Anne Page

New York John Lane Company MCMIX

Printed By William Clowes And Sons, Limited London And Beccles

_All rights reserved_

Anne Page

I

At the hour between sunset and twilight Miss Page was generally to be found in her garden.

The long irregular front of Fairholme Court faced the west, and before it, through the interminable evenings of summer, was spread the pageant of the sunset, the quiet glory of the after-glow, and finally the transition, mysterious, indefinably subtle, from the light of day, to the vaporous purple of night.

It was at this quiet end of evening that the garden, always beautiful, took on an added grace, the dream-like delicate charm which belongs to the enchanted places of the earth--places such as Corot knew, and with a magic equal to their own, has transferred upon canvasses which hold for ever the glamour of the dawn or the mystic spell of twilight.

The house, built originally in the last years of Elizabeth, and enlarged in succeeding reigns, was a medley of incongruous architecture, resulting in a style delightful and fantastic enough for a dwelling in a fairy tale. The latest wing, added in Georgian days, its red brick toned now to a restful mellow colour, imparted an air of formal stateliness to the irregular but charming structure.

Roses wreathed the latticed window-panes of the older part of the house; clematis rioted over part of the roof and climbed the chimney-stacks. On the sunny walls of the later wing a vine had been trained.

The door of the panelled hall in the middle of the house opened upon a square of flagstones, and level with these, a lawn, its smoothness unspoilt by flower-beds, stretched to a sunk fence from which meadowland, whose broad expanse was broken here and there by groups of elms, extended far as the eye could see till its verge touched the sunset sky.

On the lawn to the right of the house, one magnificent beech tree swept the ground with its lower branches, and then soared majestically towards the sky. On the left there was a group of chestnuts. But, except for a small white fountain opposite the hall porch, the lawn in its velvet softness was left unadorned.

The fountain Miss Page had brought back after one of her periodical journeys to Italy. It was a slight, graceful thing, of delicate workmanship, its thread of water falling from a fluted shell into a square marble basin. It was a fountain beloved by the fan-tailed pigeons, who from their dovecote behind the kitchen garden came to it often to drink. When they perched on the edge of the shell, or walked near it on the grass, their snowy tails outspread, a hint of Italian courtyards, a sort of fragrance of Italy, was wafted into the English garden.

All the flowers grew in secluded sheltered spots, protected by high walls or hedges of yew.

Away from the lawn, behind the beech tree, a moss-grown wall into which a little gate was set, gave promise of scent and colour within--of a garden enclosed.

This particular enclosure, one of many, was known as the “lavender garden.” It was arranged in the formal Dutch fashion--divided into square beds filled with pink monthly roses, each bed surrounded by a thick border of lavender. A sundial stood in the midst, and against the sundial, her elbows resting upon its lichen-stained plate, leant Anne Page, her face turned towards the lingering sunset.

She was expecting friends to dinner, but unable to resist the temptation of the garden, she had wandered from the drawing-room into the sweet evening air. She wore a dress the colour of which, in its shades of grey-green and purple, might have been suggested by the lavender in the borders. It was a graceful flowing dress; beautiful naturally, inevitably. Anne Page possessed the gift of surrounding herself with everything that was exquisite, as simply as a flower surrounds itself with leaves and dainty buds.

She was not a young woman. She had indeed travelled quite far on the road that leads from youth to death.

It was even on record that a girl staying at the vicarage had alluded to her as an old lady.

Every one had started with shocked surprise. None of Anne Page’s friends were accustomed to consider her age.

To them, she was just “beautiful Miss Page.” In the same way, one never thought of analyzing her appearance, nor of criticizing her features. It would have seemed an impertinence. One felt vaguely that she would have been quite as lovely without any, for her beauty was like a rare effect of light that has no connection with the object it transfigures.

Certainly her face had the delicacy of a white rose. Certainly her eyes were blue; blue as cornflowers; blue as the sea. But they were Miss Page’s eyes, and one instinctively compared them to lovely natural things.

She turned her head as the gate creaked.

Burks, in a frilled apron and a becoming cap with streamers, was hurrying up the path towards the sundial.

“There’s a carriage coming up the drive, ma’am,” she said.

“Thank you, Burks, I’ll come.”

The maid hastened back, her skirts ruffling the lavender borders, and, gathering up the filmy folds of her own gown, her mistress followed her.

At the gate, she turned for a last glance at the dying sunset sky.

On her way across the lawn, she noticed, with a thrill of pleasure, the beauty of the trees, motionless, dreaming in the dusk. White and slim in the half-light, the little fountain suggested to her a strayed nymph, transfixed with surprise and fear to find herself so near the haunts of man. Smiling at the fancy, Anne entered the drawing-room by one of the long open windows, and waited for her guests.

In a few moments, Burks admitted the Vicar and his wife.

The Reverend George Carfax was of the type already somewhat _vieux jeu_, of the muscular school of Christianity.

Good-looking, clean-shaven, bullet-headed, his appearance was rather that of a country squire than of a vicar of Christ. An excellent cricketer, hearty in manner, sound in health, he was nevertheless the ideal pastor for the rising generation of youths and maidens, whose muscles were possibly better worth developing than their souls.

His wife was the dowdy little woman, who inevitably by a process of natural selection becomes the mate of the muscular Christian.

In her first youth she had possessed the undistinguished prettiness common to thousands of English girls whose character, composed of negative qualities, renders them peculiarly acceptable to the average self-assertive man.

Now, at forty-five, in spite of her family of children, her figure was as spare and meagre as it had been at twenty, and the gown she wore, a black silk, slightly cut out at the neck, and trimmed with cheap coffee lace, was as dowdy as any of the dresses of her girlhood.

Miss Page walked with a charming dignity, her long gown moving over the floor with a soft _frou-frou_ suggestive of silk, and cloudy concealed frills. Her appearance as she bent towards the dowdy little woman, made a contrast almost ludicrous, if it had not also been somewhat pathetic.

Mrs. Carfax, innocent of contrasts and all they implied, took her hand in both of hers with an affectionate movement, and in the Vicar’s firm handshake, and in his hearty words of greeting, the same evident liking for their hostess was expressed.

“Dr. and Mrs. Dakin,” said Burks, at the door, and again Miss Page’s smile welcomed the new-comers.

She particularly liked the tall thin man who entered. Dr. Dakin was a scholar and a dreamer, a man too unpractical by nature adequately to cope with a profession eminently practical. The doctor was only a partial success at Dymfield, where a man of the Vicar’s stamp, genial, a trifle blustering, always cheerful, would have inspired more confidence than the dreamy medical man, who did not treat illness in the high-handed fashion unconsciously expected by his patients.

Only his success with one or two really serious cases in the neighbourhood preserved for him some measure of respect, and a general concurrence of opinion, that absent-minded as he appeared before the milder forms of ailment, when it came to graver maladies, Dr. Dakin was presumably to be trusted. To no one was his lack of force and “push” a greater trial than to his wife, whose ambition for her husband had been a London practice, and for herself a smart amusing circle of acquaintances.

She was a pretty little woman of six or seven and twenty, with soft dark hair, and a slim figure. Endowed with all the nervous energy her husband lacked, she bore the traces of her discontent about her well-shaped mouth, and in the expression, exasperated and querulous of her brown eyes.

They softened into a wholly admiring glance however as they rested on Miss Page.

“My dear lady,” she whispered, “that’s the most lovely dress I ever saw in my life! Where _do_ you get your things? And however do you manage to look so delightful in them?”

Anne laughed.

“Let me return the compliment. You look charming, Madge.”

Mrs. Dakin blushed with pleasure, as she turned to shake hands with Mrs. Carfax.

“We are waiting for another guest,” said Miss Page, sitting down in one of the big, chintz-covered chairs. “Monsieur Fontenelle, who, as I dare say you know, has just been made President of the International Art Congress.”

Dr. Dakin looked up quickly from the examination of an eighteenth-century fan, which he recognized as a new treasure in a cabinet filled with ivories, enamel snuff-boxes, old lace, old treasures of all kinds.

“Really?” he exclaimed. “That’s most interesting. _The_ Monsieur Fontenelle, in fact?”

“He’s a very old friend of mine,” said Anne.

“In England for the opening of the show next week, of course?”

“Yes. He’s been staying for a couple of days at The Chase, and as he goes to London to-morrow I asked him to join us this evening.”

To none of Anne’s visitors but the doctor was the Frenchman’s name significant.

Dymfield was not interested in the world of art. Very few of its inhabitants had ever heard of the International Art Congress, and even if they had, it would have conveyed nothing to their minds.

Nevertheless, a tremor of excitement and curiosity passed over the faces of Mrs. Carfax and Mrs. Dakin.

Strangers at Dymfield were rare, and a visitor who was staying at The Chase, as the guest of Lord Farringchurch was on that account alone, a distinguished if not an alarming personality.

“A Frenchman!” exclaimed Mrs. Carfax. “I hope he speaks English?” she added below her breath.

“Oh, perfectly,” Anne assured her, as the door opened.

“Monsieur Fontenelle!”

Burks, who had frequently accompanied her mistress in foreign travel, delivered the name with commendable swing and correctness of accent.

The man who entered looked considerably younger than his forty-seven years. Slight, still elegant in figure, his face possessed the distinction of clear-cut features, combined with an expression which only the charm of his smile saved from a suspicion of arrogance.

His hair, a little white on the temples, was thick and slightly wavy. His blue eyes, keen above a hawk-like nose, gleamed every now and then with a trace of irony; that irony which has become habitual, the recognized medium through which its possessor views the world. A shrewd observer would have guessed the character represented by such a face to be difficult and complex. Instinctively one knew that François Fontenelle would be no very easy man to thwart; one guessed also that he might be a man apt to form his own rules of conduct, to carve his own path in life, without too much consideration for the convenience or the paths of others.

As Miss Page rose and stretched out her hand, he stooped and kissed it with the graceful ease of manner natural to a Frenchman.

Mrs. Carfax felt quite embarrassed.

“So foreign,” she thought; the phrase expressing unconscious disapprobation.

“Glad _we_ haven’t those monkey tricks!” was her husband’s half-formed mental exclamation.

Mrs. Dakin’s heart gave a curious little flutter for which she could not account, except that she liked the manners of Frenchmen, and was for the moment acutely conscious of the dulness of life.

To her husband, the action suddenly recalled the days of Madame de Pompadour.

He glanced at the fan he still held, and his mind wandered to a book of that lady’s period which he had long coveted, and had hitherto been unable to obtain.

Absorbed in reverie, he missed Miss Page’s formal introduction, and was only recalled to the present day by the general movement following the announcement that dinner was served.

The dining-room at Fairholme Court, in the older part of the house, was a long, low room with casement windows, and carved beams supporting the ceiling.

In its midst the table sparkled with glass and silver, arranged with studied care between the shaded candles in sconces of Sheffield plate, and the crystal bowls of roses. It had the look of something exquisite, something in fact which belonged to Miss Page, and was marked with her individuality.

Mrs. Dakin made anxious notes. Her dinner-table never looked a work of art, and in the intervals of her study of, and speculations concerning Monsieur Fontenelle, she wondered why. Several times her glance wandered to Miss Page, whose eyes were bright, and whose faint pink colour was rather deeper than usual.

Did the Frenchman she wondered, represent Miss Page’s romance? It was strange how little one knew about Miss Page. Nothing, in fact. Mrs. Dakin realized the fact for the first time with a little shock of surprise. But then one never expected Miss Page to talk about her own affairs. Quite naturally, inevitably as it seemed, one went to Miss Page for advice, for sympathy, for encouragement about one’s self.

But this man must belong to the past life of her hostess, whatever it had been--something charming, something gentle, since Miss Page had lived it. Of course she had been loved. She was too pretty not to have been loved. Had this man loved her perhaps? If so, why had they not married?

Mrs. Dakin roused herself, and began to pay attention to the conversation to which, so far, she had only contributed mechanical, unheeding remarks. Indefinitely she felt that it was on a higher level than usual; the sort of conversation to which Dymfield was unaccustomed.

The Frenchman talked with the vivacity, the wealth of phrase and imagery common to his race, and Miss Page talked too, eagerly, fluently, leaning a little forward, as though enjoying a much-loved rarely indulged delight.

Dr. Dakin, roused at last from his dreaming, also sat upright, glancing from one to the other, throwing in now and again a question or a comment which was often seized upon appreciatively to form fresh material for conversation. Mrs. Dakin sat and wondered, mystified, scarcely comprehending. The topics over which the talk ranged, abstract subjects for the most part, illustrated by frequent references to books;--novels, French novels mostly, of which she sometimes just knew the titles, philosophy of which she had never heard--belonged to a class of ideas which as yet had never appeared upon her mental horizon. She was interested, as well as overwhelmed, by a new view of her hostess. Miss Page, this brilliant conversationalist, this subtle reasoner, to whose words the Frenchman, himself so fluent, such an acute critic and thinker, accorded a deference so obviously spontaneous and sincere! Miss Page, who would spend hours in discussing the organization of a mothers’ meeting, of a local flower show, of a Church bazaar. Miss Page, to whom one applied for recipes for _pot pourri_, for dainty invalid dishes, for remedies against chills. Miss Page, who suggested the fashion for one’s new summer muslin, and cut out night-shirts for the children in the Cottage Hospital!

“How we must bore her!” was Mrs. Dakin’s involuntary mental exclamation. “And how well, how delightfully she disguises it,” was her next reflection.

She remembered other dinners at Fairholme Court--dinners at which the guests had discussed the new curate, the latest book of Miss Marie Corelli, the village cricket match, the fund for the new organ.

She remembered Miss Page’s gracious charm of manner on these occasions, her apparent interest in each of these trivial topics.

Even now, surprised, uncomprehending as she was with regard to most of the conversation, she did not fail to remark the tact which with a word, with a question easy to answer, she kept three of her guests, at least, ostensibly within the pale of the conversation.

“It’s quite fair. We are evenly matched, to-night. Our stupidity has always outweighed her intelligence before, so she never had a chance,” thought Mrs. Dakin. The bitterness of the reflection was caused by the conviction that it was ignorance, not lack of ability, which kept her, at least, out of discussions which interested her. Mrs. Dakin was one of those women whom mental laziness, not lack of brain quality, goes far to ruin. Her mind, naturally active and restless, was unemployed. She had never trained herself to think. To-night, with sudden self-recognition, she regretted both circumstances.

Harry, she noticed it with a curious sensation, half jealousy, half pride, was not out of the talk. He was no conversationalist, but he understood, he appreciated, he contributed. That his point of view was valuable, she knew by the brightening of Miss Page’s eyes when he spoke; by an occasional vivacious affirmative nod from Monsieur Fontenelle.

An idea, odd, staggering in its novelty, occurred to her.

“Perhaps I bore Harry?”

Never before had this aspect of affairs presented itself to her consciousness, and the notion passed like a flash.

The conviction that the exhausting mental ailment of boredom belonged by right to her alone, was too firmly established to be upset by a fugitive ridiculous fancy.

Again she listened.

The Frenchman’s eloquence and vivacity amused and excited her. He spoke rapidly, and though the words were English, pronounced with only the slightest foreign accent, their use, their handling was French.

Never before, for instance, had she heard any one utter at length a panegyric such as that to which she was now listening. It was evoked by the name of an author of whom she had never heard, and it was the sort of thing which in a book she was accustomed to skip. Spoken with the ease and certainty which indicated a natural habit of fluent speech, it amazed and impressed her.

Never before had she guessed that Miss Page was witty. Wit at Dymfield was not understood; it was ignored, passed over in silence disapproving because uncomprehended. Quicker than her neighbours, Mrs. Dakin realized that in an argument on a play of Bernard Shaw’s which Monsieur Fontenelle had recently seen in America, Miss Page was saying good things. In opposing his view, her raillery, delicate and ingenious, brought a frequent smile to his lips, and more than once an appreciative burst of laughter.

