X.


After parting from the rest, Dove and the two Cayhills continued their way in silence: they were in the shadow thrown by the steep vaulting of the THOMASKIRCHE, before a word was exchanged between them. Johanna had several times glanced inquiringly at her sister, but Ephie had turned away her head, so that only the outline of her cheek was visible, and as Dove had done exactly the same, Johanna could only conclude that the two had fallen out. It was something novel for her to be obliged to talk when Ephie was present, but it was impossible for them to walk the whole way home as mum as this, especially as Dove had already heaved more than one deep sigh.

So, as they turned into the PROMENADE, Johanna said with a jerk, and with an aggressiveness that she could not subdue: “Well, that is the first and the last time anyone shall persuade me to go to a so-called opera by Wagner.”

“Is not that just a little rash?” asked Dove. He smiled, unruffled, with a suggestion of patronage; but there was also a preoccupation in his manner, which showed that he was thinking of other things.

“You call that music,” said Johanna, although he had done nothing of the kind. “I call it noise. I am not musical myself, thank goodness, but at least I know a tune when I hear one.”

“If my opinion had been asked, I should certainly have suggested something lighter—LOHENGRIN OR TANNHAUSER, for instance,” said Dove.

“You would have done us a favour if you had,” replied Johanna; and she meant what she said, in more ways than one. She had been at a loss to account for Ephie’s sudden longing to hear DIE WALKURE, and had gone to the theatre against her will, simply because she never thwarted Ephie if she could avoid it. Now, after she had heard the opera, she felt aggrieved with Dove as well; as far as she had been able to gather from his vague explanations, from the bawling of the singers, and from subsequent events, the first act treated of relations so infamous that, by common consent, they are considered non-existent; and Johanna was of the opinion that, instead of being so ready to take tickets for them, Dove might have let drop a hint of the nature of the piece Ephie wished to see.

After this last remark of Johanna’s there was another lengthy pause. Then Dove, looking fondly at what he could see of Ephie’s cheek, said: “I am afraid Miss Ephie has not enjoyed it either; she is so quiet—so unlike herself.”

Ephie, who had been staring into the darkness, bit her lip: he was at it again. After the unfriendly way in which Maurice Guest had deserted her, and forced her into Dove’s company, Dove had worried her right down the GRIMMAISCHESTRASSE, to know what the matter was, and how he had offended her. She felt exasperated with every one, and if he began his worryings again, would have to vent her irritation somehow.

“Ephie has only herself to blame if she didn’t enjoy it; she was bent on going,” said Johanna, in the mildly didactic manner she invariably used towards her sister. “But I think she is only tired—or a little cross.”

“Oh, that is not likely,” Dove hastened to interpose.

“I am not cross, Joan,” said Ephie angrily. “And if it was my fault you had to come—I’ve enjoyed myself very much, and I shall go again, as often as I like. But I won’t be teased—I won’t indeed!”

This was the sharpest answer Johanna had ever received from Ephie. She looked at her in dismay, but made no response, for of nothing was Johanna more afraid than of losing the goodwill Ephie bore her. Mentally she put her sister’s pettishness down to the noise and heat of the theatre, and it was an additional reason for bearing Wagner and his music a grudge. Dove also made no further effort to converse connectedly, but his silence was of a conciliatory kind, and, as they advanced along the PROMENADE, he could not deny himself the pleasure of drawing the pretty, perverse child’s attention to the crossings, the ruts in the road, the best bits of pavement, with a: “Walk you here, Miss Ephie,” “Take care,” “Allow me,” himself meanwhile dancing from one side of the footpath to the other, until the young girl was almost distracted.

“I can see for myself, thank you. I have eyes in my head as well as anyone else,” she exclaimed at length; and to Johanna’s amazed: “Ephie!” she retorted: “Yes, Joan, you think no one has a right to be rude but yourself.”

Johanna was more hurt by these words than she would have confessed. She had hitherto believed that Ephie—affectionate, lazy little Ephie—accepted her individual peculiarities as an integral part of her nature: it had not occurred to her that Ephie might be standing aloof and considering her objectively—let alone mentally using such an unkind word as rudeness of her. But Ephie’s fit of ill-temper, for such it undoubtedly was, made Johanna see things differently; it hinted at unsuspected, cold scrutinies in the past, and implied a somewhat laming care of one’s words in the days to come, which would render it difficult ever again to be one’s perfectly natural self.

Had Johanna not been so occupied with her own feelings, she would have heard the near tears in Ephie’s voice; it was with the utmost difficulty that the girl kept them back, and at the house-door, she had vanished up the stairs long before Dove had finished saying good-night. In the corridor, she hesitated whether or no, according to custom, she should go to her mother’s room. Then she put a brave face on it, and opened the door.

“Here we are, mummy. Good night. I hope the evening wasn’t too long.”

Long?—on the contrary the hours had flown. Mrs. Cayhill, left to herself, had all the comfortable sensations of a tippler in the company of his bottle. She could forge ahead, undeterred by any sense of duty; she had not to interrupt herself to laugh at Ephie’s wit, nor was she troubled by Johanna’s cold eye—that eye which told more plainly than words, how her elder daughter regarded her self-indulgence. Propped up in bed on two pillows, she now laid down her book, and put out her hand to draw Ephie to her.

“Did you enjoy it, darling? Were you amused? But you will tell me all about it in the morning.”

“Yes, mother, in the morning. I am a little tired—but it was very sweet,” said Ephie bravely. “Good night.”

Mrs. Cayhill kissed her, and nodded in perfect contentment at the pretty little figure before her. Ephie was free to go. And at last she was in her own room—at last!

She hastily locked both doors, one leading to the passage and one to her sister’s room. A moment later, Johanna was at the latter, trying to open it.

“Ephie! What is the matter? Why have you locked the door? Open it at once, I insist upon it,” she cried anxiously, and as loudly as she dared, for fear of disturbing the other inmates of the house.

But Ephie begged hard not to be bothered; she had a bad headache, and only wanted to be quiet.

“Let me give you a powder,” urged her sister. “You are so excited—I am sure you are not well;” and when this, too, was refused: “You had nothing but some tea, child—you must be hungry. And they have left our supper on the table.”

No, she was not hungry, didn’t want any supper, and was very sleepy.

“Well, at least unlock your door,” begged Johanna, with visions of the dark practices which Ephie, the soul of candour, might be contemplating on the other side. “I will not come in, I promise you,” she added.

“Oh, all right,” said Ephie crossly. But as soon as she heard that Johanna had gone, she returned to the middle of the room without touching the door; and after standing undecided for a moment, as if not quite sure what was coming next, she sat down on a chair at the foot of the bed, and suddenly began to cry. The tears had been in waiting for so long that they flowed without effort, abundantly, rolling one over another down her cheeks; but she was careful not to make a sound; for, even when sobbing bitterly, she did not forget that at any moment Johanna might enter the adjoining room and overhear her. And then, what a fuss there would be! For Ephie was one of those fortunate people who always get what they want, and but rarely have occasion to cry. All her desires had moved low, near earth, and been easily fulfilled. Did she break her prettiest doll, a still prettier was forthcoming; did anything happen to cross wish or scheme of hers, half a dozen brains were at work to think out a compensation.

But now she wept in earnest, behind closed doors, for she had received an injury which no one could make good. And the more she thought of it, the more copiously her tears flowed. The evening had been one long tragedy of disappointment: her fevered anticipation beforehand, her early throbs of excitement in the theatre, her growing consternation as the evening advanced, her mortification at being slighted—a sensation which she experienced for the first time. Again and again she asked herself what she had done to be treated in this way. What had happened to change him?

She was sitting upright on her chair, letting the tears stream unchecked; her two hands lay upturned on her knee; in one of them was a diminutive lace handkerchief, rolled to a ball, with which now and then she dabbed away the hottest tears. The windows of the room were still open, the blinds undrawn, and the street-lamps threw a flickering mesh of light on the wall. In the glass that hung over the washstand, she saw her dim reflection: following an impulse, she dried her eyes, and, with trembling fingers, lighted two candles, one on each side of the mirror. By this uncertain light, she leant forward with both hands on the stand, and peered at herself with a new curiosity.

She was still just as she had come out of the theatre: a many-coloured silk scarf was twisted round her head, and the brilliant, dangling fringes, and the stray tendrils of hair that escaped, made a frame for the rounded oval of her face. And then her skin was so fine, her eyes were so bright, the straight lashes so black and so long!—she put her head back, looked at herself through half-closed lids, turned her face this way and that, even smiling, wet though her cheeks were, in order that she might see the even line of teeth, with their slightly notched edges. The smile was still on her lips when the tears welled up again, ran over, trickled down and dropped with a splash, she watching them, until a big, unexpected sob rose in her throat, and almost choked her. Yes, she was pretty—oh, very, very pretty! But it made what had happened all the harder to understand. How had he had the heart to treat her so cruelly?

She knelt down by the open window, and laid her head on the sill. The moon, a mere sharp line of silver, hung fine and slender, like a polished scimitar, above the dark mass of houses opposite. Turning her hot face up to it, she saw that it was new, and instantly felt a throb of relief that she had not caught her first glimpse of it through glass. She bowed her head to it, quickly, nine times running, and sent up a prayer to the deity of fortune that had its home there. Good luck!—the fulfilment of one’s wish! She wished in haste, with tight-closed eyes—and who knew but what, the very next day, her wish might come true! Tired with crying, above all, tired of the grief itself, she began more and more to let her thoughts stray to the morrow. And having once yielded to the allurements of hope, she even endeavoured to make the best of the past evening, telling herself that she had not been alone for a single instant; he had really had no chance of speaking to her. In the next breath, of course, she reminded herself that he might easily have made a chance, had he wished; and a healthier feeling of resentment stole over her. Rising from her cramped position, she shut the window. She resolved to show him that she was not a person who could be treated in this off-hand fashion; he should see that she was not to be trifled with.

But she played with her unhappiness a little longer, and even had an idea of throwing herself on the bed without undressing. She was very sleepy, though, and the desire to be between the cool, soft sheets was too strong to be withstood. She slipped out of her clothes, leaving them just where they fell on the floor, like round pools; and before she had finished plaiting her hair, she was stifling a hearty yawn. But in bed, when the light was out, she lay and stared before her.

“I am very, very unhappy. I shall not sleep a wink,” she said to herself, and sighed at the prospect of the night-watch.

But before five minutes had passed her closed hand relaxed, and lay open and innocent on the coverlet; her breath came regularly—she was fast asleep. The moon was visible for a time in the setting of the unshuttered window; and when she wakened next day, toward nine o’clock, the full morning sun was playing on the bed.

For several months prior to this, Ephie had worshipped Schilsky at a distance. The very first time she saw him play, he had made a profound impression on her: he looked so earnest and melancholy, so supremely indifferent to every one about him, as he stood with his head bent to his violin. Then, too, he had beautiful hands; and she did not know which she admired more, his auburn hair with the big hat set so jauntily on it, or the thrillingly impertinent way he had of staring at you—through half-closed eyes, with his head well back—in a manner at once daring and irresistible.

Having come through a period of low spirits, caused by an acute consciousness of her own littleness and inferiority, Ephie so far recovered her self-confidence that she was able to look at her divinity when she met him; and soon after this, she made the intoxicating discovery that not only did he return her look, but that he also took notice of her, and deliberately singled her out with his gaze. And the belief was pardonable on Ephie’s part, for Schilsky made it a point of honour to stare any pretty girl into confusion; besides which, he had a habit of falling into sheep-like reveries, in which he saw no more of what or whom he looked at, than do the glassy eyes of the blind. More than once, Ephie had blushed and writhed in blissful torture under these stonily staring eyes.

From this to persuading herself that her feelings were returned was only a step. Events and details, lighter than puff-balls, were to her links of iron, which formed a wonderful chain of evidence. She went about nursing the idea that Schilsky desired an introduction as much as she did; that he was suffering from a romantic and melancholy attachment, which forbade him attempting to approach her.

At this date, she became an adept at inventing excuses to go to the Conservatorium when she thought he was likely to be there; and, suddenly grown rebellious, she shook off Johanna’s protectorship, which until now had weighed lightly on her. She grew fastidious about her dress, studied before the glass which colours suited her best, and the effect of a particular bow or ribbon; while on the days she had her violin-lessons, she developed a coquetry which made nothing seem good enough to wear, and was the despair of Johanna. When Schilsky played at an ABENDUNTERHALTUNG, she sat in the front row of seats, and made her hands ache with applauding. Afterwards she lay wakeful, with hot cheeks, and dreamt extravagant dreams of sending him great baskets and bouquets of flowers, with coloured streamers to them, such as the singers in the opera received on a gala night. And though no name was given, he would know from whom they came. But on the only occasion she tried to carry out the scheme, and ventured inside a florist’s shop, her scant command of German, and the excessive circumstantiality of the matter, made her feel so uncomfortable that she had fled precipitately, leaving the shopman staring after her in surprise.

Things were at this pass when, one day late in May, Ephie went as usual to take her lesson. It was two o’clock on a cloudless afternoon, and so warm that the budding lilac in squares and gardens began to give out fragrance. In the whitewashed, many-windowed corridors of the Conservatorium, the light was harsh and shadowless; it jarred on one, wounded the nerves. So at least thought Schilsky, who was hanging about the top storey of the building, in extreme ill-humour. He had been forced to make an appointment with a man to whom he owed money; the latter had not yet appeared, and Schilsky lounged and swore, with his two hands deep in his pockets, and his sulkiest expression. But gradually, he found himself listening to the discordant tones of a violin—at first unconsciously, as we listen when our thoughts are elsewhere engaged, then more and more intently. In one of the junior masters’ rooms, some one had begun to play scales in the third position, uncertainly, with shrill feebleness, seeking out each note, only to produce it falsely. As this scraping worked on him, Schilsky could not refrain from rubbing his teeth together, and screwing up his face as though he had toothache; now that the miserable little tones had successfully penetrated his ear, they hit him like so many blows.

“Damn him for a fool!” he said savagely to himself, and found an outlet for his irritation in repeating these words aloud. Then, however, as an ETUDE was commenced, with an impotence that struck him as purely vicious, he could endure the torment no longer. He had seen in the BUREAU the particular master, and knew that the latter had not yet come upstairs. Going to the room from which the sounds issued, he stealthily opened the door.

A girl was standing with her back to him, and was so engrossed in playing that she did not hear him enter. On seeing this, he proposed to himself the schoolboy pleasure of creeping up behind her and giving her a well-deserved fright. He did so, with such effect that, had he not caught it, her violin would have fallen to the floor.

He took both her wrists in his, held them firm, and, from his superior height—he was head and shoulders taller than Ephie —looked down on the miscreant. He recognised her now as a pretty little American whom he had noticed from time to time about the building; but—but . . . well, that she was as astoundingly pretty as this, he had had no notion. His eyes strayed over her face, picking out all its beauties, and he felt himself growing as soft as butter. Besides, she had crimsoned down to her bare, dimpled neck; her head drooped; her long lashes covered her eyes, and a tremulous smile touched the corners of her mouth, which seemed uncertain whether to laugh or to cry—the short, upper-lip trembled. He felt from her wrists, and saw from the uneasy movement of her breast, how wildly her heart was beating—it was as if one held a bird in one’s hand. His ferocity died away; none of the hard words he had had ready crossed his lips; all he said, and in his gentlest voice, was: “Have I frightened you?” He was desperately curious to know the colour of her eyes, and, as she neither answered him nor looked up, but only grew more and more confused, he let one of her hands fall, and taking her by the chin, turned her face up to his. She was forced to look at him for a moment. Upon which, he stooped and kissed her on the mouth, three times, with a pause between each kiss. Then, at a noise in the corridor, he swung hastily from the room, and was just in time to avoid the master, against whom he brushed up in going out of the door.

Herr Becker looked suspiciously at his favourite pupil’s tell-tale face and air of extreme confusion; and, throughout the lesson, his manner to her was so cold and short that Ephie played worse than ever before. After sticking fast in the middle of a passage, she stopped altogether, and begged to be allowed to go home. When she had gone, and some one else was playing, Herr Becker stood at the window and shook his head: round this innocent baby face he had woven several pretty fancies.

Meanwhile Ephie flew rather than walked home, and having reached her room unseen, flung herself on the bed, and buried her burning cheeks in the white coolness of the pillows. Johanna, finding her thus, a short time after, was alarmed, put questions of various kinds, felt sure the sun had been too hot for her, and finally stood over the bed, holding her unfailing remedy, a soothing powder for the nerves.

“Oh, do for goodness’ sake, leave me alone, Joan,” said Ephie. “I don’t want your powders. I am all right. Just let me be.”

She drank the mixture, however, and catching sight of Johanna’s anxious face, and aware that she had been cross, she threw her arms round her sister, hugged her, and called her a “dear old darling Joan.” But there was something in the stormy tenderness of the embrace, in the flushed cheeks and glittering eyes that made Johanna even more uneasy. She insisted upon Ephie lying still and trying to sleep; and, after taking off her shoes for her, and noiselessly drawing down the blinds, she went on tiptoe out of the room.

Ephie burrowed more deeply in her pillow, and putting both hands to her cars, to shut out the world, went over the details of what had happened. It was like a fairy-story. She walked lazily down the sunny corridor, entered the class-room, and took off her hat, which Herr Becker hung up for her, after having playfully examined it. She had just taken her violin from its case, when he remembered something he had to do in the BUREAU, and went out of the room, bidding her practise her scales during his absence; she heard again and smiled at the funny accent with which he said: “Just a moment.” She saw the bare walls of the room, the dust that lay white on the lid on the piano, was conscious of the difficulties of C sharp minor. She even knew the very note at which HE had been beside her—without a word of warning, as suddenly as though he had sprung from the earth. She heard the cry she had given, and felt his hands—the hands she had so often admired—clasp her wrists. He was so close to her that she felt his breath, and knew the exact shape of the diamond ring he wore on his little finger. She felt, too, rather than saw the audacious admiration of his eyes; and his voice was not the less caressing because a little thick. And then—then—she burrowed more firmly, held her ears more tightly to, laughed a happy, gurgling laugh that almost choked her: never, as long as she lived, would she forget the feel of his moustache as it scratched her lips!

When she rose and looked at herself in the glass, it seemed extraordinary that there should be no outward difference in her; and for several days she did not lose this sensation of being mysteriously changed. She was quieter than usual, and her movements were a little languid, but a kind of subdued radiance peeped through and shone in her eyes. She waited confidently for something to happen: she did not herself know what it would be, but, after the miracle that had occurred, it was beyond belief that things could jog on in their old familiar course; and so she waited and expected—at every letter the postman brought, each time the door-bell rang, whenever she went into the street.

But after a week had dragged itself to an end, and she had not even seen Schilsky again, she grew restless and unsure; and sometimes at night, when Johanna thought she was asleep, she would stand at her window, and, with a very different face from that which she wore by day, put countless questions to herself, all of which began with why and how. And Johanna was again beset by the fear that Ephie was sickening for an illness, for the child would pass from bursts of rather forced gaiety to fits of real fretfulness, or sink into brown studies, from which she wakened with a start. But if, on some such occasion, Johanna said to her: “Where ARE your thoughts, Ephie?” she would only laugh, and answer, with a hug: “Wool-gathering, you dear old bumble-bee!”

From the lesson following the eventful one, Ephie played truant, on the ground of headache, partly because her fancy pictured him lying in wait like an ogre to eat her up, and partly from a poor little foolish fear lest he should think her too easily won. Now, however, she blamed herself for not having given him an opportunity to speak to her, and began to frequent the Conservatorium assiduously. When, after ten long days, she saw him again, an unfailing instinct guided her aright.

It was in the vestibule, as she was leaving the building, and they met face to face. Directly she espied him, though her heart thumped alarmingly, Ephie tossed her head, gazed fixedly at some distant object, and was altogether as haughty as her parted lips would allow of. And she played her part so well that Schilsky’s attention was arrested; he remembered who she was, and stared hard at her as she passed. Not only this, but pleased, he could not have told why, he turned and followed her out, and standing on the steps, looked after her. She went down the street with her head in the air, holding her dress very high to display a lace-befrilled petticoat, and clattering gracefully on two high-heeled, pointed shoes. He screwed up his eyes against the sun, in order to see her better—he was short-sighted, too, but vanity forbade him to wear glasses—and when, at the corner of the street, Ephie rather spoilt the effect of her behaviour by throwing a hasty glance back, he laughed and clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

“VERDAMMT!” he said with expression.

And both on that day and the next, when he admired a well-turned ankle or a pretty petticoat, he was reminded of the provoking little American, with the tossed head and baby mouth.

A few days later, in the street that ran alongside the Gewandhaus, he saw her again.

Ephie, who, in the interval, had upbraided herself incessantly, was none the less, now the moment had come, about to pass as before—even more frigidly. But this time Schilsky raised his hat, with a tentative smile, and, in order not to appear childish, she bowed ever so slightly. When he was safely past, she could not resist giving a furtive look behind her, and at precisely the same moment, he turned, too. In spite of her trouble, Ephic found the coincidence droll; she tittered, and he saw it, although she immediately laid the back of her hand on her lips. It was not in him to let this pass unnoticed. With a few quick steps, he was at her side.

He took off his hat again, and looked at her not quite sure how to begin.

“I am happy to see you have not forgotten me,” he said in excellent English.

Ephie had impulsively stopped on hearing him come up with her, and now, colouring deeply, tried to dig a hole in the pavement with the toe of her shoe. She, too, could not think what to say; and this, together with the effect produced on her by his peculiar lisp, made her feel very uncomfortable. She was painfully conscious of his insistent eyes on her face, as he waited for her to speak; but there was a distressing pause before he added: “And sorry to see you are still angry with me.”

At this, she found her tongue. Looking, not at him, but at a passer-by on the opposite side of the street, she said: “Why, I guess I have a right to be.”

She tried to speak severely, but her voice quavered, and once more the young man was not sure whether the trembling of her lip signified tears or laughter.

“Are you always so cruel?” he asked, with an intentness that made her eyes seek the ground again. “Such a little crime! Is there no hope for me?”

She attempted to be dignified. “Little! I am really not accustomed——”

“Then I’m not to be forgiven?”

His tone was so humble that suddenly she had to laugh. Shooting a quick glance at him, she said:

“That depends on how you behave in future. If you promise never to——”

Before the words were well out of her mouth, she was aware of her stupidity; her laugh ended, and she grew redder than before. Schilsky had laughed, too, quite frankly, and he continued to smile at the confusion she had fallen into. It seemed a long time before he said with emphasis: “That is the last thing in the world you should ask of me.”

Ephie drooped her head, and dug with her shoe again; she had never been so tongue-tied as to-day, just when she felt she ought to say something very cold and decisive. But not an idea presented itself, and meanwhile he went on: “The punishment would be too hard. The temptation was so great.”

As she was still obstinately silent, he stooped and peeped under the overhanging brim of her hat. “Such pretty lips!” he said, and then, as on the former occasion, he took her by the chin and turned her face up to his.

But she drew back angrily. “Mr. Schilskyl . . . how dare you! Take your hand away at once.”

“There!—I have sinned again,” he said, and folded his hands in mock supplication. “Now I am afraid you will never forgive me.—But listen, you have the advantage of me; you know my name. Will you not tell me yours?”

Having retreated a full yard from him, Ephie regained some of her native self-composure. For the first time, she found herself able to look straight at him. “No,” she said, with a touch of her usual lightness. “I shall leave you to find it out for yourself; it will give you something to do.”

They both laughed. “At least give me your hand,” he said; and when he held it in his, he would not let her go, until, after much seeming reluctance on her part, she had detailed to him the days and hours of her lessons at the Conservatorium, and where he would be likely to meet her. As before, he stood and watched her go down the street, hoping that she would turn at the corner. But, on this day, Ephie whisked along in a great hurry.

On after occasions, he waylaid her as she came and went, and either stood talking to her, or walked the length of the street beside her. At the early hour of the afternoon when Ephie had her lessons, he did not need to fear being seen by acquaintances; the sunshine was undisturbed in the quiet street. The second time they met, he told her that he had found out what her name was; and his efforts to pronounce it afforded Ephie much amusement. Their conversation was always of the same nature, half banter, half earnest. Ephie, who had rapidly recovered her assurance, invariably began in her archest manner, and it became his special pleasure to reduce her, little by little, to a crimson silence.

But one day, about a fortnight later, she came upon him at a different hour, when he was not expecting to see her. He was strolling up and down in front of the Conservatorium, waiting for Louise, who might appear at any moment. Ephie had been restless all the morning, and had finally made an excuse to go out: her steps naturally carried her to the Conservatorium, where she proposed to study the notice-board, on the chance of seeing Schilsky. When she caught sight of him, her eyes brightened; she greeted him with an inviting smile, and a saucy remark. But Schilsky did not take up her tone; he cut her words short.

“What are you doing here to-day?” he asked with a frown of displeasure, meanwhile keeping a watchful eye on the inner staircase—visible through the glass doors—down which Louise would come. “I haven’t a moment to spare.”

Mortally offended by his manner, Ephie drew back her extended hand, and giving him a look of surprise and resentment, was about to pass him by without a further word. But this was more than Schilsky could bear; he put out his hand to stop her, always, though, with one eye on the door.

“Now, don’t be cross, little girl,” he begged impatiently. “It’s not my fault—upon my word it isn’t. I wasn’t expecting to see you to-day—you know that. Look here, tell me—this sort of thing is so unsatisfactory—is there no other place I could see you? What do you do with yourself all day? Come, answer me, don’t be angry.”

Ephie melted. “Come and visit us on Sunday afternoon,” she said. “We are always at home then.”

He laughed rudely, and took no notice of her words. “Come, think of something—quick!” he said.

He was on tenterhooks to be gone, and showed it. Ephie grew flustered, and though she racked her brains, could make no further suggestion.

“Oh well, if you can’t, you know,” he said crossly, and loosened his hold of her arm.

Then, at the last moment, she had a flash of inspiration; she remembered how, on the previous Sunday, Dove had talked enthusiastically of an opera-performance, which, if she were not mistaken, was to take place the following night. Dove had declared that all musical Leipzig would probably be present in the theatre. Surely she might risk mentioning this, without fear of another snub.

“I am going to the opera to-morrow night,” she said in a small, meek voice, and was on the verge of tears. Schilsky hardly heard her; Louise had appeared at the head of the stairs. “The very thing,” he said. “I shall look out for you there, little girl. Good-bye. AUF WIEDERSEHEN!”

He went down the steps, without even raising his hat, and when Louise came out, he was sauntering towards the building again, as if he had come from the other end of the street.

Ephie went home in a state of anger and humiliation which was new to her. For the first few hours, she was resolved never to speak to Schilsky again. When this mood passed, she made up her mind that he should atone for his behaviour to the last iota: he should grovel before her; she would scarcely deign to look at him. But the nearer the time came for their meeting, the more were her resentful feelings swallowed up by the wish to see him. She counted off the hours till the opera commenced; she concocted a scheme to escape Johanna’s surveillance; she had a story ready, if it should be necessary, of how she had once been introduced to Schilsky. Her fingers trembled with impatience as she fastened on a pretty new dress, which had just been sent home: a light, flowered stuff, with narrow bands of black velvet artfully applied so as to throw the fairness of her hair and skin into relief.

The consciousness of looking her best gave her manner a light sureness that was very charming. But from the moment they entered the FOYER, Ephie’s heart began to sink: the crowd was great; she could not see Schilsky; and in his place came Dove, who was not to be shaken off. Even Maurice was bad enough—what concern of his was it how she enjoyed herself? When, finally, she did discover the person she sought, he was with some one else, and did not see her; and when she had succeeded in making him look, he frowned, shook his head, and made angry signs that she was not to speak to him, afterwards going downstairs with the sallow girl in white. What did it mean? All through the tedious second act, Ephie wound her handkerchief round and round, and in and out of her fingers. Would it never end? How long would the fat, ugly Brunnhilde stand talking to Siegmund and the woman who lay so ungracefully between his knees? As if it mattered a straw what these sham people did or felt! Would he speak to her in the next interval, or would he not?

The side curtains had hardly swept down before she was up from her seat, hurrying Johanna away. This time she chose to stand against the wall, at the end of the FOYER. After a short time, he came in sight, but he had no more attention to spare for her than before; he did not even look in her direction. Her one consolation was that obviously he was not enjoying himself; he wore a surly face, was not speaking, and, to a remark the girl in white made, he answered by an angry flap of the hand. When they had twice gone past in this way, and she had each time vainly put herself forward, Ephie began to take an interest in what Dove was saying, to smile at him and coquet with him, and the more openly, the nearer Schilsky drew. Other people grew attentive, and Dove went into a seventh heaven, which made it hard for him placidly to accept the fit of pettish silence, she subsequently fell into.

The crowning touch was put to this disastrous evening by the fact that Schilsky’s companion of the FOYER walked the greater part of the way home with them; and, what was worse, that she took not the slightest notice of Ephie.

XI.


Before leaving her bedroom the following morning, Ephie wrote on her scented pink paper a short letter, which began: “Dear Mr. Schilsky,” and ended with: “Your sincere friend, Euphemia Stokes Cayhill.” In this letter, she “failed to understand” his conduct of the previous evening, and asked him for an explanation. Not until she had closed the envelope, did she remember that she was ignorant of his address. She bit the end of her pen, thinking hard, and directly breakfast was over, put on her hat and slipped out of the house.

It was the first time Ephie had had occasion to enter the BUREAU of the Conservatorium; and, when the heavy door had swung to behind her, and she was alone in the presence of the secretaries, each of whom was bent over a high desk, writing in a ledger, her courage almost failed her. The senior, an old, white-haired man, with a benevolent face, did not look up; but after she had stood hesitating for some minutes, an under-secretary solemnly laid down his pen, and coming to the counter, wished in English to know what he could do for her. Growing very red, Ephie asked him if he “would . . . could . . . would please tell her where Mr. Schilsky lived.”

Herr Kleefeld leaned both hands on the counter, and disconcerted her by staring at her over his spectacles.

“Mr. Schilsky? Is it very important?” he said with a leer, as if he were making a joke.

“Why, yes, indeed,” replied Ephie timidly.

He nodded his head, more to himself than to her, went back to his desk, opened another ledger, and ran his finger down a page, repeating aloud as he did so, to her extreme embarrassment: “Mr. Schilsky—let me see. Mr. Schilsky—let me see.”

After a pause, he handed her a slip of paper, on which he had painstakingly copied the address: “TALSTRASSE, 12 III.”

“Why, I thank you very much. I have to ask him about some music. Is there anything to pay?” stammered Ephie.

But Herr Kleefeld, leaning as before on the counter, shook his head from side to side, with a waggish air, which confused Ephie still more. She made her escape, and left him there, still wagging, like a china Mandarin.

Having addressed the letter in the nearest post office, she entered a confectioner’s and bought a pound of chocolate creams; so that when Johanna met her in the passage, anxious and angry at her leaving the house without a word, she was able to assert that her candy-box had been empty, and she felt she could not begin to practise till it was refilled. But Johanna was very cantankerous, and obliged her to study an hour overtime to atone for her escapade.

Then followed for Ephie several unhappy days, when all the feeling she seemed capable of concentrated itself on the visits of the postman. She remained standing at the window until she had seen him come up the street, and she was regularly the first to look through the mails as they lay on the lobby table. Two days brought no reply to her letter. On the third fell a lesson, which she was resolved not to take. But when the hour came, she dressed herself with care and went as usual. Schilsky was nowhere to be seen. Half a week later, the same thing was repeated, except that on this day, she made herself prettier than ever: she was like some gay, garden flower, in a big white hat, round the brim of which lay scarlet poppies, and a dress of a light blue, which heightened the colour of her cheeks, and, reflected in her eyes, made them bluer than a fjord in the sun. But her spirits were low; if she did not see him this time, despair would crush her.

But she did—saw him while she was still some distance off, standing near the portico of the Conservatorium; and at the sight of him, after the uncertainty she had gone through during the past week, she could hardly keep back her tears. He did not come to meet her; he stood and watched her approach, and only when she reached him, indolently held out his hand. As she refused to notice it, and went to the extreme edge of the pavement to avoid it, he made a barrier of his arms, and forced her to stand still. Holding her thus, with his hand on her elbow, he looked keenly at her; and, in spite of the obdurate way in which she kept her eyes turned from him, he saw that she was going to cry. For a moment he hesitated, afraid of the threatening scene, then, with a decisive movement, he took her violin-case out of her hand. Ephie made an ineffectual effort to get possession of it again, but he held it above her reach, and saying: “Wait a minute,” ran up the steps. He came back without it, and throwing a swift glance round him, took the young girl’s arm, and walked her off at a brisk pace to the woods. She made a few, faint protests. But he replied: “You and I have something to say to each other, little girl.”

