"We could trace him," Gideon said disdainfully, "through the publisher or the printer. If we chose to."

"But there's no address given! Only the name of the press, Anubis, and doesn't that sound as much an imposture as "Vernon Bellefleur" itself?" Jasper said. (For he was one of the leading suspects-he traveled often to the city, by himself, on business errands for Leah-and he wanted to dissociate himself from the volume altogether.) It was thought finally that Christabel or Bromwell, those rebellious unhappy children, might have sent the book through the mail, simply to stir up trouble. For of course Vernon was dead. Their Vernon was dead.

QUERY REMAINED ON the cabinet top for nearly two weeks. No one cared to tell Hiram about it, yet no one (for such was the impish nature of the Bellefleurs) wanted to spare him the experience of discovering it. Every day Noel and Cornelia whispered together: Has Hiram read the thing yet? Has he gone into the library, has he picked it up?

Cornelia was convinced that the author was Vernon. Her beloved nephew Vernon, whom she had somehow, unaccountably, paid no attention to during his lifetime. "And I just know those poems are about us, in some hideous code we can't read!" she said, pressing her beringed hand against her bosom. "He was always so strange, even before he turned against us."

"Don't be absurd, old woman," Noel said. "That Vernon is gone."

"But he always had talent-! Whatever talent is. He was always-oh, you know-he was always so-so spirited, so hopeful-The way he used to tag around after Leah-"

"The words that came out of his mouth were incomprehensible!" Noel said angrily. "Do you call that talent-?"

But he was not really angry. In the past several months-since the "difficulties" with the fruit pickers, and his brother Jean-Pierre's abrupt and unceremonious return to Powhatassie (where the old man was now ensconced, for therapeutic purposes, about which the Bellefleurs were in unanimous agreement, in the Wystan Sheeler Memorial Wing of the prison)-he had acquired a slapdash, almost hearty air, and looked more than ever like a cocky old bantam, restless for a fight. The family's amazing financial successes struck him as unreal, and he could not see, as Leah so frequently and so teasingly insisted, that they had something to do with Germaine: he had lived so long with failure, he could not put much faith in the present. Success was a pair of $200 Spanish-styled boots, failure was the old filth-softened pair of slippers he wore about the house. The one fitted tightly, the other was sprawling and splayed as his old feet themselves. There was no question which he preferred.

"We are millionaires once again," his wife sometimes whispered, silly as a girl. "And Leah promises more-even more!"

Noel grunted a reply, discourteously.

He liked to turn family conversations around to problems, like the mysterious "Vernon Bellefleur" whose book of poems they had been privileged to read. Or the inexplicable leaks in the new slate roof which had cost them-ah, God!-so many thousands of dollars. Half the new trees in the garden were dying of a mysterious black spot blight, had they noticed? And what of the rebellious old couple (great-grandmother Elvira and the old man from the flood, her absurd bridegroom, who had begun to strut about like a member of the family, turning his foolish paternal smile on anyone who approached) and their plans to move across the lake-? They were openly defying Leah; they insisted upon going to live with great-aunt Matilde to spend their "twilight years," as they called them, in solitude; and naturally this would prevent Leah from tearing down the old camp and rebuilding it according to her and her architect's elaborate plans. You see, you see, Noel liked to chuckle, things are always going against the grain-!

NO ONE DARED give the book to Hiram, directly. But one evening, having returned from a three-day business trip to Winterthur, he came upon it while riffling through an accumulation of financial newspapers and journals and odd bits of mail.

Query. Poems by Vernon Bellefleur.

No one was present in uncle Hiram's room to observe his face as he snatched the book up; no one was present to observe with what urgency he began to read. A nerve twitched in his right cheek as he leafed quickly through the book, pausing here and there, murmuring a line of verse aloud. What was this-! How had anyone dared-!

Trembling, Hiram forced himself to return to the beginning, and read the poems in order.

Whether, in the end, he believed the poet to be his son, or an impostor, or, simply, a stranger with the improbable name of "Vernon Bellefleur"-no one knew. Nor was it known (for no one, not even Noel, dared ask) what he thought of the poems, whether he found their gnomic queries provocative or maddening. It was common knowledge that the book, a dozen of its handsome pages torn out and a dozen more mutilated, and the spine broken, was discarded along with the accumulation of newspapers, journals, and nuisance mail, and burnt in the incinerator by one of the servants.

