In the driest of tones Gregory asked Karen for some tea, and while he stood above her Herr Lippheim's beam continued to include them both.

"Sit down here, Franz, near me," said Karen. She, too, had smiled joyously as Herr Lippheim greeted her husband. The expression of her face now had changed.

Herr Lippheim obeyed, placing, as before, his hands on his knees, the elbows turned outward, and contemplating Karen's husband with a gaze that might have softened a heart less steeled than Gregory's.

This, then, was Madame von Marwitz's next move; her next experiment in seeing what she could "do." Was not Herr Lippheim a taunt? And with what did he so unpleasantly associate the name of the French actress? The link clicked suddenly. La Gaine d'Or, in its veiling French, was about to be produced in London, and it was Mlle. Mauret who had created the heroine's role in Paris. These were the people by means of whom Madame von Marwitz displayed her power over Karen's life;—a depraved woman (he knew and cared nothing about Mlle. Mauret's private morality; she was the more repulsive to him if her morals weren't bad; only a woman of no morals should be capable of acting in La Gaine d'Or;) that impudent puppy Drew, and this preposterous young man who addressed Karen by her Christian name and included himself in his inappropriate enthusiasm.

He drank his tea, standing in silence by Karen's side, and avoiding all encounter with Herr Lippheim's genial eyes.

"It is like old times, isn't it, Franz?" said Karen, ignoring her husband and addressing her former suitor. "It has been—oh, years—since I have heard such talk. Tante needs all of you, really, to draw her out. She has been wonderful this afternoon, hasn't she?"

"Ah, kolossal!" said Herr Lippheim, making no gesture, but expressing the depths of his appreciation by an emphasized solemnity of gaze.

"You are right, I think, and so does Tante, evidently," Karen continued, "about the tempo rubato in the Mozart. It is strange that Monsieur Ivanowski doesn't feel it."

"Ah! but that is it, he does feel it; it is only that he does not think it," said Herr Lippheim, now running his fingers through his hair. "Hear him play the Mozart. He then contradicts in his music all that his words have said."

But though Karen talked so pointedly to him, Herr Lippheim could not keep his eyes or his thoughts from Gregory. "You are a musician, too, Mr. Jardine?" he smiled, bending forward, blinking up through his glasses and laboriously carving out his excellent English. "You do not express, but you have the soul of an artist? Or perhaps you, too, play, like our Karen here."

"No," Gregory returned, with a chill utterance. "I know nothing about music."

"Is it so, Karen?" Herr Lippheim questioned, his guileless warmth hardly tempered.

"My husband is no artist," Karen answered.

It was from her tone rather than from Gregory's that Herr Lippheim seemed to receive his intimation; he was a little disconcerted; he could interpret Karen's tones. "Ach so! Ach so!" he said; but, his good-will still seeking to find its way to the polished and ambiguous person who had gained Karen's heart,—"But now you will live amongst artists, Mr. Jardine, and you will hear music, great music, played to you by the greatest. So you will come to feel it in the heart." And as Gregory, to this, made no reply, "You will educate him, Karen; is it not so? With you and the great Tante, how could it be otherwise?"

"I am afraid that one cannot create the love of art when it is not there, Franz," Karen returned. She was neither plaintive nor confiding; yet there was an edge in her voice which Gregory felt and which, he knew, he was intended to feel. Karen was angry with him.

"Have you seen Belot's portrait of Tante, yet, Franz?"—she again excluded her husband;—"It is just finished."

Herr Lippheim had seen it only that morning and he repeated, but now in preoccupied tones, "Kolossal!"

They talked, and Gregory stood above them, aloof from their conversation frigidly gazing over the company, his elbow in his hand, his neat fingers twisting his moustache. If he was giving Madame von Marwitz a handle against him he couldn't help it. Over the heads of Karen and Herr Lippheim his eyes for a moment encountered hers. They looked at each other steadily and neither feigned a smile.

Eleanor Scrotton arrived at six, flushed and flustered.

"Thank heaven, I haven't missed her!" she said to Gregory, to whom, to-day, Eleanor was an almost welcome sight. Her eyes had fixed themselves on Mlle. Mauret. "Have you had a talk with her yet?"

"I haven't had a talk and I yield my claim to you," said Gregory. "Are you very eager to meet the lady?"

"Who wouldn't be, my dear Gregory! What a wonderful face! What thought and suffering! Oh, it has been the most extraordinary of stories. You don't know? Well, I will tell you about her some time. She is, doubtless, one of the greatest living actresses. And she is still quite young. Barely forty."

He watched Eleanor make her way to the actress's side, reflecting sardonically upon the modern growths of British tolerance. Half the respectable matrons in London would, no doubt, take their girls to see La Gaine d'Or; mercifully, they would in all probability not understand it; but if they did, was there anything that inartistic London would not swallow in its terror of being accused of philistinism?

The company was dispersing. Herr Lippheim stood holding Karen's hands saying, as she shook them, that he would bring das Muetterchen and die Schwesterchen to-morrow. Belot came for a last cup of tea and drank it in sonorous draughts, exchanging a few words with Gregory. He had nothing against Belot. Mr. Drew leaned on Madame von Marwitz's sofa and spoke to her in a low voice while she looked at him inscrutably, her eyes half closed.

"Lucky man," said Lady Rose to Gregory, on her way out, "to have her under your roof. I hope you are a scrupulous Boswell and taking notes." In the hall Barker was assorting the sombrero, the Latin Quartier and the cream-coloured felt; the last belonged to Herr Lippheim, who was putting it on when Gregory escorted Lady Rose to the door.

Gregory gave the young man a listless hand. He couldn't forgive Herr Lippheim. That he should ever, under whatever encouragements from Karen's guardian, have dared to aspire to her, was a monstrous fact.

He watched the thick rims of Herr Lippheim's ears, under the cream-coloured felt, descending in the lift and wondered if the sight was to be often inflicted upon him.

When he went back to the drawing-room, Karen was alone. Madame von Marwitz had taken Miss Scrotton to her own room. Karen was standing by the tea-table, looking down at it, her hands on the back of the chair from which she had risen to say good-bye to her guardian's guests. She raised her eyes as her husband came in and they rested on him with a strange expression.



CHAPTER XXV

"Will you shut the door, Gregory?" Karen said. "I want to speak to you." The feeling with which he looked at her was that with which he had faced her sleeping, as he thought, after their former dispute. The sense of failure and disillusion was upon him. As before, it was only of her guardian that she was thinking. He knew that he had given Madame von Marwitz a handle against him.

He obeyed her and when he came and stood before her she went on. "Before we all meet at dinner again, I must ask you something. Do not make your contempt of Tante's guests—and of mine—more plain to her than you have already done this afternoon."

"Did I make it plain?" Gregory asked, after a moment.

"I think that if I felt it so strongly, Tante must have felt it," said Karen, and to this, after another pause, Gregory found nothing further to say than "I'm sorry."

"I hardly think," said Karen, holding the back of her chair tightly and looking down again while she spoke, "that you can have realized that Herr Lippheim is not only Tante's friend, but mine. I don't think you can have realized how you treated him. I know that he is very simple and unworldly; but he is good and kind and faithful; he is a true artist—almost a great one, and he has the heart of a child. And beside him, while you were hurting and bewildering him so to-day, you looked to me—how shall I say it—petty, yes, and foolish, yes, and full of self-conceit."

The emotion with which Gregory heard her speak these words, deliberately, if in a hardened and controlled voice, expressed itself, as emotion did with him, in a slight, fixed smile. He could not pause to examine Karen's possible justice; that she should speak so, to him, was the overpowering fact.

"I imagined that I behaved with courtesy," he said.

"Yes, you were courteous," Karen replied. "You made me think of a painted piece of wood while he was like a growing tree."

"Your simile is certainly very mortifying," said Gregory, continuing to smile. But he was not mortified. He was cruelly hurt.

"I do not wish to mortify you. I have not mortified you, because you think yourself above it all. But I would like, if I could," said Karen, "to make you see the truth. I would like to make you see that in behaving as you have you show yourself not above it but below it."

"And I would like to make you see the truth, too," Gregory returned, in the voice of his bitter hurt; "and I ask you, if your prejudice will permit of it, to make some allowance for my feeling when I found you surrounded by—this rabble."

"Rabble? My guardian's friends?" Karen had grown ashen.

"I hope they're not; but I'm not concerned with her friends; I'm concerned with you. She can take people in, on the artistic plane, whom it's not fit that you should meet. That horrible actress,—I wouldn't have her come within sight of you if I could help it. Your guardian knows my feeling about the parts she plays. She had no business to ask her here. As for Herr Lippheim, I have no doubt that he is an admirable person in his own walk of life, but he is a preposterous person, and it is preposterous that your guardian should have thought of him as a possible husband for you." Gregory imagined that he was speaking carefully and choosing his words, but he was aware that his anger coloured his voice. He had also been aware, some little time before, in a lower layer of consciousness, of the stir and rustle of steps and dresses in the passage outside—Madame von Marwitz conducting Eleanor Scrotton to the door. And now—had she actually been listening, or did his words coincide with the sudden opening of the door?—Madame von Marwitz herself appeared upon the threshold.

