour in the morning. It began

then to occur to him that what had presented itself at first as a

prosaic journey from Boston to Paris and back was becoming an adventure,

with a background of castles and noble dames.

Nevertheless, he took heart for the run to Havre, and except for feeling

at twilight the wistfulness that comes out of the Norman landscape--the

melancholy of things forgotten but not gone, dead but still brooding

wraith-like over the valley of the Seine, haunting the hoary churches,

and the turreted châteaux, and the windings of the river, and the long

lines of poplar, and the villages and forests and orchards and

corn-fields--except for this, his spirits were good. If now and then he

was appalled at what he, a shy fellow with no antecedents to recommend

him and no persuasive powers, had undertaken, he thought of Olivia

Guion. The thing he was attempting became trivial when compared with the

possible benefits to her.

That reflections too, enabled him to come victoriously out of three long

hours of inward wrestling--three long hours spent on the jetty which

thrust itself into the sea just outside his hotel at Havre. He supposed

he had already fought the battle with himself and won it. Its renewal on

the part of powers within his soul took him by surprise.

He had strolled out after dinner to the Chaussée des États-Unis to while

away the time before going to bed. Ships and sailors, with the lights

and sights and sounds of a busy port, had for him the fascination they

exert over most men who lead rather sedentary lives. At that time in the

evening the Chaussée des États-Unis was naturally gay with the

landsman's welcome to the sailor on shore. The cafés were crowded both

inside and out. Singing came from one and the twang of an instrument

from another, all along the quay. Soldiers mingled fraternally with

sailors, and pretty young women, mostly bareheaded and neatly dressed in

black, mingled with both. It was what a fastidious observer of life

might call "low," but Davenant's judgments had no severity of that kind.

He looked at the merry groups, composed for the most part of chance

acquaintances, here to-day and gone to-morrow, swift and light of love,

with a curious craving for fellowship. From the gatherings of friends he

felt himself invariably the one shut out.

It was this sense of exclusion that finally sent him away from the

cheerful quay to wander down the jetty which marks the line where the

Harbor of Grace, with its intricate series of basins and docks, becomes

the sea. It was a mild night, though the waves beat noisily enough

against the bastions of the pier. At intervals he was swept by a scud of

spray. All sorts of acrid odors were in the wind--smells of tar and salt

and hemp and smoke and oil--the perfumes of sea-hazard and romance.

Pulling his cap over his brows and the collar of his ulster about his

ears, he sat down on the stone coping. His shoulders were hunched; his

hands hung between his knees. He did not care to smoke. For a few

minutes he was sufficiently occupied in tracing the lines and the

groupings of lights. He had been in Havre more than once before, and

knew the quai de Londres from the quai de New York, and both from the

quai du Chili. Across the mouth of the Seine he could distinguish the

misty radiance which must be Trouville from that which must be Honfleur.

Directly under his eyes in the Avant Port the dim hulls of steamers and

war-ships, fishing-boats and tugs, lay like monsters asleep.

There was no reason why all this should make him feel outside

[Transcriber's Note: Original reads 'outide'] the warm glow and life of

things; but it did. It did worse in that it inspired a longing for what

he knew positively to be unattainable. It stirred a new impulse to fight

for what he had definitely given up. It raised again questions he thought

he had answered and revived hopes he had never had to quench, since from

the beginning they were vain.

_Were_ they vain? In taking this form the query became more

insidious--more difficult to debate and settle once for all. To every

argument there was a perpetually recurring, "Yes, but--" with the memory

of the instants when her hand rested in his longer than there was any

need for, of certain looks and lights in her eyes, of certain tones and

half-tones in her voice. Other men would have made these things a

beginning, whereas he had taken them as the end. He had taken them as

the end by a foregone conclusion. They had meant so much to him that he

couldn't conceive of asking more, when perhaps they were nothing but the

first fruits.