Air.

Insatiable Gideon Bellefleur!

It was not known (for he himself would have scorned to keep a tally) how many women Gideon Bellefleur loved in his lifetime, and loved, shall it be said, successfully; still less was it known how many women loved him. (And loved without hope, in defiance of fate, even when it had become common knowledge throughout the region how cruelly Gideon behaved.) But it was known to a few persons at the Invemere airport, among them the former bomber pilot Tzara, who was to be Gideon's flight instructor, that the last woman he loved was the tall, aloof, mysterious "Mrs. Rache" who, dressed in tight-fitting men's trousers and a khaki jacket, appeared at the airport every week or ten days to take up, alone, the airport's single Hawker Tempest, a surplus fighter from the last war. The Tempest was the little airport's prize: for it boasted a 2,000 horsepower engine. And it was this feisty plane the Rache woman rented!

Gideon fell in love with her one chilly November afternoon when he happened to see her striding into the hangar, roughly tucking her colorless brown hair into her helmet, her narrow shoulders hunched forward in an attitude of impatience, her back to him. She wore, as always, a man's trousers. And a drab khaki-colored jacket or shirt. And her pilot's helmet, with the amber goggles snugly in place. Gideon stared after her, losing the thread of the conversation he was having with Tzara. Quickly and helplessly his eye took in the compact strength of her buttocks and thighs, the long, lean stretch of her back, the graceless movement of her elbows as she tucked in her hair, eager to get to her plane. When Gideon did not reply to a question of Tzara's but continued to stare into the hangar, Tzara said, with a sad smile, That's the Rache woman. And that's all I can tell you. We don't even know exactly where she flies.

BEFORE THAT GIDEON had loved Benjamin Stone's wife, and before that a nineteen-year-old beauty named Hester, and before that . . . But the affairs had ended badly. Abruptly, and badly. There were tears and protestations and occasionally threats of suicide, and always self-pitying litanies: How did I fail you, Gideon, what did I do wrong, why won't you look at me, why has everything changed. . . . Fatiguing, and predictable, and even at times silly, once Gideon's feeling for a woman died (and it might die overnight-it might die in an hour), these sad litanies: and the tear-glistening cheeks and the mournful does' eyes and the lips that, no longer eagerly kissed, always appeared faintly repellent. How did I fail you, Gideon, the women asked, sometimes "bravely," sometimes in raw shameless gasping voices that might have been the voices of children; why have you stopped loving me, what did I do wrong, won't you give me another chance, what has happened. . . .

Gideon's natural good manners prevented him from thrusting them away, or shouting at them to have some pride (for, like most of his family, he detested people who wept in public, or who broke down in situations clearly inhospitable to their tears); he had often to restrain himself from taking an abandoned mistress in his arms, and covering her face with kisses merely to soothe her, knowing how such an action would only prolong the woman's agony. He had encountered women who, knowing love had died, would have eagerly and desperately settled for pity-that most despicable of emotions!-and it was his strategy, his necessary strategy, to behave as coolly and judiciously as possible with them, though never without courtesy, until they grasped the fact that he would never love them again: that the extraordinary "feeling" they had evoked in him simply did not exist any longer.

Why, he wondered, sometimes irritably, did they love him?-why with such passion?

How much simpler his life would have been, he often thought, if he'd been born with a different face! His cousin Vernon's, for instance. Or a different manner, a different presence.

In the months since his accident Gideon had begun to think about his life, though thinking, and certainly brooding, were quite alien to his character. The notion of thinking, of withdrawing oneself from action in order to systematically think, struck him as not only unmanly but implausible: for how could one force oneself to think, merely think, when the world awaited! But since his hospitalization Gideon had begun to contemplate his life, and though he never turned his thoughts onto his family or his marriage or, in fact, anything connected with the castle, he frequently considered the many women with whom he had been involved over the years.