Her face made the catastrophe all too evident. She had heard him. She had, he felt convinced, crept quietly back and stood to listen before entering. His memory reconstructed the long pause between the departing rustle and this apparition.

Madame von Marwitz's face had its curious look of smothered heat. The whites of her eyes were suffused though her cheeks were pale.

"I must apologise," she said. "I overheard you as I entered, Mr. Jardine, and what I heard I cannot ignore. What is it that you say to Karen? What is it that you say of the man I thought of as a possible husband for her?"

She advanced into the room and laying her arm round Karen's shoulders she stood confronting him.

"I don't think I can discuss this with you," said Gregory. "I am very sorry that you overheard me." The slight smile of his pain had gone. He looked at Madame von Marwitz with a flinty eye.

"Ah, but you must discuss it; you shall," said Madame von Marwitz. "You say things to my child that I am not to overhear. You seek to poison her mind against me. You take her from me and then blacken me in her eyes. A possible husband! Would to God," said Madame von Marwitz, with sombre fury, "that the possibility had been fulfilled! Would to God that it were my brave, deep-hearted Franz who were her husband—not you, most ungrateful, most ungenerous of men."

"Tante," said Karen, who still stood looking down, grasping her chair-back and encircled by her guardian's arm, "he did not mean you to hear him. Forgive him."

"I beg your pardon, Karen," said Gregory, "I am very sorry that Madame von Marwitz overheard me; but I have said nothing for which I wish to apologize."

"Ah! You hear him!" cried Madame von Marwitz, and the inner conflagration now glittered in her eyes like flames behind the windows of a burning house. "You hear him, Karen? Forgive him! How can I forgive him when he has made you wretched! How can I ever forgive him when he tears your life by thrusting me forth from it—me—and everything I am and mean! You have witnessed it, Karen—you have seen my efforts to win your husband. You have seen his contempt for me, his rancour, his half-hidden insolence. Never—ah, never in my life have I faced such humiliation as has been offered to me beneath his roof—humiliations, endured for your sake, Karen—for yours only! Ah"—releasing Karen suddenly, she advanced a step towards Gregory, with a startling cry, stretching out her arm—"ungrateful and ungenerous indeed! And you find yourself one to scorn my Franz! You find yourself one to sneer at my friends, to stand and look at them and me as if we were vermin infesting your room! Did I not see it! You! justes cieux! with your bourgeois little world; your little—little world—so small—so small! your people like dull beasts pacing in a cage, believing that in the meat thrust in between their bars and the number of steps to be taken from side to side lies all the meaning of life; people who survey with their heavy eyes of surfeit the free souls of the world! Hypocrites! Pharisees! And to this cage you have consigned my child! and you would make of her, too, a creature of counted paces and of unearned meat! You would shut her in from the life of beauty and freedom that she has known! Ah never! never! there you do not triumph! You have taken her from me; you have won her love; but her mind is not yours; she sees the cage as I do; you do not share the deep things of the soul with her. And in her loyal heart—ah, I know it—will be the cry, undying, for one whose heart you have trod upon and broken!"

With these last words, gasped forth on rising sobs, Madame von Marwitz sank into the chair where Karen still leaned and broke into passionate tears.

Gregory again was smiling, with the smile now of decorum at bay, of embarrassment rather than contempt; but to Karen's eyes it was the smile of supercilious arrogance. She looked at him sternly over her guardian's bowed and oddly rolling head. "Speak, Gregory! Speak!" she commanded.

"My dear," said Gregory—their voices seemed to pass above the clash and uproar of stormy waters, Madame von Marwitz had abandoned herself to an elemental grief—"I have nothing to say to your guardian."

"To me, then," Karen clenched her hands on the back of the chair; "to me, then, you have something to say. Is it not true? Have you not repulsed her efforts to come near you? Have you not, behind her back, permitted yourself to speak with scorn of the man she hoped I would marry?"

Gregory paused, and in the pause, as he observed, Madame von Marwitz was able to withhold for a moment her strange groans and gaspings while she listened. "I don't think there has been any such effort," he said. "We were both keeping up appearances, your guardian and I; and I think that I kept them up best. As for Herr Lippheim, it was only when you accused me of rudeness to him that I confessed how much it astonished me to find that he was the man your guardian had wished you to marry. It does astonish me. Herr Lippheim isn't even a gentleman."

"Enough!" cried Madame von Marwitz. She sprang to her feet. "Enough!" she said, half suffocated. "It is the voice of the cage! We will not stay to hear its standards applied. Come with me, Karen, that I may say farewell to you."

She caught Karen by the arm. Her face was strange, savage, suffused. Gregory went to open the door for them. "Base one!" she said to him. "Ignominious one!"

She drew Karen swiftly along the passage and, still keeping her sharp clasp of her wrist while she opened and closed the door of her room, she sank, encircling her with her arms, upon the sofa, and wept loudly over her.

Karen, too, was now weeping; heavy, shaking sobs.

"My child! My poor child!" Madame von Marwitz murmured brokenly after a little time had gone. "I would have spared you this. It has come. We have both seen it. And now, so that your life may not be ruined, I must leave it."

"But Tante—my Tante—" sobbed Karen—Madame von Marwitz did not remember that Karen had ever so sobbed before—"you cannot mean those words. What shall I do if you say this? What is left for me?"

"My child, your life is left you," said Madame von Marwitz, holding her close and speaking with her lips in the girl's hair. "Your husband's love is left; the happiness that you chose and that I shall shatter if I stay; ah, yes, my Karen, how deny it now? I see my path. It is plain before me. To-night I go to Mrs. Forrester and to-morrow I breathe the air of Cornwall."

"But Tante—wait—wait. You will see Gregory again? You will let him explain? Oh, let me first talk with him! He says bitter things, but so do you, Tante; and he does not mean to offend as much as you think."

At this, after a little pause, Madame von Marwitz drew herself slightly away and put her handkerchief to her eyes and cheeks. The violence of her grief was over. "Does he still so blind you, Karen?" she then asked. "Do you still not see that your husband hates me—and has hated me from the beginning?"

"Not hate!—Not hate!" Karen sobbed. "He does not understand you—that is all. Only wait—till to-morrow. Only let me talk to him!"

"No. He does not understand. That is evident," said Madame von Marwitz with a bitter smile. "Nor will he ever understand. Will you talk to him, Karen, so that he shall explain why he smirches my love and my sincerity? You know as well as I what was the meaning of those words of his. Can you, loving me, ask me to sue further for the favour of a man who has so insulted me? No. It cannot be. I cannot see him again. You and I are still to meet, I trust; but it cannot again be under this roof."

Karen now sobbed helplessly, leaning forward, her face in her hands, and Madame von Marwitz, again laying an arm around her shoulders, gazed with majestic sorrow into the fire. "Even so," she said at last, when Karen's sobs had sunken to long, broken breaths; "even so. It is the law of life. Sacrifice: sacrifice: to the very end. Life, to the artist, must be this altar where he lays his joys. We are destined to be alone, Karen. We are driven forth into the wilderness for the sins of the people. So I have often seen it, and cried out against it in my tortured youth, and struggled against it in my strength and in my folly. But now, with another strength, I am enabled to stand upright and to face the vision of my destiny. I am to be alone. So be it."

No answer came, from Karen and Madame von Marwitz, after a pause, continued, in gentler, if no less solemn tones: "And my child, too, is brave. She, too, will stand upright. She, too, has her destiny to fulfil—in the world—not in the wilderness. And if the burden should ever grow too heavy, and the road cut her feet too sharply, and the joy turn to dust, she will remember—always—that Tante's arms and heart are open to her—at all times, in all places, and to the end of life. And now," this, with a sigh of fatigue, came on a more matter-of-fact note—"let a cab be called for me. Louise will follow with my boxes."

Karen's tears had ceased. She made no further protest or appeal.

Rising, she dried her eyes, rang and ordered the cab to be called and found her guardian's white cloak and veiled hat.

And while she shrouded her in these, Madame von Marwitz, still gazing, as if at visions, in the fire, lifted her arms and bent her head with almost the passivity of a dead thing. Once or twice she murmured broken phrases: "My ewe-lamb;—taken;—I am very weary. Mon Dieu, mon Dieu,—and is this, then, the end...."

She rested heavily on Karen's shoulder in rising. "Forgive me," she said, leaning her head against hers, "forgive me, beloved one. I have done harm where I meant to make a safer happiness. Forgive me, too, for my bitter words. I should not have spoken as I did. My child knows that it is a hot and passionate heart."

Karen, in silence, turned her face to her guardian's breast.

"And do not," said Madame von Marwitz, speaking with infinite tenderness, while she stroked the bent head, "judge your husband too hardly because of this. He gives what love he can; as he knows love. It is as my child said; he does not understand. It is not given to some to understand. He has lived in a narrow world. Do not judge him hardly, Karen; it is for the wiser, stronger, more loving soul to lift the smaller towards the light. He can still give my child happiness. In that trust I find my strength."

