For a moment he failed to understand her. "Do you mean that there can be varying degrees in my opinion of you?"

She rose and pushed away her chair. "I mean," she said quickly, "that it's better to have done nothing in bitterness--nothing in pa.s.sion." And she began to walk.

Longmore followed her without answering at first. But he took off his hat and with his pocket-handkerchief wiped his forehead. "Where shall you go? what shall you do?" he simply asked at last.

"Do? I shall do as I've always done--except perhaps that I shall go for a while to my husband's old home."

"I shall go to MY old one. I've done with Europe for the present," the young man added.

She glanced at him as he walked beside her, after he had spoken these words, and then bent her eyes for a long time on the ground. But suddenly, as if aware of her going too far she stopped and put out her hand. "Good-bye. May you have all the happiness you deserve!"

He took her hand with his eyes on her, but something was at work in him that made it impossible to deal in the easy way with her touch.

Something of infinite value was floating past him, and he had taken an oath, with which any such case interfered, not to raise a finger to stop it. It was borne by the strong current of the world's great life and not of his own small one. Madame de Mauves disengaged herself, gathered in her long scarf and smiled at him almost as you would do at a child you should wish to encourage. Several moments later he was still there watching her leave him and leave him. When she was out of sight he shook himself, walked at once back to his hotel and, without waiting for the evening train, paid his bill and departed.

Later in the day M. de Mauves came into his wife's drawing-room, where she sat waiting to be summoned to dinner. He had dressed as he usually didn't dress for dining at home. He walked up and down for some moments in silence, then rang the bell for a servant and went out into the hall to meet him. He ordered the carriage to take him to the station, paused a moment with his hand on the k.n.o.b of the door, dismissed the servant angrily as the latter lingered observing him, re-entered the drawing-room, resumed his restless walk and at last stopped abruptly before his wife, who had taken up a book. "May I ask the favour," he said with evident effort, in spite of a forced smile as of allusion to a large past exercise of the very best taste, "of having a question answered?"

"It's a favour I never refused," she replied.

"Very true. Do you expect this evening a visit from Mr. Longmore?"

"Mr. Longmore," said his wife, "has left Saint-Germain." M. de Mauves waited, but his smile expired. "Mr. Longmore," his wife continued, "has gone to America."

M. de Mauves took it--a rare thing for him--with confessed, if momentary, intellectual indigence. But he raised, as it were, the wind.

"Has anything happened?" he asked, "Had he a sudden call?" But his question received no answer. At the same moment the servant threw open the door and announced dinner; Madame Clairin rustled in, rubbing her white hands, Madame de Mauves pa.s.sed silently into the dining-room, but he remained outside--outside of more things, clearly, than his mere salle-a-manger. Before long he went forth to the terrace and continued his uneasy walk. At the end of a quarter of an hour the servant came to let him know that his carriage was at the door. "Send it away," he said without hesitation. "I shan't use it." When the ladies had half-finished dinner he returned and joined them, with a formal apology to his wife for his inconsequence.

The dishes were brought back, but he hardly tasted them; he drank on the other hand more wine than usual. There was little talk, scarcely a convivial sound save the occasional expressive appreciative "M-m-m!" of Madame Clairin over the succulence of some dish. Twice this lady saw her brother's eyes, fixed on her own over his winegla.s.s, put to her a question she knew she should have to irritate him later on by not being able to answer. She replied, for the present at least, by an elevation of the eyebrows that resembled even to her own humour the vain raising of an umbrella in antic.i.p.ation of a storm. M. de Mauves was left alone to finish his wine; he sat over it for more than an hour and let the darkness gather about him. At last the servant came in with a letter and lighted a candle. The letter was a telegram, which M. de Mauves, when he had read it, burnt at the candle. After five minutes' meditation he wrote a message on the back of a visiting-card and gave it to the servant to carry to the office. The man knew quite as much as his master suspected about the lady to whom the telegram was addressed; but its contents puzzled him; they consisted of the single word "Impossible." As the evening pa.s.sed without her brother's reappearing in the drawing-room Madame Clairin came to him where he sat by his solitary candle. He took no notice of her presence for some time, but this affected her as unexpected indulgence. At last, however, he spoke with a particular harshness. "Ce jeune mufle has gone home at an hour's notice. What the devil does it mean?"