He had loved them, each of them, so much at the time. He had loved them painfully and recklessly and desperately. One after another after another . . . His need for them had been raw and intense, almost frighteningly intense; his sexual appetite at such times was insatiable. And far from alarming women this appetite seemed to evoke in them a corresponding hunger . . . or was it merely a helpless yearning . . . a wish, at bottom childish and doomed, to maintain that appetite even as they fed it, and to maintain their sense of themselves as beautiful, desirable women capable of a man's prodigious desire. That there were so many ugly rumors about Gideon Bellefleur throughout the land, that he was (so it was whispered) responsible for more than one young woman's death, seemed to deter other women not at all: he sometimes thought his reputation aided him. Though how perverse, how absurd, how doomed it all was-! His mother-in-law, the insidious spiteful Della, once muttered in his unwilling ear that after poor Garnet, every woman will deserve him, and though he hadn't, of course, acknowledged the old woman's words with more than a curt bow of his head, he was coming to see their gradual truth. For didn't these women deserve their fate, bound up as it was with their endless capacity for self-delusion . . . ?

And then there was Gideon himself: handsome, still, in a manner of speaking, but no longer the Gideon of old.

He eyed himself without sentiment, even with a kind of sardonic gratification. For his skin was now sallow, even somewhat jaundiced-even, in certain lights, somewhat bronzed-and it was drawn tightly across his cheekbones, which were cruelly prominent. Hospitalized, he had had to endure the humiliation of endless examinations, and they had shaved his skull more than once, so that the hair grew out unevenly, in coarse gunmetal-gray clumps through which he could barely force a brush. He was now beardless, for the first time in many years. His angular jutting chin promised no tenderness, nor did his curved, sensual mouth, with its look of impatience. His eyes were darkly shadowed and striking, perhaps more striking than before, but he had, hadn't he (so he amused himself, thinking as he eyed the stranger in the mirror), the gaunt watchfulness of a long-legged sharp-billed aquatic bird of prey . . . ! Flesh had melted away from him, not only at his belly and waist, but at his chest and shoulders and upper arms as well, so that he simply wasn't as muscular, as strong, as he had been; and he wondered-was it his imagination, or had he actually lost an inch or two in height? His frame seemed to be settling down, settling into itself. And of course he had a permanent limp, a rather appealing slight limp, as a consequence of his smashed right kneecap.

Gideon Bellefleur, so much changed! Yet he saw clearly that it was Gideon Bellefleur. And he was still handsome, even with that gaunt hungry stare, and the cold, rather reptilian smile he could not, it seemed, control. Women were struck by him, they were attracted to him, they succumbed (after a siege that might be absurdly protracted, or absurdly abbreviated) to his demands, and this was "love," this was a "love affair," always profoundly exciting at the start. Perhaps if he shaved his head again, Gideon thought, and went about with a convict's mean, sour, ravenous look, women would then fear him . . . ? Or would it have little effect?

The only woman in the land who could never be brought to feel desire, let alone love, for him was Leah. And so he was free, wasn't he, he was wonderfully free, fairly drunken with freedom, and quite guiltless! The world was all before him, to explore as he wished. And hadn't his own mother-in-law predicted that each of his women, after Garnet, would deserve her fate?

STILL, HE FELL in love with the Rache woman, whose first name no one-not even Gideon-ever learned.

Even before happening to notice her at the little airport north of Invemere Gideon had been mildly interested in private planes; it was a slight prickling of an interest, strong one day, somewhat abated the next, unpredictable. The previous spring he had arranged for an extensive and costly crop-dusting operation out of the Invemere airport, and he had found himself boyishly impressed with the aging pilot Tzara's performance. Flying with such lordly brazenness low across the fields of wheat and alfalfa-pulling back and rearing, rising, at the very final moment, to avoid a line of trees-bringing the battered old Cessna high, with an appearance of effortlessness-checking speed and dropping-and then again rising-the single constant-speed propeller whirring invisibly-the low-slung wings and prominent tail now colorless, now glaring with sunlight as if afire: how masterful Tzara was! As Gideon sat in his airconditioned automobile, with the windows rolled up tight, Tzara had flown over the road, quite low over the automobile, and waved at him. He had, it seemed, winked. Or so Gideon thought.

And in that instant it seemed to Gideon that Tzara-who was in his late fifties, if not older, and had flown more than two hundred bombing missions in the war-before-last-possessed a freedom that went beyond anything Gideon had ever known. The speed, the mastery!-the daring! The courage! Tzara in the compact little plane, skimming low over the Bellefleur fields, with clouds of white powder billowing out behind him, Tzara in his frayed helmet and goggles, hired by the hour, a servant, in a sense, of Gideon's, nevertheless soared above Gideon, and knew secrets Gideon did not know.