They went down the passage together. Gregory came to the drawing-room door. He would have spoken, have questioned, but, shrinking from him and against Karen, as if from an intolerable searing, Madame von Marwitz hastened past him. He heard the front door open and the last silent pause of farewell on the threshold.

Louise scuttled by past him to her mistress's vacated rooms. She did not see him and he heard that she muttered under her breath: "Ah! par exemple! C'est trap fort, ma parole d'honneur!"

As Karen came back from the door he went to meet her.

"Karen," he said, "will you come and talk with me, now?"

She put aside his hand. "I cannot talk. Do not come to me," she said. "I must think." And going into their room she shut the door.



CHAPTER XXVI

The telephone sounded while Gregory next morning ate his solitary breakfast, and the voice of Mrs. Forrester, disembodied of all but its gravity, asked him, if he would, to come and see her immediately.

Gregory asked if Madame von Marwitz were with her. He was not willing, after the final affront that she had put upon him, to encounter Madame von Marwitz again in circumstances where he might seem to be justifying himself. But, with a deeper drop, the disembodied voice informed him that Madame von Marwitz, ten minutes before, had driven to the station on her way to Cornwall. "You will understand, I think, Gregory," said Mrs. Forrester, "that it is hardly possible for her to face in London, as yet, the situation that you have made for her."

Gregory, to this, replied, shortly, that he would come to her at once, reserving his comments on the imputed blame.

He had passed an almost sleepless night, lying in his little dressing-room bed where, by a tacit agreement, never explicitly recognized, he had slept, now, for so many nights. Cold fears, shaped at last in definite forms, stood round him and bade him see the truth. His wife did not love him. From the beginning he had been as nothing to her compared with her guardian. The pale, hard light of her eyes as she had said to him that afternoon, "Speak!" seemed to light the darkness with bitter revelations. He knew that he was what would be called, sentimentally, a broken-hearted man; but it seemed that the process of breaking had been gradual; so that now, when his heart lay in pieces, his main feeling was not of sharp pain but of dull fatigue, not of tragic night, but of a grey commonplace from which all sunlight had slowly ebbed away.

He found Mrs. Forrester in her morning-room among loudly singing canaries and pots of jonquils; and as he shook hands with her he saw that this old friend, so old and so accustomed that she was like a part of his life, was embarrassed. The wrinkles on her withered, but oddly juvenile, face seemed to have shifted to a pattern of perplexity and pained resolution. He was not embarrassed, though he was beaten and done in a way Mrs. Forrester could not guess at; yet he felt an awkwardness.

They had known each other for a life-time, he and Mrs. Forrester, but they were not intimate; and how intimate they would have to become if they were to discuss with anything like frankness the causes and consequences of Madame von Marwitz's conduct! A gloomy indifference settled on Gregory as he realized that her dear friend's conduct was the one factor in the causes and consequences that Mrs. Forrester would not be able to appraise at its true significance.

She shook his hand, and seating herself at a little table and slightly tapping it with her fingers, "Now, my dear Gregory," she said, "will you, please, tell me why you have acted like this?"

"Isn't my case prejudged?" Gregory asked, reconstructing the scene that must have taken place last night when Madame von Marwitz had appeared before her friend.

"No, Gregory; it is not," Mrs. Forrester returned with some terseness, for she felt his remark to be unbecoming. "I hope to have some sort of explanation from you."

"I'm quite ready to explain; but it's hardly possible that my explanation will satisfy you," said Gregory. "You spoke, just now, when you called me up, of a situation and said I'd made it. My explanation can only consist in saying that I didn't make it; that Madame von Marwitz made it; that she came to us in order to make it and then to fix the odium of it on me."

Already Mrs. Forrester had flushed. She looked hard at the pot of jonquils near her. "You really believe that?"

"I do. She can't forgive me for not liking her," said Gregory.

"And you don't like her. You own to it."

"I don't like her. I own to it," Gregory replied with a certain frosty relief. It was like taking off damp, threadbare garments that had chilled one for a long time and facing the winter wind, naked, but invigorated. "I dislike her very much."

"May I ask why?" Mrs. Forrester inquired, with careful courtesy.

"I distrust her," said Gregory. "I think she's dangerous, and tyrannous, and unscrupulous. I think that she's devoured by egotism. I'm sorry. But if you ask me why, I can only tell you."

Mrs. Forrester sat silent for a moment, and then, the flush on her delicate old cheek deepening, she murmured: "It is worse, far worse, than Mercedes told me. Even Mercedes didn't suspect this. Gregory,—I must ask you another question: Do you really imagine that you and your cruel thoughts of her would be of the slightest consequence to Mercedes Okraska, if you had not married the child for whose happiness she holds herself responsible?"

"Of course not. She wouldn't give me another thought, if I weren't there, in her path; I am in her path, and she feels that I don't like her, and she hasn't been able to let me alone."

"She has not let you alone because she hoped to make your marriage secure in the only way in which security was possible for you and Karen. What happiness could she see for Karen's future if she were to have cut herself apart from her life; dropped you, and Karen with you? That, doubtless, would have been the easy thing to do. There is indeed no reason why women like Mercedes Okraska, women with the world at their feet, should trouble to think of the young men they may chance to meet, whose exacting moral sense they don't satisfy. I am glad you see that," said Mrs. Forrester, tapping her table.

"It would have been far kinder to have dropped Karen than deliberately to set to work, as she has done, to ruin her happiness. She hasn't been able to keep her hands off it. She couldn't stand it—a happiness she hadn't given; a happiness for which gratitude wasn't due to her."

"Gregory, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester raised her eyes to him now; "you are frank with me, very frank; and I must be frank with you. There is more than dislike here, and distrust, and morbid prejudice. There is jealousy. Hints of it have come to me; I've tried to put them aside; I've tried to believe, as my poor Mercedes did, that, by degrees, you would adjust yourself to the claims on Karen's life, and be generous and understanding, even when you had no spontaneous sympathy to give. But it is all quite clear to me now. You can't accept the fact of your wife's relation to Mercedes. You can't accept the fact of a devotion not wholly directed towards yourself. I've known you since boyhood, Gregory, and I've always had regard and fondness for you; but this is a serious breach between us. You seem to me more wrong and arrogant than I could trust myself to say. And you have behaved cruelly to a woman for whom my feeling is more than mere friendship. In many ways my feeling for Mercedes Okraska is one of reverence. She is one of the great people of the world. To know her has been a possession, a privilege. Anyone might be proud to know such a woman. And when I think of what you have now said of her to me—when I think of how I saw her—here—last night,—broken—crushed,—after so many sorrows—"

Tears had risen to Mrs. Forrester's eyes. She turned her head aside.

"Do you mean," said Gregory after a moment, in which it seemed to him that his grey world preceptibly, if slightly, darkened, "do you mean that I've lost your friendship because of Madame von Marwitz?"

"I don't know, Gregory; I can't tell you," said Mrs. Forrester, not looking at him. "I don't recognize you. As to Karen, I cannot imagine what your position with her can be. How is she to bear it when she knows that it is said that you insulted her guardian's friends and then turned her out of your house?"

"I didn't turn her out," said Gregory; he walked to the window and stared into the street. "She went because that was the most venomous thing she could do. And I didn't insult her friends."

"You said to her that the man she had thought of as a husband for Karen was not a gentleman. You said that you did not understand how Mercedes could have chosen such a man for her. You said this with the child standing between you. Oh, you cannot deny it, Gregory. I have heard in detail what took place. Mercedes saw that unless she left you Karen's position was an impossible one. It was to save Karen—and your relation to Karen—that she went."

Gregory, still standing at the window, was silent, and then asked: "Have you seen Herr Lippheim?"

"No, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester returned, and now with trenchancy, the concrete case being easier to deal with openly. "No; I have not seen him; but Mercedes spoke to me about him last winter, when she hoped for the match, and told me, moreover, that she was surprised by Karen's refusal, as the child was much attached to him. I have not seen him; but I know the type—and intimately. He is a warm-hearted and intelligent musician."

"Your bootmaker may be warm-hearted and intelligent."

"That is petulant—almost an insolent simile, Gregory. It only reveals, pitifully, your narrowness and prejudice—and, I will add, your ignorance. Herr Lippheim is an artist; a man of character and significance. Many of my dearest friends have been such; hearts of gold; the salt of the world."

"Would you have allowed a daughter of yours, may I ask, to marry one of these hearts of gold?"

"Certainly; most certainly," said Mrs. Forrester, but with a haste and heat somewhat suspicious. "If she loved him."

"If he were personally fit, you mean. Herr Lippheim is undoubtedly warm-hearted and, in his own way, intelligent, but he is as unfit to be Karen's husband as your bootmaker to be yours."

