CHAPTER I

The

Dull Miss Archinard

By

Anne Douglas Sedgwick

New York

Charles Scribner's Sons

1898

Copyright, 1898, by

Charles Scribner's Sons

_All rights reserved_

_TO_

MY GRANDMOTHER

H. M. D.

Prologue

PETER ODD

The Dull Miss Archinard

CHAPTER I.

Peter Odd was fishing. He stood knee-deep in a placid bend of stream,

whipping the water deftly, his eyes peacefully intent on the floating

fly, his mind in the musing, impersonal mood of fisherman reverie, no

definite thought forming from the appreciative impressions of sunlit

meadows, cool stretches of shade beneath old trees, gleaming curves of

river. For a tired man, fishing is an occupation particularly soothing,

and Peter Odd was tired, tired and sad. His pleasure was now, perhaps,

more that of the lover of nature than of the true sportsman, the

pastoral feast of the landscape with its blue distance of wooded hill,

more to him than the expected flashing leap of a scarlet-spotted beauty;

yet the attitude of receptive intentness was pleasant in all its phases,

no one weary thought could become dominant while the eyes rested on the

water, or were raised to such loveliness of quiet English country. So

much of what he saw his own too; the sense of proprietorship is, under

such circumstances, an intimately pleasant thing, and although, where

Odd stood at a wide curve of water, a line of hedge and tall

beech-trees sloping down to the river marked the confines of his

property just here, the woods and meadows before him were all his--to

the blue hills on the sky almost, the park behind him stretched widely

about Allersley Manor, and to the left the river ran for a very

respectable number of miles through woods and meadows as beautiful. The

sense of proprietorship was still new enough to give a little thrill,

for the old squire had died only two years before, and the sorrow of

loss had only recently roused itself to the realization of bequeathed

responsibilities, to the realization that energies so called forth may

perhaps make of life a thing well worth living. A life of quiet utility;

to feel oneself of some earthly use; what more could one ask? The duties

of a landowner in our strenuous days may well fill a man's horizon, and

Odd was well content that they should do so; for the present at least;

and he did not look beyond the present.

In his tweeds and waterproof knee-breeches and boots, a sun-burnt straw

hat shading his thin brown face, his hand steady and dexterous, as brown

and thin, he was a pleasing example of the English country-gentleman

type. He was tall, with the flavor of easy strength and elegance that an

athletic youth gives to the most awkwardly made man. His face was at

once humorous and sad; it is strange how a humorous character shows

itself through the saddest set of feature. Odd's long, rather acquiline

nose and Vandyke beard made a decidedly melancholy silhouette on the

sunlit water, yet all the lines of the face told of a kindly

contemplation of the world's pathetic follies; the mouth was sternly

cut yet very good-tempered, and its firm line held evident suggestions

of quiet smiling.

Poor Peter Odd had himself committed a pathetic folly, and, as a result,

smiles might be tinged with bitterness.

A captured trout presently demanded concentrated attention. The vigorous

fish required long playing until worn out, when he was deftly secured in

the landing-net and despatched with merciful promptitude; indeed, a

little look of nervous distaste might have roused in an unsympathetic

looker-on conjectures as to a rather weak strain--a foolish width of

pity in Peter Odd's character.

"A beauty," he mentally ejaculated. He sat down in the shade. It was

hot; the long, thick grass invited a lolling rest.

On the other side of the hedge was a rustic bathing-cabin, and from it

Odd heard the laughing chatter of young voices. The adjoining property

was a small one belonging to a Captain Archinard. Odd had seen little of

him; his wife was understood to be something of an invalid, and he had

two girls--these their voices, no doubt. Odd took off his hat and mopped

his forehead, looking at the little landing-wharf which he could just

see beyond the hedge, and where one could moor boats or dive off into

the deepness of the water. The latter form of aquatic exercise was

probably about to take place, for Odd heard--

"I can swim beautifully already, papa," in a confident young voice--a

gay voice, quiet, and yet excited too by the prospect of a display of

prowess.

A tall, thin girl of about fourteen stepped out on to the landing. A

bathing-dress is not as a rule a very graceful thing, yet this child,

her skirt to her knee, a black silk sash knotted around her waist, with

her slim white legs and charming feet, was as graceful as a young Amazon

on a Grecian frieze. A heavy mass of braids, coiled up to avoid a

wetting, crowned her small head. She was not pretty; Odd saw that

immediately, even while admiring the well-poised figure, its gallantly

held little torso and light energy. Her profile showed a short nose and

prominent chin, inharmoniously accentuated. She seemed really ugly when

her sister joined her; the sister was beautiful. Odd roused himself a

little from his half recumbency to look at the sister appreciatively.

Her slimness was exaggerated to an extreme--an almost fluttering

lightness; her long arms and legs seemed to flash their whiteness on the

green; she had an exquisite profile, and her soft black hair swept up

into the same coronet of coils. Captain Archinard joined them as they

stood side by side.

"You had better race," he said, looking down into the water, and then

away to the next band of shadow. "Dive in, and race to that clump of

aspens. This is a jolly bit for diving."

"But, papa, we shall wet our hair fearfully," said the elder girl--the

ugly one--for so Odd already ungallantly designated her. "We usually get

in on this shallower side and swim off. We have never tried diving, for

it takes so long to dry our hair. Taylor would not like it at all."

"It is so deep, too," said the beauty in rather a faltering

voice--unfortunately faltering, for her father turned sharply on her.

"Afraid, hey? You mustn't be a coward, Hilda."

"I am not afraid," said the elder girl; "but I never tried it. What must

I do? Put my arms so, and jump head first?"

"There is nothing to do at all," said the Captain, with some acidity of

tone. "Keep your mouth shut and strike out as you come up. You'll do it,

Katherine, first try. Hilda is in a funk, I see."

"Poor Hilda," Odd ejaculated mentally. She was evidently in a funk.

Standing on the edge of the landing, one slim foot advanced in a

tentative effort, she looked down shrinking into the water--very deeply

black at this spot--and then, half entreatingly, half helplessly, at her

father.

"Oh, papa, it is so deep," she repeated.

The Captain's neatly made face showed signs of peevish irritation.

"Well, deep or not, in you go. I must break you of that craven spirit.

What are you afraid of? What could happen to you?"

"I--don't like water over my head--I might strike--on something."

Tears were near the surface.

What asses people made of themselves, thought Odd, with their silly

shows of authority. The more the father insisted, the more frightened

the child became; couldn't the idiot see that? The tear-filled eyes and

looks that showed a struggle between fear of her father's anger and fear

of the deep, black pool, moved Odd to a sudden though half-amused

resentment, for the little girl was certainly somewhat of a coward.

"Let me go in first, papa, and show her. Hilda, dear, it's nothing;

being frightened will make it something, though, so don't be frightened,

and watch me."

"Yes, go in first, Katherine; show her that I have a girl who isn't a

coward--and how one of my daughters came to be a coward I don't

understand. I am ashamed of you, Hilda."

Hilda evidently only controlled her sobs by a violent effort; her

caught-in under-lip, wide eyes, and heaving little chest affected Odd

painfully. He frowned, sat up, put his hat on, and watched Miss

Katherine with a lack of sympathy that was certainly unfair, for the

plucky little person went through the performance most creditably,

stretched out and up her thin pretty arms, curved forward her pretty

body, and made the plunge with a lithe elegance that left her father

gazing with complacent approval after the white flash of her feet.

"Bravo! First-rate! There, Hilda, you see what can be done. Come on,

little white feather." He spoke more kindly; the elder sister's prowess

put him more in humor with his less creditable offspring.

"Oh, papa!" The child shrank on the edge of the platform--she would go

bundling in, and hurt herself. "But, papa," and her voice held a sharp

accent of distress, "where is Katherine?"

Indeed Katherine had not reappeared. Only a moment had passed, but a

moment under water is long. Captain Archinard's eyes searched the

surface of the river.

"But she can swim?"

"Papa! papa! She is drowned, _drowned_!" Hilda's voice rose to a scream.

With a wild look of resolve she sprang into the river just as Odd dashed

in, knee-deep, and as Katherine's head appeared at some distance down

the current--an angry little head, half choked, and gasping. Katherine

swam and waded to the shore, falling on her knees upon the bank, while

Odd dived into the hole--very bad hole, deep and weedy--after Hilda.

He groped for the child among a tangle of roots, touched her hair,

grasped her round the waist, and came to the surface with some

difficulty, his strokes impeded by sinuous cord-like weeds. Captain

Archinard was too much astonished by the whole matter to do more than

exclaim, "Upon my word!" as his younger daughter was deposited at his

feet.

"A nasty hole that. The weeds have probably grown since any one has

dived."

Odd spoke shortly, having lost his breath, and severely; the child

looked half drowned, and Katherine was still gasping.

"Why, Mr. Odd! Upon my word!"--the Captain recognized his neighbor--"I

don't know how to thank you."

The Captain had not recovered from his astonishment, and repeated with

some vehemence: "Upon my word!"

"Well, papa, you nearly drowned me!" Katherine was struggling between

pride and anger. She would not let the tears come, but they were near

the surface. "Those horrible snaky things got hold of me and I almost

screamed, only I remembered that I mustn't open my mouth, and I thought

I would _never_ come to the top." The self-pitying retrospect brought

the tears to her eyes, but she held up her head and looked and spoke her

resentment, "I think you might have gone in first yourself. And Hilda!

Why didn't you wait until I came to the surface before you made her do

it?"

Captain Archinard looked more vague under these reproaches than one

would have expected after his exhibition of rather fretful autocracy.

"Made her!" he repeated, seizing with a rather mean haste at the error;

"made her? She went in herself! Like a rocket, after you. By Jove! she

showed her blood after all."

"Hilda! you tried to save my life!"

Odd still held the younger girl on his arm, supporting her while she

choked and panted, for she had evidently had not shown her sister's

_aplomb_ and had opened her mouth. Katherine took her into her arms and

kissed her with a warmth quite dramatic.

"Darling Hilda! And you were so frightened, too. I would have gone in

after _her_," she added, looking up at Odd with a bright, quick glance,

"but there would have been nothing to my credit in that."

"And _I_ would have gone in after her, it goes without saying, Mr. Odd,"

said the Captain, when Katherine had led away to the bathing-cabin her

still dazed sister, "but you seemed to drop from the clouds. Really, you

have put me under a great obligation."

"Not at all. I have spent most of the day in the river. I merely went

in a bit deeper to fish out that plucky little girl."

"I've dived off that spot a hundred times. I'd no idea there were weeds.

I've never known weeds to be there. I'll send down one of the men

directly after lunch and have it seen to. Really I feel a sense of

responsibility." The Captain went on with an air of added

self-justification, "Though, of course, I'm not responsible. I couldn't

have known about the weeds."

Weeds or no weeds, Odd could not forgive him for the child's fright,

though he replied good-humoredly to the invitation to the house.

"Mrs. Archinard would have called on Mrs. Odd before this, but my wife

is an invalid--never leaves the house or grounds. She sees a good deal

of Miss Odd. I knew your father myself as well as one may know such a

recluse; spent some pleasant hours in his library--magnificent library

you've got. Peculiarly satisfactory it must be, as you go in for that

sort of thing. Won't you come in to tea this afternoon? And Mrs. Odd?

Miss Odd? I was sorry to find them out when I called the other day. I

haven't seen Mrs. Odd. I don't see her at church."

"No; we have hardly settled down to our duties yet, and my wife only got

back from the Riviera a few weeks ago."

"Well, I hope we shall keep you at Allersley now that your _wanderjahre_

are over, and that you are married. I was wandering myself during your

boyhood. My brother bought the place, you know; liked the country here

immensely. Poor old Jack! Only lived ten years to enjoy it--and died a

bachelor--luckily for me. But we've missed one another, haven't we?

Neighbors too. I have seen Mrs. Odd--at a dance in London, Lady

Bartlebury's, I remember; and I remember that she was the prettiest girl

in the room. Miss Castleton--the beautiful Alicia Castleton."

Miss Castleton's fame had indeed been so wide that the title was quite

public property, and the Captain's reminiscent tone of admiration most

natural and allowable. Odd accepted the invitation to tea, waded back

round the hedge, gathered up his basket and rod, and made his way up

through the park to Allersley Manor.

CHAPTER II

Mrs. Odd and Miss Odd, Peter's eldest and unmarried sister, were having

an only half-veiled altercation when Odd, after putting on dry clothes,

came into the morning-room just before lunch. Miss Odd sat by the open

French window cutting the leaves of a review. There were several more

reviews on the table beside her, and with her eyeglasses and fine,

severe profile, she gave one the impression of a woman who would pass

her mornings over reviews and disagree with most of them for reasons not

frivolous.

Mrs. Odd lay back in an easy-chair. She was very remarkable looking. The

adjective is usually employed in a sense rather derogatory to beauty

pure and simple, yet Mrs. Odd's dominant characteristic was beauty, pure

and simple; beauty triumphantly certain of remark, and remarkable in the

sense that no one could fail to notice her, as when one had noticed her

it was impossible not to find her beautiful. It was not a loveliness

that admitted of discussion. In desperate rebellion against an almost

tame conformity, a rash person might assert that to him her type did not

appeal; but the type was resplendent. Perhaps too resplendent; in this

extreme lay the only hope of escape from conformity. The long figure in

the uniform-like commonplace of blue serge and shirt-waist was almost

too uncommonplace in elegance of outline; the white hand too slender,

too pink as to finger-tips and polished as to nails; the delicate

scarlet splendor of her mouth, the big wine-colored eyes, too dazzling.

Mrs. Odd's red-brown hair was a glory, a burnished, well-coiffed,

well-brushed glory; it rippled, coiled, and curved about her head. Her

profile was bewildering--lazily, sweetly petulant. "Is this the face?" a

man might murmur on first seeing Alicia.

Odd had so murmured when she had flashed upon his vision over a year

ago. He was still young and literary, and, as he was swept out of

himself, had still had time for a vague grasp at self-expression.

Mrs. Odd was speaking as he entered the room.

"I don't really see, Mary, what duty has got to do with it." Without

turning her head, she turned her eyes on Odd: "How wet your hair is,

Peter!"

Mary Odd looked up from the review she was cutting rather grimly, and

her cold face was irradiated with a sudden smile.

"Well, Peter," she said quietly.

"I fished a little girl out of the river," said Odd, taking a seat near

Alicia, and smiling responsively at his sister. "Captain Archinard's

little girl." He told the story.

"An interesting contrast of physical and moral courage."

"I have seen the children. They are noticeable children. They always

ride to hounds." Hunting had been Miss Odd's favorite diversion during

her father's lifetime. "But the pretty one, as I remember, has not the

pluck of her sister--physical, as you say, Peter, no doubt."

"What sort of a person is Mrs. Archinard?"

"Very pretty, very lazy, very selfish. She is an American, and was rich,

I believe. Captain Archinard left the army when he married her, and

immediately spent her money. Luckily for him poor Mr. Archinard

died--Jack Archinard; you remember him, Peter? A nice man. I go to see

Mrs. Archinard now and then. I don't care for her."

"You don't care much for any one, Mary," said Mrs. Odd, smiling. "Your

remarks on your Allersley neighbors are very pungent and very true, no

doubt. People are so rarely perfect, and you only tolerate perfection."

"Yet I have many friends, Alicia."

"Not near Allersley?"

"Yes; I think I count Mrs. Hartley-Fox, Mrs. Maynard, Lady Mainwaring,

and Miss Hibbard among my friends."

"Mrs. Maynard is the old lady with the caps, isn't she? What big caps

she does wear! Lady Mainwaring I remember in London, trying to marry off

her eighth daughter. You told me, I recollect, that she was an

inveterate matchmaker."

"She has no selfish eagerness, if that is what you understood me to

mean."

"But she does interfere a great deal with the course of events, when

events are marriageable young men, doesn't she?"

"Does she?"

"Well, you said she was a matchmaker, Mary. There was no disloyalty in

saying so, for it is known by every one who knows Lady Mainwaring."

"And, therefore, my friends are not, and need not be, perfect."

During this little conversation, Odd sat with the unhappy, helpless look

men wear when their women-kind are engaged in such contests.

"I am awfully hungry. Isn't it almost lunch-time?" he said, as they

paused.

Mrs. Odd looked at her watch. "It only wants five minutes."

Odd walked to the window and looked out at the sweep of lawn, with its

lime-trees and copper beeches. The flower-beds were in all their glory.

"How well the mignonette is getting on, Mary," he said, looking down at

the fragrant greenness that came to the window. Alicia got up and joined

her husband, putting her arm through his.

"Let us take a turn in the garden, Peter," she smiled at him; and

although he understood, with the fatal clearness that one year of life

with Alicia had given him, that the walk was only proposed as a slight

to Mary, he felt the old pleasure in her beauty--a rather sickly, pallid

pleasure--and an inner qualm was dispersed by the realization that he

and Mary understood one another so well that there need be no fear of

hurting her.

After one year of married life, he and Mary knew the nearness of the

sympathy that allows itself no words.

There seemed to Odd a perverse pathos in Alicia's lonely complacency--a

pathos emphasized by her indifferent unconsciousness.

"Mary is so disagreeable to-day," said Alicia, as they walked slowly

across the lawn. "She has such a strong sense of her own worth and of

other people's worthlessness."

Odd made no reply. He never said a harsh word to his wife. He had chosen

to marry her. The man who would wreak his own disillusion on the woman

he had made his wife must, thought Odd, be a sorry wretch. He met the

revealment of Alicia's shallow selfishness with humorous gentleness. She

had been shallow and selfish when he had married her, and he had not

found it out--had not cared to find it out. He contemplated these

characteristics now with philosophic, even scientific charity. She was

born so.

"It will be dull enough here, at all events," Alicia went on, pressing

her slim patent-leather shoe into the turf with lazy emphasis as she

walked, for Alicia was not bad-tempered, and took things easily; "but if

Mary is going to be disagreeable--"

"You know, Alicia, that Mary has always lived here. It is in a truer

sense her home than mine, but she would go directly if either you or she

found it disagreeable. Had you not assented so cordially she would never

have stayed."

"Don't imply extravagant things, Peter. Who thinks of her going?"

"She would--if _you_ made it disagreeable."

"I? I do nothing. Surely Mary won't want to go because she scolds me."

"Come, Ally, surely you don't get scolded--more than is good for you."

Odd smiled down at her. Her burnished head was on a level with his

eyes. "Like everybody else, you are not perfection, and, as Mary is

somewhat of a disciplinarian, you ought to take her lectures in a humble

spirit, and be thankful. I do. Mary is so much nearer perfection than I

am."

"I am afraid I shall be bored here, Peter." Alicia left the subject of

Mary for a still more intimate grievance.

"The art of not being bored requires patience, not to say genius. It can

be learned though. And there are worse things than being bored."

"I think I could bear anything better."

