'There wasn't any joke, and we were just absurd,' I said penitently, in my turn laying my hand on hers. 'Forgive me. I'm always sorry and ashamed when I have behaved as though I were ten. I do try not to, but sometimes it comes upon one unexpectedly--'

'Dolly is a little old to behave as though she were ten,' said Mrs.

Barnes, in sorrow rather than in anger.

'And I'm a little old too. It's very awkward when you aren't so old inside as you are outside. For years I've been trying to be dignified, and I'm always being tripped up by a kind of apparently incurable natural effervescence.'

Mrs. Barnes looked grave.

'That is what is the matter with Dolly,' she said. 'Just that. How strange that you should have met. For it isn't usual. I cannot believe it is usual. All her troubles have been caused by it. I do not, however, regard it as incurable. On the contrary--I have helped her to check it, and she is much better than she was.'

'But what are you afraid she will do _now_?' I asked; and Dolly, coming out with, the book under her arm and that funny little air of jauntiness that triumphs when she walks over her sobering black skirt and white cotton petticoat, prevented my getting an answer.

But I felt in great sympathy with Mrs. Barnes. And when, starting for our walk after tea, something happened to Dolly's boot--I think the heel came off--and she had to turn back, I gladly went on alone with her sister, hoping that perhaps she would continue to talk on these more intimate lines.

And so she did.

'Dolly,' she said almost immediately, almost before we had got round the turn of the path, 'is the object of my tenderest solicitude and love.'

'I know. I see that,' I said, sympathetically.

'She was the object of my love from the moment when she was laid, a new born baby, in the arms of the little ten year old girl I was then, and she became, as she grew up and developed the characteristics I a.s.sociate with her name, the object of my solicitude. Indeed, of my concern.'

'I wish,' I said, as she stopped and I began to be afraid this once more was to be all and the shutters were going to be shut again, 'we might be real friends.'

'Are we not?' asked Mrs. Barnes, looking anxious, as though she feared she had failed somewhere in her duties as a guest.

'Oh yes--we are friends of course, but I meant by real friends people who talk together about anything and everything. _Almost_ anything and everything,' I amended. 'People who tell each other things,' I went on hesitatingly. '_Most_ things,' I amended.

'I have a great opinion of discretion,' said Mrs. Barnes.

'I am sure you have. But don't you think that sometimes the very essence of real friendship consists in--'

'Mr. Barnes always had his own dressing-room.'

This was unexpected, and it silenced me. After a moment I said lamely, 'I'm sure he did. But you were saying about Dol--about Mrs. Jewks--'

'Yes.' Mrs. Barnes sighed. 'Well, it cannot harm you or her,' she went on after a pause, 'for me to tell you that the first thing Dolly did as soon as she was grown up was to make an impetuous marriage.'

'Isn't that rather what most of us begin with?'

'Few are so impetuous. Mine, for instance, was not. Mine was the considered union of affection with regard, entered into properly in the eye of all men, and accompanied by the good wishes of relations and friends. Dolly's--well, Dolly's was impetuous. I cannot say ill-advised, because she asked no one's advice. She plunged--it is not too strong a word, and unfortunately can be applied to some of her subsequent movements--into a misalliance, and in order to contract it she let herself down secretly at night from her bedroom window by means of a sheet.'

Mrs. Barnes paused.

'How very--how very spirited,' I couldn't help murmuring.

Indeed I believe I felt a little jealous. Nothing in my own past approaches this in enterprise. And I not only doubted if I would ever have had the courage to commit myself to a sheet, but I felt a momentary vexation that no one had ever suggested that on his account I should.

Compared to Dolly, I am a poor thing.

'So you can understand,' continued Mrs. Barnes, 'how earnestly I wish to keep my sister to lines of normal conduct. She has been much punished for her departures from them. I am very anxious that nothing should be said to her that might seem--well, that might seem to be even slightly in sympathy with actions or ways of looking at life that have in the past brought her unhappiness, and can only in the future bring her yet more.'

'But why,' I asked, still thinking of the sheet, 'didn't she go out to be married through the front door?'

'Because our father would never have allowed his front door to be used for such a marriage. You forget that it was a school, and she was running away with somebody who up till a year or two previously had been one of the pupils.'

'Oh? Did she marry a foreigner?'

Mrs. Barnes flushed a deep, painful red. She is brown and weather-beaten, yet through the brownness spread unmistakeably this deep red. Obviously she had forgotten what she told me the other day about the boys all being foreigners.

'Let us not speak evil of the dead,' she said with awful solemnity; and for the rest of the walk would talk of nothing but the view.

But in my room to-night I have been thinking. There are guests and guests, and some guests haunt one. These guests are that kind. They wouldn't haunt me so much if only we could be really friends; but we'll never be really friends as long as I am kept from talking to Dolly and between us is fixed the rugged and hitherto unscaleable barrier of Mrs.