A full hour had elapsed when Ephie appeared again. She was alone, and walked quickly, casting shy glances from side to side. On reaching the Conservatorium, she waited in a quiet corner of the vestibule for nearly a quarter of an hour, before Schilsky sauntered in, and released her violin from the keeping of the janitor, a good friend of his.

They had not gone far into the wood; Schilsky knew of a secluded seat, which was screened by a kind of boscage; and here they had remained. At first, Ephie had cried heartily, in happy relief, and he had not been able to console her. He had come to meet her with many good resolutions, determined not to let the little affair, so lightly begun, lead to serious issues; but Ephie’s tears, and the tale they told, and the sobbed confessions that slipped out unawares, made it hard for him to be wise. He put his arm round her, dried her tears with his own handkerchief, kissed the hand he held. And when he had in this way petted her back to composure, she suddenly looked up in his face, and, with a pretty, confiding movement, said:

“Then you do care for me a little?”

It would have need a stronger than he to answer otherwise. “Of course I do,” was easily said, and to avoid the necessity of more, he kissed the pink dimples at the base of her four fingers, as well as the baby crease that marked the wrist. The poppy-strewn hat lay on the seat beside them; the fluffy head and full white throat were bare; in the mellow light of the trees, the lashes looked jet-black on her cheeks; at each word, he saw her small, even teeth: and he was so unnerved by the nearness of all this fresh young beauty that, when Ephie with her accustomed frankness had told him everything he cared to know, he found himself saying, in place of what he had intended, that they must be very cautious. In the meantime, it would not do for them to be seen together: it might injure his prospects, be harmful to his future.

“Yes, but afterwards?” she asked him promptly.

He kissed her cheek. But she repeated the question, and he was obliged to reply: that would be a different matter. It was now her turn to be curious, and one of the first questions she put related to the dark girl he had been with at the theatre. Playing lightly with her fingers, Schilsky told her that this was one of his best friends, some one he had known for a long, long time, to whom he owed much, and whom he could under no circumstances offend. Ephie looked grave for a moment; and, in the desire of provoking a pretty confession, he asked her if she had minded very much seeing him with some one else. But she made him wince by responding with perfect candour: “With her? Oh, no! She’s quite old.”

Before parting, they arranged the date of the next meeting, and, a beginning once made, they saw each other as often as was feasible. Ephie grew wonderfully apt at excuses for going out at odd times, and for prolonged absences. Sound fictions were needed to satisfy Johanna, and even Maurice Guest was made to act as dummy: he had taken her for a walk, or they had been together to see Madeleine Wade; and by these means, and also by occasionally shirking a lesson, she gained a good deal of freedom. Johanna would as soon have thought of herself being untruthful as of doubting Ephie, whom she had never known to tell a lie; and if she did sometimes feel jealous of all the new claims made on her little sister’s attention, such a feeling was only temporary, and she was, for the most part, content to see Ephie content.

At night, in her own room, lying wakeful with hot cheeks and big eyes, Ephie went over in memory all that had taken place at their last meeting, or built high, top-heavy castles for the future. She was absurdly happy; and her mother and sister had never found her more charming and lovable, or richer in those trifling inspirations for brightening life, which happiness brings with it. She looked forward with secret triumph to the day when she would be able to announce her engagement to the celebrated young violinist, and the only shadow on her happiness was that she could not do this immediately. It did not once cross her mind to doubt the issue: she had always had her way, and, in her own mind, had long since arranged just how this matter was to fall out. She would return to America—where, of course, they would live—and get her clothes ready, and then he would come, and they would be married—a big wedding, with descriptions in the newspapers. They would have a big house, and he would play at concerts—as she had once heard Sarasate play in New York—and every one would stand on tiptoe to see him. She sat proud and conspicuous in the front row. “His wife. That is his wife!” people whispered, and they drew respectfully back to let her pass, as, in a very becoming dress, she swept into the little room behind the platform, which she alone was permitted to enter.

One day at this time there was a violent thunderstorm. Towards midday, the eastern sky grew black with clouds, which, for hours, had been ominously gathering; a sudden wind rose and swept the dust house-high through the streets; the thunder rumbled, and each roll came nearer. When, after a prolonged period of expectation, the storm finally burst, there was a universal sigh of relief.

The afternoon was damply refreshing. As soon as the rain ceased, Maurice shut his piano, and walked at a brisk pace to Connewitz, his head bared beneath the overhanging branches, which were still weighed down by their burden of drops. At the WALDCAFE on the bank of the river, in a thickly grown arbour which he entered to drink a glass of beer, he found Philadelphia Jensen and the pale little American, Fauvre, taking coffee.

The lady welcomed him with a large, outstretched hand, in the effusively hearty manner with which she, as it were, took possession of people; and towards six o’clock, the three walked back through the woods together, Miss Jensen, resolute of bust as of voice, slightly ahead of her companions, carrying her hat in her hand, Fauvre dragging behind, hitting indolently at stones and shrubs, and singing scraps of melodies to himself in his deep baritone.

Miss Jensen, who had once been a journalist, was an earnest worker for woman’s emancipation, and having now successfully mounted her hobby, spoke with a thought-deadening eloquence. Maurice had never been called on to think about the matter, and listened to her words absent-mindedly, comparing her, as she swept along, to a ship in full sail. She was just asserting that the ordinary German woman was little more than means to an end, the end being the man-child, when his attention was arrested, and, in an instant, jerked far away from Miss Jensen’s theories. As they reached the bend of a path, a sound of voices came to them through the trees, and on turning a corner, Maurice caught a glimpse of two people who were going in the opposite direction, down a side-walk—a passing but vivid glimpse of a light, flowered dress, of a grey suit of clothes, and auburn hair. Ephie! He could have sworn to voice and dress; but to whom in all the world was she talking, so confidentially? At the name that rose to his lips, he almost stopped short, but the next moment he was afraid lest his companions should also have seen who it was, and, quickening his steps, he incited Miss Jensen to talk on. First, however, that lady said in a surprised tone: “Say, that was Mr. Schilsky, wasn’t it? Who was the lady? Did you perceive?” So there was no possible doubt of it.

After parting from his companions, he did an errand in the town, and from there went to the Cayhills’ PENSION, determined to ascertain whether it had really been Ephie he had seen, and if so, what the meaning of it was.

Mrs. Cayhill and Johanna were in the sitting-room; Johanna looked very surprised to see him. They had this moment risen from the supper-table, she told him; Ephie had only just got home in time. Before anything further could be said, Ephie herself came into the room; her face was flushed, and she did not seem well-pleased at his unexpected visit. She hardly greeted him, and instead, commenced talking about the weather.

“Then you had a pleasant walk?” asked Johanna in a preoccupied fashion, without looking up from the letter she was writing; and before Maurice could speak, Ephie, fondling her sister’s neck, answered: “How could it be anything but sweet—after the rain?”

In the face of this frankness, it was on Maurice’s tongue to say: “Then it was you, I saw?” but again she did not give him time. Still standing behind Johanna’s chair, her eyes fixed on the young man’s face with a curious intentness, she continued: “We walked right to Connewitz and back without a rest.”

“I don’t think you should take her so far,” said Mrs. Cayhill, looking up from her book with her kindly smile. “She has never been used to walking and is easily tired—aren’t you, my pet?”

“Yes, and then she can’t get up the next morning,” said Johanna, mildly dogmatic, considering the following sentence of her letter.

Gradually it broke upon Maurice that Ephie had been making use of his name. His consternation at the discovery was such that he changed colour. The others, however, were both too engrossed to notice it. Ephie grew scarlet, but continued to rattle on, covering his silence.

“Well, perhaps to-day it was a little too far,” she admitted. “But mummy, I won’t have you say I’m not strong. Why, Herr Becker is always telling me how full my tone is getting. Yes indeed. And look at my muscle.”

She turned back the loose sleeve of her blouse, baring almost the whole of her rounded arm; then, folding it sharply to her, she invited one after another to test its firmness.

“Quite a prize-fighter, I declare!” laughed Mrs. Cayhill, at the same time drawing her little daughter to her, to kiss her. But Johanna frowned, and told Ephie to put down her sleeve at once; there was something in the childish action that offended the elder sister, she did not know why. But Maurice had first to lay two of his fingers on the soft skin, and then to help her to button the cuff.

When, soon after this, he took his leave, Ephie went out of the room with him. In the dark passage, she caught at his hand.

“Morry, you mustn’t tell tales on me,” she whispered; and added pettishly: “Why ever did you just come to-night?”

He tried to see her face. “What is it all about, Ephie?” he asked. “Then it WAS you, I saw, in the NONNE—by the weir?”

“Me? In the NONNE!” She was genuinely surprised. “You saw me?”

He nodded. By the light that came from the stairs as she opened the hall-door, she noticed that he looked troubled, and an impulse rose in her to throw her arms round his neck and say: “Yes, yes, it was me. Oh, Morry, I am so happy!” But she remembered the reasons for secrecy that had been imposed on her, and, at the same time, felt somewhat defiantly inclined towards Maurice. After all, what business was it of his? Why should he take her to task for what she chose to do? And so she merely laughed, with assumed merriment, her own charming, assuaging laugh.

“In the wood?—you old goose! Listen, Morry, I told them I had been with you, because—why, because one of the girls in my class asked me to go to the CAFE FRANCAIS with her, and we stayed too long, and ate too much ice-cream, and Joan doesn’t like it, and I knew she would be cross—that’s all! Don’t look so glum, you silly! It’s nothing,” and she laughed again.

As long as this laugh rang in his ears—to the bottom of the street, that is—he believed her. Then, the evidence of his senses reasserted itself, and he knew that what she had told him was false. He had heard her voice in the wood too distinctly to allow of any mistake, and she was still wearing the same dress. Besides, she had lied so artlessly to the others, without a tremor of her candid eyes—why should she not lie to him, too? She was less likely to be considerate of him than of Johanna. But his distress at her skill in deceit was so great that he said: “Ephie, little Ephie!” aloud to himself, just as he might have done had he heard that she was stricken down by a mortal illness.

On the top of this, however, came less selfish feelings. What was almost a sense of guilt took possession of him; he felt as if, in some way, he were to blame for what had happened; as if nature had intended him to stand in the place of a brother to this pretty, thoughtless child. And yet what could he have done? He did not now see Ephie as often as formerly, and hardly ever alone; on looking back, he began to suspect that she had purposely avoided him. The exercises in harmony, which had previously brought them together, had been discontinued. First, she had said that her teacher was satisfied with what she herself could do; then, that he had advised her to give up harmony altogether: she would never make anything of it. In the light of what had come to pass, Maurice saw that he had let himself be duped by her; she had lied then as now.

He puzzled his brains to imagine how she had learned to know Schilsky in the first instance, and when the affair had begun: what he had overheard that afternoon implied an advanced stage of intimacy; and he revolved measures by means of which a stop might be put to it. The only course he could think of was to lay the matter before Johanna; and yet what would the use of that be? Ephie would deny everything, make his story ludicrous, himself impossible, and never forgive him into the bargain. In the end, he might do more good by watching over her silently, at a distance. If it had only not been Schilsky who was concerned! Some of the ugly stories he had heard related of the young man rose up and took vivid shape before his eyes. If any harm came to Ephie, he alone would be to blame for it; not Johanna, only he knew the frivolous temptations the young girl was exposed to. Why, in Heaven’s name, had he not taken both her hands, as they stood in the passage, and insisted on her confessing to him? No, credulous as usual, he had once more allowed himself to be hoodwinked and put off.

Thus he fretted, without arriving at any clearer conclusion than this: that he had unwittingly been made accessory to an unpleasant secret. But where his mind baulked, and refused to work, was when he tried to understand what all this might mean to the third person involved. Did Louise know or suspect anything? Had she, perhaps, for weeks past been suffering under the knowledge?

He stood irresolute, at the crossing where the MOZARTSTRASSE joined the PROMENADE. A lamp-lighter was beginning his rounds; he came up with his long pole to the lamp at the corner, and, with a mild explosion, the little flame sprang into life. Maurice turned on his heel and went to see Madeleine.

The latter was making her supper of tea, bread, and cold sausage, and when she heard that he had not eaten, she set a cup and plate before him, and was glad that she happened to be late. Propped open on the table was a Danish Grammar, which she conned as she ate; for, in the coming holidays, she was engaged to go to Norway, as guide and travelling-companion to a party of Englishwomen.

“I had a letter from London to-day,” she said, “with definite arrangements. So I at once bought this book. I intend to try and master at least the rudiments of the language—barbarous though it is—for I want to get some good from the journey. And if one has one’s wits about one, much can be learnt from cab-drivers and railway-porters.”

She traced on a map with her forefinger the route they proposed to follow, and laughed at the idea of the responsibility lying heavy on her. But when they had finished their supper, and she had talked informingly for a time of Norway, its people and customs, she looked at the young man, who sat irresponsive and preoccupied, and considered him attentively.

“Is anything the matter to-night? Or are you only tired?”

He was tired. But though she herself had suggested it, she was not satisfied with his answer.

“Something has bothered you. Has your work gone badly?”

No, it was nothing of that sort. But Madeleine persisted: could she be of any help to him?

“The merest trifle—not worth talking about.”

The twilight had grown thick around them; the furniture of the room lost its form, and stood about in shapeless masses. Through the open window was heard the whistle of a distant train; a large fly that had been disturbed buzzed distractingly, undecided where to re-settle for the night. It was sultry again, after the rain.

“Look here, Maurice,” Madeleine said, when she had observed him for some time in silence. “I don’t want to be officious, but there’s something I should like to say to you. It’s this. You are far too soft-hearted. If you want to get on in life, you must think more about yourself than you do. The battle is to the strong, you know, and the strong, within limits, are certainly the selfish. Let other people look after themselves; try not to mind how foolish they are—you can’t improve them. It’s harder, I daresay, than it is to be a person of unlimited sympathies; it’s harder to pass the maimed and crippled by, than to stop and weep over them, and feel their sufferings through yourself. But YOU have really something in you to occupy yourself with. You’re not one of those people—I won’t mention names!—whose own emptiness forces them to take an intense interest in the doings of others, and who, the moment they are alone with their thoughts, are bored to desperation. just as there are people who have no talent for making a home home-like, and are only happy when they are out of it.”

Here she laughed at her own seriousness.

“But you are smiling inwardly, and thinking: the real old school-marm!”

“You don’t practise what you preach, Madeleine. Besides, you’re mistaken. At heart, I’m a veritable egoist.”

She contradicted him. “I know you better than you know yourself.”

He did not reply, and a silence fell, in which the commonplace words she had last said, went on sounding and resounding, until they had no more likeness to themselves. Madeleine rose, and pushed back her chair, with a grating noise.

“I must light the lamp. Sitting in the dark makes for foolishness. Come, wake up, and tell me what plans you have for the holidays.”

“If I had a sister, I should like her to be like you,” said Maurice, watching her busy with the lamp. “Clear-headed, and helpful to a fellow.”

“I suppose men always will continue to consider that the greatest compliment they can pay,” said Madeleine, and turned up the light so high that they both blinked.—And then she scolded the young man soundly for his intention of remaining in Leipzig during the holidays.

But when he rose to go, she said, with an impulsiveness that was foreign to her: “I wish you had a friend.”

It was his turn to smile. “Have you had enough of me?”

Madeleine, who was sitting with crossed arms, remained grave. “I mean a man. Some one older than yourself, and who has had experience. The best-meaning woman in the world doesn’t count.”

Only a very few days later, an occasion offered when, with profit to himself, he might have acted upon Madeleine’s introductory advice. He had been for a quick, solitary walk, and was returning, in the evening between nine and ten o’clock, along one of the paths of the wood, when suddenly, and close at hand, he heard the sound of voices. He stopped instantaneously, for by the jump his heart gave, he knew that Louise was one of the speakers. What she said was inaudible to him; but it was enough to be able to listen, unseen, to her voice. Hearing it like this, as something existing for itself, he was amazed at its depth and clearness; he felt that her personal presence had, until now, hindered him from appreciating a beautiful but immaterial thing at its true worth. At first, like a cadence that repeats itself, its tones rose and fell, but with more subtle inflections than the ordinary voice has: there was a note in it that might have belonged to a child’s voice; another, more primitive, that betrayed feeling with as little reserve as the cry of an animal. Then it sank, and went on in a monotone, like a Hebrew prayer, as if reiterating things worn threadbare by repetition, and already said too often. Gradually, it died away in the surrounding silence. There was no response but a gentle rustling of the leaves overhead. It began anew, and, in the interval, seemed to have gained in intensity; now there was a bitterness in it which, when it swelled, made it give out a tone like the roughly touched strings of an instrument; it seemed to be accusing, to be telling of unmerited suffering. And, this time, it elicited a reply, but a casual, indifferent one, which might have related to the weather, or to the time of night. Louise gave a shrill laugh, and then, as plainly as if the words were being carved in stone before his eyes, Maurice heard her say: “You have never given me a moment’s happiness.”

As before, no answer was returned, and almost immediately his ear caught a muffled sound of footsteps. At the same moment, a night-wind shook the tree-tops; there was a general fluttering and swaying around him; and he came back to himself to find that he was standing rigid, holding on to a slender tree that grew close by the path. His first conscious thought was that this wind meant rain . . . there would be another storm in the night . . . and the summer holidays—time of partings—were at the door. She would go away . . . and he would perhaps never see her again.

Since the evening they had walked home from the theatre together, he had had no further chance of speaking to her. If they met in the street, she gave him, as Madeleine had foretold of her, a nod and a smile; and from this coolness, he had drawn the foolish inference that she wished to avoid him. Abnormally sensitive, he shrank out of her way. But now, the mad sympathy that had permeated him on the night she had made him her confidant grew up in him again; it swelled out into something monstrous—a gigantic pity that rebounded on himself. For he knew now why she suffered; and he was cast down both for her and for himself. It seemed unnatural that he was debarred from giving her just a fraction of the happiness she craved—he, who, had there been the least need for it, would have lain himself down for her to tread on. And in some of the subsequent nights when he could not sleep, he composed fantastic letters to her, in which he told her this and more, only to colour guiltily, with the return of daylight, at the impertinent folly of his thoughts.

But he could not forget the words he had heard her say; they haunted him like an importunate refrain. Even his busiest hours were set to them—“You have never given me a moment’s happiness”—and they were alike a torture and a joy.

XII.


The second half of July scattered the little circle in all directions. Maurice spent a couple of days at the different railway-stations, seeing his friends off. One after another they passed into that anticipatory mood, which makes an egoist of the prospective traveller: his thoughts start, as it were, in advance; he has none left for the people who are remaining behind, and receives their care and attention as his due.

Dove was packed and strapped, ready to set out an hour after he had had his last lesson; and while he printed labels for his luggage, and took a circumstantial leave of his landlady and her family, with whom he was a prime favourite by reason of his decent and orderly habits, Maurice fetched for him from the lending library, the pieces of music set by Schwarz as a holiday task. Dove was on tenterhooks to be off. Of late, things had gone superlatively well with him: he had performed with applause in an ABENDUNTERHALTUNG, and been highly commended by Schwarz; while, as for Ephie, she had been so sweet and winning, so modestly encouraging of his suit, that he had every reason to hope for success in this quarter also. Too dutiful a son, however, to take, unauthorised, such an important step as that of proposing marriage, he was now travelling home to sound two elderly people, resident in a side street in Peterborough, on the advisability of an American daughter-in-law.

The Cayhills had been among the first to leave, and would be absent till the middle of September. One afternoon, Maurice started them from the THURINGER BAHNHOF, on their journey to Switzerland. Having seen Mrs. Cayhill comfortably settled with her bags, books and cushions, in the corner of a first-class carriage, and given Johanna assistance with the tickets, he stood till the train went, talking to Ephie; and he long retained a picture of her, standing with one foot on the step, in a becoming travelling-dress, a hat with a veil flying from it, and a small hand-bag slung across her shoulder, laughing and dimpling, and well aware of the admiring glances that were cast at her. It was a relief to Maurice that she was going away for a time; his feeling of responsibility with regard to her had not flagged, and he had made a point of seeing her more often, and of knowing more of her movements than before. As, however, he had not observed anything further to disturb him, his suspicions were on the verge of subsiding—as suspicions have a way of doing when we wish them to—and in the last day or two, he had begun to feel much less sure, and to wonder if, after all, he had not been mistaken.

“I shall miss you, Morry. I almost wish I were not going,” said Ephie, and this was not untrue, in spite of the pretty new dresses her trunks contained. “Say, I don’t believe I shall enjoy myself one bit. You will write, Morry, won’t you, and tell me what goes on? All the news you hear and who you see and everything.”——

“Be sure you write,” said Madeleine, too, when he saw her off early in the morning to Berlin, where she was to meet her English charges. “Christiania, POSTE RESTANTE, till the first, and then Bergen. ‘FROKEN WADE,’ don’t forget.”

The train started; her handkerchief fluttered from the window until the carriage was out of sight.

Maurice was alone; every one he knew disappeared, even Furst, who had obtained a holiday engagement in a villa near Dresden. An odd stillness reigned in the BRAUSTRASSE and its neighbourhood; from houses which had hitherto been clangrous with musical noises, not a sound issued. Familiar rooms and lodgings were either closely shuttered, or, in process of scouring, hung out their curtains to flutter on the sill.

The days passed, unmarked, eventless, like the uniform pages of a dull book. When the solitude grew unbearable, Maurice went to visit Frau Furst, and had his supper with the family. He was a welcome guest, for he not only paid for all the beer that was drunk, but also brought such a generous portion of sausage for his own supper, that it supplied one or other of the little girls as well. Afterwards, they sat round the kitchen-table, listening, the children with the old-fashioned solemnity that characterised them, to Frau Furst’s reminiscences. Otherwise, he hardly exchanged a word with anyone, but sat at his piano the livelong day. Of late, Schwarz had been somewhat cool and off-hand in manner with him; the master had also not displayed the same detailed interest in his plans for the summer, as in those of the rest of the class. This was one reason why he had not gone away like every one else; the other, that he had been unwilling to write home for an increase of allowance. Sometimes, when the day was hot, he envied his friends refreshing themselves by wood, mountain or sea; but, in the main, he worked briskly at Czerny’s FINGERFERTIGKEIT, and with such perseverance that ultimately his fingers stumbled from fatigue.

With the beginning of August, the heat grew oppressive; all day long, the sun beat, fierce and unremittent, on this city of the plains, and the baked pavements were warm to the feet. Business slackened, and the midday rest in shops and offices was extended beyond its usual limit. Conservatorium and Gewandhaus, at first given over to relays of charwomen, their brooms and buckets, soon lay dead and deserted, too; and if, in the evening, Maurice passed the former building, he would see the janitor sitting at leisure in the middle of the pavement, smoking his long black cigar. The old trees in the PROMENADE, and the young striplings that followed the river in the LAMPESTRASSE, drooped their brown leaves thick with dust; the familiar smell of roasting coffee, which haunted most house— and stair-ways, was intensified; and out of drains and rivers rose nauseous and penetrating odours, from which there was no escape. Every three or four days, when the atmosphere of the town had reached a pitch of unsavouriness which it seemed impossible to surpass, sudden storms swept up, tropical in their violence: blasts of thunder cracked like splitting beams; lightning darted along the narrow streets; rain fell in white, sizzling sheets. But the morning after, it was as hot as ever.

Maurice grew so accustomed to meet no one he knew, that one afternoon towards the middle of August, he was pulled up by a jerk of surprise in front of the PLEISSENBURG, on stumbling across Heinrich Krafft. He had stopped and impulsively greeted the young man, before he recalled his previous antipathy to him.

Krafft was sauntering along with his hands in his pockets, and, on being accosted, he looked vaguely and somewhat moodily at Maurice. The next moment, however, he laid a hand on the lappel of Maurice’s coat, and, without preamble, burst into a witty and obscene anecdote, which had evidently been in his mind when they met. This story, and the fact that, by the North Sea, he had stood before breakers twenty feet high, were the only particulars Maurice bore away from their interview. His previous impatience with such eccentricity returned, but none the less, he looked grudgingly after the other’s vanishing form.

A day or two later, towards evening, he saw Krafft again. As he was going through an outlying street, he came upon a group of children, who were amusing themselves by teasing a cat; the animal had been hit in the eye by a stone, and cowered, terrified and blinded, against the wall of a house. The children formed a half circle round it, and two of the biggest boys held a young and lively dog by the collar, inciting it and restraining it, and revelling in the cat’s convulsive starts at each capering bark.

While Maurice was considering how to expostulate with them, Krafft came swiftly up behind, jerked two of the children apart, and, with a deft and perfectly noiseless movement, caught up the cat and hid its head under his coat. Then, cuffing the biggest boy, he kicked the dog, and ordered the rest to disperse. The children did so lingeringly; and once out of his reach, stood and mocked him.

He begged Maurice to accompany him to his lodgings, and there Maurice held the animal, a large, half-starved street-cat, while Krafft, on his knees before it, examined the wound. As he did this, he crooned in a wordless language, and the cat was quiet, in spite of the pain he caused it. But directly he took his hands off it, it jumped from the table, and fled under the furthest corner of the sofa.

Krafft next fetched milk and a saucer, from a cupboard in the wall, and went down on his knees again: while Maurice sat and watched and wondered at his tireless endeavours to induce the animal to advance. He explained his proceedings in a whisper.

“If I put the saucer down and leave it,” he said, “it won’t help at all. A cat’s confidence must be won straight away.”

He was still in this position, making persuasive little noises, when the door opened, and Avery Hill, his companion of a previous occasion, entered. At the sight of Krafft crouching on the floor, she paused with her hand on the door, and looked from him to Maurice.

“Heinz?” she said interrogatively. Then she saw the saucer of milk, and understood. “Heinz!” she said again; and this time the word was a reprimand.

“Ssh!—be quiet,” said Krafft peevishly, without looking up.

The girl took no notice of Maurice’s attempt to greet her. Letting fall on the grand piano, some volumes of music she was carrying, she continued sternly: “Another cat!—oh, it is abominable of you! This is the third he has picked up this year,” she said explanatorily, yet not more to Maurice than to herself. “And the last was so dirty and destructive that Frau Schulz threatened to turn him out, if he did not get rid of it. He knows as well as I do that he cannot keep a cat here.”

Her placidly tragic face had grown hard; and altogether, the anger she displayed seemed out of proportion to the trival offence.

Krafft remained undisturbed. “It’s not the least use scolding. Go and make it right with the old crow.—Come, puss, come.”

The girl checked the words that rose to her lips, gave a slight shrug, and went out of the room. They heard her, in the passage, disputing with the landlady, who was justly indignant.

“If it weren’t for you, Fraulein, I wouldn’t keep him another day,” she declared.

Meanwhile the cat, which, in the girl’s presence, had shrunk still further into its hiding-place, began to make advances. It crept a step forward, retreated again, stretched out its nose to sniff at the milk, and, all of a sudden, emerged and drank greedily.

Krafft touched its head, and the animal paused in its hungry gulping to rub its back against the caressing hand. When the last drop of milk was finished, it withdrew to its corner, but less suspiciously.

Krafft rose to his feet and stretched himself, and when Avery returned, he smiled at her.

“Now then, is it all right?”

She did not reply, but went to the piano, to search for something among the scattered music. Krafft clasped his hands behind his head, and leaning against the table, watched her with an ironical curl of the lip.

“O LENE! LENE! O MAGDALENE!” he sang under his breath; and, for the second time, Maurice received the impression that a by-play was being carried on between these two.

“Look at this,” said Krafft after a pause. “Here, ladies and gentlemen, is one of those rare persons who have a jot of talent in them, and off she goes—I don’t mean at this moment, but tomorrow, the day after, every day—to waste it in teaching children finger-exercises. If you ask her why she does it, she will tell you it is necessary to live. Necessary to live!—who has ever proved that it is?”

For an instant, it seemed as if the girl were going to flash out a bitter retort that might have betrayed her. Then she showed the same self-control as before, and went, without a word, into the next room. She was absent for a few minutes, and when she reappeared, carried what was unmistakably a bundle of soiled linen, going away with this on one arm, the volumes of music she had picked out on the other. She did not wish the young men good-night, but, in passing Maurice, she said in an unfriendly tone: “Do you know what time it is?” and to Krafft: “It is late, Heiriz, you are not to play.”

The door had barely closed behind her, when Krafft broke into the loud, repellent laugh that had so jarred on Maurice at their former meeting. He had risen at once, and now said he must go. But Krafft would not hear of it; he pressed him into his seat again, with an effusive warmth of manner.

“Don’t mind her. Stay, like a good fellow. Of course, I am going to play to you.”

He flicked the keys of the piano with his handkerchief, adjusted the distance of his seat, threw back his head, and half closing his eyes, began to play. Except for the unsteady flickerings cast on the wall by a street-lamp, the room was soon in darkness.

Maurice resumed his seat reluctantly. He had been dragged upstairs against his will; and throughout the foregoing scene, had sat an uncomfortable spectator. He had as little desire for the girl to return and find him there, as for Krafft to play to him. But no excuse for leaving offered itself, and each moment made it harder to interrupt the player, who had promptly forgotten the fact of his presence.

After he had listened for a time, however, Maurice ceased to think of escaping. Madeleine had once alluded to Krafft’s skill as an interpreter of Chopin, but, all the same, he had not expected anything like what he now heard, and at first he could not make anything of it. He had hitherto only known Chopin’s music as played in the sentimental fashion of the English drawing-room. Here, now, came some one who made it clear that, no matter how pessimistic it appeared on the surface, this music was, at its core an essentially masculine music; it kicked desperately against the pricks of existence; what failed it was only the last philosophic calm. He could not, of course, know that various small things had combined to throw the player into one of his most prodigal moods: the rescue and taming of the cat, the passage-at-arms with Avery, her stimulating forbiddal, and, last and best, the one silent listener in the dark—this stranger, picked up at random in the streets, who had never yet heard him play, and to whom he might reveal himself with an indecency that friendship precluded.

When at length, Frau Schulz entered, in her bed-jacket, to say that it was long past ten o’clock, Krafft wakened as if out of a trance, and hid his eyes from the light. Frau Schulz, a robust person, disregarded his protests, and herself locked the piano and took the key.

“She makes me promise to,” she whispered to Maurice, pointing over her shoulder at an imaginary person. “If I didn’t, he’d go on all night. He’s no more fit to look after himself than a baby—and he gets it again with his boots in the morning.—Yes, yes, call me names if it pleases you. Names don’t kill. And if I am a hag, you’re a rascal, that’s what you are! The way you treat that poor, good creature makes one’s blood boil.”

Krafft waved her away, and opening the window, leaned out on the sill: a wave of warm air filled the room. Maurice rose with renewed decision, and sought his hat. But Krafft also took his down from a peg. “Yes, let us go out.”

It was a breathless August night, laden with intensified scents and smells, and the moonlight lay thick and white on the ground: a night to provoke to extravagant follies. In the utter stillness of the woods, the young men passed from places of inky blackness into bluish white patches, dropped through the trees like monstrous silver thalers. The town lay behind them in a glorifying haze; the river stretched silver-scaled in the moonlight, like a gigantic fish-back.

Krafft walked in front of his companion, in preoccupied silence. His slender hands, dangling loosely, still twitched from their recent exertions, and from time to time, he turned the palms outward, with an impatient gesture. Maurice wished himself alone. He was not at ease under this new companionship that had thrust itself upon him; indeed, a strong mental antagonism was still uppermost in him, towards the moody creature at whose heels he followed; and if, at this moment, he had been asked to give voice to his feelings, the term “crazy idiot” would have been the first to rise to his lips.

Suddenly, without turning, or slackening his pace, Krafft commenced to speak: at first in a low voice, as if he were thinking aloud. But one word gave another, his thoughts came rapidly, he began to gesticulate, and finally, wrought on by the beauty of the night, by this choice moment for speech, still excited by his own playing, and in an infinite need of expression, he swept the silence before him with the force of a flood set free. If he thought Maurice were about to interrupt him, he made an imploring gesture, and left what he was saying unfinished, to spring over to the next theme ready in his brain. Names jostled one another on his tongue: he passed from Beethoven and Chopin to Berlioz and Wagner, to Liszt and Richard Strauss—and his words were to Maurice like the unrolling of a great scroll. In the same breath, he was with Nietzsche, and Apollonic and Dionysian; and from here he went on to Richard Dehmel, to ANATOL, and the gentle “Loris” of the early verses; to Max Klinger, and the propriety of coloured sculpture; to PAPA HAMLET and the future of the LIED. Maurice, listening intently, had fleeting glimpses into a land of which he knew nothing. He kept as still as a mouse, in order not to betray his ignorance; for Krafft was not didactic, and talked as if the subjects he touched on were as familiar to Maurice as to himself. On the other hand, Maurice believed it was a matter of indifference to him whether he was understood or not; he spoke for the pure joy of talking, out of the motley profusion of his knowledge.