The plane's agility, even hampered as it was by the 1,800-pound chemical hopper tank, made Gideon's automobile seem tiresomely earthbound.

AFTER THE ACCIDENT he had come to feel a certain revulsion for cars. Not for the cars themselves-for he admired, still, their appearance-so much as for the fact that, in a car, one was forced to drive along a road. A narrow strip of pavement; or, worse, a dirt or gravel road. How predictable it was, how earthbound. His fastest car had taken him 125 miles per hour along the highway to Innisfail, late at night or very early in the morning, but even the Cessna crop-duster could fly at 151 miles per hour, and there was an open-cockpit Fairchild at the airport that could go much faster. And there was, of course, the Hawker Tempest with its compact body and comparatively brief and low-slung wings, and its dazzling bold red-and-black fuselage. . . .

Who is that woman, Gideon wanted to know, the one who takes up the fighter? How does she know how to handle it? Did she get her license here? Don't you know anything about her?

Only that her name was Rache. But not even that: only that she was married to a man named Rache, whom they never saw.

Tall, lean, flat-bodied. With the hips of a young boy. Always, in the instant before Gideon (who had taken to hanging about the airport) managed to see her, pulling the plastic goggles down over her eyes, tucking her hair impatiently into the helmet. A strong jaw, pursed lips, a handsome deeply tanned skin. Her profile, Gideon saw, almost with resentment, was aristocratic: the nose not unlike his own. He judged her age to be thirty, thirty-two. . . . She was not exactly young, she was certainly not a girl, and he was tired, ah, how he was tired, of the trembling bleating inconsolable passions of girls! Perhaps, he thought one day, having nearly confronted her as she strode toward her plane, she was even older. Whatever age she was would please him. She would please him, simply by glancing his way.

He stood on the runway, shading his eyes, watching her taxi the plane out, steeling himself against the propeller's passing roar and the possibility-which was of course only a frail possibility-that she might suddenly lose control of the plane, just at takeoff, and nose-dive into that clump of poplars. He stood on the cinder runway, shivering in his lightweight clothes, watching the Hawker Tempest until it was well out of sight-rising and rising and rising, and banking to the left, to the west, toward the mountains. Sometimes he waited for her to return, though she was always gone a considerable period of time, and it halfway embarrassed him, that she should see him there, waiting, so flat-footed and earthbound and hopeful. Waiting for her. Waiting for something.

HE HAD COME to feel a certain revulsion for the earth itself.

He had been thrown against it so carelessly, as if he were nothing more substantial than a rag doll. Knocked against the windshield of the Rolls, tossed against the door and against the stubbled cornfield-dripping blood into the August dust-crying Germaine, Germaine! My God, what have I done to you! (And, later, in the hospital in Nautauga Falls, waking delirious from the anesthesia, he had continued to call for her. Why did he think, everyone wondered, he had carried his three-year-old daughter off, to speed with him along the Innisfail road?) A certain revulsion for the earth, and for himself. Tricked as he had been, by the men who had tampered with his car. (Yet had he been tricked, knowing very well that they had tampered with it?) . . . A revulsion for Gideon. Walking on the earth. Walking on the earth as one must, so long as one lived. And now he limped, now his right knee ached, he was beginning to resemble his father whom he had, he scarcely knew when, stopped loving.

Germaine . . . ?

Far from home, in nameless towns, often with nameless women beside him, Gideon woke uttering that name. Germaine, is it time? Is it time for all of us to die?

INSATIABLE GIDEON!.

Fascinated now with the air, and with planes. What is air, and how do we climb into it? How do we escape the earth?

Falling in love with the Rache woman, who either ignored him or returned his greeting with a curt nod. His blood going heavy and sullen with love for her: his breath going shallow.

Cessnas and Fairchilds and Beechcrafts and Stinsons and Piper Cubs and other small light planes, taxiing along the bumpy runway and lifting above the poplars and banking into the wind and rising, rising . . .

He came to love the odor of gasoline and oil. And the hush, the fear, the almost palpable fear (for the plane might crash in the instant its wheels touched earth) as Tzara returned with one of his student pilots. Shall I take lessons? Shall I make a fool of myself? Why the hell not!