"What would you like, Ally?" Odd's voice held a certain hopefulness.

"I'll do anything I can, you know. I believe in a woman's individuality

and all that. Does your life down here crush your individuality,

Alicia?"

Again Odd smiled down at her, conscious of an inward bitterness.

"Joke away, Peter. You know how much I care for all that woman

business--rights and movements and individualities and all that; a silly

claiming of more duties that do no good when they're done. I am an

absolutely banal person, Peter; my mind to me isn't a kingdom. I like

outside things. I like gayety, change, diversion. I don't like days one

after the other--like sheep--and I don't like sheep!"

They had passed through the shrubbery, and before them were meadows

dotted with the harmless animals that had suggested Mrs. Odd's simile.

"Well, we won't look at the sheep. I own that they savor strongly of

bucolic immutability. You've had plenty of London for the past year,

Ally, and Nice and Monte Carlo. The sheep are really the change."

"You had better go in for a seat in Parliament, Peter."

"Longings for a political salon, Ally? I have hardly time for my

scribbling and landlording as it is."

"A salon! Nothing would bore me so much as being clever and keeping it

up. No, I like seeing people and being seen, and dancing and all that. I

am absolutely banal, as I tell you."

"Well, you shall have London next year. We'll go up for the season."

"You took me for what I was, Peter," Mrs. Odd remarked as they retraced

their steps towards the house. "I have never pretended, have I? You knew

that I was a society beauty and that only. I am a very shallow person, I

suppose, Peter; I certainly can't pretend to have depths--even to give

Mary satisfaction. It would be too uncomfortable. Why did you fall in

love with me, Peter? It wasn't _en caractère_ a bit, you know."

"Oh yes, it was, Ally. I fell in love with you because you were

beautiful. Why did you fall in love with me?"

The mockery with which Alicia's smile was tinged deepened into a

good-humored laugh at her own expense.

"Well, Peter, I don't think any one before made me feel that they

thought me so beautiful. I am vain, you know. Your enthusiasm was

awfully flattering. I am very sorry you idealized me, Peter. I am sure

you idealized me. Shall we go in? Lunch must be ready, and you must be

hungrier than ever."

CHAPTER III

At four that afternoon Odd, his wife, and Mary started for the

Archinards' house. Mary had offered to join her brother; the prospect of

the walk together was very pleasant. She could not object when Alicia,

at the last moment, announced her intention of going too.

"I have never been to see her. I should like the walk, and Mary will

approve of the fulfilment of my duty towards my neighbor."

Mary's prospects were decidedly nipped in the bud, as Alicia perhaps

intended that they should be; but Alicia's avowed motive was so

praiseworthy that Mary allowed herself only an inner discontent, and,

what with her good-humored demeanor, Odd's placid chat of crops and

tenantry, and Alicia's acquiescent beauty, the trio seemed to enjoy the

mile of beechwood and country road and the short sweep of prettily

wooded drive that led to Allersley Priory, a square stone house covered

with vines of magnolia and wisteria, and incorporating in its walls,

according to tradition, portions of the old Priory which once occupied

the site. From the back of the house sloped a wide expanse of lawn and

shrubberies, and past it ran the river that half a mile further on

flowed out of Captain Archinard's little property into Odd's. The

drawing-room was on the ground-floor, and its windows opened on this

view.

Mrs. Archinard and the Captain were talking to young Lord Allan Hope,

eldest son of Lord Mainwaring. Mrs. Archinard's invalidism was evidently

not altogether fictitious. She had a look of at once extreme fragility

and fading beauty. One knew at the first glance that she was a woman to

have cushions behind her and her back to the light. There was no

character in the delicate head, unless one can call a passive

determination to do or feel nothing that required energy, character.

The two little girls came in while Odd talked to their father. They were

dressed alike in white muslins. Katherine's gown reached her ankles;

Hilda's was still at the _mi-jambe_ stage. Their long hair fell about

their faces in childlike fashion. Katherine's was brown and strongly

rippled; Hilda's softly, duskily, almost bluely black; it grew in

charming curves and eddies about her forehead, and framed her little

face and long slim neck in straightly falling lines.

Katherine gave Odd her hand with a little air that reminded him of a

Velasquez Infanta holding out a flower.

"You were splendid this morning, Mr. Odd. That hole was no joke, and

Hilda swallowed lots of water as it was. She might easily have been

drowned."

Katherine was certainly not pretty, but her deeply set black eyes had a

dominant directness. She held her head up, and her smile was charming--a

little girl's smile, yet touched with the conscious power of a clever

woman. Odd felt that the child was clever, and that the woman would be

cleverer. He felt, too, that the black eyes were lit with just a spice

of fun as they looked into his as though she knew that he knew, and they

both knew together, that Hilda had not been in much danger, and that his

ducking had been only conventionally "splendid."

"Hilda wants to thank you herself, don't you, Hilda? She had such a

horrid time altogether; you were a sort of Perseus to her, and papa the

sea monster!" Then Katherine, having, as it were, introduced and paved

the way for her sister, went back across the room again, and stood by

young Allan Hope while he talked to the beautiful Mrs. Odd.

Hilda seemed really in no need of an introduction. She was not shy,

though she evidently had not her sister's ready mastery of what to say,

and how to say it. Odd was rather glad of this; he had found Katherine's

_aplomb_ almost disconcerting.

"I do thank you very much." She put her hand into Odd's as he spoke, and

left it there; the confiding little action emphasized her childlikeness.

"What did you think of as you went down?" he asked her.

"In the river?" A shade of retrospective terror crossed her face.

"No, no! we won't talk about the river, will we?" Odd said quickly.

However funny Katherine's greater common sense had found the incident,

it had not been funny to Hilda. "Have you lived here long?" he asked.

Captain Archinard had joined Mrs. Odd, and with an admirer on either

side, Alicia was enjoying herself. "I have never seen you before, you

know."

"We have lived here since my uncle died; about eight years ago, I

think."

"Yes, just about the time that I left Allersley."

"Didn't you like Allersley?" Hilda asked, with some wonder.

"Oh, very much; and my father was here, so I often came back; but I

lived in London and Paris, where I could work at things that interested

me."

"I have been twice in London; I went to the National Gallery."

"You liked that?"

"Oh, very much." She was a quiet little girl, and spoke quietly, her

wide gentle gaze on Odd.

"And what else did you like in London?"

Hilda smiled a little, as if conscious that she was being put through

the proper routine of questions, but a trustful smile, quite willing to

give all information asked for.

"The Three Fates."

"You mean the Elgin Marbles?"

"Yes, with no heads; but one is rather glad they haven't."

"Why?" asked Odd, as she paused. Hilda did not seem sure of her own

reason.

"Perhaps they would be _too_ beautiful with heads," she suggested. "Do

you like dogs?" she added, suddenly turning the tables on him.

"Yes, I love dogs," Odd replied, with sincere enthusiasm.

"Three of our dogs are out there on the verandah, if you would care to

know them?"

"I should very much. Perhaps you'll show me the garden too; it looks

very jolly."

It was a pleasure to look at his extraordinarily pretty little

Andromeda, and he was quite willing to spend the rest of his visit with

her. They went out on the verandah, where, in the awning's shade, lay

two very nice fox terriers. A dachshund sat gazing out upon the sunlit

lawn in a dog's dignified reverie.

"Jack and Vic," Hilda said, pointing out the two fox terriers. "They

just belong to the whole family, you know. And this dear old fellow is

Palamon; Arcite is somewhere about; they are mine."

"Who named yours?"

"I did--after I read it; they had other names when they were given to

me, but as I had never called them by them, I thought I had a right to

change them. I wanted names with associations, like Katherine's setters;

they are called Darwin and Spencer, because Katherine is very fond of

science."

"Oh, is she?" said Odd, rather stupefied. "You seem to have a great many

dogs in couples."

"The others are not; they are more general dogs, like Jack and Vic."

Hilda still held Odd's hand: she stooped to stroke Arcite's pensive

head, giving the fox terriers a pat as they passed them.

"So you are fond of Chaucer?" Odd said. They crossed the gravel path and

stepped on the lawn.

"Yes, indeed, he is my favorite poet. I have not read all, you know, but

especially the Knight's Tale."

"That's your favorite?"

"Yes."

"And what is your favorite part of the Knight's Tale?"

"The part where Arcite dies."

"You like that?"

"Oh! so much; don't you?"

"Very much; as much, perhaps, as anything ever written. There never was

a more perfect piece of pathos. Perhaps you remember it." He was rather

curious to know how deep was this love for Chaucer.

"I learnt it by heart; I haven't a good memory, but I liked it so much."

"Perhaps you would say it to me."

Hilda looked up a little shyly.

"Oh, I can't!" she exclaimed timidly.

"_Can't_ you?" and Odd looked down at her a humorously pleading

interrogation.

"I can't say things well; and it is too sad to say--one can just bear to

read it."

"Just bear to say it--this once," Odd entreated.

They had reached the edge of the lawn, and stood on the grassy brink of

the river. Hilda looked down into the clear running of the water.

"Isn't it pretty? I don't like deep water, where one can't see the

bottom; here the grasses and the pebbles are as distinct as possible,

and the minnows--don't you like to see them?"

"Yes, but Arcite. Don't make me tease you."

Hilda evidently determined not to play the coward a second time. The

quiet pressure of Odd's hand was encouraging, and in a gentle,

monotonous little voice that, with the soft breeze, the quickly running

sunlit river, went into Odd's consciousness as a quaint, ineffaceable

impression of sweetness and sadness, she recited:--

"Allas the wo! allas the peynes stronge,

That I for you have suffered, and so longe!

Allas the deth! allas myn Emelye!

Allas departing of our companye!

Allas myn hertes quene! allas, my wyf!

Myn hertes lady, endere of my lyf!

What is this world? What asketh man to have?

Now with his love, now in his colde grave

Allone, withouten any companye."

Odd's artistic sensibilities were very keen. He felt that painfully

delicious constriction of the throat that the beautiful in art can give,

especially the beautiful in tragic art. The far-away tale; the far-away

tongue; the nearness of the pathos, poignant in its "white simplicity."

And how well the monotonous little voice suited its melancholy.

"Allone, withouten any companye,"

he repeated. He looked down at Hilda; he had tactfully avoided looking

at her while she spoke, fearing to embarrass her; her eyes were full of

tears.

"Thanks, Hilda," he said. It struck him that this highly strung little

girl had best not be allowed to dwell too long on Arcite and, after a

sympathetic pause (Odd was a very sympathetic person), he added:

"Now are you going to take me into the garden?"

"Yes." Hilda turned from the river. "You know he had just gained her,

that made it all the worse. If he had not loved her he would not have

minded dying so much, and being alone. One can hardly bear it," Hilda

repeated.

"It is intensely sad. I don't think you ought to have learned it by

heart, Hilda. That's ungrateful of me, isn't it? But I am old enough to

take an impersonal pleasure in sad things; I am afraid they make you

sad."

Hilda's half-wondering smile was reassuringly childlike.

"Oh, but it's _nice_ being sad like that."

Odd reflected, as they went into the garden, that she had put herself

into his category.

After the shadow of the shrubberies through which they passed, the

fragrant sunlight was dazzling. Rows of sweet peas, their mauves and

pinks and whites like exquisite musical motives, ran across the

delicious old garden. A border of deep purple pansies struck a

beautifully meditative chord. Flowers always affected Odd musically; he

half closed his eyes to look at the sweeps of sun-flooded color. A

medley of Schumann and Beethoven sang through his head as he glanced

down, smiling at Hilda Archinard; her gently responsive little smile was

funnily comprehensive; one might imagine that tunes were going through

her head too.

"Isn't it jolly, Hilda?"

"Very jolly," she laughed, and, as they walked between the pansy borders

she kept her gentle smile and her gentle stare up at his appreciative

face.

She thought his smile so nice; his teeth, which crowded forward a

little, lent it perhaps its peculiar sweetness; his eyelids, drooping at

the outer corners, gave the curious look of humorous sadness to the

expression of his brown eyes. His moustache was cut shortly on his upper

lip, and showed the rather quizzical line of his mouth. Hilda,

unconsciously, enumerated this catalogue of impressions.

"What fine strawberries," said Odd. "I like the fragrance almost more

than the flavor."

"But won't you taste them?" Hilda dropped his hand to skip lightly into

the strawberry bed. "They are ripe, lots of them," she announced, and

she came running back, her outstretched hands full of the summer fruit,

red, but for the tips, still untinted. The sunlit white frock, the long

curves of black hair, the white face, slim black legs, and the spots of

crimson color made a picture--a sunshiny Whistler.

Odd accepted the strawberries gratefully; they were very fine.

"I don't think you can have them better at Allersley Manor," said Hilda,

smiling.

"I don't think mine are as good. Won't you come some day to Allersley

Manor and compare?"

"I should like to very much."

"Then you and Miss Katherine shall be formally invited to tea, with the

understanding that afterwards the strawberry beds are to be invaded."

"I should like to very much," Hilda repeated.

"Hullo! Don't make me feel a pig! Eat some yourself," said Odd, who had

finished one handful.

"No, no, I picked them for you."

Odd took her disengaged hand in his as they walked on again, Hilda

resisting at first.

"It is so sticky."

"I don't mind that: it is very generous." She laughed at the

extravagance.

"And what do you do all day besides swimming?" Odd asked.

"We have lessons with our governess. She is strict, but a splendid

teacher. Katherine is quite a first-rate Latin scholar."

"Is Katherine fond of Chaucer?"

"Katherine cares more for science and--and philosophy." Hilda spoke with

a respectful gravity. "That's why she called her dogs Darwin and

Spencer. She hasn't read any of Spencer yet, but of course he is a great

philosopher. She knows that, and she has read a good deal of a big book

by Darwin, 'The Origin of Species,' you know."

"Yes, I know." Odd found Katherine even more startling than her sister.

"I tried to read it, but it was so confusing--about selection and

cabbages--I don't see how cabbages _can_ select, do you?" Hilda's voice

held a reminiscent vagueness. "Katherine says that she did not care for

it _much_, but she thought she ought to look through it if she wanted a

foundation; she is very keen on foundations, and she says Darwin is the

foundation-key--or corner-stone--no, keystone to the arch of modern

science--at least she did not say so, but she read me that from her

journal."

"Oh! Katherine wrote that, did she?"

"Yes; but you mustn't think that Katherine is a blue-stocking."

Something in Odd's tone made Hilda fear misunderstanding. "She loves

sports of all kinds, and fun. She goes across country as well as any

woman--that is what Lord Mainwaring said of her last winter during

fox-hunting. She isn't afraid of anything."

"And what else do you do besides lessons?"

"Well, I read and walk; there are such famous walks all about here,

walks in woods and on hills. I don't care for roads, do you? And I stay

with mamma and read to her when she is tired."

"And Katherine?"

"She is more with papa." In her heart Hilda said: "He loves her best,"

but of that she could not speak, even to this new friend who seemed

already so near; to no one could she hint of that ache in her heart of

which jealousy formed no part, for it was natural that papa should love

Katherine best, that every one should; she was so gay and courageous;

but though it was natural that Katherine should be loved best, it was

hard to be loved least.

"You are by yourself a good deal, then?" said Odd. "Do you walk by

yourself, too?"

"Yes, with the dogs. I used to have grandmamma, you know; she died a

year ago."

"Oh, yes! Mrs. Archinard's mother."

Hilda nodded; her grasp on Odd's hand tightened and they walked in

silence. Odd remembered the fine portrait of a lady in the drawing-room;

he had noticed its likeness and unlikeness to Mrs. Archinard; a delicate

face, but with an Emersonian expression of self-reliance, a puritan look

of stanchness and responsibility.

CHAPTER IV

On the way home, cool evening shadows slanting across the road, Alicia

declared that she had really enjoyed herself.

"Captain Archinard is quite jolly. He has seen everybody and everything

under the sun. He is most entertaining, and Lord Allan is remarkably

uncallow."

"He thinks of standing for Parliament next year. A nice, steady, honest

young fellow. How do you like the Archinards, Peter?"

"The child--Hilda--is a dear child."

"She is awfully pretty," said Alicia, who could afford to be generous;

"I like that colorless type."

"She is delicate, I am afraid," said Mary.

"She has the mouth of a Botticelli Madonna and the eyes of a

Gainsborough; you know the portrait of Sheridan's wife at Dulwich?"

Alicia had never been to Dulwich. Mary assented.

"The other one--the ugly one--is very clever," Alicia went on; she was

in a good temper evidently. Not that Alicia was ever exactly

bad-tempered. "She said some very clever things and looked more."

"She is too clever perhaps," Mary remarked. "As for Mrs. Archinard, I

should like to slap her. I think that my conventionality is of a

tolerant order, but Mrs. Archinard's efforts at æsthetic originality

make me feel grimly conventional."

"Mary! Mary! how delightful to hear such uncharitable remarks from you.

_I_ should rather like to slap her too, though she struck me as awfully

conventional."

"Oh, she is, practically. It is the artistic _argot_ that bores one so

much."

"She is awfully self-satisfied too. Dear me, Peter, I wish we had driven

after all. I hate the next half-mile. It is just uphill enough to be

irritating--fatigue without realizing exactly the cause of it. Why

didn't we drive, Peter?"

"I thought we all preferred walking. You are a very energetic young

person as a rule."

"Not for tiresome country roads. They should be got over as quickly as

possible."

"Well, we will cut through the beech-woods as we came."

"Oh dear," Alicia yawned, "how tired I am already of those tiresome

beech-woods. I wish it were autumn and that the hunting had begun.

Captain Archinard gives me glowing accounts, and promises me a lead for

the first good run. We must fill the house with people then, Peter."

"The house shall be filled to overflowing. Perhaps you would like some

one now. Mrs. Laughton and her girls; you like them, don't you?"

Alicia wrinkled up her charming nose.

"Can't say I do. I've stopped with them too much perhaps. They bore me.

I am afraid no one would come just now, everything is so gay in London.

I wish I were there."

Alicia was not there because the doctor had strongly advised country air

and the simple inaction of country life. Alicia had lost her baby only

three weeks after its birth--two months ago--and had herself been very

ill.

"But I think I shall write to some people and ask them to take pity on

me," she added, as they walked slowly through the woods. "Sir John, and

Mr. and Mrs. Damian, Gladys le Breton, and Lord Calverly."

"Well!" Peter spoke in his usual tone of easy acquiescence.

Mary walked on a little ahead. What good did it do to trouble her

brother uselessly by her impatient look? But how could Peter yield so

placidly? Mary respected him too much to allow herself an evil thought

of his wife; but Alicia was a person to be talked about. Mary did not

doubt that she had been talked about already, and would be more so if

she were not careful.

Lord Calverly and Sir John dangling attendance would infallibly cause

comment on any woman--let alone the beautiful Mrs. Odd. Yet Peter said,

"Well!"