Meanwhile, he had grown personal. And while he was still speaking with fervour of Vienna—which was his home—of gay, melancholy Wien, he flung round and put a question to his companion.

“Do you ever think of death?”

Maurice had been the listener for so long that he started.

“Death?” he echoed, and was as much embarrassed as though asked whether he believed in God. “I don’t know. No, I don’t think I do. Why should one think of death when one is alive and well?”

Krafft laughed at this, with a pitying irony. “Happy you!” he said. “Happy you!” His voice sank, and he continued almost fearfully: “I have the vision of it before me, always wherever I go. Listen; I will tell you; it is like this.” He laid his hand on Maurice’s arm, and drew him nearer. “I know—no matter how strong and sound I may be at this moment; no matter how I laugh, or weep, or play the fool; no matter how little thought I give it, or whether I think about it all day long—I know the hour will come, at last, when I shall gasp, choke, grow black in the face, in the vain struggle for another single mouthful of that air which has always been mine at will. And no one will be able to help me; there is no escape from that hour; no power on earth can keep it from me. And it is all a matter of chance when it happens—a great lottery: one draws to-day, one to-morrow; but my turn will surely come, and each day that passes brings me twenty-four hours nearer the end.” He drew still closer to Maurice. “Tell me, have you never stood before a doorway—the doorway of some strange house that you have perhaps never consciously gone past before—and waited, with the atrocious curiosity that death and its hideous paraphernalia waken in one, for a coffin to be carried out?—the coffin of an utter stranger, who is of interest to you now, for the first and the last time. And have you not thought to yourself, with a shudder, that some day, in this selfsame way, under the same indifferent sky, among a group of loiterers as idly curious as these, you yourself will be carried out, feet foremost, like a bale of goods, like useless lumber, all will and dignity gone from you, never to enter there again?—there, where all the little human things you have loved, and used, and lived amongst, are lying just as you left them—the book you laid down, the coat you wore—now all of a greater worth than you. You are mere dead flesh, and behind the horrid lid lie stark and cold, with rigid fingers and half-closed eyes, and the chief desire of every one, even of those you have loved most, is to be rid of you, to be out of reach of sight and smell of you. And so, after being carted, and jolted, and unloaded, you will be thrown into a hole, and your body, ice-cold, and as yielding as meat to the touch—oh, that awful icy softness!—your flesh will begin to rot, to be such that not your nearest friend would touch you. God, it is unbearable!”

He wiped his forehead, and Maurice was silent, not knowing what to say; he felt that such rational arguments as he might be able to offer, would have little value in the face of this intensely personal view, which was stammered forth with the bitterness of an accusation. But as they crossed the suspensionbridge, Krafft stopped, and stood looking at the water, which glistened in the moonlight like a living thing.

“No, it is impossible for me to put death out of my mind,” he went on. “And yet, a spring into this silver fire down here would end all that, and satisfy one’s curiosity as well. Why is one not readier to make the spring?—and what would one’s sensations be? The mad rush through the air—the crash—the sinking in the awful blackness . . .”

“Those of fear and cold. You would wish yourself out again,” answered Maurice; and as Krafft nodded, without seeming to resent his tone, he ventured to put forward a few points for the other side of the question. He suggested that always to be brooding over death unfitted you for life. Every one had to die when his time came; it was foolish to look upon your own death as an exception to the rule. Besides, when sensation had left you—the soul, the spirit, whatever you liked to call it—what did it matter what afterwards became of your body? It was, then, in reality, nothing but lumber, fresh nourishment for the soil; and it was morbid to care so much how it was treated, just because it had once been your tenement, when it was now as worthless as the crab’s empty shell.

He stuttered this out piece-wise, in his halting German; then paused, not sure how his companion would take the didactic tone he had fallen into. But Krafft had turned, and was gazing at him, considering him attentively for the first time. When Maurice ceased to speak, he nodded a hasty assent: “Yes, yes, it is quite true. Go on.” And as the former, having nothing more to say, was mute, he added: “You are like some one I once knew. He was a great musician. I saw him die; he died by inches; it lasted for months; he could neither die nor live.”

“Why do you brood over these things, if you find them so awful? Are you not afraid your nerves will go through with you, and make you do something foolish?” asked Maurice, and was himself astonished at his boldness.

“Of course I am. My life is a perpetual struggle against suicide,” answered Krafft.

In the distance, a church-clock struck a quarter to twelve, and it was on Maurice’s tongue to suggest that they should move homewards, when, with one of his unexpected transitions, Krafft turned to him and said in a low voice: “What do you say? Shall you and I be friends?”

Maurice hesitated, in some embarrassment. “Why yes, I should be very glad.”

“And you will let me say ‘DU’ to you?”

“Certainly. If you are sure you won’t regret it in the morning.”

Krafft stretched out his hand. As Maurice held in his the fine, slim fingers, which seemed mere skin and muscle, a hitherto unknown feeling of kindliness came over him for the young man at his side. At this moment, he had the lively sensation that he was the stronger and wiser of the two, and that it was even a little beneath him to take the other too seriously.

“You think so poorly of me then? You think no good thing can come out of me?” asked Krafft, and there was an appealing note in his voice, which, but a short time back, had been so overbearing.

Had Maurice known him better, he would have promptly retorted: “Don’t be a fool.” As it was, he laughed. “Who am I to sit in judgment? The only thing I do know is, that if I had your talent—no, a quarter of it—I should pull myself together and astonish the world.”

“It sounds so easy; but I have too many doubts of myself,” said Krafft, and laid his hand on Maurice’s shoulder. “And I have never had anyone to keep me up to the mark—till now. I have always needed some one like you. You are strong and sympathetic; and one has the feeling that you understand.”

Maurice was far from certain that he did. However, he answered in a frank way, doing his best to keep down the sentimental tone that had invaded the conversation. At heart he was little moved by this new friendship, which hail begun with the word itself; he told himself that it was only a whim of Krafft’s, which would be forgotten in the morning. But, as they stood thus on the bridge, shoulder to shoulder, he did not understand how he could ever have taken anything this frail creature did, amiss. At the moment, there was a clinging helplessness about Krafft, which instinctively roused his manlier feelings. He said to himself that he had done wrong in lightly condemning his companion; and, impelled by this sudden burst of protectiveness, he seized the moment, and spoke earnestly to Krafft of earnest things, of duty, not only to one’s fellows, but to oneself and one’s abilities, of the inspiring gain of unremitted endeavour.

Afterwards, they sauntered home—first to Maurice’s lodging, then to Krafft’s, and once again to Maurice’s. At this stage, Krafft was frankness itself; Maurice learnt to his surprise that the slim, boyish lad at his side was over twenty-seven years of age; that, for several semesters, Krafft had studied medicine in Vienna, then had thrown up this “disgusting occupation,” to become a clerk in a wealthy uncle’s counting-house. From this, he had drifted into journalism, and finally, at the instigation of Hans von Bullow, to music; he had been for two and a half years with Bullow, on travel, and in Hamburg, and was at present in Leipzig solely to have his “fingers put in order.” His plans for the future were many, and widely divergent. At one time, a musical career tempted him irresistibly; every one but Schwarz—this finger-machine, this generator of living metronomes—believed that he could make a name for himself as a player of Chopin. At other times, and more often, he contemplated retiring from the world and entering a monastery. He spoke with a morbid horror—yet as if the idea of it fascinated him—of the publicity of the concert-platform, and painted in glowing colours a monastery he knew of, standing on a wooded hill, not far from Vienna. He had once spent several weeks there, recovering from an illness, and the gardens, the trimly bedded flowers, the glancing sunlight in the utter silence of the corridors, were things he could not forget. He had lain day for day on a garden-bench, reading Novalis, and it still seemed to him that the wishless happiness of those days was the greatest he had known.

Beside this, Maurice’s account of himself sounded tame and unimportant; he felt, too, that the circumstances of English life were too far removed from his companion’s sphere, for the latter to be able to understand them.

On waking next morning, Maurice recalled the incidents of the evening with a smile; felt a touch of warmth at the remembrance of the moment when he had held Krafft’s hand in his; then classed the whole episode as strained, and dismissed it from his mind. He had just shut the piano, after a busy forenoon, when Krafft burst in, his cheeks pink with haste and excitement. He had discovered a room to let, in the house he lived in, and nothing would satisfy him but that Maurice should come instantly to see it. Laughing at his eagerness, Maurice put forward his reasons for preferring to remain where he was. But Krafft would take no denial, and not wishing to hurt his feelings, Maurice gave way, and agreed at least to look at the room.

It was larger and more cheerful than his own, and had also, a convenient alcove for the bedstead; and after inspecting it, Maurice felt willing to expend the extra marks it cost. They withdrew to Krafft’s room to come to a decision. There, however, they found Avery Hill, who, as soon as she heard what they contemplated, put a veto on it. Growing pale, as she always did where others would have flushed, she said: “It is an absurd idea—sheer nonsense! I won’t have it, understand that! Pray, excuse me,” she continued to Maurice, speaking in a more friendly tone than she had yet used to him, “but you must not listen to him. It is just one of his whims—nothing more. In less than a week, you would wish yourself away again. You have no idea how changeable he is—how impossible to live with.”

Maurice hastened to reassure her. Krafft did not speak; he stood at the window, with his back to them, his forehead pressed against the glass.

So Maurice continued to live in the BRAUSTRASSE, under the despotic rule of Frau Krause, who took every advantage of his good-nature. But after this, not a day passed without his seeing Krafft; the latter sought him out on trivial pretexts. Maurice hardly recognised him: he was gentle, amiable, and amenable to reason; he subordinated himself entirely to Maurice, and laid an ever-increasing weight on his opinion. Maurice became able to wind him round his finger; and the hint of a reproof from him served to throw Krafft into a state of nervous depression. Without difficulty, Maurice found himself to rights in his role of mentor, and began to flatter himself that he would ultimately make of Krafft a decent member of society. As it was, he soon induced his friend to study in a more methodical way; they practised for the same number of hours in the forenoon, and met in the afternoon; and Krafft only sometimes broke through this arrangement, by appearing in the BRAUSTRASSE early in the morning, and, despite remonstrance, throwing himself on the sofa, and remaining there, while Maurice practised. The latter ended by growing accustomed to this whim as to several other things that had jarred on him—such as Krafft’s love for a dirty jest—and overlooked or forgave them. At first embarrassed by the mushroom growth of a friendship he had not invited, he soon grew genuinely attached to Krafft, and missed him when he was absent from him.

Avery Hill could hardly be termed third in the alliance; Maurice’s advent had thrust her into the background, where she kept watch over their doings with her cold, disdainful eye. Maurice was not clear how she regarded his intrusion. Sometimes, particularly when she saw the improvement in Heinrich’s way of life, she seemed to tolerate his presence gladly; at others again, her jealous aversion to him was too open to be overlooked. The jealousy was natural; he was an interloper, and Heinz neglected her shamefully for him; but there was something else behind it, another feeling, which Maurice could not make out. He by no means understood the relationship that existed between his friend and this girl of the stone-grey eyes and stern, red lips. The two lived almost door by door, went in and out of each other’s rooms at all hours, and yet, he had never heard them exchange an affectionate word, or seen a mark of endearment pass between them. Avery’s attachment—if such it could be called—was noticeable only in the many small ways in which she cared for Krafft’s comfort; her manner with him was invariably severe and distant, with the exception of those occasions when a seeming trifle raised in her a burst of the dull, passionate anger, beneath which Krafft shrank. Maurice believed that his friend would be happier away from her; in spite of her fresh colouring, he, Maurice, found her wanting in attraction, nothing that a woman ought to be. But her name was rarely mentioned between them; Krafft was, as a rule, reticent concerning her, and when he did speak of her, it was in a tone of such contempt that Maurice was glad to shirk the subject.

“It’s all she wants,” Krafft had replied, when his companion ventured to take her part. “She wouldn’t thank you to be treated differently. Believe me, women are all alike; they are made to be trodden on. Ill-usage brings out their good points—just as kneading makes dough light. Let them alone, or pamper them, and they spread like a weed, and choke you”—and he quoted a saying about going to women and not forgetting the whip, at which Maurice stood aghast.

“But why, if you despise a person like that—why have her always about you?” he cried, at the end of a flaming plea for woman’s dignity and worth.

Krafft shrugged his shoulders. “I suppose the truth is we are dependent on them—yes, dependent, from the moment we are laid in the cradle. It’s a woman who puts on our first clothes and a woman who puts on our last. But why talk about these things?”—he slipped his arm through Maurice’s. “Tell me about yourself; and when you are tired of talking, I will play.”

It usually ended in his playing. They ranged through the highways and byways of music.

One afternoon—it was a warm, wet, grey day towards the end of August—Maurice found Krafft in a strangely apathetic mood. The weather, this moist warmth, had got on his nerves, he said; he had been unable to settle to anything; was weighed down by a lassitude heavier than iron. When Maurice entered, he was stretched on the sofa, with closed eyes; on his chest slept Wotan, the one-eyed cat, now growing sleek and fat. While Maurice was trying to rally him, Krafft sprang up. With a precipitance that was the extreme opposite of his previous sloth, he lowered both window-blinds, and, lighting two candles, set them on the piano, where they dispersed the immediate darkness, but no more.

“I am going to play TRISTAN to you.”

Maurice had learnt by this time that it was useless to try to thwart Krafft. He laughed and nodded, and having nothing in particular to do, lay down in the latter’s place on the sofa.

Krafft shook his hair back, and began the prelude to the opera in a rapt, ecstatic way, finding in the music an outlet for all his nervousness. At first, he played from memory; when this gave out, he set the piano-score up before him, then forgot it again, and went on playing by heart. Sometimes he sang the different parts, in a light, sweet tenor; sometimes recited them, with dramatic fervour. Only he never ceased to play, never gave his hearer a moment in which to recover himself.

Frau Schulz’s entry with the lamp, and her grumblings at the “UNVERSCHAMTE SPEKTAKEL” passed unheeded. A strength that was more than human seemed to take possession of the frail youth at the piano. Evening crept on afternoon, night on evening, and still he continued, drunk with the most emotional music conceived by a human brain.

Even when hands and fingers could do no more, the frenzy that was in him would not let him rest: he paced the room, and talked—talked for hours, his eyes ablaze. A church-clock struck ten, then half-past, then eleven, and not for a moment was he still; his speech seemed, indeed, to gather impetus as it advanced like a mountain torrent.

Then, all of a sudden, in the middle of a vehement defence of anti-Semitism, to which he had been led by the misdeeds of those “arch-charlatans,” Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, he stopped short, like a run-down clock, and, falling into a chair before the table, buried his face in his arms. There was silence, the more intense for all that had preceded it. Wotan wakened from sleep, and was heard to stretch his limbs, with a yawn and a sigh. The spell was broken; Maurice, his head in a whirl, rose stiff and cramped from his uncomfortable position on the sofa.

“You rascal, you make one lose all sense of time. And I am starving. I must snatch something at Canitz’s as I go by.”

Krafft started, and raised a haggard face with twitching lips. “You are not going to leave me?—like this?”

Maurice was both hungry and tired—worn out, in fact.

“We will go somewhere in the town,” said Krafft. “And then for a walk. The rain has stopped—look!”

He drew up one of the blinds, and they saw that the stars were shining.

“Yes, but what about to-morrow?—and to-morrow’s work?”

“To-morrow may never come. And to-night is.”

“Those are only words. Do you know the time?”

Krafft turned quickly from the window. “And if I make it a test of the friendship you have professed for me, that you stay here with me to-night?—You can sleep on the sofa.”

“Why on earth get personal?” said Maurice; he could not find his hat, which had fallen in a dark corner. “Heinz, dear boy, be reasonable. Come, give me the house-key—like a good fellow.”

“It’s the first—the only thing, I have asked of you.”

“Nonsense. You have asked dozens.”

Krafft took a few steps towards him, and threw the key on the floor at his feet. Wotan, who was at the door, mewing to be let out, sprang back, in affright.

“Go, go, go!” Krafft cried. “I never want to see you again.”

Earlier than usual the next morning, Maurice returned to set things right, and to laugh with Heinz at their extravagance the night before. But Krafft was not to be seen. From Frau Schulz, who flounced past him in the passage, first with hot water, then with black coffee, Maurice learned that Krafft had been brought home early that morning, in a disgraceful state of intoxication. Frau Schulz still boiled at the remembrance.

“SO ‘N SCHWEIN, SO ‘N SCHWEIN!” she cried. “But this time he goes. I have said it before and, fool that I am, have always let them persuade me. But this is the end. Not a day after the fifteenth will I have him in the house.”

Maurice slipped away.

Two days passed before he saw his friend again. He found him pale and dejected, with reddish, heavy eyes and a sneering smile. He was wholly changed; his words were tainted with the perverse irony, which, at the beginning of their acquaintance, had made his manner so repellent. But now, Maurice was not, at once, frightened away by it; he could not believe Heinrich’s pique was serious, and gave himself trouble to win his friend back. He chid, laughed, rallied, was earnest and apologetic, and all this without being conscious of having done wrong.

“I think you had better leave him alone,” said Avery, after watching his fruitless efforts. “He doesn’t want you.”

It was true; now Krafft had no thought for anyone but Avery. It was Avery here, and Avery there. He called her by a pet name, was anxious for her comfort, and hung affectionately on her arm.—The worst of it was, that he did not seem in the least ashamed of his fickleness.

Maurice made one further attempt to move him, then, hurt and angry, intruded no more. At first, he was chiefly angry. But, gradually, the hurt deepened, and became a sense of injury, which made him avoid the street Krafft lived in, and shun him when they met. He missed him, after the close companionship of the past weeks, and felt as if he had been suddenly deprived of a part of himself. And he would no doubt have missed him more keenly still, if, just at this juncture, his attention had not been engrossed by another and more important matter.

XIII.


The commencement of the new term had just assembled the incoming students to sign their names in the venerable rollbook, when the report spread that Schilsky was willing to play his symphonic poem, ZARATHUSTRA, to those of his friends who cared to hear it. Curiosity swelled the number, and Furst lent his house for the occasion.

“You’ll come, of course,” said the latter to Maurice, as they left Schwarz’s room after their lesson; and Madeleine said the same thing while driving home from the railway-station, where Maurice had met her. She was no more a friend of Schilsky’s than he was, but she certainly intended to be present, to hear what kind of stuff he had turned out.

On the evening of the performance, Maurice and she walked together to the BRANDVORWERKSTRASSE. Madeleine had still much to say. She had returned from her holiday in the best of health and spirits, liberally rewarded for her trouble, and possessed of four new friends, who, no doubt, would all be of use to her when she settled in England again. This was to be her last winter in Leipzig, and she was drawing up detailed plans of work. From now on, she intended to take private lessons from Schwarz, in addition to those she received in the class.

“Even though they do cost ten marks each, it makes him ever so much better disposed towards you.”

She also told him that she had found a letter from Louise waiting for her, in which the latter announced her return for the following week. Louise wrote from England, and all her cry was to be back in Leipzig.

“Of course—now he is here,” commented Madeleine. “You know, I suppose, that he has been travelling with Zeppelin? He has the luck of I don’t know what.”

The Cayhills would be absent till the middle of the month; Maurice had received from Ephie one widely written note, loud in praise of a family of “perfectly sweet Americans,” whom they had learnt to know in Interlaken, but also expressing eagerness to be at home again in “dear old Leipzig.” Dove had arrived a couple of days ago—and here Madeleine laughed.

“He is absolutely shiny with resolution,” she declared. “Mind, Maurice, if he takes you into confidence—as he probably will—you are not on any account to dissuade him from proposing. A snub will do him worlds of good.”

They were not the first to climb the ill-lighted stair that wound up to the Fursts’ dwelling. The entry-door on the fourth storey stood open, and a hum of voices came from the sitting-room. The circular hat-stand in the passage was crowded with motley headgear.

As they passed the kitchen, the door of which was ajar, Frau Furst peeped through the slit, and seeing Maurice, called him in. The coffee-pot was still on the stove; he must sit down and drink a cup of coffee.

“There is plenty of time. Schilsky has not come yet, and I have only this moment sent Adolfchen for the beer.”

Maurice asked her if she were not coming in to hear the music. She laughed good-naturedly at the idea.

“Bless your heart, what should I do in there, among all you young people? No, no, I can hear just as well where I am. When my good husband had his evenings, it was always from the kitchen that I listened.”

Pausing, with a saucepan in one hand, a cloth in the other, she said: “You will hear something good to-night, Herr Guest. Oh, he has talent, great talent, has young Schilsky! This is not the usual work of a pupil. It has form, and it has ideas, and it is new and daring. I know one of the motives from hearing Franz play it,” and she hummed a theme as she replaced on the shelf, the scrupulously cleaned pot. “For such a young man, it is wonderful; but he will do better still, depend upon it, he will.”

Here she threw a hasty glance round the tiny kitchen, at three of the children sitting as still as mice in the corner, laid a finger on her lips, and, bursting with mystery, leaned over the table and asked Maurice if he could keep a secret.

“He is going away,” she whispered.

Maurice stared at her. “Going away? Who is? What do you mean?” he asked, and was so struck by her peculiar manner that he set his cup down untouched.

“Why Schilsky, of course.” She thought his astonishment was disbelief, and nodded confirmingly. “Yes, yes, he is going away. And soon, too.”

“How do you know?” cried Maurice. Sitting back in his chair, he stemmed his hands against the edge of the table, and looked challengingly at Frau Furst.

“Ssh—not so loud,” said the latter. “It’s a secret, a dead secret— though I’m sure I don’t know why. Franz——”

At this very moment, Franz himself came into the kitchen. He looked distrustfully at his whispering mother.

“Now then, mother, haven’t you got that beer yet?” he demanded. His genial bonhomie disappeared, as if by magic, when he entered his home circle, and he was particularly gruff with this adoring woman.

“GLEICH, FRANZCHEN, GLEICH,” she answered soothingly, and whisked about her work again, with the air of one caught napping.

Maurice followed Furst’s invitation to join the rest of the party.

The folding-doors between the “best room” and the adjoining bedroom had been opened wide, and the guests were distributed over the two rooms. The former was brilliantly lighted by three lamps and two candles, and all the sitting-accommodation the house contained was ranged in a semicircle round the grand piano. Here, not a place was vacant; those who had come late were in the bedroom, making shift with whatever offered. Two girls and a young man, having pushed back the feather-bed, sat on the edge of the low wooden bedstead, with their arms interlaced to give them a better balance. Maurice found Madeleine on a rickety little sofa that stood at the foot of the bed. Dove sat on a chest of drawers next the sofa, his long legs dangling in the air. Beside Madeleine, with his head on her shoulder, was Krafft.

“Oh, there you are,” cried Madeleine. “Well, I did my best to keep the place for you; but it was of no use, as you see. Just sit down, however. Between us, we’ll squeeze him properly.”

Maurice was glad that the room, which was lighted only by one small lamp, was in semi-darkness; for, at the sound of his own voice, it suddenly became clear to him that the piece of gossip Frau Furst had volunteered, had been of the nature of a blow. Schilsky’s departure threatened, in a way he postponed for the present thinking out, to disturb his life; and, in an abrupt need of sympathy, he laid his hand on Krafft’s knee.

“Is it you, old man? What have you been doing with yourself?”

Krafft gave him one of those looks which, in the early days of their acquaintance, had proved so disconcerting—a look of struggling recollection.

“Oh, nothing in particular,” he replied, without hostility, but also without warmth. His mind was not with his words, and Maurice withdrew his hand.

Madeleine leaned forward, dislodging Krafft’s head from its resting-place.

“How long have you two been ‘DU’ to each other?” she asked, and at Maurice’s curt reply, she pushed Krafft from her. “Sit up and behave yourself. One would think you had an evil spirit in you to-night.”

Krafft was nervously excited: bright red spots burnt on his cheeks, his hands twitched, and he jerked forward in his seat and threw himself back again, incessantly.

“No, you are worse than a mosquito,” cried Madeleine, losing patience. “Anyone would think you were going to play yourself. And he will be as cool as an iceberg. The sofa won’t stand it, Heinz. If you can’t stop fidgeting, get up.”

He had gone, before she finished speaking; for a slight stir in the next room made them suppose for a moment that Schilsky was arriving. Afterwards, Krafft was to be seen straying about, with his hands in his pockets; and, on observing his rose-pink cheeks and tumbled curly hair, Madeleine could not refrain from remarking: “He ought to have been a girl.”

The air was already hot, by reason of the lamps, and the many breaths, and the firmly shut double-windows. The clamour for beer had become universal by the time Adolfchen arrived with his arms full of bottles. As there were not enough glasses to go round, every two or three persons shared one between them—a proceeding that was carried out with much noisy mirth. Above all other voices was to be heard that of Miss Jensen, who, in a speckled yellow dress, with a large feather fan in her hand, sat in the middle of the front row of seats. It was she who directed how the beer should be apportioned; she advised a few late-comers where they would still find room, and engaged Furst to place the lights on the piano to better advantage. Next her, a Mrs. Lautenschlager, a plump little American lady, with straight yellow hair which hung down on her shoulders, was relating to her neighbour on the other side, in a tone that could be clearly heard in both rooms, how she had “discovered” her voice.

“I come to Schwarz, last fall,” she said shaking back her hair, and making effective use of her babyish mouth; “and he thinks no end of me. But the other week I was sick, and as I lay in bed, I sung some—just for fun. And my landlady—she’s a regular singer herself—who was fixing up the room, she claps her hands together and says: ‘My goodness me! Why YOU have a voice!’ That’s what put it in my head, and I went to Sperling to hear what he’d got to say. He was just tickled to death, I guess he was, and he’s going to make something dandy of it, so I stop long enough. I don’t know what my husband’ll say though. When I wrote him I was sick, he says: ‘Come home and be sick at home’—that’s what he says.”

Miss Jensen could not let pass the opportunity of breaking a lance for her own master, the Swede, and of cutting up Sperling’s method, which she denounced as antiquated. She made quite a little speech, in the course of which she now and then interrupted herself to remind Furst—who, was as soft as a pudding before her—of something he had forgotten to do, such as snuffing the candles or closing the door.

“Just let me hear your scale, will you?” she said patronisingly to Mrs. Lautenschlager. The latter, nothing loath, stuck out her chin, opened her mouth, and, for a short time, all other noises were drowned in a fine, full volume of voice.

On their sofa, Madeleine and Maurlee sat in silence, pretending to listen to Dove, who was narrating his journey. Madeleine was out of humour; she tapped the floor, and had a crease in her forehead. As for Maurice, he was in such poor spirits that she could not but observe it.

“Why are you so quiet? Is anything the matter?”

He shook his head, without speaking. His vague sense of impending misfortune had crystallised into a definite thought; he knew now what it signified. If Schilsky went away from Leipzig, Louise would probably go, too, and that would be the end of everything.

“I represented to him,” he heard Dove saying, “that I had seen the luggage with my own eyes at Flushing. What do you think he answered? He looked me up and down, and said: ‘ICH WERDE TELEGRAPHIEREN UND ERKUNDIGUNGEN EINZIEHEN.’ Now, do you think if you said to an English station-master: ‘Sir, I saw the luggage with my own eyes,’ he would not believe you? No, in my opinion, the whole German railway-system needs revision. Would you believe it, we did not make fifty kilometers in the hour, and yet our engine broke down before Magdeburg?”

So this would be the end; the end of foolish dreams and weak hopes, which he had never put into words even to himself, which had never properly existed, and yet had been there, nevertheless, a mass of gloriously vague perhapses. The end was at hand—an end before there had been any beginning.

“. . . the annoyance of the perpetual interruptions,” went on the voice on the other side. “A lady who was travelling in the same compartment—a very pleasant person, who was coming over to be a teacher in a school in Dresden—I have promised to show her our lions when she visits Leipzig: well, as I was saying, she was quite alarmed the first time he entered in that way, and it took me some time, I assure you, to make her believe that this was the German method of revising tickets.”

The break occasioned by the arrival of the beer had been of short duration, and the audience was growing impatient; at the back of the room, some one began to stamp his feet; others took it up. Furst perspired with anxiety, and made repeated journeys to the stair-head, to see if Schilsky were not coming. The latter was almost an hour late by now, and jests, bald and witty, were made at his expense. Some one offered to take a bet that he had fallen asleep and forgotten the appointment, and at this, one of the girls on the bed, a handsome creature with bold, prominent eyes, related an anecdote to her neighbours, concerning Schilsky’s powers of sleep. All three exploded with laughter. In a growing desire to be asked to play, Boehmer had for some time hung about the piano, and was now just about to drop, as if by accident, upon the stool, when the cry of: “No Bach!” was raised—Bach was Boehmer’s specialty—and re-echoed, and he retired red and discomfited to his Place in a corner of the room, where his companion, a statuesque little English widow, made biting observations on the company’s behaviour. The general rowdyism was at its height, when some one had the happy idea that Krafft should sing them his newest song. At this, there was a unanimous shriek of approval, and several hands dragged Krafft to the piano. But himself the wildest of them all, he needed no forcing. Flinging himself down on the seat, he preluded wildly in imitation of Rubinstein. His hearers sat with their mouths open, a fixed smile on their faces, laughter ready in their throats, and only Madeleine was coolly contemptuous.

“Tom-fool!” she said in a low voice.

Krafft was confidently expected to burst into one of those songs for which he was renowned. Few of his friends were able to sing them, and no one but himself could both sing and play them simultaneously: they were a monstrous, standing joke. Instead of this, however, he turned, winked at his audience, and began a slow, melancholy ditty, with a recurring refrain. He was not allowed to finish the first verse; a howl of disapproval went up; his hearers hooted, jeered and stamped.

“Sick cats!”

“Damn your ‘WENIG SONNE!’”—this was the refrain.

“Put your head in a bag!”

“Pity he drinks!”

“Give us one of the rousers—the rou . . . sers!”

Krafft himself laughed unbridledly. “DAS ICH SPRICHT!”—he announced. “In C sharp major.”

There was a hush of anticipation, in which Dove, stopping his BRETZEL half-way to his mouth, was heard to say in his tone of measured surprise: “C sharp major! Why, that is——”

The rest was drowned in the wild chromatic passages that Krafft sent up and down the piano with his right hand, while his left followed with full-bodied chords, each of which exceeded the octave. Before, however, there was time to laugh, this riot ceased, and became a mournful cadence, to the slowly passing harmonies of which, Krafft sang:

I am weary of everything that is, under the sun. I sicken at the long lines of rain, which are black against the sky; They drip, for a restless heart, with the drip of despair: For me, winds must rage, trees bend, and clouds sail stormily.

The whirlwind of the prelude commenced anew; the chords became still vaster; the player swayed from side to side, like a stripling-tree in a storm. Madeleine said, “Tch!” in disgust, but the rest of the company, who had only waited for this, burst into peals of laughter; some bent double in their seats, some leant back with their chins in the air. Even Dove smiled. Just, however, as those whose sense of humour was most highly developed, mopped their faces with gestures of exhaustion, and assured their neighbours that they “could not, really could not laugh any more,” Furst entered and flapped his hands.

“Here he comes!”

A sudden silence fell, broken only by a few hysterical giggles from the ladies, and by a frivolous American, who cried: “Now for ALSO SCHRIE ZENOPHOBIA!” Krafft stopped playing, but remained sitting at the piano, wiping down the keys with his handkerchief.

Schilsky came in, somewhat embarrassed by the lull which had succeeded the hubbub heard in the passage, but wholly unconcerned at the lateness of the hour: except in matters of practical advancement, time did not exist for him. As soon as he appeared, the two ladies in the front row began to clap their hands; the rest of the company followed their example, then, in spite of Furst’s efforts to prevent it, rose and crowded round him. Miss Jensen and her friend made themselves particularly conspicuous. Mrs Lauterischlager had an infatuation for the young man, of which she made no secret; she laid her hand caressingly on his coat-sleeve, and put her face as near his as propriety admitted.