They had come now, on this lower, easier level, to one of the points where temper betrays itself as it cannot do on the heights of contest. Gregory's reiteration of the bootmaker greatly incensed Mrs. Forrester.

"My dear Gregory," she said, "I yield to no one in my appreciation of Karen; owing to the education and opportunities that Mercedes has given her, she is a charming young woman. But, since we are dealing with, facts, the bare, bald, worldly aspects of things, we must not forget the facts of Karen's parentage and antecedents. Herr Lippheim is, in these respects, I imagine, altogether her equal. A rising young musician, the friend and protege of one of the world's great geniuses, and a penniless, illegitimate girl. Do not let your rancour, your jealousy, blind you so completely."

Gregory turned from the window at this, smiling a pallid, frosty smile and Mrs. Forrester was now aware that she had made him very angry. "I may be narrow," he said, "and conventional and ignorant; but I'm unconventional and clear-sighted enough to judge people by their actual, not their market, value. Of Herr Lippheim I know nothing, except that his parentage and antecedents haven't made a gentleman, or anything resembling one, of him; while of Karen I know that hers, unfortunate as they certainly were, have made a lady and a very perfect one. I don't forgive Madame von Marwitz for a great many things in regard to her treatment of Karen," Gregory went on with growing bitterness, "chief among them that she has taken her at her market value and allowed her friends to do the same. I've been able, thank goodness, to rescue Karen, at all events, from that. Madame von Marwitz can't carry her about any longer like a badge from some charitable society on her shoulder. No woman who really loved Karen, or who really appreciated her," Gregory added, falling back on his concrete fact, "could have thought of Herr Lippheim as a husband for her."

Mrs. Forrester sat looking up at him, and she was genuinely aghast.

"You are incredible to me, Gregory," she said. "You set your one year of devotion to Karen against Mercedes's life-time, and you presume to discredit hers."

"Yes. I do. I don't believe in her devotion to Karen."

"Do you realize that your attitude may mean a complete rupture between Karen and her guardian?"

"No such luck; I'm afraid!" said Gregory with a grim laugh. "My only hope is that it may mean a complete rupture between Madame von Marwitz and me. It goes without saying, feeling as I do, that, if it wouldn't break Karen's heart, I'd do my best to prevent Madame von Marwitz from ever seeing her again."

There was a little silence and then Mrs. Forrester got up sharply.

"Very well, Gregory," she said. "That will do."

"Are you going to shake hands with me?" he asked, still with the grim smile.

"Yes. I will shake hands with you, Gregory," Mrs. Forrester replied. "Because, in spite of everything, I am fond of you. But you must not come here again. Not now."

"Never any more, do you really mean?"

"Not until you are less wickedly blind."

"I'm sorry," said Gregory. "It's never any more then, I'm afraid."

He was very sorry. He knew that as he walked away.



CHAPTER XXVII

Mrs. Forrester remained among her canaries and jonquils, thinking. She was seriously perturbed. She was, as she had said, fond of Gregory, but she was fonder, far, of Mercedes von Marwitz, whom Gregory had caused to suffer and whom he would, evidently, cause to suffer still more.

She controlled the impulse to telephone to Eleanor Scrotton and consult with her; a vague instinct of loyalty towards Gregory restrained her from that. Eleanor would, in a day or two, hear from Cornwall and what she would hear could not be so bad as what Mrs. Forrester herself could tell her. After thinking for the rest of the morning, Mrs. Forrester decided to go and see Karen. She was not very fond of Karen. She had always been inclined to think that Mercedes exaggerated the significance of the girl's devotion, and Gregory's exaggeration, now, of her general significance—explicable as it might be in an infatuated young husband—disposed her the less kindly towards her. She felt that Karen had been clumsy, dull, in the whole affair. She felt that, at bottom, she was somewhat responsible for it. How had Gregory been able, living with Karen, to have formed such an insensate conception of Mercedes? The girl was stupid, acquiescent; she had shown no tact, no skill, no clarifying courage. Mrs. Forrester determined to show them all—to talk to Karen.

She drove to St. James's at four o'clock that afternoon and Barker told her that Mrs. Jardine was in the drawing-room. Visitors, evidently, were with her, and it affected Mrs. Forrester very unpleasantly, as Barker led her along the passage, to hear rich harmonies of music filling the flat. She had expected to be perhaps ushered into a darkened bedroom; to administer comfort and sympathy to a shattered creature before administering reproof and counsel. But Karen not only was up; she was not alone. The strains were those of chamber-music, and a half-perplexed delight mingled with Mrs. Forrester's displeasure as she recognized the heavenly melodies of Schumann's Pianoforte Quintet. The performers were in the third movement.

Karen rose, as Barker announced her, from the side of a stout lady at the piano, and Mrs. Forrester, nodding, her finger at her lips, dropped into a chair and listened.

The stout lady at the piano had a pale, fat, pear-shaped face, her grizzled hair parted above it and twisted to a large outstanding knob behind. She wore eyeglasses and peered through them at her music with intelligent intensity and profound humility. The violin was played by an enormous young man with red hair, and the viola, second violin and 'cello by three young women, all of the black-and-tan Semitic type.

Mrs. Forrester was too much preoccupied with her wonder to listen as she would have wished to, but by the time the end of the movement was come she had realized that they played extremely well.

Karen came forward in the interval. She was undoubtedly pale and heavy-eyed; but in her little dress of dark blue silk, with her narrow lawn ruffles and locket and shining hair, she showed none of the desperate signs appropriate to her circumstances nor any embarrassment at the incongruous situation in which Mrs. Forrester found her.

"This is Frau Lippheim, Mrs. Forrester," she said. "And these are Fraeulein Lotta and Minna and Elizabeth, and this is Herr Franz. I think you have often heard Tante speak of our friends."

Her ears buzzing with the name of Lippheim since the night before, Mrs. Forrester was aware that she showed confusion, also that for a brief, sharp instant, while her eyes rested on Herr Franz, a pang of perverse sympathy for Gregory, in a certain aspect of his wickedness, disintegrated her state of mind. He was singular looking indeed, this untidy young man, whose ill-kept clothes had a look of insecurity, like arrested avalanches on a mountain. "No, I can feel for Gregory somewhat in this," Mrs. Forrester said to herself.

"We are having some music, you see," said Karen. "Herr Lippheim promised me yesterday that they would all come and play to me. Can you stay and listen for a little while? They must go before tea, for they have a rehearsal for their concert," she added, as though to let Mrs. Forrester know that she was not unconscious of the matter that must have brought her.

There was really no reason why she shouldn't stay. She could not very well ask to have the Lippheims and their instruments turned out. Moreover she was very fond of the Quintet. Mrs. Forrester said that she would be glad to stay.

When they went on to the fourth movement, and while she listened, giving her mind to the music, Mrs. Forrester's disintegration slowly recomposed itself. It was not only that the music was heavenly and that they played so well. She liked these people; they were the sort of people she had always liked. She forgot Herr Franz's uncouth and mountainous aspect. His great head leaning sideways, his eyes half closed, with the musician's look of mingled voluptuous rapture and cold, grave, listening intellect, he had a certain majesty. The mother, too, all devout concentration, was an artist of the right sort; the girls had the gentle benignity that comes of sincere self-dedication. They pleased Mrs. Forrester greatly and, as she listened, her severity towards Gregory shaped itself anew and more forcibly. Narrow, blind, bigoted young man. And it was amusing to think, as a comment on his fierce consciousness of Herr Lippheim's unfitness, that here Herr Lippheim was, admitted to the very heart of Karen's sorrow. It was inconceivable that anyone but very near and dear friends should have been tolerated by her to-day. Karen, too, after her fashion, was an artist. The music, no doubt, was helpful to her. Soft thoughts of her great, lacerated friend, speeding now towards her solitudes, filled Mrs. Forrester's eyes more than once with tears.

They finished and Frau Lippheim, rubbing her hands with her handkerchief, stood smiling near-sightedly, while Mrs. Forrester expressed her great pleasure and asked all the Lippheims to come and see her. She planned already a musical. Karen's face showed a pale beam of gladness.

"And now, my dear child," said Mrs. Forrester, when the Lippheims had departed and she and Karen were alone and seated side by side on the sofa, "we must talk. I have come, of course you know, to talk about this miserable affair." She put her hand on Karen's; but already something in the girl's demeanour renewed her first displeasure. She looked heavy, she looked phlegmatic; there was no response, no softness in her glance.

"You have perhaps a message to me, Mrs. Forrester, from Tante," she said.

"No, Karen, no," Mrs. Forrester with irrepressible severity returned. "I have no message for you. Any message, I think should come from your husband and not from your guardian."

Karen sat silent, her eyes moving away from her visitor's face and fixing themselves on the wall above her head.

The impulse that had brought Mrs. Forrester was suffering alterations.

Gregory had revealed the case to her as worse than she had supposed; Karen emphasized the revelation. And what of Mercedes between these two young egoists? "I must ask you, Karen," she said, "whether you realise how Gregory has behaved, to the woman to whom you, and he, owe so much?"