CHAPTER V

The evening did not pass pleasantly at the Priory. Captain Archinard's

jolliness did not extend to family relationships; he often found family

relationships a bore, and the contrasted stodginess of his own

surroundings seemed greater after Mrs. Odd's departure.

He muttered and fumed about the drawing-room after dinner.

He was confoundedly pinched for money, and upon his word he would not be

surprised if he should have to sell the horses. "And what my life will

be stuck down here without the hunting, I can't imagine. Damnable!"

The Captain growled out the last word under his breath in consideration

of Katherine and Hilda, who had joined their father and mother after

their own tea and a game of lawn-tennis. But Mrs. Archinard was not the

woman to allow to pass unnoticed such a well-founded cause of grievance.

With a look of delicate disgust she laid down the volume of Turgenieff

that she was reading.

"Shall I send the children away, Charles? Either they or you had best

go, if you are going to talk like that."

"Beg pardon," said the Captain shortly. "No, of course they don't go."

"I am sure I have few enough enjoyments without being made to suffer

because you are to lose one of yours."

"Who asks you to suffer, Kate? But you don't wait for the asking. You're

only too willing to offer yourself as a _souffre-douleur_ on all

occasions."

Then Mrs. Archinard retired behind her book in scornful resignation and,

after twenty minutes of silence, the little girls were very glad to get

away to bed.

Hilda was just undressed when Mrs. Archinard sent for her to come to her

room. Her head ached, and Hilda must brush her hair; it was early yet.

This was a customary task, and one that Hilda prided herself upon

accomplishing with sovereign beneficence. Taylor's touch irritated Mrs.

Archinard; Hilda only was soothing.

In dressing-gown and slippers she ran to her mother's room.

Mrs. Archinard's long hair--as black and as fine as Hilda's--fell over

the back of the large arm-chair in which she reclined.

"Such a headache!" she sighed, as Hilda took up the brush and began to

pass it slowly and gently down the length of hair. "It is really brutal

of your father to forget my head as he does."

Hilda's heart sank. The unideal attitude of her father and mother toward

one another was one of her great sorrows. Papa was certainly fond of his

pretty wife, but he was so fretful and impatient, and mamma so

continually grieved. It was all wrong. Hilda had already begun to pass

judgment, unconsciously, on her father; but her almost maternal

tenderness for her mother as yet knew no doubt.

"It would be very dreadful if the horses had to go, wouldn't it?" she

said. Her father's bad temper might be touching if its cause were

suggested.

"Of course it would; and so are most things dreadful. I am sure that

life is nothing but dreadfulness in every form." Yet Mrs. Archinard was

not at all an unhappy woman. Her life was delicately epicurean. She had

few wants, but those few were never thwarted. From the early cup of

exquisite tea brought to her bedside, through all the day of dilettante

lounging over a clever book--a day relieved from monotony by pleasant

episodes--dainty dishes especially prepared, visits from acquaintances,

with whom she had a reputation for languid cynicism and quite awesome

literary and artistic cleverness--to this hour of hair-brushing, few of

her moments were not consciously appreciative of the most finely

flavored mental and physical enjoyment. But the causes for enjoyment

certainly seemed so slight that Mrs. Archinard's graceful pessimism

usually met with universal sympathy. Hilda was very sorry for her

mother. To lie all day reading dreary books; condemned to an inaction

that cut her off from all the delights of outdoor life, seemed to her

tragic. Mrs. Archinard did not undeceive her; indeed, perhaps, the most

fascinating of Mrs. Archinard's artistic occupations was to fancy

herself very tragic. Hilda went back to her room much depressed.

The girls slept together, and Katherine was sitting up in her night-gown

writing her journal by candlelight and enjoying a sense of talent

flowing at all costs--for writing by candlelight was strictly

forbidden--as she dotted down what she felt to be a very original and

pungent account of the day and the people it had introduced.

When, however, she heard the patter of Hilda's heedless slippers in the

corridor, she blew out the candle in a hurry, pinched the glowing wick,

and skipped into bed. She might take an artistic pleasure in braving

rules, but Katherine knew that Hilda would have shown an almost dull

amazement at her occupation; and although Katherine characterized it as

dull, she did not care to arouse it. She wished to stand well in Hilda's

eyes in all things. Hilda must find nothing to criticise in her either

mentally or morally.

"What shall we do if the horses are sold?" she exclaimed, as Hilda got

into the little bed beside hers. "Only imagine! no hunting next winter!

at least, none for us!"

"Poor papa," Hilda sighed.

"Oh, you may be sure that he will keep one hunter at least, but of

course he will be dreadfully cut off from it with only one, and of

course our horses will have to go if the worst comes to the worst. You

won't miss it as much as I will, Hilda; the riding, yes, no doubt, but

not the hunting. Still Lord Mainwaring will give us a mount, and now

that Mr. Odd is here, he will be sure to have a lot of horses. The old

squire let everything of that sort run down so, Miss Odd had only two

hunters. Well, Hilda, and what do you think of Mr. Odd?"

"Oh, I love him, Katherine!" Hilda lay looking with wide eyes into the

soft darkness of the room. The windows were open, and the drawn chintz

curtains flapped gently against the sills.

"I wouldn't say that if I were you, Hilda," Katherine remarked, with

some disapproval.

"Why not?" Hilda's voice held an alarmed note. Katherine was, to a great

extent, her mentor.

"It doesn't sound very--dignified. Of course you are only a little girl,

but still--one doesn't say such things."

"But I do love him; how can one help loving a person who treats one so

kindly. And then--anyway--even if he had not been kind to me I should

love him, I think."

Hilda would have liked to be able properly to analyze her sensations and

win her sister's approval; but how explain clearly?

"That would be rather foolish," Katherine said, in a tone of kind but

restraining wisdom; "one shouldn't let one's feelings run away with one

like that. Shall I tell you what _I_ think about Mr. Odd?"

"Oh yes, please."

"I think he is like the river where we jumped in to-day--ripples on the

top, kindness and smiles, you know--but somewhere in his heart a big

hole--a hole with stones and weeds in it." Katherine was quoting from

her journal, but Hilda might as well think the simile improvised:

Katherine felt some pride in it; it certainly justified, she thought,

the conventionally illicit act of the candle.

Hilda lay in silent admiration.

"Oh, Katherine, I never know how I feel things till you tell me like

that," she said at last. "How beautiful! Yes, I am sure he has a hole in

his heart." And tears came into Hilda's eyes and into her mind the

line:--

"Allone, withouten any companye."

"As for Mrs. Odd," Katherine continued, pleased with the success of her

psychology, "she has no heart to make a hole in."

"Katherine, do you think so? How dreadful!"

"She is a thorough egotist. She doesn't know much either, Hilda, for

when Darwin came in she laughed a lot at the name and said she wouldn't

be paid to read him--the real Darwin."

"Perhaps she likes other things best."

"Herself," said Katherine decisively. "Miss Odd of course we have had

time to make up our minds about."

"I like her; don't you? She has such a clear, trustful face."

"She is rather rigid; about as hard on other people as she would be on

herself. She could never do anything wrong."

"I don't quite like _that_; being hard on other people, I mean. One

could be quite sure about one's own wrongness, but how can one about

other people's? It is rather uncharitable, isn't it, Katherine?"

"She isn't very charitable, but she is very just. As for Lord Allan, he

is a sort of type, and, therefore, not very entertaining."

"A type of what?"

"Oh, just the eldest son type; very handsome, very honest, very good,

with a strong sense of responsibility. Jimmy Hope is just like him,

which is a great pity, as one expects a difference in the younger

son--more interest."

Katharine went to sleep with a warmly comfortable sense of competence.

She doubted whether many people saw things as clearly as she did.

She was wakened by an unpleasant dreaming scream from Hilda.

"What is the matter, Hilda?" She spoke crossly. "How you startled me."

"Oh, such a horrid dream!" Hilda half sobbed. "How glad I am that it

isn't so!"

"What was it?" Katherine asked, still crossly; severity she thought the

best attitude towards Hilda's fright.

"About the river, down in the hole; I was choking, and my legs and arms

were all tangled in roots."

"Well, go to sleep now," Katherine advised.

Hilda was obediently silent, but presently a small, supplicating voice

was heard.

"Katherine--I'm so sorry--don't be angry--might I come to you? I'm so

frightened."

"Come along," said Katherine, still severely, but she put her arms very

fondly around her shivering sister, snuggled her consolingly and kissed

her.

"Silly little Hilda," she said.

CHAPTER VI

Three days before the arrival of Gladys le Breton, Mrs. Marchant, Lord

Calverly, and Sir John (the Damians only did not accept Alicia's

invitation), Mary Odd astonished her brother.

She came into the library early one morning before breakfast. Odd was

there, writing.

"Peter," she said, "last night, before going to bed, I wrote to Mr.

Apswith and accepted him."

Mary always spoke to the point. Peter wheeled round his chair in

amazement.

"Accepted Mr. Apswith, Mary?"

"Yes. I always intended to at some time, and I felt that the time had

come."

Mr. Apswith, a clever, wealthy M. P., had for years been in love with

Miss Odd. Mary was now one-and-thirty, two years older than her brother,

and people said that Mr. Apswith had fallen in love when she first came

out twelve years ago. Mr. Apswith's patience, perseverance, and fidelity

were certainly admirable, but Peter, like most people, had thought that

as Mary had, so far, found no difficulty in maintaining her severe

independence, it would, in all probability, never yield to Mr. Apswith's

ardor.

Mary, however, was a person to keep her own counsel. During her father's

lifetime, when much responsibility and many duties had claimed her, she

had certainly doubted more than once the possibility of Mr. Apswith's

ultimate success; there was a touch of the Diana in Mary, and a great

deal of the Minerva. But, since her father's death, since Peter's bridal

home-coming, Mary often found herself thinking of Mr. Apswith, her

fundamental sympathy with him on all things, her real loneliness and his

devotion. They had corresponded for years, and often saw one another.

Familiarity had not bred contempt, but rather strengthened mutual trust

and dependence. A certain tone of late in Mary's letters had called

forth from Mr. Apswith a most domineering and determined love-letter.

Mary had yielded to it--gladly, as she now realized. Yet her heart

yearned over Peter. He got up now, and kissed her.

"Mary, my dear girl"--he could hardly find words--"may you be very, very

happy. You deserve it; so does he."

Neither touched, as they talked of the wonderful decision, on the fact

that by it Peter would be left to the solitary companionship of his

wife; it was not a fact to be touched on. Mary longed to fling her arms

around his neck and cry on his shoulder. Her happiness made his missing

it so apparent, but she shrank from emphasizing their mutual knowledge.

"We must ask Apswith down at once," said Odd. "It's a busy session, but

he can manage a few days."

"Well, Peter, that is hardly necessary. I shall go up to London within

the week. Lady Mainwaring asked me to go to Paris with her on the 20th.

She stops in London for three days. I shall see Mr. Apswith there, get

my trousseau in Paris, and be married in July, in about six weeks' time.

Delay would be rather silly--he has waited so long."

"You take my breath away, Mary. I am selfish, I own. I don't like to

lose you."

"It isn't losing me, Peter dear. We shall see a lot of one another. I

shall be married from here, of course. Mr. Apswith will stop with the

Mainwarings."

When Mary left him, Peter resumed his seat, and even went on writing for

a few moments. Then he put down the pen and stretched himself, as one

does when summoning courage. He did not lack courage, yet he owned to

himself that Mary's prospective departure sickened him. Her grave, even

character had given him a sense of supporting sympathy; he needed a

sympathetic atmosphere; and Alicia's influence was a very air-pump. Poor

Alicia, thought Odd. The sense of his own despair struck him as rather

unmanly. He looked out of the open window at the lawn, its cool, green

stretches whitened with the dew; the rooks were cawing in the trees, and

his thoughts went back suddenly to a certain morning in London, not two

months ago, just after the baby's death and just before Alicia's

departure for the Riviera.

Alicia was lying on the sofa--Peter staring at the distant trees, did

not see them but that scene--her magnificent health had made lying on

sofas very uncharacteristic, and Odd had been struck with a gentle sort

of compunction at the sight of the bronze head on the pillow, the thin

white cheek. His heart was very heavy. The paternal instincts are not

said to be strong; Odd had not credited himself with possessing them in

any elevated form. Yet, now that the poor baby was dead, he realized how

keen had been his interest in the little face, how keen the half-animal

pleasure in the clinging of the tiny fingers, and as he looked at the

baby in its small white coffin, he had realized, too, with a pang of

longing that the little white face, like a flower among the flowers

about it, was that of his child--dead.

On that morning he bent over Alicia with something of the lover's

tenderness in his heart, though Alicia had very nearly wrung all

tenderness out of it.

"My dear girl, my poor, dear girl," he said, kissing her; and he sat

down beside her on the sofa and smoothed back her hair. Alicia looked up

at him with those wonderful eyes--looked up with a smile.

"Oh, I shall be all right soon enough, Peter."

Peter put his arm under her head and looked hard at her--her beauty

entranced him as it had done from the beginning.

"Alicia, Alicia, do you love me?" His earnestness pleased her; she felt

in it her own power.

"What a thing to ask, Peter. Did you ever imagine I didn't?"

"Shall it bring us together, my wife, the death of our child? Will you

feel for my sorrow as I feel for yours, my poor darling?"

"Feel for you, Peter? Why, of course I do. It is especially hard on you,

too, losing your heir."

Her look, her words crushed all the sudden impulse of resolve, hope,

love even.

"My heir?" Peter repeated, in a stumbling tone. "That has nothing to do

with it. I wasn't thinking of that."

"Weren't you?" said Alicia, rather wearily. She felt her weakness, it

irked her, and her next words were more fretfully uttered--

"Of course I know you feel for me. Such a lot to go through, too, and

for nothing." She saw the pain setting her husband's lips sternly. "I

suppose now, Peter, that you are imagining I care nothing about baby,"

she remarked.

"I hope I am not a brute," said Peter gloomily.

"You hope _I'm_ not, too, no doubt."

"Don't, don't, Alicia."

"I felt awfully about it; simply awfully," Alicia declared.

Odd, retracing the sorry little scene as he looked from his library

windows, found that from it unconsciously he had dated an epoch, an

epoch of resignation that had donned good-humor as its shield. Alicia

could disappoint him no longer.

In the first month of their married life, each revelation of emptiness

had been an agony. Alicia was still mysterious to him, as must be a

nature centered in its own shallowness to one at touch on all points

with life in all its manifestations; her mind still remained as much a

thing for conjecture as the mind of some animals. But Alicia's

perceptions were subtle, and he only asked now to keep from her all

consciousness of his own marred life; for he had marred it, not she. He

was carefully just to Alicia.

Mary remained at the Manor until all Alicia's guests had arrived. Mrs.

Marchant, an ugly, "smart," vivacious widow, splendid horsewoman, and

good singer; Gladys le Breton, who was very blonde and fluffy as to

head, just a bit made-up as to skin, harmless, pretty, silly, and

supposed to be clever.

"Clever, I suppose," Mary said to Lady Mainwaring, "because she has the

reputation of doing foolish things badly--dancing on dinner-tables and

thoroughly _bête_ things like that. She has not danced on Peter's table

as yet."

Miss le Breton skirt-danced in the drawing-room, however, very prettily,

and Peter's placid contemplation of her coyness irritated Mary. Miss le

Breton's coyness was too mechanical, too well worn to afford even a

charitable point of view.

"Poor little girl," said Peter, when she expressed her disapproval with

some severity; "it is her nature. Each man after his own manner; hers is

to make a fool of herself," and with this rather unexpected piece of

opinion Mary was fully satisfied. As for Lord Calverly, she cordially

hated the big man with the good manners and the coarse laugh. His

cynical observation of Miss le Breton aroused quite a feeling of

protecting partisanship in Mary's breast, and his looks at Alicia made

her blood boil. They were not cynical. Sir John Fleetinge was hardly

more tolerable; far younger, with a bonnie look of devil-may-care and a

reputation for recklessness that made Mary uneasy. Peter was indifferent

good-humor itself, but she thought the time might come when Peter's

good-humor might fail.

The thought of Mr. Apswith was cheering; but she hated to leave Peter

_dans cette galère_.

Peter, however, did not much mind the _galère_. His duties as host lay

lightly on him. He did not mind Calverly at billiards, nor Fleetinge at

the river, where they spent several mornings fishing silently and

pleasantly together. Fleetinge had only met him casually in London clubs

and drawing-rooms, but at close quarters he realized that literary

tastes, which might have indicated a queer twist according to Sir John

and an air of easy confidence in Mrs. Odd, would not make a definite

falling in love with Mrs. Odd one whit the safer; he rather renounced

definiteness therefore, and rather liked Peter.

Mary departed for London with Lady Mainwaring, and Alicia, as if to show

that she needed no chaperonage, conducted herself with a little less

gayety than when Mary was there.

She rode in the mornings with Lord Calverly and Captain Archinard--who

had not, as yet, put into execution the hideous economy of selling his

horses. In the evening she played billiards in a manly manner, and at

odd hours she flirted, but not too forcibly, with Lord Calverly, Sir

John, and with Captain Archinard in the beech-woods, or by lamplight

effects in the drawing-room.

Peter had not forgotten Hilda and the strawberry beds, and one day

Captain Archinard, who spent many of his hours at the Manor, was asked

to bring his girls to tea.

Hilda and Katherine found Lord Calverly and Mrs. Marchant in the

drawing-room with Mrs. Odd, and their father, after a cursory

introduction, left them to sit, side by side, on two tall chairs, while

he joined the trio. Mrs. Marchant moved away to a sofa, the Captain

followed her, and Alicia and Lord Calverly were left alone near the two

children. Katherine was already making sarcastic mental notes as to the

hospitality meted out to Hilda and herself, and Hilda stared hard at

Mrs. Odd. Mrs. Odd was more beautiful than ever this afternoon in a

white dress; Hilda wondered with dismay if Katherine could be right

about her. Alicia, turning her head presently, met the wide absorbed

gaze, and, with her charming smile, asked if they had brought their

dogs--

"I saw such a lot of them about at your place the other day."

"We didn't know that you expected them to tea. We should have liked to

bring them," said Katherine, and Hilda murmured with an echo-like

effect: "We _should_ have liked to; Palamon howled dreadfully."

That Palamon's despair had been unnecessary made regret doubly keen.

"Hey! What's that?" Lord Calverly had been staring at Hilda and heard

the faint ejaculation; "what is your dog called?"

"Palamon." Hilda's voice was reserved; she had already thought that she

did not like Lord Calverly, and now that he looked at her, spoke to her,

she was sure of it.

"What funny names you give your dogs," said Alicia. "The other is called

Darwin," she added, looking at Lord Calverly with a laugh; "but Palamon

is pretty--prettier than the monkey gentleman. What made you call him

that?"