Mr. Carfax, who had never heard of Bernard Shaw, asked for the story of the play.

His hostess told it in a few words. That they were in every respect well chosen, Mrs. Dakin, who had also never read the works of the latter-day apostle, guessed from a faint smile of admiration, which at various points in the narrative lighted the Frenchman’s face. Mr. Carfax nodded his head approvingly when she ceased.

“Very good, I should say. Full of common sense and right views. We want some one to elevate the stage; and I’m glad this man, what’s his name? Ah! Shaw--is a Britisher. I believe in home-grown literature; something that expresses the character of the English people. A fine, sturdy character; the best in the world.”

Miss Page rose without looking at Monsieur Fontenelle, whose smile, for greater safety, had taken refuge in his eyes.

Mrs. Dakin and Mrs. Carfax followed her into the drawing-room, and as though stricken with fear lest the dinner-table topics had resulted in dissatisfaction for her guests, she moved close to Mrs. Carfax.

“I saw Sylvia, to-day, looking _so_ pretty,” she began in her gentle, caressing voice.

Mrs. Carfax bridled, half pleased, half unwilling to accept a compliment on behalf of a daughter who was unsatisfactory.

“Looks don’t matter so much as right behaviour,” she returned. “She displeases her father very much with what he calls her advanced ideas. I don’t know what they are, I’m sure, except wanting to get away from a good home. I wish you would speak to her, Miss Page. She thinks so much of you. You might bring her to her senses.”

“Poor little Sylvia,” said Miss Page, softly. “She’s very young, my dear--and she’s a sweet child at heart. Do ask her to come to tea with me to-morrow.”

“I think your French friend is most interesting,” remarked Mrs. Dakin, suddenly, putting down her coffee cup, and taking a seat beside Anne on the sofa.

Her hostess turned to her with a pleased smile.

“I’m so glad. You are always appreciative, Madge.”

“I never heard any one talk like you two,” continued Mrs. Dakin, slowly.

“I’m afraid we talked too much.” The quick colour sprang to her cheeks. “I hope you weren’t bored?” She included the two women in a swift, apologetic glance. “Talking too much is an old habit of mine, a habit of long ago, which revives when I see François. I----” she paused suddenly.

“I was never so interested in my life,” said Mrs. Dakin, with such obvious sincerity that Anne’s face cleared.

“Very clever, I’m sure. Very clever,” murmured Mrs. Carfax. “Tell me, my dear, what shall I do about Emma? The girl gets worse and worse. She’s no good at all as a parlourmaid. I’ve been thinking about her all dinner-time, and wondering whether I should give her notice, or whether----”

The entrance of the three men interrupted the heart-searchings of Mrs. Carfax.

Monsieur Fontenelle stood a moment just within the door. His eyes fell upon Mrs. Dakin, who sat in the corner of the sofa, her slender little figure in its white dress showing to advantage against its coloured background.

A tremor of pleasure shook her as he drew up a chair of gilded cane, and leaning over the arm of the sofa, began to talk to her.

Mr. Carfax and Dr. Dakin, who both made simultaneously for Miss Page’s corner of the room, were met by her with a little amused laugh, to which each responded.

“We can’t _both_ talk to her,” declared Mr. Carfax, “because of course we each want her advice.”

“I yield to you,” said the Doctor, characteristically. “But you mustn’t keep her too long.”

“Time passes all too quickly with Miss Page,” returned Mr. Carfax, with his hearty laugh. “I can make no promises.”

“Do you really want to consult me?” asked his hostess, turning to him with her flattering air of undivided, interested attention.

“About many things. There’s that case of Mrs. O’Malley’s. It’s really very difficult. Now, what would you advise?” He recounted at length a conversation he had lately held with the drunken old woman, on the circumstances of whose life, though upon this point she was silent, Miss Page’s knowledge was considerably fuller than his own.

She listened thoughtfully, and suggested a different method of attack.

“Thank you,” said the Vicar, his brow clearing. “I never thought of that.”

“Anything else?” asked Miss Page.

“Oh well, yes; but I haven’t time for that now. I must come some other day. I want to have a long talk with you about Sylvia. I can’t make the girl out.” He frowned. “She’s so restless and discontented. I can’t imagine why she doesn’t settle down and be of some little assistance to her mother. The girl annoys me. I have no patience with the modern shirking of home duties.”

“Dear little Sylvia!” repeated Miss Page. “She’s coming to tea with me to-morrow. I always like talking to Sylvia. She’s so pretty and charming.”

Mr. Carfax looked a little mollified. “There’s Dakin thinking I’ve overstepped my time-limit,” he declared. “Come along, Dakin, your innings now.”

The doctor approached Miss Page’s chair, a smile on his long thin face.

“I only want you to show me your latest toys,” he said, glancing at the cabinet. “I see you have one or two new things there.”

She rose with alacrity, and in a few moments they were bending over and discussing a piece of Battersea enamel.

Dr. Dakin, also an enthusiastic collector, was especially interested in the dainty trifles of the eighteenth century, which Anne too loved. It was a period which specially appealed to him, and the conversation passing from the frail things they handled--fans painted on chicken-skin, ivories, patch-boxes--soon extended to books, many of which he found Anne possessed.

Their conversation became engrossing, and Mrs. Dakin turned to her companion with a laugh.

“My husband is very happy,” she remarked.

“No wonder,” he returned. “Every one is happy with Miss Page.”

“And she’s so pretty, isn’t she?”

“The most beautiful woman of my acquaintance,” he replied gravely. “Because she has _acquired_ her beauty--secreted it, in the same marvellous way that from hidden cells a rose draws its colour and its sweetness.”

Mrs. Dakin glanced at him curiously. “It takes a Frenchman to say that. But it describes Miss Page,” she added.

She hesitated a moment, curiosity very strong within her.

“You have known her a long time? Many years?” she asked.

“I first met sweet Anne Page twenty years ago, in this very house.”

He smiled, a quiet reminiscent smile.

“And she wasn’t young even then!” exclaimed Mrs. Dakin, involuntarily.

“Pardon me. Anne Page was always young, in the sense that the brooks and the hawthorn-trees and the roses are always young.”

The smile was still on his lips, and Mrs. Dakin blushed.

“Oh yes, I know,” she began hurriedly. “One never thinks of age with regard to her. I didn’t mean that exactly.”

“He must have been in love with her!” The idea ran into the undercurrent of her thoughts. “Perhaps he is still. It would be awfully romantic. And not absurd at all,” she added, as a sudden mental supplement. “Sweet Anne Page is quite pretty.”

Aloud, still impelled by irresistible curiosity, she went on asking questions.

“But this house didn’t belong to her then, did it? We haven’t been at Dymfield long enough, of course, but the old people in the village remember when Mrs. Burbage lived here.”

“Mrs. Burbage! Yes, I’d forgotten. That was the name.”

“It was quite a romantic story, wasn’t it?” went on Mrs. Dakin, vivaciously. “You know it, of course? Miss Page was companion to old Mrs. Burbage for years before she died. She had a nephew, and naturally every one imagined that he would come into the property. But he displeased her in some way, and she left everything to Miss Page. At least, so I’m told. Is it right?”

Monsieur Fontenelle bowed. “I believe so.” He laughed suddenly. “When I first knew the house, it was horrible. This beautiful room, for instance, was full of antimacassars and wool-work mats. The old lady had--how do you call it? Mid-Victorian--yes, Mid-Victorian tastes.”

“Glass shades with wax fruits underneath, I suppose? Rep curtains and that sort of thing.”

“Oh, _c’était affreux_!” he agreed, with a comic gesture of horror.

“How Miss Page must have enjoyed refurnishing it! She has such exquisite taste, hasn’t she? But the garden? The garden must always have been lovely.”

“It was neglected. Mrs. Burbage was an invalid--fortunately. For the garden, I mean. But Anne had begun to work her magic even then. The first time I ever saw her she had been planting roses round a sundial.”

“Oh, in the lavender garden?”

“She took me there this morning. The rose hedge is very tall now, and the rose leaves were dropping down on to the sundial”--he stretched up his arm--“from a height like this, above it.”

“Yes. Fairholme Court is the most beautiful place in the neighbourhood. Certainly the most beautiful place _I’ve_ ever seen.”

There was a moment’s pause, during which Mrs. Dakin glanced towards the sofa, to which Anne had returned.

Her green and lavender gown fell in graceful folds round her feet. Against the cushions of dim purple at her back, her hair shone with a sort of moon-lit radiance. The poise of her head, the smile that wavered constantly near her sweet mouth, the radiance of her blue eyes, above all a certain dignity, too gentle to be quite stately, yet suggesting stateliness, made her a lovely and a gracious figure.

“Do you know,” said Mrs. Dakin, suddenly, “what surprises me is that the people who knew her long ago, when she first came here, scarcely remember her. They say, ‘Oh, she was a quiet creature. Very shy. We scarcely noticed her. She was just Mrs. Burbage’s companion.’ Things like that, you know. It has often disappointed me. I should have thought she must have been so beautiful as a younger woman.”

“She was always beautiful,” said her companion, quietly, “to those who had eyes to see. But she has learnt to use her beauty. She had first to learn that she possessed it. That took her a long time.” Again he smiled his odd little smile of reminiscence. “They are quite right when they say that she was shy. There are many people in the world, madame, who could be beautiful if they knew how. Beauty, the truest beauty, is an art. A subtle blend of many powers, mental and moral, which result in a mastery of the physical qualities. A knowledge of them, a perfect handling, a moulding of them to the ideal of the spirit. Do you remember what your critic Pater, says of _Mona Lisa_? It is a well-known passage, but it expresses what I am trying to say so poorly, so inadequately.”

Mrs. Dakin shook her head. “I’m a very ignorant person,” she said, with an embarrassed laugh.

“He is speaking of the portrait--which is lovely, according to the spirit rather than the flesh, and he says, ‘_It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries, and exquisite passions._’”

Mrs. Dakin wrinkled her forehead. The last words shocked her a little. Her plea of ignorance was a true one in every sense of the word. It was the plea of a woman who had passed most of her life with ordinary conventional people, as oblivious to the complexities of human life as to the world of ideas in art, in philosophy, in all the realms invaded by human thought and emotion.

If her existence was troubled, it was with the discontent of a child who cries for the moon which it regards as a pretty material plaything, rather than the trouble of a woman to whom the moon is a symbol of the rare, the exquisite things of life, which she weeps to find beyond her reach.

Yet her next remark pleased her companion.

“I think what you said about the rose describes her much better,” she ventured, rather timidly.

He smiled. “You’re quite right. I see you understand our sweet Anne Page. She doesn’t belong to the _Mona Lisa_ type. She’s made up of all the beautiful natural things; of the sunlight and the roses, and the dew. _Tiens!_ Don’t say I’m ignorant of your poets. One of them has come rather near it when he says, ‘_And beauty born of murmuring sound has passed into her face._’”

Mrs. Dakin had never heard the lines before, and hurriedly wondered how she could find them. She felt flattered, shy, and troubled at the same moment. It was rather a fearful joy to be talked to by this Frenchman, who was evidently so used to what she called “clever” people, that he quite naturally assumed her comprehension of his language. She wondered who _Mona Lisa_ was, and half thought of asking Harry. It occurred to her that Harry read a great deal; that his study was lined with books into which she had never thought of looking. He never talked to her about them.

“I suppose that’s because he thinks me too stupid,” was her impatiently scornful reflection.

She was half relieved, half sorry when Mrs. Carfax, with a conventional exclamation upon the lateness of the hour, rose to go.

“Good-bye,” she said, holding out her hand to her companion.

She hesitated, and then, shyness making the words a little brusque--

“If you are ever here again, I hope Miss Page will bring you to see us,” she added.

“_Enchanté_, madame!” he returned with his easy bow and smile.

“Delightful fellow that!” exclaimed Dr. Dakin, as he stepped into the motor-car after his wife. He spoke with an animation unusual to him. “It’s been a nice evening, hasn’t it, Madge?”

“Very,” she returned shortly, pulling the rug round her, and relapsing into silence.

She was thinking of the Frenchman’s smile, and of his voice. He had beautiful hands, she remembered. Her husband looked at her and sighed a little. He would liked to have discussed the party, but Madge was in one of her moods, and he knew that the attempt would be useless.

* * * * *

“There’s an air of unreality about foreigners,” remarked Mr. Carfax, pulling up the window with a jerk, as the hired brougham turned out of the drive.

“Theatrical, rather--the way that fellow talked, wasn’t it?”

“Quite absurd,” agreed his wife. “I didn’t listen. Miss Page is generally more interesting than she was to-night.”

“Yes. Women do better as a rule, to keep to the subjects that suit them,” announced the Vicar. “Not that Miss Page isn’t a clever woman, I believe. At least, Dakin says so, and _he_ ought to know.”

“I suppose this Monsieur--what’s his name--was one of the friends she made when she was travelling?”

“I suppose so. She was away long enough to make shoals of them.”

“You didn’t know her, George, did you, when you were a young man?”

The Vicar shook his head. “I may have seen her once or twice when she was old Mrs. Burbage’s companion. I had just left college then, and was at my first curacy in Nottingham--just before we were married, you know. I came back to the Vicarage once or twice in those days to see the old Dad, and I suppose she must have been at Fairholme Court then. But I don’t remember her. She was nurse and general factotum to the old lady. Mrs. Burbage was an eccentric woman, you know; rather dotty towards the end, I believe. I can imagine that poor Miss Page hadn’t much of a life with her.”

“And then directly she had the place left to her, she shut it up and went away?”

“Yes. That must be nearly twenty years ago. How time flies!”

“I remember we came to the Vicarage just after she had gone, when Sylvia was a baby; the year after your father died. It was a nine-days’ wonder then. And I remember the people at The Chase saying what a piece of luck it was for such a dowdy quiet woman to come into a fortune.”

“They can’t say that now!” observed the Vicar.

“No. I never was so surprised in my life as the first time I saw her. That must be ten years ago now, George?”

“Yes. She was away ten years, and she’s been back at the Court nearly the same time. That makes it about twenty years, as I thought. Dear me, it seems impossible!”

“She doesn’t alter at all, does she? Her hair may have got a little whiter since I first saw her, but I believe she’s prettier even. Well! Foreign travel must be wonderful if it can change a plain, dowdy creature into a woman like Miss Page.”

“Money!” exclaimed the Vicar, sententiously. “Money. It may be the root of all evil, but it’s a great power--a great power, Mary.”

“Mrs. Dakin’s always very much over-dressed, isn’t she?” remarked his wife, as they approached the Vicarage porch.

“Yes. Foolish little woman that--foolish little woman. Take care how you get out, Mary; the step is awkward.”

The sound of a high sweet voice floated out upon the darkness, and Mrs. Carfax looked up sharply at a lighted window on the first floor.

“There’s Sylvia singing!” she exclaimed in an exasperated tone. “She’ll wake all the children. Run up and tell her to stop at once, George! Really, she is the most annoying girl I ever met.”

II

Left alone for a few moments while his hostess was making her farewells in the hall, Monsieur Fontenelle sat still admiring the beautiful room, quiet now, its long windows open to the night and to the sound of the whispering trees.

Lighted by pink-shaded candles, its white panelled walls, its rose-patterned chintz curtains and chair-covers gave it an air of exquisite freshness and purity. Everywhere there were flowers. Roses glowed between the candles on the mantelpiece. China bowls filled with sweet peas, with pink mallows, with snapdragon, stood on tables, or on the top of Sheraton bureaus. Even the deep fireplace was filled with flowering plants.

