It was a hard, chill morning and Gregory, sauntering up and down the platform at Euston beside the open doors of the long steamer-train, felt that the taste and smell of London was, as nowhere else, concentrated, compressed, and presented to one in tabloid form, as it were, at a London station on a winter morning. It was a taste and smell that he, personally, rather liked, singularly compounded as it was, to his fancy, of cold metals and warm sooty surfaces; of the savour of kippers cooking over innumerable London grates and the aroma of mugs of beer served out over innumerable London bars; something at once acrid yet genial, suggesting sordidness and unlimited possibility. The vibration of adventure was in it and the sentiment, oddly intermingled, of human solidarity and personal detachment.

Gregory, as he strolled and waited for his old friend and whilom Oxford tutor, Professor Blackburn, whom he had promised to see off, had often to pause or to deviate in his course; for, though it was still early, and the season not a favourite one for crossing, the platform was quite sufficiently crowded, and crowded, evidently, with homeward-bound Americans, mostly women. Gregory tended to think of America and its people with the kindly lightness common to his type. Their samenesses didn't interest him, and their differences were sometimes vexatious. He had a vague feeling that they'd really better have been Colonials and be done with it. Professor Blackburn last night had reproved this insular levity. He was going over with an array of discriminations that Gregory had likened to an explorer's charts and instruments. He intended to investigate the most minute and measure the most immense, to lecture continually, to dine out every evening and to write a book of some real appropriateness when he came home. Gregory said that all that he asked of America was that it should keep its institutions to itself and share its pretty girls, and the professor told him that he knew more about the latter than the former. There were not many pretty girls on the platform this morning, though he remarked one rather pleasing young person who sat idly on a pile of luggage and fixed large, speculative, innocently assured eyes upon him when he went by, while near her her mother and a tawny sister disputed bitterly with a porter. Most of the ladies who hastened to and fro seemed, while very energetic, also very jaded. They were packed as tightly with experiences as their boxes with contraband clothing, and they had both, perhaps, rather heavily on their minds, wondering, it was probable, how they were to get them through. Some of them, strenuous, eye-glassed and scholastic, looked, however, as they marshalled their pathetically lean luggage, quite innocent of material trophies.

Among these alien and unfamiliar visages, Gregory caught sight suddenly of one that was alien yet recognizable. He had seen the melancholy, simian features before, and after a moment he placed the neat, black person, walking beside a truck piled high with enormous boxes, as Louise, Madame von Marwitz's maid. To recognise Louise was to think of Miss Woodruff. Gregory looked around the platform with a new interest.

Miss Woodruff was nowhere to be seen, but a new element pervaded the dingy place, and it hardly needed the presence of four or five richly dressed ladies bearing sheaves of flowers, or that of two silk-hatted impresario-looking gentlemen with Jewish noses, to lead Gregory to infer that the element was Madame von Marwitz's, and that he had, inadvertently, fallen upon the very morning of her departure. Already an awareness and an expectancy was abroad that reminded him of that in the concert hall. The contagion of celebrity had made itself felt even before the celebrity herself was visible; but, in another moment, Madame von Marwitz had appeared upon the platform, surrounded by cohorts of friends. Dressed in a long white cloak and flowing in sables, a white lace veil drooping about her shoulders, a sumptuous white feather curving from her brow to her back, she moved amidst the scene like a splendid, dreamy ship entering some grimy Northern harbour.

Mrs. Forrester, on heels as high as a fairy-godmother's and wearing a strange velvet cloak and a stranger velvet bonnet, trotted beside her; Sir Alliston was on the other hand, his delicate Vandyke features nipped with the cold; Mr. Claude Drew walked behind and before went Eleanor Scrotton, smiling a tight, stricken smile of triumph and responsibility. As the group passed Gregory, Miss Scrotton caught sight of him.

"We are in plenty of time, I see," she said. "Dear me! it has been a morning! Mercedes is always late. Could you, I wonder, induce these people to move away. She so detests being stared at."