Prowling about the grimy little airport, whistling tunelessly. Making casual conversation with the mechanics, who never flew, who had no interest in flying, but who had certain opinions-offered cautiously enough-about the Rache woman. (Her original pilot's license, they said, had been issued in Germany.) Feeding coins to the cigarette machine and smoking those stale cigarettes; chewing, simply because his hunger leapt upon him, chocolate bars tasting of wax, from the vending machine in the manager's office. Gideon in love, insatiable Gideon in love. When the Hawker Tempest taxied out the runway and lifted into the sky and began its slow ascent Gideon felt his soul drawn after it, thinner and thinner, until nothing remained in the cold glowering air but the wind sock's sullen flapping noise. It was the noise, he knew, of his own heartbeat.

Insatiable Gideon Bellefleur, a gaunt shivering figure at the Invemere airport, obviously homeless.

THOUGH TZARA KNEW the Bellefleurs were buying the airport, he never spoke of the transaction to Gideon; when he spoke, and he spoke rarely, it was only about flying, and about the weather.

He took Gideon up for the first time in a Curtiss biplane with faded yellow wings, one of his own planes. Gideon climbed into the cockpit, his eyes filling with tears behind the amber-tinted goggles. Of course his life was being changed. It would never be the same again. His heart rocked in his chest as if he were a small child, and genuinely frightened.

What is air, and how do we climb into it? How do we escape the earth?

The old plane taxied down the runway, bouncing and vibrating, and lifted, at the last minute (for the line of scrawny poplars had been rushing back with dismaying speed), and Gideon's breath was torn from him and he exclaimed aloud with a child's delight and terror: ah, how wonderful! how uncanny! they were in the air now! they were flying! Absurdly, he could not stop trembling. His jaws clenched, his breath came in shudders. As if it were secretly attached to the earth the pit of his stomach sank as the plane rose.

Now the earth fell away. It was only a surface, falling away. As Gideon stared in amazement the sky swung downward and opened majestically. The poplars were gone. The weedy field adjacent to the runway was gone. Now they were flying, wind-buffeted and rattling crazily, above a forest. And now above a field. In the near distance the Powhatassie River wound narrowly through winter fields, glittering snakelike as he had never seen it before. Tzara carried them above it, and it was gone, fallen away behind them. Fields, forests, rectangles of farmland, houses and barns and silos and outbuildings, grazing animals in snow-stubbled fields, ever smaller, ever more miniature as they climbed into the air: how queer, how marvelous, how uncanny! Of course it was perfectly commonplace, planes were perfectly commonplace, Gideon knew he had nothing to fear, and yet he could not stop trembling, and he could not stop a mad sunny smile from raying across his face. At last! Such joy! Such freedom! His heart soaring! His spirit rising above the earth!

This is it, isn't it! he shouted to Tzara, who could not, of course, hear.

The Joyful Wedding.

Many were the impassioned cross-Atlantic wires, and the tear-splotched letters in reply; many were the tasteful, modest gifts Lord Dunraven sent to his shy beloved (on Michaelmas eve an antique ring with a single pink pearl, on Christmas Day a Japanese shawl shot through with bright purples and greens, on Twelfth Night a tiny German music box inlaid with tortoiseshell and hammered silver-which poor Garnet felt she could not accept, and yet could not bring herself to return for fear of hurting her suitor's feelings). When Lord Dunraven returned to America shortly after the New Year, and was, of course, a houseguest of the Bellefleurs, there were many weeks of letters delivered by hand to Garnet, in Mrs. Pym's house in Bushkill's Ferry, and weeks of ostensibly secret meetings in that house (with Della, of course, close by in an adjoining room, as a kind of chaperone), weeks of sleepless nights, increasingly impassioned pleas from Lord Dunraven's side, gradually weakening defenses from Garnet's: until at last, to everyone's astonishment, not least to Lord Dunraven's own, Garnet agreed to be his bride.

"I cannot say-I cannot know-if I will ever come to feel such love for you, as you declare you feel for me," Garnet wept in his arms, "but-but-if you truly do not think me unworthy-if you truly do not hold me in secret contempt for having given my heart and soul to another man-and ah! how unwisely- If it's as you declare, that my hand in marriage will make you happy, will save you from despair, then-then-then I cannot refuse you, for you are, Lord Dunraven, as everyone exclaims, the kindest of men-the most generous, the most considerate-"

Garnet's words brought to Lord Dunraven's ruddy face an even deeper blush, and for a moment it appeared that he did not comprehend-did not dare comprehend the import of what he heard. But then, whispering only, "Ah, my dear! my beloved Garnet!" he tightened his embrace and pressed upon her anxious lips a warm, passionate, husbandly kiss.