"It is out of 'The Knight's Tale,'" said Katherine; "Hilda is very fond

of it, and called her dogs after the two heroes, Palamon and Arcite."

Lord Calverly had been trying to tease Hilda by the open admiration of

his monocled gaze; the fixed gravity of her stare, like a pretty baby's,

hugely amused him.

"So you like Chaucer?" Hilda averted her eyes, feeling very

uncomfortable. "Strong meat that for babes," Lord Calverly added,

looking at Alicia, who contemplated the children with pleasant

vagueness.

"Never read it," she replied briskly; "not to remember. If I had had

literary tastes in my infancy I might have read all the improper books

without understanding them; now I am too old to read them innocently."

Katherine listened to this dialogue with scorn for the speakers (she did

not care for Chaucer, but she knew very well that to dispose of him as

"improper" showed depths of Philistinism), and Hilda listened in alarm

and wonder. Alicia's expressive eyebrows and gayly languid eyes made her

even more uncomfortable than Lord Calverly's appreciative monocle--the

monocle turning on her more than once while its wearer lounged with

abrupt, lazy laughs near Alicia. Hilda wondered if Mrs. Odd liked a man

who could so laugh and lounge, and a vague disquiet and trouble, a

child's quick but ignorant sense of sadness stirred within her, for if

Katherine had been right, then Mr. Odd must be unhappy. She sprang up

with a long breath of relief and eagerness when he came in. Odd, with a

half-humorous, half-cynical glance, took in the situation of his two

little guests; Alicia was evidently taking no trouble to claim them

hers. He appreciated, too, Hilda's glad face.

"I'm sorry I have kept you waiting; are you ready for strawberries?"

He shook hands, smiling at them.

"Don't, please, put yourself out, Odd, in looking after my offspring,"

called the Captain; "they can find their way to the garden without an

escort."

"But it won't put me out to take them; it would put me out very much if

I couldn't," and Odd smiled his kindliest at Hilda, who stood dubious

and hesitating.

Katherine thought it rather babyish to go into the garden for

strawberries. She preferred to await tea in this atmosphere of

unconscious inferiority; these grown-up people who did not talk to her,

and who were yet so much duller than she and Hilda. When Hilda went out

with Mr. Odd she picked up some magazines, and divided her attention

between the pictures and the couples. Papa and Mrs. Marchant did not

interest her, but she found Alicia's low, musical laughter, and the

enjoyment with which she listened to Lord Calverly's half-muffled

utterances, full of psychological suggestions that would read very well

in her journal.

"He is probably flattering her," thought Katherine; "that is what she

likes best."

Meanwhile Hilda had forgotten Lord Calverly's stare and Alicia's

frivolity; she was so glad, so glad to be with her big friend again. He

took her first to the picture gallery--having noticed as they went

through a room that her eyes swerved to a Turner water-color with

evident delight. Hilda was silent before the great Velasquez, the

Holbein drawings, the Chardin and the Corot; but as they went from

picture to picture, she would look up at Odd with her confident, gentle

smile, so that, after the half-hour in the fine gallery, he felt sure

that the child cared for the pictures as much as he did; her silence was

singularly sympathetic. As they went into the garden she confessed, in

answer to his questions, that she would love to paint, to draw.

"All the beautiful, beautiful things to do!" she said; "almost

everything would be beautiful, wouldn't it, if one were great enough?"

The strawberry beds were visited, and--

"Shall we go down to the river and have a look at the scene of our first

acquaintance?" asked Peter; "we have plenty of time before tea." But,

seeing the half-ashamed reluctance in Hilda's eyes, "Well, not there,

then, but to the river; there are even prettier places. Our

boating-house is a mile from yours, and I'll give you a paddle in my

Canadian canoe,--such a pretty thing. You must sit very still, you know,

or you'll spill us both into the river."

"I shouldn't mind, as you would be there," laughed Hilda; and so they

went through the sunlit golden green of the beechwoods, and Hilda made

the acquaintance of the Canadian canoe and of a mile or so of river that

she had never seen before, and she and Peter talked together like the

best and oldest of friends.

CHAPTER VII

Odd's life of melancholy and good-humored resignation was cut short with

an abruptness so startling that the needlessness of further resignation

deepened the melancholy to a lasting habit of mind.

The melancholy that lies in the resignation to a ruinous mistake, the

acceptance of ruin, and the nerving oneself to years of self-control and

kindly endurance may well become a fine and bracing stoicism, but the

shock of the irretrievably lost opportunity, the eternally irremediable

mistake, gave a sensitive mind a morbid faculty of self-questioning and

self-doubt that sapped the very springs of energy and confidence.

Mary's wedding came off in July, and when Mr. and Mrs. Apswith were gone

for two months' cruising in a friend's yacht about the North Sea, Peter

set to work with vigor. "The Sonnet" was in a year's time to make him

famous in the world of letters. In September, Mary and her husband went

to their house in Surrey, and there Peter paid her a visit. Alicia found

a trip to Carlsbad with friends more desirable. The friends were

thoroughly irreproachable--a middle-aged peer and his young and pretty

but very sensible wife.

Peter, in allowing her to enjoy herself after her own fashion, felt no

weight of warning responsibility. But Alicia died suddenly at Carlsbad,

and the horror of self-reproach, of bitter regret, that fell upon Odd

when the news reached him at his sister's, was as unjust as it was

poignant. At Allersley the general verdict was that Mrs. Odd's death had

broken her husband's heart, and Allersley, though arguing from false

premises, was not far wrong. Odd was nearly heart-broken. That Alicia's

death should have lifted the weight of a fatal mistake from his life was

a fact that tortured and filled him with remorse. Doubts and conjectures

haunted him. Alicia might have dumbly longed for a sympathy for which

she was unable to plead, and he to guess her longing. She had died away

from him, without one word of mutual understanding, without one look of

the love he once had felt and she accepted; and bitterest of all came

the horrid realism of the thought that his absence had not made death

more bitter to her. He shut himself up in the Manor for three weeks,

seeing no one, and then, in sudden rebellion against this passive

suffering, determined to go to India. He had a second sister married

there. The voyage would distract him, and change, movement, he must

have. The news spread quickly over Allersley, and Allersley approved of

the wisdom of the decision.

At the Priory little Hilda Archinard was suffering in her way--the

dreary suffering of childhood, with its sense of hopeless finality, of

helpless inexperience. Chasms of desolation deepened within her as she

heard that her friend was going away.

The sudden blossoming of her devotion to Odd had widened her

capabilities for conscious loneliness. Her loneliness became apparent to

her, and the immense place his smile, his kindness, her confident sense

of his goodness had filled in her dreaming little life. Her aching pity

for him was confused by a vague terror for herself. She could hardly

bear the thought of his departure. Every day she walked all along the

hedges and walls that divided the Priory from the Manor estate; but she

never saw him. The thought of not seeing him again, which at first had

seemed impossible, now fixed upon her as a haunting obsession.

"Odd goes to-morrow," the Captain announced one evening in the

drawing-room. Katherine was playing, not very conscientiously but rather

cleverly, a little air by Grieg. Hilda had a book on her lap, but she

was not reading, and her father's words seemed to stop her heart in its

heavy beating.

"I met Thompson"--Mr. Thompson was Peter's land-agent--"and everything

is settled. Poor chap! Thompson says he's badly broken up."

"How futile to mourn over death," Mrs. Archinard sighed from her sofa.

"Tangled as we are in the webs of temperament, and environment, and

circumstance, should we not rather rejoice at the release from the great

illusion?" Mrs. Archinard laid down a dreary French novel and vaguely

yawned, while the Captain muttered something about talking "rot" before

the children.

"Move this lamp away, Hilda," said Mrs. Archinard. "I think I can take a

nap now, if Katherine will put on the soft pedal."

It was a warm autumn night, and the windows were open. Hilda slipped

out when she had moved the lamp away.

She could not go by the country road, nor scramble through the hedge,

but to climb over the wall would be an easy matter. Hilda ran over the

lawn, across the meadows, and through the woods. In the uncanny darkness

her white dress glimmered like the flitting wings of a moth. As she came

to the wall the moon seemed to slide from behind a cloud. Hilda's heart

stood still with a sudden terror at her loneliness there in the wood at

night. The boy-like vault over the wall gave her an impetus of courage,

and she began to run, feeling, as she ran, that the courage was only

mechanical, that the moon, the mystery of a dimly seen infinity of tree

trunks, the sorrow holding her heart as if in a physical pressure, were

all terrible and terrifying. But Hilda, on occasions, could show an

indomitable moral courage even while her body quaked, and she ran all

the half-mile from the boundary wall to Allersley Manor without

stopping. There was a light in the library window; even at a distance

she had seen it glowing between the trees. She ran more slowly over the

lawn, and paused on the gravel path outside the library to get her

breath. Yes, _he_ was there alone. She looked into the dignified quiet

of the fine old room. A tall lamp threw a strong light on the pages of

the book he held, and his head was in shadow. The window was ajar, and

Hilda pushed it open and went in.

At the sound Odd glanced up, and his face took on a look of half

incredulous stupefaction. Hilda's white face, tossed hair, the

lamentable condition of her muslin frock, made of her indeed a

startling apparition.

"My dear Hilda!" he exclaimed.

Hilda pressed her palms together, and stared silently at him. Mr. Odd's

face looked so much older; its gravity made her heart stand still with

an altogether new sense of calamity. She stood helplessly before him,

tears brimming to her eyes.

"My dear child, what is the matter? You positively frightened me."

"I came to say 'Good-bye,'" said Hilda brokenly.

Peter's gravity was mere astonishment and sympathetic dismay. The

tear-brimmed eyes, after his weeks of solitary brooding, filled him with

a most exquisite rush of pity and tenderness.

"Come here, you dear child," he said, holding out his arms to her; "you

came to say 'Good-bye?' I am very grateful to you."

Hilda leaned her head against his shoulder and wept. After the frozen

nightmare moment, the old kindness was a delicious contrast; she almost

forgot the purport of her journey, though she knew that she was crying.

Odd stroked her long hair; her tears slightly amused and slightly

alarmed him, even while the pathos of the affection they revealed

touched him deeply.

"Did you come alone?" he asked.

Hilda nodded.

"That was a very plucky thing to do. I thank you for it. There, can't

you smile at me? Don't cry."

"Oh, I love you _so_ much, I can hardly bear it." Peter felt

uncomfortable. The capacity for suffering revealed in these words gave

him a sense of responsibility. Poor child! Would her lot in life be to

cry over people who were not worth it?

"I shall come back some day, Hilda." Hilda stopped crying, and Peter was

relieved by the sobs' cessation. "I have a wandering fit on me just now;

you understand that, don't you?"

She held his hand tightly. She could not speak; her heart swelled so at

his tone of mutual understanding.

"I am going to see my sister. I haven't seen her for five years; but

long before another five years are passed I shall be here again, and the

thing I shall most want to see when I get back will be your little

face."

"But you will be different then, I will be different, we will both be

changed." Hilda put her hands before her face and sobbed again. Peter

was silent for a moment, rather aghast at the child's apprehension of

the world's deepest tragedy. He could not tell her that they would be

unchanged--he the man of thirty-five, she the girl of seventeen. Poor

little Hilda! Her grief was but too well founded, and his thoughts

wandered for a moment with Hilda's words far away from Hilda herself.

Hilda wiped her eyes and sat upright. Odd looked at her. He had a keen

sense of the unconventional in beauty, and her tears had not disfigured

her small face--had only made it strange. He patted her cheek and smiled

at her.

"Cheer up, little one!" She evidently tried to smile back.

"I am afraid you have idealized me, my child--it's a dangerous faculty.

I am a very ordinary sort of person, Hilda; you must not imagine fine

things about me nor care so much. I'm not worth one of those tears, poor

little girl!"

It was difficult to feel amused before her solemn gaze; a sage prophecy

of inevitable recovery would be brutal; to show too much sympathy

equally cruel. But the reality of her feeling dignified her grief, and

he found himself looking gravely into her large eyes.

"You're not worth it?" she repeated.

"No, really."

"I don't imagine things about you."

"Well, I am glad of that," said Peter, feeling rather at a loss.

"I love you dearly," said Hilda, with a certain air of dreary dignity;

"you are you. I don't have to imagine anything."

Odd put her hand to his lips and kissed it gently.

"Thank you, my dear child. I love you too, and certainly I don't have to

imagine anything."

Hilda's eyes, with their effect of wide, almost unseeing expansion,

rested on his for a moment longer. She drew herself up, and a look of

resolution, self-control, and fidelity hardened her young face. Odd

still felt somewhat disconcerted, somewhat at a loss.

"I must go now; they don't know that I am here."

"They didn't know that you were coming, I suppose?"

"No; they wouldn't have let me come if I had told them before, but I

will tell them now."

"Well, we will tell them together."

"Are you going to take me home?"

"Did you imagine that I would let you go alone?"

"You are very kind."

"And what are you, then? Your shoes are wringing wet, my child. Your

dress is thin, too, for this time of year. Wrap this coat of mine around

you. There! and put on this hat."

Peter laughed as he coiffed her in the soft felt hat that came down over

her ears; she looked charming and quaint in the grotesque costume. Hilda

responded with a quiet, patient little smile, gathering together the

wide sleeves of the covert coat. Odd lit a cigar, put on his own hat,

took her hand, and they sallied forth.

"You came across, I suppose?"

"Yes, by the woods."

"And you weren't frightened?"

He felt the patient little smile in the darkness as she replied--

"You know already that I am a coward."

"I know, on the contrary, that you are amazingly courageous. The flesh

may be weak, but the spirit is willing with a vengeance. Eh, Hilda?"

"Yes," said Hilda vaguely.

They walked in silence through the woods. Clouds hid the moon, and the

wind had risen.

Peter had dreary thoughts. He felt like a ghost in the ghost-like

unreality of existence. The walk through the melancholy dimness seemed

symbolical of a wandering, aimless life. The touch of Hilda Archinard's

little hand in his was comforting. When they had passed through the

Priory shrubbery and were nearing the house, Hilda's step beside him

paused.

"Will you kiss me 'Good-bye' here, not before them all?"

"What beastly things 'Good-byes' are," Odd said, looking down at the

glimmering oval of her uplifted face; "what thoroughly beastly things."

He took the little face between his hands and kissed her: "Good-bye,

dear little Hilda."

"Thank you so much--for everything," she said.

"Thank you, my child. I shall not forget you."

"Don't be different. _Try_ not to change."

"Ah, Hilda! Hilda!"

That she, not he, would change was the inevitable thing. He stooped and

kissed again the child beside him.

Part I

KATHERINE

CHAPTER I

Odd knew that he was late as he drove down the Champs Elysées in a

rattling, closed _fiacre_. He and Besseint had talked so late into the

evening that he had barely had time to get to his hotel in the

Marboeuf quarter and dress.

Besseint was one of the cleverest French writers of the day; he and

Peter had battled royally and delightfully over the art of writing, and

as Besseint was certainly more interesting than would be the dinner at

the Embassy, Peter felt himself excusable.

Lady---- welcomed him unresentfully--

"Just, only just in time. I am going to send you down with Miss

Archinard--over there talking to my husband--she is such a clever girl."

Peter was conscious of a shock of surprise; a shock so strong that

Lady---- saw a really striking change come over his face. Peter himself

was startled by his own pleasure and eagerness.

"Evidently you know her; and evidently you _were_ going to be bored and

are _not_ going to be now! Your change of expression is really

unflattering!" Lady---- laughed good humoredly.

"I haven't seen her for ten years; we were the greatest chums. Oh! it

isn't Hilda, then!" Odd caught sight of the young lady.

"I am _very_ sorry it isn't 'Hilda.' Hilda is the beauty; she is,

unfortunately, almost an unknown quantity; but Katherine will be a

stepping-stone, and I assure you that she is worth cultivation on her

own account."

Yes, Katherine was a stepping-stone; that atoned somewhat for the

disappointment that Odd felt as he followed his hostess across the room.

"Miss Archinard--an old friend. Mr. Odd tells me he has not seen you for

ten years."

"Mr. Odd!" cried Miss Archinard. She was evidently very glad to see him.

"It is astonishing, isn't it?" said Peter. "Ten years does mean

something, doesn't it?"

"So much and yet so little. It hasn't changed you a bit," said

Katherine. "And here is papa. Papa, isn't this nice? Mr. Odd, do you

remember the day you fished Hilda out of the river? Poor Hilda! And her

romantic farewell escapade?"

Captain Archinard was changed; his hair had become very white, and his

good looks well worn, but his greeting had the cordiality of old

friendship.

"And Hilda?" Peter questioned, as he and Katherine went into the

dining-room together. "Hilda is well? And as lovely as ever?"

"Well, and as lovely as ever," Katherine assured him. "She is not here

because she rarely goes out. Papa and I are the frivolous members of the

family. Mamma goes in for culture, and Hilda for art." Peter had a good

look at her as they sat side by side.

Katherine was no more beautiful than in childhood, but she was

distinctly interesting and--yes--distinctly charming. Her black eyes,

deeply set under broad eyebrows, held the same dominant significance;

humorous, cynical, clever eyes. Her white teeth gave a brilliant gayety

to her smile. There was distinction in her coiffure--the thick deeply

rippled hair parted on one side, and coiled smoothly from crown to neck;

and Peter recognized in her dress a personal taste as distinctive--the

long unbroken lines of her nasturtium velvet gown were untinged by any

hint of so-called artistic dowdiness, and yet the dress wrinkled about

her waist as she moved with a daring elegance far removed from the

moulded conventionality of the other women's bodices. This glowing gown

was cut off the shoulders; Katherine's shoulders were beautiful, and

they were triumphantly displayed.

"And now, please tell me," said Peter, "how it comes that I haven't seen

you for ten years?"

"How comes it that we have not seen _you_? You have been everywhere, and

so have we; really it is odd that we should never have met. Of course

you know that we left the Priory only a year after you went to India?"

Peter nodded.

"I was dismayed to find you gone when I got back. I heard vague rumors

of Florence, and when I went there one winter you had disappeared."

"We must have been in Dresden. How I hated it! All the shabby

second-rate culture of the world seems to gravitate to Dresden. We had

to let the Priory, you know. We are so horribly poor."

Katherine's smiling assertion was not carried out in her appearance, yet

the statement put a bond of familiarity between them; Katherine spoke as

to an old friend who had a right to know.

"Then we had a year or two at Dinard--loathsome place I think it! Then

Florence again, and at last Paris, and here we have been for over three

years, and here we shall probably stick for who knows how long! Hilda's

painting gives us a reasonable background; at least as reasonable as

such exiles can hope for."

"But you don't mean to say that your exile is indefinite?"

Katherine nodded, with eyebrows lifted and a suggestion of shrug in the

creamy expanse of shoulder.

"And Hilda paints? Well?"