Eleanor, as usual, roused a mischievous spirit in Gregory. "I'm afraid I'm helpless," he replied. "We're in a public place, and a cat may look at a king. Besides, who could help looking at those marvellous clothes."

"It isn't a question of cats but of impertinent human beings," Miss Scrotton returned with displeasure. "Allow me, Madam," she forged a majestic way through a gazing group.

"Where is Miss Woodruff?" Gregory inquired. He was wondering.

"Tiresome girl," Miss Scrotton said, watching the ladies with the flowers who gathered around her idol. "She will be late, I'm afraid. She had forgotten Victor."

"Victor? Is Victor the courier? Why does Miss Woodruff have to remember him?"

"No, no. Victor is Mercedes's dog, her dearly loved dog," said Miss Scrotton, her impatience with an ignorance that she suspected of wilfulness tempered, as usual, by the satisfaction of giving any and every information about Madame von Marwitz. "It is a sort of superstition with her that he should always be on the platform to see her off. It will be serious, really serious, if Karen doesn't get him here in time. It may depress Mercedes for the whole of the voyage."

"And where has she gone to get him?"

"Oh, she turned back nearly at once. She was with us in the carriage and we passed Louise in the omnibus with the boxes and fortunately Karen noticed that Victor wasn't with her. It turned out, when we stopped and asked Louise about him, that she had given him to the footman to take for a walk and she thought he had been brought back to Karen. Karen took a hansom at once and went back. She really ought to have seen to it before starting. I do hope she will get him here in time. Madam, if you please; we really can't get by."

A little woman, stout but sprightly, in whom Gregory recognized the agitated mother of the pretty girl, evaded Miss Scrotton's extended hand and darted past her to place herself in front of Madame von Marwitz. She wore a large, box-like hat from which a blue veil hung. Her small features, indeterminate in form and incoherent in assemblage, expressed to an extraordinary degree determination and strategy. She faced the great woman.

"Baroness," she said, in swift yet deliberate tones; "allow me to present myself; Mrs. Hamilton K. Slifer. We have mutual friends; Mrs. Tollman, Mrs. General Tollman of St. Louis, Missouri. She had the pleasure of meeting you in Paris some years ago. An old family friend of ours. My girls, Baroness; Maude and Beatrice. They won't forget this day. We're simply wild about you, Baroness. We were at your concert the other night." Maude, the lean and tawny, and Beatrice, the dark and pretty, had followed deftly in their mother's wake and were smiling, Maude with steely brightness, Beatrice with nonchalant assurance, at Madame von Marwitz.

"Bon Dieu!" the great woman muttered. She gazed away from the Slifers and about her with helpless consternation. Then, slightly bowing her head and murmuring: "I thank you, Madam," she moved on, her friends closing round her. Miss Scrotton, pale with wrath, put the Slifers aside as she passed them.

"Well, girls, I knew I could do it!" Mrs. Slifer ejaculated, drawing a deep breath. They stood near Gregory, and Beatrice, who had adjusted her camera, was taking a series of snaps of the retreating celebrity. "We've met her, anyway, and perhaps if she ever comes on deck we'll get another chance. That's a real impertinent woman she's got with her. Did you see her try and shove me back?"

"Never mind, mother," said Beatrice, who was evidently easy-going; "I snapped her as she did it and she looked ugly enough to turn milk sour. My! do look at that girl with the queer cap and the big dog. She's a freak and no mistake! Stand back, Maude, and let me have a shot at her."

"Why, I believe it's the adopted daughter!" Maude exclaimed. "Don't you remember. She was in the front row and we heard those people talking about her. I think she's distinguée myself. She looks like a Russian countess."

It was indeed Miss Woodruff who had arrived and Gregory, whose eyes followed the Slifers', was aware of a sudden emotion on seeing her. It was the emotion of his dream, touched and startled and sweet, and even more than in his dream she made him think of a Hans Andersen heroine with the little sealskin cap on her fair hair, and a long furred coat reaching to her ankles. She stood holding Victor by a leash, looking about her with a certain anxiety.

