September

September 1st.

Dolly forgot herself this morning.

On the first of the month I pay the bills. Antoine reminded me last month that this used to be my practice before the war, and I remember how languidly I roused myself from my meditations on the grass to go indoors and add up figures. But to-day I liked it. I went in cheerfully.

'This is my day for doing the accounts,' I said to Mrs. Barnes, as she was about to form the procession to the chairs. 'They take me most of the morning, so I expect we won't see each other again till luncheon.'

'Dear me,' said Mrs. Barnes sympathetically, 'how very tiresome for you. Those terrible settling up days. How well I know them, and how I used to dread them.'

'Yes,' said Dolly—

Reines Gl點k geniesst doch nie
Wer zahlen soll und weiss nicht wie.

Poor Kitty. We know all about that, don't we.' And she put her arm round her sister.

Dolly had forgotten herself.

I thought it best not to linger, but to go in quickly to my bills.

Her accent was perfect. I know enough German to know that.

September 2nd.

We've been a little strained all day in our relations because of yesterday. Dolly drooped at lunch, and for the first time didn't smile. Mrs. Barnes, I think, had been rebuking her with more than ordinary thoroughness. Evidently Mrs. Barnes is desperately anxious I shouldn't know about Siegfried. I wonder if there is any way of delicately introducing Germans into the conversation, and conveying to her that I have guessed about Dolly's husband and don't mind him a bit. Why should I mind somebody else's husband? A really nice woman only minds her own. But I know of no two subjects more difficult to talk about tactfully than Germans and husbands; and when both are united, as in this case, my courage rather fails.

We went for a dreary walk this afternoon. Mrs. Barnes was watchful, and Dolly was meek. I tried to be sprightly, but one can't be sprightly by oneself.

September 3rd.

In the night there was a thunderstorm, and for the first time since I got here I woke up to rain and mist. The mist was pouring in in waves through the open windows, and the room was quite cold. When I looked at the thermometer hanging outside, I saw it had dropped twenty degrees.

We have become so much used to fine weather arrangements that the sudden change caused an upheaval. I heard much hurrying about downstairs, and when I went down to breakfast found it was laid in the hall. It was like breakfasting in a tomb, after the radiance of our meals out of doors. The front door was shut; the rain pattered on the windows; and right up against the panes, between us and the world like a great grey flannel curtain, hung the mist. It might have been some particularly odious December morning in England.

'C'est l'automne,' said Antoine, bringing in three cane chairs and putting them round the tea-table on which the breakfast was laid.

'C'est un avertissement,' said Mrs. Antoine, bringing in the coffee.

Antoine then said that he had conceived it possible that Madame and ces dames might like a small wood fire. To cheer. To enliven.

'Pray not on our account,' instantly said Mrs. Barnes to me, very earnestly. 'Dolly and I do not feel the cold at all, I assure you. Pray do not have one on our account.'

'But wouldn't it be cosy—' I began, who am like a cat about warmth.

'I would far rather you did not have one,' said Mrs. Barnes, her features puckered.

'Think of all the wood!'

'But it would only be a few logs—'

'What is there nowadays so precious as logs? And it is far, far too early to begin fires. Why, only last week it was still August. Still the dog-days.'

'But if we're cold—'

'We should indeed be poor creatures, Dolly and I, if the moment it left off being warm we were cold. Please do not think we don't appreciate your kindness in wishing to give us a fire, but Dolly and I would feel it very much if our being here were to make you begin fires so early.'

'But—'

'Keep the logs for later on. Let me beg you.'

So we didn't have a fire; and there we sat, Mrs. Barnes with the white shawl at last put to its proper use, and all of us trying not to shiver.

After breakfast, which was taken away bodily, table and all, snatched from our midst by the Antoines, so that we were left sitting facing each other round empty space with a curious sensation of sudden nakedness, I supposed that Merivale would be produced, so I got up and pushed a comfortable chair conveniently for Dolly, and turned on the light.

To my surprise I found Mrs. Barnes actually preferred to relinquish the reading aloud rather than use my electric light in the daytime. It would be an unpardonable extravagance, she said. Dolly could work at her knitting. Neither of them needed their eyes for knitting.

I was greatly touched. From the first she has shown a touching, and at the same time embarrassing, concern not to cause me avoidable expense, but never yet such concern as this. I know what store she sets by the reading. Why, if we just sat there in the gloom we might begin to say things. I really was very much touched.

But indeed Mrs. Barnes is touching. It is because she is so touching in her desire not to give trouble, to make us happy, that one so continually does exactly what she wishes. I would do almost anything sooner than hurt Mrs. Barnes. Also I would do almost anything to calm her. And as for her adhesiveness to an unselfish determination, it is such that it is mere useless fatigue to try to separate her from it.

I have learned this gradually.

At first, most of my time at meals was spent in reassuring her that things hadn't been got specially on her and Dolly's account, and as the only other account they could have been got on was mine, my assurances had the effect of making me seem very greedy. I thought I lived frugally up here, but Mrs. Barnes must have lived so much more frugally that almost everything is suspected by her to be a luxury provided by my hospitality.

She was, for instance, so deeply persuaded that the apricots were got, as she says, specially, that at last to calm her I had to tell Mrs. Antoine to buy no more. And we all liked apricots. And there was a perfect riot of them down in the valley. After that we had red currants because they, Mrs. Barnes knew, came out of the garden; but we didn't eat them because we didn't like them.

Then there was a jug of lemonade sent in every day for lunch that worried her. During this period her talk was entirely of lemons and sugar, of all the lemons and sugar that wouldn't be being used if she and Dolly were again, in order to calm her, and rather than that she should be made unhappy, I told Mrs. Antoine to send in only water.

Cakes disappeared from tea a week ago. Eggs have survived at breakfast, and so has honey, because Mrs. Barnes can hear the chickens and has seen the bees and knows they are not things got specially. She will eat potatoes and cabbages and anything else that the garden produces with serenity, but grows restive over meat; and a leg of mutton made her miserable yesterday, for nothing would make her believe that if I had been here alone it wouldn't have been a cutlet.

'Let there be no more legs of mutton,' I said to Mrs. Antoine afterwards. 'Let there instead be three cutlets.'

I'm afraid Mrs. Antoine is scandalised at the inhospitable rigours she supposes me to be applying to my guests. My order to Antoine this morning not to light the fire will have increased her growing suspicion that I am developing into a cheese-paring Madame. She must have expressed her fears to Antoine; for the other day, when I told her to leave the sugar and lemons out of the lemonade and send in only the water, she looked at him, and as I went away I heard her saying to him in a low voice—he no doubt having told her I usedn't to be like this, and she being unable to think of any other explanation—'C'est la guerre.'

About eleven, having done little good by my presence in the hall whose cheerlessness wrung from me a thoughtless exclamation that I wished I smoked a pipe, upon which Dolly instantly said, 'Wouldn't it be a comfort,' and Mrs. Barnes said, 'Dolly,' I went away to the kitchen, pretending I wanted to ask what there was for dinner but really so as to be for a few moments where there was a fire.

Mrs. Antoine watched me warming myself with respectful disapproval.

'Madame devrait faire faire un peu de feu dans la halle,' she said. 'Ces dames auront bien froid.'

'Ces dames won't let me,' I tried to explain in the most passionate French I could think of. 'Ces dames implore me not to have a fire. Ces dames reject a fire. Ces dames defend themselves against a fire. I perish because of the resolve of ces dames not to have a fire.'

But Mrs. Antoine plainly didn't believe me. She thought, I could see, that I was practising a repulsive parsimony on defenceless guests. It was the sorrows of the war, she concluded, that had changed Madame's nature. This was the kindest, the only possible, explanation.

Evening.

There was a knock at my door just then. I thought it must be Mrs. Antoine come to ask me some domestic question, and said Entrez, and it was Mrs. Barnes.

She has not before this penetrated into my bedroom. I hope I didn't look too much surprised. I think there could hardly have been a gap of more than a second between my surprise and my recovered hospitality.

'Oh—do come in,' I said. 'How nice of you.'

Thus do the civilised clothe their real sensations in splendid robes of courtesy.

'Dolly and I haven't driven you away from the hall, I hope?' began Mrs. Barnes in a worried voice.

'I only came up here for a minute,' I explained, 'and was coming down again directly.'

'Oh, that relieves me. I was afraid perhaps—'

'I wish you wouldn't so often be afraid you're driving me away,' I said pleasantly. 'Do I look driven?'

But Mrs. Barnes took no notice of my pleasantness. She had something on her mind. She looked like somebody who is reluctant and yet impelled.

'I think,' she said solemnly, 'that if you have a moment to spare it might be a good opportunity for a little talk. I would like to talk with you a little.'

And she stood regarding me, her eyes full of reluctant but unconquerable conscientiousness.

'Do,' I said, with polite enthusiasm. 'Do.'

This was the backwash, I thought, of Dolly's German outbreak the other day, and Siegfried was going at last to be explained to me.

'Won't you sit down in this chair?' I said, pushing a comfortable one forward, and then sitting down myself on the edge of the sofa.

'Thank you. What I wish to say is—'

She hesitated. I supposed her to be finding it difficult to proceed with Siegfried, and started off impulsively to her rescue.

'You know, I don't mind a bit about—' I began.

'What I wish to say is,' she went on again, before I had got out the fatal word, 'what I wish to point out to you—is that the weather has considerably cooled.'

This was so remote from Siegfried that I looked at her a moment in silence. Then I guessed what was coming, and tried to put it off.

'Ah,' I said—for I dreaded, the grateful things she would be sure to say about having been here so long—'you do want a fire in the hall after all, then.'