"Hilda paints really well. She has always painted, and her work is

really individual, unaffectedly individual, and that's the rare thing,

you know. Over four years of atelier work didn't scotch Hilda's

originality, and she has a studio of her own now, and is never happy out

of it."

"What kind of work does she go in for?" Peter was conscious of a vague

uneasiness about Hilda. "Portraits?"

"No; Hilda is not very good at likenesses. Her things are very

decorative--not Japanese either--except in their air of choice and

selection; well, you must see them, they really are original, and, in

their own little way, quite delightful; they are, perhaps, a wee bit

like baby Whistlers--not that I intimate any real resemblance--but the

sense of color, the harmony; but you must see them," Katherine repeated.

"And Mrs. Archinard?" Peter felt some remorse at having forgotten that

rather effaced personality.

"Mamma is just the same, only stronger than she used to be in England.

I think the Continent suits her better. And now _you_, Mr. Odd. The idea

of talking about such nobodies as we are when you have become such a

personage! You have become rather cynical too, haven't you? As a child

you did not make a cynical impression on me, and your 'Dialogues' did. I

think you are even more cynical than Renan. Some stupid person spoke to

me of a _rapport_ between your 'Dialogues' and his 'Dialogues

Philosophiques.' I don't imply that, except that you are both sceptical

and both smiling, only your smile is more bitter, your scepticism less

frivolous."

"I'm sceptical as to people, not as to principles," said Peter, smiling

not bitterly.

"Yet you are not a misanthrope, you do not hate people."

"I don't admire them."

"You would like to help them to become more admirable. Ah! The

Anglo-Saxon is strong within you. You are not at all like Renan. And

then you went in for Parliamentary honors too; three years ago, wasn't

it? Why didn't you keep on?"

"Because I didn't keep my seat when my party went out. The honors were

dubious, Miss Archinard. I cut a very ineffective figure."

"I remember meeting a man here at the time who said you weren't

'practical,' and I liked you for it too. If only you had kept in we

should surely have met. Hilda and I were in London this spring."

"Were you? And I was in Japan. I only got back three weeks ago."

"How you do dash about the globe. But you have been to Allersley since

getting back?"

"Only for a day or two. But tell me about your spring in London."

"We were with Lady Mainwaring."

"Ah, I did not see her when I was at Allersley. That accounts for my

having had no news of you. You did not see my sister in London; she has

been in the country all this year. You went to Court, I suppose?"

"Yes, Lady Mainwaring presented us."

"And Hilda enjoyed herself?"

Katherine smiled: "How glad you will be to see Hilda. Yes, enjoyed

herself after a fashion, I think. She only stopped a month. She doesn't

care much for that sort of thing really."

Katherine did not say, hardly knew perhaps, that the reproachful

complaint of Mrs. Archinard's weekly letter had cut short Hilda's

season, and brought her back to the little room in the little

_appartement, 3ième au dessus de l'entresol_, where Mrs. Archinard spent

her days as she had spent them at Allersley, at Dresden, at Dinard, at

Florence. Change of surroundings made no change in Mrs. Archinard's

lace-frilled recumbency, nor in the air of passive long-suffering that

went with so much appreciation of her own merits and other people's

deficiencies.

"But Hilda's month meant more than other girls' years," Katherine went

on; "you may imagine the havoc she played, all unconsciously, poor

Hilda! Hilda is the most unconscious person. She fixes one with those

big vague eyes of hers. She fixed, among other people, another old

friend," and Katherine smiled, adding with lowered tone, "Allan Hope."

Peter was not enough conscious of a certain inner irritation to attempt

its concealment.

"Allan Hope?" he repeated. "It is impossible for me to imagine little

Hilda with lovers; and Allan Hope one of them!"

"Allan Hope is very nice," Katherine said lightly.

"Nice? Oh, thoroughly nice. But to think that Hilda is grown up, not a

child."

Odd looked with a certain tired playfulness at Katherine.

"And you are grown up too; have lovers too. What a pity it is."

"That depends." Katherine laughed. "But regrets of that kind are

unnecessary as far as Hilda is concerned. I don't think little Hilda is

much less the child than when you last saw her. Having lovers doesn't

imply that one is ready for them, and I don't think that Hilda is

ready."

Odd had looked away from her again, and Katherine's black eyes rested on

him with a sort of musing curiosity. She had not spoken quite truthfully

in saying that the ten years had left him unchanged. A good deal of

white in the brown hair, a good many lines about eyes and mouth might

not constitute change, but Katherine had seen, in her first keen clear

glance at the old friend, that these badges of time were not all.

There had been something still boyish about the Mr. Odd of ten years

ago; the lines at the eye corners were still smiling lines, the quiet

mouth still kind; but the whole face wore the weary, almost heavy look

of middle age.

"His Parliamentary experience probably knocked the remaining illusions

out of him," Katherine reflected. "He was certainly very unsuccessful,

he tried for such a lot too, sought obstacles. He should mellow a bit

now (that smile of his is bitter) into resignation, give up the windmill

hunt (I think all nice men go through the Quixotic phase), stop at home

and write homilies. And he certainly, certainly ought to marry; marry a

woman who would be nice to him." And it was characteristic of Katherine

that already she was turning over in her mind the question as to whether

it would be feasible, or rather desirable--for Katherine intended to

please herself, and had not many doubts as to possibilities if once she

could make up her mind--to contemplate that rôle for herself. Miss

Archinard was certainly the last woman in the world to be suspected of

matrimonial projects; her frank, almost manly bonhomie, and her apparent

indifference to ineligibility had combined to make her doubly

attractive; and indeed Katherine was no husband-hunter. She would

choose, not seek. She certainly intended to get married, and to a

husband who would make life definitely pleasant, definitely successful;

and she was very keenly conscious of the eligibility or unfitness of

every man she met; only as the majority had struck her as unfit, Miss

Archinard was still unmarried. Now she said to herself that Peter Odd

would certainly be nice to his wife, that his position was

excellent--not glittering--Katherine would have liked glitter, and the

more the better; and yet with that long line of gentlefolk ancestry,

that old Elizabethan house and estate, far above the shallow splendor of

modern dukedoms or modern wealth, fit only to impress ignorance or

vulgarity. He had money too, a great deal. Money was a necessity if one

wanted a life free for highest flights; and she added very calmly that

she might herself, after consideration, find it possible to be nice to

him. Rather amusing, Katherine thought it, to meet a man whom one could

at once docket as eligible, and find him preoccupied with a dreamy

memory of such slight importance as Hilda's child friendship; but

Katherine's certainty of the slightness--and this man of forty looked

anything but sentimental--left her very tolerant of his preoccupation.

Hilda was a milestone, a very tiny milestone in his life, and it was to

the distant epoch her good-bye on that autumn night had marked as ended,

rather than to the little closing chapter itself, that he was looking.

Indeed his next words showed as much.

"How many changes--forgive the truism, of course--in ten years! Did you

know that my sister, Mrs. Apswith, had half-a-dozen babies? I find

myself an uncle with a vengeance."

"I haven't seen Mrs. Apswith since she was married. It does seem ages

ago, that wedding."

"Mary has drawn a lucky number in life," said Odd absently.

"She expects you to settle down definitely now, I suppose; in England,

at Allersley?"

"Yes, I shall. I shall go back to Allersley in a few months. It is

rather lonely."

"Why don't you fill it with people?"

"You forget that I don't like people," said Odd.

"You prefer loneliness, with your principles for company. There will be

something of martyrdom, then, when you at last settle down to your duty

as landowner and country gentleman."

"Oh, I shall do it without any self-glorification. Perhaps you will come

back to the Priory. That would mitigate the loneliness."

"The sense of our nearness. Of course you wouldn't care to see us! No, I

think I prefer Paris to the Priory."

"What do you do with yourself in Paris?"

"Very little that amounts to anything," Katherine owned; "one can't very

well when one is poor and not a genius. If one isn't born with them, one

must buy weapons before one can fight. I feel I should be a pretty good

fighter if I had my weapons!" and Katherine's dark eye, as it flashed

round on him in a smile, held the same suggestion of gallant daring with

which she had impressed him on that morning by the river ten years ago.

He looked at her contemplatively; the dark eyes pleased him.

"Yes," he said, "I think you would be a good fighter. What would you

fight?"

"The world, of course: and one only can with its own weapons, more's the

pity."

"And the flesh and the devil," Odd suggested; "is this to be a moral

crusade?"

"I'm afraid I can't claim that. I only want to conquer for the fun of

conquering; 'to ride in triumph through Persepolis,' like Tamburlaine,

chain up people I don't like in cages! Oh, of course, Persepolis would

be a much nicer place when once I held it, I should be delightful to the

people I liked."

"And all the others would be in cages!"

"They would deserve it if I put them there! I'm very kind-hearted, very

tolerant."

"And when you have conquered the world, what then? As life is not all

marching and caging."

"I shall live in it after my own fashion. I am ambitious, Mr. Odd, but

not meanly so, I assure you."

"No; not meanly so, I am sure." Odd's eyes were quietly scrutinizing,

as, another sign of the ten years, he adjusted a pair of eyeglasses and

looked at her, but not, as Katherine felt, unsympathetic.

"And meanwhile? you will find your weapons in time, no doubt, but,

meanwhile, what do you do with yourself?"

"Meanwhile I study my _milieu_. I go out a good deal, if one can call it

going out in this dubious Parisian, Anglo-American _mélange_; I read a

bit, and I bicycle in the Bois with papa in the morning. It sounds like

sentimentality, but I do feel that there is an element of tragedy in

papa and myself bicycling. Oh, for a ride across country!"

"You rode so well, too, Mary told me."

"Yes, I rode well, otherwise I shouldn't regret it." Katherine smiled

with even more assurance under the added intensity of the _pince-nez_.

"You enjoy the excelling, then, more than the feeling."

"That sounds vain; I certainly shouldn't feel pleasure if I were

conscious of playing second fiddle to anybody."

"A very vain young lady," Odd's smile was quite alertly interested, "and

a self-conscious young lady, too."

"Yes, rather, I think," Katherine owned; frankness became her, "but I am

very conscious of everything, myself included. I am merely one among the

many phenomena that come under my notice, and, as I am the nearest of

them all, naturally the most intimately interesting. Every one is

self-conscious, Mr. Odd, if they have any personality at all."

"And you are clever," Peter pursued, in a tone of enumeration, his smile

becoming definitely humorous as he added: "And I am very impudent."

Katherine was not sure that she had made just the effect she had aimed

for, but certainly Mr. Odd would give her credit for frankness.

It was agreed that he should come for tea the next afternoon.

"After five," Katherine said; "Hilda doesn't get in till so late; and I

know that Hilda is the _clou_ of the occasion."

"Does Hilda take her painting so seriously as all that?"

"She doesn't care about anything, _anything_ else," Katherine said

gravely, adding, still gravely, "Hilda is very, very lovely."

"I hope you weren't too much disappointed," Lady---- said to Odd, just

before he was going; "is she not a charming girl?"

"She really is; the disappointment was only comparative. It was Hilda

whom I knew so well. The dearest little girl."

"I have not seen much of her," Lady---- said, with some vagueness of

tone. "I have called on Mrs. Archinard, a very sweet woman, clever,

too; but the other girl was never there. I don't fancy she is much help

to her mother, you know, as Katherine is. Katherine goes about, brings

people to see her mother, makes a _milieu_ for her; such a sad invalid

she is, poor dear! But Hilda is wrapt up in her work, I believe. Rather

a pity, don't you think, for a girl to go in so seriously for a fad like

that? She paints very nicely, to be sure; I fancy it all goes into that,

you know."

"What goes into that?" Odd asked, conscious of a little temper; all

seemed combined to push Hilda more and more into a slightly derogatory

and very mysterious background.

"Well, she is not so clever as her sister. Katherine can entertain a

roomful of people. Grace, tact, sympathy, the impalpable something that

makes success of the best kind, Katherine has it."

Katherine's friendly, breezy frankness had certainly amused and

interested Odd at the dinner-table, but Lady ----'s remarks now produced

in him one of those quick and unreasoning little revulsions of feeling

by which the judgments of a half-hour before are suddenly reversed.

Katherine's cleverness was that of the majority of the girls he took

down to dinner, rather _voulu_, banal, tiresome. Odd felt that he was

unjust, also that he was a little cross.

"There are some clevernesses above entertaining a roomful of people.

After all, success isn't the test, is it?"

Lady---- smiled, an unconvinced smile--

"You should be the last person to say that."

"I?" Odd made no attempt to contradict the evident flattery of his

hostess' tones, but his ejaculation meant to himself a volume of

negatives. If success were the test, he was a sorry failure.

He was making his way out of the room when Captain Archinard stopped

him.

"I have hardly had one word with you, Odd," said the Captain, whose

high-bridged nose and finely set eyes no longer saved his face from its

fundamental look of peevish pettiness. "Mrs. Brooke is going to take

Katherine home. It's a fine night, won't you walk?"

Odd accepted the invitation with no great satisfaction; he had never

found the Captain sympathetic. After lifting their hats to Mrs. Brooke

and Katherine as they drove out of the Embassy Courtyard, the two men

turned into the Rue du Faubourg St. Honoré together.

"We are not far from you, you know," the Captain said--"Rue Pierre

Charron; you said you were in the Marboeuf quarter, didn't you? We are

rather near the Trocadero, uphill, so I'll leave you at the door of your

hotel."

They lit cigars and walked on rather silently. The late October night

was pleasantly fresh, and the Champs Elysées, as they turned into it,

almost empty between the upward sweep of its line of lights.

"Ten years is a jolly long time," remarked Captain Archinard, "and a

jolly lot of disagreeable things may happen in ten years. You knew we'd

left the Priory, of course?"

"I was very sorry to hear it."

"Devilish hard luck. It wasn't a choice of evils, though, if that is

any consolation; it was that or starvation."

"As bad as that?"

"Just as bad; the horses went first, and then some speculations--safe

enough they seemed, and, sure enough, went wrong. So that, with one

thing and another, I hardly knew which way to turn. To tell the truth, I

simply can't go back to England. I have a vague idea of a perfect fog of

creditors. I have been able to let the Priory, but the place is

mortgaged up to the hilt; and devilish hard work it is to pay the

interest; and hard luck it is altogether," the Captain repeated.

"Especially hard on a man like me. My wife is perfectly happy. I keep

all worry from her; she doesn't know anything about my troubles; she

lives as she has always lived. I make that a point, sacrifice myself

rather than deprive her of one luxury." The tone in which the Captain

alluded to his privations rather made Peter doubt their reality. "And

the two children live as they enjoy it most; a very jolly time they have

of it. But what is my life, I ask you?" The Captain's voice was very

resentful. Odd almost felt that he in some way was to blame for the good

gentleman's unhappy situation. "What is my life, I ask you? I go

dragging from post to pillar with stale politics in the morning, and

five o'clock tea in grass widows' drawing-rooms for all distraction.

Paris is full of grass widows," he added, with an even deepened

resentment of tone; "and I never cared much about the play, and French

actresses are so deuced ugly, at least I find them so, even if I cared

about that sort of thing, which I never did--much," and the Captain

drew disconsolately at his cigar, taking it from his lips to look at the

tip as they passed beneath a lamp.

"I can hardly afford myself tobacco any longer," he declared, "smokable

tobacco. Thought I'd economize on these, and they're beastly, like all

economical things!" And the Captain cast away the cigar with a look of

disgust.

Peter offered him a substitute.

"You are a lucky dog, Odd, to come to contrasts," the Captain paused to

shield his lighted match as he applied it to the fresh cigar; "I don't

see why things should be so deuced uneven in this world. One fellow born

with a silver spoon in his mouth--and you've got a turn for writing,

too; once one's popular, that's the best paying thing going, I

suppose--and the other hunted all over Europe, through no fault of his

own either. Rather hard, I think, that the man who doesn't need money

should be born with a talent for making it."

"It certainly isn't just."

"Damned unjust."

Odd felt that he was decidedly a culprit, and smiled as he smoked and

walked beside the rebellious Captain. He was rather sorry for him. Odd

had wide sympathies, and found whining, feeble futility pathetic,

especially as there was a certain amount of truth in the Captain's

diatribes, the old eternal truth that things are not evenly divided in

this badly managed world. It would be kinder to immediately offer the

loan for which the Captain was evidently paving the way to a request.

But he reflected that the display of such quickness of comprehension

might make the request too easy; and in the future the Captain might

profit by a discovered weakness a little too freely. He would let him

ask. And the Captain was not long in coming to the point. He was in a

devilish tight place, positively couldn't afford a pair of boots

(Peter's eyes involuntarily sought the Captain's feet, neatly shod in

social patent-leather), could Odd let him have one hundred pounds? (The

Captain was frank enough to make no mention of repayment) etc., etc.

Peter cut short the explanation with a rather unwise manifestation of

sympathetic comprehension; the Captain went upstairs with him to his

room when the hotel was reached, and left it with a check for 3000

francs in his pocket; the extra 500 francs were the price of Peter's

readiness.

CHAPTER II

It rained next day, and Peter took a _fiacre_ from the Bibliothèque

Nationale, where he had spent the afternoon diligently, and drove

through the gray evening to the Rue Pierre Charron. It was just five

when he got there, and already almost dark. There were four flights to

be ascended before one reached the Archinards' apartment; four steep and

rather narrow flights, for the house was not one of the larger newer

ones, and there was no lift. Wilson, whom Odd remembered at Allersley,

opened the door to him. Captain Archinard had evidently not denuded

himself of a valet when he had parted with his horses; that sacrifice

had probably seemed too monstrous, but Peter wondered rather whether

Wilson's wages were ever paid, and thought it more probable that a

mistaken fidelity attached him to his master. In view of year-long

arrears, he might have found it safer to stay with a future possibility

of payment than, by leaving, put an end forever to even the hope of

compensation.

The little entrance was very pretty, and the drawing-room, into which

Peter was immediately ushered, even prettier. Evidently the Archinards

had brought their own furniture, and the Archinards had very good taste.

The pale gray-greens of the room were charming. Peter noticed

appreciatively the Copenhagen vases filled with white flowers; he could

find time for appreciation as he passed to Mrs. Archinard's sofa, for no

one else was in the room, a fact of which he was immediately and

disappointedly aware. Mrs. Archinard was really improved. Her husband's

monetary embarrassments had made even less impression on her than upon

the surroundings, for though the little salon was very pretty, it was

not the Priory drawing-room, and Mrs. Archinard was, if anything,

plumper and prettier than when Peter had last seen her.

"This is really quite too delightful! Quite too delightful, Mr. Odd!"

Mrs. Archinard's slender hand pressed his with seemingly affectionate

warmth. "Katherine told us this morning about the _rencontre_. I was

expecting you, as you see. Ten years! It seems impossible, really

impossible!" Still holding his hand, she scanned his face with her sad

and pretty smile. "I could hardly realize it, were it not that your

books lie here beside me, living symbols of the years."