GARNET HECHT, THE parentless servant girl, the step-granddaughter of old Jonathan Hecht, impoverished, barely educated, and, since the shame of her affair with Gideon Bellefleur and the birth of her illegitimate child, a figure of contemptuous pity in the Lake Noir area-Garnet Hecht to be Lord Dunraven's bride! To be the bride of that finest of gentlemen, and to live on his country estate in England for the rest of her life!

It was really, as everyone said, most extraordinary.

Extraordinary, said Leah. Our unhappy little Garnet to be Lady Dunraven.

Of course there was a great deal of excited talk. And yet, oddly, very little of it was mean-spirited. For it seemed quite clear to the Bellefleurs, even to Leah, that Garnet had resisted Lord Dunraven's proposals; she had attempted to break off communication with him more than once; it was certainly not the case that she had seduced him, and cajoled him into marriage. She had, they felt, behaved honorably. Though Garnet was not a Bellefleur she had exhibited a Bellefleur's integrity-it was a pity, really, that they couldn't claim her for one of their own.

Grandmother Cornelia offered to throw the castle open for the wedding: for it looked as if, if Morna were actually going to marry Governor Horehound's son (and that courtship was a stormy one), the wedding party would be held at the governor's mansion, and not at Bellefleur Manor. And it was not to be until June, if indeed it took place at all. "You really must allow us," grandmother Cornelia told the shy couple, "to do all we can. The renovations in the west wing are nearly complete-we've made over the entire third floor into a particularly lovely guest suite and of course it would make an ideal bridal suite-so spacious, so private-"

But in the end Della insisted, and of course no one dared oppose her, that the wedding party be held at her house. Garnet and Lord Dunraven would be married at the Anglican church in Bushkill's Ferry, and there would be, afterward, a small gathering at her house. "Garnet has been, as everyone knows, the dearest of daughters to me," Della said, her lips twisting as if she were trying not to cry, "and I will miss her-I will miss her terribly. But I want only her happiness. And this marriage has come to her from heaven. It has come to her from what must be called heaven."

So the wedding and the party would be held across the lake. But the date presented a problem. For Lord Dunraven naturally wished to be married as quickly as possible (he had waited so long, so very long, for his beloved's consent, and he was not a young man; and he was anxious, as well, to return to his homeland), but Jonathan Hecht was now critically ill, and it was feared he might die at any time. Dr. Jensen held out no hope. And, indeed, the cadaverous old man looked deathly. Cornelia and Della discussed the situation for hours. If they went ahead and planned the wedding for early March, as Lord Dunraven seemed to want, it was probable that Jonathan would just have died-and the wedding would have to be postponed. But if they waited for Jonathan to die-that was, of course, out of the question, in execrable taste. The most strategic thing would be to have the wedding immediately, but this too was out of the question-the haste would only provoke unseemly gossip, and ruin plans for a meaningful celebration.

In the end they scheduled the wedding for the first Saturday in March, before the start of Lent.

AND SO IT took place on that day, without a single difficulty. There were fears that at the last minute Garnet might change her mind-for she did continue to worry about the propriety of the marriage, and whether she deserved Lord Dunraven's love: but she held fast to her decision, and exchanged her wedding vows in a clear, firm voice. Never had a bride, everyone exclaimed afterward, looked so exquisitely beautiful. And never had a wedding been so joyful.

The little church was tastefully decorated with lilies, white roses, and white and pink carnations; the bridegroom, his silvery-gray hair brushed back smartly from his temples, had never looked more handsome; and the bride-ah, the bride: her slender hips and small, high breasts were shown to advantage in a simple white dress with a smocked bodice, and she wore, on her thick honey-blond hair, which was parted in the center of her head to fall in two gentle curving wings over her temples, a veil of Flemish lace that had been Della's bridal veil. She carried herself proudly-there was no fear, as some of the less charitable Bellefleurs said, that she would slink guiltily up the aisle, or burst into tears at the crucial moment. Her skin appeared creamy, and flawless (the subtle ravages of the past two years had quite disappeared); her neck was nobly columnar; the erect grace of her carriage suggested that she was, even at this time, Lady Dunraven. The only testimony of her nervousness was the trembling of her bridal bouquet of white and pink carnations.