The wind increased in violence; the spray was salt on his mustache, and

clung to the nap of his clothing. The radiance that marked Trouville and

Honfleur grew dim almost to extinction. Along the quay the cafés began

to diminish the number of their lights. The cheerful groups broke up,

strolling home to the mansard or to the fo'castle, with bursts of

drunken or drowsy song. Davenant continued to sit crouched, huddled,

bowed. He ceased to argue, or to follow the conflict between

self-interest and duty, or to put up a fight of any kind. He was content

to sit still and suffer. In its own way suffering was a relief. It was

the first time he had given it a chance since he had brought himself to

facing squarely the fact of his useless, pointless love. He had always

dodged it by finding something to be done, or choked it down by sheer

force of will. Now he let it rush in on him, all through him, all over

him, flooding his mind and spirit, making his heart swell and his blood

surge and his nerves ache and his limbs throb and quiver. If he could

have formed a thought it would have been that of the Hebrew Psalmist

when he felt himself poured out like water. He had neither shame for his

manhood nor alarm for his pride till he heard himself panting, panting

raucously, with a sound that was neither a moan nor a sob, but which

racked him convulsively, while there was a hot smarting in his eyes.

But in the end he found relief and worked his way out to a sort of

victory. That is to say, he came back to see, as he had seen all along,

that there was one clear duty to be done. If he loved Olivia Guion with

a love that was worthy to win, it must also be with a love that could

lose courageously. This was no new discovery. It was only a fact which

loneliness and the craving to be something to her, as she was everything

to him, had caused him for the moment to lose sight of. But he came back

to it with conviction. It was conviction that gave him confidence, that

calmed him, enabling him, as a clock somewhere struck eleven, to get up,

shake the sea-spray from his person, and return to his hotel.

It was while he was going to bed that Rodney Temple's words came back to

him, as they did from time to time: "Some call it God."

"I wonder if it is--God," he questioned.

* * * * *

But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the

morning, was of another kind. It was that which attaches to the unlikely

and the queer. Once having plunged into a country road, away from

railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase. His

assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger. In vain an

obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of

this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they

sped had once--and not so many years ago--been the border of the bed of

the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and

edged along the top with verdure, marked the natural brink of the river,

and that the church so admirably placed on a hillside was the shrine of

a martyred maiden saint, whose body had come ashore here at Graville,

having been flung into the water at Harfleur. Davenant was deaf to these

interesting bits of information. He was blind, too. He was blind to the

noble sweep of the Seine between soft green hills. He was blind to the

craft on its bosom--steamers laden with the produce of orchard and the

farm for England; Norwegian brigantines, weird as _The Flying Dutchman_

in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen;

fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages,

clambering over cliffs to a casino, a _plage_, and a Hôtel des Bains, or

nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque

wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had

once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was

blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a

still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties

only when the chauffeur turned and said:

"Voilà, monsieur--voilà le château de madame la marquise."

If it was possible for Davenant's heart to leap and sink in the same

instant, it did it then. It leaped at the sight of this white and rose

castle, with its towers and donjon and keep; it sank at the thought that

he, poor old unpretentious Peter Davenant, with no social or personal

passports of any kind, must force his way over drawbridge and beneath

portcullis--or whatever else might be the method of entering a feudal

pile--into the presence of the châtelaine whose abode here must be that

of some legendary princess, and bend her to his will. Stray memories

came to him of Siegfrieds and Prince Charmings, with a natural gift for

this sort of thing, but only to make his own appearance in the rôle the

more absurd.

Melcourt-le-Danois had that characteristic which goes with all fine and

fitting architecture of springing naturally out of the soil. It seemed

as if it must always have been there. It was as difficult to imagine the

plateau on which it stood without it as to see Mont Saint Michel merely

as a rocky islet. The plateau crowned a white bluff running out like the

prow of a Viking ship into a bend of the Seine, commanding the river in

both directions. It was clear at a glance that when Roger the Dane laid

here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of

Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky

cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been

carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had

driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois

which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the

first place a strip of gardens, and orchards of small fruit, through

which the, road from Harfleur to the village of Melcourt, half a mile

farther up the Seine, ran like a bit of white braid.

Viewed from the summit of the cliff on which Davenant's motor had

stopped, the château was composed of two ancient towers guarding the

long, and relatively low, relatively modern, brick mansion of the epoch

of Louis Treize. The brick, once red, had toned down now to a soft old

rose; the towers, once white, were splashed above the line to which the

ivy climbed with rose and orange. Over the tip of the bluff and down its

side of southern exposure, toward the village of Melcourt, ran a park of

oak and chestnut, in all the October hues of yellow and olive-brown.