'No, no. We are quite warm enough, I assure you. A fire would distress us. What I wish to say is—' Again she hesitated, then went on more firmly, 'Well, I wish to say that the weather having broken and the great heat having come to an end, the reasons which made you extend your kind, your delightful hospitality to us, have come to an end also. I need hardly tell you that we never, never shall be able to express to you—'

'Oh, but you're not going to give me notice?' I interrupted, trying to be sprightly and to clamber over her rock-like persistence in gratitude with the gaiety of a bright autumnal creeper. This was because I was nervous. I grow terribly sprightly when I am nervous.

But indeed I shrink from Mrs. Barnes's gratitude. It abases me to the dust. It leaves me mourning in much the same way that Simon Lee's gratitude left Wordsworth mourning. I can't bear it. What a world it is, I want to cry out,—what a miserable, shameful, battering, crushing world, when so dreadfully little makes people so dreadfully glad!

Then it suddenly struck me that the expression giving notice might not be taken by Mrs. Barnes, she being solemn, in the spirit in which it was offered by me, I being sprightly; and, desperately afraid of having possibly offended her, I seized on the first thing I could think of as most likely to soothe her, which was an extension, glowing and almost indefinite, of my invitation. 'Because, you know,' I said, swept along by this wish to prevent a wound, 'I won't accept the notice. I'm not going to let you go. That is, of course,' I added, 'if you and Dolly don't mind the quiet up here and the monotony. Won't you stay on here till I go away myself?'

Mrs. Barnes opened her mouth to speak, but I got up quickly and crossed over to her and kissed her. Instinct made me go and kiss her, so as to gain a little time, so as to put off the moment of having to hear whatever it was she was going to say; for whether she accepted the invitation or refused it, I knew there would be an equally immense, unbearable number of grateful speeches.

But when I went over and kissed her Mrs. Barnes put her arm round my neck and held me tight; and there was something in this sudden movement on the part of one so chary of outward signs of affection that made my heart give a little leap of response, and I found myself murmuring into her ear—amazing that I should be murmuring into Mrs. Barnes's ear—'Please don't go away and leave me—please don't—please stay—'

And as she didn't say anything I kissed her again, and again murmured, 'Please—'

And as she still didn't say anything I murmured, 'Won't you? Say you will—'

And then I discovered to my horror that why she didn't say anything was because she was crying.

I have been slow and unimaginative about Mrs. Barnes. Having guessed that Dolly was a German widow I might so easily have guessed the rest: the poverty arising out of such a situation, the vexations and humiliations of the attitude of people in the pensions she has dragged about in during and since the war,—places in which Dolly's name must needs be registered and her nationality known; the fatigue and loneliness of such a life, with no home anywhere at all, forced to wander and wander, her little set at Dulwich probably repudiating her because of Dolly; or scolding her, in rare letters, for the folly of her sacrifice; with nothing to go back, to and nothing to look forward to, and the memory stabbing her always of the lost glories of that ordered life at home in her well-found house, with the church bells ringing on Sundays, and everybody polite, and a respectful crossing-sweeper at the end of the road.

All her life Mrs. Barnes has been luminously respectable. Her respectability has been, I gather from things she has said, her one great treasure. To stand clear and plain before her friends, without a corner in her actions that needed defending or even explaining, was what the word happiness meant to her. And now here she is, wandering about in a kind of hiding. With Dolly. With the beloved, the difficult, the unexplainable Dolly. Unwelcomed, unwanted, and I daresay quite often asked by the many pension proprietors who are angrily anti-German to go somewhere else.

I have been thick-skinned about Mrs. Barnes. I am ashamed. And whether I have guessed right or wrong she shall keep her secrets. I shall not try again, however good my silly intentions may seem to me, however much I may think it would ease our daily intercourse, to blunder in among things about which she wishes to be silent. When she cried like that this morning, after a moment of looking at her bewildered and aghast, I suddenly understood. I knew what I have just been writing as if she had told me. And I stroked her hand, and tried to pretend I didn't notice anything, because it was so dreadful to see how she, for her part, was trying so very hard to pretend she wasn't crying. And I kept on saying—for indeed I didn't know what to say—'Then you'll stay—how glad I am—then that's settled—'

And actually I heard myself expressing pleasure at the certainty of my now hearing Merivale to a finish!

How the interview ended was by my conceiving the brilliant idea of going away on the pretext of giving an order, and leaving Mrs. Barnes alone in my room till she should have recovered sufficiently to appear downstairs.

'I must go and tell Mrs. Antoine something,' I suddenly said,—'something I've forgotten.' And I hurried away.

For once I had been tactful. Wonderful. I couldn't help feeling pleased at having been able to think of this solution to the situation. Mrs. Barnes wouldn't want Dolly to see she had been crying. She would stay up quietly in my room till her eyes had left off being red, and would then come down as calm and as ready to set a good example as ever.

Continuing to be tactful, I avoided going into the hall, because in it was Dolly all by herself, offering me my very first opportunity for the talk alone with her that I have so long been wanting; but of course I wouldn't do anything now that might make Mrs. Barnes uneasy; I hope I never may again.

To avoid the hall, however, meant finding myself in the servants' quarters. I couldn't take shelter in the kitchen and once more warm myself, because it was their dinner hour. There remained the back door, the last refuge of a hostess. It was open; and outside was the yard, the rain, and Mou-Mou's kennel looming through the mist.

I went and stood in the door, contemplating what I saw, waiting till I thought Mrs. Barnes would have had time to be able to come out of my bedroom. I knew she would stay there till her eyes were ready to face the world again, so I knew I must have patience. Therefore I stood in the door and contemplated what I saw from it, while I sought patience and ensued it. But it is astonishing how cold and penetrating these wet mountain mists are. They seem to get right through one's body into one's very spirit, and make it cold too, and doubtful of the future.

September 4th.

Dolly looked worried, I thought, yesterday when Mrs. Barnes, as rocky and apparently arid as ever—but I knew better—told her at tea-time in my presence that I had invited them to stay on as long as I did.

There were fortunately few expressions of gratitude this time decorating Mrs. Barnes's announcement. I think she still wasn't quite sure enough of herself to be anything but brief. Dolly looked quickly at me, without her usual smile. I said what a great pleasure it was to know they weren't going away. 'You do like staying, don't you, Dolly?' I asked, breaking off suddenly in my speech, for her serious eyes were not the eyes of the particularly pleased.

She said she did; of course she did; and added the proper politenesses. But she went on looking thoughtful, and I believe she wants to tell me, or have me told by Mrs. Barnes, about Siegfried. I think she thinks I ought to know what sort of guest I've got before deciding whether I really want her here any longer or not.

I wish I could somehow convey to Dolly, without upsetting Mrs. Barnes, that I do know and don't mind. I tried to smile reassuringly at her, but the more I smiled the more serious she grew.

As for Mrs. Barnes, there is now between her and me the shyness, the affection, of a secret understanding. She may look as arid and stiff as she likes, but we have kissed each other with real affection and I have felt her arm tighten round my neck. How much more enlightening, how much more efficacious than any words, than any explanations, is that very simple thing, a kiss. I believe if we all talked less and kissed more we should arrive far quicker at comprehension. I give this opinion with diffidence. It is rather a conjecture than an opinion. I have not found it shared in literature—in conversation I would omit it—except once, and then by a German. He wrote a poem whose first line was:

O schw鰎e nicht und k黶se nur

And I thought it sensible advice.

September 5th.

The weather after all hasn't broken. We have had the thunderstorm and the one bad day, and then it cleared up. It didn't clear up back to heat again—this year there will be no more heat—but to a kind of cool, pure gold. All day yesterday it was clearing up, and towards evening there came a great wind and swept the sky clear during the night of everything but stars; and when I woke this morning there was the familiar golden patch on the wall again, and I knew the day was to be beautiful.

And so it has been, with the snow come much lower down the mountains, and the still air very fresh. Things sparkle; and one feels like some bright bubble of light oneself. Actually even Mrs. Barnes has almost been like that,—has been, for her, astonishingly, awe-inspiringly gay.

'Ah,' she said, standing on the terrace after breakfast, drawing in deep draughts of air, 'now I understand the expression so frequently used in descriptions of scenery. This air indeed is like champagne.'

'It does make one feel very healthy,' I said.

There were several things I wanted to say instead of this, things suggested by her remark, but I refrained. I mean to be careful now to let my communications with Mrs. Barnes be Yea, yea and Nay, nay—that is, straightforward and brief, with nothing whatever in them that might directly or indirectly lead to the encouragement of Dolly. Dolly has been trying to catch me alone. She has tried twice since Mrs. Barnes yesterday at tea told her I had asked them to stay on, but I have avoided her.

'Healthy?' repeated Mrs. Barnes. 'It makes one feel more than healthy. It goes to one's head. I can imagine it turning me quite dizzy—quite turning my head.'

And then she actually asked me a riddle—Mrs. Barnes asked a riddle, at ten o'clock in the morning, asked me, a person long since callous to riddles and at no time since six years old particularly appreciative of them.

Of course I answered wrong. Disconcerted, I impetuously hazarded Brandy as the answer, when it should have been Whisky; but really I think it was wonderful to have got even so near the right answer as Brandy. I won't record the riddle. It was old in Mrs. Barnes's youth, for she told me she had it from her father, who, she said, could enjoy a joke as heartily as she can herself.