Appreciatively, Monsieur Fontenelle glanced at the delicate workmanship of a Chippendale chair, noticed the graceful shape of a writing-table, and the beauty of an inlaid bookcase with a lattice-work of wood over its diamond panes. There were only one or two pictures on the walls, whose creamy surface made a restful background to the colour in the room. Monsieur Fontenelle examined them. His quick eye detected a Corot, a tiny sketch of Whistler’s, and then on the wall opposite to him, a landscape at the sight of which a peculiar brightness sprang to his eyes.

He crossed the room and stood looking at it. He was still looking at it when the rustle of a gown made him aware that Miss Page had come back.

Then he turned. She was standing just within the door, watching him, and in her eyes also there was the same curious brightness.

He looked at her a moment whimsically, without moving.

“You are a wonderful woman!” he exclaimed at last, speaking in French.

“Why?” she returned in the same language.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“I leave that to the _bon Dieu_ who made you. He’s responsible, I suppose, for women of your type.”

She smiled without replying.

“You tell me you’re happy?” he asked.

“Quite happy, François.”

Again he shrugged his shoulders. “Come, let us talk,” he said, taking her by both hands and leading her to the sofa. “I only saw you for ten minutes this morning.”

“Let us talk,” she replied. And in French, “_Ça me fera du bien_.”

Instead of speaking at first, he looked at her.

“Anne,” he exclaimed after a moment, “you are amazing! How do you manage it? You look younger than the day I first saw you.”

“But I was old then,” she returned, shaking her head--“very old. A woman who had done with life.”

He answered her seriousness with a slow smile.

“Life had not done with you, had it?”

She did not reply, and with a change of voice, he said--

“So these are your neighbours.”

“Some of them. They are dear people. I can’t tell you half their kindness to me.”

“It’s not difficult to be kind to sweet Anne Page.”

She gave him a quick glance. “It’s nice to hear the old name again.”

“No name ever suited a woman better. So you can live with the inhabitants of Dymfield without boring yourself to extinction? But of course you can. I never saw you bored.”

“Boredom is a modern disease, isn’t it? And you know I am not a modern woman.”

“Thank God!” he exclaimed with fervour. “The little woman whose pretty head I’ve been puzzling all the evening, suffers from it terribly, though.”

“Boredom? You’re very quick, François. You always were. Poor little thing!” she added with a sigh.

“Why? Doesn’t her husband amuse her?”

She shook her head. “No. It’s one of those unnecessary tragedies of life. They don’t try to understand one another. The material for happiness is all there, and they miss it. He’s a dear fellow. Kind, and good; and a scholar too, as of course you discovered.”

“Yes. You have one person at least with whom you need not talk in words of one syllable.”

“Words of one syllable are often the sweetest.”

He laughed. “You remind me of the lady from whose lips whenever she opened them, a flower fell. Your floors ought to be strewn with roses and violets by this time. But come! I don’t want to discuss your neighbours. I want to talk about you. Do you know that in ten years I have only seen you three times? And you must have been through Paris very often. What have you to say for yourself?”

“Twice when I went to your studio you were away. The last time, the _concièrge_ told me you were with a lady.”

“Well?”

“Well I didn’t come up, of course.”

He laughed. “Anne! You are the same Anne. So demure--so discreet.”

“I thought you would have married by this time, François,” she said after a moment.

He shook his head. “No dear Anne, you didn’t. You know I am not the man to marry.”

She returned his glance. “You are right,” she answered quietly. “You have become such a celebrity François, that I ought to be afraid of you,” she added.

His face changed. “I have become a popular painter, you mean.”

“You are not satisfied?” She put the question softly.

He shrugged his shoulders. “One becomes what one is fit to become. I’m a lazy devil, Anne. It wasn’t in me to bear the heat and burden of the day without my hire. I have learnt to give the public what it wants, and to laugh in my sleeve at its stupid shouting. The result is that in every paper the world is assured that I have achieved an international reputation. And next week I shall stand at the head of a staircase, solemnly shaking by the hand, innumerable stupid people who know nothing, and care less about art, but have come because it is one of the functions of the season, to stare at the President of the International Art Congress. _Quelle farce!_”

He laughed a little. “It seems far enough away from that summer twenty years ago, when we all sat in that garden,” he nodded towards the open window, “and talked of our dreams and our ambitions. Ah! we were going to revolutionize art, weren’t we? We were going to bring the world to our feet like the young painters in _L’Oeuvre_, do you remember? The young painters who used to walk about Paris, talking, for ever talking, mad with hope and enthusiasm. And now? Henri is writing for _La Presse_ ... _Sacré tonnerre de Dieu_, as Lantier and Sandoz used to remark so frequently. What stuff! And how it pays! (Henri has a flat, Rue Malesherbes--Empire right through.) Paul has abandoned music, and is making vast sums on the Bourse, and I am President of the International Art Congress.”

He paused.

“And René is dead,” said Anne.

There was a silence. The lamp-lit room with its colour and fragrance was very still. To both of them, their minds filled with the scenes of other days, it assumed for a moment an air of brilliant unreality, like a room seen in a dream. Outside, the trees whispered very softly.

“Whom the gods love----” began François.

He rose abruptly, and moved to the picture he had been examining when Anne entered.

“That’s the real stuff!” he exclaimed. “God! how good it is! How did you get this?” he asked.

“I bought it.”

He wheeled abruptly round. “Have you much of his work?”

“I bought all I could get. _The Bathers_ and _The Forest_ are in my room upstairs.”

“Then France is the poorer by three masterpieces.”

“France will get them back at my death.”

“You have arranged that?”

She nodded. “They belong to his country, of course.”

He came and sat beside her again. “I told you that the Luxembourg had bought my portrait of you?”

“Yes. Dear François the news gave me more pleasure than anything I have heard about you for a long time.”

“It was to be my masterpiece, if you remember. They’re quite right. I’ve never done anything to touch it since. It belongs to my youth.”

He saw that she was pale, and that her eyes looked sad.

“I’ve distressed you. I’m a brute!” he declared impulsively. “And we’re not all _hommes ratés_, thank Heaven! Some of the men of the old Rue de Fleurus days are not to be despised.”

“Thouret, Bussières, Giroux,” murmured Anne.

“Yes; they have big names now. But after all Anne, it’s you who have made an art of _life_. You’re the only real success. You and René--who was wise enough to die,” he added.

“Talk to me about Paris,” Anne urged. “What is your new studio like? Very gorgeous, I suppose?”

“It’s the studio of a popular portrait-painter. Now you know all about it.”

“And the Duclos? And Georges Pasteurs?”

He began to talk gaily, while she questioned him, and they both laughed at reminiscences. There was no end to her eager inquiries.

“How you remember the people!” exclaimed François, presently.

“How can I forget?” she asked.

It was late when he rose to go.

“To-morrow, early I start for London, to prepare for the fuss of next week. I’m glad you won’t be there, Anne.”

His whimsical mocking smile met her as she raised her eyes.

“I should prefer you not to see your old friend playing the solemn fool.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Well! One can’t have everything, and I have five thousand a year. It’s enough to make one comfortable.”

“But not happy,” she said gently.

“That, till forty, depends on one’s temperament. Afterwards on one’s dinner. I’m very happy to-night. Your cook was chosen with your usual discretion.”

She laughed.

“You will be coming through Paris this winter?”

“Not to stay. Paris hurts me a little, old woman as I am. On my way back, in the spring perhaps.”

He kissed her hand. “Most certainly in the spring. It’s _au revoir_.”

III

An hour after her friend had gone, Miss Page sat by the open window in her bedroom. The room was full of moonlight, for she had put out the candles and drawn back the curtains.

Somewhere in the garden, or near it, a nightingale was singing.

Deep shadows lay across the lawn, and all the trees were dreaming. Far out, the meadows covered with a light mist, were like a mystic silver-flooded sea.

For a long time Anne did not move. Her long talk had revived memories. They crowded so swiftly to her mind that she grew bewildered, and as though impelled by a sudden impulse to seek relief, she rose and crossed the room to a tall bureau opposite the window.

Its interior revealed a number of pigeonholes, and tiny cupboards with brass knobs. Pressing a spring under one of these, a deep drawer sprang open.

She felt in its recesses for a moment, and presently drew out a book bound in a linen cover. Then lighting a candle and placing it on the table near the window, she resumed her seat.

In the quiet air the candle flame burnt clear and steady, and opening the book, Anne began to read a journal begun in her childhood. The volume was an ordinary thick exercise book such as schoolgirls use, and on the first page, in a large childish hand, was written--

“_Anne Page_, “_Tufton Street_, “_Dalston_, “_London, 18--_.

“This is my birthday,” it began. “I am twelve to-day, and I have made up my mind to keep a diary like Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. At least I think they didn’t exactly keep a diary. They wrote down what they were all doing at a certain time, and then four years afterwards, they opened their papers and compared notes. I think that was a good plan. But I shall write in my book once a year, on my birthday. So few things happen to me that I dare say that will be quite enough.

“As I have never written a journal before, I will say all I can remember about myself before this birthday. Perhaps if I don’t, I shall have forgotten it by the time I’m old.

“I live at Dalston, and father is one of the curates at St. Jude’s. Mother died when I was two years old, so I don’t remember her. She left me her watch and chain and two bracelets. I have one brother Hugh, but last year he ran away from home, and went to sea. He ran away because he wasn’t happy. Father was very strict with him. It is a good thing to be a boy, and be able to run away. I can’t, because girls can’t be sailors, and there’s nowhere to run to. I miss Hugh dreadfully. He was fourteen, and he was very nice to me. I still cry about him sometimes at night. But it’s no good.

“Our house is very ugly. It’s in a street. It has a little back garden, but nothing will grow there because it’s full of cats.

“I have a governess. Her name is Miss Atkins. She comes every day at half-past nine, and gives me lessons till twelve. Then we go for a walk. But there are no nice walks here. In the afternoon I do needlework, and learn my lessons for the next day, and Miss Atkins goes at six o’clock. She has corkscrew curls, and her hair is sandy like Thomas, our cat. She is cross every arithmetic day, because I can’t do arithmetic. But she says it’s because I won’t, but that is not true. I like history and poetry, and all about the poets and writers. And especially Shakespeare. Sometimes I read out of Lamb’s tales for my reading lesson. I should like to read out of Shakespeare, but Miss Atkins won’t let me. She says it isn’t fit. I don’t know why she says this, because I have found a Shakespeare in father’s study, and some of it is beautiful. I like the Midsummer-Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. The Shakespeare is the only nice book in the house. Most of them are sermons, and about religion.

“I’m going to put a wicked thing in this book, so I must be careful always to lock it up. _I don’t like religion._

“Miss Atkins says she loves God, and I asked her whether father did. She was shocked, and said of course he did, because he was a curate. I wish he loved _me_, but I don’t think he does. He is nearly always cross, and I’m always being punished.”

Miss Page let the book fall on to her lap. Mechanically she turned her face towards the meadows with their islands of motionless trees emerging from the mists. But she did not see them. The childish words, already considerably more than forty years old, already a little yellow and faded, had brought into sight instead, the dreary house in Tufton Street. With the clearness and precision of actual vision, she saw the narrow staircase covered with oilcloth, which led up to the bedroom in which she had spent so many hours of solitary confinement.

She saw the pattern on the shabby wall-paper. She saw her little iron bedstead, covered with a counterpane of thick white material, with a raised pattern upon its surface; the curtains of dingy drab rep on either side of a red blind; the outlook across a leaden street, swept by wind and rain.

She thought of her father, a morose, irritable man whose persistent bad temper, condoned to himself under the guise of necessary chastisement, had driven her brother from the house.

She remembered him in the clothes of his office, shabby and ill-cut, going doggedly about the duties which in later years she knew had been uncongenial.

Half reluctantly Anne took up the book again.

“I said that nothing ever happened to me. But one lovely thing happened last year. I went to stay at Dymfield, with Mr. and Mrs. Burbage. Mr. Burbage was some relation to my mother--a cousin, I think. Anyhow they wrote to father, and asked him to let me come. Their house is called Fairholme Court, and it is a lovely house, only the furniture is ugly (except upstairs in some of the bedrooms, where Mrs. Burbage can’t see it). Mrs. Burbage is very funny. She was kind to me, and I liked her rather, but not nearly so much as Mr. Burbage. I liked him better than any one I ever saw, though he doesn’t talk much, but reads all day long. Perhaps that’s what makes his eyes look so tired and sad. He has a lovely study full of books, and he let me read anything I liked. It was there that I read about Charlotte and Emily and Anne Brontë. They are very interesting, but I wish Emily had been called Anne, like me, instead of the youngest one. I like Emily best. And I read Hans Andersen too, and when I came away Mr. Burbage gave it to me. It is the loveliest book in the world. My favourite story is ‘The Little Sea Maid.’ Some day when I am grown up, I will go to places where there are orange trees, and marble palaces, and the sea is quite blue.

“My bedroom was so pretty. It was like a room in a fairy-tale. There was furniture with spindly legs in it; the kind of furniture Mrs. Burbage said was ugly and old-fashioned. But I thought it was very pretty. There were white curtains to the bed, and the wall-paper had pink rosebuds on it, and the window was like a little door with lots of tiny panes, and it pushed outwards. There was clematis all round the window, and white roses which tried to grow into the room. In the morning I used to hear the birds chirping in their nests, and then I used to jump out of bed, and see the sun rising over the fields. And the garden was all shining with dew, and everything look _enchanted_.

“I was there a month, while Miss Atkins was away for her holiday, and I was _too_ happy. But now I shall never go there again, because father has had a quarrel with Mr. Burbage. It was something about me, I think.”

Her eyes still fixed on the round handwriting, Anne’s memory was working.

Years later she knew that her old friend had once loved her mother, his cousin and playfellow. At her father’s death she had found, on going through his papers, the letter in which he had offered to provide for the child of the woman who would not be his wife. It was a letter full of tact and delicate feeling, but it indicated how much of the little girl’s loneliness he knew and understood.

He pointed out that companions of her own age were necessary for the happy development of her temperament. He wanted to educate her with some neighbour’s children, so that she might live at Fairholme Court, in the country which she loved. She was not strong, he declared, and London air obviously did not suit her. There would of course be no attempt to separate her from her father. She could return to him during the holidays, whenever he wished to see her.

It was a letter written from full knowledge of the circumstances.

He knew the atmosphere of struggling poverty in which Anne, as the daughter of a curate with an income of little more than a hundred a year, passed her existence. He knew also that the man had little tenderness for his daughter, and he hoped that his suggestion might come as a relief.

Even at the age of twelve, Anne could have undeceived him.

Already, unable as yet to put her knowledge into definite form, she knew her father well.

Gloomy and morose, a man of narrow intelligence and invincible obstinacy, he resented any overtures which to his mind savoured of patronage.

In later years Anne knew the bitterness of his life.

The son of a rich stockbroker, he had just finished his course at Cambridge when the financial ruin, which killed his father, struck the death-blow to his own ambitions also.

He had been reading for the Church, with dreams, easy as it then seemed to be realized, of a splendid living, and a possible bishopric.

The girl to whom he was engaged, the daughter of an impoverished Irish landlord, was penniless.

She refused to give him up, and he married her, after taking orders, and entering the Church as a miserably paid curate. Together they settled in the dingy little house near the Church of St. Jude, at Dalston, to prove that love in poverty was a different matter from the same emotion experienced in affluence.

Henry Page was not strong enough to bear misfortune well.

His temper, naturally irrational and impatient of hardship--a temper which it would have required much material prosperity to soften, became soured and exacting under the stress of daily anxious necessity. Five years after their marriage, his young wife, crushed and saddened, gave up the struggle and died, leaving her two children in no very gentle hands.

The boy, determined to call his life his own, had cut the knot of uncongenial family existence by flight.

Anne was left.

* * * * *

Miss Page turned over the leaves of the exercise book slowly.