“Disgusting, the way those women go on with him!” said Madeleine. “And what is worse, he likes it.”

Schilsky listened to the babble of compliments with that mixture of boyish deference and unequivocal superiority, which made him so attractive to women. He was too good-natured to interrupt them and free himself, and would have stood as long as they liked, if Furst had not come to the rescue and led him to the piano. Schilsky laid his hand affectionately on Krafft’s shoulder, and Krafft sprang up in exaggerated surprise. The audience took its seats again; the thick manuscript-score was set up on the music-rack, and the three young men at the piano had a brief disagreement with one another about turning the leaves: Krafft was bent on doing it, and Schilsky objected, for Krafft had a way of forgetting what he was at in the middle of a page. Krafft flushed, cast an angry look at his friend, and withdrew, in high dudgeon, to a corner.

Standing beside the piano, so turned to those about him that the two on the sofa in the next room only saw him sideways, and ill at that, Schilsky gave a short description of his work. He was nervous, which aggravated his lisp, and he spoke so rapidly and in such a low voice that no one but those immediately in front of him, could understand what he said. But it did not matter in the least; all present had come only to hear the music; they knew and cared nothing about Zarathustra and his spiritual development; and one and all waited impatiently for Schilsky to stop speaking. The listeners in the bedroom——merely caught disjointed words—WERDEGANG, NOTSCHREI, TARANTELN—but not one was curious enough even to lean forward in his seat. Madeleine made sarcastic inward comments on the behaviour of the party.

“It’s perfectly clear to you, I suppose,” she could not refrain from observing as, at the finish, Dove sagely wagged his head in agreement.

It transpired that there was an ode to be sung before the last section of the composition, and a debate ensued who, should sing it. The two ladies in the front had quite a little quarrel—without knowing anything about the song—as to which of their voices would best suit it. Schilsky was silent for a moment, tapping his fingers, then said suddenly: “Come on, Heinz,” and looked at Krafft. But the latter, who was standing morose, with folded arms, did not move. He had a dozen reasons why he should not sing; he had a cold, was hoarse, was out of practice, could not read the music from sight.

“Good Heavens, what a fool Heinz is making of himself tonight!” said Madeleine.

But Schilsky thumped his fist on the lid, and said, if Krafft did not sing it, no one should; and that was the end of the matter. Krafft was pulled to the piano.

Schilsky took his seat, and, losing his nervousness as soon as he touched the keys, preluded firmly and easily, with his large, white hands. Now, every one leaned forward to see him better; especially the ladies threw themselves into positions from which they could watch hair and hands, and the slender, swaying figure.

“Isn’t he divine?” said the bold-eyed girl on the bed, in a loud whisper, and hung upon her companion’s neck in an ecstatic attitude.

After the diversity of noises which had hitherto interfered with his thinking connectedly, Maurice welcomed the continuous sound of the music, which went on without a break. He sat in a listening attitude, shading his eyes with his hand. Through his fingers, he surreptitiously watched the player. He had never before had an opportunity of observing Schilsky so closely, and, with a kind of blatant generosity, he now pointed out to himself each physical detail that he found prepossessing in the other, every feature that was likely to attract—in the next breath, only to struggle with his honest opinion that the composer was a slippery, loose-jointed, caddish fellow, who could never be proved to be worthy of Louise. But he was too down-hearted at what he had learnt in the course of the evening, to rise to any active feeling of dislike.

Intermittently he heard, in spite of himself, something of Schilsky’s music; but he was not in a frame of mind to understand or to retain any impression of it. He was more effectively jerked out of his preoccupation by single spoken words, which, from time to time, struck his ear: this was Furst, who, in the absence of a programme, announced from his seat beside Schilsky, the headings of the different sections of the work: WERDEGANG; SEILTANZER—here Maurice saw Dove conducting with head and hand—NOTSCHREI; SCHWERMUT; TARANTELN—and here again, but vaguely, as if at a distance, he heard suppressed laughter. But he was thoroughly roused when Krafft, picking up a sheet of music and coming round to the front of the piano, began to sing DAS TRUNKENE LIED. By way of introduction, the low F in the bass of F minor sounded persistently, at syncopated intervals; Schilsky inclined his head, and Krafft sang, in his sweet, flute-like voice:

Oh, Mensch! Gieb Acht! Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht? “Ich schlief, ich schlief, Aus tiefem Schlaf bin ich erwacht: Die Welt ist tief, Und tiefer als der Tag gedacht.”

—the last phrase of which was repeated by the accompaniment, a semitone higher.

Tief ist ihr Weh, Lust—tiefer noch als Herzeleid:

As far as this, the voice had been supported by simple, full-sounding harmonies. Now, from out the depths, still of F minor, rose a hesitating theme, which seemed to grope its way: in imagination, one heard it given out by the bass strings; then the violas reiterated it, and dyed it purple; voice and violins sang it together; the high little flutes carried it up and beyond, out of reach, to a half close.

Weh spricht: vergeh!

Suddenly and unexpectedly, there entered a light yet mournful phrase in F major, which was almost a dance-rhythm, and seemed to be a small, frail pleading for something not rightly understood.

Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit, Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit.

The innocent little theme passed away, and the words were sung again to a stern and fateful close in D flat major.

The concluding section of the work returned to these motives, developed them, gathered them together, grouped them and interchanged them, in complicated thermatic counterpoint. Schilsky was barely able to cope with the difficulties of the score; he exerted himself desperately, laboured with his head and his whole body, and surmounted sheerly unplayable parts with the genial slitheriness that is the privilege of composers.

When, at last, he crashed to a close and wiped his face in exhaustion, there was a deafening uproar of applause. Loud cries were uttered and exclamations of enthusiasm; people rose from their seats and crowded round the piano to congratulate the player. Mrs. Lautenschlager could not desist from kissing his hand. A tall, thin Russian girl in spectacles, who had assiduously taken notes throughout, asked in a loud voice, and her peculiar, hoppy German, for information about the orchestration. What use had he made of the cymbals? She trusted a purely Wagnerian one. Schilsky hastened to reopen the score, and sat himself to answer the question earnestly and at length.

“Come, Maurice, let us go,” said Madeleine, rising and shaking the creases from her skirt. “There will be congratulations enough. He won’t miss ours.”

Maurice had had an idea of lingering till everybody else had gone, on the chance of picking up fresh facts. But he was never good at excuses. So they slipped out into the passage, followed by Dove; but while the latter was looking for his hat, Madeleine pulled Maurice down the stairs.

“Quick, let us go!” she whispered; and, as they heard him coming after them, she drew her companion down still further, to the cellar flight, where they remained hidden until Dove had passed them, and his steps had died away in the street.

“We should have had nothing but his impressions and opinions all the way home,” she said, as they emerged. “He was bottled up from having to keep quiet so long—I saw it in his face. And I couldn’t stand it to-night. I’m in a bad temper, as you may have observed—or perhaps you haven’t.”

No, he had not noticed it.

“Well, you would have, if you hadn’t been so taken up with yourself. What on earth is the matter with you?”

He feigned. surprise: and they walked in silence down one street and into the next. Then she spoke again. “Do you know—but you’re sure not to know that either—you gave me a nasty turn to-night?”

“I?” His surprise was genuine this time.

“Yes, you—when I heard you say ‘DU’ to Heinz.”

He looked at her in astonishment; but she was not in a hurry to continue. They walked another street-length, and all she said was: “How refreshing the air is after those stuffy rooms!”

As they turned a corner however, she made a fresh start.

“I think it’s rather hard on me,” she said, and laughed as she spoke. “Here am I again, having to lecture you! The fact is, I suppose, one’s METIER clings to one, in spite of oneself. But there must be something about you, too, Maurice Guest, that makes one want to do it—want to look after you, so to speak—as if you couldn’t be trusted to take care of yourself. Well, it disturbed me to-night, to see how intimate you and Heinz have got.”

“Is that all? Why on earth should that trouble you? And anyhow,” he added, “the whole affair came about without any wish of mine.”

“How?” she demanded; and when he had told her: “And since then?”

He went into detail, coolly, without the resentment he had previously felt towards Krafft.

“And that’s all?”

“Isn’t it enough—for a fellow to go on in that way?”

“And you feel aggrieved?”

“No, not now. At first I was rather sore, though, for Heinz is an interesting fellow, and we were very thick for a time.”

“Yes, of course—until Schilsky comes back. As soon as he appears on the scene, Master Heinz gives you the cold shoulder. Or perhaps you didn’t know that Heinz is the attendant spirit of that heaven-born genius?”

Maurice did not reply, and when she spoke again, it was with renewed seriousness. “Believe me, Maurice, he is no friend for you. It’s not only that you ought to be above letting yourself be treated in this way, but Heinz’s friendship won’t do you any good. He belongs to a bad set here—and Schilsky, too. If you were long with Heinz, you would be bound to get drawn into it, and then it would be good-bye to anything you might have done—to work and success. No, take my advice—it’s sincerely meant—and steer clear of Heinz.”

Maurice smiled to himself at her womanly idea of Krafft leading him to perdition. “But you’re fond of him yourself, Madeleine,” he said. “You can’t help liking him either.”

“I daresay I can’t. But that is quite a different matter—quite;” and as if more than enough had now been said, she abruptly left the subject.

Before going home that night, Maurice made the old round by way of the BRUDERSTRASSE, and stood and looked up at the closed windows behind which Louise lived. The house was dark, and as still as was the deserted street. Only the Venetian blinds seemed to be faintly alive; the outer windows, removed for the summer, had not yet been replaced, and a mild wind flapped the blinds, just as it swayed the tops of the trees in the opposite garden. There was a breath of autumn in the air. He told himself aloud, in the nightly silence, that she was going away—as if by repeating the words, he might ultimately grow used to their meaning. The best that could be hoped for was that she would not go immediately, but would remain in Leipzig for a few weeks longer. Then a new fear beset him. What if she never came back again?—if she had left the place quietly, of set purpose?—if these windows were closed for good and all? A dryness invaded his throat at the possibility, and on the top of this evening of almost apathetic resignation to the inevitable, the knowledge surged up in him that all he asked was to be allowed to see her just once more. Afterwards, let come what might. Once again, he must stand face to face with her—must stamp a picture of her on his brain, to carry with him for ever.

For ever!—And through his feverish sleep ran, like a thread, the words he had heard Krafft sing, of an eternity that was deep and dreamless, a joy without beginning or end.

Madeleine had waved her umbrella at him. He crossed the road to where she was standing in rain-cloak and galoshes. She wished to tell him that the date of her playing in the ABENDUNTERHALTUNG had been definitely fixed. About to go, she said:

“Louise is back—did you know?”

Of course he knew, though he did not tell her so—knew almost the exact hour at which the blinds had been drawn up, the windows opened, and a flower-pot, in a gaudy pink paper, put out on the sill.

Not many days after this, he came upon Louise herself. She was standing talking, at a street-corner, to the shabby little Englishman, Eggis, with whom she had walked the FOYER of the theatre. Maurice was about to bow and pass by, but she smiled and held out her hand.

“You are back, too, then? To-day I am meeting all my friends.”

She had fur about her neck, although the weather was not really cold, and her face rose out of this setting like a flower from its cup.

This meeting, and the few cordial words she had spoken, helped him over the days that followed. Sometimes, while he waited for the blow to fall, his daily life grew very unimportant; things that had hitherto interested him, now went past like shadows; he himself was a mere automaton. But sometimes, too, and especially after he had seen Louise, and touched her living hand, he wondered whether he were not perhaps tormenting himself unnecessarily. Nothing more had come to light; no one had hinted by a word at Schilsky’s departure; it might yet prove to be all a mistake.

Then, however, he received a postcard from Madeleine, saying that she had something interesting to tell him. He went too early, and spent a quarter of an hour pacing her room. When she entered, she threw him a look, and, before she had finished taking off her wraps, said:

“Maurice, I have a piece of news for you. Schilsky is going away.”

He nodded; his throat was dry.

“Why, you don’t mean to say you knew?” she cried, and paused half-way out of her jacket.

Maurice went to the window, and stood with his back to her. In one of the houses opposite, at a window on the same level, a girl was practising the violin; his eyes followed the mechanical movements of the bow.

He cleared his throat. “Do you—Is it likely—I mean, do you think?——”

Madeleine understood him. “Yes, I do. Louise won’t stay here a day longer than he does; I’m sure of that.”

But otherwise she knew no more than Maurice; and she did not offer to detain him, when, a few minutes later, he alleged a pressing appointment. Madeleine was annoyed, and showed it; she had come in with the intention of being kind to him, of encouraging him, and discussing the matter sympathetically, and it now turned out that not only had he known it all the time, but had also kept it a secret from her. She did not like underhand ways, especially in people whom she believed she knew inside out.

Now that the pledge of secrecy had been removed from him, Maurice felt that he wanted facts; and, without thinking more about it than if he had been there the day before, he climbed the stairs that led to Krafft’s lodging.

He found him at supper; Avery was present, too, and on the table sat Wotan, who was being regaled with strips of skin off the sausage. Krafft greeted Maurice with a touch of his former effusiveness; for he was in a talkative mood, and needed an audience. At his order, Avery put an extra plate on the table, and Maurice had to share their meal. It was not hard for him to lead Krafft round to the desired subject. It seemed that one of the masters in the Conservatorium had expressed a very unequivocal opinion of Schilsky’s talents as a composer, and Krafft was now sarcastic, now merry, at this critic’s expense. Maurice laid down his knife, and, in the first break, asked abruptly: “When does he go?”

“Go?—who?” said Krafft indifferently, tickling Wotan’s nose with a piece of skin which he held out of reach.

“Who?—why, Schilsky, of course.”

It sounded as if another than he had said the words: they were so short and harsh. The plate Avery was holding fell to the floor. Krafft sat back in his chair, and stared at Maurice, with a face that was all eyes.

“You knew he was going away?—or didn’t you?” asked Maurice in a rough voice. “Every one knows. The whole place knows.”

Krafft laughed. “The whole place knows: every one knows,” he repeated. “Every one, yes—every one but me. Every one but me, who had most right to know. Yes, I alone had the right; for no one has loved him as I have.”

He rose from the table, knocking over his chair. “Or else it is not true?”

“Yes, it is true. Then you didn’t know?” said Maurice, bewildered by the outburst he had evoked.

“No, we didn’t know.” It was Avery who spoke. She was on her knees, picking up the pieces of the plate with slow, methodical fingers.

Krafft stood hesitating. Then he went to the piano, opened it, adjusted the seat, and made all preparations for playing. But with his fingers ready on the keys, he changed his mind and, instead, laid his arms on the folded rack and his head on his arms. He did not stir again, and a long silence followed. The only sound that was to be heard came from Wotan, who, sitting on his haunches on a corner of the table, washed the white fur of his belly with an audible swish.

XIV.


Whistling to him to stop, Furst ran the length of a street-block after Maurice, as the latter left the Conservatorium.

“I say, Guest,” he said breathlessly, on catching up with him. “Look here, I just wanted to tell you, you must be sure and join us to-night. We are going to give Schilsky a jolly send-off.”

They stood at the corner of the WACHTERSTRASSE; it was a blowy day. Maurice replied evasively, with his eyes on the unbound volume of Beethoven that Furst was carrying; its tattered edges moved in the wind.

“When does he go?” he asked, without any show of concern.

Furst looked warily round him, and dropped his voice. “Well, look here, Guest, I don’t mind telling you,” he said; he was perspiring from his run, and dried his neck and face. “I don’t mind telling you; you won’t pass it on; for he has his reasons—family or domestic reasons, if one may say so, tra-la-la!”—he winked, and nudged Maurice with his elbow—“for not wanting it to get about. It’s deuced hard on him that it should have leaked out at all. I don’t know how it happened; for I was mum, ‘pon my honour, I was.”

“Yes. And when does he go?” repeated his hearer with the same want of interest.

“To-morrow morning early, by the first train.”

Now to be rid of him! But it was never easy to get away from Furst, and since Maurice had declared his intention of continuing to take lessons from him, as good as impossible. Furst was overpowering in his friendliness, and on this particular occasion, there was no escape for Maurice before he had promised to make one of the party that was to meet that night, at a restaurant in the town. Then he bluffly alleged an errand in the PLAGWITZERSTRASSE, and went off in an opposite direction to that which his companion had to take.

As soon as Furst was out of sight, he turned into the path that led to the woods. Overhead, the sky was a monotonous grey expanse, and a soft, moist wind drove in gusts, before which, on the open meadow-land, he bent his head. It was a wind that seemed heavy with unfallen rain; a melancholy wind, as the day itself was melancholy, in its faded colours, and cloying mildness. With his music under his arm, Maurice walked to the shelter of the trees. Now that he had learnt the worst, a kind of numbness came over him; he had felt so intensely in the course of the past week that, now the crisis was there, he seemed destitute of feeling.

His feet bore him mechanically to his favourite seat, and here he remained, with his head in his hands, his eyes fixed on the trodden gravel of the path. He had to learn, once and for all, that, by tomorrow, everything would be over; for, notwithstanding the wretchedness of the past days, he was as far off as ever from understanding. But he was loath to begin; he sat in a kind of torpor, conscious only of the objects his eyes rested on: some children had built a make-believe house of pebbles, with a path leading up to the doorway, and at this he gazed, estimating the crude architectural ideas that had occurred to the childish builders. He felt the wind in his hair, and listened to the soothing noise it made, high above his head. But gradually overcoming this physical dullness, his mind began to work again. With a sudden vividness, he saw himself as he had walked these very woods, seven months before; he remembered the brilliant colouring of the April day, and the abundance of energy that had possessed him. Then, on looking into the future, all his thoughts had been of strenuous endeavour and success. Now, success was a word like any other, and left him cold.

For a long time, in place of passing on to his real preoccupation, he considered this, brooding over the change that had come about in him. Was it, he asked himself, because he had so little whole-hearted endurance, that when once a thing was within his grasp, that grasp slackened? Was it that he was able to make the effort required for a leap, then, the leap over, could not right himself again? He believed that the slackening interest, the inability to fix his attention, which he had had to fight against of late, must have some such deeper significance; for his whole nature—the inherited common sense of generations—rebelled against tracing it back to the day on which he had seen a certain face for the first time. It was too absurd to be credible that because a slender, dark-eyed girl had suddenly come within his range of vision, his life should thus lose form and purpose—incredible and unnatural as well—and, in his present mood, he would have laughed at the suggestion that this was love. To his mind, love was something frank and beautiful, made for daylight and the sun; whereas his condition was a source of mortification to him. To love, without any possible hope of return; to love, knowing that the person you loved regarded you with less than indifference, and, what was worse, that this person was passionately attached to another man—no, there was something indelicate about it, at which his blood revolted. It was the kind of thing that it suited poets to make tragedies of, but it did not—should not—happen in sober, daily life. And if, as it seemed in this case, it was beyond mortal’s power to prevent it, then the only fitting thing to do was promptly to make an end. And because, over the approach of this end, he suffered, he now called himself hard names. What had he expected? Had he really believed that matters could always dally on, in this pleasant, torturous way? Would he always have been content to be third party, and miserable outsider? No; the best that could happen to him was now happening; let the coming day once be past, let a very few weeks have run their course, and the parting would have lost its sting; he would be able to look back, regretfully no doubt, but as on something done with, irrecoverable. Then he would apply himself to his work with all his heart; and it would be possible to think of her, and remember her, calmly. If once an end were put to these daily chances of seeing her, which perpetually fanned his unrest, all would go well.

And yet . . . did he close his eyes and let her face rise up before him—her sweet, white face, with the unfathomable eyes, and pale, sensuous mouth—he was shaken by an emotion that knocked his resolutions as flat as a breath knocks a house of cards. It was not love, nor anything to do with love, this he could have sworn to: it was merely the strange physical effect her presence, or the remembrance of her presence, had had upon him, from the first day on: a tightening of all centres, a heightening of all faculties, an intense hope, and as intense a despair. And in this moment, he confessed to himself that he would have been over-happy to live on just as he had been doing, if only sometimes he might see her. He needed her, as he had never felt the need of anyone before; his nature clamoured for her, imperiously, as it clamoured for light and air. He had no concern with anyone but her—her only—and he could not let her go. It was not love; it was a bodily weakness, a pitiable infirmity: he even felt it degrading that another person should be able to exercise such an influence over him, that there should be a part of himself over which he had no control. Not to see her, not to be able to gather fresh strength from each chance meeting, meant that the grip life had of him would relax—he grew sick even at the thought of how, in some unknown place, in the midst of strangers, she would go on living, and giving her hand and her smile to other people, while he would never see her again. And he said her name aloud to himself, as if he were in bodily pain, or as if the sound of it might somehow bring him aid: he inwardly implored whatever fate was above him to give him the one small chance he asked—the chance of fair play.

The morning passed, without his knowing it. When, considerably after his usual dinner-hour, he was back in his room, he looked at familiar objects with unseeing eyes. He was not conscious of hunger, but going into the kitchen begged for a cup of the coffee that could be smelt brewing on Frau Krause’s stove. When he had drunk this, a veil seemed to lift from his brain; he opened and read a letter from home, and was pricked by compunction at the thought that, except for a few scales run hastily that morning, he had done no work. But while he still stood, with his arm on the lid of the piano, an exclamation rose to his lips; and taking up his hat, he went down the stairs again, and out into the street. What was he thinking of? If he wished to see Louise once more, his place was under her windows, or in those streets she would be likely to pass through.

He walked up and down before the house in the BRUDERSTRASSE, sometimes including a side street, in order to avoid making himself conspicuous; putting on a hurried air, if anyone looked curiously at him; lingering for a quarter of an hour on end, in the shadow of a neighbouring doorway. Gradually, yet too quickly, the grey afternoon wore to a close. He had paced to and fro for an hour now, but not a trace of her had he seen; nor did even a light burn in her room when darkness fell. A fear lest she should have already gone away, beset him again, and got the upper hand of him; and wild schemes flitted through his mind. He would mount the stairs, and ring the door-bell, on some pretext or other, to learn whether she was still there; and his foot was on the lowest stair, when his courage failed him, and he turned back. But the idea had taken root; he could not bear much longer the uncertainty he was in; and so, towards seven o’clock, when he had hung about for three hours, and there was still no sign of life in her room, he went boldly up the broad, winding stair and rang the bell. When the door was opened, he would find something to say.

The bell, which he had pulled hard, pealed through the house, jangled on, and, in a series of after-tinkles, died away. There was no immediate answering sound; the silence persisted, and having waited for some time, he rang again. Then, in the distance, he heard a door creak; soft, cautious footsteps crept along the passage; a light moved; the glass window in the upper half of the door was opened, and a little old woman peered out, holding a candle above her head. On seeing the pale face close before her, she drew back, and made as if to shut the window; for, as a result of poring over newspapers, she lived in continual expectation of robbery and murder.

“She is not at home,” she said with tremulous bravado, in answer to the young man’s question, and again was about to close the window. But Maurice thrust in his hand, and she could not shut without crushing it.

“Then she is still here? Has she gone out? When will she be back?” he queried.

“How should I know? And look here, young man, if you don’t take away your hand and leave the house at once, I shall call from the window for a policeman.”

He went slowly down the stairs and across the street, and took up anew his position in the dark doorway—a proceeding which did not reassure Fraulein Grunhut, who, regarding his inquiries as a feint, was watching his movements from between the slats of a window-blind. But Maurice had not stood again for more than a quarter of an hour, when a feeling of nausea seized him, and this reminded him that he had practically eaten nothing since the morning. If he meant to hold out, he must snatch a bite of food somewhere; afterwards, he would return and wait, if he had to wait all night.

In front of the PANORAMA on the ROSSPLATZ, he ran into the arms of Furst, and the latter, when he heard where Maurice was going, had nothing better to do than to accompany him, and drink a SCHNITT. Furst, who was in capital spirits at the prospect of the evening, laughed heartily, told witty anecdotes, and slapped his fat thigh, the type of rubicund good-humour; and as he was not of an observant turn of mind, he did not notice his companion’s abstraction. Hardly troubling to dissemble, Maurice paid scant attention to Furst’s talk; he ate avidly, and as soon as he had finished, pushed back his chair and called to the waiter for his bill.

“I must go,” he said, and rose. “I have something important to do this evening, and can’t join you.”

Furst, cut short in the middle of a sentence, let his double chin fall on his collar, and gazed open-mouthed at his companion.

“But I say, Guest, look here!. . .” Maurice heard him expostulate as the outer door slammed behind him.

He made haste to retrace his steps. The wind had dropped; a fine rain was beginning to fall; it promised to be a wet night, of empty streets and glistening pavements. There was no visible change in the windows of the BRUDERSTRASSE; they were as blankly dark as before. Turning up his coat-collar, Maurice resumed his patrollings, but more languidly; he was drowsy from having eaten, and the air was chill. A weakness overcame him at the thought of the night-watch he had set himself; it seemed impossible to endure the crawling past of still more hours. He was tired to exhaustion, and a sudden, strong desire arose in him, somehow, anyhow, to be taken out of himself, to have his thoughts diverted into other channels. And this feeling grew upon him with such force, the idea of remaining where he was, for another hour, became so intolerable, that he forgot everything else, and turned and ran back towards the PANORAMA, only afraid lest Furst should have gone without him.

The latter was, in fact, just coming out of the door. He stared in astonishment at Maurice.

“I’ve changed my mind,” said Maurice, without apology. “Shall we go? Where’s the place?”

Furst mumbled something inaudible; he was grumpy at the other’s behaviour. Scanning him furtively, and noting his odd, excited manner, he concluded that Maurice had been drinking.

They walked without speaking; Furst hummed to himself. In the thick-sown, business thoroughfare, the BRUHL, they entered a dingy cafe and while Furst chattered with the landlord and BUFFETDAME, with both of whom he was on very friendly terms, Maurice went into the side-room, where the KNEIPE was to be held, and sat down before a long, narrow table, spread with a soiled red and blue-checked tablecloth. He felt cold and sick again, and when the wan PICCOLO set a beer-mat before him, he sent the lad to the devil for a cognac. The waiter came with the liqueur-bottle; Maurice drank the contents of one and then another of the tiny glasses. A genial warmth ran through him and his nausea ceased. He leaned his head on his hands, closed his eyes, and, soothed by the heat of the room, had a few moments’ pleasant lapse of consciousness.

He was roused by the entrance of a noisy party of three. These were strangers to him, and when they had mentioned their names and learned his, they sat down at the other end of the table and talked among themselves. They were followed by a couple of men known to Maurice by sight. One, an Italian, a stout, animated man, with prominent jet-black eyes and huge white teeth, was a fellow-pupil of Schilsky’s, and a violinist of repute, notwithstanding the size and fleshiness of his hands, which were out of all proportion to the delicate build of his instrument. The other was a slender youth of fantastic appearance. He wore a long, old-fashioned overcoat, which reached to his heels, and was moulded to a shapely waist; on his fingers were numerous rings; his bushy hair was scented and thickly curled, his face painted and pencilled like a woman’s. He did not sit down, but, returning to the public room, leaned over the counter and talked to the BUFFETDAME, in a tone which had nothing in common with Furst’s hearty familiarity.

Next came a couple of Americans, loud, self-assertive, careless of dress and convention; close behind them still another group, and at its heels, Dove. The latter entered the room with an apologetic air, and on sitting down at the head of the table, next Maurice, mentioned at once that, at heart, he was not partial to this kind of thing, and was only there because he believed the present to be an exceptional occasion: who knew but what, in after years, he might not be proud to claim having, made one of the party on this particular evening?—the plain truth being that Schilsky was little popular with his own sex, and, in consequence of the difficulty of beating up a round dozen of men, Furst had been forced to be very pressing in his invitations, to have recourse to bribes and promises, or, as in the case of Dove, to stimulating the imagination. The majority of the guests present were not particular who paid for their drink, provided they got it.

At Krafft’s entry, a stifled laugh went round. To judge from his appearance, he had not been in bed the previous night: sleep seemed to hang on his red and sunken eyelids; his hands and face were dirty, and when he took off his coat, which he had worn turned up at the neck, it was seen that he had either lost or forgotten his collar. Shirt and waistcoat were insufficiently buttoned. His walk was steady, but his eyes had a glassy stare, and did not seem to see what they rested on. A strong odour of brandy went out from him; but he had not been many minutes in the room before a stronger and more penetrating smell made itself felt. The rest of the company began to sniff and ejaculate, and Furst, having tracked it to the corner where the overcoats hung, drew out of one of Krafft’s pockets a greasy newspaper parcel, evidently some days old, containing bones, scraps of decaying meat, and rancid fish. The PICCOLO, summoned by a general shout, was bade to dispose of the garbage instantly, and to hang the coat in a draughty place to air. Various epithets were hurled at Krafft, who, however, sat picking his teeth with unconcern, as if what went on around him had nothing to do with him.

They were now all collected but Schilsky, and much beer had been drunk. Furst was in his usual state of agitation lest his friend should forget to keep the appointment; and the spirits of those—there were several such present—who suffered almost physical pain from seeing another than themselves the centre of interest, went up by leaps and bounds. But at this juncture, Schilsky’s voice was heard in the next room. It was raised and angry; it snarled at a waiter. Significant glances flew round the table: for the young man’s outbursts of temper were well known to all. He entered, making no response to the greetings that were offered him, displaying his anger with genial indifference to what others thought of him. To the PICCOLO he tossed coat and hat, and swore at the boy for not catching them. Then he let his loose-limbed body down on the vacant chair, and drank off the glass of PILSENER that was set before him.

There was a pause of embarrassment. The next moment, however, several men spoke at once: Furst continued a story he was telling, some one else capped it, and the mirth these anecdotes provoked was more than ordinarily uproarious. Schilsky sat silent, letting his sullen mouth hang, and tapping the table with his fingers. Meanwhile, he emptied one glass of beer after another. The PICCOLO could hardly cope with the demands that were made on him, and staggered about, top-heavy, with his load of glasses.

But it was impossible to let the evening pass as flatly as this; besides, as the general hilarity increased, it made those present less sensitive to the mood of the guest of honour. Furst was a born speaker, and his heart was full. So, presently, he rose to his feet, struck his glass, and, in spite of Schilsky’s deepening scowl, held a flowery speech about his departing friend. The only answer Schilsky gave was a muttered request to cease making an idiot of himself.

This was going rather too far; but no one protested, except Ford, the pianist, who said in English: “Speesch? Call that a speesch?”

Furst, inclined in the first moment of rebuff to be touchy, allowed his natural goodness of heart to prevail. He leaned forward, and said, not without pathos: “Old man, we are all your friends here. Something’s the matter. Tell us what it is.”

Before Schilsky could reply, Krafft awakened from his apparent stupor to say with extreme distinctness: “I’ll tell you. There’s been the devil to pay.”

“Now, chuck it, Krafft!” cried one or two, not without alarm at the turn things might take.

But Schilsky, whose anger had begun to subside under the influence of the two litres he had drunk, said slowly and thickly: “Let him be. What he says is the truth—gospel truth.”

“Oh, say, that’s to’ bad!” cried one of the Americans—a lean man, with the mouth and chin of a Methodist.

All kept silence now, in the hope that Schilsky would continue. As he did not, but sat brooding, Furst, in his role of peacemaker, clapped him on the back. “Well, forget it for to-night, old man! What does it matter? To-morrow you’ll be miles away.”

This struck a reminiscence in Ford, who forthwith tried to sing:

I’m off by the morning train, Across the raging main——

“That’s easily said!” Schilsky threw a dark look round the table. “By those who haven’t been through it. I have. And I’d rather have lost a hand.”

Krafft laughed—that is to say, a cackle of laughter issued from his mouth, while his glazed eyes stared idiotically. “He shall tell us about it. Waiter, a round of SCHNAPS!”

“Shut up, Krafft!” said Furst uneasily.

“Damn you, Heinz!” cried Schilsky, striking the table. He swallowed his brandy at a gulp, and held out the glass to be refilled. His anger fell still more; he began to commiserate himself. “By Hell, I wish a plague would sweep every woman off the earth!”

“The deuce, why don’t you keep clear of them?”

Schilsky laughed, without raising his heavy eyes. “If they’d only give one the chance. Damn them all!—old and young——I say. If it weren’t for them, a man could lead a quiet life.”

“It’ll all come out in the wash,” consoled the American.

Maurice heard everything that passed, distinctly; but the words seemed to be bandied at an immeasurable distance from him. He remained quite undisturbed, and would have felt like a god looking on at the doings of an infinitesimal world, had it not been for a wheel which revolved in his head, and hindered him from thinking connectedly. So far, drinking had brought him no pleasure; and he had sense enough to find the proximity of Ford disagreeable; for the latter spilt half the liquor he tried to swallow over himself, and half over his neighbour.