But what was so surprising was that the effect of the crisp, sunlit air on Mrs. Barnes should be to engender riddles. It didn't do this to my pre-war guests. They grew young, but not younger than twenty. Mrs. Barnes to-day descended to the age of bibs. I never could have believed it of her. I never could have believed she would come so near what I can only call an awful friskiness. And it wasn't just this morning, in the first intoxication of the splendid new air; it has gone on like it all day. On the mountain slopes, slippery now and difficult to walk on because of the heavy rain of the thunderstorm, might have been seen this afternoon three figures, two black ones and a white one, proceeding for a space in a rather wobbly single file, then pausing in an animated group, then once more proceeding. When they paused it was because Mrs. Barnes had thought of another riddle. Dolly was very quick at the answers,—so quick that I suspected her of having been brought up on these very ones, as she no doubt was, but I cut a lamentable figure. I tried to make up for my natural incapacity by great goodwill. Mrs. Barnes's spirits were too rare and precious, I felt, not to be welcomed; and having failed in answers I desperately ransacked my memory in search of questions, so that I could ask riddles too.

But by a strange perversion of recollection I could remember several answers and not their questions. In my brain, on inquiry, were fixed quite firmly things like this,—obviously answers to what once had been riddles.

Because his tail comes out of his head.
So did the other donkey.
He took a fly and went home.
Orleans.

Having nothing else to offer Mrs. Barnes I offered her these, and suggested she should supply the questions.

She thought this way of dealing with riddles subversive and difficult. Dolly began to laugh. Mrs. Barnes, filled with the invigorating air, actually laughed too. It was the first time I have heard her laugh. I listened with awe. Evidently she laughs very rarely, for Dolly looked so extraordinarily pleased; evidently her doing it made to-day memorable, for Dolly's face, turned to her sister in a delighted surprise, had the expression on it that a mother's has when her offspring suddenly behaves in a way unhoped for and gratifying.

So there we stood, gesticulating gaily on the slippery slope.

This is a strange place. Its effects are incalculable. I suppose it is because it is five thousand feet up, and has so great a proportion of sunshine.

September 6th.

There were letters this morning from England that wiped out all the gaiety of yesterday; letters that reminded me. It was as if the cold mist had come back again, and blotted out the light after I had hoped it had gone for good. It was as if a weight had dropped down again on my heart, suffocating it, making it difficult to breathe, after I had hoped it was lifted off for ever. I feel sick. Sick with the return of the familiar pain, sick with fear that I am going to fall back hopelessly into it. I wonder if I am. Oh, I had such hope that I was better! Shall I ever get quite well again? Won't it at best, after every effort, every perseverance in struggle, be just a more or less skilful mending, a more or less successful putting together of broken bits? I thought I had been growing whole. I thought I wouldn't any longer wince. And now these letters....

Ridiculous, hateful and ridiculous, to be so little master of one's own body that one has to look on helplessly at one's hands shaking.

I want to forget. I don't want to be reminded. It is my one chance of safety, my one hope of escape. To forget—forget till I have got my soul safe back again, really my own again, no longer a half destroyed thing. I call it my soul. I don't know what it is. I am very miserable.

It is details that I find so difficult to bear. As long as in my mind everything is one great, unhappy blur, there is a chance of quietness, of gradual creeping back to peace. But details remind me too acutely, flash back old anguish too sharply focussed. I oughtn't to have opened the letters till I was by myself. But it pleased me so much to get them. I love getting letters. They were in the handwriting of friends. How could I guess, when I saw them on the breakfast-table, that they would innocently be so full of hurt? And when I had read them, and I picked up my cup and tried to look as if nothing had happened and I were drinking coffee like anybody else, my silly hand shook so much that Dolly noticed it.

Our eyes met.

I couldn't get that wretched cup back on to its saucer again without spilling the coffee. If that is how I still behave, what has been the good of being here? What has the time been but wasted? What has the cure been but a failure?

I have come up to my room. I can't stay downstairs. It would be unbearable this morning to sit and be read to. But I must try to think of an excuse, quickly. Mrs. Barnes may be up any minute to ask—oh, I am hunted!

It is a comfort to write this. To write does make one in some strange way less lonely. Yet—having to go and look at oneself in the glass for companionship,—isn't that to have reached the very bottom level of loneliness?

Evening.

The direct result of those letters has been to bring Dolly and me at last together.

She came down to the kitchen-garden after me, where I went this morning when I had succeeded in straightening myself out a little. On the way I told Mrs. Barnes, with as tranquil a face as I could manage, that I had arrangements to discuss with Antoine, and so, I was afraid, would for once miss the reading.

Antoine I knew was working in the kitchen-garden, a plot of ground hidden from the house at the foot of a steep descent, and I went to him and asked to be allowed to help. I said I would do anything,—dig, weed, collect slugs, anything at all, but he must let me work. Work with my hands out of doors was the only thing I felt I could bear to-day. It wasn't the first time, I reflected, that peace has been found among cabbages.

Antoine demurred, of course, but did at last consent to let me pick red currants. That was an easy task, and useful as well, for it would save Lisette the assistant's time, who would otherwise presently have to pick them. So I chose the bushes nearest to where he was digging, because I wanted to be near some one who neither talked nor noticed, some one alive, some one kind and good who wouldn't look at me, and I began to pick these strange belated fruits, finished and forgotten two months ago in the valley.

Then I saw Dolly coming down the steps cut in the turf. She was holding up her long black skirt. She had nothing on her head, and the sun shone in her eyes and made her screw them up as she stood still for a moment on the bottom step searching for me. I saw all this, though I was stooping over the bushes.

Then she came and stood beside me.

'You oughtn't to be here,' I said, going on picking and not looking at her.

'I know,' said Dolly.

'Then hadn't you better go back?'

'Yes. But I'm not going to.'

I picked in silence.

'You've been crying,' was what she said next.

'No,' I said.

'Perhaps not with your eyes, but you have with your heart.'

At this I felt very much like Mrs. Barnes; very much like what Mrs. Barnes must have felt when I tried to get her to be frank.

'Do you know what your sister said to me the other day?' I asked, busily picking. 'She said she has a great opinion of discretion.'

'Yes,' said Dolly. 'But I haven't.'

'And I haven't either,' I was forced to admit.

'Well then,' said Dolly.

I straightened myself, and we looked at each other. Her eyes have a kind of sweet radiance. Siegfried must have been pleased when he saw her coming down the sheet into his arms.

'You mustn't tell me anything you don't quite want to,' said Dolly, her sweet eyes smiling, 'but I couldn't see you looking so unhappy and not come and—well, stroke you.'

'There isn't anything to tell,' I said, comforted by the mere idea of being stroked.

'Yes there is.'

'Not really. It's only that once—oh well, what's the good? I don't want to think of it—I want to forget.'

Dolly nodded. 'Yes,' she said. 'Yes.'

'You see I came here to get cured by forgetting, and I thought I was cured. And this morning I found I wasn't, and it has—and it has disappointed me.'

'You musn't cry, you know,' said Dolly gently. 'Not in the middle of picking red currants. There's the man—'

She glanced at Antoine, digging.

I snuffled away my tears without the betrayal of a pocket handkerchief, and managed to smile at her.

'What idiots we go on being,' I said ruefully.

'Oh—idiots!'

Dolly made a gesture as of including the whole world.

'Does one ever grow up?' I asked.

'I don't know. I haven't.'

'But do you think one ever learns to bear pain without wanting to run crying bitterly to one's mother?'

'I think it's difficult. It seems to take more time,' she added smiling, 'than I've yet had, and I'm forty. You know I'm forty?'

'Yes. That is, I've been told so, but it hasn't been proved.'

'Oh, I never could prove anything,' said Dolly.

Then she put on an air of determination that would have alarmed Mrs. Barnes, and said, 'There are several other things that I am that you don't know, and as I'm here alone with you at last I may as well tell you what they are. In fact I'm not going away from these currant bushes till I have told you.'

'Then,' I said, 'hadn't you better help me with the currants while you tell?' And I lifted the basket across and put it on the ground between us.

Already I felt better. Comforted, cheered by Dolly's mere presence and the sweet understanding that seems to shine out from her.

She turned up her sleeves and plunged her arms into the currant bushes. Luckily currants don't have thorns, for if it had been a gooseberry bush she would have plunged her bare arms in just the same.

'You have asked us to stay on,' she began, 'and it isn't fair that you shouldn't know exactly what you are in for.'

'If you're going to tell, me how your name is spelt,' I said, 'I've guessed that already. It is Juchs.'

'Oh, you're clever!' exclaimed Dolly unexpectedly.

'Well, if that's clever,' I said modestly, 'I don't know what you would say to some of the things I think of.'

Dolly laughed. Then she looked serious again, and tugged at the currants in a way that wasn't very good for the bush.

'Yes. His name was Juchs,' she said. 'Kitty always did pronounce it Jewks. It wasn't the war. It wasn't camouflage. She thought it was the way. So did the other relations in England. That is when they pronounced it at all, which I should think wasn't ever.'

'You mean they called him Siegfried,' I said.

Dolly stopped short in her picking to look at me in surprise. 'Siegfried?' she repeated, her arrested hands full of currants.

'That's another of the things I've guessed,' I said proudly. 'By sheer intelligently putting two and two together.'

'He wasn't Siegfried,' said Dolly.

'Not Siegfried?'

It was my turn to stop picking and look surprised.

'And in your sleep—? And so affectionately—?' I said.

'Siegfried wasn't Juchs, he was Bretterstangel,' said Dolly. 'Did I say his name that day in my sleep? Dear Siegfried.' And her eyes, even while they rested on mine became softly reminiscent.

'But Dolly—if Siegfried wasn't your husband, ought you to have—well, do you think it was wise to be dreaming of him?'

'But he was my husband.'

I stared.

'But you said your husband was Juchs,' I said.

'So he was,' said Dolly.