Barnes. Perhaps to-morrow, if I have the courage, I shall make a great attempt at friendship,--at what Mrs. Barnes would call being thoroughly indiscreet. For isn't it senseless for us three women, up here alone together, to spend the precious days when we might be making friends for life hiding away from each other? Why can't I be told outright that Dolly married a German? Evidently she did; and if she could bear it I am sure I can. Twenty years ago it might have happened to us all. Twenty years ago I might have done it myself, except that there wasn't the German living who would have got me to go down a sheet for him. And anyhow Dolly's German is dead; and doesn't even a German leave off being one after he is dead? Wouldn't he naturally incline, by the sheer action of time, to dissolve into neutrality? It doesn't seem humane to pursue him into the recesses of eternity as an alien enemy. Besides, I thought the war was over.

For a long while to-night I have been leaning out of my window thinking. When I look at the stars I don't mind about Germans. It seems impossible to. I believe if Mrs. Barnes would look at them she wouldn't be nearly so much worried. It is a very good practice, I think, to lean out of one's window for a s.p.a.ce before going to bed and let the cool darkness wash over one. After being all day with people, how blessed a thing it is not to be with them. The night to-night is immensely silent, and I've been standing so quiet, so motionless that I would have heard the smallest stirring of a leaf. But nothing is stirring. The air is quite still. There isn't a sound. The mountains seem to be brooding over a valley that has gone to sleep.

_August 29th._

Antoine said to me this morning that he thought if _ces dames_--so he always speaks of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly--were going to stay any time, perhaps an a.s.sistant for Mrs. Antoine had better be engaged; because Mrs. Antoine might otherwise possibly presently begin to find the combination of heat and visitors a little--

'Of course,' I said. 'Naturally she might. I regret, Antoine, that I did not think of this. Why did you not point it out sooner? I will go myself this very day and search for an a.s.sistant.'

Antoine said that such exertions were not for Madame, and that it was he who would search for the a.s.sistant.

I said he couldn't possibly leave the chickens and the cow, and that it was I who would search for the a.s.sistant.

So that is what I have been doing all day--having a most heavenly time wandering from village to village along the mountain side, my knapsack over my arm and freedom in my heart. The knapsack had food in it and a volume of Crabbe, because it was impossible to tell how long the search might last, and I couldn't not be nourished. I explained to my guests how easily I mightn't be back till the evening, I commended them to the special attentiveness of the Antoines, and off I went, accompanied by Mrs. Barnes's commiseration that I should have to be engaged on so hot a day in what she with felicitous exactness called a domestic pursuit, and trying very hard not to be too evidently pleased.

I went to the villages that lie in the direction of my lovely place of larches, and having after some search found the a.s.sistant I continued on towards the west, walking fast, almost as if people would know I had accomplished what I had come out for, and might catch me and take me home again.

As I walked it positively was quite difficult not to sing. Only hostesses know this pure joy. To feel so deep and peculiar an exhilaration you must have been having guests and still be having them.

Before my guests came I might and did roam about as I chose, but it was never like to-day, never with that holiday feeling. Oh, I have had a wonderful day! Everything was delicious. I don't remember having smelt the woods so good, and there hasn't ever been anything like the deep cool softness of the gra.s.s I lay on at lunch-time. And Crabbe the delightful,--why don't people talk more about Crabbe? Why don't they read him more? I have him in eight volumes; none of your little books of selections, which somehow take away all his true flavour, but every bit of him from beginning to end. n.o.body ever made so many couplets that fit in to so many occasions of one's life. I believe I could describe my daily life with Mrs. Barnes and Dolly entirely in couplets from Crabbe.

It is the odd fate of his writings to have turned by the action of time from serious to droll. He decomposes, as it were, hilariously. I lay for hours this afternoon enjoying his neat couplets. He enchants me. I forget time when I am with him. It was Crabbe who made me late for supper. But he is the last person one takes out for a walk with one if one isn't happy. Crabbe is a barometer of serenity. You have to be in a cloudless mood to enjoy him. I was in that mood to-day. I had escaped.

Well, I have had my outing, I have had my little break, and have come back filled with renewed zeal to my guests. When I said good-night to-night I was so much pleased with everything, and felt so happily and comfortably affectionate, that I not only kissed Dolly but embarked adventurously on an embrace of Mrs. Barnes.

She received it with surprise but kindliness.

I think she considered I was perhaps being a little impulsive.

I think perhaps I was.

_August 30th._

In the old days before the war this house was nearly always full of friends, guests, for they were invited, but they never were in or on my mind as guests, and I don't remember ever feeling that I was a hostess.

The impression I now have of them is that they were all very young. But of course they weren't; some were quite as old as Mrs. Barnes, and once or twice came people even older. They all, however, had this in common, that whatever their age was when they arrived, by the time they left they were not more than twenty.