But ten minutes later, when the motor had made a detour round cliffs and

little inlets and arrived at the main entrance to the château, Davenant

found the aspect of things less intimidating. Through a high

wrought-iron grille, surmounted by the head of an armorial beast, he had

the view of a Lenôtre garden, all scrolls and arabesques. The towers,

which at a distance had seemed part of a continuous whole, now detached

themselves. The actual residence was no more imposing than any

good-sized house in America. Davenant understood the chauffeur to say

that "Madame la marquise l'avait modernisé jusqu'au bout des ongles."

Having summoned up courage to ring the bell, he found it answered by a

middle-aged woman with a face worn by time and weather to the polished

grooves and creases to which water wears a rock.

"On ne visite pas le château."

She made the statement with the stony, impersonal air of one who has to

say the same thing a good many times a year. Davenant pressed close to

the grille, murmuring something of which she caught the word "Madame."

"Madame la marquise n'est pas visible."

The quick Norman eye had, however, noticed the movement of Davenant's

hand, detecting there something more than a card. In speaking she edged

nearer the grille. Thrusting his fingers between the curves of the iron

arabesques, he said, in his best French: "_Prenez_."

Measuring time by the pounding of his heart rather than the ticking of

his watch, it seemed to him he had a long time to wait before the woman

reappeared, handing him back his card through the openwork of the

grille, saying briefly: "Madame la marquise ne reçoit pas." Perhaps it

was the crestfallen look in the blond giant's face that tempted her to

add: "Je le regrette, monsieur."

In the compassionate tone he read a hint that all was not lost.

Scribbling under his name the words: "Boston, Mass. Very urgent," he

once more passed the card through the grille, accompanied by the manual

act that had won the woman's sympathy in the first place.

"_Allez_, please," he said, earnestly, "and--_vite_."

He found his penciled words effective, for presently the woman came

back. "Venez, monsieur," she said, as she unlocked the grille with a

large key carried beneath her apron. Her stony official manner had

returned.

As he drew near the house a young man sketching or writing under a

yew-tree looked up curiously. A few steps farther on a pretty girl, in a

Leghorn hat, clipping roses into a basket, glanced at him with shy,

startled eyes. In the hall, where he was left standing, a young officer

in sky-blue tunic and red breeches, who had been strumming at a piano in

an adjoining room, strolled to the door and stared at him. A thin,

black-eyed, sharp-visaged, middle-aged lady, dressed in black and

wearing a knitted shawl--perhaps the mother of the three young people he

had just seen--came half-way down the strip of red carpet on the stairs,

inspected him, and went up again. It was all more disconcerting than he

had expected.

The great hall, of which the chief beauty was in the magnificent sweep

of the monumental stairway, with its elaborate wrought-iron balustrade,

struck him as a forbidding entry to a home. A man-servant came at last

to deliver him from the soft, wondering eyes of the young officer, and

lead him into a room which he had already recognized as a library

through the half-open door.

Here he had just time to get a blurred impression of portraits, busts,

Bull surfaces, and rich or ancient bindings--with views through the long

windows of the traffic on the Seine--when a little old lady appeared in

a doorway at the farther end of the room. He knew she was a little old

lady from all sorts of indefinable evidence, in spite of her own efforts

to be young. He knew it in spite of fluffy golden hair and a filmy,

youthful morning robe that displayed the daintiness of her figure as

well as the expensiveness of her taste.

She tripped rapidly down the long room, with quick little steps and a

quick little swinging of the arms that made the loose gossamer sleeves

blow outward from the wrists. He recognized her instantly as the

Marquise de Melcourt from her resemblance, in all those outlines which

poudre de riz and cherry paste could not destroy, to the Guion type. The

face would have still possessed the Guion beauty, had she given it a

chance. Looking at it as she came nearer, Davenant was reminded of

things he had read of those Mongolian tribes who are said to put on

masks to hide their fear and go resolutely forth to battle. Having

always considered this a lofty form of courage, he was inconsistent in

finding its reflection here--the fear of time beneath these painted

cheeks and fluffy locks, and the fight against it carried on by the

Marquise's whole brave bearing--rather pitifully comic.