Peter indeed saw, on the little table by the sofa, the familiar

bindings.

"I asked Katherine to get them out, so that I might look over them

again; strengthen my impression of your personality, join all the links

before meeting you again. Dear, dear little books!" Mrs. Archinard laid

her hand, with its one great emerald ring, on the "Dialogues," which was

uppermost. "Sit down, Mr. Odd; no, on this chair. The light falls on

your face so. Yes, your books are to me among the most exquisite art

productions of our age. Pater is more _étincellant_--a style too

jewelled perhaps--one wearies of the chain of rather heartless beauty;

but in your books one feels the heart, the aroma of life--a chain of

flowers, flowers do not weary. Your personality is to me very

sympathetic, Mr. Odd, very sympathetic."

Peter was conscious of being sorry for it.

"I think we are both of us tired." Mrs. Archinard's smile grew even more

sadly sweet; "both tired, both hopeless, both a little indifferent too.

How few things one finds to care about! Things crumble so, once touched,

do they not? Everything crumbles." Mrs. Archinard sighed, and, as Peter

found nothing to say ("How dull a man who writes quite clever books can

be!" thought Mrs. Archinard), she went on in a more commonplace tone--

"And you talked with dear Katherine last night; you pleased her. She

told Hilda and me this morning that you really pleased her immensely.

Katherine is hard to please. I am proud of my girl, Mr. Odd, very, very

proud. Did you not find her quite distinctive? Quite significant? I

always think of Katherine as significant, many facetted, meaning much."

The murmuring modulations of Mrs. Archinard's voice irritated Odd to

such a pitch of ill-temper that he found it difficult to keep his own

pleasant as he replied--

"Significant is most applicable. She is a charming girl."

"Yes, charming; that too applies, and oh, what a misapplied word it is!

Every woman nowadays is called charming. The daintily distinctive term

is flung at the veriest schoolroom hoyden, as at the hard, mechanical

woman of the world."

Peter now said to himself that Mrs. Archinard was an ass--very

unjustly--Mrs. Archinard was far from being an ass. She felt the

atmosphere with unerring promptitude. Her effects were not to be made

upon _ce type là_. She welcomed Katherine's entrance as a diversion from

looming boredom. Katherine seemed to go in for a regal simplicity in

dress. Her gown was again of velvet, a deep amethyst color. The high

collar and the long sleeves that came over her white hands in points

were edged with a narrow line of sable. A necklace of amethysts lightly

set in gold encircled the base of her throat. Peter liked to see a

well-dressed woman, and Katherine was more than well dressed. In the

pearly tints of the room she made a picture with her purple gleams and

shadows.

"I _am_ glad to see you. Sit down. It is nice to have you in our little

diggings. You are like a bit of England sitting there--a big bit!"

"And you are a perfectly delightful condensation of everything

delightfully Parisian."

"The heart is British. True oak!" laughed Katherine; "don't judge me by

the foliage."

"Ah, but it needs a good deal of Gallic genius to choose such foliage."

"No, no. I give the credit to my American blood, to mamma. But thanks,

very much. I am glad you are appreciative." Katherine smiled so gayly,

and looked so charmingly in the amethyst velvet, that Peter forgot for a

moment to wonder where Hilda was, but Katherine did not forget.

"I expect Hilda every moment. I have told them to wait tea until she

comes, poor dear! 'Them' is Wilson, whom you saw, I suppose; Taylor, our

old maid; and the cook! The cook is French, otherwise our staff is

shrunken, but of the same elements. One doesn't mind having no servants

in a little box like this. Yes, mamma, I have paid _all_ the calls, and

only two people were out; so I deserve petting and tea. I hope Hilda

will hurry." Mrs. Archinard's face took on a look of ill-used

resignation.

"We all pay dearly for Hilda's egotism," she remarked, and for a moment

there was a rather uncomfortable silence. Odd felt a queer indignation

and a queerer melancholy rising within him.

The Hilda of to-day seemed far further away than the Hilda of ten years

ago. They talked in a rather desultory fashion for some time. Mrs.

Archinard's presence was damping, and even Katherine's smile was like a

flower seen through rain. The little clock on the mantelpiece struck the

quarter.

"Almost six!" exclaimed Katherine; "we must have tea."

"Yes, we may sacrifice ourselves, but we must not sacrifice Mr. Odd,"

said Mrs. Archinard with distinct fretfulness. Taylor answered the bell,

and Peter, with a quickness of combination that surprised himself,

surmised that Hilda was out alone. Had she become emancipated? Bohemian?

His melancholy grew stronger. Tea was brought, a charming set of

daintiest white and a little silver teapot of a quaint and delicate

design.

"Hilda designed it in Florence," said Katherine, seeing him looking at

it; "an Italian friend had it made for her after her own model and

drawings. Yes, Hilda goes in for decorative work a good deal. People who

know about it have admired that teapot, as you do, I see."

"It's a lovely thing," said Peter, as Katherine turned it before him;

"the simplicity of the outline and the delicate bas-relief"--he bent his

head to look more closely--"exquisite." And he thought it rather rough

on Hilda; to pour the tea from her own teapot without waiting for her.

Still, he owned, when at last the door-bell rang at fully half-past six,

that he might have been asking for too much patience.

"There she is," said Katherine; "I must go and tell her that you are

here." Katherine went out, and Odd heard a murmured colloquy in the

entrance. He was conscious of feeling excited, and unconsciously rose to

his feet and looked eagerly toward the door. But only Katherine came in.

"I don't believe I shall ever see Hilda!" he exclaimed, with an

assumption of exasperation that hid some real nervousness. Katherine

laughed.

"Oh yes, you shall, in five minutes. She had to wash her face and hands.

Artists are untidy people, you know," and Odd, with that same strange

acuteness of perception with which he seemed dowered this afternoon,

felt that Hilda had been coming in in all her artistic untidiness, and

that Katherine had seen to a more respectable _entrée_.

It rather irritated him with Katherine, and that tactful young lady

probably guessed at his disappointment, for she went to the piano and

began to play a sad aria from one of Schumann's Sonatas that sighed and

pled and sobbed. She played very well, with the same perfect taste that

she showed in her gowns, and Peter was too fond of music, too fond of

Schumann especially, not to listen to her.

In the middle of the aria Hilda came in. It was over in a moment, the

meeting, as the most exciting things in life are. Peter had not realized

till the moment came how much it would excite him.

Hilda came in and walked up to him. She put her hand in his with all the

pretty gravity he remembered in the child. Odd took the other hand too

and stared at her. He was conscious then of being very much excited, and

conscious that she was not.

Her eyes were "big and vague," but they were the most beautiful eyes he

had ever seen, and the vagueness was only in a certain lack of

expression, for they looked straight into his. Carried along by that

first impulse of excitement, despite the little shock of half-felt

disappointment, Peter bent his head and kissed her on each cheek.

"Bravo!" said Katherine, still striking soft chords at the piano,

"Bravo, Mr. Odd! considering your first meeting and your last parting,

you have a right to that!" And Katherine laughed pleasantly, though she

was a trifle displeased.

"Yes, I have, haven't I?" said Peter, smiling. He still held Hilda's

hands. The little flush that had come to her cheeks when he had kissed

her was gone, and she looked very white.

"Are you glad to see me, Hilda?" he asked; "I beg your pardon, but it

comes naturally to call you that."

"I am very glad to see you, Mr. Odd," Hilda smiled. Her voice was very

like the child's voice saying, "I thank you very much," ten years ago.

The same voice, grave and gentle. Odd had expected some little warmth,

some little embarrassment even, in the girl, considering the parting

from the child. But Hilda did not show any warmth, neither did she seem

at all embarrassed, and Odd felt rather as one does when an unnecessary

downward stride reveals level ground where one expected another step. He

had stumbled a little, and now, half ruefully, half humorously, he

considered the child Hilda grown up. She sat down near her mother.

"I am so sorry. I am afraid you waited for me," she said, bending

towards her; "I really couldn't help it, mamma."

"No, I think it kindest to consider you irresponsible; there is

certainly an element of insanity in your exaggerated devotion to your

work." Mrs. Archinard smiled acidly, and Hilda, Odd thought, did look a

little embarrassed now. He had adjusted himself to the reality of the

present, and was able to study her. The same Botticelli Madonna mouth,

the same Gainsborough eyes; the skin of dazzling whiteness--an almost

unnatural white--but she was evidently tired.

Certainly her black gown looked strangely beside Katherine's velvet,

Mrs. Archinard's silk and laces. Odd saw that there was mud on the

skirt, a very short skirt, and Hilda's legs were very long. She had

walked, then. His own paternal solicitude struck him as amusing, and

rather touching, as he glanced at her slim feet, to see with

satisfaction that wet boots had been replaced by patent-leather

shoes--heelless little shoes.

"I am afraid you work too much, you tire yourself," he said, for after

her mother's rebuff she had sunk back in her chair with a weary

lassitude of pose. Hilda immediately sat up straightly, giving him an

almost frightened glance. How unchanged the little face, though the

cloud of her hair no longer framed it. Hilda's hair was as smooth as her

sister's, only it was brushed straight back, and the soft blue-black

coils were massed from ear to ear, and showed, in a coronet-like effect

above her head, almost too much hair; it emphasized the pale fragility

of her look.

"Oh no, I am not tired," she said, "not particularly. I walked home, you

see. I am very fond of walking."

"Hilda is fond of such funny things," said Katherine, coming from the

piano, "of walking in the mud and rain for instance. She is the most

persistently, consistently energetic person I ever knew." Katherine

paused pleasantly as though for Hilda to speak, but Hilda said nothing

and looked even more vague than before, almost dull in fact.

"Well, she has had no tea," said Odd, "and after mud and rain that is

rather cruel, even as a punishment."

Again Hilda gave him the alarmed quick glance; his eyes were humorously

kind, and she smiled a slight little smile.

"Some tea!" Katherine cried; "my poor Hilda, I'm afraid it is

hard-boiled by this time"--she laid her hand on the teapot--"and

_almost_ cold. Shall I heat some more water, dear?"

"Oh! don't think of it, Katherine, it is almost dinner-time."

"Must I be off?" asked Odd, laughing.

"How absurd; we don't dine till eight," Katherine said.

"It wasn't a hint to me, then, Hilda?" Hilda looked helplessly

distressed.

"A hint? Oh no, no. How could you think that?"

"I was only joking. I didn't really believe you so anxious to get rid of

an old friend." Odd, with some determination, crossed the room and sat

down beside her.

"I want to see a great deal of you if you will let me."

"No one sees much of Hilda, not even her own mother," said Mrs.

Archinard from her sofa. "It is terrible indeed to feel oneself a

cumberer of the earth, unable to suffice to oneself, far less to others.

With my failing eyesight I simply cannot read by lamplight, and there

are three or four hours at this season when I am absolutely without

resources. Yet even those hours Hilda cannot give me."

Hilda now looked so painfully embarrassed that Odd was perforce obliged,

for very pity's sake, to avert his eyes from her face.

"Ah, Mr. Odd," Mrs. Archinard went on, "you do not know what that is. To

lie in the gray dusk and watch one's own gray, gray thoughts."

"It must be very unpleasant," Odd owned unwillingly, feeling that his

character of old friend was being rather imposed upon; this degree of

intimacy was certainly unwarranted.

"Now, mamma, you usually have friends every afternoon," said Katherine,

in her pleasant, even voice. She was preparing some fresh tea. "You make

me as well as Hilda feel a culprit."

"No, my dear." Mrs. Archinard's deep sense of accumulated injury

evidently got quite the better of her manners. "No, my dear, you never

_could_ read aloud and never _did_. I never asked it of you. You are

really occupied as a girl should be. At all events you fulfil your

social duties. You see that people come to see me. As I cannot go out,

as Hilda will not, I really don't know what I should do were it not for

you. And, as it is, no one came this afternoon until Mr. Odd made his

welcome appearance."

"But Mr. Odd came at five, and you always read till then." Katherine's

voice was gently playful. Hilda had not said one word, and her

expression seemed now absolutely dogged.

"At this season, Katherine! You forget that it is night by four! And how

a girl with any regard for her mother's wishes can walk about the

streets of Paris alone after that hour it passes my comprehension to

understand."

"Do you care about bicycling, Mr. Odd?" The change was abrupt but

welcome. "Because I am going to the Bois to-morrow morning, and alone

for once." Katherine smiled at him over the kettle which she was

lifting. "Papa has deserted me."

"I should enjoy it immensely. And you," he looked at Hilda, "won't you

come?"

"Oh, I can't," said Hilda, with a troubled look. "Thanks so much."

"Oh no, Hilda can't," laughed Mrs. Archinard.

"And where is the Captain off to?" queried Peter hastily. He felt that

he would like to shake Mrs. Archinard. Hilda's stubborn silence might

certainly be irritating, and Odd had sympathy for parental claims and

wishes, especially concerning the advisability of a beautiful girl

walking in the streets at night unescorted, sacrificed to youthful

conceit; but Mrs. Archinard's personality certainly weakened all claims,

and her taste was as certainly atrocious.

"Papa," said Katherine, pouring out the tea, "is going to-morrow morning

to the Riviera. Lucky papa!" Odd thought with some amusement of the £120

that constituted papa's "luck." "I have only been once to Monte Carlo,

and I won such a lot. Only imagine how forty pounds turned my head. I

revelled in hats and gloves for a whole year. Then we go to-morrow, Mr.

Odd? I have my own bicycle. I have kept it near the Porte Dauphine, and

you can hire a very nice one at the same place."

"May I call for you here at ten, then? Will that suit you?"

"Very well." Odd watched Katherine as she carried the tea and cake to

her sister. Hilda gave a little start.

"O Katherine, how good of you! I didn't realize what you were doing."

"It is you who are good, my pet," said Katherine in a low, gentle voice.

Peter thought it a pretty little scene.

"A great deal of latitude must be granted to the young person who

invented that teapot," he said to Hilda. "One must work hard to do

anything in art, mustn't one? A most lovely teapot, Hilda."

"I am glad you like it." Hilda smiled her thanks, but her eyes still

expressed that distance and reserve that showed no consciousness of the

past, no intention of admitting it as a link to the present. She did not

seem exactly shy, but her whole manner was passive--negative. Katherine

probably thought that Mr. Odd had by this time realized the futility of

an attempt to draw out the unresponsive artist, for she seated herself

between Odd and the sofa, thus protecting Hilda from Mrs. Archinard's

severities and Odd from the ineffectual necessity for talking to Hilda.

Odd thought that were Katherine and Mrs. Archinard not there he might

have "come at" Hilda, but the sense of ease Katherine brought with her

was undeniable. She was charmingly mistress of herself, made him talk,

appealed prettily to her mother, who even gave more than one melancholy

laugh, and, with a tactful give and take, yet kept the reins of

conversation well within her own hands.

Odd found her a nice girl, but the undercurrent of his thought dwelt on

Hilda, and at every gayety of Katherine's, his eyes sought her sister's

face; Hilda's eyes were always fixed on Katherine, and she smiled a

certain dumbly admiring smile. As he sat near her, he could see that the

little black dress was very shabby. He could not have associated Hilda

with real untidiness, and indeed the dress with its white linen cuffs

and collar, its inevitable grace of severely simple outline, was neat to

an almost painful degree. Hilda's artistic proclivities perhaps showed

themselves in shiny seams and careful darns and patches.

When he rose to go he took her hands again; he hoped that his

persistency did not make him appear rather foolish.

"I am sorry you won't come to-morrow. May I hope for another day?"

"I can't come to-morrow"--there was a touch of self-defence in Hilda's

smile--"but perhaps some other day. I should love to," she finished

rather abruptly.

"But you will be different--I will be different. We will both be

changed," repeated itself in Odd's mind as he walked down the Rue Pierre

Charron. Poor little child-voice! how sadly it sounded. How true had

been the prophecy.

CHAPTER III

Peter Odd, at this epoch of his life, felt that he was resting on his

oars and drifting. He had spent his life in strenuous rowing. He had

seen much, thought much, done much; yet he had made for no goal, and had

won no race; how should he, when he had not yet made up his mind that

racing for anything was worth while?

Perhaps the two years in Parliament had most closely savored of

consciously applied contest, and in that contest Odd considered himself

beaten, and its efforts as though they had never been. Every one had

told him that to bring the student's ideals into the political arena was

to insure defeat; one's friends would consider a carefully

discriminating honesty and broad-mindedness mere disloyal luke-warmness,

foolish hair-splitting feebleness; one's enemies would rejoice and

triumph in the impartiality of an opponent. Certainly he had been

defeated, and he could not see that his example had in any way been

effectual. At all events, he had held to the ideals.

His fine critical taste found even his own books but crude and partial

expressions of still groping thoughts. His unexpressed intention, good

indeed, if one might so call its indefiniteness, had been to make the

world better for having lived in it; better, or at least wiser. But he

doubted the saving power of his own sceptical utterances; the world

could not be saved by the balancings of a mind that saw the tolerant

point of view of every question, a mind itself so unassured of results.

A strong dash of fanaticism is necessary for success, and Odd had not

the slightest flavor of fanaticism. Perhaps he had given a little

pleasure in his more purely literary studies, and Peter thought that he

would stick to them in the future, but he had put the future away from

him just now. He had only returned from the great passivity of the

Orient a few weeks ago, and its example seemed to denote drifting as the

supreme wisdom. No effort, no desire; a peaceful receptivity, a peaceful

acceptance of the smiles or buffets of fate; that was Odd's ideal--for

the present. He was a little sick of everything. The Occidental's energy

for combat was lulled within him, and the Occidental's individualistic

tendencies seemed to stretch themselves in a long yawn expressive of an

amused and tolerant observation free from striving; and, for an

Occidental, this mood is dangerous. Odd also did a good deal of

listening to very modern and very clever French talk. He knew many

clever Frenchmen. He did not agree with all of them, but, as he was not

sure of his own grounds for disagreement, he held his peace and listened

smilingly. Certainly the exclusively artistic standpoint was a most

comforting and absorbing plaything to fall back on.

Peter's friends talked of the amusing and touching spectacle of the

universe. The representation of each man's illusion on the subject, and

the manner of that representation, were never-ceasing sources of

interest. Peter also read a little at the Bibliothèque Nationale, paid a

few calls, dined out pretty constantly, and bicycled a great deal in the

mornings with Katherine Archinard. She understood things well, and her

taste was as sure and as delicate as even Odd could ask. Katherine had

absorbed a great deal of culture during her wanderings, and it would

have taken a long time for any one to find out that it was of a rather

second-hand quality, and sought more for attainment than for enjoyment.

Katherine talked with clever people and read clever reviews, and being

clever herself, with a very acute critical taste, she knew with the

utmost refinement of perception just what to like and just what to

dislike; and as she tolerated only the very best, her liking gave value.