A fresh imprecation of Schilsky’s called forth more laughter. On its subsidence, Krafft awoke to his surroundings again. “What has the old woman given you?” he asked, with his strange precision of speech and his drunken eyes.

Schilsky struck the table with his fist. “Look at him!—shamming drunk, the bitch!” he cried.

“Never mind him; he don’t count. How much did she give you?”

“Oh, gee, go on!”

But Schilsky, turned sullen again, refused to answer.

“Out with it then, Krafft!—you know, you scoundrel, you!”

Krafft put his hand to the side of his mouth. “She gave him three thousand marks.”

On all sides the exclamations flew.

“Oh, gee-henna!”

“Golly for her!”

“DREI TAUSEND MARK!—ALLE EHRE!”

Again Krafft leaned forward with a maudlin laugh.

“JAWOHL—but on what condition?”

“Heinz, you ferret out things like a pig’s snout,” said Furst with an exaggerated, tipsy disgust.

“What, the old louse made conditions, did she?”

“Is she jealous?”

There was another roar at this. Schilsky looked as black as thunder.

Again Furst strove to intercede. “Jealous?—in seven devils’ name, why jealous? The old scarecrow! She hasn’t an ounce of flesh to her bones.”

Schilsky laughed. “Much you know about it, you fool! Flesh or no flesh, she’s as troublesome as the plumpest. I wouldn’t go through the last month again for all you could offer me. Month?—no, nor the last six months either! It’s been a hell of a life. Three of ’em, whole damned three, at my heels, and each ready to tear the others’ eyes out.”

“Three! Hullo!”

“Three? Bah!—what’s three?” sneered the painted youth.

Schilsky turned on him. “What’s three? Go and try it, if you want to know, you pap-sodden suckling! Three, I said, and they’ve ended by making the place too hot to hold me. But I’m done now. No more for me!—if my name’s what it is.”

Having once broken through his reserve, he talked on, with heated fluency; and the longer he spoke, the more he was carried away by his grievances. For, all he had asked for, he assured his hearers, had been peace and quiet—the peace necessary to important work. “Jesus and Mary! Are a fellow’s chief obligations not his obligations to himself?” At the same time, it was not his intention to put any of the blame on Lulu’s shoulders: she couldn’t help herself. “Lulu is Lulu. I’m damned fond of Lulu, boys, and I’ve always done my best by her—is there anyone here who wants to say I haven’t?”

There was none; a chorus of sympathetic ayes went up from the party that was drinking at his expense.

Mollified, he proceeded, asserting vehemently that he would have gone miles out of his. way to avoid causing Lulu pain. “I’m a soft-hearted fool—I admit it!—where a woman is concerned.” But he had yielded to her often enough—too often—as it was; the time had come for him to make a stand. Let those present remember what he had sacrificed only that summer for Lulu’s sake. Would anyone else have done as much for his girl? He made bold to doubt it. For a man like Zeppelin to come to him, and to declare, with tears in his eyes, that he could teach him no more—could he afford to treat a matter like that with indifference? Had he really been free to make a choice?

Again he looked round the table with emphasis, and those who had their muscles sufficiently under control, hastened to lay their faces in seemly folds.

Then, however, Schilsky’s mood changed; he struck the table so that the glasses danced. “And shall I tell you what my reward has been for not going? Do you want to know how Lulu has treated me for staying on here? ‘You are a quarter of an hour late: where have you been? You’ve only written two bars since I saw you this morning: what have you been doing? A letter has come in a strange writing: who is it from? You’ve put on another tie: who have you been to see?’ HIMMELSAKRAMENT!” He drained his glass. “I’ve had the life of a dog, I tell you—of a dog! There’s not been a moment in the day when she hasn’t spied on me, and followed me, and made me ridiculous. Over every trifle she has got up a fresh scene. She’s even gone so far as to come to my room and search my pockets, when she knew I wasn’t at home.”

“Yes, yes,” sneered Krafft. “Exactly! And so, gentlemen he was now for slinking off without a word to her.”

“Oh, PFUI!” spat the American.

“Call him a liar!” said a voice.

“Liar?” repeated Schilsky dramatically. “Why liar? I don’t deny it. I would have done it gladly if I could—isn’t that just what I’ve been saying? Lulu would have got over it all the quicker alone. And then, why shouldn’t I confess it? You’re all my friends here.” He dropped his voice. “I’m afraid of Lulu, boys. I was afraid she’d get round me, and then my chance was gone. She might have shot me, but she wouldn’t have let me go. You never know how a woman of that type’ll break out—never!”

“But she didn’t!” said Krafft. “You live.”

Schilsky understood him.

“Some brute,” he cried savagely, “some dirty brute had nothing better to do than to tell her.”

“Ha, ha, ha!” laughed the painted boy.

Furst blew his nose. “It wasn’t me. I was mum. ‘Pon my honour, I was.”

“My God!” said Schilsky, and fell to remembering it. “What a time I’ve been through with her this afternoon!” He threatened to be overcome by the recollection, and supported his head on his hands. “A woman has no gratitude,” he murmured, and drew his handkerchief from his pocket. “It is a weak, childish sex—with no inkling of higher things.” Here, however, he suddenly drew himself up. “Life is very hard!” he cried, in a loud voice. “The perpetual struggle between duty and inclination for a man of genius . . . !”

He grew franker, and gave gratuitous details of the scene that had taken place in his room that afternoon. Most of those present were in ecstasies at this divulging of his private life, which went forward to the accompaniment of snores from Ford, and the voice of Dove, who, with portentous gravity, sang over and over again, the first strophe of THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER.

“A fury!” said Schilsky. “A . . . a what do you call it ?—a . . . Meg . . . a Meg—” He gave it up and went on: “By God, but Lulu knows how! Keep clear of her nails, boys—I’d advise you!” At this point, he pulled back his collar, and exhibited a long, dark scratch on the side of his neck. “A little remembrance she gave me to take away with me!” While he displayed it, he seemed to be rather proud of it; but immediately afterwards, his mood veered round again to one of bitter resentment. To illustrate the injustice she had been guilty of, and his own long-suffering, he related, at length, the story of his flirtation with Ephie, and the infinite pains he had been at to keep Louise in ignorance of what was happening. He grew very tender with himself as he told it. For, according to him, the whole affair had come about without any assistance of his. “What the deuce was I to do? Chucked herself full at my head, did the little one. No invitation necessary—a ripe plum, boys! Touch the plum—and off it tumbles! As pretty a little thing, too, as ever was made! Had everything arranged by the second meeting. Papa to set us up; house in New York; money IN HULLE UND FULLE!”

At the mention of New York, the lean American looked grave. “Look here, you, don’t think you’re the whole shoot because you’ve got a wave in your hair!” he murmured in English.

But Schilsky did not hear him; his voice droned on, giving the full particulars of this particular case. He grew momentarily opener.

“One no sooner out of the door than the other was in,” he asserted, and laughed long to himself.

For some time past, Maurice had been possessed by the idea that what was happening concerned him very nearly, and that he ought to interfere and put his foot down. His hands had grown cold, and he sat vainly trying to speak: nothing, however, came, but little drunken gulps and hiccups. But the first mention of Ephie’s name seemed to put new strength into him; he made a violent effort, and rose to his feet, holding on to the table with both hands. He could not, however, manage to attract attention; no one took any notice of him; and besides this, he had himself no notion what it was that he really wanted to say.

“And drowns his sorrows in the convivial glass!” he suddenly shouted in English, at the top of his voice, which he had found. He had a vague belief that he was quoting a well-known line of poetry, and, though he did not in the least understand how it applied to the situation, he continued to repeat it, with varying shades of fervour, till some one called out: “Oh, stop your blasted rot!”

He laughed hoarsely at this, could not check himself, and was so exhausted when he had finished that it took him some time to remember why he was on his feet. Schilsky was still relating: his face was darkly red, his voice husky, and he flapped his arms with meaningless gestures. A passionate rebellion, a kind of primitive hatred, gripped Maurice, and when Schilsky paused for breath, he could contain himself no longer. He felt the burning need of contradicting the speaker, even though he could not catch the drift of what was said.

“It’s a lie!” he cried fiercely, with such emphasis that every face was turned to him. “A damned lie!”

“A lie? What the devil do you mean?” responded not one but many voices—the whole table seemed to be asking him, with the exception of Dove, who sang on in an ever decreasing tempo.

“Get out!—Let him alone; he’s drunk. He doesn’t know what he’s saying—He’s got rats in his head!” he heard voices asserting. Forthwith he began a lengthy defence of himself, broken only by gaps in which his brain refused to work. Conscious that no one was listening to him, he bawled more and more loudly.

“Oh, quit it, you double-barrelled ass!” said the American.

Schilsky, persuaded by those next him to let the incident pass unnoticed, contented himself with a: “VERFLUCHTE SCHWEINEREI!” spat, after Furst’s gurgled account of Maurice’s previous insobriety, across the floor behind him, to express his contempt, and proceeded as dominatingly as before with the narration of his love-affairs.

The blood rushed to Maurice’s head at the sound of this voice which he could neither curb nor understand. Rage mastered him—a vehement desire to be quits. He kicked back his chair, and rocked to and fro.

“It’s a lie—a dirty lie!” he cried. “You make her unhappy—God, how unhappy you make her! You illtreat her. You’ve never given her a day’s happiness. S . . . said so . . . herself. I heard her . . . I swear . . . I——”

His voice turned to a whine; his words came thick and incoherent.

Schilsky sprang to his feet and aimed the contents of a half-emptied glass at Maurice’s face. “Take that, you blasted spy!—you Englishman!” he spluttered. “I’ll teach you to mix your dirty self in my affairs!”

Every one jumped up; there was noise and confusion; simultaneously two waiters entered the room, as if they had not been unprepared for something of this kind. Furst and another man restrained Schilsky by the arms, reasoning with him with more force than coherence. Maurice, the beer dripping from chin, collar and shirt-front, struggled furiously with some one who held him back.

“Let me get at him—let me get at him!” he cried. “I’ll teach him to treat a woman as he does. The sneak—the cur—the filthy cad! He’s not fit to touch her hand—her beautiful hand—her beau . . . ti . . . ful——” Here, overpowered by his feelings, as much as by superior strength, he sank on a chair and wept.

“I’ll break his bones!” raved Schilsky. “What the hell does he mean by it?—the INFAME SCHUFT, the AAS, the dirty ENGLANDER! Thinks he’ll sneak after her himself, does he?—What in Jesus’ name is it to him how I treat her? I’ll take a stick to her if I like—it’s none of his blasted business! Look here, do you see that?” He freed one hand, fumbled in his pocket, and, almost inarticulate with rage and liquor, brandished a key across the table. “Do you see that? That’s a key, isn’t it, you drunken hog? Well, with that key, I can let myself into Lulu’s room at any hour I want to; I can go there now, this very minute, if I like—do you think she’ll turn me out, you infernal spy? Turn me out?—she’d go down on her knees here before you all to get me back to her!”

Unwilling to be involved in the brawl, the more sober of the party had begun to seek out their hats and to slink away. A little group round Schilsky blarneyed and expostulated. Why should the whole sport of the evening be spoilt in this fashion? What did it matter what the damned cranky Englishman said? Let him be left to his swilling. They would clear out, and wind up the night at the BAUER; and at four, when that shut, they would go on to the BAYRISCHE BAHNHOF, where they could not only get coffee, but could also see Schilsky off by a train soon after five. These persuasions prevailed, and, still swearing, and threatening, and promising, by all that was holy, to bring Lulu there, by the hair of her head if necessary, to show whether or no he had the power over her he boasted of, Schilsky finally allowed himself to be dragged off, and those who were left lurched out in his wake.

With their exit an abrupt silence fell, and Maurice sank into a heavy sleep, in which he saw flowery meadows and heard a gently trickling brook. . . .

“Now then, up with you!—get along!” some one was shouting in his ear, and, bit by bit, a pasty-faced waiter entered his field of view. “It’s past time, anyhow,” and yawning loudly, the waiter turned out all the gas-jets but one. “Don’t yer hear? Up with you! You’ll have to look after the other—now, damn me, if there isn’t another of you as well!” and, from under the table, he drew out a recumbent body.

Maurice then saw that he was still in the company of Dove, who sat staring into space—like a dead man. Krafft, propped on a chair, hung his head far back, and the collarless shirt exposed the whole of his white throat.

The waiter hustled them about. Maurice was comparatively steady on his legs; and it was found that Dove could walk. But over Krafft, the man scratched his head and called a comrade. At the mention of a droschke, however, Maurice all but wept anew with ire and emotion: this was his dearest friend, the friend of his bosom; he was ready at any time to stake his life for him, and now he was not to be allowed even to see him home.

A difficulty arose about Maurice’s hat: he was convinced that the one the waiter jammed so rudely on his head did not belong to him; and it seemed as if nothing in the world had ever mattered so much to him as now getting back his own hat. But he had not sufficient fluency to explain all he meant; before he had finished, the man lost patience; and suddenly, without any transition, the three of them were in the street. The raw night air gave them a shock; they gasped and choked a little. Then the wall of a house rose appositely and met them. They leaned against it, and Maurice threw the hat from him and trampled on it, chuckling at the idea that he was revenging himself on the waiter.

It was a journey of difficulties; not only was he unclear what locality they were in, but innumerable lifeless things confronted them and formed obstacles to their progress; they had to charge an advertisement-column two or three times before they could get round it. Maurice grew excessively angry, especially with Dove. For while Heinz let himself be lugged this way and that, Dove, grown loud and wilful, had ideas of his own, and, in addition to this, sang the whole time with drunken gravity:

Sez the ragman, to the bagman, I’ll do yees no harm.

“Stop it, you oaf!” cried Maurice, goaded to desperation. “You beastly, blathering, drunken idiot!”

Then, for a street-length, he himself lapsed into semi-consciousness, and when he wakened, Dove was gone. He chuckled anew at the thought that somehow or other they had managed to outwit him.

His intention had been to make for home, but the door before which they ultimately found themselves was Krafft’s. Maurice propped his companion against the wall, and searched his own pockets for a key. When he had found one, he could not find the door, and when this was secured, the key would not fit. The perspiration stood out on his forehead; he tried again and again, thought the keyhole was dodging him, and asserted the fact so violently that a window in the first storey was opened and a head thrust out.

“What in the name of Heaven are you doing down there?” it cried. “You drunken SCHWEIN, can’t you see the door’s open?”

In the sitting-room, both fell heavily over a chair; after that, with infinite labour, he got Heinz on the sofa. He did not attempt to make a light; enough came in from a street-lamp for him to see what he was doing.

Lying on his face, Krafft groaned a little, and Maurice suddenly grasped that he was taken ill. Heinz was ill, Heinz, his best friend, and he was doing nothing to help him! Shedding tears, he poured out a glass of water. He believed he was putting the carafe safely back on the table, but it dropped with a crash to the floor. He was afraid Frau Schulz would come in, and said in a loud voice: “It’s that fellow there, he’s dead drunk, beastly drunk!” Krafft would not drink the water, and in the attempt to force him, it was spilled over him. He stirred uneasily, put up his arms and dragged Maurice down, so that the latter fell on his knees beside the sofa. He made a few ineffectual efforts to free himself; but one arm held him like a vice; and in this uncomfortable position, he went to sleep.

Part II

O viva morte, e dilettoso male!
Petrarch.



I.

The following morning, towards twelve o’clock, a note from Madeleine was handed to Maurice. In it, she begged him to account to Schwarz for her absence from the rehearsal of a trio, which was to have taken place at two.

GO AND EXPLAIN THAT IT IS QUITE IMPOSSIBLE FOR ME TO COME, she wrote. LOUISE IS VERY ILL; THE DOCTOR IS AFRAID OF BRAIN FEVER. I AM RUSHING, OFF THIS MOMENT TO SEE ABOUT A NURSE—AND SHALL STAY TILL ONE COMES.

He read the words mechanically, without taking in their meaning. From the paper, his eyes roved round the room; he saw the tumbled, unopened bed, from which he had just risen, the traces of his boots on the coverings. He could not remember how he had come there; his last recollection was of being turned out of Krafft’s room, in what seemed to be still the middle of the night. Since getting home, he must have slept a dead sleep.

“Ill? Brain fever?” he repeated to himself, and his mind strove to pierce the significance of the words. What had happened? Why should she be ill? A racking uneasiness seized him and would not let him rest. His inclination was to lay his aching head on the pillow again; but this was out of the question; and so, though he seldom braved Frau Krause, he now boldly went to her with a request to warm up his coffee.

When he had drunk it, and bathed his head, he felt considerably better. But he still could not call to mind what had occurred. The previous evening was blurred in its details; he only had a sense of oppression when he thought of it, as of something that had threatened, and still did. He was glad to have a definite task before him, and went out at once, in order to catch Schwarz before he left the Conservatorium; but it was too late; the master’s door was locked. It was a bright, cold day with strong sunlight; Maurice’s eyes ached, and he shrank from the wind at every corner. Instead of going home, he went to Madeleine’s room and sat down to wait for her. She had evidently been away since early morning; the piano was dusty and unopened; the blind at the head of it had not been drawn up. It was a pleasant dusk; he put his arms on the table, his head on his arms, and, in spite of his anxiety, fell into a sound sleep.

He was wakened by Madeleine’s entrance. It was three o’clock. She came bustling in, took off her hat, laid it on the piano, and at once drew up the blind. She was not surprised. to find him there, but exclaimed at his appearance.

“Good gracious, Maurice, how dreadful you look! Are you ill?”

He hastened to reassure her, and she was a little put out at her wasted sympathy.

“Well, no wonder, I’m sure, after the doings there were last night. A pretty way to behave! And that you should have mixed yourself up in it as you did!—I wouldn’t have believed it of you. How I know? My dear boy, it’s the talk of the place.”

Her words called up to him a more lucid remembrance of the past evening than he had yet been capable of. In his eagerness to recollect everything, he changed colour and looked away. Madeleine put his confusion down to another cause.

“Never mind, it’s over now, and we won’t say any more about it. Sit still, and I’ll make you some tea. That will do your head good—for you have a splitting headache, haven’t you? I shall be glad of some myself, too, after all the running about I’ve had this morning. I’m quite worn out.”

When she heard that he had had no dinner, she sent for bread and sausage, and was so busy and unsettled that only when she sat down, with her cup before her, did he get a chance to say: “What is it, Madeleine? Is she very ill?”

Madeleine shrugged her shoulders. “Yes, she is ill enough. It’s not easy to say what the matter is, though. The doctor is to see her again this evening. And I found a nurse.”

“Then she is not going away?” He did not mean to say the words aloud; they escaped him against his will.

His companion raised her eyebrows, filling her forehead with wrinkles. “Going away?” she echoed. “I should say not. My dear Maurice, what is more, it turns out she hadn’t an idea he was going either. What do you say to that?” She flushed with sincere indignation. “Not an idea—until yesterday. My lord had the intention of sneaking off without a word, and of leaving her to find it out for herself. Oh, it’s an abominable affair altogether!—and has been from beginning to end. There’s much about Louise, as you know, that I don’t approve of, and I think she has behaved weakly—not to call it by a harder name—all through. But now, she has my entire sympathy. The poor girl is in a pitiable state.”

“Is she . . . dangerously ill?”

“Well, I don’t think she’ll die of it, exactly—though it might be better for her if she did. NA!. . . let me fill up your cup. And eat something more. Oh, he is . . . no words are bad enough for him; though honestly speaking, I think we might have been prepared for something of this kind, all along. It seems he made his arrangements for going on the quiet. Frau Schaefele advanced him the money; for of course he has nothing of his own. But what condition do you think the old wretch made? That he should break with Louise. Furst has told me all about it. I went to him at once this morning. She was always jealous of Louise—though to him she only talked of the holiness of art and the artist’s calling, and the danger of letting domestic ties entangle you, and rubbish of that kind. I believe she was at the bottom of it that he didn’t marry Louise long ago. Well, however that may be, he now let himself be persuaded easily enough. He was hearing on all sides that he had been here too long; and candidly, I think he was beginning to feel Louise a drag on him. I know of late they were not getting on well together. But to be such a coward and a weakling! To slink off in this fashion! Of course, when it came to the last, he was simply afraid of her, and of the scene she would make him. Bravery has as little room in his soul as honesty or manliness. He would always prefer a back-door exit. Such things excite a man, don’t you know?—and ruffle the necessary artistic composure.” She laughed scornfully. “However, I’m glad to say, he didn’t escape scot-free after all. Everything went well till yesterday afternoon, when Louise, who was as unsuspecting as a child, heard of it from some one—they say it was Krafft. Without thinking twice—you know her . . . or rather you don’t—she went straight to Schilsky and confronted him. I can’t tell you what took place between them, but I can imagine something of it, for when Louise lets herself go, she knows no bounds, and this was a matter of life and death to her.”

Madeleine rose, blew out the flame of the spirit-lamp, and refilled the teapot.

“Fraulein Grunhut, her landlady, heard her go out yesterday afternoon, but didn’t hear her come in, so it must have been late in the evening. Louise hates to be pried on, and the old woman is lazy, so she didn’t go to her room till about half-past eight this morning, when she took in the hot water. Then she found Louise stretched on the floor, just as she had come in last night, her hat lying beside her. She was conscious, and her eyes were open, but she was stiff and cold, and wouldn’t speak or move. Grunhut couldn’t do anything with her, and was mortally afraid. She sent for me; and between us we got her to bed, and I went for a doctor. That was at nine, and I have been on my feet ever since.”

“It’s awfully good of you.”

“No, she won’t die,” continued Madeleine meditatively, stirring her tea. “She’s too robust a nature for that. But I shouldn’t wonder if it affected her mind. As I say, she knows no bounds, and has never learnt self-restraint. It has always been all or nothing with her. And this I must say: however foolish and wrong the whole thing was, she was devoted to Schilsky, and sacrificed everything—work, money and friends—to her infatuation. She lived only for him, and this is a moral judgment on her. Excess of any kind brings its own punishment with it.”

She rose and smoothed her hair before the mirror.

“And now I really must get to work, and make up for the lost morning. I haven’t touched a note to-day. As for you, Maurice, if you take my advice, you’ll go home and go to bed. A good sleep is what you’re needing. Come to-morrow, if you like, for further news. I shall go back after supper, and hear what the doctor says. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Madeleine. You’re a brick.”

Having returned to his room, he lay face downwards on the sofa. He was sick at heart. Viewed in the light of the story he had heard from Madeleine, life seemed too unjust to be endured. It propounded riddles no one could answer; the vast output of energy that composed it, was misdirected; on every side was cruelty and suffering. Only the heartless and selfish—those who deserved to suffer—went free.

He pressed the back of his hand to his tired eyes; and, despite her good deeds, he felt a sudden antipathy to Madeleine, who, on a day like this, could take up her ordinary occupation.

In the morning, on awakening from a heavy sleep, he was seized by a fear lest Louise should have died in the night. Through brooding on it, the fear became a certainty, and he went early to Madeleine, making a detour through the BRUDERSTRASSE, where his suspicions were confirmed by the lowered blinds. He had almost two hours to wait; it was eleven o’clock before Madeleine returned. Her face was so grave that his heart seemed to stop beating. But there was no change in the sick girl’s condition; the doctor was perplexed, and spoke of a consultation. Madeleine was returning at two o’clock to relieve the nurse.

“You are foolishly letting it upset you altogether,” she reproved Maurice. “And it won’t mend matters in the least. Go home and settle down to work, like a sensible fellow.”

He tried to follow Madeleine’s advice. But it was of no use; when he had struggled on for half an hour, he sprang up, realising how monstrous it was that he should be sitting there, drilling his fingers, getting the right notes of a turn, the specific shade of a crescendo, when, not very far away, Louise perhaps lay dying. Again he felt keenly the contrariness of life; and all the labour which those around him were expending on the cult of hand and voice and car, seemed of a ludicrous vanity compared with the grim little tragedy that touched him so nearly; and in this mood he remained, throughout the days of suspense that now ensued.

He went regularly every afternoon to Madeleine, and, if she were not at home, waited till she returned, an hour, two hours, as the case might be. This was the vital moment of the day—when he read her tidings from her face.

At first they were always the same: there was no change. Fever did not set in, but, day and night, Louise lay with wide, strained eyes; she refused nourishment, and the strongest sleeping-draught had no effect. Then, early one morning, for some trifling cause which, afterwards, no one could recall, she broke into a convulsive fit of weeping, went on till she was exhausted, and subsequently fell asleep.

On the day Maurice learnt that she was out of danger, he walked deep into the woods. The news had lifted such a load from his mind that he felt almost happy. But before he reached home again, his brain had begun to work at matters which, during the period of anxiety, it had left untouched. At first, in desperation, he had been selfless enough to hope that Schilsky would return, on learning what had happened. Now, however, that he had not done so, and Louise had passed safely through the ordeal, Maurice was ready to tremble lest anything should occur to soil the robe of saintly suffering, in which he draped her.

He began to take up the steady routine of his life again. Furst received him with open arms, and no allusion was made to the night in the BRUHL. With the cessation of his anxiety, a feeling of benevolence towards other people awakened in him, and when, one afternoon, Schwarz asked the assembled class if no one knew what had become of Krafft, whether he was ill, or anything of the kind, it was Maurice who volunteered to find out. He remembered now that he had not seen Krafft at the Conservatorium for a week or more.

Frau Schulz looked astonished to see him, and, holding the door in her hand, made no mien to let him enter. Herr Krafft was away, she said gruffly, had been gone for about a week, she did not know where or why. He had left suddenly one morning, without her knowledge, and the following day a postcard had come from him, stating that all his things were to lie untouched till his return.

“He was so queer lately that I’d he just as pleased if he stayed away altogether,” she said. “That’s all I can tell you. Maybe you’d get something more out of her. She knows more than she says, anyhow,” and she pointed with her thumb at the door of the adjoining PENSION.

Maurice rang there, and a dirty maid-servant showed him Avery’s room. At his knock, she opened the door herself, and first looked surprised, then alarmed at seeing him.

“What’s the matter? Has anything happened?” she stammered, like one on the look-out for bad news.

“Then what do you want?” she asked in her short, unpleasant way, when he had reassured her.

“I came up to see Heinz. And they tell me he is not here; and Frau Schulz sent me to you. Schwarz was asking for him. Is it true that he has gone away?”

“Yes, it’s true.”

“Where to? Will he be away long?”

“How should I know?” she cried rudely. “Am I his keeper? Find out for yourself, if you must know,” and the door slammed to in his face.

He mentioned the incident to Madeleine that evening. She looked strangely at him, he thought, and abruptly changed the subject. A day or two later, on the strength of a rumour that reached his ears, he tackled Furst, and the latter, who, up to this time, had been of a praiseworthy reticence, let fall a hint which made Maurice look blank with amazement. Nevertheless, he could not now avoid seeing certain incidents in his friendship with Krafft, under a different aspect.

About a fortnight had elapsed since the beginning of Louise’s illness; she was still obliged to keep her bed. More than once, of late, Madeleine had returned from her daily visit, decidedly out of temper.

“Louise rubs me up the wrong way,” she complained to Maurice. “And she isn’t in the least grateful for all I’ve done for her. I really think she prefers having the nurse about her to me.”

“Sick people often have such fancies,” he consoled her.

“Louise shows hers a little too plainly. Besides, we have never got on well for long together.”

But one afternoon, on coming in, she unpinned her hat and threw it on the piano, with a decisive haste that was characteristic of her in anger.

“That’s the end; I don’t go back again. I’m not paid for my services, and am under no obligation to listen to such things as Louise said to me to-day. Enough is enough. She is well on the mend, and must get on now as best she can. I wash my hands of the whole affair.”

“But you’re surely not going to take what a sick person says seriously?” Maurice exclaimed in dismay. “How can she possibly get on with only those strangers about her?”

“She’s not so ill now. She’ll be all right,” answered Madeleine; she had opened a letter that was on the table, and did not look up as she spoke. “There’s a limit to everything—even to my patience with her rudeness.”

And on returning the following day, he found, sure enough, that, true to her word, Madeleine had not gone back. She maintained an obstinate silence about what had happened, and requested that he would now let the matter drop.

The truth was that Madeleine’s conscience was by no means easy.

She had gone to see Louise on that particular afternoon, with even more inconvenience to herself than usual. On admitting her, Fraulein Grunhut had endeavoured to detain her in the passage, mumbling and gesticulating in the mystery-mongering way with which Madeleine had no patience. It incited her to answer the old woman in a loud, clear voice; then, brusquely putting her aside, she opened the door of the sick girl’s room.

As she did so, she utttered an exclamation of surprise. Louise, in a flannel dressing-gown, was standing at the high tiled stove behind the door. Both her arms were upraised and held to it, and she leant her forehead against the tiles.

“Good Heavens, what are you doing out of bed?” cried Madeleine; and, as she looked round the room: “And where is Sister Martha?”

Louise moved her head, so that another spot of forehead came in contact with the tiles, and looked up at Madeleine from under her heavy lids, without replying.

Madeleine laid one by one on the table some small purchases she had made on the way there.

“Well, are you not going to speak to me to-day?” she said in a pleasant voice, as she unbuttoned her jacket. “Or tell me what I ask about the Sister?” There was not a shade of umbrage in her tone.

Louise moved her head again, and looked away from Madeleine to the wall of the room. “I have got up,” she answered, in such a low voice that Madeleine had to pause in what she was doing, to hear her; “because I could not bear to lie in bed any longer. And I’ve sent the Sister away—because . . . oh, because I couldn’t endure having her about me.”

“You have sent Sister Martha away?” echoed Madeleine. “On your own responsibility? Louise!—how absurd! Well, I suppose I must put on my hat again and fetch her back. How can you get on alone, I should like to know? Really, I have no time to come oftener than I do.”

“I’m quite well now. I don’t need anyone.”

“Come, get back into bed, like a good girl, and I will make you some tea,” said Madeleine, in the gently superior tone that one uses to a sick person, to a young child, to anyone with whom it is not fitting to dispute.

Instead, Louise left the stove, and sat down in a low American rocking-chair, where she crouched despondently.

“I wish I had died,” she said in a toneless voice.

Madeleine smiled with exaggerated cheerfulness, and rattled the tea-cups. “Nonsense! You mustn’t talk about dying—now that you are nearly well again. Besides, you know, such things are easily said. One doesn’t mean them.”

“I wish I had died. Why didn’t you let me die?” repeated Louise in the same apathetic way.

Madeleine did not reply; she was cogitating whether it would be more convenient to go after the nurse at once, and what she ought to do if she could not get her to come back. For Louise would certainly have despatched her in tragedy-fashion.

Meanwhile the latter had laid her arms along the low arms of the chair, and now sat gazing from one to the other of her hands. In their way, these hands of hers had acquired a kind of fame, which she had once been vain of. They had been photographed; a sculptor had modelled them for a statue of Antigone—long, slim and strong, with closely knit fingers, and pale, deep-set nails: hands like those of an adoring Virgin; hands which had an eloquent language all their own, but little or no agility, and which were out of place on the keys of a piano. Louise sat looking at them, and her face was so changed—the hollow setting of the eyes reminded perpetually of the bones beneath; the lines were hammered black below the eyes; nostrils and lips were pinched and thinned—that Madeleine, secretly observing her, remarked to herself that Louise looked at least ten years older than before. Her youth, and, with it, such freshness as she had once had, were gone from her.

“Here is your tea.”

The girl drank it slowly, as if swallowing were an effort, while Madeleine went round the room, touching and ordering, and opening a window. This done, she looked at her watch.

“I will go now,” she said, “and see if I can persuade Sister Martha to come back. If you haven’t mortally offended her, that is.”

Louise started up from her chair, and put her cup, only half emptied, on the table.

“Madeleine!—please—please, don’t! I can’t have her back again. I am quite well now. There was nothing more she could do for me. I shall sleep a thousand times better at night if she is not here. Oh, don’t bring her back again! Her voice cut like a knife, and her hands were so hard.”

She trembled with excitement, and was on the brink of tears.

“Hush!—don’t excite yourself like that,” said Madeleine, and tried to soothe her. “There’s no need for it. If you are really determined not to have her, then she shall not come and that’s the end of it. Not but what I think it foolish of you all the same,” she could not refrain from adding. “You are still weak. However, if you prefer it, I’ll do my best to run up this evening to see that you have everything for the night.”

“I don’t want you either.”