On the whole, the child she remembered had kept her resolution fairly well.

“_To-day is my birthday. I am thirteen. I am fifteen. I am seventeen._” The words marking another year met her eyes constantly as she fluttered the pages. Several times there was a mention of Hugh. She had heard from him. He was getting on. He hoped some day to be captain of a trading vessel. He had sent her some funny writing-paper from Japan. Another time it was a pressed flower, or some curious seeds from the South Sea Islands.

Once--this was recorded after her seventeenth birthday--he had come home for a week.

“He is nineteen, and so brown and handsome and strong,” was the remark in the journal. “He did not get on well with father. He told him that I ought to go away--that I had no friends, and that my life was very dull. Father was terribly angry. Now Hugh has gone, and I’m wretched--_wretched_. The house is so quiet. I can hear the clock in the hall ticking even when I’m upstairs in my bedroom. It is raining, and the sky is like lead.”

* * * * *

Anne still turned the leaves. There were big gaps in the journal, but if they had been filled, the word across the page would have been the classic _nothing_ of the diary of Louis XVI.

In thought Anne went back over the long, dreary years--the incredibly empty years of a woman whom lack of means as well as lack of opportunity cuts off from the world.

A woman moreover, whose youth was spent under conditions less elastic, less favourable to development than those of modern days.

The cold bare nave of St. Jude’s rose vividly in her mind. She saw the pews full of women in frowsy faded bonnets--the bonnets of Dalston.

She saw the parish room lighted by unshaded gas-burners, in which, shy as she was, she had held classes for work-girls. Again she watched them bending over their desks, giggling and nudging one another when she entered the room.

She remembered the look of the street when after the appointed hour for her class, she emerged from the stuffy room into the night air.

There was a butcher’s shop opposite, with a row of flaring lights, and the butcher in a greasy apron used to stand upon the pavement shouting his wares to the hurrying passers-by.

Then there was the return to the dingy house. A hurried lighting of the gas in the entrance passage, the glare of which revealed the oil-cloth on the floor, growing more worn and shabby every year. How well Anne remembered what was left of the pattern of that oil-cloth!

A descent into the kitchen followed, where she prepared the supper, and directed the clumsy movements of Harriet, the little maid-of-all-work.

Supper then with her father, who sometimes scarcely raised his head from his plate, and seldom spoke a word.

Anne remembered one or two of the curates who had tried to make friends with her.

One of them who sometimes insisted upon walking back with her from her evening class, had hovered upon the verge of a mild flirtation. But to Anne, desperately shy and unused to the society of her fellow-creatures, his words were meaningless and embarrassing. Moreover, her father was unpopular. Frequently embroiled with his colleagues, none of them sought his society, and none ventured to a house to which they were never invited.

In retrospect, she scarcely needed aid from the journal, Anne saw the years pass in grey procession. There was no note of revolt in the record of her girlhood’s days, and the reading was the sadder for its absence. No revolt, no bitterness. Only a sad acquiescence with fate, a gradual numbing of sensation, a sort of mental and moral apathy, grey, leaden, hopeless.

She paused at the words which followed the announcement of her twenty-seventh birthday.

“Last week father was taken suddenly very ill. The doctor is afraid it is paralysis.”

For three years there was no further word in the book, but Anne knew those three years by heart.

They were passed chiefly between the sick-room and the kitchen, in which she prepared invalid food, and directed the little maid in the management of the housework. Helpless as a child, her father required constant unremitting attendance, and when on the eve of her thirtieth birthday he died, Anne found herself literally penniless. The long illness had swallowed up his scanty earnings, and, unprepared for any work in the world, his daughter was left to face starvation.

Fastened inside the book was the letter which saved her.

It was written in the thin, quavering handwriting of an old woman even then ill and feeble. She opened and read it.

“Fairholme Court, “February, 18--

“_My dear Anne_,

“_The news of your loss has just reached me. Before he died, my husband made me promise that if you were ever free, I would ask you to come to me. Will you come now? I am an old woman, and an invalid. In any case, before long I must have had a companion who would look after me, and nurse me when necessary. I cannot offer you a very cheerful home, but if you come you will be welcome._

“_With sincere sympathy for the grief you have sustained_,

“_Believe me_, “_Sincerely yours_, “_JANE BURBAGE_.”

On the next page, the last written page in the book, Anne read these words:--

“To-morrow I go to Fairholme Court. It is eighteen years since I saw it. I am now thirty years old, and what I said as a child is still true. Nothing has ever happened to me. Nothing will ever happen now. It is not surprising. I am very plain, and nothing happens to a plain woman who is also poor. I ought to be very grateful to Mrs. Burbage. She has probably saved me from starving. I _am_ very grateful. But to-night I can’t feel anything except that I don’t care to go on living. If I were a religious woman I should think this sinful, but what I said as a child is still true. I don’t like religion. I mean that it has never affected me. Never made me happy. Perhaps I have never yet found the religion to suit me. I don’t know. To-morrow I begin a new life, but it will be again a life of nursing.

“I try to be grateful for a home. I try to feel cheerful. But all feeling seems to have gone. I remember my thoughts as a child. I was often very eager then, and hopeful. I was often sure in my heart that something delightful would happen to me. But now nothing seems worth while, and I am only very tired. Perhaps when I feel better I shall be glad that Fairholme Court is beautiful and in the country. To-night even that doesn’t matter.

“Hugh wrote to me after father’s death. He has saved a little money, and with another man, a friend, he is going to start a sheep farm in New Zealand. He is engaged to be married to a girl he met on one of his voyages. She has since returned to England, and they will have to wait till he has made a home for her before they can marry. But he seems full of hope, and is very happy.

“I am chiefly thankful for Mrs. Burbage’s invitation, because now I need not be a burden to him. As it is, he has sent me money which he can ill afford, though without it I could not have existed during the past few months. He wanted my photograph, and, to please him, I had it taken. The other copies will be wasted. There’s no one else in the world who wants my picture. All my things are packed. This is the end of my life here. I wish it were the end altogether.”

A photograph, one of the wasted copies, was placed between the leaves, at the last written page.

Anne took it up, and examined it by the light of the expiring candle.

She saw a sad quiet face, with thick hair parted smoothly on either side of the forehead. It was a face which looked older than the one now bent over it. A disfiguring gown, fastened with a little tucker at the neck, concealed the long line of the throat. Except for the indication of a clear cut chin, and a mouth sweet, despite its sadness, there was no beauty, not even a suggestion of grace or charm in the picture.

Anne replaced the photograph, and slowly shut the book.

There was a look of terror on her face. She had called up a ghost--the ghost of her past self.

Like a woman whose one idea is flight, she half rose, and for a moment glanced with frightened eyes about the room.

Dawn was breaking. The eerie, grey light showed her the embroidered linen coverlet on her bed, the spindle-legged dressing-table which had once stood in the little white bedroom upstairs, the flowered curtains at the window, the bowl of sweet peas on the table at which she had been sitting.

She drew a deep breath, and moved close to the window.

The air thrilled with the voices of the birds. The trees were still motionless, as though waiting for the sun; and grey with dew, the meadows stretched away towards the dim horizon. In the rose-garden on the right, beneath the sheltering wall, the sun-dial glimmered white as pearl in the dawn-light.

The candle flared up, and went out with a flicker.

Anne turned, and groping her way in the half light, replaced the book in the drawer, and touched the spring which closed it.

IV

At four o’clock, Sylvia Carfax swung the gate of the Vicarage garden behind her, and stepped into the dusty road.

It was nearly a mile to Fairholme Court, and the sun blazed in a sky of cloudless blue, and beat upon her shoulders protected only by a blouse of thin muslin.

Sylvia was just twenty, tall slim, and, as Miss Page suggested very pretty.

In her own mind Anne often wondered when she looked at the girl’s rich black hair, which made such a striking contrast to eyes blue as the sky, that from the shelter of the Vicarage and all it represented such a southern, opulent type of beauty should have emerged.

To reach her destination Sylvia had to walk through the village, past the blacksmith’s, and past the baker’s shop, with its quaint carving over the entrance porch.

Dymfield was an ideally beautiful village, to which even the doctor’s motor-car scarcely brought more than a hint of the rush and hurry and ugliness of much of modern life.

In the gardens of the thatched cottages, summer flowers made a blaze of colour. Roses and honeysuckle clambered over porch and roof.

The church, resting peacefully in the green sea of the churchyard, was like some great rock, stained with lichen, crumbling with age, beautiful in its decay.

Near it, under the shade of mighty elms, was a row of almshouses, fine specimens of black-and-white work, and at the end of the rambling street stood the old well, with its canopy of wrought iron, and its ancient moss-grown steps.

As she passed through the village in which from babyhood she had lived, Sylvia recognized its beauty and its peace. It seemed a place where it was always afternoon, and for that reason, to the girl who yearned for the morning, herself in the glad confident morning of life, it was intolerable.

She gave herself an impatient little shake, and hurried on.

Now, across the green, the beeches of Fairholme Court were in sight.

In summer they almost completely screened the house, and made deep shadows in the drive. Thankfully Sylvia plunged into the shade and quickened her steps.

The hall door was wide open, revealing the coolness of the white-panelled hall, and as she entered, the air was sweet with the scent of flowers.

She stopped a moment to bend over a great bowl of sweet peas.

“Everything is peaceful here too,” she thought. “But it’s interesting as well. I wonder why?”

The appearance of Burks, immaculate as usual in snowy cap and apron, interrupted her vague musing.

“Mistress is upstairs in her sitting-room. I’ll tell her you’re here, miss.”

“Thank you Burks, she expects me. I’ll go up.”

The maid disappeared, and Sylvia ran up the shallow stairs to the first floor, and knocked at a door on the right.

“Ah! my dear child!”

Anne half rose from a couch which was placed close to the window.

The matting blinds outside were half drawn to keep out the glare of the sun, and the room was filled with a light soft and green, as though it had filtered through a canopy of leaves. Beneath the blinds one caught a glimpse of one of the rose-gardens. Protected by a yew hedge, roses of all colours lifted their sweet, hot faces to the sun. A grass path running down the middle of the garden ended at a white seat, in a bower of white blossom.

Sylvia drew a deep breath. “I believe all the delicious scents in the world are here!” she exclaimed.

“That’s why I like this room in the afternoon,” said Anne. “The sun draws all the sweetness out of the roses, and sends it up here. Take off your hat, my child. You’ve had a tiring walk, I’m afraid.”

“I’d walk twenty miles in the sun to find you at the end of them,” declared Sylvia, vehemently.

Anne laughed, as she got up and rang the bell for tea.

Her white wrapper of cambric and lace trailed after her as she moved. Sylvia touched it with reverent fingers.

“You look so sweet in these things,” she said.

“I ought to have changed my gown properly to receive you. But I was reading, and too lazy to move.”

Sylvia picked up the book which lay on the sofa.

“French, I see by the yellow cover.” She began to turn over the leaves, and suddenly laughed.

“How like you to have a rose-leaf for a book-marker! _I_ should put in a hairpin, or something equally ugly. I wish I could read French easily, then you would lend me all your books, wouldn’t you, Miss Page?”

“Not all of them,” returned Anne, smiling.

“Why not? I’m sure _you_ haven’t got stupid ideas about proper reading for young girls, and all that sort of thing,” declared Sylvia, petulantly.

“I’ve got ideas on the subject, stupid or otherwise. Tea, please Burks. We’ll have it up here. And bring the pink tea-service. It goes so nicely with this room,” she explained to Sylvia in parenthesis.

“Do tell me why you wouldn’t lend me all your novels?” the girl persisted.

“Because certain books, my dear, are of no use to us till life makes them intelligible. And life can only be learnt by living it.”

“I wish I’d lived it then,” protested Sylvia.

“Oh Sylvia, there’s time enough. Don’t wish that,” returned Miss Page, quickly. She bent forward and took the girl’s hand. “Don’t wish your youth away. It goes so fast in any case. And it should be the most beautiful part of one’s life.”

“_Should be!_” replied Sylvia, passionately. “But is it? What’s the good of my youth to me, here in this dull little hole? I’d give the world to be like you, Miss Page. You’re not--not quite young, perhaps----”

“My dear, I’m almost an old woman.”

Her smile was wistful, though it was touched with amusement.

“You’ll never be that!” returned Sylvia, vehemently. “And anyhow, you’re lovely, and every one adores you. And you lead your own life and make it beautiful. And I’m perfectly certain that you _have_ had everything I want. Except that you’re not married. I suppose I shall want to be married some time or other. But, then, as you didn’t marry it must have been because you didn’t want to. Hundreds of men must have been dying to marry you. I’m sure hundreds are dying now----”

“What an awful picture of carnage!” interrupted Anne, laughing, as Burks appeared with the tea.

“What a _lovely_ tea-service!” Sylvia exclaimed, taking up one of the Sèvres cups gently to examine it. “But then everything of yours is lovely. This room is as perfect as the drawing-room, and I think I like it almost better. I love the white matting on the floor, and these green-and-white chair-covers and curtains. And I love a room lined with books. What a lot!”

She began to walk round examining them. “But heaps of them are French ones, so you needn’t be afraid,” she added mischievously. “Oh, and Italian too! Do you read Italian, Miss Page? Really? I ought to be afraid of you. You’re so awfully clever. I believe you keep everything you love best up here, don’t you? The pictures now--I don’t understand pictures, but I like the colour of these. This room seems more _you_ than all the rest of the house. Though it’s all like you in a way.”

“I only receive my _special_ visitors up here.”

Anne’s smile flattered and touched the girl.

She slipped down on to the sofa beside her friend, and moved close to her with a caressing movement, as she took the tea-cup from her hand.

“These cakes were baked expressly for you, so you must do them justice. Really cook makes them very prettily, doesn’t she? They’re rather like the cakes in _Goblin Market_. Do you remember how the sisters

‘_Kneaded cakes of whitest wheat, Cakes for dainty mouths to eat?_’”

She passed them to Sylvia in their silver basket, over the rim of which fell a d’oyley of fine lace and linen.

Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t know anything!” she exclaimed. “I shall never know anything if I stay here. Oh Miss Page, _do_ help me to get away! You can do anything with father. Please persuade him that I ought to go. You know how it is at home. I’m not really wanted. We’re quite comfortably off, and there are enough servants to do the work without _making_ work for me, to try to keep me quiet when I’m aching to go and make my own life!”

She pushed her cup away from her with an impatient movement.

Anne waited a moment. “It’s still the music, I suppose?”

“Yes. I _have_ got a voice. I know I could do something with it. And you see they don’t understand. Mother says I can take lessons from Miss Rowe at Dorminster. _Miss Rowe!_” She laughed derisively. “And father says if I sing well enough to please them at home, and to lead in the choir, what more do I want? They expect me to trot round with mother on her district calls, when I’m really only in the way. Mother _likes_ doing it. She wouldn’t give up her work to me even if I wished it. And I’m supposed to do needlework for the children, when poor Mrs. Jones down the village would be glad of it, and ought to have it. And they think I’m awful and ungrateful not to be quite happy with tennis parties and flower shows for my amusement! Oh Miss Page, don’t you think to be a daughter at home, with no money, at the mercy of your parents, unable to get away, is just like being a slave?”

She poured out the words passionately. Her hands were shaking, her eyes full of tears.

Anne looked at her, and a wave of comprehension and pity passed over her heart.

The girl’s incoherent words were echoes; they touched painful memories of years for her, long past.

She recognized the despairing cry of youth, articulate in these modern times, no longer stifled as in the days of her own girlhood.

Youth, fettered, struggling with passionate clamour to be free.

She recognized the revolt of a temperament unsuited to its environment, bound by a tyranny no less stifling because it was unconscious and even loving.