'He was? Then why—I'm fearfully slow, I know, but do tell me—if Juchs was your husband why wasn't he called Siegfried?'

'Because Siegfried's name was Bretterstangel. I began with Siegfried.'

There was a silence. We stood looking at each other, our hands full of currants.

Then I said, 'Oh.' And after a moment I said, 'I see.' And after another moment I said, 'You began with Siegfried.'

I was greatly taken aback. The guesses which had been arranged so neatly in my mind were swept into confusion.

'What you've got to realise,' said Dolly, evidently with an effort, 'is that I kept on marrying Germans. I ought to have left off at Siegfried. I wish now I had. But one gets into a habit—'

'But,' I interrupted, my mouth I think rather open, 'you kept on—?'

'Yes,' said Dolly, holding herself very straight and defiantly, 'I did keep on, and that's what I want you to be quite clear about before we settle down to stay here indefinitely. Kitty can't stay if I won't. I do put my foot down sometimes, and I would about this. Poor darling—she feels desperately what I've done, and I try to help her to keep it quiet with ordinary people as much as I can—oh, I'm always letting little bits out! But I can't, I won't, not tell a friend who so wonderfully invites us—'

'You're not going to begin being grateful?' I interrupted quickly.

'You've no idea,' Dolly answered irrelevantly, her eyes wide with wonder at her past self, 'how difficult it is not to marry Germans once you've begun.'

'But—how many?' I got out.

'Oh, only two. It wasn't their number so much. It was their quality.'

'What—Junkers?'

'Junkers? Would you mind more if they had been? Do you mind very much anyhow?'

'I don't mind anything. I don't mind your being technically German a scrap. All I think is that it was a little—well, perhaps a little excessive to marry another German when you had done it once already. But then I'm always rather on the side of frugality. I do definitely prefer the few instead of the many and the little instead of the much.'

'In husbands as well?'

'Well yes—I think so.'

Dolly sighed.

'I wish I had been like that,' she said. 'It would have saved poor Kitty so much.'

She dropped the currants she held in her hands slowly bunch by bunch into the basket.

'But I don't see,' I said, 'what difference it could make to Kitty. I mean, once you had started having German husbands at all, what did it matter one more or less? And wasn't the second one d—I mean, hadn't he left off being alive when the war began? So I don't see what difference it could make to Kitty.'

'But that's just what you've got to realise,' said Dolly, letting the last bunch of currants drop out of her hand into the basket.

She looked at me, and I became aware that she was slowly turning red. A very delicate flush was slowly spreading over her face, so delicate that for a moment I didn't see what it was that was making her look more and more guilty, more and more like a child who has got to confess—but an honourable, good child, determined that it will confess.

'You know,' she said, 'that I've lived in Germany for years and years.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I've guessed that.'

'And it's different from England.'

'Yes,' I said. 'So I understand.'

'The way they see things. Their laws.'

'Yes,' I said.

Dolly was finding it difficult to say what she had to say. I thought it might help her if I didn't look at her, so I once more began to pick currants. She mechanically followed my example.

'Kitty,' she said, as we both stooped busily over the same bush, 'thinks what I did too dreadful. So did all our English relations. It's because you may think so too that I've got to tell you. Then you can decide whether you really want me here or not.'

'Dear Dolly,' I murmured, 'don't please make my blood run cold—'

'Ah, but it's forbidden in the Prayer Book.'

'What is?'

'What I did.'

'What did you do, Dolly?' I asked, now thoroughly uneasy; had her recklessness gone so far as to lead her to tamper with the Commandments?

Dolly tore off currants and leaves in handfuls and flung them together into the basket. 'I married my uncle,' she said.

'What?' I said, really astonished.

'Karl—that was my second husband—was Siegfried's—that was my first husband's—uncle. He was Siegfried's mother's brother—my first mother-in-law's brother. My second mother-in-law was my first husband's grandmother. In Germany you can. In Germany you do. But it's forbidden in the English Prayer Book. It's put in the Table of Kindred and Affinity that you mustn't. It's number nine of the right-hand column—Husband's Mother's Brother. And Kitty well, you can guess what Kitty has felt about it. If it had been my own uncle, my own mother's brother, she couldn't have been more horrified and heartbroken. I didn't realise. I didn't think of the effect it might have on them at home. I just did it. They didn't know till I had done it. I always think it saves bother to marry first and tell afterwards. I had been so many years in Germany. It seemed quite natural. I simply stayed on in the family. It was really habit.'

She threw some currants into the basket, then faced me. 'There,' she said, looking me straight in the eyes, 'I've told you, and if you think me impossible I'll go.'

'But—' I began.

Her face was definitely flushed now, and her eyes very bright.

'Oh, I'd be sorry, sorry,' she said impetuously, 'if this ended us!'

'Us?'

'You and me. But I couldn't stay here and not tell you, could I. Just because you may hate it so I had to tell you. You've got a dean in your family. The Prayer Book is in your blood. And if you do hate it I shall understand perfectly, and I'll go away and take Kitty and you need never see or hear of me again, so you musn't mind saying—'

'Oh do wait a minute!' I cried. 'I don't hate it. I don't mind. I'd only hate it and mind if it was I who had to marry a German uncle. I can't imagine why anybody should ever want to marry uncles anyhow, but if they do, and they're not blood-uncles, and it's the custom of the country, why not? You'll stay here, Dolly. I won't let you go. I don't care if you've married fifty German uncles. I've loved you from the moment I saw you on the top of the wall in your funny petticoat. Why, you don't suppose,' I finished, suddenly magnificently British, 'that I'm going to let any mere German come between you and me?'

Whereupon we kissed each other,—not once, but several times; fell, indeed, upon each other's necks. And Antoine, coming to fetch the red currants for Lisette who had been making signs to him from the steps for some time past, stood waiting quietly till we should have done.

When he thought we had done he stepped forward and said, 'Pardon, mesdames'—and stooping down deftly extracted the basket from between us.

As he did so his eye rested an instant on the stripped and broken branches of the currant bush.

He wasn't surprised.

September 7th.

I couldn't finish about yesterday last night. When I had got as far as Antoine and the basket I looked at the little clock on my writing-table and saw to my horror that it was nearly twelve. So I fled into bed; for what would Mrs. Barnes have said if she had seen me burning the electric light and doing what she calls trying my eyes at such an hour? It doesn't matter that they are my eyes and my light: Mrs. Barnes has become, by virtue of her troubles, the secret standard of my behaviour. She is like the eye of God to me now,—in every place. And my desire to please her and make her happy has increased a hundredfold since Dolly and I have at last, in spite of her precautions, become real friends.

We decided before we left the kitchen-garden yesterday that this was the important thing: to keep Mrs. Barnes from any hurt that we can avoid. She has had so many. She will have so many more. I understand now Dolly's deep sense of all her poor Kitty has given up and endured for her sake, and I understand the shackles these sacrifices have put on Dolly. It is a terrible burden to be very much loved. If Dolly were of a less naturally serene temperament she would go under beneath the weight, she would be, after five years of it, a colourless, meek thing.

We agreed that Mrs. Barnes musn't know that I know about Dolly's marriages. Dolly said roundly that it would kill her. Mrs. Barnes regards her misguided sister as having committed a crime. It is forbidden in the Prayer Book. She brushes aside the possible Prayer Books of other countries. Therefore the word German shall never I hope again escape me while she is here, nor will I talk of husbands, and perhaps it will be as well to avoid mentioning uncles. Dear me, how very watchful I shall have to be. For the first time in his life the Dean has become unmentionable.

I am writing this before breakfast. I haven't seen Dolly alone again since the kitchen-garden. I don't know how she contrived to appease Mrs. Barnes and explain her long absence, but that she did contrive it was evident from the harmonious picture I beheld when, half an hour later, I too went back to the house. They were sitting together in the sun just outside the front door knitting. Mrs. Barnes's face was quite contented. Dolly looked specially radiant. I believe she is made up entirely of love and laughter—dangerous, endearing ingredients! We just looked at each other as I came out of the house. It is the most comforting, the warmest thing, this unexpected finding of a completely understanding friend.

September 10th.

Once you have achieved complete understanding with anybody it isn't necessary, I know, to talk much. I have been told this by the wise. They have said mere knowledge that the understanding is there is enough. They have said that perfect understanding needs no expression, that the perfect intercourse is without words. That may be; but I want to talk. Not excessively, but sometimes. Speech does add grace and satisfaction to friendship. It may not be necessary, but it is very agreeable.

As far as I can see I am never, except by the rarest chance, going to get an opportunity of talking to Dolly alone. And there are so many things I want to ask her. Were her experiences all pleasant? Or is it her gay, indomitable spirit that has left her, after them, so entirely unmarked? Anyhow the last five years can't possibly have been pleasant, and yet they've not left the shadow of a stain on her serenity. I feel that she would think very sanely about anything her bright mind touched. There is something disinfecting about Dolly. I believe she would disinfect me of the last dregs of morbidness I still may have lurking inside me.

She and Mrs. Barnes are utterly poor. When the war began Dolly was in Germany, she told me that morning in the kitchen-garden, and had been a widow nearly a year. Not Siegfried's widow: Juchs's. I find her widowhoods confusing.

'Didn't you ever have a child, Dolly?' I asked.

'No,' she said.

'Then how is it you twitched the handkerchief off your sister's sleeping face that first day and said Peep bo to her so professionally?'

'I used to do that to Siegfried. We were both quite young to begin with, and played silly games.'

'I see,' I said. 'Go on.'