Quite apart from the beauty of the bride, and the love that showed so clearly on the bridegroom's face, the wedding was remarkable for another reason: not only had old Jonathan Hecht managed not to die and disrupt the plans, he had, through what must have been a preternatural effort, forced himself up out of his sickbed, and, in the wheelchair he had not been able to use for five or six years, he attended the wedding-and gave the bride away.

"What a feat! What a surprise!" grandfather Noel said, gripping the old man's arm afterward. "You go your own way, don't you, eh?-like all of us!"

Noel was the liveliest, and the loudest, of the wedding guests. He declared he didn't mind making a fool of himself, and went about kissing the women, and insisting upon dancing with the bride, almost as if she were his daughter. "Lady Dunraven, is it? Lady Dunraven? Yes? Right?" he said, winking, and hugging the blushing young woman until Cornelia came to take him away. "You go your own way like all of us! I see that now! I'm beginning to see that now!" he crowed.

And so Garnet and Lord Dunraven were wed at last, and soon sailed for England, where they were to live out the rest of their lives in contentment: for the joyful wedding did prognosticate a joyful marriage. The following January they were to send a wire, never received, announcing the birth of a son; but in general, after they left for England, communications between them and the Bellefleurs were but feebly maintained. "It's true, it's true," Della said with a sad smile, "we all must go our own way."

AND YET:.

A scant two days before the wedding Garnet sought out her lover Gideon, and spoke passionately with him, in secret, for three-quarters of an hour.

She wanted, she said, simply to say goodbye to him. For, as he must know, she would be married on Saturday, and would leave for England shortly afterward. Her life was taking a turn she could not have anticipated. "Between us . . . between you and me . . . so much has passed," she said with difficulty, "that it is almost as if . . . almost as if we had been married, and had suffered together the loss of our child. And so . . . And so I wanted to say goodbye to you, in private."

Deeply moved, Gideon took the young woman's hand and brought it to his lips. He murmured something about her pretty engagement ring-the small pink pearl in the antique setting-which he had not seen before.

"Yes," Garnet said vaguely, "yes, it's very pretty-Lord Dunraven is so fine a man, I scarcely-I scarcely-" and, staring at her lover's gaunt, melancholy face (for he too had suffered, perhaps more cruelly than she), she lost the thread of her words.

After a pause Gideon released her hand. He wished her happiness in her marriage, and in her new homeland. Was it likely she would ever return to America?

Garnet didn't think so. Lord Dunraven frequently expressed a wish to "settle down," after the draining turbulence of the past year; for he was, evidently, accustomed to a far quieter life. "He is by nature a gentle person," Garnet said. "Unlike . . . unlike you. And your family."

"A fine man," Gideon said slowly. "Who deserves happiness."

"Yes, a fine man. An exceptionally . . . fine man," Garnet said in a hollow voice.

They stood for a while in silence. In another part of the house a piano's treble notes were struck merrily, and children shouted with laughter; there was a comfortable odor of wood smoke from one of the fireplaces; the door to this room, not firmly closed, was nudged open by one of the cats-by Mahalaleel himself, resplendent in his thick ruffed winter coat. He mewed inquisitively and trotted forward, quite as if he and Gideon were on friendly terms. His tawny eyes, in the lamplight, glowed with a covert intelligence, and his enormous silver plume of a tail was carried high.

"Well-" Garnet said. She paused, blinking rapidly. "I had only meant to- I thought, since between now and Saturday-"

Gideon nodded gravely. "Yes, there is a great deal to be done, I should imagine. You'll be very busy."

"Mrs. Pym tells me-she tells me you've bought an airport, in Invemere, is it? And you're learning to fly a plane-"

"Yes," Gideon said.

"But isn't-isn't that sort of thing dangerous?"

"Dangerous?" Gideon said. He had stooped to rub the great cat's head, and seemed distracted. "But-but a man must challenge himself, you know. Only in motion is there life."

"And your wife doesn't object?" Garnet said in a small, quavering, reckless voice.

"My wife?" Gideon said strangely.

"Yes. She doesn't object? For of course it must be-it must be dangerous."

Gideon laughed, straightening. Garnet could not interpret his tone.