Gregory made his way to her and when she saw him she started to meet him, gladly, but without surprise. "Where is Tante?" she said, "Is she already in the train? Did she send you for me?"

"You are in very good time," he reassured her. "She is over there—you see her feather now, don't you. I'll take you to her."

"Thank you so much. It has been a great rush. You have heard of the misfortunes? By good chance I found the quickest cab."

She was walking beside him, her eyes fixed before them on the group where she saw her guardian's plume and veil. "I don't know what Tante would have done if Victor had not been here in time to say good-bye to her."

Madame von Marwitz was holding a parting reception before the open door of her saloon carriage. Flowers and fruits lay on the tables. Louise and Miss Scrotton's maid piled rugs and cushions on the chairs and divans. One of the Jewish gentlemen stood with his hat pushed off his forehead talking in low, important tones to a pallid young newspaper man who made rapid notes.

Madame von Marwitz at once caught sight of Karen and Victor. Past the intervening heads she beckoned Karen to come to her and she and Gregory exchanged salutes. In her swift smile on seeing him he read a mild amusement; she could only think that, like everybody else, he had come to see her off.

The cohorts opened to receive Miss Woodruff and Madame von Marwitz enfolded her and stooped to kiss Victor's head.

Gregory watched the little scene, which was evidently touching to all who witnessed it, and then turned to find Professor Blackburn at his elbow. He, too, it appeared, had been watching Madame von Marwitz. "Yes; I heard her two years ago in Oxford," he said; "and even my antique blood was stirred, as much by her personality as by her music. A most romantic, most pathetic woman. What eyes and what a smile!"

"I see that you are one of the stricken," said Gregory. "Shall I introduce you to my old friend, Mrs. Forrester? She'll no doubt be able to get you a word with Madame Okraska, if you want to hear her speak."

No, the professor said, he preferred to keep his idols remote and vaguely blurred with incense. "Who is the young Norse maiden?" he inquired; "the one you were with. Those singular ladies are accosting her now."

Karen Woodruff, on the outskirts of the group, had been gazing at her guardian with a constrained smile in which Gregory detected self-mastery, and turned her eyes upon the Slifers as the professor asked his question. Mrs. Slifer, marshalling her girls, and stooping to pat Victor, was introducing herself, and while Gregory told the professor that that was Miss Woodruff, Madame Okraska's ward, she bent to expound to the Slifers the inscription on Victor's collar, speaking, it was evident, with kindness. Gregory was touched by the tolerance with which, in the midst of her own sad thoughts, she satisfied the Slifers' curiosity.

"Then she really is Norse," said the professor.

"Really half Norse."

"I like her geniality and her reticence," said the professor, watching the humours of the little scene. "Those enterprising ladies won't get much out of her. Ah, they must relinquish her now; her guardian is asking for her. I suppose it's time that I got into my compartment."

The groups were breaking up and the travellers, detaching themselves from their friends, were taking their places. Madame von Marwitz, poised above a sea of upturned faces on the steps of her carriage, bent to enfold Karen Woodruff once more. Doors then slammed, whistles blew, green flags fluttered, and the long train moved slowly out of the station.

Standing at a little distance from the crowd, and holding Victor by his leash, Miss Woodruff looked after the train with a fixed and stiffened smile. She was near tears. The moment was not a propitious one for speaking to her; yet Gregory felt that he could not go without saying good-bye. He approached her and she turned grave eyes upon him.

"And you are going to Cornwall, now?" said Gregory, patting Victor's head.

"Yes; I go to-morrow," said Miss Woodruff in a gentle voice.

"Have you friends there?" Gregory asked, "and books? Things to amuse you?"

"We see the rector and his wife and one or two old ladies now and then. But it is very remote, you know. That is why my guardian loves it so much. She needs the solitude after her rushing life. But books; oh yes; my guardian has an excellent library there; she is a great reader; I could read all day, in every language, if I wanted to. As for amusement, Mrs. Talcott and I are very busy; we see after the garden and the little farm; I practice and take Victor out for walks."