Juchs had left her some money; just enough to live on. Siegfried hadn't ever had any, except what he earned as a clerk in a bank, but Juchs had had some. She hadn't married Juchs for any reason, I gathered, except to please him. It did please him very much, she said, and I can quite imagine it. Siegfried too had been pleased in his day. 'I seem to have a gift for pleasing Germans,' she remarked, smiling. 'They were both very kind to me. I ended by being very fond of them both. I believe I'd be fond of anyone who was kind. There's a good deal of the dog about me.'

Directly the war began she packed up and came to Switzerland; she didn't wish, under such circumstances, to risk pleasing any more Germans. Since her marriage to Juchs all her English relations except Kitty had cast her off, so that only a neutral country was open to her, and Kitty instantly gave up everybody and everything to come and be with her. At first her little income was sent to her by her German bank, but after the first few months it sent no more, and she became entirely dependent on Kitty. All that Kitty had was what she got from selling her house. The Germans, Dolly said, would send no money out of the country. Though the war was over she could get nothing out of them unless she went back. She would never go back. It would kill Kitty; and she too, she thought, would very likely die. Her career of pleasing Germans does seem to be definitely over.

'So you see,' she said smiling, 'how wonderful it is for us to have found you.'

'What I can't get over,' I said, 'is having found you.'

But I wish, having found her, I might sometimes talk to her.

September 12th.

We live here in an atmosphere of combats de g閚閞osit?/i>. It is tremendous. Mrs. Barnes and I are always doing things we don't want to do because we suppose it is what is going to make the other one happy. The tyranny of unselfishness! I can hardly breathe.

September 19th.

I think it isn't good for women to be shut up too long alone together without a man. They seem to fester. Even the noblest. Taking our intentions all round they really are quite noble. We do only want to develope in ideal directions, and remove what we think are the obstacles to this development in each other's paths; and yet we fester. Not Dolly. Nothing ever smudges her equable, clear wholesomeness; but there are moments when I feel as if Mrs. Barnes and I got much mixed up together in a sort of sticky mass. Faint struggles from time to time, brief efforts at extrication, show there is still a life in me that is not flawlessly benevolent, but I repent of them as soon as made because of the pain and surprise that instantly appear in Mrs. Barnes's tired, pathetic eyes, and hastily I engulf myself once more in goodness.

That's why I haven't written lately, not for a whole week. It is glutinous, the prevailing goodness. I have stuck. I have felt as though my mind were steeped in treacle. Then to-day I remembered my old age, and the old lady waiting at the end of the years who will want to be amused, so I've begun again. I have an idea that what will really most amuse that old lady, that wrinkled philosophical old thing, will be all the times when I was being uncomfortable. She will be so very comfortable herself, so done with everything, so entirely an impartial looker-on, that the rebellions and contortions and woes of the creature who used to be herself will only make her laugh. She will be blithe in her security. Besides, she will know the sequel, she will know what came next, and will see, I daresay, how vain the expense of trouble and emotions was. So that naturally she will laugh. 'You silly little thing!' I can imagine her exclaiming, 'If only you had known how it all wasn't going to matter!' And she will laugh very heartily; for I am sure she will be a gay old lady.

But what we really want here now is an occasional breath of brutality,—the passage, infrequent and not too much prolonged, of a man. If he came to tea once in a way it would do. He would be a blast of fresh air. He would be like opening a window. We have minced about among solicitudes and delicacies so very long. I want to smell the rankness of a pipe, and see the cushions thrown anyhow. I want to see somebody who doesn't knit. I want to hear Mrs. Barnes being contradicted. Especially do I want to hear Mrs. Barnes being contradicted ... oh, I'm afraid I'm still not very good!

September 20th.

The grapes are ripe down in the vineyards along the edge of the valley, and this morning I proposed that we should start off early and spend the day among them doing a grape-cure.

Mrs. Barnes liked the idea very much, and sandwiches were ordered, for we were not to come back till evening; then at the last moment she thought it would be too hot in the valley, and that her head, which has been aching lately, might get worse. The sandwiches were ready on the hall table. Dolly and I were ready too, boots on and sticks in hand. To our great surprise Mrs. Barnes, contemplating the sandwiches, said that as they had been cut they mustn't be wasted, and therefore we had better go without her.

We were astonished. We were like children being given a holiday. She kissed us affectionately when we said goodbye, as though, to mark her trust in us,—in Dolly that she wouldn't tell me the dreadful truth about herself, in me that I wouldn't encourage her in undesirable points of view. How safe we were, how deserving of trust, Mrs. Barnes naturally didn't know. Nothing that either of us could say could possibly upset the other.

'If Mrs. Barnes knew the worst, knew I knew everything, wouldn't she be happier?' I asked Dolly as we went briskly down the mountain. 'Wouldn't at least part of her daily anxiety be got rid of, her daily fear lest I should get to know?'

'It would kill her,' said Dolly firmly.

'But surely—'

'You mustn't forget that she thinks what I did was a crime.'

'You mean the uncle.'

'Oh, she wouldn't very much mind your knowing about Siegfried. She would do her utmost to prevent it, because of her horror of Germans and of the horror she assumes you have of Germans. But once you did know she would be resigned. The other—' Dolly shook her head. 'It would kill her,' she said again.

We came to a green slope starred thick with autumn crocuses, and sat down to look at them. These delicate, lovely things have been appearing lately on the mountain, at first one by one and then in flocks,—pale cups of light, lilac on long white stalks that snap off at a touch. Like the almond trees in the suburban gardens round London that flower when the winds are cruellest, the autumn crocuses seem too frail to face the cold nights we are having now; yet it is just when conditions are growing unkind that they come out. There they are, all over the mountain fields, flowering in greater profusion the further the month moves towards winter.

This particular field of them was so beautiful that with one accord Dolly and I sat down to look. One doesn't pass such beauty by. I think we sat quite half an hour drinking in those crocuses, and their sunny plateau, and the way the tops of the pine trees on the slope below stood out against the blue emptiness of the valley. We were most content. The sun was so warm, the air of such an extraordinary fresh purity. Just to breathe was happiness. I think that in my life I have been most blest in this, that so often just to breathe has been happiness.

Dolly and I, now that we could talk as much as we wanted to, didn't after all talk much. Suddenly I felt incurious about her Germans. I didn't want them among the crocuses. The past, both hers and mine, seemed to matter very little, seemed a stuffy, indifferent thing, in that clear present. I don't suppose if we hadn't brought an empty basket with us on purpose to take back grapes to Mrs. Barnes that we would have gone on down to the vineyards at all, but rather have spent the day just where we were. The basket, however, had to be filled; it had to be brought back filled. It was to be the proof that we had done what we said we would. Kitty, said Dolly, would be fidgeted if we hadn't carried out the original plan, and might be afraid that, if we weren't eating grapes all day as arranged, we were probably using our idle mouths for saying things she wished left unsaid.

'Does poor Kitty always fidget?' I asked.

'Always,' said Dolly.

'About every single thing that might happen?'

'Every single thing,' said Dolly. 'She spends her life now entirely in fear—and it's all because of me.'

'But really, while she is with me she could have a holiday from fear if we told her I knew about your uncle and had accepted it with calm.'

'It would kill her,' said Dolly once more, firmly.

We lunched in the vineyards, and our desert was grapes. We ate them for a long while with enthusiasm, and went on eating them through every degree of declining pleasure till we disliked them. For fifty centimes each the owner gave us permission to eat grapes till we died if we wished to. For another franc we were allowed to fill the basket for Mrs. Barnes. Only conscientiousness made us fill it full, for we couldn't believe anybody would really want to eat such things as grapes. Then we began to crawl up the mountain again, greatly burdened both inside and out.

It took us over three hours to get home. We carried the basket in turns, half an hour at a time; but what about those other, invisible, grapes, that came with us as well? I think people who have been doing a grape-cure should sit quiet for the rest of the day, or else walk only on the level. To have to take one's cure up five thousand feet with one is hard. Again we didn't talk; this time because we couldn't. All that we could do was to pant and to perspire.

It was a brilliant afternoon, and the way led up when the vineyards left off through stunted fir trees that gave no shade, along narrow paths strewn with dry fir needles,—the slipperiest things in the world to walk on. Through these hot, shadeless trees the sun beat on our bent and burdened figures. Whenever we stopped to rest and caught sight of each other's flushed wet faces we laughed.

'Kitty needn't have been afraid we'd say much,' panted Dolly in one of these pauses, her eyes screwed up with laughter at my melted state.

I knew what I must be looking like by looking at her.

It was five o'clock by the time we reached the field with the crocuses, and we sank down on the grass where we had sat in the morning, speechless, dripping, overwhelmed by grapes. For a long while we said nothing. It was bliss to lie in the cool grass and not to have to carry anything. The sun, low in the sky, slanted almost level along the field, and shining right through the thin-petalled crocuses made of each a little star. I don't know anything more happy than to be where it is beautiful with some one who sees and loves it as much as you do yourself. We lay stretched out on the grass, quite silent, watching the splendour grow and grow till, having reached a supreme moment of radiance, it suddenly went out. The sun dropped behind the mountains along to the west, and out went the light; with a flick; in an instant. And the crocuses, left standing in their drab field, looked like so many blown-out candles.

Dolly sat up.

'There now,' she said. 'That's over. They look as blind and dim as a woman whose lover has left her. Have you ever,' she asked, turning her head to me still lying pillowed on Mrs. Barnes's grapes—the basket had a lid—'seen a woman whose lover has left her?'

'Of course I have. Everybody has been left by somebody.'

'I mean just left.'

'Yes. I've seen that too.'

'They look exactly like that,' said Dolly, nodding towards the crocuses. 'Smitten colourless. Light gone, life gone, beauty gone,—dead things in a dead world. I don't,' she concluded, shaking her head slowly, 'hold with love.'