Madame herself had no such feeling. She wore her mask with absolute

nonchalance, beginning to speak while still some yards away.

"Eh, bien, monsieur?"

Davenant doubled himself up into a deep bow, but before he had time to

stammer out some apologetic self-introduction, she continued:

"You've come from Davis and Stern, I suppose, on business. I always tell

them not to send me people, but to cable. Why didn't they cable? They

know I don't like Americans coming here. I'm pestered to death with

them--that is, I used to be--and I should be still, if I didn't put 'em

down."

The voice was high and chattering, with a tendency to crack. It had the

American quality with a French intonation. In speaking, the Marquise

made little nervous dashes, now to the right, now to the left, as though

endeavoring to get by some one who blocked her way.

"I haven't come on business, my--my lady."

He used this term of respect partly from a frightened desire to

propitiate a great personage and partly because he couldn't think of any

other.

"Then what _have_ you come on? If it's to see the château you may as

well go away. It's never shown. Those are positive orders. I make no

exceptions. They must have told you so at the gate. But you Americans

will dare anything. Mon Dieu, quel tas de barbares!"

The gesture of her hands in uttering the exclamation was altogether

French, but she betrayed her oneness with the people she reviled by

saying: "Quel tah de bah-bah!"

"I haven't come to see the château either, my lady--"

"You can call me madame," she interrupted, not without a kindlier

inflection on the hint.

He began again. "I haven't come to see the château, either--madame. I've

come to see _you_."

She made one of her little plunges. "Oh, indeed! _Have_ you? I thought

you'd learned better than that--over there. You used to come in

ship-loads, but--"

He began to feel more sure of himself. "When I say I came to see you,

madame, I mean, I came to--to tell you something."

"Then, so long as it's not on business, I don't want to hear it. I

suppose you're one of Walter Davenant's boys? I don't consider him any

relation to me at all. It's too distant. If I acknowledged all the

cousins forced on me from over there I might as well include Abraham and

Adam. Are you the first or the second wife's son?"

He explained his connection with the Davenant name. "But that isn't what

I came to talk about, madame--not about myself. I wanted to tell you

of--of your nephew--Mr. Henry Guion."

She turned with a movement like that of a fleeing nymph, her hand

stretched behind her. "Don't. I don't want to hear about him. Nor about

my niece. They're strangers to me. I don't know them."

"You'd like to know them now, madame--because they're in great trouble."

She took refuge behind a big English arm-chair, leaning on the back.

"I dare say. It's what they were likely to come to. I told my niece so,

the last time she allowed me the privilege of her conversation. But I

told her, too, that in the day of her calamity she wasn't to look to

me."

"She isn't looking to you, madame. _I_ am. I'm looking to you because I

imagine you can help her. There's no one else--"

"And has she sent you as her messenger? Why can't she come herself, if

it's so bad as all that--or write? I thought she was married--to some

Englishman."

"They're not married yet, madame; and unless you help her I don't see

how they're going to be--the way things stand."

"Unless I help her! My good fellow, you don't know what you're saying.

Do you know that she refused--refused violently--to help _me_?"

He shook his head, his blue eyes betraying some incredulity.

"Well, then, I'll tell you. It'll show you. You'll be able to go away

again with a clear conscience, knowing you've done your best and failed.

Sit down."

As she showed no intention of taking a seat herself, he remained

standing.

"She refused the Duc de Berteuil." She made the statement with head

erect and hands flung apart. "I suppose you have no idea of what that

meant to me?"

"I'm afraid I haven't."

"Of course you haven't. I don't know an American who _would_ have.

You're so engrossed in your own small concerns. None of you have any

conception of the things that really matter--the higher things. Well,

then, let me tell you. The Duc de Berteuil is--or rather _was_--the

greatest parti in France. He isn't any more, because they've married him

to a rich girl from South America or one of those places--brown as a

berry--with a bust--" She rounded her arms to give an idea of the bust.

"Mais, n'importe. My niece refused him. That meant--I've never confessed

it to any one before--I've been too proud--but I want you to

understand--it meant my defeat--my final defeat. I hadn't the courage to

begin again. C'était le désastre. C'était Sedan."