Karen continued to look fixedly at the wall and after a moment of deliberation replied: "Tante did not speak rightly to Gregory, Mrs. Forrester. She lost her temper very much. You know that Tante can lose her temper."

Mrs. Forrester, at this, almost lost hers. "You surprise me, Karen. Your husband had spoken insultingly of her friends—and yours—to her. Why attempt to shield him? I heard the whole story, in detail, from your guardian, you must remember."

Again Karen withdrew into a considering silence; but, though her face remained impassive, Mrs. Forrester observed that a slight flush rose to her cheeks.

"Gregory did not intend Tante to overhear what he said," she produced at last. "It was said to me—and I had questioned him—not to her. Tante came in by chance. It is not likely, Mrs. Forrester, that my version would differ in any way from hers."

"You mustn't take offence at what I say, Karen," Mrs. Forrester spoke with more severity; "your version does differ. To my astonishment you seem actually to defend your husband."

"Yes; from what is not true: that is not to differ from Tante as to what took place." Karen brought her eyes to Mrs. Forrester's.

"From what is not true. Very well. You will not deny that he so intensely dislikes your guardian and has shown it so plainly to her that she has had to leave you. You will not deny that, Karen?"

"No. I will not deny that," Karen replied.

"My poor child—it is true, and it is only a small part of the truth. I don't know what Gregory has said to you in private, but even Mercedes had not prepared me for what he said to me this morning."

"What did he say to you this morning, Mrs. Forrester?"

"He believes her to be a bad woman, Karen; do you realise that; has he told you that; can you bear it? Dangerous, unscrupulous, tyrannous, devoured by egotism, were the words he used of her. I shall not forget them. He accused her of hypocrisy in her feeling for you. He hoped that you might never see her again. It is terrible, Karen. Terrible. It puts us all—all of us who love Mercedes, and you through her, into the most impossible position."

Karen sat, her head erect, her eyes downcast, with a rigidity of expression almost torpid.

"Do you see the position he puts us in, Karen?" Mrs. Forrester went on with insistence. "Have you had the matter out with Gregory? Did you realise its gravity? I must really beg you to answer me."

"I have not yet spoken with my husband," said Karen, in a chill, lifeless tone.

"But you will? You cannot let it pass?"

"No, Mrs. Forrester. I will not let it pass."

"You will insist that he shall make a full apology to Mercedes?"

"Is he to apologise to her for hating her?" Karen at this asked suddenly.

"For hating her? What do you mean?" Mrs. Forrester was taken aback.

"If he is to apologise," said Karen, in a still colder, still more lifeless voice, "it must be for something that can be changed. How can he apologise to her for hating her if he continues to hate her?"

"He can apologise for having spoken insultingly to her."

"He has not done that. It was Tante who overheard what she was not intended to hear. And it was Tante who spoke with violence."

"It amazes me to hear you put it on her shoulders, Karen. He can apologise, then, for what he has said to me," said Mrs. Forrester with indignation. "You will not deny that what he said of her to me was insulting."

"He is to tell her that he has said those words and then apologise, Mrs. Forrester? Oh, no; you do not think what you say."

"Really, my dear Karen, you have a most singular fashion of speaking to a person three times your age!" Mrs. Forrester exclaimed, the more incensed for the confusion of thought into which the girl's persistence threw her. "The long and short of it is that he must make it possible for Mercedes to meet him, with decency, in the future."

"But I do not know how that can be," said Karen, rising as Mrs. Forrester rose; "I do not know how Tante, now, can see him. If he thinks these things and does not say them, there may be pretence; but if he says them, to Tante's friends, how can there be pretence?"

There was no appeal in her voice. She put the facts, so evident to herself, before her visitor and asked her to look at them. Mrs. Forrester was suddenly aware that her advice might have been somewhat hasty. She also felt suddenly as though, on a reconnoitring march down a rough but open path, she found herself merging in the gloomy mysteries of a forest. There were hidden things in Karen's voice.

"Well, well," she said, taking the girl's hand and casting about in her mind for a retreat; "that's to see it as hopeless, isn't it, and we don't want to do that, do we? We want to bring Gregory to reason, and you are the person best fitted to do that. We want to clear up these dreadful ideas he has got into his head, heaven knows how. And no one but you can do it. No one in the world, my dear Karen, is more fitted than you to make him understand what our wonderful Tante really is. There is the trouble, Karen," said Mrs. Forrester, finding now the original clue with which she had started on her expedition; "he shouldn't have been able, living with you, seeing your devotion, seeing from your life, as you must have told him of it, what it was founded on, he shouldn't have been able to form such a monstrous conception of our great, dear one. You have been in fault there, my dear, you see it now, I am sure. At the first hint you should have made things clear to him. I know that it is hard for a young wife to oppose the man she loves; but love mustn't make us cowardly," Mrs. Forrester murmured on more cheerfully as they moved down the passage, "and Gregory will only love you more wisely and deeply if he is made to recognize, once for all, that you will not sacrifice your guardian to please him."

They were now at the door and Karen had not said a word.

"Well, good-bye, my dear," said Mrs. Forrester. Oddly she did not feel able to urge more strongly upon Karen that she should not sacrifice her guardian to her husband. "I hope I've made things clearer by coming. It was better that you should, realize just what your guardian's friends felt—and would feel—about it, wasn't it?" Karen still made no reply and on the threshold Mrs. Forrester paused to add, with some urgency: "It was right, you see that, don't you, Karen, that you should know what Gregory is really feeling?"

"Yes," Karen now assented. "It is better that I should know that."



CHAPTER XXVIII

Gregory when he came in that evening thought at first, with a pang of fear, that Karen had gone out. It was time for dressing and she was not in their room. In the drawing-room it was dark; he stood in the doorway for a moment and looked about it, sad and tired and troubled, wondering if Karen had gone to Mrs. Forrester's, wondering whether, in her grave displeasure with him, she had even followed her guardian. And then, from beside him, came her voice. "I am here, Gregory. I have been waiting for you."

His relief was so intense that, turning up the lights, seeing her sitting there on a little sofa near the door, he bent involuntarily over her to kiss her.

But her hand put him away.

"No; I must speak to you," she said.

Gregory straightened himself, compressing his lips.

Karen had evidently not thought of changing. She wore her dark-blue silk dress. She had, indeed, been sitting there since Mrs. Forrester went. He looked about the room, noting, with dull wonder, the grouped chairs, and open piano. "You have had people here?"

"Yes. The Lippheims came and played to me. I would have written to them and told them not to come; but I forgot. And Mrs. Forrester has been here."

"Quite a reception," said Gregory. He walked to the window and looked out. "Well," he said, not turning to his wife, "what have you to say to me, Karen?" His tone was dry and even ironic.

"Mrs. Forrester came to tell me," said Karen, "that you had seen her this morning."

"Yes. Well?"

"And she told me," Karen went on, "that you had a great deal to say to her about my guardian—things that you have never dared to say to me."

He turned to her now and her eyes from across the room fixed themselves upon him.

"I will say them to you if you like," said Gregory, after a moment. He leaned against the side of the window and folded his arms. And he examined his wife with, apparently, the cold attention that he would have given to a strange witness in the box. And indeed she was strange to him. Over his aching and dispossessed heart he steeled himself in an impartial scrutiny.

"It is true, then," said Karen, "that you believe her tyrannous and dangerous and unscrupulous, and that you think her devoured by egotism, and hypocritical in her feeling for me, and that you hope that I may never see her again?"

She catalogued the morning's declarations accurately, like the witness giving unimpeachable testimony. But it was rather absurd to see her as the witness, when, so unmistakably, she considered herself the judge and him the criminal in the dock. There was relief in pleading guilty to everything. "Yes: it's perfectly true," he said.

She looked at him and he could discover no emotion on her face.

"Why did you not tell me this when you asked me to marry you?" she questioned.

"Oh—I wasn't so sure of it then," said Gregory. "And I loved you and hoped it would never come out. I didn't want to give you pain. That's why I never dared tell you, as you put it."

"You wanted to marry me and you knew that if you told me the truth I would not marry you; that is the reason you did not dare," said Karen.

"Well, there's probably truth in that," Gregory assented, smiling; "I'm afraid I was an infatuated creature, perhaps a dishonest one. I can't expect you to make allowances for my condition, I know."

She lowered her eyes and sat for so long in silence that presently, rather ashamed of the bitterness of his last words, he went on in a kinder tone: "I know that I can never make you understand. You have your infatuation and it blinds you. You've been blind to the way in which, from the very beginning, she has tracked me down. You've been blind to the fact that the thing that has moved her hasn't been love for you but spite, malicious spite, against me for not giving her the sort of admiration she's accustomed to. If I've come to hate her—I didn't in the least at first, of course—it's only fair to say that she hates me ten times worse. I only asked that she should let me alone."

"And let me alone," said Karen, who had listened without a movement.

"Oh no," Gregory said, "that's not at all true. You surely will be fair enough to own that it's not; that I did everything I could to give you both complete liberty."