At this I sat up too, and began to tidy my hair and put my hat on again. 'It's cold,' I said, 'now that the sun is gone. Let us go home.'

Dolly didn't move.

'Do you?' she asked.

'Do I what?'

'Hold with love.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Whatever happens?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Whatever its end is?'

'Yes,' I said. 'And I won't even say yes and no, as the cautious Charlotte Bront?did when she was asked if she liked London. I won't be cautious in love. I won't look at all the reasons for saying no. It's a glorious thing to have had. It's splendid to have believed all one did believe.'

'Even when there never was a shred of justification for the belief?' asked Dolly, watching me.

'Yes,' I said; and began passionately to pin my hat on, digging the pins into my head in my vehemence. 'Yes. The thing is to believe. Not go round first cautiously on tiptoe so as to be sure before believing and trusting that your precious belief and trust are going to be safe. Safe! There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing is to risk—to believe, and to risk everything for your belief. And if there wasn't anything there, if it was you all by yourself who imagined the beautiful kind things in the other one, the wonderful, generous, beautiful kind things, what does it matter? They weren't there, but you for once were capable of imagining them. You were up among the stars for a little, you did touch heaven. And when you've had the tumble down again and you're scrunched all to pieces and are just a miserable heap of blood and brokenness, where's your grit that you should complain? Haven't you seen wonders up there past all telling, and had supreme joys? It's because you were up in heaven that your fall is so tremendous and hurts so. What you've got to do is not to be killed. You've got at all costs to stay alive, so that for the rest of your days you may go gratefully, giving thanks to God that once ... you see,' I finished suddenly, 'I'm a great believer in saying thank you.'

'Oh,' said Dolly, laying her hand on my knee and looking at me very kindly, 'I'm so glad!'

'Now what are you glad about, Dolly?' I asked, turning on her and giving my hat a pull straight. And I added, my chin in the air, 'Those dead women of yours in their dead world, indeed! Ashamed of themselves—that's what they ought to be.'

'You're cured,' said Dolly.

'Cured,' I echoed.

I stared at her severely. 'Oh—I see,' I said. 'You've been drawing me out.'

'Of course I have. I couldn't bear to think of you going on being unhappy—hankering—'

'Hankering?'

Dolly got up. 'Now let's go home,' she said. 'It's my turn to carry the basket. Yes, it's a horrid word. Nobody should ever hanker. I couldn't bear it if you did. I've been afraid that perhaps—'

'Hankering!'

I got up too and stood very straight.

'Give me those grapes,' said Dolly.

'Hankering!' I said again.

And the rest of the way home, along the cool path where the dusk was gathering among the bushes and the grass was damp now beneath our dusty shoes, we walked with heads held high—hankering indeed!—two women surely in perfect harmony with life and the calm evening, women of wisdom and intelligence, of a proper pride and self-respect, kind women, good women, pleasant, amiable women, contented women, pleased women; and at the last corner, the last one between us and Mrs. Barnes's eye on the terrace, Dolly stopped, put down the basket, and laying both her arms about my shoulders kissed me.

'Cured,' she said, kissing me on one side of my face. 'Safe,' she said, kissing me on the other.

And we laughed, both of us, confident and glad. And I went up to my room confident and glad, for if I felt cured and Dolly was sure I was cured, mustn't it be true?

Hankering indeed.

September 21st.

But I'm not cured. For when I was alone in my room last night and the house was quiet with sleep, a great emptiness came upon me, and those fine defiant words of mine in the afternoon seemed poor things, poor dwindled things, like kaisers in their night-gowns. For hours I lay awake with only one longing: to creep back,—back into my shattered beliefs, even if it were the littlest corner of them. Surely there must be some corner of them still, with squeezing, habitable? I'm so small. I need hardly any room. I'd curl up. I'd fit myself in. And I wouldn't look at the ruin of the great splendid spaces I once thought I lived in, but be content with a few inches. Oh, it's cold, cold, cold, left outside of faith like this....

For hours I lay awake; and being ashamed of myself did no good, because love doesn't mind about being ashamed.

Evening.

All day I've slunk about in silence, watching for a moment alone with Dolly. I want to tell her that it was only one side of me yesterday, and that there's another, and another—oh, so many others; that I meant every word I said, but there are other things, quite different, almost opposite things that I also mean; that it's true I'm cured, but only cured in places, and over the rest of me, the rest that is still sick, great salt waves of memories wash every now and then and bite and bite....

But Dolly, who seems more like an unruffled pool of clear water to-day than ever, hasn't left Mrs. Barnes's side; making up, I suppose, for being away from her all yesterday.

Towards tea-time I became aware that Mrs. Barnes was watching me with a worried face, the well-known worried, anxious face, and I guessed she was wondering if Dolly had been indiscreet on our picnic and told me things that had shocked me into silence. So I cast about in my mind for something to reassure her, and, as I thought fortunately, very soon remembered the grapes.

'I'm afraid I ate too many grapes yesterday,' I said, when next I caught her worried, questioning eye.

Her face cleared. I congratulated myself. But I didn't congratulate myself long; for Mrs. Barnes, all motherly solicitude, inquired if by any chance I had swallowed some of the stones; and desiring to reassure her to the utmost as to the reason of my thoughtfulness, I said that very likely I had; from the feel of things; from the kind of heaviness.... And she, before I could stop her, had darted into the kitchen—these lean women are terribly nimble—and before I could turn round or decide what to do next, for by this time I was suspicious, she was back again with Mrs. Antoine and all the dreadful paraphernalia of castor oil. And I had to drink it. And it seemed hard that because I had been so benevolently desirous to reassure Mrs. Barnes I should have to drink castor oil and be grateful to her as well.

'This is petty,' I thought, sombrely eyeing the bottle,—I alluded in my mind to Fate.

But as I had to drink the stuff I might as well do it gallantly. And so I did; tossing it off with an air, after raising the glass and wishing the onlookers health and happiness in what I tried to make a pleasant speech.

Mrs. Barnes, Mrs. Antoine and Dolly stood watching me spellbound. A shudder rippled over them as the last drops slid down.

Then I came up here.

September 22nd.

Let me draw your attention, O ancient woman sitting at the end of my life, to the colour of the trees and bushes in this place you once lived in, in autumns that for you are now so far away. Do you remember how it was like flames, and the very air was golden? The hazel-bushes, do you remember them? Along the path that led down from the terrace to the village? How each separate one was like a heap of light? Do you remember how you spent to-day, the 22nd of September, 1919, lying on a rug in the sun close up under one of them, content to stare at the clear yellow leaves against the amazing sky? You ve forgotten, I daresay. You re only thinking of your next meal and being put to bed. But you did spend a day to-day worth remembering. You were very content. You were exactly balanced in the present, without a single oscillation towards either the past, a period you hadn't then learned to regard with the levity for which you are now so remarkable, or to the future, which you at that time, however much the attitude may amuse you now, thought of with doubt and often with fear. Mrs. Barnes let you go to-day, having an appreciation of the privileges due to the dosed, and you took a cushion and a rug—active, weren't you—and there you lay the whole blessed day, the sun warm on your body, enfolded in freshness, thinking of nothing but calm things. Rather like a baby you were; a baby on its back sucking its thumb and placidly contemplating the nursery ceiling. But the ceiling was the great sky, with, two eagles ever so far up curving in its depths, and when they sloped their wings the sun caught them and they flashed.

It seems a pity to forget these things. They make up, after all, the real preciousness of life. But I'm afraid my writing them down won't make you feel any joy in them again, you old thing. You'll be too brittle and rheumaticky to be able to think of lying on the grass for a whole day except with horror. I'm beginning to dislike the idea of being forced into your old body; and, on reflection, your philosophical detachment, your incapacity to do anything but laugh at the hopes and griefs and exultations and disappointments and bitter pains of your past, seems to me very like the fixed grimace of fleshless death.

September 23rd.

Mrs. Barnes can't, however hard she tries, be with us absolutely continuously. Gaps in her attendance do inevitably occur. There was one of them to-day; and I seized it to say to Dolly across the momentarily empty middle chair—we were on the terrace and the reading was going on,—'I've not seen you alone since the grape day. I wanted to tell you that I'm not cured. I had a relapse that very night. I meant all I said to you, but I meant too, all I said to myself while I was having the relapse. You'd better know the worst. I simply intolerably hankered.'

Dolly let Merivale fall on her lap, and gazed pensively at the distant mountains across the end of the valley.

'It's only the last growlings,' she said after a moment.

'Growlings?' I echoed.

'It's only the last growlings and mutterings of a thunderstorm that's going away. Whatever it was that happened to you—you've never told me, you know, but I'm quite good at somehow knowing—was very like a thunderstorm. A violent one. It was rather brief, it raged incredibly, and then it rumbled off. Though you were flattened out while it was going on, like some otherwise promising crop—'

'Oh,' I protested; but I had to laugh.

'—still when it took itself off you missed it. I wouldn't talk like this,' she said, turning her sweet eyes to me, 'I wouldn't make fun if I weren't sure you are on the road, anyhow, to being cured. Presently you'll reach the stage when you begin to realise that falling out of love is every bit as agreeable as falling in. It is, you know. It's a wonderful feeling, that gradual restoration to freedom and one's friends.'

'You don't understand after all,' I said.

Dolly said she did.

'No. Because you talk of falling out of love. What has happened to me is far worse than that. That? That's nothing. It's what everybody is doing all the time. What has happened to me is that I've lost my faith. It has been like losing God, after years of trust in Him. I believed with all my heart. And I am desolate.'