She rose, and began to walk about the room, conscious of the modern spirit, accepting it as inevitable, and in spite of all the misery it involved, right in its essence, a necessary step towards the just claim for individual liberty.

Sylvia watched her hungrily, like a prisoner who has staked his existence on the goodwill and clemency of a ruler.

“I will do what I can, Sylvia,” she said at last. “I will speak to your father. I think you ought to go.”

The girl’s face grew radiant. “Oh, you’re an _angel_!” she cried. “What should I do without you? Speak to him soon, Miss Page!” she implored. “I can’t bear it any longer. I really can’t. I get on so badly with father now, and with mother too. I can’t help it. I know I’ve got an awful temper, but they irritate me so, and----”

Anne sat down beside her on the sofa. “I will speak to your father,” she repeated. “But, my dear, I know it’s a hard, perhaps almost an impossible thing to ask you, but try to see your parents’ point of view as well as your own. They _have_ one, you know,” she added, smiling. “One that belongs to their age and the traditions of their education. To them, though you don’t believe it, their standpoint is as important as yours to you.”

“But you think mine is right?” demanded Sylvia, breathlessly.

Miss Page laughed. “For you, yes. But I’m sorry for your people.”

“I believe you’re sorry for every one,” said Sylvia, after a pause.

“There’s a tendency to get sorrier for most people as one gets older, I admit. You must bear with me, Sylvia.”

The girl flushed. “Now you’re laughing at me,” she said.

“No. Only remembering how I felt at your age, and being very sorry for you too.”

“Ought I to see every one’s point of view as you do?”

“You couldn’t. It’s not to be expected of you. And after all, it’s right that you shouldn’t. It’s the young who make history, and history is made by seeing one thing at a time to the exclusion of every other consideration. It’s only in the autumn of life that one has time to be sorry. But still my dear, you can be kind even without comprehension. Remember the immortal remark that our parents are fellow-creatures after all.”

She looked at the girl whimsically, and Sylvia laughed.

“How angry father would be to hear you say that!” she cried. “But you wouldn’t say it to him, of course,” she added.

“You know it’s only nonsense; and there’s such a thing as tact, my dear.”

“I know,” sighed Sylvia. “I haven’t got any.”

“That’s another of the things that comes with age.”

“All the nice things come with age, I believe.”

“Well, age should have _some_ compensations,” returned Anne, gaily.

“You have _all_ of them,” Sylvia declared. “All the pretty things that generally belong to girls, and all the interesting things that ought to belong to women. It isn’t fair. You know how to talk to every one. I should _love_ to hear what you say to father. It would be too amusing! Mrs. Dakin came in this morning, and said you were wonderful with the Frenchman who dined here last night. And the way you talk to Dr. Dakin is quite different from the way you talk to father. And of course, you’re quite different with me again. You always remind me of that verse in the Bible about being all things to all men!”

“You’re really a terrible young woman!” was Miss Page’s reply. “Go and sing me something. It’s the only way to stop you from proving me a monster of duplicity.”

“No, no,” urged Sylvia, eagerly. “You only speak to people as they can understand. But the wonderful thing is, that you know by instinct exactly what they _will_ understand, and exactly how to say it.”

“Go and sing,” repeated Anne.

Sylvia went laughing to the piano. “I feel awfully happy. I must think of something that suits.”

She considered a moment, and then broke into a gay little love-song, with a charming refrain.

Anne listened, and as she listened, her determination grew. Sylvia was right. She must go. Her voice was worth cultivating, even at the price of parental displeasure.

“Thank you dear,” she said as the clear, ringing notes ceased. “I feel as though a nightingale with brains had been kind enough to fly into my room.”

“What else would you like?” Sylvia turned her head as she sat at the piano, playing rippling notes with her left hand. The cloud had left her face, and her parted red lips were very sweet.

Anne hesitated a moment. “You read music easily, don’t you? I wonder whether you could sing me a little French song?”

She got up, and opening a cupboard in the wall, began to turn over some papers.

“Here it is,” she said at last.

Sylvia left her place, and knelt beside her friends chair, taking the music from her hand.

There were some words upon the cover, but they were in French, and in a difficult handwriting.

Anne opened the page rather quickly. “You see it’s quite short and quite simple,” she observed.

“Let me read the words first, and you must correct my pronunciation.”

She began to say the lines a little falteringly, but her quick ear soon found their lilt, and she read them well.

“How pretty! They’re quite easy words. I can understand them,” she said, going to the piano again. “Who wrote them?”

Anne did not answer, and Sylvia, engrossed in trying the accompaniment, forgot her question.

“I see how it goes!” she exclaimed, playing the first bars. Involuntarily, as she began the first bar, Miss Page put out a quick hand as though to stop her, but the girl sang on unconsciously, and the hand dropped at her side.

“It’s lovely!” Sylvia cried, playing the last notes softly over again.

“Thank you, dear,” said Anne, gently. She had crossed the room, and was trying on her garden hat.

With one hand she gathered up the folds of her long gown.

“The sun is off the roses now, and I’m going to give you some to take home to your mother. Come out and help me pick them.”

V

Dr. Dakin’s house stood in the village street. It was a plain Georgian dwelling of a type common to every English country town; a type which admirably combines comfort with a certain homely dignity.

It was covered with ivy, carefully trimmed where the rows of square-paned windows broke the front, and its long, narrow door was surmounted by the conventional classic design of skulls and garlands.

As Miss Page crossed the road towards the post-office one morning late in September, Mrs. Dakin tapped at the window of the breakfast-room, and then ran to the door.

Anne smiled as she crossed the threshold. “Why, Madge, what is it? You look radiant, my dear!”

“I am. I mean I feel radiant. Come in. Do come in. I want to tell you.”

Her voice shook with suppressed excitement, as Anne followed her across the stone-flagged hall to a room on the right.

“I’m going to Paris for a long visit!” she exclaimed, drawing up a chair for her friend close to the window. “What do you think of that?”

“I didn’t know you had friends in Paris.”

“Oh yes. Didn’t I ever tell you about Helen Didier? She was one of my school-fellows at the convent near Tours, where I went for a year. She married a Frenchman.”

“And she lives in Paris?”

“Yes. I haven’t seen her for ages--scarcely once since we both married. But I took it into my head to write to her a week or two ago, and just fancy! You’ll be awfully interested. She knows Monsieur Fontenelle quite well. Her husband is a friend of his.”

Anne looked up rather quickly. “Really?”

“Yes. Isn’t it strange? I happened to mention him when I wrote to her, and she knew all about him. She would, naturally, as he’s such a great man; but it’s awfully exciting that he should be a friend, isn’t it?”

“What does Harry say?” asked Anne.

“Oh, he doesn’t mind. He says it will do me good to have a change.”

“He will miss you horribly, my dear.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “He’s so busy, you know. And when he’s at home, he’s always buried in his books. Besides, he knows I must have a change. My nerves get worse and worse, and I’m always having neuralgia. I sleep badly, too.”

“You mustn’t look so brilliant, then,” returned Anne, laughing. “You’ll be considered a fraud.”

“It’s nothing but joy,” Madge declared. “You know I’ve never been to Paris. And just think of getting out of this hole for two or three months, perhaps. I could scream with excitement at the bare idea!”

“When do you go?”

“Next month. I shall be awfully interested to meet Monsieur Fontenelle again,” she added. “He’s so clever, isn’t he? I’m rather afraid of him. I envy you for getting on with him so well.”

Anne smiled.

“Why has he never been to see you before?”

“He’s not often in England now, though he travels a great deal, and is very cosmopolitan.”

“How on earth has he learnt to speak English so perfectly?”

“He has English relations--Lady Farringchurch is one of them. And as a young man he studied over here with a friend. But in any case he’s a wonderful linguist naturally.”

“What interesting people you must have met!” exclaimed Madge, looking rather curiously at her visitor. “I suppose you met him during all those years you were travelling? I often wonder how you stand this miserable little dead-and-alive place. You must have had such an exciting life.”

Anne did not reply for a moment.

“My dear,” she said at last quietly, “when you come to my age, your garden, your books, and your friends make a very pleasant haven before you set sail.”

“And your memories, I suppose?” Madge glanced again swiftly at her friend.

“And your memories--yes,” Anne repeated.

“I shall have none,” declared Madge, restlessly. “None that count.”

Miss Page was silent. “Oh! I know you think me an ungrateful wretch!” she broke out, leaning back in her chair and tapping her foot impatiently. “Harry’s very good and all that. But I’m so _bored_. I’m bored from morning till night. When I get up every morning I think--‘Here’s another dull day, what on earth shall I do with it?’ And sometimes it doesn’t seem worth while to get up and go on.”

Anne watched her as she stared moodily into the narrow trim garden, discontent and listlessness plainly expressed by her eyes and drooping mouth.

She was a woman loved faithfully and with infinite tenderness. If she had allowed them expression, Anne’s reflection would have been translated by a smile and a sigh, both of them utterly unintelligible to the little woman at her side. Both of them were therefore repressed.

“Well!” she said aloud. “I hope you’ll have a very gay time. I’m very glad for you, my dear. Go and be happy. Where does your friend live?”

“Over by the Parc Monceau, wherever that is. _Do_ tell me what it’s like?” she begged, all animation again.

Anne stayed a few minutes longer, talking about Paris, and then rose to go.

Mrs. Dakin kissed her affectionately. “I wish you were going with me. I shall miss you horribly!” she declared.

She followed Anne to the door, and stood a moment, waving and smiling as her friend crossed the street.

All the bored discontent had vanished from her face, and her husband, who at the moment drove up in his car, thought she had never looked prettier.

The reflection was accompanied by a curious dull pain at his heart, a pain to which he was well accustomed.

“I’ll drive you home,” he called to Miss Page, stopping his car at the opposite pavement.

“So Madge is going to Paris?” she said, as they swept off.

“Yes. I hope it will do her good,” he returned shortly. “She complains of neuralgia. Perhaps a change will set that right. I hear the little Carfax girl is going to London to study this autumn?” he added after a moment. “She’s off her head with delight about it. That’s _your_ doing, of course.”

“Well, I suggested it to her father,” Anne admitted.

He laughed. “We all know your suggestions. When a witch ‘suggests,’ mere man is instantly hypnotized. Poor old Carfax can do nothing now, but put his hand in his pocket and produce the necessary fees.”

Anne smiled. “Come in and look at my hollyhocks,” she said, as they turned into the drive. “They’re really worth seeing.”

The doctor followed her through the house and across the lawn into one of the walled gardens. “How gorgeous!” he exclaimed, as she opened the gate.

The enclosure was a blaze of colour. Wine-red, white faintly flushed with pink, yellow soft as a sunset sky, the flowers stood close together in stately rows.

Behind them, on either side of the dividing grass path, masses of phlox, white and rose and crimson, continued the wave of colour till it was arrested by the enclosing walls.

“Look at the butterflies,” said the doctor, instinctively lowering his voice as though he feared to disturb them.

They hovered in numbers above the silken cups of the hollyhocks. On the sulphur-coloured petals of one of them, a Purple Emperor, motionless, extended his splendid wings. Here and there, dazzling in fairy armour of peacock-blue and sheen of silver, darted a dragon-fly.

“The colour of the thing is intoxicating,” murmured Dr. Dakin.

“It reminded me this morning of an elaborately arranged ‘sensation’ scheme, planned by that madman in _À Rebours_. Only of course, he would have despised such a homely natural flower as the hollyhock.”

The doctor smiled. “What a curious anomaly you are here, my dear lady!” he declared suddenly. “And yet that’s not true either, because you also suit the place to perfection. Huysmans, and a country practice, and Carfax--and you! It’s an amazing world. I hope some intelligent Being doesn’t miss the exquisite humour of many human juxtapositions,” he added rather drily.

“I’m glad Sylvia’s going to study,” was Miss Page’s somewhat irrelevant reply. “She has a beautiful voice.”

“Quite remarkable,” he agreed. “She’ll be a difficult young woman though, if that face of hers means anything. I don’t know that you haven’t thrown her to the lions.”

“My dear doctor, isn’t it better to meet the lions, and take one’s chance, than to be preyed upon by restlessness and discontent till the whole of one’s character is worm-eaten?” asked Anne, quietly.

The doctor stooped to examine the Purple Emperor which still lay motionless, basking in the sunshine.

When he raised his head Anne saw the trouble in his eyes.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said. Then abruptly, after a moment, “I wish I could give Madge the life that would suit her!” he exclaimed, jerking out the words awkwardly.

Miss Page waited a moment. “What do you think _would_ suit her?” she asked gently.

The doctor shrugged his shoulders. “She wants to live in London, you know. She wants a gayer life. But I should be no use in town. I shouldn’t make a living even. I haven’t the manner. It’s as much as I can do to hold my own here.”

“Every one who knows you, ends by being thankful to find a splendid friend as well as an excellent doctor,” returned Anne.

The bitterness in his face softened. “If all the world were like you,” he began with a little laugh, and paused. “I’m glad they’re not, though. There must only be one Miss Page. But that’s it,” he went on, “I must know people well--better than one could ever know them in the rush of a London practice, where the polished manner I don’t possess is absolutely necessary.”

There was a silence, while they walked the length of the grass path together.

“I ought never to have married Madge,” he broke out at last, in a low voice. “She’s too pretty, and too gay by nature, for a slow coach like me. This village life is too dull for her. She wants her dances, her theatres”--he made a vague gesture--“all that sort of thing. I can’t make her happy.”

There was a note of sad discouragement in his voice which went to his listener’s heart.

“I think you could,” she said.

He turned his head sharply. “How?” The involuntary hope died. He shook his head. “She’s bored with me.”

“Partly I think, because she imagines you are bored with her.”

He started. “_I?_ Bored with Madge?” He stopped, as though suddenly arrested, and stood staring down at the grass. “I--I don’t think you understand how much I--care for Madge. She’s the only woman I ever wanted to marry. I----”

His voice failed. Miss Page saw that his face was working.

“I _do_ know. Better than any one, perhaps. But I don’t think you understand her.”

He looked at her mutely, waiting for her next words.

“You think of her as a butterfly, don’t you? A woman with no brains, perhaps? Oh! I know,” she interrupted, as he made a gesture of protest. “I know that would make no difference.” She smiled a little. “A man doesn’t want the woman he loves to have brains. But they are useful sometimes. In her case they may be very useful. She would like a life of gaiety, of course. She’s young and pretty, and it’s only natural. But she can’t have it. Very well then, if she were nothing but a butterfly, her lot--and yours, would be hard. But Madge has a mind. Oh, she’s ignorant, of course! She says so herself. She never reads. She never thinks. But that’s habit. No one has ever taken any trouble with her. Did you notice how interested she was the evening we were really talking--the evening Monsieur Fontenelle dined here? She was proud of you then. She wished she could take part in the conversation. Her mind is empty because she has never troubled to fill it. But it’s a mind of good quality. She has the power to be interested in a thousand things. You could open a new world to her, if you were careful--and had a little tact. And we all know that you possess that admirable quality!”

The flattery of her smile was not lost upon the doctor.

Surprise, involuntary hope, gratitude, admiration, all struggled in the look with which he regarded her.

“You always say the right thing,” he declared simply. “I didn’t know the child----” He paused, but there was a look of sudden tenderness in his eyes. “Well! she’s going away now,” he began.

“And that’s such a good thing,” interrupted Miss Page, eagerly. “She will hear and see so much to interest her. She will come back with new impressions. You will have something to work on.”

They strolled out of the garden together, and across the lawn without speaking.

“Good-bye,” said the doctor, starting as though from a deep reverie, as he found himself opposite his car.

He pressed her hand warmly. “You have made me much happier,” he added shyly.

“But don’t forget to tell her very often that you love her, and that she’s the prettiest thing in the world!” Miss Page admonished him, with a laugh. “There are remarks which never bore a woman, however many times they are repeated. Those are two of them.”