Madeleine shrugged her shoulders, and her pity became tinged with impatience.

“The doctor says you must go away somewhere, for a change,” she said as she beat up the pillows and smoothed out the crumpled sheets, preparatory to coaxing her patient back to bed.

Louise shook her head, but did not speak.

“A few weeks’ change of air is what you need to set you up again.”

“I cannot go away.”

“Nonsense! Of course you can. You don’t want to be ill all the winter?”

“I don’t want to be well.”

Madeleine sniffed audibly. “There’s no reasoning with you. When you hear on all sides that it’s for your own good——”

“Oh, stop tormenting me!” cried Louise, raising a drawn face with disordered hair. “I won’t go away! Nothing will make me. I shall stay here—though I never get well again.”

“But why? Give me one sensible reason for not going.—You can’t!”

“Yes . . . if . . . if Eugen should come back.”

The words could only just be caught. Madeleine stood, holding a sheet with both hands, as though she could not believe her ears.

“Louise!” she said at last, in a tone which meant many things.

Louise began to cry, and was shaken by hard, dry sobs. Madeleine did not look at her again, but went severely on with her bedmaking. When she had finished, she crossed to the washstand, and poured out a glass of water.

Louise took it, humbled and submissive, and gradually her sobs abated. But now Madeleine, in place of getting ready to leave, as she had intended, sat down at the centre table, and revolved what she felt it to be her duty to say. When all sound of crying had ceased, she began to speak, persuasively, in a quiet voice.

“You have brought the matter up yourself, Louise,” she said, “and, now the ice is broken, there are one or two things I should like to say to you. First then, you have been very ill, far worse than you know—the immediate danger is over now, so I can speak of it. But who can tell what may happen if you persist in remaining on here by yourself, in the state you are in?”

Louise did not stir; her face was hidden.

“The reason you give for staying is not a serious one, I hope,” Madeleine proceeded cautiously choosing her words. “After all the . . . the precautions that were taken to ensure the . . . break, it is not all likely . . . he would think of returning. And Louise,” she added with warmth, “even though he did—suppose he did—after the way he has behaved, and his disgraceful treatment of you——”

Louise looked up for an instant. “That is not true,” she said.

“Not true?” echoed Madeleine. “Well, if you are able to admire his behaviour—if you don’t consider it disgraceful—no, more than that—infamous——” She stopped, not being able to find a stronger epithet.

“It is not true,” said Louise in the same expressionless voice. But now she lifted her head, and pressed the palms of her hands together.

Madeleine pushed back her chair, as if she were about to rise. “Then I have nothing more to say,” she said; and went on: “If you are ready to defend a man who has acted towards you as he has—in a way that makes a respectable person’s blood boil—there is indeed nothing more to be said.” She reddened with indignation. “As if it were not bad enough for him to go, after all you have done for him, but that he must do it in such a mean, underhand way—it’s enough to make one sick. The only thing to compare with it is his conduct on the night before he left. Do you know, pray, that on the last evening, at a KNEIPE in the GOLDENE HIRSCH, he boasted of what you had done for him—boasted about everything that had happened between you—to a rowdy, tipsy crew? More than that, he gave shameless details, about you going to his room that afternoon——”

“It’s not true, it’s not true,” repeated Louise, as if she had got these few words by heart. She rose from her chair, and leaned on it, half turning her back to Madeleine, and holding her handkerchief to her lips.

Madeleine shrugged her shoulders. “Do you think I should say it, if it weren’t?” she asked. “I don’t invent scandal. And you are bound to hear it when you go out again. He did this, and worse than I choose to tell you, and if you felt as you ought to about it, you would never give him another thought. He’s not worth it. He’s not worth any respectable person’s——”

“Respectable!” burst in Louise, and raised two blazing eyes to her companion’s face. “That’s the second time. Why do you come here, Madeleine, and talk like that to me? He did what he was obliged to—that’s all: for I should never have let him go. Can’t you see how preposterous it is to think that by talking of respectability, and unworthiness, you can make me leave off caring for him?—when for months I have lived for nothing else? Do you think one can change one’s feelings so easily? Don’t you understand that to love a person once is to love him always and altogether?—his faults as well—everything he does, good or bad, no matter what other people think of it? Oh, you have never really cared for anyone yourself, or you would know it.”

“It’s not preposterous at all,” retorted Madeleine. “Yes—if he had deserved all the affection you wasted on him, or if unhappy circumstances had separated you. But that’s not the case. He has behaved scandalously, without the least attempt at shielding you. He has made you the talk of the place. And you may consider me narrow and prejudiced, but this I must say—I am boundlessly astonished at you. When he has shown you as plainly as he can that he’s tired of you, that you should still be ready to defend him, and have so little proper pride that you even say you would take him back!——”

Louise turned on her. “You would never do that, Madeleine, would you?—never so far forget yourself as to crawl to a man’s feet and ask—ask?—no, implore forgiveness, for faults you were not conscious of having committed. You would never beg him to go on loving you, after he had ceased to care, or think nothing on earth worth having if he would not—or could not. As I would; as I have done.” But chancing to look at Madeleine, she grew quieter. “You would never do that, would you?” she repeated. “And do you know why?” Her words came quickly again; her voice shook with excitement. “Because you will never care for anyone more than yourself—it isn’t in you to do it. You will go through life, tight on to the end, without knowing what it is to care for some one—oh, but I mean absolutely, unthinkingly——”

She broke down, and hid her face again. Madeleine had carried the cups and saucers to a side-table, and now put on her hat.

“And I hope I never shall,” she said, forcing herself to speak calmly. “If I thought it likely, I should never look at a man again.”

But Louise had not finished. Coming round to the front of the rocking-chair, and leaning on the table, she gazed at Madeleine with wild eyes, while her pale lips poured forth a kind of revenge for the suffering, real and imaginary, that she had undergone at the hands of this cooler nature.

“And I’ll tell you why. You are doubly safe; for you will never be able to make a man care so much that—that you are forced to love him like this in return. It isn’t in you to do it. I don’t mean because you’re plain. There are plenty of plainer women than you, who can make men follow them. No, it’s your nature—your cold, narrow, egotistic nature—which only lets you care for things outside yourself in a cold, narrow way. You will never know what it is to be taken out of yourself, taken and shaken, till everything you are familiar with falls away.”

She laughed; but tears were near at hand. Madeleine had turned her back on her, and stood buttoning her jacket, with a red, exasperated face.

“I shall not answer you,” she said. “You have worked yourself into such a state that you don’t know what you’re saying. All the same, I think you might try to curb your tongue. I have done nothing to you—but be kind to you.”

“Kind to me? Do you call it kind to come here and try to set me against the man I love best in the world? And who loves me best, too. Yes; he does. He would never have gone, if he hadn’t been forced to—if I hadn’t been a hindrance to him—a drag on him.”

“It makes me ashamed of my sex to hear you say such things. That a woman can so far lose her pride as to——”

“Oh, other women do it in other ways. Do you think I haven’t seen how you have been trying to make some one here like you?—doing your utmost, without any thoughts of pride or self-respect.—And how you have failed? Yes, failed. And if you don’t believe me, ask him yourself—ask him who it is that could bring him to her, just by raising her finger. It’s to me he would come, not to you—to me who have never given him look or thought.”

Madeleine paled, then went scarlet. “That’s a direct untruth. You!—and not to egg a man on, if you see he admires you! You know every time a passer-by looks at you in the street. You feed on such looks—yes, and return them, too. I have seen you, my lady, looking and being looked at, by a stranger, in a way no decent woman allows.—For the rest, I’ll trouble you to mind your own business. Whatever I do or don’t do, trust me, I shall at least take care not to make myself the laughing-stock of the place. Yes, you have only succeeded in making yourself ridiculous. For while you were cringing before him, and aspiring to die for his sake, he was making love behind your back to another girl. For the last six months. Every one knew it, it seems, but you.”

She had spoken with unconcealed anger, and now turned to leave the room. But Louise was at the door before her, and spread herself across it.

“That’s a lie, Madeleine! Of your own making. You shall prove it to me before you go out of this room. How dare you say such a thing !—how dare you!”

Madeleine looked at her with cold aversion, and drew back to avoid touching her.

“Prove it?” she echoed. “Are his own words not proof enough! He told the whole story that night, just as he had first told all about you. It had been going on for months. Sometimes, you were hardly out of his room, before the other was in. And if you don’t believe me, ask the person you’re so proud of having attracted, without raising your finger.”

Louise moved away from the door, and went back to the table, on which she leaned heavily. All the blood had left her face and the dark rings below her eyes stood out with alarming distinctness. Madeleine felt a sudden compunction at what she had done.

“It’s entirely your own fault that I told you anything whatever about it,” she said, heartily annoyed with herself. “You had no right to provoke me by saying what you did. I declare, Louise, to be with you makes one just like you. If it’s any consolation to you to know it, he was drunk at the time, and there’s a possibility it may not be true.”

“Go away—go out of my room!” cried Louise. And Madeleine went, without delay, having almost a physical sensation about her throat of the slender hands stretched so threateningly towards her.—And this unpleasant feeling remained with her until she turned the corner of the street.

II.


On the afternoon when Maurice found that Madeleine had kept her word he went home and paced his room in perplexity. He pictured Louise lying helpless, too weak to raise her hand. His brain went stupidly over the few people to whom he might turn for aid. Avery Hill?—Johanna Cayhill? But Avery was occupied with her own troubles; and Johanna’s relationship to Ephie put her out of the question. He was thinking fantastic thoughts of somehow offering his own services, or of even throwing himself on the goodness of a person like Miss Jensen, whose motherly form must surely imply a corresponding motherliness of heart, when Frau. Krause entered the room, bearing a letter which she said had been left for him an hour or two previously. She carried a lamp in her hand, and eyed her restless lodger with suspicion.

“Why, in the name of goodness, didn’t you bring this in when it came?” he demanded. He held the unopened letter at arm’s length, as if he were afraid of it.

Frau Krause bridled instantly. Did he think she had nothing else to do than to carry things in and out of his room? The letter had lain on the chest of drawers in the passage; he could have seen it for himself, had he troubled to look.

Maurice waved her away. He was staring at the envelope; he believed he knew the handwriting. His heart beat with precise hammerings. He laid the letter on the table, and took a few turns in the room before he picked it up again. On examining it anew, it seemed to him that the lightly gummed envelope had been tampered with, and he made a threatening movement towards the door, then checked himself, remembering that if the letter were what he believed, it would be written in English. He tore it open, destroying the envelope in his nervousness. There was no heading, and it was only a few lines long.

I MUST SPEAK TO YOU. WILL YOU COME TO ME THIS EVENING? LOUISE DUFRAYER.

His heart was thumping now. He was to go to her, she said so herself; to go this moment, for it was evening already. As it was, she was perhaps waiting for him, wondering why he did not come. He had not shaved that day, and his first impulse was to call for hot water. In the same breath he gave up the idea: it was out of the question by the poor light of the lamp, and the extraordinary position of the looking-glass. He made, however, a hasty toilet in his best, only to colour at himself when finished. Was there ever such a fool as he? His act contained the germ of an insult: and he rapidly changed back to his workaday wear.

All this took time, and it was eight o’clock before he rang the door-bell in the BRUDERSTRASSE. Now, the landlady did not mistake him for a possible thief. But she looked at him in an unfriendly way, and said grumblingly that Fraulein had been expecting him for an hour or more. Then she pointed to the door of the room, and left him to make his way in alone.

He knocked gently, but no one answered. The old woman, who stood watching his movements, signed to him to enter, and he turned the handle. The large room was dark, except for the light shed by a small lamp, which stood on the table before the sofa. From somewhere out of the dusk that lay beyond, a white figure rose and came towards him.

Louise was in a crumpled dressing-gown, and her hair was loosened from its coil on her neck. Maurice saw so much, before she was close beside him, her eyes searching his face.

“Oh, you have come,” she said with a sigh, as if a load had been lifted from her mind. “I thought you were not coming.”

“I only got your note a few minutes ago. I . . . I came at once,” he said, and stammered, as he saw how greatly illness had changed her.

“I knew you would.”

She did not give him her hand, but stood gazing at him; and her look was so helpless and forlorn that he grew uncomfortable.

“You have been ill?” he said, to render the pause that followed less embarrassing.

“Yes; but I’m better now.” She supported herself on the table; her indecision seemed to increase, and several seconds passed before she said: “Won’t you sit down?”

He took one of the stuffed arm-chairs she indicated; and she went back to the sofa. Again there was silence. With her elbows on her knees, her chin on her two hands, Louise stared hard at the pattern of the tablecloth. Maurice sat stiff and erect, waiting for her to tell him why she had summoned him.

“You will think it strange that I should send for you like this . . . when I know you so slightly,” she began at length. “But . . .since I saw you last . . . I have been in trouble,”—her voice broke, but her eyes remained fixed on the cloth. “And I am quite alone. I have no one to help me. Then I thought of you; you were kind to me once; you offered to help me.” She paused, and wound her handkerchief to a ball.

“Anything!—anything that lies in my power,” said Maurice fervently. He fidgeted his hands round the brim of his hat, which he was holding to him.

“Won’t you tell me what it is?” he asked, after another long break. “I should be so glad, and grateful—yes, indeed, grateful—if there were anything I could do for you.”

She met his eyes, and tried to say something, but no sound came over her lips. She was trying to fasten her thoughts on what she had to say, but, in spite of her efforts, they eluded her. For more than twenty-four hours she had brooded over one idea; the strain had been too great; and, now that the moment had come, her strength deserted her. She would have liked to lay her head on her arms and sleep; it almost seemed to her now, in the indifference of sheer fatigue, that it did not matter whether she spoke or not. But as she looked at the young man, she became conscious of an expression in his face, which made her own grow hard.

“I won’t be pitied.”

Maurice turned very red. His heart had gone out to her in her distress; and his feelings were painted on his face. His discomfiture at her discovery was so palpable that it gave her courage to go on.

“You were one of those, were you not, who were present at a certain cafe in the BRUHL, one evening, three weeks ago.” It was more of a statement than a question. Her eyes held him fast. His retreating colour rose again; he had a presentiment of what was coming.

“Then you must have heard——” she began quickly, but left the sentence unended.

His suspicions took shape, and he made a large, vague gesture of dissent. “You heard all that was said,” she continued, without paying any heed to him. “You heard how . . . how some one—no, how the man I loved and trusted . . . how he boasted about my caring for him; and not only that, but how, before that drunken crowd, he told how I had been to him ... to his room . . . that afternoon——” She could not finish, and pressed her knotted handkerchief to her lips.

Maurice looked round him for assistance. “You are mistaken,” he declared. “I heard nothing of the kind. Remember, I, too, was among those . . . in the state you mention,” he added as an afterthought, lowering his voice.

“That is not it.” Leaning forward, she opened her eyes so wide that he saw a rim of white round the brown of the pupils. “You must also have heard . . . how, all this time, behind my back, there was some one else . . . someone he cared for . . . when I thought it was only me.”

The young man coloured, with her and for her. “It is not true; you have been misled,” he said with vehemence. And, again, a flash of intuition suggested an afterthought to him. “Can you really believe it? Don’t you think better of him than that?”

For the first time since she had known him, Louise gave him a personal look, a look that belonged to him alone, and held a warm ray of gratitude. Then, however, she went on unsparingly: “I want you to tell me who it was.”

He laid his hat on a chair, and used his hands. “But if I assure you it is not true? If I give you my word that you have been misinformed?”

“Who was it? What is her name?”

He rose, and went away from the table.

“I knew him better than you,” she said slowly, as he did not speak: “you or anyone else—a hundred thousand times better—and I KNOW it is true.”

Still he did not answer. “Then you won’t tell me?”

“Tell you? How can I? There’s nothing to tell.”

“I was wrong then. You have no pity for me?”

“Pity!—I no pity?” he cried, forgetting how, a minute ago, she had resented his feeling it. “But all the same I can’t tell you what you ask me. You don’t realise what it means: putting a slur on a young girl’s name . . . which has never been touched.”

Directly he had said this, he was aware of his foolishness; but she let the admission contained in the words pass unnoticed.

“Then she is not with him?” she cried, springing to her feet, and there was a jubilation in her voice, which she did not attempt to suppress. Maurice made no answer, but in his face was such a mixture of surprise and disconcertion that it was answer enough.

She remained standing, with her head bowed; and Maurice, who, in his nervousness, had gripped the back of his chair, held it so tightly that it left a furrow in his hand. He was looking into the lamp, and did not at first see that Louise had raised her head again and was contemplating him. When she had succeeded in making him look at her, she sat down on the sofa and drew the folds of her dressing-gown to her.

“Come and sit here. I want to speak to you.”

But Maurice only shot a quick glance at her, and did not move.

She leaned forward, in her old position. She had pushed the heavy wings of hair up from her forehead, and this, together with her extreme pallor, gave her face a look of febrile intensity.

“Maurice Guest,” she said slowly, “do you remember a night last summer, when, by chance, you happened to walk with me, coming home from the theatre?—Or have you perhaps forgotten?”

He shook his head.

“Then do you remember, too, what you said to me? How, since the first time you had seen me—you even knew where that was, I believe—you had thought about me . . . thought too much, or words to that effect. Do you remember?”

“Do you think when a man says a thing like that he forgets it? “asked Maurice in a gruff voice. He turned, as he spoke, and looked down on her with a kind of pitying wisdom. “If you knew how often I have reproached myself for it!” he added.

“There was no need for that,” she answered, and even smiled a little. “We women never resent having such things said to us—never—though it is supposed we do, and though we must pretend to. But I remember, too, I was in a bad mood that night, and was angry with you, after all. Everything seemed to have gone against me. In the theatre—in . . . Oh, no, no!” she cried, as she remembrance of that past night, with its alternations of pain and pleasure, broke over her. “My God!”

Maurice hardly breathed, for fear he should remind her of his presence. When the paroxysm had passed, she crossed to the window; the blinds had not been drawn, and leaning her forehead on the glass, she looked out into the darkness. In spite of his trouble of mind, the young man could not but comment on the ironic fashion in which fate was treating him: not once, in all the hours he had spent on the pavement below, had Louise come, like this, to the window; now that she did so, he was in the room beside her, wishing himself away.

Then, with a swift movement, she came back to him, and stood at his side.

“Then it was not true?—what you said that night.”

“True?” echoed Maurice. He instinctively moved a step away from her, and threw a quick glance at the pale face so near his own. “If I were to tell you how much more than that is true, you wouldn’t have anything more to do with me.”

For the second time, she seemed to see him and consider him. But he kept his head turned stubbornly away.

“You feel like that,” she began in slow surprise, to continue hurriedly: “You care for me like that, and yet, when I ask the first and only thing I shall ever ask of you, you won’t do it? It is a lesson to me, I suppose, not to come to you for help again.—Oh, I can’t understand you men! You are all—all alike.”

“I would do anything in the world for you. Anything but this.”

She repeated his last words after him. “But I want nothing else.”

“This I can’t tell you.”

“Then you don’t really care. You only think you do. If you can’t do this one small thing for me! Oh, there is no one else I can turn to, or I would. Oh, please tell me!—you who make-believe to care for me. You won’t? When it comes to the point, a man will do nothing—nothing at all.”

“I would cut off my hands for you. But you are asking me to do something I think wrong.”

“Wrong! What is wrong?—and what is right? They are only words. Is it right that I should be left like this?—thrown away like a broken plate? Oh, I shall not rest till I know who it was that took him from me. And you are the only person who can help me. Are you not a little sorry for me? Is there nothing I can do to make you sorry?”

“You won’t realise what you are asking me to do.”

He spoke in a constrained voice, for he felt the impossiblity of standing out much longer against her. Louise caught the note of yielding, and taking his hand in hers, laid it against her forehead.

“Feel that! Feel how it throbs and burns! And so it has gone on for hours now, for days. I can’t think or feel—with that fever in me. I must know who it was, or I shall go mad. Don’t torture me then— you, too! You are good. Be kind to me now. Be my friend, Maurice Guest.”

Maurice was vanquished; in a low voice he told her what she wished to hear. She read the syllables from his lips, repeated the name slowly after him, then shook her head; she did not know it. Letting his hand drop, she went back to the sofa.

“Tell me everything you know about her,” she said imperiously. “What is she like?—what is she like? What is the colour of her hair?”

Maurice was a poor hand at description. Questioned thus, he was not even sure whether to call Ephie pretty or not; he knew that she was small, and very young, but of her hair he could say little, except that it was not black.

Louise caught at the detail. “Not black, no, not black!” she cried. “He had black enough here,” and she ran her hands through her own unruly hair.

There was nothing she did not want to know, did not try to force from his lips; and a relentless impatience seized her at his powerlessness.

“I must see her for myself,” she said at length, when he had stammered into silence. “You must bring her to me.”

“No, that you really can’t ask me to do.”

She came over to him again, and took his hands. “You will bring her here to-morrow—to-morrow afternoon. Do you think I shall hurt her? Is she any better than I am? Oh, don’t be afraid! We are not so easily soiled.”

Maurice demurred no more.

“For until I see her, I shall not know—I shall not know,” she said to herself, when he had pledged his word.

The tense expression of her face relaxed; her mouth drooped; she lay back in the sofa-corner and shut her eyes. For what seemed a long time, there was no sound in the room. Maurice thought she had fallen asleep. But at his first light movement she opened her eyes.

“Now go,” she said. “Please, go!” And he obeyed.

The night was cold, but, as he stood irresolute in the street, he wiped the perspiration from his forehead. He felt very perplexed. Only one thing was clear to him: he had promised to bring Ephie to see her the next day, and, however wrong it might be, the promise was given and must be kept. But what he now asked himself was: did not the bringing of the child, under these circumstances, imply a tacit acknowledgment that she was seriously involved?—a fact which, all along, he had striven against admitting. For, after his one encounter with Ephie and Schilsky, in the woods that summer, and the first firing of his suspicions, he had seen nothing else to render him uneasy; a few weeks later, Ephie had gone to Switzerland, and, on her return in September, or almost directly afterwards—three or four days at most—Schilsky had taken his departure. There had been, of course, his drunken boasts to take into account, but firstly, Maurice had only retained a hazy idea of their nature, and, in the next place, the events which had followed that evening had been of so much greater importance to him that he had had no thoughts to spare for Ephie—more especially as he then knew that Schilsky was out of the way. But now the whole affair rose vividly before his mind again, and in his heart he knew that he had always believed—just as Louise believed—in Ephie’s guilt. No: guilt was too strong a word. Yet however harmless the flirtation might have been in itself, it had been carried on in secret, in an underhand way: there had been nothing straightforward or above-board about it; and this alone was enough to compromise a young girl.

The Cayhills had been in Leipzig again for three weeks, but so occupied had Maurice been during this time, that he had only paid them one hasty call. Now he felt that he must see Ephie at once, not only to secure her word that she would come out with him, the following day, but also to read from her frank eyes and childish lips the assurance of her innocence, or, at least, the impossibility of her guilt.

But as he walked to the LESSINGSTRASSE, he remembered, without being able to help it, all the trifles which, at one time or another, had disturbed his relations with Ephie. He recalled each of the thin, superficial untruths, by means of which she had defended herself, the day he had met her with Schilsky: it seemed incredible to him now that he had not seen through them instantly. He called up her pretty, insincere behaviour with the circle of young men that gathered round her; the language of signs by which she had conversed with Schilsky in the theatre. He remembered the astounding ease with which he had made her acquaintance in the first case, or rather, with which she had made his. Even the innocent kiss she had once openly incited him to, and on the score of which she had been so exaggeratedly angry—this, too, was summoned to bear witness against her. Each of these incidents now seemed to point to a fatal frivolity, to a levity of character which, put to a real test, would offer no resistance.

Supper was over in the PENSION, but only Mrs. Cayhill sat in her accustomed corner. Ephie was with the rest of the boarders in the general sitting-room, where Johanna conducted Maurice. Boehmer was paying an evening visit, as well as a very young American, who laughed: “Heh, heh!” at everything that was said, thereby displaying two prominently gold teeth. Mrs. Tully sat on a small sofa, with her arm round Ephie’s waist: they were the centre of the group, and it did not appear likely that Maurice would get an opportunity of speaking to Ephie in private. She was in high spirits, and had only a saucy greeting for him. He sat down beside Johanna, and waited, ill at ease. Soon his patience was exhausted; rising, he went over to the sofa, and asked Ephie if he might come to take her for a walk, the next afternoon. But she would not give him an express promise; she pouted: after all these weeks, it suddenly occurred to him to come and see them, and then, the first thing he did, was to ask a favour of her. Did he really expect her to grant it?

“Don’t, Ephie, love, don’t!” cried Mrs. Tully in her sprightly way. “Men are really shocking creatures, and it is our duty, love, to keep them in their place. If we don’t, they grow presumptuous,” and she shot an arch look at Boehmer, who returned it, fingered his beard, and murmured: “Cruel—cruel!”

“And even if I wanted to go when the time came, how do you expect me to know so long beforehand? Ever so many things may happen before to-morrow,” said Ephie brilliantly; at which Mrs. Tully laughed very much indeed, and still more at Boehmer’s remark that it was an ancient privilege of the ladies, never to be obliged to know their own minds.

“It’s a libel—take that, you naughty boy!” she cried, and slapped him playfully on the hand. “Ephie, love, how shall we punish him?”

“He is not to come again for a week,” answered Ephie slily; and at Boehmer’s protestations of penitence and despair, both she and Mrs. Tully laughed till the tears stood in their eyes, Ephie all the more extravagantly because Maurice stood unsmiling before her.

“I ask this as a direct favour, Ephie. There’s something I want to say to you—something important,” he added in a low voice, so that only she could hear it.

Ephie changed colour at once, and tried to read his face.

“Then I may come at five? You will be ready? Good night.”

Johanna followed him into the passage, and stood by while he put on his coat. They had used up all their small talk in the sitting-room, and had nothing more to say to each other. When however they shook hands, she observed impulsively: “Sometimes I wish we were safe back home again.” But Maurice only said: “Indeed?” and displayed no curiosity to know the reason why.

After he had gone, Ephie was livelier than before, as long as she was being teased about her pale, importunate admirer. Then, suddenly, she pleaded a headache, and went to her own room.

Johanna, listening outside the door, concluded from the stillness that her sister was asleep. But Ephie heard Johanna come and go. She could not sleep, nor could she get Maurice’s words out of her mind. He had something important to say to her. What could it be? There was only one important subject in the world for her now; and she longed for the hour of his visit—longed, hoped, and was more than half afraid.

III.


Since her return to Leipzig, Ephie’s spirits had gone up and down like a barometer in spring. In this short time, she passed through more changes of mood than in all her previous life. She learned what uncertainty meant, and suspense, and helplessness; she caught at any straw of hope, and, for a day on end, would be almost comforted; she invented numberless excuses for Schilsky, and rejected them, one and all. For she was quite in the dark about his movements; she had not seen him since her return, and could hear nothing of him. Only the first of the letters she had written to him from Switzerland had elicited a reply, and he had left all the notes she had sent him, since getting back, unanswered.

Her fellow-boarder, Mrs. Tully, was her only confidant; and that, only in so far as this lady, knowing that what she called “a little romance” was going on, had undertaken to enclose any letters that might arrive during Ephie’s absence. Johanna had no suspicions, or rather she had hitherto had none. In the course of the past week, however, it had become plain even to her blind, sisterly eyes that something was the matter with Ephie. She could still be lively when she liked, almost unnaturally lively, and especially in the company of Mrs. Tully and her circle; but with these high spirits alternated fits of depression, and once Johanna had come upon her in tears. Driven into a corner, Ephie declared that Herr Becker had scolded her at her lesson; but Johanna was not satisfied with this explanation; for formerly, the master’s blame or praise had left no impression on her little sister’s mind. Even worse than this, Ephie could now, on slight provocation, be thoroughly peevish—a thing so new in her that it worried Johanna most of all. The long walks of the summer had been given up; but Ephie had adopted a way of going in and out of the house, just as it pleased her, without a word to her sister. Johanna scrutinised her keenly, and the result was so disturbing that she resolved to broach the subject to her mother.

On the morning after Maurice’s visit, therefore, she appeared in the sitting-room, with a heap of undarned stockings in one hand, her work-basket in the other, and with a very determined expression on her face. But the moment was not a happy one: Mrs. Cayhill was deep in WHY PAUL FERROL KILLED HIS WIFE; and would be lost to her surroundings until the end of the book was reached. Had Johanna been of an observant turn of mind, she would have waited a little; for, finding the intermediate portion of the novel dry reading, Mrs. Cayhill was getting over the pages at the rate of three or four a minute, and would soon have been finished.

But Johanna sat down at the table and opened fire.

“I wish to speak to you, mother,” she said firmly.

Mrs. Cayhill did not even blink. Johanna drew several threads across a hole she was darning, before she repeated, in the same decided tone: “Do you hear me, mother? There is something I wish to speak to you about.”

“Hm,” said Mrs. Cayhill, without raising her eyes from the page. She heard Johanna, and was even vaguely distracted by her from the web of circumstance that was enveloping her hero; but she believed, from experience, that if she took no notice of her, Johanna would not persist. What the latter had to say would only be a reminder that it was mail-day, and no letters were ready; or that if she did not put on her bonnet and go out for a walk, she would be obliged to take another of her nerve-powders that night: and Mrs. Cayhill hated moral persuasion with all her heart.

“Put down your book, mother, please, and listen to me,” continued Johanna, without any outward sign of impatience, and as she spoke, she drew another stocking over her hand.

“What IS the matter, Joan? I wish you would let me be,” answered Mrs. Cayhill querulously, still without looking up.

“It’s about Ephie, mother. But you can’t hear me if you go on reading.”

“I can hear well enough,” said Mrs. Cayhill, and turning a page, she lost herself, to all appearance, in the next one. Johanna did not reply, and for some minutes there was silence, broken only by the turning of the leaves. Then, compelled by something that was stronger than herself, Mrs. Cayhill laid her book on her knee, gave a loud sigh, and glanced at Johanna’s grave face.

“You are a nuisance, Joan. Well, make haste now—what is it?”

“It’s Ephie, mother. I am not easy about her lately. I don’t think she can be well. She is so unlike herself.”

“Really, Joan,” said Mrs. Cayhill, laughing with an exaggerated carelessness. “I think I should be the first to notice if she were sick. But you like to make yourself important, that’s what it is, and to have a finger in every pie. There is nothing whatever the matter with the child.”

“She’s not well, I’m sure,” persisted Johanna, without haste. “I have noticed it for some time now. I think the air here is not agreeing with her. I constantly hear it said that this is an enervating place. I believe it would be better for her if we went somewhere else for the winter—even if we returned home. Nothing binds us, and health is the first and chief——”

“Go home?” cried Mrs. Cayhill, and turned her book over on its face. “Really, Joan, you are absurd! Because Ephie finds it hard to settle down again, after such a long vacation—and that’s all it is—you want to rush off to a fresh place, when . . . when we are just so comfortably fixed here for the winter, and where we have at last gotten us a few friends. As for going home, why, every one would suppose we’d gone crazy. We haven’t been away six months yet—and when Mr. Cayhill is coming over to fetch us back—and . . . and everything.”

She spoke with heat; for she knew from experience that what her elder daughter resolved on, was likely to be carried through.

“That is all very well, mother,” continued Johanna unmoved. “But I don’t think your arguments are sound if we find that Ephie is really sick, and needs a change.”

“Arguments not sound! What big words you love to use, Joan! You let Ephie be. She grows prettier every day, and she’s a favourite wherever she goes.”

“That’s another thing. Her head is being turned, and she will soon be quite spoilt. She begins to like the fuss and attention so well that——”

“You had your chances too, Joan. You needn’t be jealous.”

Johanna had heard this remark too often to be sensitive to it.

“When it comes to serious ‘chances,’ as you call them, no one will be more pleased for Ephie or more interested than I. But this is something different. You see that yourself, mother, I am sure. These young men who come about the house are so foolish, and immature, and they have such different ideas of things from ourselves. They think so. . . so”—Johanna hesitated for a word—“so laxly on earnest subjects. And it is telling on Ephie—Look, for instance, at Mr. Dove! I don’t want to say anything against him, in particular. He is really more serious than the rest. But for some time now, he has been making himself ridiculous,”—Johanna had blushed for Dove on the occasion of his last visit. “No one could be more in earnest than he is; but Ephie only makes fun of him, in a heartless way. She won’t see what a grave matter it is to him.”