But Dolly only shook her head. 'You're not as desolate as you were,' she said. 'Nobody who loves all this as you do—' and she turned up her face to the warm sun, blinking her eyes,—'can go on being desolate long. Besides—really, you know—look at that.'

And she pointed to the shining mountains across the valley's eastern end.

Yes. That is eternal. Beauty is eternal. When I look at that, when I am in the clear mood that, looking at the mountains, really sees them, all the rest, the bewilderment and crying out, the clinging and the hankering, seem indeed unworthy. Imagine, with the vast landscape of the splendid world spread out before you, not moving freely in it on and on rejoicing and praising God, but sitting quite still lamenting in one spot, stuck in sediment.

'Did you say sentiment?' asked Dolly.

'Did I say anything?' I asked in surprise, turning my head to her. 'I thought I was thinking.'

'You were doing it aloud, then,' said Dolly. 'Was the word sentiment?'

'No. Sediment.'

'They're the same thing. I hate them both.'

September 24th.

What will happen to Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when I go back to England? The weather was a little fidgety to-day and yesterday, a little troubled, like a creature that stirs fretfully in its sleep, and it set me thinking. For once the change really begins at this time of the year it doesn't stop any more. It goes on through an increasing unpleasantness winds, rain, snow, blizzards—till, after Christmas, the real winter begins, without a cloud, without a stir of the air, its short days flooded with sunshine, its dawns and twilights miracles of colour.

All that fuss and noise of snow-flurries and howling winds is only the preparation for the great final calm. The last blizzard, tearing away over the mountains, is like an ugly curtain rolling up; and behold a new world. One night while you are asleep the howls and rattlings suddenly leave off, and in the morning you look out of the window and for the first time for weeks you see the mountains at the end of the valley clear against the eastern sky, clothed in all new snow from head to foot, and behind them the lovely green where the sunrise is getting ready. I know, because I was obliged to be here through the October and November and December of the year the house was built and was being furnished. They were three most horrid months; and the end of them was heaven.

But what will become of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when the weather does finally break up?

I can't face the picture of them spending a gloomy, half-warmed winter down in some cheap pension; an endless winter of doing without things, of watching every franc. They've been living like that for five years now. Where does Dolly get her sweet serenity from? I wish I could take them to England with me. But Dolly can't go to England. She is German. She is doomed. And Mrs. Barnes is doomed too, inextricably tied up in Dolly's fate. Of course I am going to beg them to stay on here, but it seems a poor thing to offer them, to live up here in blizzards that I run away from myself. It does seem a very doubtful offer of hospitality. I ought, to make it real, to stay on with them. And I simply couldn't. I do believe I would die if I had three months shut up with Mrs. Barnes in blizzards. Let her have everything—the house, the Antoines, all, all that I possess; but only let me go.

My spirit faints at the task before me, at the thought of the persuasions and the protests that will have to be gone through. And Dolly; how can I leave Dolly? I shall be haunted in London by visions of these two up here, the wind raging round the house, the snow piled up to the bedroom windows, sometimes cut off for a whole week from the village, because only in a pause in the blizzard can the little black figures that are peasants come sprawling over the snow with their shovels to dig one out. I know because I have been through it that first winter. But it was all new to us then, and we were a care-free, cheerful group inside the house, five people who loved each other and talked about anything they wanted to, besides being backed reassuringly by a sack of lentils and several sacks of potatoes that Antoine, even then prudent and my right hand, had laid in for just this eventuality. We made great fires, and brewed strange drinks. We sat round till far into the nights telling ghost stories. We laughed a good deal, and said just what we felt like saying. But Mrs. Barnes and Dolly? Alone up here, and undug out? It will haunt me.

September 25th.

She hasn't noticed the weather yet. At least, she has drawn no deductions from it. Evidently she thinks its fitfulness, its gleams of sunshine and its uneasy cloudings over, are just a passing thing and that it soon will settle down again to what it was before. After all, she no doubt says to herself, it is still September. But Antoine knows better, and so do I, and it is merely hours now before the break-up will be plain even to Mrs. Barnes. Then the combats de g閚閞osit?/i> will begin. I can't, I can't stop here so that Mrs. Barnes may be justified to herself in stopping too on the ground of cheering my solitude. I drank the castor oil solely that her mind might be at rest, but I can't develope any further along lines of such awful magnanimity. I would die.

September 26th.

To-day I smoked twelve cigarettes, only that the house should smell virile. They're not as good as a pipe for that, but they're better than the eternal characterless clean smell of unselfish women.

After each cigarette Mrs. Barnes got up unobtrusively and aired the room. Then I lit another.

Also I threw the cushions on the floor before flinging myself on the sofa in the hall; and presently Mrs. Barnes came and tidied them.

Then I threw them down again.

Towards evening she asked me if I was feeling quite well. I wasn't, because of the cigarettes, but I didn't tell her that. I said I felt very well indeed. Naturally I couldn't explain to her that I had only been trying to pretend there was a man about.

'You're sure those grape-stones—?' she began anxiously.

'Oh, certain!' I cried; and hastily became meek.

September 27th.

Oaths, now. I shrink from so much as suggesting it, but there is something to be said for them. They're so brief. They get the mood over. They clear the air. Women explain and protest and tiptoe tactfully about among what they think are your feelings, and there's no end to it. And then, if they're good women, good, affectionate, unselfish women, they have a way of forgiving you. They keep on forgiving you. Freely. With a horrible magnanimousness. Mrs. Barnes insisted on forgiving me yesterday for the cigarettes, for the untidiness. It isn't a happy thing, I think, to be shut up in a small lonely house being forgiven.

September 28th.

In the night the wind shook the windows and the rain pelted against them, and I knew that when I went down to breakfast the struggle with Mrs. Barnes would begin.

It did. It began directly after breakfast in the hall, where Antoine, remarking firmly 'C'est l'hiver,' had lit a roaring fire, determined this time to stand no parsimonious nonsense, and it has gone on all day, with the necessary intervals for recuperation.

Nothing has been settled. I still don't in the least know what to do. Mrs. Barnes's attitude is obstinately unselfish. She and Dolly, she reiterates, won't dream of staying on here unless they feel that by doing so they could be of service to me by keeping me company. If I'm not here I can't be kept company with; that, she says, I must admit.

I do. Every time she says it—it has been a day of reiterations—I admit it. Therefore, if I go they go, she finishes with a kind of sombre triumph at her determination not to give trouble or be an expense; but words fail her, she adds, (this is a delusion,) to express her gratitude for my offer, etc., and never, for the rest of their lives, will she and Dolly forget the delightful etc., etc.

What am I to do? I don't know. How lightly one embarks on marriage and on guests, and in what unexpected directions do both develope! Also, what a terrible thing is unselfishness. Once it has become a habit, how tough, how difficult to uproot. A single obstinately unselfish person can wreck the happiness of a whole household. Is it possible that I shall have to stay here? And I have so many things waiting for me in England that have to be done.

There's a fire in my bedroom, and I've been sitting on the floor staring into it for the past hour, seeking a solution. Because all the while Mrs. Barnes is firmly refusing to listen for a moment to my entreaties to use the house while I'm away, her thin face is hungry with longing to accept, and the mere talking, however bravely, of taking up the old homeless wandering again fills her tired eyes with tears.

Once I got so desperate that I begged her to stay as a kindness to me, in order to keep an eye on those patently efficient and trustworthy Antoines. This indeed was the straw-clutching of the drowning, and even Mrs. Barnes, that rare smiler, smiled.

No. I don't know what to do. How the wind screams. I'll go to bed.

September 29th.

And there's nothing to be done with Dolly either.

'You told me you put your foot down sometimes,' I said, appealing to her this morning in one of Mrs. Barnes's brief absences, 'Why don't you put it down now?'

'Because I don't want to,' said Dolly.

'But why not?' I asked, exasperated. 'It's so reasonable what I suggest, so easy—'

'I don't want to stay here without you,' said Dolly. 'This place is you. You've made it. It is soaked in you. I should feel haunted here without you. Why, I should feel lost.'

'As though you would! When we hardly speak to each other as it is—'

'But I watch you,' said Dolly, smiling, 'and I know what you're thinking. You've no idea how what you're thinking comes out on your face.'

'But if it makes your unhappy sister's mind more comfortable? If she feels free from anxiety here? If she feels you are safe here?' I passionately reasoned.

'I don't want to be safe.'

'Oh Dolly—you're not going to break out again?' I asked, as anxiously every bit as poor Mrs. Barnes would have asked.

Dolly laughed. 'I'll never do anything again that makes Kitty unhappy,' she said. 'But I do like the feeling—' she made a movement with her arms as though they were wings—'oh, I like the feeling of having room!'

September 30th.

The weather is better again, and there has been a pause in our strivings. Mrs. Barnes and I have drifted, tired both of us, I resting in that refuge of the weak, the putting off of making up my mind, back into talking only of the situation and the view. If Mrs. Barnes were either less good or more intelligent! But the combination of non-intelligence with goodness is unassailable. You can't get through. Nothing gets through. You give in. You are flattened out. You become a slave. And your case is indeed hopeless if the non-intelligent and good, are at the same time the victims, nobly enduring, of undeserved misfortune.

Evening.

A really remarkable thing happened to-day: I've had a prayer answered. I shall never dare pray again. I prayed for a man, any man, to come and leaven us, and I've got him.

Let me set it down in order.

This afternoon on our walk, soon after we had left the house and were struggling along against gusts of wind and whirling leaves in the direction, as it happened, of the carriage road up from the valley, Dolly said, 'Who is that funny little man coming towards us?'

And I looked, and said after a moment in which my heart stood still—for what had he come for?—'That funny little man is my uncle.'