VI

The midday post had come while Miss Page and the doctor talked in the garden.

As she passed through the hall after the motor-car had disappeared, Anne found her letters lying upon the table.

She turned them over, and lighted with satisfaction upon one with a foreign postmark.

Her correspondence with François Fontenelle--a correspondence of fifteen years’ duration--had never ceased to be a pleasure to her.

She picked up his letter, and went through the inner hall into the garden, to the seat under the beech tree.

Several things on the first page made her laugh. François was evidently in a gay mood when he wrote. He had more work with portraits than he could get through. He described his sitters with the light raillery he managed so well, presenting them to his reader with a felicity of phrase, a touch as skilful and clever as she well knew the portraits themselves must possess.

It was better to be François Fontenelle’s friend than his enemy, Miss Page reflected, and smiled to remember the rash women who now crowded to his studio, anxious to be painted by the popular if distinguished artist.

She guessed how many of them winced in secret at the result, and marvelled that fashion, as well as religion, should exact its willing martyrs.

“_I hear_,” he said towards the end of the letter, “_that I’m likely to renew my acquaintance with your little friend, Mrs. Dakin. By a strange chance, the wife of a friend of mine, Louis Didier, knew her as a school-girl--went to school with her, I think; and she has been asked to visit them. Louis Didier is a good fellow--an architect. No. You never met him. I have known him myself only two or three years. He belongs to the younger generation. C’est un bon garçon, though his work is mediocre enough. I don’t like his wife. I suspect her of being what you in England call a cat, though to me she is amiable enough. I may possibly have struck terror into her feline heart. When you are in Rome I want you to go again to the Farnesina Palace, and look at the Correggio. You know the one I mean?_” The letter ended with talk about pictures.

Anne read it to the last word, and then sat with it still unfolded in her lap. Her eyes were fixed on the drooping branches of the beech under which she sat.

Its leaves were already yellow, and it rose like a fountain of gold towards the quiet September sky. All round the eaves of the house the swallows were skimming and crying, in the unrest of an imminent parting, and the hazy sunshine wrapped the garden in a dream of peace.

Anne too, sat dreaming. Ever since the visit of her friend, earlier in the summer, her thoughts had developed a tendency to wander back over the years before their meeting.

To-day it was of her first five years at Fairholme Court that she was thinking.

She remembered driving up to the house that was now her home.

She remembered walking through the hall into the drawing-room, distressfully conscious, even through her shyness, of the desecrated stateliness of a dwelling meant for beauty.

True, she would not in those days have known with what to replace the gaudy Axminster carpet in the hall, nor the arsenic green curtains at the drawing-room windows. But little as she had seen, little as she then knew of material loveliness, the right instinct she possessed for form and colour was outraged at every turn by the indications at once trivial and ponderous of Mid-Victorian taste.

As she entered the drawing-room, Mrs. Burbage rose from the sofa on which she had been lying, a woollen rug of rainbow hues thrown across her feet.

She was a little old woman with grey, corkscrew curls hanging in bunches over her ears, keen eyes, and a mouth which combined shrewdness and suspicion.

She looked Anne up and down with a penetrating glance.

“I didn’t think you would have grown so tall,” she remarked. “You were a little creature when I last saw you. Ring for tea, my dear, and then I dare say you would like to go to your room. Parker will show you. Make yourself at home, and amuse yourself in your own way, if you can find anything to do in this dull place. I don’t want you to think you need trouble about running after me, unless I ask for you. I hate fuss. There will be time enough for that when I get worse.”

The words struck the keynote of the future relationship between the two women.

Even at that time Anne’s benefactress was a semi-invalid who did not rise till noon, and usually spent the rest of the day on the sofa, knitting interminably. Her illness, not at first severe, made any but the slightest attention unnecessary. She was a woman a little eccentric, often difficult in temper, but never exacting in trifles.

Her great abhorrence was what she called “fuss” of any sort, and as she frequently preferred to be alone, she left Anne for the most part free.

Her duties gradually became those of general supervision of the household, which composed as it was of elderly well-trained servants, proved no arduous task.

Few callers came to the house. There was never anything in the nature of entertainment at Fairholme Court. The days went on. Monotonously, peacefully, spring glided into summer, summer to autumn; the winters came and went.

A good understanding, a quiet comradeship was gradually established between the old woman and her companion, who moved so gently, whose voice was so soothing, who was always at hand when she happened to be wanted--never in the way when her presence was not required.

Anne practically led her own isolated life. Too shy to make any advances, the people of her own grade in the village, from the outset, ignored the companion of a woman who had never been popular. She was just a quiet, harmless creature, lady-like certainly, but very dull, whom they occasionally pitied for being shut up with “that disagreeable Mrs. Burbage.”

Anne found the bedroom she had loved as a child, now her own, almost unchanged. The rosebuds on the wall were faded certainly, but the dimity valance at the window, the white curtains to the bed were fresh and spotless, and the “spindly” furniture remained. The white roses had grown much taller. They clambered round the window now, and far above her head, looked down at her as she opened it in the morning.

The library was also unaltered, and in this room, and in the garden, Anne found all the joy of her life.

She was permitted to do what she liked with the garden, and, under the direction of the old gardener, who rejoiced to find some one who loved the work, and, delighted in its results, Anne planned and planted and laid the foundation for the beauty that now surrounded her. The hours in the open air restored her health. Insensibly, she grew strong and straight. Her always graceful figure developed, and though it was marred by the ill-cut gowns of the village dressmaker, she carried it superbly.

Through the long winter days, the library was her solace and delight. At first, imperfectly educated as she was, unused to reading, owing to lack of time and lack of opportunity, she was bewildered by the numberless books through which she was free to range.

But gradually she found her way; made a path for herself, and followed it to find it leading her to distant prospects. Mr. Burbage, a gentle and scholarly recluse with a catholic taste in literature, had left a fine and widely representative library behind him, containing not only the masterpieces of French as well as English prose and poetry, but many curious and rare volumes dealing with the less frequented roads of mental travel.

Anne found history, biography, philosophy, in sufficient quantities to last her for a lifetime.

She found curious memoirs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as books on magic, on alchemy, on all the strange and recondite studies which at various periods have exercised human thought. French literature was well represented, and impelled by interest and curiosity, Anne began to recall the little of the language she had learnt with her governess as a child. In this endeavour she unexpectedly found a ready teacher in Mrs. Burbage, who, educated in a French convent up to the time of her marriage, spoke the language fluently, and liked to speak it. Naturally gifted as a linguist, Anne learnt quickly, and often from choice, as time went on, the two women spoke French together, rather than English.

But it was to the English poets that Anne most often returned. Poetry suited her nature. It was the form of art which to her, most fully expressed the heights and depths, the beauty and the terror, the haunting melancholy, the fear, the inexpressible longings, the regrets, the sadness, the innocent delights of life, which, in all its complexity, she had begun to recognize through the world of books.

In life, men went down to the sea in ships, and did business in great waters. In life, there had been beautiful cities, in which a many-coloured crowd of citizens and soldiers, of artists and thinkers, had jostled and fought, and painted their thoughts in churches, and on palace walls; built them into soaring towers, and mighty cathedrals; woven them into immortal books, and lived them in schemes for the regeneration of the world. In life, as Anne had come to know it through her reading, there had been, and still were, fierce passions of love and hate, swaying men and women as the trees of a forest are swayed by a rushing wind. Passions which had given birth to the great stories of the world--the stories of Helen of Troy, of Abelard and Heloise, of Launcelot and Guinevere, of Romeo and Juliet. In life, running like a dark mysterious stream, among the simpler sensations, the more elemental passions of humanity, there had been strange terrors, haunting curiosities, insatiable longings for the unattainable, the unknowable, the unrealized--the desire of the moth for the star.

In life too, there had always existed the fresh unspoiled delight in Nature’s loveliness; in the charming natural embroidery of earth’s garment. Delight in the simple things out of which, as her favourite Herrick told her, he rejoiced to make his songs.

“_I sing of Books, of Blossoms, Birds, and Bowers; Of April, May, of June, and July flowers----_”

In poetry, as in a mirror, Anne found the result of all her reading reflected and transfigured.

It summed up for her all that she had learnt from other books, of love and life, and hope of immortality.

She began with Chaucer, and found him sweet and fresh and hardy as the hawthorn blossom with which he powders his English meadows. She found in him all the simple and tender emotions which have existed in the heart of man since he became human. The love of Custance for her child delighted her.

“Pees litel sone, I wol do thee no harm: With that hire couverchief of hire hed she braid, And over his litel eyen she it laid.

* * * * *

O litel child, alas! what is thy gilt That never wroughtest sinne as yet parde?”

The gentle, natural words, written five hundred years ago, went to her heart. She loved the gaiety, the bustle, the gossip, the sense of colour and vitality in that long procession which wound from the Tabard Inn, along the white roads full of sunshine, which led to Canterbury.

She read the ballads which like vivid lightning flashes illumine the darkness of the Middle Ages, and show the mainsprings of human action to be ever the old mainsprings of love and hate.

She came to the Elizabethan poets--to the period when England had become “a nest of singing birds.” She found Spenser’s glorious love-song, and the wonderful cry in which Marlowe’s Faust links one great love-story to another.

“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss----”

She learnt to know so well that they haunted her thoughts like music, the sonnets of Shakespeare, and the lyrics of all the “singing birds,” Lodge and Peele and Nash, Ben Jonson and Campion, who, a musician in every sense of the word, framed his “Ayres for one voyce with the Lute or Violl,” so as “to couple words and notes lovingly together.” She came to Milton, and the lighter poets of the Restoration, of whom her love was given chiefly to Herrick. The poets of comparatively modern times followed, and led her in due time to Keats and Shelley, who revealed to her the modern note of unrest, and the troubling effect on the human spirit, of beauty, whether revealed as to Keats in the material world, or as to Shelley in the intangible world of ideas. With these two poets, the library, formed in her old friend’s youth, paused abruptly in its representations of English poetry.

Anne found no volume of Browning, nor of Tennyson, on the shelves.

In her friend’s day they were young, untried men, as in a still greater degree, were Swinburne, Morris, and Meredith.

But without them, Anne, like Keats, had travelled in the realms of gold, and the new planet that swam into her ken was the very world in which for thirty years she had lived blind and a prisoner, ignorant of its beauty, deaf to its calling voices.

It was of her five years of solitary reading that Anne was thinking as she sat in the September sunshine with François’s letter open on her lap.

She had read, she had thought. Imaginatively, she had entered into the life of the great world outside her country home.

But of actual individual experience of one personal heart-beat, known to thousands of men and women past and present, she was as ignorant at thirty-five as she had been all through her quiet existence.

Like the Lady of Shalott, she sat weaving her tapestry of dreams before a magic mirror in which the pageant of the world was nothing but a reflection; a shadow-dance of figures, loving, hating, struggling; pursuing brave adventures, triumphing or defeated, hopeful or despairing.

Miss Page folded her letter, and replaced it slowly in its envelope.

It was the day for her class of village children, whom she taught to sew, and to whom, while they wrestled with long seams, she read fairy tales.

There was tea in the garden afterwards, and she had forgotten to tell Burks to put out the strawberry jam.

She rose, and went into the house to repair the omission.

VII

“We shall have a very dull winter,” complained Mrs. Carfax, “with so many of you away. Sylvia and Mrs. Dakin have gone already, and now you are going to desert us. We shall feel quite lost.”

It was a damp afternoon in mid-October, and the wood-fire in Miss Page’s drawing-room glowed cheerfully.

The tea-table was drawn up near its blaze, and Mrs. Carfax leant back comfortably in the corner of the sofa, sipping her tea and eating hot cakes appreciatively.

“So you’re going to Rome?” she continued. “We hoped as you didn’t go away last year you had become reconciled to an English winter.”

“I didn’t mean to go,” confessed Anne. “I was very happy here last year. But somehow this autumn I have begun to long for more sunshine. I know we’ve had a lovely summer, and I ought to be content, but the rain of the last fortnight has decided me.”

She glanced with a little shiver towards the drenched garden. The rain had been too persistent to make much sweeping of leaves practicable, and the grass was strewn with them, yellow, battered and rotting.

“Tell me about Sylvia!” she inquired. “I heard from her the other day, but I dare say you have later news. She seems very happy.”

“Oh, she writes in excellent spirits, as of course she would, now she’s got her own way.”

Mrs. Carfax’s expression was one of rather irritable displeasure, and Anne’s inward reflections turned on that deplorable yet possibly comprehensible antagonism which so frequently exists between children and parents; the tie of blood so binding, yet so provocative of mutual adverse criticism, involuntary irritation and impatience.

“Do you like the boarding-house?” she asked.

“Oh yes. Very nice. Her father and I took her there last week, you know. I couldn’t be easy till I’d seen what sort of place she was in. And men are no good at that sort of thing.” She helped herself to another tea-cake.

“Oh yes,” she repeated, “it’s a very comfortable house; on the Embankment, I think you call it. At any rate, it’s quite close to the school where she takes her lessons. Sylvia shares a sitting-room with Susie Villiers, one of her school-fellows who is studying at the Slade, is it? I always forget the names of these places. It’s a house built on purpose for students, I understand. _Most_ comfortable. Hot and cold water on every floor, and bathrooms, and a beautiful dining-room. To my mind it’s all _too_ luxurious. Everything is done nowadays, it seems to me, to tempt young people from their homes.”

Mrs. Carfax gave an exasperated sigh.

“But Sylvia has a great gift, dear Mrs. Carfax,” pleaded Anne. “It isn’t as though she leaves home to do nothing.”

“That’s what her father says now. He never used to. He always upheld me in maintaining that the place of the eldest daughter is at home. I don’t know what you could have said to change him so, Miss Page, but ever since he talked to you about Sylvia, his cry is that it’s sinful not to use the gifts with which God has endowed us. Men are so inconsistent; and if they’re clergymen they always seem able to quote some text to annoy you. I don’t mean to be profane, but sometimes I have found the Bible most trying.”

Mrs. Carfax sighed again.

“She has a lovely voice. You will be proud of her one day,” declared Miss Page, with her disarming smile.

“But what is she going to do with it? I would never consent to a child of mine singing in public, with her name in newspapers, and on placards and all that! It would break my heart.”

“Still you needn’t think of the future yet, need you? She has years of training before her.”

“But if she’s not going to do anything with it, what a waste of money!” exclaimed Mrs. Carfax, tragically. “I think it’s much better for girls not to have gifts,” she added.

Miss Page was rather disposed to consider that her guest had uttered a great truth.

Her reply however, was non-committal.

“Perhaps,” she said. “But if they _do_ possess them don’t you agree with Mr. Carfax that it’s right to cultivate them? A gift of any sort is such a worrying thing,” she added persuasively. “And if it’s allowed to rust, it chiefly worries its possessor. Now that she’s doing what she was born to do, Sylvia will be contented. I _don’t_ think it’s just because she’s getting her own way that she’s happy. It’s deeper than that. She’s satisfied because she’s fulfilling a need of her nature for which she’s no more responsible than she is for the colour of her very pretty eyes.”

Anne’s voice was so gentle, her smile so irresistible, that Mrs. Carfax was visibly softened.

“At any rate I’m glad it’s not art she’s got a taste for,” she conceded.

To Mrs. Carfax, painting, to the exclusion of all the other activities of the Muses, was art, as Miss Page understood.

“You wouldn’t like her to paint?”

“Oh landscapes and flowers, and that sort of thing is all right. A very nice amusement. I’ve got lots of water-colour sketches I did as a girl, and hand-painted screens, and sofa cushions too. But nowadays art is such a shocking thing, isn’t it? I hear that Susie Villiers draws from the nude, as they call it. To me, it’s a perfectly disgusting idea. And they draw _men_, as well as women. Imagine a young girl having the boldness to draw a man without his clothes!”