She had quite mastered her emotion and Gregory could look up at her frankly. "Isn't there something I could send you," he said, "to help to pass the time? Magazines? Do you have them? And sweets? Do you like sweets?" His manner was half playful and he smiled at her as he might have smiled at a young school-girl. If only those wide braids under the little cap had been hanging over her shoulders the manner would have been justified. As it was, Gregory felt with some bewilderment that his behaviour was hardly normal. He was not in the habit of offering magazines and sweets to young women. But his solicitude expressed itself in these unconventional forms and luckily she found nothing amiss with them. She was accustomed, no doubt, to a world where such offerings passed freely.

"It is very kind of you," said Miss Woodruff. "I should indeed like to see a review now and then. Mr. Drew is writing another little article on my guardian, in one of this month's reviews, I did not hear which one; and I would like to see that very much. But sweets? No; when I like them I like them too much and eat too many and then I am sorry. Please don't send me sweets." She was smiling.

"What do you like to eat, then, that doesn't make you sorry—even when you eat a great deal?"

"Roast-beef!" she said, laughing, and the tip of her tongue was caught between her teeth. He was charmed to feel that, for the moment, at least, he had won her from her sadness.

"But you get roast-beef in Cornwall."

"Oh, excellent. I will not have roast-beef, please."

"Fruit, then? You like fruit?"

"Yes; indeed."

"And you don't get much fruit in Cornwall in winter."

"Only apples," she confessed, "and dried apricots."

He elicited from her that nectarines and grapes were her favourite fruits. But in the midst of their talk she became suddenly grave again.

"I do not believe that you had a single word with her after I came!"

His face betrayed his bewilderment.

"Tante," she enlightened him. "But before then? You did speak with her? She had sent you to look for me?" The depths of her misconception as to his presence were apparent.

"No; it was by chance I saw you," he said. "And I didn't have any talk with Madame von Marwitz." He had no time to undeceive her further if it had been worth while to undeceive her, for Mrs. Forrester, detaching herself from the larger group of bereaved ones, joined them.

"I can't give you a lift, Gregory?" she asked. "You are going citywards? We are all feeling very bleak and despoiled, aren't we? What an awful place a station is when someone has gone away from it."

"Mrs. Forrester," said Karen Woodruff, with wide eyes, "he did not have one single word with her; Mr. Jardine did not get any talk at all with Tante. Oh, that should have been managed."

But Mrs. Forrester, though granting to his supposed plight a glance of sympathetic concern, was in a hurry to get home and he was, again, spared the necessity of a graceless confession. He piloted them through the crowd, saw them—Miss Woodruff, Mrs. Forrester and Victor,—fitted into Mrs. Forrester's brougham, and then himself got into a hansom. It was still the atmosphere of the dream that hovered about him as he decided at what big fruit-shop he should stop to order a box of nectarines. He wanted her to find them waiting for her in Cornwall. And the very box of nectarines, the globes of sombre red fruit nested in cotton-wool, seemed part of the dream. He knew that he was behaving curiously; but she was, after all, the little Hans Andersen heroine and one needn't think of ordinary customs where she was concerned.

On a chill, sunny morning in April, Gregory Jardine went out on to his balcony before breakfast and stood leaning there as was his wont, looking down over his view. The purpling tree-tops in the park emerged from a light morning mist. The sky, of the palest blue, seemed very high and was streaked with white. Spring was in the air and he could see daffodils shining here and there on the slopes of green.

He had just read Karen Woodruff's last letter, and he was in the mood, charmed, amused and touched, that her letters always brought. Never, he thought, had there been such sweet and such funny letters; so frank and so impersonal; so simple and so mature. During these months of their correspondence the thought of her had been constantly in his mind, mingling now not only with his own deep and distant memories, but, it seemed, with hers, so that while she still walked with him over the hills of his boyhood and stooped to look with him at the spring gushing from under the bracken, they also brushed together the dry, soft snow from the trailing arbutus, or stood above the sea on the Cornish headlands. Never in his life had he so possessed the past and been so aware of it. His youth was with him, even though he still thought of his relation to Karen Woodruff as a paternal and unequal one; imagining a crisis in which his wisdom and knowledge of the world might serve her; a foolish love-affair, perhaps, that he would disentangle; or a disaster connected with the great woman under whose protection she lived; he could so easily imagine disasters befalling Madame von Marwitz and involving everyone around her. And now in a week's time he would be in Cornwall and seeing again the little Hans Andersen heroine. This was the thought that emerged from the sweet vagrancy of his mood; and, as it came, he was pierced suddenly with a strange rapture and fear that had in it the very essence of the spring-time.