Yet _au fond_ Katherine did not really care even for the very very best.

Her appreciation was negative. She excelled in a finely smiling,

superior scorn, and could pick flaws in almost any one's enjoyment, if

she chose to do so. Katherine, however, was kind-hearted and tactful,

and did not arouse dislike by displaying her cleverness except to people

who would like it. Enthusiasm was banal, and Katherine was not often

required to feign where she did not feel it; her very rigor and

exclusiveness of taste implied an appreciation too high for expression;

but Katherine had no enthusiasm.

Her rebellious and iconoclastic young energy amused Odd. He thought her

rather pathetic in a way. There was a look of daring and revolt in her

eye that pleased his lazy spirit. Meanwhile Hilda troubled him.

Would she never bicycle? Katherine, wheeling lightly erect beside him,

gave the little shake of the head and shrug of the shoulders

characteristic of her. She evidently found no fault with Hilda. Others

might do so--the shrug implied that, implied as well that Katherine

herself perhaps owned that her sister's impracticable unreason gave

grounds for fault-finding--but Hilda was near her heart.

When could he see her? That, too, seemed wrapped in the general cloud of

vagueness, unaccountableness that surrounded Hilda. Odd called twice in

the evening; once to be received by Katherine alone, Hilda was already

in _dèshabille_ it seemed, and once to find not even Katherine; she was

dining out, and Miss Hilda in bed. In bed at nine! "Was she ill?" he

asked of Taylor. Wilson had evidently accompanied the Captain.

"No wonder if she were, sir," Taylor had replied, with a touch of the

grievance in her tone that Hilda always seemed to arouse in those about

her; "but no, she's only that tired!" and Odd departed with a deepened

sense of Hilda's wilful immolation. Katherine brought him home to lunch

on several occasions after the bicycling, but Hilda was never there. She

lunched at her studio.

On a third call Hilda appeared, but only as he was on the point of

going. She wore the same black dress, and the same look of unnatural

pallor.

"Hilda," said Odd, for amid these unfamiliar conditions he still used

the familiar appellation, "I must see the cause of all this."

"Of what?" Her smile was certainly the sweet smile he remembered.

"Of this unearthly devotion; these white cheeks."

"Hilda is naturally pale," put in Mrs Archinard; "she has my skin. But,

of course, now she is a ghost."

"Well, I want to see the haunted studio. I want to see the

masterpieces." Odd spoke with a touch of gentle irony that did not seem

to offend Hilda.

"You will see nothing either uncanny or unusual."

"Well, at all events, when can I come to see you in your studio?" The

vague look crossed Hilda's smile.

"You see--I work very hard;" she hesitated, seemed even to cast a

beseeching glance at Katherine, standing near. Katherine was watching

her.

"She is getting ready her pictures for the Champs de Mars. But, Hilda,

Mr. Odd may come some morning."

"Oh yes. Some morning. I thought you always bicycled in the morning. I

wish you _would_ come, it would be so nice to see you there!" she spoke

with a gay and sudden warmth; "only you must tell me when to expect you.

My studio must be looking nicely and my model presentable."

"I will take Mr. Odd to-morrow," said Katherine, "he would never find

his way."

"Thanks, that will be very jolly," said Odd, conscious that an

unescorted visit would have been more so, yet wondering whether Hilda

alone might not be more disconcerting than Hilda aided and abetted by

her sister.

So the next morning he called for Katherine, and they walked to a

veritable nest of _ateliers_ near the Place des Ternes, where they

climbed interminable stairs to the very highest studio of all, and here,

in very bare and business-like surroundings, they found Hilda. She left

her easel to open the door to them. A red-haired woman was lying on a

sofa in a far, dim corner, a vase of white flowers at her head. There

was a big linen apron of butcher's blue over the black dress, and Hilda

looked very neat, less pallid, too, than Odd had seen her look as yet.

Her skin had blue shadows under the chin and nose, and a blue shadow

made a mystery beneath the long sweep of her eyebrows and about her

beautiful eyes. But when she turned her head to the light, Odd saw that

the lips were red and the cheeks freshly and faintly tinted.

He was surprised by the picture on the big easel; the teapot had not

prepared him for it. A rather small picture, the figure flung to its

graceful, lazy length, only a fourth life-size. It was a picture of

elusive shadows, touched with warmer lights in its grays and greens. The

woman's half-hidden face was exquisite in color. The sweep of her pale

gown, half lost in demi-tint, lay over her like the folded wings of a

tired moth. The white flowers stood like dreams in the dreamy

atmosphere.

"Hilda, I can almost forgive you." Odd stood staring before the canvas;

he had put on his eye-glass. "Really this atones."

"Isn't it wonderfully simple, wonderfully decorative?" said Katherine,

"all those long, sleepy lines. My clever little Hilda!"

"My clever, clever little Hilda!" Odd repeated, turning to look at the

young artist. Her eyes met his with their wide, sweet gaze that said

nothing. Hilda was evidently only capable of saying things on canvas.

"It is lovely."

"You like it really?"

"I really think it is about as charming a picture as I have seen a woman

do. So womanly too." Odd turned to Katherine, it was difficult not to

merge Hilda in her art, not to talk about her talent as a thing apart

from her personality: "She expresses herself, she doesn't imitate."

"Perhaps that is rather unwomanly," laughed Katherine: "a crawling

imitativeness seems unfortunately characteristic. Certainly Hilda has

none of it. She has inspired me with hopes for my sex."

"Really cleverer than Madame Morisot," said Odd, looking back to the

canvas, "delightful as she is! She could touch a few notes surely,

gracefully; Hilda has got hold of a chord. Yes, Hilda, you are an

artist. Have you any others?"

Hilda brought forward two. One was a small study of a branch of pink

blossoms in a white porcelain vase; the other a woman in white standing

at a window and looking out at the twilight. This last was, perhaps, the

cleverest of the three; the lines of the woman's back, shoulder, _profil

perdu_, astonishingly beautiful.

"You are fond of dreams and shadows, aren't you?"

"I haven't a very wide range, but one can only try to do the things one

is fitted for. I like all sorts of pictures, but I like to paint

demi-tints and twilights and soft lamplight effects."

"'Car nous voulons la nuance encor--

pas la couleur, rien que la nuance,'"

chanted Katharine. "Hilda lives in dreams and shadows, I think, Mr. Odd,

so naturally she paints them. '_L'art c'est la nature, vue à travers un

temperament_.' Excuse my spouting."

"So your temperament is a stuff that dreams are made of. Well, Hilda,

make as many as you can. Hello! is that another old friend I see?" On

turning to Hilda he had caught sight of a dachshund--rather white about

the muzzle, but very luminous and gentle of eye--stretching himself from

a nap behind the little stove in the corner. He came toward them with a

kindly wag of the tail.

"Is this Palamon or Arcite?"

A change came over Hilda's face.

"That is Palamon; poor old Palamon. Arcite fulfilled his character by

dying first."

"And Darwin and Spencer?"

"Dead, too; Spencer was run over."

"Poor old Palamon! Poor old dog!" Odd had lifted the dog in his arms,

and was scratching the silky smooth ears as only a dog-lover knows how.

Palamon's head slowly turned to one side in an ecstasy of appreciation.

Odd looked down at Hilda. Katherine was behind him. "Poor Palamon,

'allone, withouten any companye.'" Hilda's eyes met his in a sad,

startled look, then she dropped them to Palamon, who was now putting out

his tongue towards Odd's face with grateful emotion.

"Yes," she said gently, putting her hand caressingly on the dog's head;

her slim, cold fingers just brushed Odd's; "yes, poor Palamon." She was

silent, and there was silence behind them, for Katherine, with her usual

good-humored tact, was examining the picture. The model on the sofa

stretched her arms and yawned a long, scraping yawn. Palamon gave a

short, brisk bark, and looked quickly and suspiciously round the studio.

Both Odd and Hilda laughed.

"But not 'allone,' after all," said Odd. "Is he a great deal with you?

That is a different kind of company, but Palamon is the gainer."

"We mustn't judge Palamon by our own standards," smiled Hilda, "though

highly civilized dogs like him don't show many social instincts towards

their own kind. He did miss Arcite though, at first, I am sure; but he

certainly is not lonely. I bring him here with me, and when I am at home

he is always in my room. I think all the walking he gets is good for

him. You see in what good condition he is."

Palamon still showing signs of restlessness over the yawn, Odd put him

down. He was evidently on cordial terms with the model, for he trotted

affably toward her, standing with a lazy, smiling wave of the tail

before her, while she addressed him with discreetly low-toned,

whispering warmth as "_Mon chou! Mon bijou! Mon petit lapin à la sauce

blanche!_"

"Don't you get very tired working here all day?" Odd asked.

"Sometimes. But anything worth doing makes one tired, doesn't it?"

"You take your art very seriously, Hilda?"

"Sometimes--yes--I take it seriously." Hilda smiled her slight, reserved

smile.

"Well, I can't blame you; you really have something to say."

"Hilda, I am afraid we are becoming _de trop_. I must carry you off, Mr.

Odd. Hilda's moments are golden."

"That is a sisterly exaggeration," said Hilda. Had all her personality

gone into her pictures? was she a self-centred little egotist? Odd

wondered, as he and Katherine walked away together. Katherine's warmly

human qualities seemed particularly consoling after the chill of the

abstract one felt in Hilda's studio.

CHAPTER IV

"Peter, she is a nice, a clever, a delightful girl," said Mary Apswith.

Mrs. Apswith sat in a bright little salon overlooking the Rue de la

Paix. For her holiday week of shopping Peter's hotel was not central

enough, but Peter himself was at her command from morning till night. He

stood before her now, his back to the flaming logs in the fireplace,

looking alternately down at his boots and up at his sister. Peter's face

wore an amused but pleasant smile. Katherine must certainly be nice,

clever, and delightful, to have won Mary, usually so slow in friendship.

"Whether she is deep--deeply good, I mean--I don't know; one can't tell.

But, at all events, she is sincere to the core." Mary had called on the

Archinards some days ago, and had seen Katherine every day since then.

Mary's stateliness had not become buxom. The fine lines of her face had

lost their former touch of heaviness. Her gray hair--grayer than

Peter's--and fresh skin gave her a look of merely perfected maturity.

Life had gone well with her; everybody said that; yet Mary knew the

sadness of life. She had lost two of her babies, and sorrow had

softened, ripened her. The Mary of ten years ago had not had that tender

look in her eyes, those lines of sympathetic sensibility about the

lips. Her decisively friendly sentence was followed by a little sigh of

disapprobation.

"As for Hilda!"

"As for Hilda?"

"I am disappointed, Peter. Yes; we went to her studio this morning;

Katherine took me there; Katherine's pride in her is pretty. Yes; I

suppose the pictures are very clever, if one likes those rather misty

things. They look as though they were painted in the back drawing-room

behind the sofa!" Peter laughed. "I don't pretend to know. I suppose _au

fond_ I am a Philistine, with a craving for a story on the canvas. I

don't really appreciate Whistler, so of course I haven't a right to an

opinion at all. But however clever they may be, I don't think those

pictures should fill her life to the exclusion of _everything_. The girl

owes a duty to herself; I don't speak of her duty to others. I have no

patience with Mrs. Archinard, she is simply insufferable! Katherine's

patience with her is admirable; but Hilda is completely one-sided, and

she is not great enough for that. But she will fancy herself great

before long. Lady---- told me that she was never seen with her

sister--there is that cut off, you see--how natural that they should go

out together! Of course she will grow morbidly egotistic, people who

never meet other people always do; they fancy themselves grandly

misunderstood. So unhealthy, too! She looked like a ghost."

"Poor little Hilda! She probably fancies an artist's mission the

highest. Perhaps it is, Mary."

"Not in a woman's case"--Mrs. Apswith spoke with a vigorous decision

that would have stamped her with ignominy in the eyes of the perhaps

mythical New Woman; "woman's art is never serious enough for heroics."

"Perhaps it would be, if they would show a consistent heroism for it."

Peter opposed Mary for the sake of the argument, and for the sake of an

old loyalty. _Au fond_ he agreed with her.

"A female Palissy would revolutionize our ideas of woman's art."

"A pleasant creature she would be! Tearing up the flooring and breaking

the chairs for firewood! An abominable desecration of the housewifely

instincts! I don't know what Allan Hope will do about it," Mary pursued.

"Ah! That is an accepted fact, then?"

"Dear me, yes. Lady Mainwaring is very anxious for it. It shows what

Allan's steady persistency has accomplished. The child hasn't a penny,

you know."

"You think she'd have him?"

"Of course she will have him. And a lucky girl she is for the chance!

But, before the definite acceptance, she will, of course, lead him the

usual dance; it's quite the thing now among girls of that type.

Individuality; their own life to be lived, their Art--in capitals--to be

lived for; home, husband, children, degrading impediments. Such tiresome

rubbish! I am very sorry for poor Allan." Peter studied his boots.

"Allan probably accounts for that general absent-mindedness I observed

in her; perhaps Allan accounts for more than we give her credit for;

this desperate devotion to her painting, her last struggle to hold to

her ideal. Really the theory that she is badly in love explains

everything. Poor child!"

"Why poor, Peter? Allan Hope is certainly the very nicest man I know,

barring yourself and Jack. He has done more than creditably in the

House, and now that he is already on the Treasury Bench, has only to

wait for indefinite promotion. He is clever, kind, honest as the day. He

will be an earl when the dear old earl dies, and that that is a pretty

frame to the picture no one can deny. What more can a girl ask?"

"This girl probably asks some impossible dream. I'm sorry for people who

haven't done dreaming."

"Between you and me, Peter, I don't think Hilda is really clever enough

to do much dreaming--of the pathetic sort. Her eyes are clever; she sees

things prettily, and puts them down prettily; but there is nothing more.

She struck me as a trifle stupid--really dull, you know."

Odd shifted his position uncomfortably.

"That may be shyness, reserve, inability for self-expression." He leaned

his arm on the mantelpiece and studied the fire with a puzzled frown.

"That exquisite face must _mean_ something."

"I don't know. By the law of compensation Katherine has the brains, the

heart, and Hilda the beauty. _I_ didn't find her shy. She seemed

perfectly mistress of herself. It may be a case of absorption in her

love affair, as you say. I am not sure that he has asked her yet. He is

a most modest lover."

Mary saw a great deal of Katherine during her stay, and her first

impression was strengthened.

Katherine shopped with her; they considered gowns together. Katherine's

taste was exquisite, and the bonnets of her choice the most becoming

Mrs. Apswith had ever worn. The girl was not above liking pretty

things--that was already nice in her--for the girl was clever enough to

pose indifference. Mary saw at once that she was clever. Katherine was

very independent, but very attentive. Her sincerity was charmingly gay,

and not priggish. She said just what she thought; but she thought things

that were worth saying. She made little display of learning, but one

felt it--like the silk lining in a plain serge gown. She did not talk

too much; she made Mrs. Apswith feel like talking. Mary took her twice

to the play with Peter and herself. Hilda was once invited and came. Odd

sat in the back of the box and watched for the effect on her face of the

clever play interpreted by the best talent of the Théâtre Français. The

quiet absorption of her look might imply much intelligent appreciation;

but Katherine's little ripples of glad enjoyment, clever little thrusts

of criticism, made Hilda's silence seem peculiarly impassive, and while

between the acts Katherine analyzed keenly, woke a scintillating sense

of intellectual enjoyment about her in flashes of gay discussion, Hilda

sat listening with that same smile of admiration that almost irritated

Odd by its seeming acceptance of inability--inferiority.

The smile, from its very lack of all self-reference, was rather

touching; and Mary owned that Hilda was "sweet," but the adjective did

not mitigate the former severity of judgment--that was definite.

When Mary went, she begged Katherine to accept the prettiest gown Doucet

could make her, and Katherine accepted with graceful ease and frankness.

The gown was exquisite. Mary sent to Hilda a fine Braun photograph,

which Hilda received with surprised delight, for she had done nothing to

make Mrs. Apswith's stay in Paris pleasant. She thought such kindness

touching, and Katherine's gown the loveliest she had ever seen.

CHAPTER V

Mary gone, the bicycling tête-à-têtes were resumed, and Odd, too, began

to call more frequently at the houses where he met Katherine. They were

bon camarades in the best sense of the term, and Peter found it a very

pleasant sense. He realized that he had been lonely, and loneliness in

his present désoeuvrée condition would have been intolerable. The

melancholy of laziness could not creep to him while this girl laughed

beside him. The frank, sympathetic relation--almost that of man to

man--was untouched by the faintest infusion of sentiment; delicious

breeziness and freedom of intercourse was the result. Peter listened to

Katherine, laughed at her sometimes, and liked her to laugh at him. He

told her a good many of his thoughts; she criticised them, approved of

them, encouraged him to action. But Odd felt his present

contemplativeness too wide to be limited by any affirmation. He had

never felt so little sure of anything nor so conscious of everything in

general. Writing in such a mood seemed folly, and he continued to drift.

He still read in an objectless way at the Bibliothèque, hunting out old

references, pleasing himself by a circuit through the points of view of

all times. Katherine offered to help him, and in the morning he would

bring her his notes to look over; her quick comprehension formed

another link. He was very sorry for Katherine too. She had no taste for

drifting. In her eye he read a dissatisfaction, a thirst for wider

vision, wider action, a restless impatience with the narrowness, the

ineffectiveness of her lot, that made him muse on her probable future

with a sense of pathos. Hilda's wide gaze showed no such rebellion with

the actual; her art had filled it with a distant content that shut

strife and the defeat of yearnings from her: or was it merely the placid

consciousness of Allan Hope--a future assured and fully satisfactory?

Under Katherine's gayety there was a fierce beating of caged wings, and

Odd fancied at times that, freed, the imprisoned birds might be strong

and beautiful. He fancied this especially when she played to him; she

played well, with surprising sureness of taste, and, as the winter came

and it grew too cold for bicycling, Peter often spent the morning in

listening to her. Mrs. Archinard did not appear until the afternoon in

the drawing-room, and in the evenings he usually met her dining out or

at some reception; their intimacy once noticed, they were invited

together. Lady---- was especially anxious that Odd should have every

opportunity for meeting her favorite.

But with all this intimacy, to Peter's consciousness thoroughly,

paternally platonic, under all its daily interests and quiet pleasure

lay a half-felt hurt, a sense of injury and loss. The little voice,

seldom thought of during the last ten years, now repeated often: "But

you will be different; I will be different; we will both be changed."