“Do have some of this toast before it gets cold,” urged Anne. “Oh! while I think of it I wish you would tell me how to make that delicious shortbread I tasted the last time I came to you.”

Mrs. Carfax, adroitly switched off the topic of art as she understood it, was on firm ground now that culinary operations held the conversational field.

She gave minute directions to which her friend listened with flattering attention.

“I must write that down before I forget it,” said Anne, opening a bureau to take from it her book of recipes.

“How beautifully orderly you are!” exclaimed her guest, glancing with admiration at the packets of papers tied with ribbon, the piles of little books which filled the pigeonholes. “What a pity you never married. You would have made _such_ a good wife. The wives of to-day are shocking housekeepers. Look at that flighty little Mrs. Dakin! The doctor, poor man, must suffer a good deal. I doubt whether he ever gets a decent meal. Don’t you think it’s very extraordinary of him to let her go away for such a long visit as she proposes to make? I think that kind of thing is a mistake, you know.”

Launched upon the stream of gossip for which she possessed a considerable weakness, Mrs. Carfax shook her head portentously.

“He thinks it will be good for her health. She’s not very strong, is she? And this place doesn’t suit her in the winter.”

“Oh! I don’t think there’s much the matter with her health,” answered Mrs. Carfax with a touch of scorn. “She hasn’t anything else to think of. She hasn’t enough to do, that’s what’s the matter with her. One or two children would soon make her forget her ailments. Poor Dr. Dakin! I _don’t_ think she’s very nice to him, do you? I often pity him.”

“But I’m quite sure they’re devoted to one another,” began Miss Page, hailing with relief the entrance of the Vicar, who had called to fetch his wife, and to bid their hostess farewell.

“Well, dear lady!” he exclaimed in his hearty voice. “So you’re off to the land of perpetual sunshine to-morrow. Lucky woman! And Rome too, a city which I have always had a great desire to visit. Most interesting. Most interesting. But you leave us desolate.”

“How kind of you to come and say good-bye! My farewells this week have made me quite sad,” declared Anne. “I hate last days.”

“We shall all miss you terribly. You leave a heart-broken community behind you,” said the Vicar. “Poor Dakin is already bemoaning his fate, bereft of his wife and of you. It’s a good thing Sylvia isn’t here, or we should have had nothing but lamentations till the spring.”

“You all spoil me,” Anne said in a moved voice. “We have been talking about Sylvia,” she went on rather hurriedly. “I’m so glad she’s happy.”

“Best thing for her. Quite the right thing!” declared the Vicar emphatically. “I’m always telling my wife that gifts are ours as a sacred trust. Moreover, when the girl comes back for the holidays and so on, she will appreciate her home, and we shall all get on much better in consequence. Girls as well as boys must find their own paths, and make their own lives. To thwart them only leads to unnecessary friction, and is after all unjust. Every girl should have her chance.”

If Miss Page smiled in secret to find the ideas she had implanted in the Vicar’s mind so well assimilated that they re-appeared in the form of original conviction, no trace of her amusement was visible.

“I’m sure Mrs. Carfax will find that you’re right,” was her remark, as she smiled at the lady in question.

Mrs. Carfax kissed her affectionately. “Good-bye. I’m sure we’re preventing you from looking after your packing,” she said.

“Good-bye,” echoed her husband, enclosing Anne’s frail hand in his vigorous clasp. “Don’t let Sylvia bother you with too many letters. I am convinced that I’ve done the right thing by the child in sticking to my own ideas.”

He smiled the manly smile of self-confidence and wisdom denied to women, and Miss Page, following her visitors to the hall-door, waved to them as they went down the drive together.

* * * * *

The amusement that she need no longer repress, was in her eyes, as she went upstairs to her room; the gentle tolerant amusement of a woman old enough to look at life with kindly sympathy for its absurdities, and that charity without which the spectacle has a tendency to move to a mirth as bitter and more cruel than anger.

She found Burks on her knees before a trunk, still engaged in packing.

“That will do, Burks. I’ll finish it myself,” she said. “You go down and get your tea.”

After the maid had left, Anne opened the door which led from her bedroom into her sitting-room, and examined the shelves with the idea of choosing one or two favourite books to take with her on her journey.

The books in this room were chiefly modern, supplementing the library downstairs.

She chose one or two French novels, and a little volume of Herrick, which had found its way to the shelves mostly devoted to French literature. Then she returned to the bedroom, which was already bright with lamp and firelight.

She hesitated a moment, then went to the bureau, from which several months before she had taken her old journal.

This time she sought for, and found another book. After adjusting the spring, and locking the writing part of the piece of furniture, she thrust this volume, without looking at it, deep into her nearly filled trunk.

VIII

Anne always returned with pleasure to Rome, a city which she knew well, and to which she was bound by many memories. She settled down happily with her maid in the little hotel in the heart of the city, at which she frequently stayed.

It had been chosen chiefly on account of the garden which her rooms overlooked--one of those charming Roman gardens, full of orange-trees in tubs, of oleanders, and of clambering vines.

A fountain splashed in the midst, and the sound of its falling water was music in her ears.

The deep blue sky, the dazzling sunshine never ceased to fill her with a sense of buoyancy and youth, and all her wanderings to distant churches, to ruined temples; amongst pictures, and statues, were a delight.

One morning, when she had tired herself by a long ramble through the halls and corridors of the Vatican, she returned with the determination to do nothing for the rest of the day, but read and be lazy.

She went to her room after lunch, her mind filled with the beauty of the Borgia rooms in which she had just lingered.

The ribbed ceilings, rich with the gorgeous colour of the emblems and coats-of-arms of the princely house, the marble pavements, the lofty windows, formed the empty frame into which her fancy painted pictures of the scenes those rooms had beheld. She heard the rustle of dresses stiff with gold and gems; she caught the backward glance of many a face; the face of Isabella d’Este, of Beatrice, of Lucrezia, framed in the golden hair she washed so frequently, and tended with such care.

“_What’s become of all the gold Used to hang and brush their bosoms?_”

Browning’s words had come to Anne’s mind as she stood for a moment alone in one of the ante-chambers, and glanced about her as though expecting it to be full of ghosts.

She wondered how many of these golden-haired women had loved the painted walls upon which her eyes now rested. Those wonderful frescoes of Pinturicchio with their background of valley and mountain, and their flower-starred meadows; their animals and birds, their fantastic towers, their dainty figures, fanciful and charming as a fairy tale.

She hoped they had loved them, and praised the painter with their sweetest smiles.

Outside in the garden, the fountain splashed in the sunshine, and suddenly its melody was the melody of her own fountain in her own English garden at home.

She thought of it lovingly, and planned a new hedge of briar-roses in the sunny corner where the dovecote stood.

Gradually the memory of the garden filled her mind, and blotted out the stately visions of palaces and princes.

It grew peopled with well-known figures, with men who twenty years ago had walked with her across its green lawn, had sat with her under its trees, laughing, talking, reading, sometimes, but rarely silent.

Presently she rose, and took from a locked drawer the book she had brought from home, and till this moment, forgotten.

Sitting in the sunshine, with the splash of the fountain sounding in her ears, Anne opened it.

“_March 3._ Hugh came home last November to marry Alice,” were the first words that met her eyes.

“They have taken a little furnished cottage by the sea, at St. Margaret’s Bay near Dover, and they want me to stay with them before they sail for New Zealand. Mrs. Burbage says of course I must go, and I start to-morrow to be with them for a fortnight. I long to see Hugh again, but I’m shy at the thought of meeting his wife. I have never seen her.”

Except for the mention of her return to Fairholme Court, there was nothing written in the book from that date, till May of the same year, and the painful colour crept into Anne’s face as she noticed this.

There was no need for written record. Clearly, as though she had recently lived through the experience, she remembered that fortnight’s visit.

She remembered getting out of the train at the wayside station, the nearest station touched by the railroad, for St. Margaret’s Bay. Her heart was beating rather fast. It was eighteen years since she had seen Hugh. Should she recognize him? He would not know her. When he last came home she was a girl of seventeen. The thought of her present age struck her with a shock of dismay.

There were only two people on the platform. A big burly man, tall and bearded, and beside him a girl in a white serge dress.

Hugh and his wife!

“I am Anne,” she stammered, going up to them.

Hugh put his arms round her with his old impulsive roughness, and then held her away from him.

“Why, you’ve grown, Anne!” he cried gaily. “You were such a little thing! So slight, I mean. Darling, this is Anne. Isn’t she a damned fine woman?”

His old laugh rang out boyishly, as Anne turned shyly to his wife.

She was very small, very daintily made, very prettily dressed. Her face, despite her twenty-five years, was still babyish with its large blue eyes and rings of soft hair round a childish forehead. She took her sister-in-law’s hand and smiled, but even then, Anne did not miss the quick glance that scrutinized her quizzically from head to foot.

From that moment, she knew that for Alice she was merely a dowdily dressed woman; an old maid, some one to be treated with patronizing kindliness.

They drove from the station to the cottage, which was almost upon the seashore.

“Hugh loves the sea. He can’t be happy away from it, can you, darling?” Alice asked, slipping her hand into his, as they entered the little parlour where tea was spread.

“Now Anne, tell us all about it!” exclaimed Hugh as they sat down. “Bless my soul, it’s seventeen or eighteen years since I saw you. What have you been doing all this time?”

A sudden paralyzing blankness fell upon Anne’s mind.

What had she been doing? For thirteen years after her brother’s last departure, she had lived in the little house in Tufton Street, managing the house work, anxiously counting her weekly allowance for fear that with all her pains, both ends could not be made to meet. She had nursed a hopeless invalid, and tried to bear his exacting temper with patience. For the last five of the eighteen years she had read books, and worked in the garden. There was nothing to tell them.

Instinctively she felt that to these people who belonged to practical life, who lived and loved, who were in the mainstream of human activity, her world of books meant nothing.

The colour rushed to her cheeks, and left them white.

“I--I have done nothing at all,” she stammered. “You know I have been living with Mrs. Burbage for five years? She’s very kind. But she’s almost an invalid, so we’re--we’re very quiet. Tell me about yourself, Hugh. Things are always happening to you.”

“Well, _this_ has happened to me,” he returned with a laugh, slipping his arm round his wife’s shoulder. “The best thing that ever happened in my life.”

Alice drew close to him with a little nestling movement, and Anne suddenly felt a sickening pain at her heart.

“Don’t be so silly, Hugh! Any one would think we were lovers,” she declared, turning to her sister-in-law. “And we’ve been married ages. Nearly four months.”

“Well, aren’t we lovers?” demanded Hugh, shaking her. “Answer me at once. Aren’t we?”

She got up laughing, and kissed the top of his head.

“Of course we are. But don’t be silly!” she commanded. She blushed, but her eyes were bright with happiness.

“Oh never mind Anne!” said Hugh. “She’s one of the family. She doesn’t count.”

The light, kindly meant words caused Anne another strange pang. She didn’t count. Of course she didn’t count. Why should she?

“How lovely the sea is!” she exclaimed hastily. “I can’t look at it enough. You know I’ve only seen it once before.”

“Nonsense! How’s that?” asked Hugh, with the easy forgetfulness of a man who does not realize the straitened life in which he never had a part.

“I never went away,” said Anne, simply. “There was no money. Once when I was a child, Miss Atkins took me for a day to Broadstairs. You remember Miss Atkins?”

“Old Thomas? She was Anne’s governess, and exactly like a tortoise-shell cat,” he explained turning to his wife. “Yes, what’s become of her?”

“Dead,” said Anne. “She died ten years ago.”

“Poor old thing!” returned Hugh perfunctorily. “Darling, won’t you show Anne her room, and then we can go for a walk before supper. Isn’t it warm here!” he exclaimed, leaning from the open window. “It’s so sheltered you see with the cliffs at the back. Make haste, Anne. We’ll take you on to the downs, and show you the sea to your heart’s content.”

At supper the talk was all about Hugh. His past adventures, his future prospects. He had worked hard, and was now partner of the promising sheep farm in New Zealand, to which next month he proposed to return with his wife.

“I tell Alice it won’t be a very gay existence for her. She doesn’t look much like a farmers wife, does she?” He threw her an admiring glance. “But she declares she won’t mind.”

“_You’ll_ be there,” was Alice’s only comment.

“Oh yes! And there are neighbours too. Very jolly people. And Bob Holmes, that’s my partner, you know, Anne, is an awfully decent fellow. You’ll like his wife, Alice. She’s such a cheery little woman. Oh! it’s not so bad. And the climate’s splendid. Lord! how one misses the sun in this damp misty old country!”

“It will be lovely. I’m longing to go,” Alice exclaimed.

“You see she’s only got an uncle and aunt to leave,” explained Hugh, turning to his sister. “She’s a very lonely little person.”

“Not now,” said Alice, her voice full of content.

* * * * *

Before she had been with them two days, Anne had found herself filled with a passionate longing to return to her quiet home. To get back to the shelter in which she was not reminded twenty times an hour that she “didn’t count.”

She was amazed at the violence of her own emotions.

Every glance exchanged by the married lovers, every word of love, every caress, stabbed her afresh.

She had never before known what it was to feel acutely, and the suffering bewildered her. She was afraid of it. She wanted desperately to escape from herself, this new self which seemed all torn and bleeding.

There was a hunted look in her eyes like that of a starving and desperate animal. She shuddered at them sometimes when they met her suddenly in the glass. One evening, unable to bear the sight of their endearments, she had gone early to her room, pleading a headache. She groped her way to the window, in the dark, and kneeling down beside it, looked out upon the sea.

Every few minutes, a flash from the lighthouse on the cliffs momentarily illumined the still water. Far out, lights moved on the prow of passing ships. She could hear the wash and murmur of the waves, as they broke lazily on the pebbly shore.

For a long time she knelt there immovable, the sound of the sea lulling her into a sort of painless trance, till the hum of voices below gradually filtered to her senses. The evening was so warm that Hugh and his wife were sitting in the garden. At first, numbed and half conscious in mind, she scarcely heeded the murmur of talk, but finally a sentence in a man’s voice reached her consciousness.

“Nonsense, darling! She’s not at all bad looking. Well dressed, she’d be a fine figure of a woman.”

“Why is she so dowdy then?”

“She lives in the country, you see. I suppose there’s no one to dress for. And after all what does it matter?”

There was a little laugh. “No. She’s too old now. She’ll never marry.”

Again there was an incoherent murmur. “Yes I know, darling, it’s boring for you. But she’s had a dreary life, poor girl. I want you to be nice to her.”

“I _am_ nice,” the answer came in a hurt voice, and was followed immediately by a rustle.

“I know you are. You’re a darling. You’re the sweetest thing on this earth!”

There was a sound of a kiss, and Anne drew back from the window with a quick movement.

“Hush!” The exclamation came swiftly from Hugh.

“Oh! it’s all right. Her light’s out. She’s asleep.”

Anne closed the window noiselessly to shut out the voices to which she had listened without her will, scarcely conscious of how they had reached her. She threw herself on her bed in the dark. After all, as Hugh said, it didn’t matter. But she cried all night as though it did.

In the journal which Miss Page held open on her knee, she saw the date of her return recorded.

“_Came back to Fairholme Court, March 17th._”

She remembered her old friend’s greeting, as she went to find her in the morning-room, where she was lying on the sofa.

“Why, Anne! Sea air doesn’t suit you. You’ve got thin, my dear. You look quite ill. You mustn’t go away again.”

“No,” she said quietly. “I will never go away again.”

She remembered going into the library before she took off her walking things, looking round at the walls lined with books, and wondering why they had ever meant anything to her at all.

“Books are no good,” she said to herself, as she went upstairs.

“This also is vanity,” was what the words implied.