"As when you applauded and upheld Betty for her insolent interference; as when you complained to me of my guardian because she asked that I should have a wider life; as when you hoped to have Mrs. Talcott here so that my guardian might be kept out."

"Did she suggest that?"

"She showed it to me. I had not seen it even then. Do you deny it?"

"No; I don't suppose I can, though it was nothing so definite. But I certainly hoped that Madame von Marwitz would not come here."

"And yet you can tell me that you have not tried to come between us."

"Yes; I can. I never tried to come between you. I tried to keep away. It's been she, as I say, who has tracked me down. That was what I was afraid of if she came here; that she'd force me to show my dislike. Can you deny, Karen, I ask you this, that from the beginning she has made capital to you out of my dislike, and pointed it out to you?"

"I will not discuss that with you," said Karen; "I know that you can twist all her words and actions."

"I don't want to do that. I can see a certain justice in her malice. It was hard for her, of course, to find that you'd married a man she didn't take to and who didn't take to her; but why couldn't she have left it at that?"

"It couldn't be left at that. It wasn't only that," said Karen. "If she had liked you, you would never have liked her; and if you had liked her she would have liked you."

The steadiness of her voice as she thus placed the heart of the matter before him brought him a certain relief. Perhaps, in spite of his cold realizations and the death of all illusion as to Karen's love for him, they could really, now, come to an understanding, an accepted compromise. His heart ached and would go on aching until time had blunted its hurts, and a compromise was all he had to hope for. He had nothing to expect from Karen but acceptance of fact and faithful domesticity. But, after all the uncertainties and turmoils, this bitter peace had its balms. He took up her last words.

"Ah, well, she'd have liked my liking," he analysed it. "I don't know that she'd have liked me;—unless I could have managed to give her actual worship, as you and her friends do. But I'm not going to say anything more against her. She has forced the truth from me, and now we may bury it. You shall see her, of course, whenever you want to. But I hope that I shall never have to speak of her to you again."

The talk seemed to have been brought to an end. Karen, had risen and Barker, entering at the moment, announced dinner.

"By Jove, is it as late as that," Gregory muttered, nodding to him. He turned to Karen when Barker was gone and, the pink electric lights falling upon her face, he saw as he had not seen before how grey and sunken it was. She had made no movement towards the door.

"Gregory," she said, fixing her eyes upon him, and he then saw that he had misinterpreted her quiet, "I tell you that these things are not true. They are not true. Will you believe me?"

"What things?" he asked. But he was temporizing. He saw that the end had not come.

"The things you believe of Tante. That she is a heartless woman, using those who love her—feeding on their love. I say it is not true. Will you believe me?"

She stood on the other side of the room, her arms hanging at her sides, her hands hanging open, all her being concentrated in the ultimate demand of her compelling gaze.

"Karen," he said, "I know that she must be lovable; I know, of course, that she has power, and charm, and tenderness. I think I can understand why you feel for her as you do. But I don't think that there is any chance that I shall change my opinion of her; not for anything you say. I believe that she takes you in completely."

Karen gazed at him. "You will still believe that she is tyrannous, and dangerous, and false, whatever I may say?"

"Yes, Karen. I know it sounds horrible to you. You must try to forgive me for it. We won't speak of it again; I promise you."

She turned from him, looking before her at the Bouddha, but not as if she saw it. "We shall never speak of it again," she said. "I am going to leave you, Gregory."

For a moment he stared at her. Then he smiled. "You mustn't punish me for telling you the truth, Karen, by silly threats."

"I do not punish you. You have done rightly to tell me the truth. But I cannot live with a man who believes these things."

She still gazed at the Bouddha and again Gregory stared at her. His face hardened. "Don't be absurd, Karen. You cannot mean what you say."

"I am going to-night. Now," said Karen.

"Going? Where?"

"To Cornwall, back to my guardian. She will take care of me again. I will not live with you."

"If you really mean what you say," said Gregory, after a moment, "you are telling me that you don't love me. I've suspected it for some time."

"I feel as if that were true," said Karen, looking now down upon the ground. "I think I have no more love for you. I find you a petty man." It was impossible to hope that she was speaking recklessly or passionately. She had come to the conclusion with deliberation; she had been thinking of it since last night. She was willing to cast him off because he could not love where she loved. How deeply the roots of hope still knotted themselves in him he was now to realize. He felt his heart and mind rock with the reverberation of the shattering, the pulverizing explosion, and he saw his life lying in a wilderness of dust about him.

Yet the words he found were not the words of his despair. "Even if you feel like this, Karen," he said, "there is no necessity for behaving like a lunatic. Go and stay with your guardian, by all means, and whenever you like. Start to-morrow morning. Spend most of your time with her. I shall not put the smallest difficulty in your way. But—if only for your own sake—have some common-sense and keep up appearances. You must remain my wife in name and the mistress of my house."

"Thank you, you mean to be kind, I know," said Karen, who had not looked at him since her declaration; "But I am not a conventional woman and I do not wish to live with a man who is no longer my husband. I do not wish to keep up appearances. I do not wish it to be said—by those who know my guardian and what she has done for me and been to me—that I keep up the appearance of regard for a man who hates her. I made a mistake in marrying you; you allowed me to make it. Now, as far as I can, I undo it by leaving you. Perhaps," she added, "you could divorce me. That would set you free."

The remark in its childishness, callousness, and considerateness struck him as one of the most revealing she had made. He laughed icily. "Our laws only allow of divorce for one cause and I advise you not to seek freedom for yourself—or for me—by disgracing yourself. It's not worth it. The conventions you scorn have their solid value."

She had now turned her head and was looking at him. "I think you are insulting me," she said.

For the first time he observed a trembling in her voice and interpreted it as anger. It gave him a hurting satisfaction to have made her angry. She had appalled and shattered him.

"I am not insulting you, I am warning you, Karen," he said. "A woman who can behave as you are behaving is capable of acts of criminal folly. You don't believe in convention, and in your guardian's world you will meet many men who don't."

"What do you mean by criminal folly?"

"I mean living with a man you're not married to."

He had simply and sincerely forgotten something. Karen's face grew ashen.

"You mean that my mother was a criminal?"

Even at this moment of his despair Gregory was horribly sorry. Yet the memory that she recalled brought a deeper fear for her future. He had spoken with irony of her suggestion about divorce and freedom. But did not her very blood, as well as her environment, give him reason to emphasise his warning?

"I didn't mean that. I wasn't thinking of that," he said, "as you must know. And to be criminally foolish is a very different thing from being a criminal. But I'm convinced that to break social laws—and these laws about men and women have deeper than merely social sanctions—to break them, I'm convinced, can bring no happiness. I feel about your mother, and what she did—I say it with all reverence—that she was as mistaken as she was unfortunate. And I beg of you, Karen, never to follow her example."

"It is not for you to speak of her!" Karen said, not moving from her place but uttering the words with a still and sudden passion that he had never heard from her. "It is not for you to preach sermons to me on the text of my mother's misfortunes. I do not call them misfortunes—nor did she. I do not accept your laws, and she was not afraid of them. How dare you call her unfortunate? She lost nothing that she valued and she gained great happiness, and gave it, for she was happy with my father. It was a truer marriage than any I have known. She was more married than you or I have ever been or could ever have been; for there was deep love between them, and trust and understanding. Do not speak to me of her. I forbid it."

She turned to the door. Gregory sprang to her side and seized her wrist. "Karen! Where are you going? Wait till to-morrow!" he exclaimed, fear for her actual safety surmounting every other feeling.

She stood still under his hand and looked at him with her still passion of repudiation. "I will not wait. I shall go to-night to Frau Lippheim. And to-morrow I shall go to Cornwall. I shall tell Mrs. Barker to pack my clothes and send them to me there."

"You have no money."

"Frau Lippheim will lend me money. My guardian will take care of me. It is not for you to have any thought for me."

He dropped her arm. "Very well. Go then," he said.

He turned from her. He heard that she paused, the knob of the door in her hand. "Good-bye," she then said.

Again it was, inconceivably, the mingled childishness, callousness and considerateness. That, at the moment, she could think of the formality, suffocated him. "Good-bye," he replied, not looking round.

The door opened and closed. He heard her swift feet passing down the passage to their room.

She was not reckless. She needed her hat and coat at least. Quiet, rational determination was in all her actions.

Yet, as he waited to hear her come out again, a hope that he knew to be chimerical rose in him. She would, perhaps, return, throw herself in his arms and, weeping, say that she loved him and could not leave him. Gregory's heart beat quickly.

But when he heard her footsteps again they were not returning. They passed along to the kitchen; she was speaking to Mrs. Barker—Gregory had a shoot of surface thought for Mrs. Barker's astonishment; they entered the hall again, the hall door closed behind them.

Gregory stood looking at the Bouddha. The tears kept mounting to his throat and eyes and, furiously, he choked them back. He did not see the Bouddha.

But, suddenly becoming aware of the bland contemplative gaze of the great bronze image, his eyes fixed themselves on it.