"Oh, madame!"

It seemed to him that her mouth worked with an odd piteousness; and

before going on she put up a crooked little jeweled hand and dashed away

a tear.

"It would have been everything to me. It would have put me where I

belong, in the place I've been trying to reach all these years. The life

of an American woman in Europe, monsieur, can be very cruel. We've

nothing to back us up, and everything to fight against in front. It's

all push, and little headway. They don't want us. That's the plain

English of it. They can't imagine why we leave our own country and come

over here. They're so narrow. They're selfish, too. Everything they've

got they want to keep for themselves. They marry us--the Lord only knows

why!--and nine times out of ten all we get for it is the knowledge that

we've been bamboozled out of our own _dots_. There was René de

Lonchartres who married that goose Annie Armstrong. They ridiculed her

when she came over here, and at the same time clapped him on the back

for having got her. That's as true as you live. It's their way. They

would have ridiculed me, too, if I hadn't been determined years ago to

beat them on their own ground. I could have done it, too, if--"

"If it had been worth while," he ventured.

"You know nothing about it. I could have done it if my niece had put out

just one little finger--when I'd got everything ready for her to do it.

Yes, I'd got everything ready--and yet she refused him. She refused him

after I'd seen them all--his mother, his sisters, his two uncles--one of

them in waiting on the Duc d'Orléans--Philippe V., as we call him--all

of them the purest old noblesse d'epée in Normandy."

Her agitation expressed itself again in little dartings to and fro. "I

went begging to them, as you might say. I took all their snubs--and oh!

so fine some of them were!--more delicate than the point of a needle! I

took them because I could see just how I should pay them back. I needn't

explain to you how that would be, because you couldn't understand. It

would be out of the question for an American."

"I don't think we _are_ good at returning snubs, madame. That's a fact."

"You're not good at anything but making money; and you make that

blatantly, as if you were the first people in the world to do it. Why,

France and England could buy and sell you, and most of you don't know

it. Mais, n'importe. I went begging to them, as I've told you. At first

they wouldn't hear of her at any price--didn't want an American. That

was bluff, to get a bigger _dot_. I had counted on it in advance. I knew

well enough that they'd take a Hottentot if there was money enough. For

the matter of that, Hottentot and American are much the same to them.

But I made it bluff for bluff. Oh, I'm sharp. I manage all my own

affairs in America--with advice. I've speculated a little in your

markets quite successfully. I know how I stand to within a few thousand

dollars of your money. I offered half a million of francs. They laughed

at it. I knew they would, but it's as much as they'd get with a French

girl. I went to a million--to a million and a half--to two millions. At

two millions--that would be--let me see--five into twenty makes

four--about four hundred thousand dollars of your money--they gave in.

Yes, they gave in. I expected them to hold out for it, and they did. But

at that figure they made all the concessions and gave in."

"And did he give in?" Davenant asked, with naïve curiosity.

"Oh, I'd made sure of him beforehand. He and I understood each other

perfectly. He would have let it go at a million and a half. He was next

door to being in love with her besides. All he wanted was to be well

established, poor boy! But I meant to go up to two millions, anyhow. I

could afford it."

"Four hundred thousand dollars," Davenant said, with an idea that he

might convey a hint to her, "would be practically the sum--"

"I could afford it," she went on, "because of those ridiculous

copper-mines--the Hamlet and Tecla. I wasn't rich before that. My _dot_

was small. No Guion I ever heard of was able to save money. My father

was no exception."

"You are in the Hamlet and Tecla!" Davenant's blue eyes were wide open.

He was on his own ground. The history of the Hamlet and Tecla Mines had

been in his own lifetime a fairy-tale come true.

Madame de Melcourt nodded proudly. "My father had bought nearly two

thousand shares when they were down to next to nothing. They came to me

when he died. It was mere waste paper for years and years. Then all of a

sudden--pouff!--they began to go up and up--and I sold them when they

were near a thousand. I could have afforded the two millions of

francs--and I promised to settle Melcourt-le-Danois on them into the

bargain, when I--if I ever should--But my niece wouldn't take

him--simply--would--not. Ah," she cried, in a strangled voice, "c'était

trop fort!"