Madame Clairin now felt thankful for her umbrella. "It means that I've a sister-in-law whom I've not the honour to understand."

He said nothing more and silently allowed her, after a little, to depart. It had been her duty to provide him with an explanation, and he was disgusted with her blankness; but she was--if there was no more to come--getting off easily. When she had gone he went into the garden and walked up and down with his cigar. He saw his wife seated alone on the terrace, but remained below, wandering, turning, pausing, lingering.

He remained a long time. It grew late and Madame de Mauves disappeared.

Toward midnight he dropped upon a bench, tired, with a long vague exhalation of unrest. It was sinking into his spirit that he too didn't understand Madame Clairin's sister-in-law.

Longmore was obliged to wait a week in London for a ship. It was very hot, and he went out one day to Richmond. In the garden of the hotel at which he dined he met his friend Mrs. Draper, who was staying there.

She made eager enquiry about Madame de Mauves; but Longmore at first, as they sat looking out at the famous view of the Thames, parried her questions and confined himself to other topics. At last she said she was afraid he had something to conceal; whereupon, after a pause, he asked her if she remembered recommending him, in the letter she had addressed him at Saint-Germain, to draw the sadness from her friend's smile. "The last I saw of her was her smile," he said--"when I bade her good-bye."

"I remember urging you to 'console' her," Mrs. Draper returned, "and I wondered afterwards whether--model of discretion as you are--I hadn't cut you out work for which you wouldn't thank me."

"She has her consolation in herself," the young man said; "she needs none that any one else can offer her. That's for troubles for which--be it more, be it less--our own folly has to answer. Madame de Mauves hasn't a grain of folly left."

"Ah don't say that!"--Mrs. Draper knowingly protested. "Just a little folly's often very graceful."

Longmore rose to go--she somehow annoyed him. "Don't talk of grace," he said, "till you've measured her reason!"

For two years after his return to America he heard nothing of Madame de Mauves. That he thought of her intently, constantly, I need hardly say; most people wondered why such a clever young man shouldn't "devote"

himself to something; but to himself he seemed absorbingly occupied. He never wrote to her; he believed she wouldn't have "liked" it. At last he heard that Mrs. Draper had come home and he immediately called on her.

"Of course," she said after the first greetings, "you're dying for news of Madame de Mauves. Prepare yourself for something strange. I heard from her two or three times during the year after your seeing her. She left Saint-Germain and went to live in the country on some old property of her husband's. She wrote me very kind little notes, but I felt somehow that--in spite of what you said about 'consolation'--they were the notes of a wretched woman. The only advice I could have given her was to leave her scamp of a husband and come back to her own land and her own people. But this I didn't feel free to do, and yet it made me so miserable not to be able to help her that I preferred to let our correspondence die a natural death. I had no news of her for a year.

Last summer, however, I met at Vichy a clever young Frenchman whom I accidentally learned to be a friend of that charming sister of the Count's, Madame Clairin. I lost no time in asking him what he knew about Madame de Mauves--a countrywoman of mine and an old friend. 'I congratulate you on the friendship of such a person,' he answered.

'That's the terrible little woman who killed her husband.' You may imagine I promptly asked for an explanation, and he told me--from his point of view--what he called the whole story. M. de Mauves had fait quelques folies which his wife had taken absurdly to heart. He had repented and asked her forgiveness, which she had inexorably refused.

She was very pretty, and severity must have suited her style; for, whether or no her husband had been in love with her before, he fell madly in love with her now. He was the proudest man in France, but he had begged her on his knees to be re-admitted to favour. All in vain!

She was stone, she was ice, she was outraged virtue. People noticed a great change in him; he gave up society, ceased to care for anything, looked shockingly. One fine day they discovered he had blown out his brains. My friend had the story of course from Madame Clairin."

Longmore was strongly moved, and his first impulse after he had recovered his composure was to return immediately to Europe. But several years have pa.s.sed, and he still lingers at home. The truth is that, in the midst of all the ardent tenderness of his memory of Madame de Mauves, he has become conscious of a singular feeling--a feeling of wonder, of uncertainty, of awe.