Mrs. Cayhill laughed, not at all displeased. “Young people will be young people. You can’t put old heads on young shoulders, Joan, or shut them up in separate houses. Ephie is an extremely pretty girl, and it will be the same wherever we go.—As for young Dove, he knows well enough that nothing can come of it, and if he chooses to continue his attentions, why, he must take the consequences—that’s all. Absurd!—a boy and girl flirtation, and to make so much of it! A mountain of a molehill, as usual. And half the time, you only imagine things, and don’t see what is going on under your very nose. Anyone but you, I’m sure, would find more to object to in the way young Guest behaves than Dove.”

“Maurice Guest?” said Johanna, and laid her hands with stocking and needle on the table.

“Yes, Maurice Guest,” repeated Mrs. Cayhill, with complacent mockery. “Do you think no one has eyes but yourself?—No, Joan, you’re not sharp enough. Just look at the way he went on last night! Every one but you could see what was the matter with him. Mrs. Tully told me about it afterwards. Why, he never took his eyes off her.”

“Oh, I’m sure you are mistaken,” said Johanna earnestly, and was silent from sheer surprise. “He has been here so seldom of late,” she added after a pause, thinking aloud.

“Just for that very reason,” replied Mrs. Cayhill, with the same air of wisdom. “A nice-minded young man stays away, if he sees that his feelings are not returned, or if he has no position to offer.—And another thing I’ll tell you, Joan, though you do think yourself so clever. You don’t need to worry if Ephie is odd and fidgety sometimes just now. At her age, it’s only to be expected. You know very well what I mean. All girls go through the same thing. You did yourself.”

After this, she took up her book again, having, she knew, successfully silenced her daughter, who, on matters of this nature, was extremely sensitive.

Johanna went methodically on with her darning; but the new idea which her mother had dropped into her mind, took root and grew. Strange that it had not occurred to her before! Dove’s state of mind had been patent from the first; but she had had no suspicions of Maurice Guest. His manner with Ephie had hitherto been that of a brother: he had never behaved like the rest. Yet, when she looked back on his visit of the previous evening, she could not but be struck by the strangeness of his demeanour: his distracted silence, his efforts to speak to Ephie alone, and the expression with which he had watched her. And Ephie?—what of her? Now that Johanna thought of it, a change had also come over Ephie’s mode of treating Maurice; the gay insouciance of the early days had given place to the pert flippancy which, only the night before, had so pained her sister. What had brought about this change? Was it pique? Was Ephie chafing, in secret, at his prolonged absences, and was she, girl-like, anxious to conceal it from him?

Johanna gathered up her work to go to her own room and think the matter out in private. In the passage, she ran into the arms of Mrs. Tully, whom she disliked; for, ever since coming to the PENSION, this lady had carried on a kind of cult with Ephie, which was distasteful in the extreme to Johanna.

“Oh, Miss Cayhill!” she now exclaimed. “I was just groping my way—it is indeed groping, is it not?—to your sitting-room. WHERE is your sister? I want SO much to ask her if she will have tea with me this afternoon. I am expecting a few friends, and should be so glad if she would join us.”

“Ephie is practising, Mrs. Tully,” said Johanna in her coolest tone. “And I cannot have her disturbed.”

“She is so very, very diligent,” said Mrs. Tully with enthusiasm. “I always remark to myself on hearing her, how very idle a life like mine is in comparison. I am able to do SO little; just a mere trifle here and there, a little atom of good, one might say. I have no talents.—And you, too, dear Miss Cayhill. So studious, so clever! I hear of you on every side,” and, letting her eyes rest on Johanna’s head, she wondered why the girl wore her hair so unbecomingly.

Johanna did not respond.

“If only you would let your hair grow, it would make such a difference to your appearance,” said Mrs. Tully suddenly, with disconcerting outspokenness.

Johanna drew herself up.

“Thanks,” she said. “I have always worn my hair like this, and at my age, have no intention of altering it,” and leaving Mrs. Tully protesting vehemently at such false modesty, she went past her, into her own room, and shut the door.

She sat down by the window to sew. But her hands soon fell to her lap, and with her eyes on the backs of the neighbouring houses, she continued her interrupted reflections. First, though, she threw a quick, sarcastic side-glance on her mother and herself. As so often before, when she had wanted to pin her mother’s attention to a subject, the centre of interest had shifted in spite of her efforts, and they had ended far from where they had begun: further, she, Johanna, had a way, when it came to the point, not of asking advice or of faithfully discussing a question, but of emphatically giving her opinion, or of stating what she considered to be the facts of the case.

From an odd mixture of experience and self-distrust, Johanna had, however, acquired a certain faith in her mother’s opinions—these blind, instinctive hits and guesses, which often proved right where Johanna’s carefully drawn conclusions failed. Here, once more, her mother’s idea had broken in upon her like a flash of light, even though she could not immediately bring herself to accept it. Maurice and Ephie! She could not reconcile the one with the other. Yet what if the child were fretting? What if he did not care? A pang shot through her at the thought that any outsider should have the power to make Ephie suffer. Oh, she would make him care!—she would talk to him as he had never been talked to in his life before.

The sisters’ rooms were connected by a door; and, gradually, in spite of her preoccupation, Johanna could not but become aware how brokenly Ephie was practising. Coaxing, encouragement, and sometimes even severity, were all, it is true, necessary to pilot Ephie through the two hours that were her daily task; but as idle as to-day, she had never been. What could she be doing? Johanna listened intently, but not a sound came from the room; and impelled by a curiosity to observe her sister in a new light, she rose and opened the door.

Ephie was standing with her back to it, staring out of the window, and supporting herself on the table by her violin, which she held by the neck. At Johanna’s entrance, she started, grew very red, and hastily raised the instrument to her shoulder.

“What are you doing, Ephie? You are wasting a great deal of time,” said Johanna in the tone of mild reproof that came natural to her, in speaking to her little sister. “Is anything the matter to-day? If you don’t practice better than this, you won’t have the ETUDE ready by Friday, and Herr Becker will make you take it again—for the third time.”

“He can if he likes. I guess I don’t care,” said Ephie nonchantly, and, seizing the opportunity offered for a break, she sat down, and laid bow and fiddle on the table.

“Have you remembered everything he pointed out to you at your last lesson?” asked Johanna, going over to the music-stand, and peering at the pages with her shortsighted eyes. “Let me see—what was it now? Something about this double-stopping here, and the fingering in this position.”

Ephie laughed. “Old Joan, what do you know about it?”

“Not much, dear, I admit,” said Johanna pleasantly. “But try and master it, like a good girl. So you can get rid of it, and go on to something else.”

Ephie sat back, clasped her hands behind her head, and gave a long sigh. “Yes, to the next one,” she said. “Oh, if you only knew how sick I am of them, Joan! The next won’t be a bit better than this. They are all alike—a whole book of them.”

Johanna looked down at the little figure with the plump, white arms, and discontented expression; and she tried to find in the childish face something she had previously not seen there.

“Are you tired of studying, Ephie?” she asked. “Would you like to leave off and go away?”

“Go away from Leipzig? Where to?” Ephie did not unclasp her hands, but her eyes grew vigilant.

“Oh, there are plenty of other places, child. Dresden—or Weimar—or Stuttgart—where you could take lessons just as well. Or if you are tired of studying altogether, there is no need for you to go on with it. We can return home, any day. Sometimes, I think it would be better if we did. You have not been yourself lately, dear. I don’t think you are very well.”

“I not myself?—not well? What rubbish you talk, Joan! I am quite well, and wish you wouldn’t tease me. I guess you want to go away yourself. You are tired of being here. But nothing shall induce me to go. I love old Leipzig. And I still have heaps to learn before I leave off studying.—I don’t even know whether I shall be ready by spring. It all depends. And now, Joan, go away.” She took up her violin and put it on her shoulder. “Now it’s you who are wasting time. How can I practise when you stand there talking?”

Johanna was silent. But after this, she did not venture to mention Maurice’s name; and she had turned to leave the room when she remembered her meeting with Mrs. Tully.

“I would rather you did not go to tea, Ephie,” she ended, and then regretted having said it.

“That’s another of your silly prejudices, Joan. I want to know why you feel so about Mrs. Tully. I think she’s lovely. Not that I’d have gone anyway. I promised Maurice to go for a walk with him at five. I know what her ‘few friends’ means, too—just Boehmer, and she asks me along so people will think he comes to see me, and not her. He sits there, and twirls his moustache, and makes eyes at her, and she makes them back. I’m only for show. No, I shouldn’t have gone. I can’t bear Boehmer. He’s such a goat.”

“You didn’t think that as long as he came to see us,” expostulated Johanna.

“No, of course not. But so he only comes to see her, I do.—And sometimes, Joan, why it’s just embarrassing. The last afternoon, why, he had a headache or something, and she made him lie on the sofa, with a rug over him, so she could bathe his head with eau-de-cologne. I guess she’s going to marry him. And I’m not the only one. The other day I heard Frau Walter and Frau von Baerle talking in the dining-room after dinner, and they said the little English widow was very HEIRATSLUSTIG.”

“Ephie, I don’t like to hear you repeat such foolish gossip,” said Johanna in real distress. “And if you can understand and remember a word like that, you might really take more pains with your German. It is not impossible for you to learn, you see.”

“Joan the preacher, and Joan the teacher, and Joan the wise old bird,” sang Ephie, and laughed. “I think Mrs. Tully is real kind. She’s going to show me a new way to do my hair. This style is quite out in London, she says.”

“Don’t let her touch your hair. It couldn’t be better than it is,” said Johanna quickly. But Ephie turned her head this way and that, and considered herself in the looking-glass.

Now that she knew Maurice was expected that afternoon, Johanna awaited his arrival with impatience. Meanwhile, she believed she was not wrong in thinking Ephie unusually excited. At dinner, where, as always, the elderly boarders made a great fuss over her, her laughter was so loud as to grate on Johanna’s ear; but afterwards, in their own sitting-room, a trifle sufficed to put her out of temper. A new hat had been sent home, a hat which Johanna had not yet seen. Now that it had come, Ephie was not sure whether she liked it or not; and all the cries of admiration her mother and Mrs. Tully uttered, when she put it on, were necessary to reassure her. Johanna was silent, and this unspoken disapproval irritated Ephie.

“Why don’t you say something, Joan?” she cried crossly. “I suppose you think it’s homely?”

“Frankly, I don’t care for it much, dear. To my mind, it’s overtrimmed.”

This was so precisely Ephie’s own feeling that she was more annoyed than ever; she taunted Johanna with old-fashioned, countrified tastes; and, in spite of her mother’s comforting assurances, retired in a pet to her own room.

That afternoon, as they sat together at tea, Mrs. Cayhill, who for some time had considered Ephie fondly, said: “I can’t understand you thinking she isn’t well, Joan. I never saw her look better.”

Ephie went crimson. “Now what has Joan been saying about me?” she asked angrily.

Johanna had left the table, and was reading on the sofa.

“I only said what I repeated to yourself, Ephie. That I didn’t think you were looking well.”

“Just fancy,” said Mrs. Cayhill, laughing good-humouredly, “she was saying we ought to leave Leipzig and go to some strange place. Even back home to America. You don’t want to go away, darling, do you?”

“No, really, Joan is too bad,” cried Ephie, with a voice in which tears and exasperation struggled for the mastery. “She always has some new fad in her head. She can’t leave us alone—never! Let her go away, so she wants to. I won’t. I’m happy here. I love being here. Even if you both go away, I shall stop.”

She got up from the table, and went to a window, where she stood biting her lips, and paying small attention to her mother’s elaborate protests that she, too, had no intention of being moved.

Johanna did not raise her eyes from her book. She could have wept: not only at the spirit of rebellious dislike, which was beginning to show more and more clearly in everything Ephie said. But was no one but herself awake to the change that was taking place in the child, day by day? She would write to her father, without delay, and make him insist on their returning to America.

From the moment Maurice entered the room, she did not take her eyes off him; and, under her scrutiny, the young man soon grew nervous. He sat and fidgeted, and found nothing to say.

Ephie was wayward: she did not think she wanted to go out; it looked like rain. Johanna refrained from interfering; but Maurice was most persistent: he begged Ephie not to disappoint him, and, when this failed, said angrily that she had no business to bring him there for such capricious whims. This treatment cowed Ephie; and she went at once to put on her hat and jacket.

“He wants to speak to her; and she knows it; and is trying to avoid it,” said Johanna to herself; and her heart beat fast for both of them. But she was alone with Maurice; she must not lose the chance of sounding him a little.

“Where do you think of going for a walk?” she asked, and her voice had an odd tone to her ears.

“Where? Oh, to the ROSENTAL—or the SCHEIBENHOLZ—or along the river. Anywhere. I don’t know.”

She coughed. “Have you noticed anything strange about Ephie lately? She is not herself. I’m afraid she is not well.”

He had noticed nothing. But he did not face Johanna; and he held the photograph he was looking at upside down.

She leaned out of the window to watch them walk along the street. At this moment, she was fully convinced of the correctness of her mother’s assumption; and by the thought of what might take place within the next hour, she was much disturbed. During the rest of the afternoon, she found it impossible to settle to anything; and she wandered from one room to another, unable even to read. But it struck six, seven, eight o’clock; it was supper-time; and still Ephie had not come home. Mrs. Cayhill grew anxious, too, and Johanna strained her eyes, watching the dark street. At nine and at ten, she was pacing the room, and at eleven, after a messenger had been sent to Maurice’s lodging and had found no one there she buttoned on her rain-cloak, to accompany one of the servants to the police-station.

“Why did I let her go?—Oh, why did I let her go!”

IV.


Maurice and Ephie walked along the LESSINGSTRASSE without speaking—it was a dull, mild day, threatening to rain, as it had rained the whole of the preceding night. But Ephie was not accustomed to be silent; she found the stillness disconcerting, and before they had gone far, shot a furtive look at her companion. She did not intend him to see it; but he did, and turned to her. He cleared his throat, and seemed about to speak, then changed his mind. Something in his face, as she observed it more nearly, made Ephie change colour and give an awkward laugh.

“I asked you before how you liked my hat,” she said, with another attempt at the airiness which, to-day, she could not command. “And you didn’t say. I guess you haven’t looked at it. You’re in such a hurry.”

Maurice turned his head; but he did not see the hat. Instead, he mentally answered a question Louise had put to him the day before, and which he had then not known how to meet. Yes, Ephie was pretty, radiantly pretty, with the fresh, unsullied charm of a flower just blown.

“Joan was so stupid about it,” she went on at random; her face still wore its uncertain smile. “She said it was overtrimmed, and top-heavy, and didn’t become me. As if she ever wore anything that suited her! But Joan is an old maid. She hasn’t a scrap of taste. And as for you, Maurice, why I just don’t believe you know one hat from another. Men are so stupid.”

Again they went forward in silence.

“You are tiresome to-day,” she said at length, and looked at him with a touch of defiance, as a schoolgirl looks at the master with whom she ventures to remonstrate.

“Yes, I’m a dull companion.”

“Knowing it doesn’t make it any better.”

But she was not really cross; all other feelings were swallowed up by the uneasiness she felt at his manner of treating her.

“Where are we going?” she suddenly demanded of him, with a little quick upward note in her voice. “This is not the way to the SCHEIBENHOLZ.”

“No.” He had been waiting for the question. “Ephie,”—he cleared his throat anew. “I am taking you to see a friend—of mine.”

“Is that what you brought me out for? Then you didn’t want to speak to me, as you said? Then we’re not going for a walk?”

“Afterwards, perhaps. It’s like this. Some one I know has been very ill. Now that she is getting better, she needs rousing and cheering up, and that kind of thing; and I said I would bring you to call on her. She knows you by sight—and would like to know you personally,” he added, with a lame effort at explanation.

“Is that so?” said Ephie with sudden indifference; and her heart, which had begun to thump at the mention of a friend, quieted down at once. In fancy, she saw an elderly lady with shawls and a footstool, who had been attracted by her fresh young face; the same thing had happened to her before.

Now, however, that she knew the object of their walk, she was greatly relieved, as if a near danger had been averted; but she had not taken many steps forward before she was telling herself that another hope was gone. The only thing to do was to take the matter into her own hands; it was now or never; and simply a question of courage.

“Maurice, say, do many people go away from here in the fall?—leave the Con., I would say?” she asked abruptly. “I mean is this a time more people leave than in spring?”

Maurice started; he had been lost in his own thoughts, which all centred round this meeting he had weakly agreed to arrange. Again and again he had tried to imagine how it would fall out. But he did not know Louise well enough to foresee how she would act; and the nearer the time came, the stronger grew his presentiment of trouble. His chief remaining hope was that there would be no open speaking, that Schilsky’s name would not be mentioned; and plump into the midst of this hope fell Ephie’s question. He turned on her; she coloured furiously, and walked into a pool of water; and, at this moment, everything was as clear to Maurice as though she had said: “Where is be? Why has he gone?”

“Why do you ask?” he queried with unconscious sharpness. “No, Easter is the general time for leaving. But people who play in the PRUFUNGEN then, sometimes stay for the summer term. Why do you ask?”

“Gracious, Maurice, how tiresome you are! Must one always say why? I only wanted to know. I missed people I used to see about, that’s all.”

“Yes, a number have not come back.”

He was so occupied with what they were saying that he, in his turn, stepped into a puddle, splashing the water up over her shoe. Ephie was extremely annoyed.

“Look!—look what you’ve done!” she cried, showing him her spikey little shoe. “Why don’t you look where you’re going? How clumsy you are!” and, in a sudden burst of illhumour: “I don’t know why you’re bringing me here. It’s a horrid part of the city anyway. I didn’t have any desire to come. I guess I’ll turn back and go home.”

“We’re almost there now.”

“I don’t care. I don’t want to go.”

“But you shall, all the same. What’s the matter with you to-day that you don’t know your own mind for two minutes together?”

“You didn’t inquire if I wanted to come. You’re just horrid, Maurice.”

“And you’re a capricious child.”

He quickened his pace, afraid she might still escape him; and Ephie had hard work to keep up with him. As she trotted along, a few steps behind, there arose in her a strong feeling of resentment against Maurice, which was all the stronger because she suspected that she was on the brink of hearing her worst suspicions confirmed. But she could not afford to yield to the feeling, when the last chance she had of getting definite information was passing from her. Knitting both hands firmly inside her muff, she asked, with an earnestness which, to one who knew, was fatally tale-telling: “Did anyone you were acquainted with leave, Maurice?”

“Yes,” said the young man at her side, with brusque determination. He remained untouched by the tone of appeal in which Ephie put the question; for he himself suffered under her continued hedging. “Yes,” he said, “some one did, and that was a man called Schilsky—a tall, red-haired fellow, a violinist. But he has only just gone. He came back after the vacation to settle his affairs, and say good-bye to his friends. Is there anything else you want to know?”

He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. After all, Ephie was such a child. He could not see her face, which was hidden by the brim of the big hat, but there was something pathetic in the line of her chin, and the droop of her arms and shoulders. She seemed to shrink under his words—to grow smaller. As he stood aside to let her pass before him, through the house-door in the BRUDERSTRASSE, he had a quick revulsion of feeling. Instead of being rough and cruel to her, he should have tried to win her confidence with brotherly kindness. But he had had room in his mind for nothing but the meeting with Louise, and now there was no more time; they were going up the stairs. All he could do was to say gently: “I ought to tell you, Ephie, that the person we are going to see has been very, very ill—and needs treating with the utmost consideration. I rely on your tact and good-feeling.”

But Ephie did not reply; the colour had left her face, and for once, the short upper-lip closed firmly on the lower one. For some minutes amazed anger with Maurice was all she felt. Then, however, came the knowledge of what his words meant: he knew—Maurice knew; he had seen through her fictions; he would tell on her; there would be dreadful scenes with Joan; there would be reproaches and recriminations; she would be locked up, or taken away. As for what lay beyond, his assertion that Schilsky had been there—had been and gone, without a word to her—that was a sickening possibility, which, at present, her mind could not grasp. She grew dizzy under these blows that rained down on her, one after the other. And meanwhile, she had to keep up appearances, to go on as though nothing had happened, when it seemed impossible even to drag herself to the top of the winding flight of stairs. She held her head down; there was a peculiar clicking in her throat, which she could not master; she felt at every step as if she would have to burst out crying.

At the glass of the door, and at the wizened old face that appeared behind it, she looked with unseeing eyes; and she followed Maurice mechanically along the passage to a door at the end.

In his agitation the young man forgot to knock; and as they entered, a figure sprang up from the sofa-corner, and made a few impulsive steps towards them.

Maurice went over to Louise and took her hand.

“I’ve brought her,” he said in a low tone, and with a kind of appeal in voice and eyes, which he was not himself aware of. Louise answered the look, and went on looking at him, as if she were fearful of letting her eyes stray. Both turned at an exclamation from Ephie. She was still standing where Maurice had left her, close beside the door; but her face was flaming, and her right hand fumbled with the doorhandle.

“Ephie!” said Maurice warningly. He was afraid she would turn the handle, and, going over to her, took her by the arm.

“Say, Maurice, I’m going home,” she said under her breath. “I can’t stop here. Oh, why did you bring me?”

“Ssh!—be a good girl, Ephie,” he replied as though speaking to a child. “Come with me.”

An inborn politeness struggled with Ephie’s dread. “I can’t. I don’t know her name,” she whispered. But she let him draw her forward to where Louise was standing; and she held out her hand.

“Miss—?” she said in a small voice, and waited for the name to be filled in.

Louise had watched them whispering, with a stony fare, but, at Ephie’s gesture, life came into it. Her eyes opened wide; and drawing back from the girl’s outstretched hand, yet without seeming to see it, she turned with a hasty movement, and went over to the window, where she stood with her back to them.

This was the last straw; Ephie dropped on a chair, and hiding her face in her hands, burst into the tears she had hitherto restrained. Her previous trouble was increased a hundredfold. For she had recognised Louise at once; she felt that she was in a trap; and the person who had entrapped her was Maurice. Holding a tiny lace handkerchief to her eyes, she sobbed as though her heart would break.

“Don’t cry, dear, don’t cry,” said the young man. “It’s all right.” But his thoughts were with Louise. He was apprehensive of what she might do next.

As if in answer to his fear, she crossed the room.

“Ask her to take her hands down. I want to see her face.”

Maurice bent over Ephie, and touched her shoulder.

“Ephie, dear, do you hear? Look up, like a good girl, and speak to Miss Dufrayer.”

But Ephie shook off his hand.

Over her bowed head, their eyes met; and the look Louise gave the young man was cold and questioning. He shrugged his shoulders: he could do nothing; and retreating behind the writing-table, he left the two girls to themselves.

“Stand up, please,” said Louise in an unfriendly voice; and as Ephie did not obey, she made a movement to take her by the wrists.

“No, no!—don’t touch me,” cried Ephie, and rose in spite of herself. “What right have you to speak to me like this?”

She could say no more, for, with a quick, unforeseen movement, Louise took the young girl’s face in both hands, and turned it up. And after her first instinctive effort to draw back, Ephie kept still, like a fascinated rabbit, her eyes fixed on the dark face that looked down at her.

Seconds passed into minutes; and the minutes seemed hours. Maurice watched, on the alert to intervene, if necessary.

At the entrance of her visitors, Louise had been unable to see distinctly, so stupefied was she by the thought that the person on whom her thoughts had run, with a kind of madness, for more than forty-eight hours, was actually in the room beside her—it was just as though a nightmare phantom had taken bodily form. And then, too, though she had spent each of these hours in picturing to herself what this girl would be like, the reality was so opposed to her imagining that, at first, she could not reconcile the differences.

Now she forced herself to see every line of the face. Nothing escaped her. She saw how loosened tendrils of hair on neck and forehead became little curls; saw the finely marked brows, and the dark blue veins at the temples; the pink and white colouring of the cheeks; the small nose, modelled as if in wax; the fascinating baby mouth, with its short upper-lip. Like most dark, sallow women, whose own brief freshness is past, the elder girl passionately admired such may-blossom beauty, as something belonging to a different race from herself. And this was not all: as she continued to look into Ephie’s face, she ceased to be herself; she became the man whose tastes she knew better than her own; she saw with his eyes, felt with his senses. She pictured Ephie’s face, arch and smiling, lifted to his; and she understood and excused his weakness. He had not been able to help what had happened: this was the prettiness that drew him in, the kind he had invariably turned to look back at, in the street—something fair and round, adorably small and young, something to be petted and protected, that clung, and was childishly subordinate. For her dark sallowness, for her wilful mastery, he had only had a passing fancy. She was not his type, and she knew it. But to have known it vaguely, when it did not matter, and to know it at a moment like the present, were two different things.

In a burst of despair she let her arms fall to her sides; but her insatiable eyes gazed on; and Ephie, though she was now free, did not stir, but remained standing, with her face raised, in a silly fascination. And the eyes, having taken in the curves of cheeks and chin, and the soft white throat, passed to the rounded, drooping shoulders, to the plumpness of the girlish figure, embracing the whole body in their devouring gaze. Ephie went hot and cold beneath them; she felt as if her clothes were being stripped from her, and she left standing naked. Louise saw the changing colour, and interpreted it in her own way. His—all his! He was not the mortal—she knew it only too well—to have this flower within his reach, and not clutch at it, instinctively, as a child clutches at sunbeams. It would riot have been in nature for him to do otherwise than take, greedily, without reflection. At the thought of it, a spasm of jealousy caught her by the throat; her hanging hands trembled to hurt this infantile prettiness, to spoil these lips that had been kissed by his.

Maurice was at her side. “Don’t hurt her,” he said, and did not know how the words came to his lips.

The spell was broken. The unnatural expression died out of her face; she was tired and apathetic.

“Hurt her?” she repeated faintly. “No, don’t be afraid. I shall not hurt her. But if I beat her with ropes till all my strength was gone, I couldn’t hurt her as she has hurt me.”

“Hush! Don’t say such things.”

“I? I hurt you?” said Ephie, and began to cry afresh. “How could I? I don’t even know you.”

“No, you don’t know me; and yet you have done me the cruellest wrong.”

“Oh, no, no,” sobbed Ephic. “No, indeed!”

“He was all I had—all I cared for. And you plotted, and planned, and stole him from me—with your silly baby face.”

“It’s not true,” wept Ephie. “How could I? I didn’t know anything about you. He . . . he never spoke of you.”

Louise laughed. “Oh, I can believe that! And you thought, didn’t you, you poor little fool, that he only cared for you? That was why my name was never mentioned. He didn’t need to scheme, and contrive, and lie, lie abominably, for fear I should come to hear what he was doing!”

“No, indeed,” sobbed Ephie. “Never! And you’ve no right to say such things of him.”

“I no right?” Louise drew herself up. “No right to say what I like of him? Are you going to tell me what I shall say and what I shan’t of the man I loved?—yes, and who loved me, too, but in a way you couldn’t understandyou who think all you have to do is to smile your silly smile, and spoil another person’s life. You didn’t know, no, of course not!—didn’t know this was his room as well as mine. Look, his music is still lying on the piano; that’s the chair he sat in, not many days ago; here,” she took Ephie by the shoulder and drew her behind the screen, where a small door, papered like the wall, gave, direct from the stair-head, a second entrance to the room—” here’s the door he came in at.—For he came as he liked, whenever he chose.”

“It’s not true; it can’t be true,” said Ephie, and raised her tear-stained face defiantly. “We are engaged—since the summer. He’s coming back to marry me soon.”

“He’s coming back to marry you!” echoed Louise in a blank voice. “He’s coming back to marry you!”

She moved a few steps away, and stood by the writing-table, looking dazed, as if she did not understand. Then she laughed.

Ephie cried with renewed bitterness. “I want to go home.”

But Maurice did not pay any attention to her. He was watching Louise, with a growing dismay. For she continued to laugh, in a breathless way, with a catch in the throat, which made the laughter sound like sobbing. On his approaching her, she tried to check herself, but without success. She wiped her lips, and pressed her handkerchief to them, then took the handkerchief between her teeth and bit it. She crossed to the window, and stood with her back to the others; but she could not stop laughing. She went behind the low, broad screen that divided the room, and sat down on the edge of the bed; but still she had to laugh on. She came out again into the other part of the room, and saw Maurice pale and concerned, and Ephie’s tears dried through pure fear; but the sight of these two made her laugh more violently than before. She held her face in her hands, and pressed her jaws together as though she would break them; for they shook with a nervous convulsion. Her whole body began to shake, with the efforts she made at repression.

Ephie cowered in her seat. “Oh, Maurice, let us go. I’m so afraid,” she implored him.

“Don’t be frightened! It’s all right.” But he was following Louise about the room, entreating her to regain the mastery of herself. When he did happen to notice Ephie more closely, he said: “Go downstairs, and wait for me there. I’ll come soon.”

Ephie did not need twice telling: she turned and fled. He heard the hall-door bang behind her.

“Do try to control yourself. Miss Dufrayer—Louise! Every one in the house will hear you.”

But she only laughed the more. And now the merest trifles helped to increase the paroxysm—the way Maurice worked his hands, Ephie’s muff lying forgotten on a chair, the landlady’s inquisitive face peering in at the door. The laugh continued, though it had become a kind of cackle—a sound without tone. Maurice could bear it no longer. He went up to her and tried to take her hands. She repulsed him, but he was too strong for her. He took both her hands in his, and pressed her down on a chair. He was not clear himself what to do next; but, the moment he touched her, the laughter ceased. She gasped for breath; he thought she would choke, and let her hands go again. She pressed them to her throat; her breath came more and more quickly; her eyes closed; and falling forward on her knees, she hid her face in the cushioned seat of the sofa.

Then the tears came, and what tears! In all his life, Maurice had never heard crying like this. He moved as far away from her as he could, stood at the window, staring out and biting his lips, while she sobbed, regardless of his presence, with the utter abandon of a child. Like a child, too, she wept rebelliously, unchastenedly, as he could not have believed it possible for a grown person to cry. Such grief as this, so absolute a despair, had nothing to do with reason or the reasoning faculties; and the words were not invented that would be able to soothe it.

But, little by little, a change came over her crying. The rebellion died out of it; it grew duller, and more blunted, hopeless, without life. Her strength was almost gone. Now, however, there was another note of childishness in it, that of complete exhaustion, which it is so hard to hear. The tears rose to his own eyes; he would have liked to go to her, to lay his hand on her head, and treat her tenderly, to make her cease and be happy once more; but he did not dare. Had he done so, she might not have repelled him; for, in all intensely passionate grief, there comes a moment of subsidence, when the grief and its origin are forgotten, and the one overruling desire is the desire to be comforted, no matter who the comforter and what his means, so long as they are masterful and strong.

She grew calmer; and soon she was only shaken at widening intervals by a sob. Then these, too, ceased, and Maurice held his breath. But as, after a considerable time had elapsed, she still lay without making sound or movement, he crossed the room to look at her. She was fast asleep, half sitting, half lying, with her head on the cushions, and the tears wet on her cheeks. He hesitated between a wish to see her in a more comfortable position, and an unwillingness to disturb her. Finally, he took an eider-down quilt from the bed, and wrapped it round her; then slipped noiselessly from the room.

It was past eight o’clock.

* * * * *

Ephie ran down the stairs as if a spectre were at her heels, and even when in the street, did not venture to slacken her speed. Although the dusk was rapidly passing into dark, a good deal of notice was attracted by the sight of a well-dressed young girl running along, holding a handkerchief to her face, and every now and then emitting a loud sob. People stood and stared after her, and some little boys ran with her. Instead of dropping her pace when she saw this, Ephie grew confused, and ran more quickly than before. She had turned at random, on coming out of the house; and she was in a part of the town she did not know. In her eagerness to get away from people, she took any turn that offered; and after a time she found that she had crossed the river, and was on what was almost a country road. A little further off, she knew, lay the woods; if once she were in their shelter, she would be safe; and, without stopping to consider that night was falling, she ran towards them at full speed. On the first seat she came to she sank breathless and exhausted.

Her first sensation was one of relief at being alone. She unpinned and took off the big, heavy hat, and laid it on the seat beside her, in order to be more at her case; and then she cried, heartily, and without precautions, enjoying to the full the luxury of being unwatched and unheard. Since teatime, she seemed to have been fighting her tears, exercising a self-restraint that was new to her and very hard; and not to-day alone—oh, no, for weeks past, she had been obliged to act a part. Not even in her bed at night had she been free to indulge her grief; for, if she cried then, it made her pale and heavy-eyed next day, and exposed her to Joan’s comments. And there were so many things to cry about: all the emotional excitement of the summer, with its ups and downs of hope and fear; the never-ceasing need of dissimulation; the gnawing uncertainty caused by Schilsky’s silence; the growing sense of blankness and disappointment; Joan’s suspicions; Maurice’s discovery; the knowledge that Schilsky had gone away without a word to her; and, worst of all, and most inexplicable, the terrible visit of the afternoon—at the remembrance of the madwoman she had escaped from, Ephie’s tears flowed with renewed vigour. Her handkerchief was soaked and useless; she held her fur tippet across her eyes to receive the tears as they fell; and when this grew too wet, she raised the skirt of her dress to her face. Not a sound was to be heard but her sobbing; she was absolutely alone; and she wept on till those who cared for her, whose chief wish was to keep grief from her, would hardly have recognized in her the child they loved.