Captain Archinard returned from the Riviera in a temper that could mean

but one thing; he had gambled at Monte Carlo, and he had lost. He did

not mention the fact in the family circle; indeed, by a tacit agreement,

money matters were never alluded to before Mrs. Archinard. Her years of

successful invalidism had compelled even her husband's acquiescence in

the decision early arrived at by Hilda and Katherine: mamma must be

spared the torments to which they had grown accustomed. But to Katherine

the Captain freed his querulous soul, never to Hilda. There was a look

in Hilda's eyes that made the Captain very uncomfortable, very angry;

conscious of those cases of wonderful champagne, the races, the clubs,

the boxes at the play, and all the infinite array of his wardrobe--a

sad, wondering look. Katherine's scoldings were far preferable, for

Katherine was not so devilish superior to human weaknesses; she had

plenty of unpaid bills on her own conscience, and understood the

necessities of an aristocratic taste. He and Katherine had their little

secrets, and were mutually on the defensive. Hilda never criticised, to

be sure, but her very difference was a daily criticism. The Captain

thought his younger daughter rather dull; Katherine, of finer calibre

than her father, admired such dulness, and found some difficulty in

stilling self-reproachful comparisons; temperament, circumstance, made a

comforting philosophy. And then Hilda's art made things easy for Hilda;

with such a refuge, would she, Katherine, ask for more? Katherine rather

wondered now, after her father's exasperated recountal of ill-luck,

where papa had got the money to lose; but papa on this point was

prudently reticent, and borrowed two one-hundred-franc notes from Peter

while the latter waited in the drawing-room for Katherine one morning.

Katherine and her father were making a round of calls one day, and the

Captain stopped at his bank to cash a check. Katherine stood beside him,

and, although he manoeuvred concealment with hand and shoulder, her

keen eyes read the name.

Her mouth was stern as they walked away--the Captain had folded the

notes and put them in his pocket.

"A good deal of money that, papa."

"I suppose I owe twice as much to my tailor," Captain Archinard replied,

with irritation.

"Has Mr. Odd lent you money before this?"

"I really don't know that Mr. Odd's affairs--or mine--are any business

of yours, Katherine."

"Yours certainly are, papa. When a father puts his daughter in a false

position, his affairs decidedly become her business."

"What rubbish, Katherine. Better men than Odd have been glad to give me

a lift. I can't see that Odd has been ill-used. He is rolling in money."

"I don't quite believe that, papa. Allersley is not such a rich

property. But it is not of Mr. Odd's ill-usage I complain, it is of

mine; for if this borrowing goes on, I hardly think I can continue my

relations with Mr. Odd. It would rather look like--decoying."

The Captain stopped and fixed a look of futile dignity on his daughter.

"That's a strange word for you to use, Katherine. I would horsewhip the

man who would suggest it. Odd is a gentleman."

"Decidedly. I did not speak of his point of view but of mine. All

frankness of intercourse between us is impossible if you are going to

sponge on him."

"Katherine! I can't allow such impertinence! Outrageous! It really is!

Sponge! Can't a man borrow a few paltry hundreds from another without

exposing himself to such insulting language?--especially as Odd is to

become my son-in-law, I suppose. He is always hanging about you."

"That is what I meant, papa." Katherine's tone was icy. "Your

suppositions were apparent to me, you drain Mr. Odd on the strength of

them. Borrow from any one else you like as much as you can get, but, if

you have any self-respect, you won't borrow from Mr. Odd in the hope

that I will marry him."

"Devilish impertinent! Upon my word, devilish impertinent!" the Captain

muttered. He drew out his cigar-case with a hand that trembled.

Katherine's bitter look was very unpleasant.

Katherine expected Odd the next morning; he was reading a manuscript to

her, and would come early.

She was waiting for him at ten. She had put on her oldest dress. The

severe black lines, a silk sash, knotted at the side, suggested a

soutane--the slim buckled shoes with their square tips carried out the

monastic effect, and Katherine's strong young face was cold and stern.

"Shall we put off our work for a little while? I want to speak to you,"

she said, after Odd had come, and greetings had passed between them.

"Shall we? You have been too patient all along, Miss Archinard." Odd

smiled down at her as he held her hand. "You make me feel that I have

been driving you--arrantly egotistic."

"No; I like our work immensely, as you know." Katherine remained

standing by the fireplace. She leaned her arm on the mantelpiece, and

turned her head to look directly at him. "I am not at all happy this

morning, Mr. Odd." Odd's kind eyes showed an almost boyish dismay.

"What is it? Can I help you?" His tone was all sympathetic anxiety and

friendly warmth.

"No; just the contrary. Mr. Odd, I am ashamed that you should have seen

the depths of our poverty. It is not a poverty one can be proud of.

Poverty to be honorable must work, and must not borrow."

Odd flushed.

"You exaggerate," he said, but he liked her for the exaggeration.

"I did not know till yesterday that papa owed to you his Riviera trip."

"Really, Katherine"--he had not used her name before, it came now most

naturally with this new sense of intimacy--"you mustn't misunderstand,

misjudge your father. He couldn't work; his life has unfitted him for

it; it would be a false pride that would make him hesitate to ask an old

friend for a loan; an old friend so well able to lend as I am. You women

judge these things far too loftily." And Peter liked her for the

loftiness.

"Would you mind telling me how much you lent him last time? I was with

him when he cashed the check. I saw the name, not the amount."

"It was nothing of any importance," said Odd shortly. He exaggerated

now. The Captain had told him that the furniture would be seized unless

some creditors were satisfied, and, with a very decided hint as to the

inadvisability of another trip for retrievement to the Riviera, Peter

had given him the money, ten thousand francs; a sum certainly of

importance, for Odd was no millionaire.

Katherine looked hard at him.

"You won't tell me because you want to spare me."

"My dear Katherine, I certainly want to spare you anything that would

add a straw's weight to your distress; you have no need, no right to

shoulder this. It is your father's affair--and mine. You must not give

it another thought."

"That is so easy!" Katherine clenched her hand on the mantelpiece. She

was not given to vehemence of demonstration; the little gesture showed a

concentration of bitter rebellion. Odd, standing beside her, put his own

hand over hers; patted it soothingly.

"It's rather hard on me, you know, a slur on my friendship, that you

should take a merely conventional obligation so to heart."

Katherine now looked down into the fire.

"Take it to heart? What else have I had on my heart for years and years?

It is a mere variation on the same theme, a little more poignantly

painful than usual, that is all! What a life to lead. What a future to

look forward to. I wonder what else I shall have to endure." Odd had

never seen her before in this mood of fierce hopelessness.

"Our poverty has poisoned everything, everything. I have had no youth,

no happiness. Every moment of forgetfulness means redoubled keenness of

gnawing anxiety. Debts! Duns! harassing, sordid cares that drag one

down. Mr. Odd, I have had to coax butchers and bakers; I have had to

plead with horrible men with documents of all varieties! I have had to

pawn my trinkets, and all with surface gayety; everything must be kept

from mamma, and papa's extravagance is incorrigible."

Odd was all grave amazement, grave pity, and admiration.

"You are a brave woman, Katherine."

"No, no; I am not brave. I am frightened--frightened to death sometimes.

I see before me either a hideous struggle with want or--a _mariage de

convenance_. I have none of the classified, pigeon-holed knowledge one

needs nowadays to become a teaching drudge, and I can't make up my mind

to sell myself, though, in spite of my lack of beauty and lack of money,

that means of escape has often presented itself. I have had many offers

of marriage. Only I _can't_."

Odd was silent under the stress of a new thought, an entirely new

thought.

"For Hilda I have no fear," Katherine continued, still speaking with the

same steady quiet voice, still looking into the fire. "In the past her

art has absorbed and protected her, and her future is assured. She will

marry a good husband." A flash as of Hilda's beauty crossed the growing

definiteness of Peter's new thought. That old undoing, that mirage of

beauty; he put it aside with some self-disgust, feeling, as he did so,

a queer sense of impersonality as though putting away himself as he put

away his weakness. He seemed to contemplate himself from an outside

aloofness of observation. The trance-like feeling of the illusion of all

things which he had felt more than once of late made him hold more

firmly to the tonic thought of a fine common-sense.

"Of course, mamma will be safe when Hilda is Lady Hope," Katherine said;

"perhaps I shall be forced to accept the same charity." Her voice broke

a little, and she turned the sombre revolt of her look on Peter; her

eyes were full of tears.

"Katherine," he said, "will you marry me?"

Odd, five minutes before, had not had the remotest idea that he would

ask Katherine Archinard to be his wife. Yet one could hardly call the

sudden decision that had brought the words to his lips, impulsive. While

Katherine spoke, the bitter struggle of the fine young life, surely

meant for highest things; the courage of the cheerfulness she never

before had failed in; the pride of that repulsion for the often offered

solution to her difficulties--a solution many women would have accepted

with a sense of the inevitable--became admirably apparent to Odd. Their

mutual sympathy and good-fellowship and, almost unconsciously, Hilda's

assured future--Allan Hope--had defined the thought. He felt none of

that passion which, now that he looked back on it, made of the miserable

year of married life that followed but the logical retribution of its

reckless and wilful blindness. The very lack of passion now seemed an

added surety of better things. His life with Katherine could count on

all that his life with Alicia had failed in. He did not reason on that

unexcited sense of impersonality and detachment. He would like her to

accept him. He would like to help this fine, proud young creature; he

would like sympathetic companionship. He was sure of that. He had not

surprised Katherine; she had seen, as clearly as he now saw, what Peter

Odd would do. She had not exactly intended to bring him to a realization

of this by the morning's confession, for on the whole Katherine had been

perfectly sincere in all that she had said, but she felt that she could

rely on no better opportunity. Now she only turned her head towards him,

without moving from her position before the fireplace. Katherine never

took the trouble to act. She merely aimed at the most advantageous line

of conduct and let taste and instinct lead her. Her taste now told her

that quiet sincerity was very suitable; she felt, too, a most sincere

little dash of proud hesitation.

"Are you generously offering me another form of charity, Mr. Odd? My

distress was not conscious of an appeal."

"You know your own value too well, Katherine, to ask me that. _I_

appeal."

"Yet the apropos of your offer makes me smart. Another joy of poverty.

One can't trust."

"It was apropos because a man who loves you would not see you suffer

needlessly." Peter, too, was sincere; he did not say "loved."

"Shall I let you suffer needlessly?" asked Katherine, smiling a little.

"I sha'n't, if that implies that you love me."

"Suppose I do. And suppose I stand on my dignity. Pretend to distrust

your motives. Refuse to be married out of pity?"

"That sort of false dignity wouldn't suit you; you have too much of the

real."

"Would you be good to me, Mr. Odd?"

"Very, very good, Katherine."

Odd took her hand and kissed it, and Katherine's smile shone out in all

its frank gayety. "I think I can make you happy, dear."

"I think you can, Mr. Odd."

"You must manage 'Peter' now."

"I think you can, Peter," Katherine said obediently.

"And Katherine--I would not have dared say this before, you would have

flung it back at me as bribery--but I can give you weapons."

"Yes, I shall be able to fight now." She looked up at him with her

charming smile. "And you will help me, you must fight too. You must be

great, Peter, great, _great!_"

"With such a fiery little engine throbbing beside my laggard bulk, I

shall probably be towed into all sorts of combats and come off

victorious."

They sat down side by side on the sofa. Katherine was a delightfully

comfortable person; no change, but a pleasant development of relation

seemed to have occurred.

"You won't expect any flaming protestations, will you, Katherine," said

Peter; "I was never good at that sort of thing."

"Did you never flame, then?"

"I fancy I flamed out in about two months--a long time ago; that is

about the natural life of the feeling."

"And you bring me ashes," said Katherine, rallying him with her smile.

"You mustn't tease me, Katherine," said Peter. He found her very dear,

and kissed her hand again.

Part II

HILDA.

CHAPTER I

"Well, Hilda, we have some news for you!" With these words, spoken in

the triumphant tone of the news-breaker, the Captain greeted his

daughter as she came into the drawing-room at half-past six. Odd had

been paying his respects to his future parents-in-law, and was sitting

near Mrs. Archinard's sofa. He rose to his feet as Hilda entered and

looked at her, smiling a trifle nervously.

"Guess what has happened, my dear," said the Captain, whose good humor

was apparent, while Mrs. Archinard murmured, "_She_ would never guess.

Hilda, only look at your hat in the mirror." It was windy, and Hilda's

shabby little hat was on the back of her head.

"What must I guess? Is it about you?" she asked, turning her sweet

bewildered eyes from Odd to her father, to her mother, and back to Odd

again.

"Yes, about me and another person."

"You are going to marry Katherine!" Her eyes dilated and their sweetness

deepened to a smile; "you are going to marry Katherine, that _must_ be

it."

"That is it, Hilda. Congratulate me." He took her hands in his and

kissed her. "Welcome me, and tell me you are glad."

"Oh! I am very glad. I welcome you. I congratulate you!"

"You will like your brother?"

"A brother is dearer than a friend, and you have always been a friend,

haven't you, Mr. Odd?"

"Always, always, Hilda; I didn't know that you realized it."

"Did _you_ realize it?"

"_Did_ I, my dear Hilda! I did, I do, I always will." Hilda's face

seemed subtly irradiated. Her listless look of pallor had brightened

wonderfully. No one could have said that the lovely face was dull with

this sudden change upon it. Peter felt that he himself was grave in

comparison.

"And I am going to claim all a brother's rights immediately, Hilda."

"What are a brother's rights?"

"I am going to look after you, to scold you, to see you don't overwork

yourself."

"I give you leave, but you mustn't presume _too_ much on the new

rights."

"Ah! but I have old ones as well."

"You mustn't be tyrannical!" she still laughed gently as she withdrew

her hands; "I must go and see Katherine."

"Yes, go and dress now, Hilda." Mrs. Archinard spoke from the sofa,

having watched the scene with a slight air of injury; Hilda's unwonted

gayety constituted a certain grievance. "Mr. Odd dines with us, and I

really can't bear to see you in that costume. The skirt especially is

really ludicrous, my dear. I am glad that I don't see you walking

through the streets in it."

"Hilda knows that her feet bear showing," remarked the Captain, crossing

his own with complacency; "she has her mother's foot in size and mine

in make--the Archinard foot; narrow, arched instep, and small heel.

"Really, Charles, I think the Maxwells will bear the comparison!" Mrs.

Archinard, though she smiled, looked distinctly distressed.

Hilda found her sister before the long mirror in her room, Taylor

fastening the nasturtium velvet. Katherine always had a commanding air,

and it was quite regally apparent to-night; all things seemed made to

serve her, and Taylor's crouching attitude symbolic.

Hilda put her arms around her neck.

"My dear, dear Kathy, I am so glad! To think that good things _do_ come

true!"

"You like my choice, pet?"

"_No_ one else would have done," cried Hilda; "he is the only man I ever

saw whom I could have thought of for you. Why, Katherine, from that

first day when you told me you had met him at the dinner, I _knew_ it

would happen."

"Yes, I certainly felt a prophetic sense of proprietorship from the

first," Katherine owned musingly. She looked over her sister's shoulder

at the fine outline of her own head and neck in the glass.

"Aren't you rather splashed and muddy, pet? Poor people can't afford an

affection that puts their velvet gowns in danger. There, I mustn't

rumple my lace."

"I haven't hurt, have I?" Hilda stood back hastily. "I forgot, I _am_

rather muddy. And, Katherine, you will help one another so much; that

makes it so ideal."

"Idealistic little Hilda!"

"But that is evident, isn't it? You with all your energy and cleverness

and general _sanity_, and he so widely sympathetic that he is a bit

impersonal. I mean that he doubts himself because he doubts everything

rather; he sees how relative everything is; he probably thinks too much;

I am sure that is dangerous. You will make him act."

"I am to be the concrete to his abstract. He certainly does lack energy.

I wonder if even I shall be able to prod him into initiative."

Katherine patted down the fine old lace that edged her bodice, and

looked a smiling question from her own reflection in the mirror to her

sister. "Suppose I fail to arouse him."

"You will understand him. He will have something to live for; that is

what he needs. He won't be able to say, 'Is it worth while?' about

_your_ happiness. As for initiative, you will probably have to have that

for both. After all, he has made his name and place. He has the nicest

kind of fame; the more apparent sort made up by the admiration of

mediocrities isn't half as nice."

"Ah, pet, you are an intellectual aristocrat. My _pâte_ is coarser. I

like the real thing; the donkey's brayings make a noise, and one must

take the whole world with all its donkeys conscious of one, to be

famous. I like noise." Katherine smiled as she spoke, and Hilda smiled,

too, a little smile of humorous comprehension, for she did not take

Katherine in this mood at all seriously. She was as stanch in her belief

of Katherine's ideals as she was in sticking to her own.

"We will be married in March," said Katherine, pausing before her

dressing-table to put on her rings--a fine antique engraved gem and a

splendid opal. "You may go, Taylor; and Taylor, you may put out my

opera-cloak after dinner. I think, Hilda, I will go to the opera; papa

has a box. He and I and Peter might care about dropping in for the last

two acts. You don't care to come, do you?"

"Well, mamma expects me to read to her; it's a charming book, too,"

added Hilda, with tactful delicacy.

"Well, I shall envy you your quiet evening. I can't ask Peter to spend

his here in the bosom of my family. Yes, March, I think, unless I decide

on making that round of visits in England; that would put it off for a

month. I hope the ravens will fetch me a trousseau--for I don't know who

else will."

"I shall have quite a lot by that time, Katherine. I haven't heard from

the dealer in London yet, but those two pictures will sell, I hope. And,

at all events, with the other things, you know, I shall have about a

hundred pounds."

Katherine flushed a little when Hilda spoke of "other things," and

looked round at her sister.

"I _hate_ to think of taking the money, Hilda."

"My dear, why should you? Except, of course--the debts," Hilda sighed

deeply: "but I think on _this_ occasion you have a right to forget

them." Katherine's flush perhaps showed a consciousness of having

forgotten the debts on many occasions less pressing.

"I meant, in particular, taking the money from you."

Hilda opened her wide eyes to their widest.

"Kathy! as if it were not my pleasure! my joy! I am lucky to be able to

get it for you. _Can_ you get a trousseau for that much, Kathy?"

"Well, linen, yes. I don't care how little I get, but it must be

good--good lace. I shall manage; I don't care about gowns, I can get

them afterwards. Peter, I know, will be an indulgent husband." A

pleasant little smile flickered across Katherine's lips. "He _is_ a

dear! I only hope, pet, that you will be able to hold on to the money.

Don't let the duns worry it out of you!" The weary, pallid look came to

Hilda's face.

"I'll try, Kathy dear. I'll do my very best."

"My precious Hilda! You need not tell me _that!_ Run quickly and dress,

dear, it must be almost dinner-time. What _have_ you to wear? Shall I

lend you anything?"

"Why, you forgot my gray silk! My fichu! Insulting Kathy!"

"So I did! And you look deliciously pretty in that dress, though she

_did_ make a fiasco of the back; let the fichu come well down over it.

You really shouldn't indulge your passion for _petites couturières_,

child. It doesn't pay."