He had known it from the first to be an enemy. Its presage was fulfilled. The tidal wave had broken over his life.



PART II



CHAPTER XXIX

Karen sat in her corner of the railway carriage looking out at familiar scenery.

Reading and the spring-tide beauties of the Thames valley had gone by in the morning. Then, after the attendant had passed along the corridor announcing lunch, and those who were lunching had followed him in single file, had come the lonely majesty of the Somerset downs, lying like great headlands along the plain, a vast sky of rippled blue and silver above them. They had passed Plymouth where she had always used to look down from the high bridges and wonder over the lives of the midshipmen on the training-ships, and now they were winding through wooded Cornish valleys.

Karen had looked out of her window all day. She had not read, though kind Frau Lippheim had put the latest tendenz-roman, paper-bound, into the little basket, which was also stocked with stout beef-sandwiches, a bottle of milk, and the packet of chocolate and bun in paper bag that Franz had added to it at the station.

Poor Franz. He and his mother had come to see her off and they had both wept as the train moved away, and strange indeed it must have been for them to see the Karen Jardine who, only yesterday, had been, apparently, so happy, and so secure in her new life, carried back to the old; a wife who had left her husband.

Karen had slept little the night before, and kind Franz must have slept less; for he had given her his meagre bedroom and spent the night on the narrowest, hardest, most slippery of sofas in the sitting-room of the Bayswater lodging-house where Karen had found the Lippheims very cheaply, very grimly, not to say greasily, installed. It was no wonder that Franz's eyes had been so heavy, his face so puffed and pale that morning; and his tears had given the last touch of desolation to his countenance.

Karen herself had not wept, either at the parting or at the meeting of the night before. She had told them, with no explanations at all, that she had left her husband and was going back to her guardian, and the Lippheims had asked no questions.

It might have been possible that Franz, as he sat at the table, his fingers run through his hair, clutching his head while he and his mother listened to her, was not so dazed and lost as was Frau Lippheim, who had not seen Gregory. Franz might have his vague perceptions. "Ach! Ach!" he had ejaculated once or twice while she spoke.

And Frau Lippheim had only said: "Liebes Kind! Liebes, armes Kind!"

She was, after all, going back to the great Tante and they felt, no doubt, that no grief could be ultimate which had that compensatory refuge.

She was going back to Tante. As the valleys, in their deepened shadows, streamed past her, Karen remembered that it had hardly been at all of Tante that she had thought while the long hours passed and her eyes observed the flying hills and fields. Perhaps she had thought of nothing. The heavy feeling, as of a stone resting on her heart, of doom, defeat and bitterness, could hardly have been defined as thought. She had thought and thought and thought during these last dreadful days; every mental cog had been adjusted, every wheel had turned; she had held herself together as never before in all her life, in order to give thought every chance. For wasn't that to give him every chance? and wasn't that, above all, to give herself any chance that might still be left her?

And now the machinery seemed to lie wrecked. There was not an ember of hope left with which to kindle its activity. How much hope there must have been to have made it work so firmly and so furiously during these last days! how much, she hadn't known until her husband had come in last night, and, at last, spoken openly.

Even Mrs. Forrester's revelations, though they had paralyzed her, had not put out the fires. She had still hoped that he could deny, explain, recant, own that he had been hasty, perhaps; perhaps mistaken; give her some loophole. She could have understood—oh, to a degree almost abject—his point of view. Mrs. Forrester had accused her of that. And Tante had accused her of it, too. But no; it had been slowly to freeze to stillness to hear his clear cold utterance of shameful words, see the folly of his arrogance and his complacency, realise, in his glacial look and glib, ironic smile, that he was blind to what he was destroying in her. For he could not have torn her heart to shreds and then stood bland, unaware of what he had done, had he loved her. Her young spirit, unversed in irony, drank in the bitter draught of disillusion. They had never loved each other; or, worse, far worse, they had loved and love was this puny thing that a blow could kill. His love for her was dead.

She still trembled when the ultimate realization surged over her, looking fixedly out of the window lest she should weep aloud.

She had only one travelling companion, an old woman who got out at Plymouth. Karen had found her curiously repulsive and that was one reason why she had kept her eyes fixed on the landscape. She had been afraid that the old woman would talk to her, perhaps offer her refreshments, or sympathy; for she was a kind old woman, with bland eyes and a moist warm face and two oily curls hanging forward from her old-fashioned bonnet upon her shoulders. She was stout, dressed in tight black cashmere, and she sat with her knees apart and her hands, gloved in grey thread gloves, lying on them. She held a handkerchief rolled into a ball, and from time to time, as if furtively, she would raise this handkerchief to her brow and wipe it. And all the time, Karen felt, she looked mildly and humbly at her and seemed to divine her distress.

Karen was thankful when she got out. She had been ashamed of her antipathy.

Bodmin Road was now passed and the early spring sunset shone over the tree-tops in the valleys below. Karen leaned her head back and closed her eyes. She was suddenly aware of her great fatigue, and when they reached Gwinear Road she found that she had been dozing.

The fresh, chill air, as she walked along the platform, waiting for the change of trains, revived her. She had not been able to eat her beef sandwiches and the thought that so much of Frau Lippheim's good food should be wasted troubled her; she was glad to find a little wandering fox-terrier who ate the meat eagerly. She herself, sitting beside the dog, nibbled at Franz's chocolate. She had had nothing on her journey but the milk and part of the bun which Franz had given her.

Now she was in the little local train and the bleak Cornish country, nearing the coast, spread before her eyes like a map of her future life. She began to think of the future, and of Tante.

She had not sent word to Tante that she was coming. She felt that it would be easiest to appear before her in silence and Tante would understand. There need be no explanations.

She imagined that Tante would find it best that she should live, permanently now, in Cornwall with Mrs. Talcott. It could hardly be convenient for her to take about with her a wife who had left her husband. Karen quite realized that her status must be a very different one from that of the unshadowed young girl.

And it would be strange to take up the old life again and to look back from it at the months of life with Gregory—that mirage of happiness receding as if to a blur of light seen over a stretch of desert. Still with her quiet and unrevealing young face turned towards the evening landscape, Karen felt as if she had grown very old and were looking back, after a life-time without Gregory, at the mirage. How faint and far it would seem to be when she was really old—like a nebulous star trembling on the horizon. But it would never grow invisible; she would never forget it; oh never; nor the dreadful pain of loss. To the very end of life, she was sure of it, she would keep the pang of the shining memory.

When they reached Helston, dusk had fallen. She found a carriage that would drive her the twelve miles to the coast. It was a quiet, grey evening and as they jolted slowly along the dusty roads and climbed the steep hills at a snail's pace, she leaned back too tired to feel anything any longer. And now they were out upon the moors where the gorse was breaking into flowers; and now, over the sea, she saw at last the great beacon of the Lizard lighthouse sweeping the country with its vast, desolate, yet benignant beam.

They reached the long road and the stile where, a year before, she had met Gregory. Here was the hedge of fuchsia; here the tamarisks on their high bank; here the entrance to Les Solitudes. The steeply pitched grey roofs rose before her, and the white walls with their squares of orange light glimmered among the trees.

She alighted, paid the man, and rang.

A maid, unknown to her, came to the door and showed surprise at seeing her there with her bag.

Yes; Madame von Marwitz was within. Karen had entered with the asking. "Whom shall I announce, Madam?" the maid inquired.

Karen looked at her vaguely. "She is in the music-room? I do not need to be announced. That will go to my room." She put down the bag and crossed the hall.

She was not aware of feeling any emotion; yet a sob had taken her by the throat and tears had risen to her eyes; she opened them widely as she entered the dusky room, presenting a strange face.

Madame von Marwitz rose from a distant sofa.

In her astonishment, she stood still for a moment; then, like a great, white, widely-winged moth, she came forward, rapidly, yet with hesitant, reconnoitring pauses, her eyes on the girl who stood in the doorway looking blindly towards her.

"Karen!" she exclaimed sharply. "What brings you here?"

"I have come back to you, Tante," said Karen.

Tante stood before her, not taking her into her arms, not taking her hands.

"Come back to me? What do you mean?"

"I have left Gregory," said Karen. She was bewildered now. What had happened? She did not know; but it was something that made it impossible to throw herself in Tante's arms and weep.

Then she saw that another person was with them. A man was seated on the distant sofa. He rose, wandering slowly down the room, and revealed himself in the dim light that came from the evening sky and sea as Mr. Claude Drew. Pausing at some little distance he fixed his eyes on Karen, and in the midst of all the impressions, striking like chill, moulding blows on the melted iron of her mood, she was aware of these large, dark eyes of Mr. Drew's and of their intent curiosity.

The predominant impression, however, was of a changed aspect in everything, and as Tante, now holding her hands, still stood silent, also looking at her with intent curiosity, the impression vaguely and terribly shaped itself for her as a piercing question: Was Tante not glad to have her back?

There came from Tante in another moment a more accustomed note.

"You have left your husband—because of me—my poor child?"