* * * * *

Miss Page looked out with a sort of surprise upon the garden steeped in sunshine. The fountain was still splashing gaily into its marble basin. In the blue overhead, two pigeons flashed and wheeled. She had been living over again the life of many years ago, with such intensity of vision and of feeling, that her present surroundings had the unreality of a dream.

After a few moments, she turned the next page, knowing well what she should find, yet curious to see the words in her own handwriting of twenty years ago.

“_May 15th.--We have had visitors to-day for the first time almost, since I have lived here. They were all men, too, and Frenchmen. The parents of one of them, Monsieur René Dampierre, knew Mrs. Burbage long ago, and he called and brought three friends with him._”

As Anne slowly turned the pages, isolated paragraphs met her eye.

“_I felt horribly shy at first, but only for a little while. They were all so nice. I suppose Frenchmen have easier manners than Englishmen, though I have had no experience of either._”

“_Monsieur Fontenelle is very amusing and clever. I like his face, though he looks sarcastic, and I’m sure he can say bitter things. But he never says them to me._”

“_Mrs. Burbage wanted me to describe Monsieur Dampierre in whom she is chiefly interested, because she knew him when he was a child. I found it very difficult. When I had said that he was tall, and broad-shouldered, and very fair and handsome, it seemed as though I had said nothing. It’s his smile and his changing face which make up his personality--a very charming one._”

All through that summer there were short entries concerning the little colony of Frenchmen that had settled in the village.

Anne glanced at them with a smile. It was a very sweet smile, scarcely sad, scarcely regretful. It was the smile of content with which a woman bends over a bowl of dried rose-leaves, and feels again the warmth of the sun, and sees the glitter and the blueness of the day when the leaves were red.

IX

It was grey and cheerless in Paris, while Anne sat in the sunshine of Rome.

Winter had set in early, and in François’s studio the stove piled with fuel was almost insufficient to warm the great room.

It was as he had suggested, the typical luxurious studio of a rich man.

A broad divan under the window, was piled with cushions, and supported by them in an attitude suggestive of extreme comfort, François sat and smoked while he talked to an old friend.

The Vicomte de Montmédy, rich now, through his marriage with an American heiress, was a lover of the arts, a connoisseur and a buyer of pictures.

Fontenelle had known him in the days when he was only a struggling and unsuccessful painter.

His title and his noble birth, had stood him in better stead than his talent. That this was of an inferior quality to his fine taste in art, François had early recognized, and his felicitations on the subject of his prudent marriage had therefore gained an added warmth and fervour of approval.

The two men had been talking while the daylight waned, and when François, finding his match-box empty, rose to refill it from a jar on a side table, he paused to glance with a shiver upon the prospect outside the window.

The studio looked upon the Luxembourg Gardens. The trees were bare now, and their branches showed black and stiff against a wintry sky.

The paths underneath them, in summer gay as the flower beds, with children and their nurses, were now lightly powdered with the first fall of snow.

“I ought to have gone abroad,” he declared, lighting a cigarette. “If it were not for these confounded commissions, I should be in Rome at this moment. There’s no light here. It’s abominable!”

“Why Rome?” asked the Vicomte lazily.

“I love Rome. And then sweet Anne Page is there, and she’s always an attraction.”

The other man looked up quickly. “By the way, it’s _her_ portrait the Luxembourg has bought, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He made a quick movement. “Good heavens man, it’s here, and I’ve never shown it to you. I forgot you hadn’t seen it. It goes next week. I kept it to do a little work on the background first.”

“Quick! Show me before the light goes,” urged his friend. “I was always curious about it.”

François crossed the studio rapidly, and returned with a large canvas.

“The best thing I ever did in my life,” he said deliberately, as he placed it on an easel in the middle of the room.

The Vicomte had risen, and in a silence that lasted for some time the men stood before the picture.

“Charming!” he murmured at last. “Adorable! They’ve picked out the right thing, _mon ami, hein_? The smile! How well one remembers it. So sweet, and so shy. And that flowered gown. Admirable! It suggests one of the Botticelli Madonnas. It might be a robe all sown with stars. And the hair, that delicious soft hair that was no particular colour--_couleur de miel_, perhaps.”

“Mistress Anne Page? She has brown hair, and speaks small, like a woman,” quoted François softly.

“What’s that?”

“It’s Shakespeare. And it’s Anne Page,” he answered smiling.

“And the flowers! The great sheaf of flowers she’s carrying. They’re English, and ‘sweet-Anne’ too.”

Fontenelle looked amused. “You always pronounced it like that,--as one word!” he said.

“I used to think it _was_ one word. Just a Christian name; a lovely name.”

He joined in his friend’s laugh.

“When did you do this?” he asked after a moment.

“Just before she went.”

“Was I away then?”

“You were just married. You had gone to America with your wife.”

“Yes. I stayed a year. But when I came back why didn’t you show it to me?”

“I put it away. She wouldn’t accept it, and I didn’t want to see it, after she had gone. I never looked at it again till last spring. Paul! Do you know that picture’s been painted eighteen years, and I’ve never done anything to touch it since? Encouraging, isn’t it? Something to congratulate one’s self upon.”

The last words were accompanied by a bitter laugh. His friend was silent.

“Here comes tea,” said François, with an abrupt change of voice.

His _femme de ménage_ entered with a tray which she placed on one of the tables. She went out, and re-entered with the spirit lamp and kettle.

“_Voilà, Monsieur!_”

François began to put the tea into the teapot.

“Antoinette brews it abominably; I always make it myself,” he remarked.

“This tea-habit dates from ‘Sweet Anne’s’ time, doesn’t it?” asked the Vicomte.

“I believe it does. Do you remember the flat in the Rue Vaugirard? And Anne pouring out tea on winter afternoons?”

Before the other man could answer, he turned to the picture again.

“I painted that as a sort of memory of the first day I saw her, in an old English garden. Did I ever tell you how we four, the old four, you know, first met Anne Page? _You_ only knew her here in Paris, when she had learnt to dress, when she had learnt to talk, when she had grown used to us and our ways. We saw her in her garden, when she knew no one, when from year’s end to year’s end she spoke to no one but the invalid old woman with whom she lived.”

“What were you four doing in her garden?” inquired the Vicomte, helping himself to sugar.

“Well, René was in England. He was often there, visiting his relations--his mother’s people.

“You know he was educated in England? Went to school there, to Beaumont, and afterwards lived some time in London. René was an Englishman with at least half his nature. And he loved England because of his mother. Well, he wrote to me that year--to Thouret, Dacier and me, to suggest that we should join him for the summer. He told us he’d found a gorgeous village, where we could all paint and write, and go on with our beastly art as much as we liked. We thought it wouldn’t be bad, so we said all right, and packed up our traps and went.

“Have some more tea? Well, another cigarette?

“Dymfield is in Warwickshire, _mon cher_,” he went on, striking a match, “and Warwickshire is Shakespeare’s county, and Anne Page is one of Shakespeare’s women. So it was all as right as it could be.

“We put up at the inn. The Falcon it was called. Such a jolly old place! Sixteenth century. Yawning fireplaces, beams, oak staircases, walls a yard thick. You know the sort of thing.

“And the village! Thatched roofs all stained with moss. Oh, the colour of those roofs! Cottage gardens full of hollyhocks and roses. Such a church! If you’ve ever seen a really beautiful English village, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Dymfield is one of them.”

“And how did you get to know Anne?”

“Well, René’s mother had been a friend of the rich woman of the place, an old lady who no more deserved to possess Fairholme Court than she deserved Anne as her companion.”

“Cantankerous?”

“I don’t know anything about her moral qualities. Her taste was execrable. Anyhow René made his mother responsible for taking us to see the place--a wonderful jumble of every style from the fifteenth century downward. But beautiful! _Mon Dieu_, beautiful as a dream. And Fate was kind. The old lady was ill in bed, and sweet Anne--I told you she was her companion, didn’t I?--was forced to do the honours.”

François got up, and began to pace up and down the floor as he talked.

“We were all packed into the drawing-room to wait, the first time we called, and while René was making absurd remarks about the sofa cushions, and the bead mats, and the whole chamber of horrors, I caught sight of Anne coming across the lawn.

“She wore that gown.” He nodded towards the portrait. “An absurd thing really, but it suited her because it showed her figure.”

“Her figure was superb,” murmured the Vicomte.

“Yes.”

Fontenelle paused a moment. “Even at the time,” he said rather slowly, “I wondered how she would strike René. Because she wasn’t really beautiful, you know. Certainly not in those days. Only remarkable looking, curious, and very sweet.”

“But he was struck too?”

“I remember he looked up suddenly, and said, ‘By Jove, who on earth is this? It’s some garden goddess or other. Flora. Yes, that’s it,--Flora. Good Lord, let’s run out and burn incense or something!’

“She had a heap of flowers, branches of lilac and hawthorn and things, in one arm, supported against her hip, and with the other hand she held her dress away from her feet. She was moving quickly across the grass. You know how she walks?

“Then she came into the drawing-room, and we saw her curious face.”

“There it is!” said the Vicomte, with his eyes on the portrait. “You’ve got it exactly. Something between a Botticelli Madonna and a pagan goddess--Flora is admirable. But it’s the sort of face that it takes a painter to admire.”

“She had been considered hideous all her life, of course. She thought herself desperately plain. Even when we burnt incense,--and René at once began to send it up in clouds,--she thought we were laughing at her.” François laughed gently himself.

“You remember Anne? You know how she would take praise. Adorably, like a little girl who is almost too shy to be pleased. It was absurd, of course. She was by no means young even then, remember. But somehow that only made it more piquante. Anne is one of the few women for whom age is an absurd convention. Quite meaningless, quite beside the point. The goddesses are immortal.”

“But there was nothing of the goddess about her nature,” objected his friend.

“Good heavens, no! Except physically. She’s a mortal woman if ever there was one. She’s just what she always was, sweet Anne Page.”

Twilight was creeping into the studio. The polished floor with its costly rugs, the pictures on the walls, the outlines of cabinets and tables, all were growing dim and indistinct. The last light from the window above the men’s heads fell across the face of the portrait on the easel. It looked down upon them gently with the wavering uncertain smile in the eyes, and on the lips, red and soft as the petals of a rose.

“René saw a great deal of her that summer, I suppose?” asked the Vicomte, breaking a silence.

“We all did. The gods for their own inscrutable purposes had decided Anne’s fate. The old lady got weaker and insisted upon having a hospital nurse. She was in her room all day in bed, and Anne was bidden to entertain us.

“When we were not in her garden, she was at the old barn which René and I had rigged up as a studio.

“She amazed us all. Do you know those tightly shut buds on a rose-tree, that you think will never open? And then the sun shines, and gradually, very slowly, a little every day, they grow pinker and sweeter, till at last they are roses?

“I think the sun came out for Anne that year, for the first time in her life.

“We made her laugh. I don’t believe she had ever laughed before. And we discovered that she had brains, and taste and understanding, and _instinct_ for everything that fired our young brains. Instinct is the word for Anne. It’s a sixth sense with her. The only sense it’s any good for a woman to possess. The very sense that nowadays with their education and their emancipation, and their ‘rights,’ women are doing their best to kill.

“And she’d read, _mon cher_. Good heavens, what she’d read! The modern English woman with her smattering of Latin and Greek, is an ill-educated prig beside her. For five years she had been shut up in a library, and I believe she had read everything worth reading in her own literature, and much of ours too, for that matter. And I, who like René am partly English by education at least, know what that means. It’s a magnificent literature for those who have ears to hear, and a heart to understand.”

He began to light one of the lamps, stooping over it as he talked.

“She used to read poetry to us sometimes. Thouret and Dacier knew very little English then, but they could understand the simple things when she read them. I can hear Thouret now, trying to say after her--

“‘_I sing of times trans-shifting; and I write How Roses first came red, and Lilies white._’”

François laughed, as he mimicked the accent of his friend the novelist, who since the days of which he talked, had attained an almost European reputation.

“That’s Herrick. You don’t know him? Well, he’s an English seventeenth-century poet, and he wrote on purpose for a woman as simple and natural as Anne Page. She used to read him to us in an old walled garden, where in June that year, the lilies were ‘coming white.’”

“And Dampierre?” asked the Vicomte. “I didn’t know Dampierre in those days, remember. Tell me something about him.”

He spoke as one speaks of a great man who is dead, whose lightest word is of importance to the admirers who survive him.

“René was twenty-seven then,” said François, slowly. “He was a year younger than I. You know how he looked? He was like his mother. Quite magnificent. Oh sometimes absurdly handsome, when the right mood affected his face. He used to dress like an Englishman in those days, in white flannels. When he and Anne walked together they were worth looking at, I can tell you.”

“But she was, what was it? Seven--ten years older?”

“Yes. She remembered that,” returned François.

His companion glanced quickly in his direction. He had never heard the whole story, and his curiosity was roused; but something in his friend’s voice assured him that it would not be gratified.

He made a tentative effort, however, by a suggestion half seriously offered.

“_Mon ami_, you were in love with her yourself.”

François echoed his light laugh. “No,” he declared. “No. My feeling for her now is what it has always been. I have paid her the compliment of thinking of her in a different way from every other woman I ever met. And I’ve never arrived at defining that way to myself. An English writer--I’m boring you to death with English writers to-day,--comes nearest to it in his definition of religion. He says ‘_religion is morality touched by emotion_.’

“Well, I believe what I have always felt for Anne Page is affectionate morality,” he laughed again, “strict morality mind, touched with emotion.”

“Have you seen her lately?”

“I saw her last June, for the first time in three or four years.”

“She’s altered, of course?”

“She has. She’s more beautiful. She’s really beautiful now, so that even the turnip-headed people she lives among see and acknowledge it.”

“That’s rather wonderful.”

“You would think so, if you saw her with them. She’s the village goddess and oracle. Giving to charities with both hands, petitioned for advice and counsel, loved by every one, high and low. That’s not surprising. Nor is it more surprising, I suppose, that she’s happy. Her nature is essentially simple and maternal. She ought to have had children and children’s children by now.”

He got up and switched on all the lights, revealing the spacious room, and the beautiful things it contained; revealing also once more the portrait on the easel.

The Vicomte again examined it. “The Luxembourg has made a good choice,” he repeated. “It’s a beautiful thing, _mon cher_. Gracious, dignified, sweet--but sad. In spite of the smile, because of it, I suppose, profoundedly sad. But why? She was not, she is not a sad woman.”

François was moving about the room, rearranging the canvases against the wall.

“She was sad then.”

The Vicomte waited, but François said no more, and the conversation turned upon other matters.

As he rose to go, he stooped to examine a little sketch propped up on the top of a cabinet, against the wall.

“That’s rather nice,” he remarked critically. “It’s the little woman I met here the other day, isn’t it? Dark. Pretty. English. Who is she?”

“A Mrs. Dakin. By the way, she’s one of Anne Page’s friends. One of the people in her village. She’s staying here with Madame Didier.”

“Louis Didier’s wife? Did they know her then?” asked his friend quickly.

“Who? Anne? No. It was all ages before their time. Louis has only been in Paris five or six years.”

“So much the better. That woman’s a cat, _mon cher_. Sleek fur, claws and all.”

“Madame Didier? I agree,” returned François with a laugh. “The typical English devotee of Mrs. Grundy. Louis goes in mortal fear of her.”

“_Tant pis!_” exclaimed the Vicomte, with an accent of commiseration.

X

Towards the middle of December, Mrs. Carfax became possessed with the idea of going to London.

Various circumstances had combined to render her projected visit pleasurably fraught with interest.

There was shopping to be done, of course. There was also Sylvia to embrace;--Sylvia whose holidays were so short that she herself had suggested the advisability of staying in town for Christmas, in order not to interrupt her work.

Naturally Mrs. Carfax was an