"But did she know you were--what shall I say?--negotiating?"

"She was in that stupid England. It wasn't a thing I could write to her

about. I meant it as a surprise. When all was settled I sent for

her--and told her. Oh, monsieur, vous n'avez pas d'idée! Queue scène!

Queue scène! J'ai failli en mourir." She wrung her clasped hands at the

recollection.

"That girl has an anger like a storm. Avec tous ses airs de reine et de

sainte--she was terrible. Never shall I forget it--jamais! jam-ais! au

grand jamais! Et puis," she added, with a fatalistic toss of her hands,

"c'était fini. It was all over. Since then--nothing!"

She made a little dash as if to leave him, returning to utter what

seemed like an afterthought. "It would have made her. It would have made

_me_. We could have dictated to the Faubourg. We could have humiliated

them--like that." She stamped her foot. "It would have been a great

alliance--what I've been so much in need of. The Melcourt--well, they're

all very well--old noblesse de la Normandie, and all that--but

poor!--mais pauvres!--and as provincial as a curé de campagne. When I

married my poor husband--but we won't go into that--I've been a widow

since I was so high--ever since 1870--with my own way to make. If my

niece hadn't deserted me I could have made it. Now all that is

past--fini-ni-ni! The clan Berteuil has set the Faubourg against me.

They've the power, too. It's all so intricate, so silent, such wheels

within wheels--but it's done. They've never wanted me. They don't want

any of us--not for ourselves. It's the sou!--the sou!--the everlasting

sou! Noble or peasant--it makes no difference. But if my niece hadn't

abandoned me--"

"Why shouldn't you come home, madame?" Davenant suggested, touched by so

much that was tragic. "You wouldn't find any one after the sou there."

"They're all about me," she whispered--"the Melcourt. They're all over

the house. They come and settle on me, and I can't shake them off. They

suffocate me--waiting for the moment when--But I've made my will, and

some'll be disappointed. Oh, I shall leave them Melcourt-le-Danois. It's

mine. I bought it with my own money, after my husband's death, and

restored it when the Hamlet and Tecla paid so well. It shall not go out

of their family--for my husband's sake. But," she added, fiercely,

"neither shall the money go out of mine. They shall know I have a

family. It's the only way by which I can force the knowledge on them.

They think I sprang out of the earth like a mushroom. You may tell my

niece as much as that--and let her get all the comfort from it she can.

That's all I have to say, monsieur. Good morning."

The dash she made from him seeming no more final than those which had

preceded it, he went on speaking.

"I'm afraid, madame, that help is too far in the future to be of much

assistance now. Besides, I'm not sure it's what they want. We've managed

to keep Mr. Henry Guion out of prison. That danger is over. Our present

concern is for Miss Olivia Guion's happiness."

As he expected, the shock calmed her. Notwithstanding her mask, she grew

suddenly haggard, though her eyes, which--since she had never been able

to put poudre de riz or cherry paste in them--were almost as fine as

ever, instantly flashed out the signal of the Guion pride. Her fluffy

head went up, and her little figure stiffened as she entrenched herself

again behind the arm-chair. Her only hint of flinching came from a

slackening in the flow of speech and a higher, thinner quality in the

voice.

"Has my nephew, Henry Guion, been doing things--that--that would send

him--to prison?"

In spite of herself the final words came out with a gasp.

"It's a long story, madame--or, at least, a complicated one. I could

explain it, if you'd give me the time."

"Sit down."

They took seats at last. Owing to the old lady's possession of what she

herself called a business mind he found the tale easy in the telling.

Her wits being quick and her questions pertinent, she was soon in

command of the facts. She was soon, too, in command of herself. The

first shock having passed, she was able to go into complete explanations

with courage.

"So that," he concluded, "now that Mr. Guion is safe, if Miss Guion

could only marry--the man--the man she cares for--everything would be

put as nearly right as we can make it."

"And at present they are at a deadlock. She won't marry him if he has to

sell his property, and so forth; and he can't marry her, and live in

debt to you. Is that it?"

"That's it, madame, exactly. You've put it in a nutshell."