Karen nodded. Mr. Drew's presence made speech impossible.

"He made it too difficult for you?"

Karen nodded again.

"And you have come back to me." Madame von Marwitz summed it up rather than inquired. And then, after another pause, she folded Karen in her arms.

The piercing question seemed answered. Yet Karen could not now have wept. A dry, hard desolation filled her. "May I go to my room, Tante?"

"Yes, my child. Go to your room. You will find Tallie. Tallie is in the house, I think—or did I send her in to Helston?—no, that was for to-morrow." She held Karen's hand at a stretch of her arm while she seemed, with difficulty still, to collect her thoughts. "But I will come with you myself. Yes; that is best. Wait here, Claude." This to the silent, dusky figure behind them.

"Do not let me be a trouble." Karen controlled the trembling of her voice. "I know my way."

"No trouble, my child; no trouble. Or none that I am not glad to take."

Tante had her now on the stair—her arm around her shoulders. "You will find us at sixes and sevens; a household hastily organized, but Tallie, directed by wires, has done wonders. So. My poor Karen. You have left him. For good? Or is it only to punish him that you come to me?"

"I have left him for good."

"So," Madame von Marwitz repeated.

With all the veils and fluctuations, one thing was growing clear to Karen. Tante might be glad to have her back; but she was confused, trying to think swiftly, to adjust her thoughts. They were in Karen's little room overlooking the trees at the corner of the house. It was dismantled; a bare dressing-table, the ewer upturned in the basin, the bed and its piled bedding covered with a sheet. Madame von Marwitz sat down on the bed and drew Karen beside her.

"But is not that to punish him too much?"

"It is not to punish him. I cannot live with him any longer."

"I see; I see;" said Madame von Marwitz, with a certain briskness, as though, still, to give herself time to think. "It might have been wiser to wait—to wait for a little. I would have written to you. We could have consulted. It is serious, you know, my Karen, very serious, to leave one's husband. I went away so that this should not come to you."

"I could not wait. I could not stay with him any longer," said Karen heavily.

"There is more, you mean. You had words? He hates me more than you thought?"

Karen paused, and then assented: "Yes; more than I thought."

Above the girl's head, which she held pressed down on her shoulder, Madame von Marwitz pondered for some moments. "Alas!" she then uttered in a deep voice. And, Karen saying nothing, she repeated on a yet more melancholy note: "Alas!"

Karen now raised herself from Tante's shoulder; but, at the gesture of withdrawal, Madame von Marwitz caught her close again and embraced her. "I feared it," she said. "I saw it. I hoped to hide it by my flight. My poor child! My beloved Karen!"

They held each other for some silent moments. Then Madame von Marwitz rose. "You are weary, my Karen; you must rest; is it not so? I will send Tallie to you. You will see Tallie—she is a perfection of discretion; you do not shrink from Tallie. And you need tell her nothing; she will not question you. Between ourselves; is it not so? Yes; that is best. For the present. I will come again, later—I have guests, a guest, you see. Rest here, my Karen." She moved towards the door.

Karen looked after her. An intolerable fear pressed on her. She could not bear, in her physical weakness, to be left alone with it. "Tante!" she exclaimed.

Madame von Marwitz turned. "My child?"

"Tante—you are glad to have me back?"

Her pride broke in a sob. She hid her face in her hands.

Madame von Marwitz returned to the bed.

"Glad, my child?" she said. "For all the sorrow that it means? and to know that I am the cause? How can I be glad for my child's unhappiness?"

She spoke with a touch of severity, as though in Karen's tears she felt an unexpressed accusation.

"Not for that," Karen spoke with difficulty. "But to have me with you again. It will not be a trouble?"

There was a little silence and then, her severity passing to melancholy reproof, Madame von Marwitz said: "Did we not, long since, speak of this, Karen? Have you forgotten? Can you so wound me once again? Only my child's grief can excuse her. It is a sorrow to see your life in ruins; I had hoped before I died to see it joyous and secure. It is a sorrow to know that you have maimed yourself; that you are tied to an unworthy man. But how could it be a trouble to me to have you with me? It is a consolation—my only consolation in this calamity. With me you shall find peace and happiness again."

She laid her hand on Karen's head. Karen put her hand to her lips.

"There. That is well," said Madame von Marwitz with a sigh, bending to kiss her. "That is my child. Tante is sad at heart. It is a heavy blow. But her child is welcome."

When she had gone Karen lay, her face in the billows of the bed, while she fixed her thoughts on Tante's last words.

They became a sing-song monotone. "Tante is sad at heart. But her child is welcome. It is a heavy blow. But her child is welcome."

After the anguish there was a certain ease. She rested in the given reassurance. Yet the sing-song monotone oppressed her.

She felt presently that her hat, wrenched to one side, and still fixed to her hair by its pins, was hurting her. She unfastened it and dropped it to the floor. She felt too tired to do more just then.

Soon after this the door opened and Mrs. Talcott appeared carrying a candle, a can of hot water, towels and sheets.

Karen drew herself up, murmuring some vague words of welcome, and Mrs. Talcott, after setting the candle on the dressing-table and the hot water in the basin, remarked: "Just you lie down again, Karen, and let me wash your face for you. You must be pretty tired and dirty after that long journey."

But Karen put her feet to the ground. They just sustained her. "Thank you, Mrs. Talcott. I will do it," she said.

She bent over the water, and, while she washed, Mrs. Talcott, with deliberate skill, made up the bed. Karen sank in a chair.

"You poor thing," said Mrs. Talcott, turning to her as she smoothed down the sheet; "Why you're green. Sit right there and I'll undress you. Yes; you're only fit to be put to bed."

She spoke with mild authority, and Karen, under her hands, relapsed to childhood.

"This all the baggage you've brought?" Mrs. Talcott inquired, finding a nightdress in Karen's dressing-case. She expressed no surprise when Karen said that it was all, passed the nightdress over her head and, when she had lain down, tucked the bed-clothes round her.

"Now what you want is a hot-water bottle and some dinner. I guess you're hungry. Did you have any lunch on the train?"

"I've had some chocolate and a bun and some milk, oh yes, I had enough," said Karen faintly, raising her hand to her forehead; "but I must be hungry; for my head aches so badly. How kind you are, Mrs. Talcott."

"You lie right there and I'll bring you some dinner." Mrs. Talcott was swiftly tidying the room.

"But what of yours, Mrs. Talcott? Isn't it your dinner-time?"

"I've had my supper. I have supper early these days."

Karen dimly reflected, when she was gone, that this was an innovation. Whoever Madame von Marwitz's guests, Mrs. Talcott had, until now, always made an acte de presence at every meal. She was tired and not feeling well enough after her illness, she thought.

Mrs. Talcott soon returned with a tray on which were set out hot consommee and chicken and salad, a peach beside them. Hot-house fruit was never wanting when Madame von Marwitz was at Les Solitudes.

"Lie back. I'll feed it to you," said Mrs. Talcott. "It's good and strong. You know Adolphe can make as good a consommee as anybody, if he's a mind to."

"Is Adolphe here?" Karen asked as she swallowed the spoonfuls.

"Yes, I sent for Adolphe to Paris a week ago," said Mrs. Talcott. "Mercedes wrote that she'd soon be coming with friends and wanted him. He'd just taken a situation, but he dropped it. Her new motor's here, too, down from London. The chauffeur seems a mighty nice man, a sight nicer than Hammond." Hammond had been Madame von Marwitz's recent coachman. Mrs. Talcott talked on mildly while she fed Karen who, in the whirl of trivial thoughts, turning and turning like midges over a deep pool, questioned herself, with a vague wonder that she was too tired to follow: "Did Tante say anything to me about coming to Cornwall?"

Mrs. Talcott, meanwhile, as Madame von Marwitz had prophesied, asked no questions.

"Now you have a good long sleep," she said, when she rose to go. "That's what you need."

She needed it very much. The midges turned more and more slowly, then sank into the pool; mist enveloped everything, and darkness.



CHAPTER XXX

Karen was waked next morning by the familiar sound of the Wohltemperirtes Clavier.

Tante was at work in the music-room and was playing the prelude in D flat, a special favourite of Karen's.

She lay and listened with a curious, cautious pleasure, like that with which, half awake, one may guide a charming dream, knowing it to be a dream. There was so much waiting to be remembered; so much waiting to be thought. Tante's beautiful notes, rising to her like the bubbles of a spring through clear water, seemed to encircle her, ringing her in from the wider consciousness.

While she listened she looked out at the branches of young leaves, softly stirring against the morning sky. There was her wall-paper, with the little pink flower creeping up it. She was in her own little bed. Tante was practising. How sweet, how safe, it was. A drowsy peace filled her. It was slowly that memory, lapping in, like the sinister, dark waters of a flood under doors and through crevices, made its way into her mind, obliterating peace, at first, rather than revealing pain. There was a fear formless and featureless; and there was loss, dreadful loss. And as the sense of loss grew upon her, consciousness grew more vivid, bringing its visions.