There he was, the authentic uncle: gaiters, apron, shovel hat. He was holding on his hat, and the rude wind, thwarted in its desire to frolic with it, frisked instead about his apron, twitching it up, bellying it out; so that his remaining hand had all it could do to smooth the apron down again decorously, and he was obliged to carry his umbrella pressed tightly against his side under his arm.

'Not your uncle the Dean?' asked Mrs. Barnes in a voice of awe, hastily arranging her toque; for a whiff of the Church, any whiff, even one so faint as a curate, is as the breath of life to her.

'Yes,' I said, amazed and helpless. 'My Uncle Rudolph.'

'Why, he might be a German,' said Dolly, 'with a name like that.'

'Oh, but don't say so to him!' I cried. 'He has a perfect horror of Germans—'

And it was out before I remembered, before I could stop it. Good heavens, I thought; good heavens.

I looked sideways at Mrs. Barnes. She was, I am afraid, very red. So I plunged in again, eager to reassure her. 'That is to say,' I said, 'he used to have during the war. But of course now that the war is over it would be mere silliness—nobody minds now—nobody ought to mind now—'

My voice, however, trailed out into silence, for I knew, and Mrs. Barnes knew, that people do mind.

By this time we were within hail of my uncle, and with that joy one instinctively assumes on such occasions I waved my stick in exultant circles at him and called out, 'How very delightful of you, Uncle Rudolph!' And I advanced to greet him, the others tactfully dropping behind, alone.

There on the mountain side, with the rude wind whisking his clothes irreverently about, we kissed; and in my uncle's kiss I instantly perceived something of the quality of Mrs. Barnes's speeches the day I smoked the twelve cigarettes,—he was forgiving me.

'I have come to escort you home to England,' he said, his face spread over with the spirit of allowing byegones to be byegones; and in that spirit he let go of his apron in order reassuringly to pat my shoulder.

Immediately the apron bellied. His hand had abruptly to leave my shoulder so as to clutch it down again. 'You are with ladies?' he said a little distractedly, holding on to this turbulent portion of his clothing.

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph,' I replied modestly. 'I hope you didn't expect to find me with gentlemen?'

'I expected to find you, dear child, as I have always found you,—ready to admit and retrace. Generously ready to admit and retrace.'

'Sweet of you,' I murmured. 'But you should have let me know you were coming. I'd have had things killed for you. Fatted things.'

'It is not I,' he said, in as gentle a voice as he could manage, the wind being what it was, 'who am the returning prodigal. Indeed I wish for your sake that I were. My shoulders could bear the burden better than those little ones of yours.'

This talk was ominous, so I said, 'I must introduce you to Mrs. Barnes and her sister Mrs. Jewks. Let me present,' I said ceremoniously, turning to them who were now fortunately near enough, 'my Uncle Rudolph to you, of whom you have often heard me speak.'

'Indeed we have,' said Mrs. Barnes, with as extreme a cordiality as awe permitted.

My uncle, obviously relieved to find his niece not eccentrically alone but flanked by figures so respectable, securely, as it were, embedded in widows, was very gracious. Mrs. Barnes received his pleasant speeches with delighted reverence; and as we went back to the house, for the first thing to do with arrivals from England is to give them a bath, he and she fell naturally into each other's company along the narrow track, and Dolly and I followed behind.

We looked at each other, simultaneously perceiving the advantages of four rather than of three. Behind Mrs. Barnes's absorbed and obsequious back we looked at each other with visions in our eyes of unsupervised talks opening before us.

'They have their uses, you see,' I said in a low voice,—not that I need have lowered it in that wind.

'Deans have,' agreed Dolly, nodding.

And my desire to laugh,—discreetly, under my breath, ready to pull my face sober and be gazing at the clouds the minute our relations should turn round, was strangled by the chill conviction that my uncle's coming means painful things for me.

He is going to talk to me; talk about what I am trying so hard not to think of, what I really am succeeding in not thinking of; and he is going to approach the desolating subject in, as he will say and perhaps even persuade himself to believe, a Christian spirit, but in what really is a spirit of sheer worldliness. He has well-founded hopes of soon going to be a bishop. I am his niece. The womenkind of bishops should be inconspicuous, should see to it that comment cannot touch them. Therefore he is going to try to get me to deliver myself up to a life of impossible wretchedness again, only that the outside of it may look in order. The outside of the house,—of the house of a bishop's niece,—at all costs keep it neat, keep it looking like all the others in the street; so shall nobody know what is going on inside, and the neighbours won't talk about one's uncle.

If I were no relation but just a mere ordinary stranger-soul in difficulties, he, this very same man, would be full of understanding, would find himself unable, indeed, the facts being what they are, to be anything but most earnestly concerned to help me keep clear of all temptations to do what he calls retrace. And at the same time he would be concerned also to strengthen me in that mood which is I am sure the right one, and does very often recur, of being entirely without resentment and so glad to have the remembrance at least of the beautiful things I believed in. But I am his niece. He is about to become a bishop. Naturally he has to be careful not to be too much like Christ.

Accordingly I followed uneasily in his footsteps towards the house, dreading what was going to happen next. And nothing has happened next. Not yet, anyhow. I expect to-morrow....

We spent a most bland evening. I'm as sleepy and as much satiated by ecclesiastical good things as though I had been the whole day in church. My uncle, washed, shaven, and restored by tea, laid himself out to entertain. He was the decorous life of the party. He let himself go to that tempered exuberance with which good men of his calling like to prove that they really are not so very much different from other people after all. Round the hall fire we sat after tea, and again after supper, Dolly and I facing each other at the corners, my uncle and Mrs. Barnes in the middle, and the room gently echoed with seemly and strictly wholesome mirth. 'How enjoyable,' my uncle seemed to say, looking at us at the end of each of his good stories, gathering in the harvest of our appreciation, 'how enjoyable is the indulgence of legitimate fun. Why need one ever indulge in illegitimacy?'

And indeed his stories were so very good that every one of them, before they reached the point of bringing forth their joke, must have been to church and got married.

Dolly sat knitting, the light shining on her infantile fair hair, her eyes downcast in a dove-like meekness. Punctually her dimple flickered out at the right moment in each anecdote. She appeared to know by instinct where to smile; and several times I was only aware that the moment had come by happening to notice her dimple.

As for Mrs. Barnes, for the first time since I have known her, her face was cloudless. My uncle, embarked on anecdote, did not mention the war. We did not once get on to Germans. Mrs. Barnes could give herself up to real enjoyment. She beamed. She was suffused with reverential delight. And her whole body, the very way she sat in her chair, showed an absorption, an eagerness not to miss a crumb of my uncle's talk, that would have been very gratifying to him if he were not used to just this. It is strange how widows cling to clergymen. Ever since I can remember, like the afflicted Margaret's apprehensions in Wordsworth's poem, they have come to Uncle Rudolph in crowds. My aunt used to raise her eyebrows and ask me if I could at all tell her what they saw in him.

When we bade each other goodnight there was something in Mrs. Barnes's manner to me that showed me the presence of a man was already doing its work. She was aerated. Fresh, air had got into her and was circulating freely. At my bedroom door she embraced me with warm and simple heartiness, without the usual painful search of my face to see if by any chance there was anything she had left undone in her duty of being unselfish. My uncle's arrival has got her thoughts off me for a bit. I knew that what we wanted was a man. Not that a dean is quite my idea of a man, but then on the other hand neither is he quite my idea of a woman, and his arrival does put an end for the moment to Mrs. Barnes's and my dreadful combats de g閚閞osit?/i>. He infuses fresh blood into our anaemic little circle. Different blood, perhaps I should rather say; the blood of deans not being, I think, ever very fresh.

'Good night, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, getting up at ten o'clock and holding up my face to him. 'We have to thank you for a delightful evening.'

'Most delightful,' echoed Mrs. Barnes enthusiastically, getting up too and rolling up her knitting.

My uncle was gratified. He felt he had been at his best, and that his best had been appreciated.

'Good night, dear child,' he said, kissing my offered cheek. 'May the blessed angels watch about your bed.'

'Thank you, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, bowing my head beneath this benediction.

Mrs. Barnes looked on at the little domestic scene with reverential sympathy. Then her turn came.

'Good night, Mrs. Barnes,' said my uncle most graciously, shaking hands and doing what my dancing mistress used to call bending from the waist.

And to Dolly, 'Good night, Miss—'

Then he hesitated, groping for the name. 'Mrs.,' said Dolly, sweetly correcting him, her hand in his.

'Ah, I beg your pardon. Married. These introductions—especially in that noisy wind.'

'No—not exactly married,' said Dolly, still sweetly correcting him, her hand still in his.

'Not exactly—?'

'My sister has lost her—my sister is a widow,' said Mrs. Barnes hastily and nervously; alas, these complications of Dolly's!

'Indeed. Indeed. Sad, sad,' said my uncle sympathetically, continuing to hold her hand. 'And so young. Ah. Yes. Well, good night then, Mrs—'

But again he had to pause and grope.

'Jewks,' said Dolly sweetly.

'Forgive me. You may depend I shall not again be so stupid. Good night. And may the blessed angels—'

A third time he stopped; pulled up, I suppose, by the thought that it was perhaps not quite seemly to draw the attention of even the angels to an unrelated lady's bed. So he merely very warmly shook her hand, while she smiled a really heavenly smile at him.

We left him standing with his back to the fire watching us go up the stairs, holding almost tenderly, for one must expend one's sympathy on something, a glass of hot water.

My uncle is very sympathetic. In matters that do not touch his own advancement he is all sympathy. That is why widows like him, I expect. My aunt would have known the reason if she hadn't been his wife.