How long she had been there she did not know, when she was startled to her feet by a loud rustling in the bushes behind her. Then, of a sudden, she became aware that it was pitch-dark, and that she was all by herself in the woods. She took to her heels, in a panic of fear, and did not stop running till the street-lamps came into sight. When she was under their friendly shine, and could see people walking on the other side of the river, she remembered that she had left her hat lying on the seat. At this fresh misfortune, she began to cry anew. But not for anything in the world would she have ventured back to fetch it.

She crossed the Pleisse and came to a dark, quiet street, where few people were; and here she wandered up and down. It was late; at home they would be sitting at supper now, exhausting themselves in conjectures where she could be. Ephie was very hungry, and at the thought of the warmth and light of the supper-table, a lump rose in her throat. If it had been only her mother, she might have faced her—but Joan! Home in this plight, at this hour, hatless, and with swollen face, to meet Joan’s eyes and questions!—she shivered at the idea. Moreover, the whole PENSION would get to know what had happened to her; she would need to bear inquisitive. looks and words; she would have to explain, or, still worse, to invent and tell stories again; and of what use were they now, when all was over? A feeling of lassitude overcame her—an inability to begin fresh. All over: he would never put his arm round her again, never come towards her, careless and smiling, and call her his “little, little girl.”

She sobbed to herself as she walked. Everything was bleak, and black, and cheerless. She would perhaps die of the cold, and then all of them, Joan in particular, would be filled with remorse. She stood and looked at the inky water of the river between its stone walls. She had read of people drowning themselves; what if she went down the steps and threw herself in?—and she feebly fingered at the gate. But it was locked and chained; and at the idea of her warm, soft body touching the icy water; at the picture of herself lying drowned, with dank hair, or, like the Christian Martyr, floating away on the surface; at the thought of their grief, of HIM wringing his hands over her corpse, she was so moved that she wept aloud again, and amost ran to be out of temptation’s way.

It had begun to drizzle. Oh, how tired she was! And she was obliged constantly to dodge impertinently staring men. In a long, wide street, she entered a door-way that was not quite so dark as the others, and sat down on the bottom step of the stairs. Here she must have dozed, for she was roused by angry voices on the floor above. It sounded like some one who was drunk; and she fled trembling back to the street.

A neighbouring clock struck ten. At this time of night, she could not go home, even though she wished to. She was wandering the streets like any outcast, late at night, without a hat—and her condition of hatlessness she felt to be the chief stigma. But she was starving with hunger, and so tired that she could scarcely drag one foot after the other. Oh, what would they say if they knew what their poor little Ephie was enduring! Her mother—Joan—-Maurice!

Maurice! The thought of him came to her like a ray of light. It was to Maurice she would turn. He would be good to her, and help her; he had always been kind to her, till this afternoon. And he knew what had happened; it would not be necessary to explain.—Oh, Maurice, Maurice!

She knew his address, if she could but find the street. A droschke passed, and she tried to hail it; but she did not like to advance too far out of the shadow, on account of her bare head. Finally, plucking up courage, she inquired the way of a feather-hatted woman, who had eyed her with an inquisitive stare.

It turned out that the BRAUSTRASSE was just round the corner; she had perhaps been in the street already, without knowing it; and now she found it, and the house, without difficulty. The street-door was still open; or she would never have been bold enough to ring.

The stair was poorly lighted, and full of unsavoury smells. In her agitation, Ephie rang on a wrong floor, and a strange man answered her timid inquiry. She climbed a flight higher, and rang again. There was a long and ominous pause, in which her heart beat fast; if Maurice did not live here either, she would drop where she stood. She was about to ring a second time, when felt slippers and an oil lamp moved along the passage, the glass window was opened, and a woman’s face peered out at her. Yes, Herr Guest lived there, certainly, said Frau Krause, divided between curiosity and indignation at having to rise from bed; and she held the lamp above her head, in order to see Ephie better. But he was not at home, and, even if he were, at this hour of night . . . The heavy words shuffled along, giving the voracious eyes time to devour.

At the thought that her request might be denied her, Ephie’s courage took its last leap.

“Why, I must see him. I have something important to tell him. Could I not wait?” she urged in her broken German, feeling unspeakably small and forlorn. And yielding to a desire to examine more nearly the bare, damp head and costly furs, Frau Krause allowed the girl to pass before her into Maurice’s room.

She loitered as long as she could over lighting the lamp that stood on the table; and meanwhile threw repeated glances at Ephie, who, having given one look round the shabby room, sank into a corner of the sofa and hid her face: the coarse browed woman, in petticoat and night-jacket, seemed to her capable of robbery or murder. And so Frau Krause unwillingly withdrew, to await further developments outside: the holy, smooth-faced Herr Guest was a deep one, after all.

When Maurice entered, shortly before eleven, Ephie started up from a broken sleep. He came in pale and disturbed, for Frau Krause had met him in the passage with angry mutterings about a FRAUENZIMMER in his room; and his thoughts had at once leaped fearfully to Louise. When he saw Ephie, he uttered a loud exclamation of surprise.

“Good Lord, Ephie! What on earth are you doing here?”

She sprang at his hands, and caught her breath hysterically.

“Oh, Morry, you’ve come at last. Oh, I thought you would never come. Where have you been? Oh, Morry, help me—help me, or I shall die!”

“Whatever is the matter? What are you doing here?”

At his perturbed amazement, she burst into tears, still clinging fast to his hands. He led her back to the sofa, from which she had sprung.

“Hush, hush! Don’t cry like that. What’s the matter, child? Tell me what it is—at once—and let me help you.”

“Oh, yes, Morry, help me, help me! There’s no one else. I didn’t know where to go. Oh, what shall I do!”

Her own words sounded so pathetic that she sobbed piteously. Maurice stroked her hand, and waited for her to grow quieter. But now that she had laid the responsibility of herself on other shoulders, Ephie was quite unnerved: after the dark and fearful wanderings of the evening, to be beside some one who knew, who would take care of her, who would tell her what to do!

She sobbed and sobbed. Only with perseverance did Maurice draw from her, word by word, an account of where she had been that evening, broken by such cries as: “Oh, what shall I do! I can’t ever go home again—ever! . . . and I lost my hat. Oh, Morry, Morry! And I didn’t know he had gone away—and it wasn’t true what I said, that he was coming back to marry me soon.. I only said it to spite her, because she said such dreadful things to me. But we were engaged, all the same; he said he would come to New York to marry me. And now . . . oh, dear, oh, Morry! . . .”

“Then he really promised to marry you, did he?”

“Yes, oh, yes. Everything was fixed. The last day I was there,” she wept. “But I didn’t know he was going away; he never said a word about it. Oh, what shall I do! Go after him, and bring him back, Morry. He must come back. He can’t leave me like this, he can’t—oh, no, indeed!”

“You don’t mean to say you went to see him, Ephie?—alone?—at his room?” queried Maurice slowly, and he did not know how sternly. “When? How often? Tell me everything. This is no time for fibbing.”

But he could make little of Ephie’s sobbed and hazy version of the story; she herself could not remember clearly now; the impressions of the last few hours had been so intense as to obliterate much of what had gone before. “I thought I would drown myself . . . but the water was so black. Oh, why did you take me to that dreadful woman? Did you hear what she said? It wasn’t true, was it? Oh, it can’t be!”

“It was quite true, Ephie. What he told YOU wasn’t true. He never really cared for anyone but her. They were—were engaged for years.”

At this, she wept so heart-rendingly that he was afraid Frau Krause would come in and interfere.

“You MUST control yourself. Crying won’t alter things now. If you had been frank and candid with us, it would never have happened.” This was the only reproach he could make her; what came after was Johanna’s business, not his. “And now I’m going to take you home. It’s nearly twelve o’clock. Think of the state your mother and sister will be in about you.”

But at the mention of Johanna, Ephie flung herself on the sofa again and beat the cushions with her hands.

“Not Joan, not Joan!” she wailed. “No, I won’t go home. What will she say to me? Oh, I am so frightened! She’ll kill me, I know she will.” And at Maurice’s confident assurance that Johanna would have nothing but love and sympathy for her, she shook her head. “I know Joan. She’ll never forgive me. Morry, let me stay with you. You’ve always been kind to me. Oh, don’t send me away!”

“Don’t be a silly child, Ephie. You know yourself you can’t stay here.”

But he gave up urging her, coaxed her to lie down, and sat beside her, stroking her hair. As he said no more, she gradually ceased to sob, and in what seemed to the young man an incredibly short time, he heard from her breathing that she was asleep. He covered her up, and stood a sheet of music before the lamp, to shade her eyes. In the passage he ran up against Frau Krause, whom he charged to prevent Ephie in the event of her attempting to leave the house.

Buttoning up his coat-collar, he hastened through the mistlike rain to fetch Johanna.

There was a light in every window of the PENSION in the LESSINGSTRASSE; the street-door and both doors of the flat stood open. As he mounted the stairs a confused sound of voices struck his car; and when he entered the passage, he heard Mrs. Cayhill crying noisily. Johanna came out to him at once; she was in hat and cloak. She listened stonily to his statement that Ephie was safe at his lodgings, and put no questions; but, on her returning to the sitting-room, Mrs. Cayhill’s sobs stopped abruptly, and several women spoke at once.

Johanna preserved her uncompromising attitude as they walked the midnight streets. But as Maurice made no mien to explain matters further, she so far conquered her aversion as to ask: “What have you done to her?”

The young man’s consternation at this view of the case was so evident that even she felt the need of wording her question differently.

“Answer me. What is Ephie doing at your rooms?”

Maurice cleared his throat. “It’s a long and unpleasant story, Miss Cayhill. And I’m afraid I must tell it from the beginning.—You didn’t suspect, I fear, that . . . well, that Ephie had a fancy for some one here?”

At these words, which were very different from those she had expected, Johanna eyed him in astonishment.

“A fancy!” she repeated incredulously. “What do you mean?”

“Even more—an infatuation,” said Maurice with deliberation. “And for some one I daresay you have never even heard of—a...a man here, a violinist, called Schilsky.”

The elaborate fabric she had that day reared, fell together about Johanna’s ears. She stared at Maurice as if she doubted his sanity; and she continued to listen, with the same icy air of disbelief, to his stammered and ineffectual narrative, until he said that he believed “it” had been “going on since summer.”

At this Johanna laughed aloud. “That is quite impossible,” she said. “I knew everything Ephie did, and everywhere she went.”

“She met him nearly every day. They exchanged letters, and——-”

“It is impossible,” repeated Johanna with vehemence, but less surely.

“——and a sort of engagement seems to have existed between them.”

“And you knew this and never said a word to me?”

“I didn’t know—not till to-night. I only suspected something—once . . . long ago. And l couldn’t—I mean—one can’t say a thing like that without being quite sure——”

But here he broke down, conscious, as never before, of the negligence he had been guilty of towards Ephie. And Johanna was not likely to spare him: there was, indeed, a bitter antagonism to his half-hearted conduct in the tone in which she said: “I stood to Ephie in a mother’s place. You might have warned me—oh, you might, indeed!”

They walked on in silence—a hard, resentful silence. Then Johanna put the question he was expecting to hear.

“And what has all this to do with to-night?”

Maurice took up the thread of his narrative again, telling how Ephie had waited vainly for news since returning from Switzerland, and how she had only learnt that afternoon that Schilsky had been in Leipzig, and had gone away again, without seeing her, or letting her know that he did not intend to return.

“And how did she hear it?”

“At a friend’s house.”

“What friend?”

“A friend of mine, a—No; I had better be frank with you: the girl this fellow was engaged to for a year or more.”

“And Ephie did not know that?”

He shook his head.

“But you knew, and yet took her there?”

It was a hopeless job to try to exonerate himself. “Yes, there were reasons—I couldn’t help it, in fact. But I’m afraid I should not be able to make you understand.”

“No, never!” retorted Johanna, and squared her shoulders.

But there was more to be said—she had worse to learn before Ephie was handed over to her care.

“And Ephie has been very foolish,” he began anew, without looking at her. “It seems—from what she has told me tonight—that she has been to see this man . . . been at his rooms . . . more than once.”

At first, he was certain, Johanna did not grasp the meaning of what he said; she turned a blank face curiously to him. But, a moment later, she gave a low cry, and hardly able to form the words for excitement, asked: “Who . . . what . . . what kind of a man was he—this . . . Schilsky?”

“Rotten,” said Maurice; and she did not press him further. He heard her breath coming quickly, and saw the kind of stiffening that went through her body; but she kept silence, and did not speak again till they were almost at his house-door. Then she said, in a voice that was hoarse with feeling: “It has been all my fault. I did not take proper care of her. I was blind and foolish. And I shall never be able to forgive myself for it—never. But that Ephic—my little Ephie—the child I—that Ephie could . . . could do a thing like this . . .” Her voice tailed off in a sob.

Maurice struck matches, to light her up the dark staircase; and the condition of the stairs, the disagreeable smells, the poverty of wall and door revealed, made Johanna’s heart sink still further: to surroundings such as these had Ephie accustomed herself. They entered without noise; everything was just as Maurice had left it, except that the lamp had burned too high and filled the room with its fumes. As Johanna paused, undecided what to do, Ephie started up, and, at the sight of her sister, burst into loud cries of fear. Hiding her face, she sobbed so alarmingly that Johanna did not venture to approach her. She remained standing beside the table, one thin, ungloved hand resting on it, while Maurice bent over Ephie and tried to soothe her.

“Please fetch a droschke,” Johanna said grimly, as Ephie’s sobs showed no signs of abating; and when, after a lengthy search in the night, Maurice returned, she was standing in the same position, staring with drawn, unblinking eyes at the smoky lamp, which no one had thought of lowering. Ephie was still crying, and only Maurice might go near her. He coaxed her to rise, wrapped his rug round her, and carried her, more than he led her, down the stairs.

“Be good enough to drive home with us,” said Johanna. And so he sat with his arm round Ephie, who pressed her face against his shoulder, while the droschke jolted over the cobbled streets, and Johanna held herself pale and erect on the opposite seat. She mounted the stairs in front of them. Ephie was limp and heavy going up; but no sooner did she catch sight of Mrs. Cayhill than, with a cry, she rushed from the young man’s side, and threw herself into her mother’s arms.

“Oh, mummy, mummy!”

Downstairs, in the rain-soaked street, Maurice found the droschke-driver waiting for his fare. It only amounted to a couple of marks, and it was no doubt a just retribution for what had happened that he should be obliged to lay it out; but, none the less, it seemed like the last straw—the last dismal touch—in a day of forlorn discomfort.

V.


A few weeks later, a great variety of cabin-trunks and saratogas blocked the corridor of the PENSION. The addresses they bore were in Johanna’s small, pointed handwriting.

On this, the last afternoon of the Cayhills’ stay in Leipzig, Maurice saw Johanna again for the first time. She had had her hands full. In the woods, on that damp October night, and on her subsequent wanderings, Ephie had caught a severe cold; and the doctor had feared an inflammation of the lungs. This had been staved off; but there was also, it seemed, a latent weakness of the chest, hitherto unsuspected, which kept them anxious. Ephie still had a dry, grating cough, which was troublesome at night, and left her tired and fretful by day. They were travelling direct to the South of France, where they intended to remain until she had quite recovered her strength.

Maurice sat beside Johanna on the deep sofa where he and Ephie had worked at harmony together. But the windows of the room were shut now, and the room itself looked unfamiliar; for it had been stripped of all the trifles and fancy things that had given it such a comfortable, home-like air, and was only the bare, lodging-house room once more. Johanna was as self-possessed as of old, a trifle paler, a trifle thinner of lip.

She told him that they intended leaving quietly the next morning, without partings or farewells. Ephie was still weak and the less excitement she had to undergo, the better it would be for her.

“Then I shall not see Ephie again?” queried Maurice in surprise.

Johanna thought not: it would only recall the unhappy night to her memory; besides, she had not asked to see him, as she no doubt would have done, had she wished it.—At this, the eleventh hour, Johanna did not think it worth while to tell Maurice that Ephie bore him an unalterable grudge.

“I never want to see him again.”

That was all she said to Johanna; but, during her illness, she had brooded long over his treachery. And even if things had come all right in the end, she would never have been able to forgive his speaking to her of Schilsky in the way he had done. No, she was finished with Maurice Guest; he was too double-faced, too deceitful for her.—And she cried bitterly, with her face turned to the wall.

The young man could not but somewhat lamely agree with Johanna that it was better to let the matter end thus: for he felt that towards the Cayhills he had been guilty of a breach of trust such as it is difficult to forgive. At the same time, he was humanly hurt that Ephie would not even say good-bye to him.

He asked their further plans, and learnt that as soon as Ephie was well again, they would sail for New York.

“My father has cabled twice for us.”

Johanna’s manner was uncompromisingly dry and short. After her last words, there was a long pause, and Maurice made a movement to rise. But she put out her hand and detained him.

“There is something I should like to say to you.” And thereupon, with the abruptness of a nervous person: “When I have seen my sister and mother safe back, I intend leaving home myself. I am going to Harvard.”

Maurice realised that the girl was telling him a fact of considerable importance to herself, and did his best to look interested.

“Really? That’s always been a wish of yours, hasn’t it?”

“Yes.” Johanna coloured, hesitated as he had never known her to do, then burst out: “And now there is nothing in the way of it.” She drew her thumb across the leaf-corners of a book that was lying on the table. “Oh, I know what you will say: how, now that Ephie has turned out to be weak and untrustworthy, there is all the more reason for me to remain with her, to look after her. But that is not possible.” She faced him sharply, as though he had contradicted her. “I am incapable of pretending to be the same when my feelings have changed; and, as I told you—as I knew that night—I shall never be able to feel for Ephie as I did before. I am ready, as I said, to take all the blame for what has happened; I was blind and careless. But if the care and affection of years count for nothing; if I have been so little able to win her confidence; if, indeed, I have only succeeded in making her dislike me, by my care of her, so that when she is in trouble, she turns from me, instead of to me—why, then I have failed lamentably in what I had made the chief duty of my life.”

“Besides,” she continued more quietly, “there is another reason: Ephie is going to fall a victim to her nerves. I see that; and my poor, foolish mother is doing her best to foster it.—You smile? Only because you do not understand what it means. It is no laughing matter. If an American woman once becomes conscious of her nerves, then Heaven help her!—Now I am not of a disinterested enough nature to devote myself to sick-nursing where there is no real sickness. And then, too, my mother intends taking a French maid back with her, and a person of that class will perform such duties much more competently than I.”

She spoke with bitterness. Maurice mumbled some words of sympathy, wondering why she should choose to say these things to him.

“Even at home my place is filled,” continued Johanna. “The housekeeper who was appointed during our absence has been found so satisfactory that she will continue in the post after our return. Everywhere, you see, I have proved superfluous. There, as here.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken,” said Maurice with more warmth. “And, Miss Joan, there’s something I should like to say, if I may. Don’t you think you take what has happened here a little too seriously? No doubt Ephie behaved foolishly. But was it after all any more than a girlish escapade?”

“Too seriously?”

Johanna turned her shortsighted eyes on the young man, and gazed at him almost pityingly. How little, oh, how little, she said to herself, one mortal knew and could know of another, in spite of the medium of speech, in spite of common experiences! Some of the nights at the beginning of Ephie’s illness returned vividly to her mind, nights, when she, Johanna, had paced her room by the hour, filled with a terrible dread, a numbing uncertainty, which she would sooner have died than have let cross her lips. She had borne it quite alone, this horrible fear; her mother had been told of the whole affair only what it was absolutely necessary for her to know. And, naturally enough, the young man who now sat at her side, being a man, could not be expected to understand. But the consciousness of her isolation made Johanna speak with renewed harshness.

“Too seriously?” she repeated. “Oh, I think not. The girlish escapade, as you call it, was the least of it. If that had been all, if it had only been her infatuation for some one who was unworthy of her, I could have forgiven Ephie till seventy times seven. But, after all these years, after the way I have loved her—no, idolised her!—for her to treat me as she did—do you think it possible to take that too seriously? There was no reason she should not have had her little secrets. If she had let me see that something was going on, which she did not want to tell me about, do you think I should have forced her?” —and Johanna spoke in all good faith, forgetful of how she had been used to clip and doctor Ephie’s sentiments. “But that she could deceive me wilfully, and lie so lightly, with a smile, when, all the time, she was living a double life, one to my face and one behind my back—that I cannot forgive. Something has died in me that I used to feel for her. I could never trust her again, and where there is no trust there can be no real love.”

“She didn’t understand what she was doing. She is so young.”

“Just for that reason. So young, and so skilled in deceit. That is hardest of all, even to think of: that she could wear her dear innocent face, while behind it, in her brain, were cold, calculating thoughts how she could best deceive me! If there had been but a single sign to waken my suspicions, then, yes, then I could have forgiven her,” said Johanna, and again forgot how often of late she had been puzzled by the subtle change in Ephie. “If I could just know that, in spite of her efforts, she had been too candid to succeed!”

She had unburdened herself and it had been a relief to her, but nothing could be helped or mended. Both knew this, and after a few polite questions about her future plans and studies, Maurice rose to take his leave.

“Say good-bye to them both for me, and give Ephie my love.”

“I will. I think she will be sorry afterwards that she did not see you. She has always liked you.”

“Good-bye then. Or perhaps it is only AUF WIEDERSEHEN?”

“I hardly think so.” Johanna had returned to her usual sedate manner. “If I do visit Europe again, it will not be for five or six years at least.”

“And that’s a long time. Who knows where I may be, by then!”

He held Johanna’s hand in his, and saw her gauntly slim figure outlined against the bare sitting-room. It was not likely that they would ever meet again. But he could not summon up any very lively feelings of regret. Johanna had not touched him deeply; she had left him as cool as he had no doubt left her; neither had found the key to the other. Her chief attraction for him had been her devotion to Ephie; and now, having been put to the test, this was found wanting. She had been wounded in her own pride and self-love, and could not forgive. At heart she was no more generous and unselfish than the rest.

He repeated farewell messages as he stood in the passage. Johanna held the front door open for him, and, as he went down the stairs, he heard it close behind him, with that extreme noiselessness that was characteristic of Johanna’s treatment of it.

The following morning, shortly after ten o’clock, a train steamed out of the THURINGER BAHNHOF, carrying the Cayhills with it. The day was misty and cheerless, and none of the three travellers turned her head to give the town a parting glance. They left unattended, without flowers or other souvenirs, without any of the demonstratively pathetic farewells, the waving of hats, and crowding about the carriage-door, which one of the family, at least, had connected inseverably with their departure. And thus Ephie’s musical studies came to an abrupt and untimely end.

* * * * *

“My faith in women is shattered. I shall never believe in a woman again.”

Dove paced the floor of Maurice’s room with long and steady strides, beneath which a particular board creaked at intervals. His voice was husky, and the ruddiness of his cheeks had paled.

At the outset of Ephie’s illness, Dove had called every morning at the PENSION, to make inquiries and to leave his regards. But when the story leaked out, as it soon did, in an exaggerated and distorted form, he straightway ceased his visits. Thus he was wholly unprepared for the family’s hurried departure, the news of which was broken to him by Maurice. Dove was dumbfounded. Not a single sententious phrase crossed his lips; and he remained unashamed of the moisture that dimmed his eyes. But he maintained his bearing commendably; and it was impossible not to admire the upright, manly air with which he walked down the street.

The next day, however, he returned, and was silent no longer. He made no secret of having been hard hit; just as previously he had let his friends into his hopes and intentions, so now every one heard of his reverses. He felt a tremendous need of unbosoming himself; he had been so sure of success, or, at least, so unthinking of failure, and the blow to his selfesteem was a rude one.

Maurice sat with his hands in his pockets, and tried to urge reason. But Dove would not admit even the possibility of his having been mistaken. He had received innumerable proofs of Ephie’s regard for him.

“Remember how young she was! Girls of that age never know their own minds,” said Maurice. But Dove was inclined to take Johanna’s sterner view, and to cry: “So young and so untender!” for which he, too, substituted “untrue”; and, just on this score, to deduce unfavourable inferences for Ephie’s whole moral character. As Maurice listened to him, he could not help thinking that Johanna’s affection had been of the same nature as Dove’s, in other words, had had a touch of the masculine about it: it had existed only as long as it could guide and subordinate; it denied to its object any midget attempt at individual life; it set up lofty moral standards, and was implacable when a smaller, frailer being found it impossible to live up to them.

At the same time, he was sorry for Dove, who, in his blindness, had laid himself open to receive this snubbing; and he listened patiently, even a thought flattered by his confidence, until he learnt from Madeleine that Dove was making the round of his acquaintances, and behaving in the same way to anyone who would let him. Then he found that the openness with which Dove related his past hopes, and the marks of affection Ephie had given him, bordered on indecency. He said so, with a wrathful frankness; but Dove could not see it in that light, and was not offended.

As the personal smart weakened, the more serious question that Dove had to face was, what he was going to tell his relatives at home. For it now came out that he had represented the affair to them as settled; in his perfectly sincere optimism, he had regarded himself as an all but engaged man. And the point that disturbed him was, how to back out with dignity, yet without violating the truth, on which he set great store.

“I’m sure he needn’t let that trouble him,” said Madeleine, on hearing of his dilemma. “He has only to say that HE has changed his mind, which is true enough.”

This was the conclusion Dove eventually came to himself— though not with such unseemly haste as Madeleine. Having approached the matter from all sides, he argued that it would be more considerate to Ephie to put it in this light than to tell the story in detail. And consequently, two elderly people in Peterborough nodded to each other one morning over the breakfast-table, and agreed that Edward had done well. They had not been much in favour of the American match, but they had trusted implicitly in their son’s good sense, and now, as ever, he had acted in the most becoming way. He had never given them an hour’s uneasiness since his birth.

Dove wrote:

CIRCUMSTANCES HAVE ARISEN, MY DEAR PARENTS, WHICH MAKE IT INCONTROVERTIBLY CLEAR TO ME THAT THE YOUNG LADY TO WHOM I WAS PAYING MY ADDRESSES WHEN I CONSULTED YOU IN SUMMER AND MYSELF WOULD NOT HAVE KNOWN TRUE HAPPINESS IN OUR UNION. ON MORE INTIMATE ACQUAINTANCE IT TRANSPIRED THAT OUR CHARACTERS WERE TOTALLY UNSUITED. I HAVE THEREFORE FOUND IT ADVISABLE TO BANISH THE AFFAIR FROM MY MIND AND TO DEVOTE MYSELF WHOLLY TO MY STUDIES.

As time passed, and Dove was able to view what had happened more objectively, he began to feel and even to hint that, all things considered, he had had a rather lucky escape; and from this, it was not very far to believing that if he had not just seen through the whole affair from the beginning, he had at any rate had some inkling of it; and now, instead of giving proofs of Ephie’s affection, he narrated the gradual growth of his suspicions, and how these had ultimately been verified. In conclusion, he congratulated himself on having drawn back, with open eyes, while there was still time.

“Like his cheek!” said Madeleine. “But he could imagine himself into being the Shah of Persia, if he sat down and gave his mind to it. I don’t believe the snub is going to do him a bit of good. He bobs up again like a cork, irrepressible. HAVE you heard him quote: ‘Frailty thy name is woman!’ or: ‘If women could be fair and yet not fond’?—It’s as good as a play.”

But altogether, Madeleine was very sharp of tongue since she learnt the part Maurice had played in what, for a day, was the scandal of the English-speaking colony. She had taken him to task at once, for his “lamentable interference.”

“Haven’t I warned you, Maurice, not to mix yourself up in Louise’s affairs? No good can come of it. She breeds mischief. And if that absurd child had really drowned herself”—in the version of the story that had reached Madeleine’s ears, Maurice was represented fishing Ephie bodily from the river—“you would have had to bear the whole brunt of the blame. It ought to teach you a lesson. For you’re just the kind of boy women will always take advantage of, a mean advantage, you know. Consider how you were treated in this case—by both of them! They were not a scrap grateful to you for what you did—women never are. They only look down on you for letting them have their own way. Kindness and complaisance don’t move them. A well-developed biceps and a cruel mouth—that’s what they want, and that’s all!” she wound up with a flourish, in an extreme bad temper.

She sat, one dull November afternoon, at her piano, and continued to run her fingers over the keys. Maurice leant on the lid, and listened to her. But they had barely exchanged a word, when there was a light tap at the door, and Krafft entered. Both started at his unexpected appearance, and Madeleine cried: “You come in like a ghost, to frighten people out of their wits.”

Krafft was buttoned to the chin in a travelling-ulster, and looked pale and thin.

“What news from St. Petersburg?” queried Madeleine with a certain asperity.

But Maurice recalled an errand he had to do in town; and, on hearing this, Krafft, who was lolling aimlessly, declared that he would accompany him.

“But you’ve only just come!” expostulated Madeleine. “What in the name of goodness did you climb the stairs for?”

He patted her cheek, without replying.

The young men went away together, Maurice puffing somewhat ostentatiously at a cigarette. The wind was cold, and Krafft seemed to shrink into his ulster before it, keeping his hands deep in his pockets. But from time to time, he threw a side-glance at his friend, and at length asked, in the tone of appeal which Maurice found it hard to withstand: “What’s the matter, LIEBSTER? Why are you so different?—so changed?”

“The matter? Nothing—that I’m aware of,” said Maurice, and considered the tip of his cigarette.

“Oh, yes, there is,” and Krafft laid a caressing hand on his companion’s arm. “You are changed. You’re not frank with me. I feel such things at once.”

“Well, how on earth am I to know when to be frank with you, and when not? Before you . . . not very long ago, you behaved as if you didn’t want to have anything more to do with me.”

“You are changed, and, if I’m not mistaken, I know why,” said Krafft, ignoring his answer. “You have been listening to gossip—to what my enemies say of me.”

“I don’t listen to gossip. And I didn’t know you had enemies, as you call them.”

“I ?—and not have enemies?” He flared up as though Maurice had affronted him. “My good fellow, did you ever bear of a man worth his salt, who didn’t have enemies? It’s the penalty one pays: only the dolts and the ‘all-too-many’ are friends with the whole world. No one who has work to do that’s worth doing, can avoid making enemies. And who knows what a friend is, who hasn’t an enemy to match him? It’s a question of light and shade, theme and counter-theme, of artistic proportion.” He laughed, in his superior way. But directly afterwards, he dropped back into his former humble tone. “But that you, my friend, are so ready to let yourself be influenced—I should not have believed it of you.”

“What I heard, I heard from Furst; and I have no reason to suspect him of falsehood.—Of course, if you assure me it was not true, that’s a different thing.” He turned so sharply that he sent a beautiful flush over Krafft’s face. “Come, give me your word, Heirtz, and things will be straight again.”

But Krafft merely shrugged his shoulders, and his colour subsided as rapidly as it had risen.

“Are you still such an outsider,” he asked, “after all this time—in my society—as to attach importance to a word? What is ‘giving a word’? Do you really think it is of any value? May I not give it tonight, and take it back to-morrow, according to the mood I am in, according to whether I believe it myself or not, at the moment?—You think a thing must either be true or not true? You are wrong. Do you believe, when you answer a question in the affirmative or the negative, that you are actually telling the truth? No, my friend, to be perfectly truthful one would need to lose oneself in a maze of explanation, such as no questioner would have the patience to listen to. One would need to take into account the innumerable threads that have gone to making the statement what it is. Do you think, for instance, if I answered yes or no, in the present case, it would be true? If I deny what you heard—does that tell you that I have longed with all my heart for it to come to pass? Or say I admit it—I should need to unroll my life before you to make you understand. No, there’s no such thing as absolute truth. If there were, the finest subtleties of existence would be lost. There is neither positive truth nor positive untruth; life is not so coarse-fibred as that. And only the grossest natures can be satisfied with a blunt yes or no. Truth?—it is one of the many miserable conventions the human brain has tortured itself with, and its first principle is an utter lack of the imaginative faculties.—A DIEU!”