Gregory had continued to think of the girl he was to marry in the guise of a Constance Armytage, and although Constance Armytage's engagement to another man found him unmoved, except with relief for the solution of what had really ceased to be a perplexity—since, apparently, he could not manage to fall in love with her—this fact had not been revealing, since he still continued to think of Constance as the type, if she had ceased to be the person. Karen Woodruff was almost the last type he could have fixed upon. She fitted nowhere into his actual life. She only fitted into the life of dreams and memories.

So now, still looking down at the trees and daffodils, he drew a long breath and tried to smile over what had been a trick of the imagination and to relegate Karen to the place of half-humorous dreams. He tried to think calmly of her. He visualized her in her oddity and child-likeness; seeing the flat blue bows of the concert; the old-fashioned gold locket of the tea; the sealskin cap of the station. But still, it was apparent, the infection of the season was working in him; for these trivial bits of her personality had become overwhelmingly sweet and wonderful. The essential Karen infused them. Her limpid grey eyes looked into his. She said, so ridiculously, so adorably: "My guardian likes best to be called von Marwitz by those who know her personally." She laughed, the tip of her tongue caught between her teeth. From the place of dream and memory, the living longing for her actual self emerged indomitably.

Gregory turned from the balcony and went inside. He was dazed. Her primroses stood about the room in the white and blue bowls. He wanted to kiss them. Controlling the impulse, which seemed to him almost insane, he looked at them instead and argued with himself. In love? But one didn't fall in love like that between shaving and breakfast. What possessed him was a transient form of idée fixe, and he had behaved very foolishly in playing fairy-godfather to a dear little girl. But at this relegating phrase his sense of humour rose to mock him. He could not relegate Karen Woodruff as a dear little girl. It was he who had behaved like a boy, while she had maintained the calm simplicities of the mature. He hadn't the faintest right to hope that she saw anything in his correspondence but what she had herself brought to it. Fear fell more strongly upon him. He sat down to his breakfast, his thoughts in inextricable confusion. And while he drank his coffee and glanced nervously down the columns of his newspaper, a hundred little filaments of memory ran back and linked the beginning to the present. It had not been so sudden. It had been there beside him, in him; and he had not seen it. The meeting of their eyes in the long, grave interchange at the concert had been full of presage. And why had he gone to tea at Mrs. Forrester's? And why, above all why, had he dreamed that dream? It was his real self who had felt no surprise when, at the edge of the forest, she had said: "And I love you." The words had been spoken in answer to his love.

Gregory laid down his paper and stared before him. He was in love. Should he get over it? Did he want to get over it? Was it possible to get over it if he did want to? And, this was the culmination, would she have him? These questions drove him forth.

When Barker, his man, came to clear away the breakfast things he found that the bacon and eggs had not been eaten. Barker was a stone-grey personage who looked like a mid-Victorian Liberal statesman. His gravity often passed into an air of despondent responsibility. "Mr. Jardine hasn't eaten his breakfast," he said to his wife, who was Gregory's cook. "It's this engagement of Miss Armytage's. He was more taken with her than we'd thought."

Gregory had intended to motor down to Cornwall, still a rare opportunity in those days; a friend who was going abroad had placed his car at his disposal. But he sent the car ahead of him and, on the first day of his freedom, started by train. Next day he motored over to the little village near the Lizard.

It was a pale, crystalline Spring day. From heights, where the car seemed to poise like a bird in mid-air, one saw the tranquil blue of the sea. The woods were veiled in young green and the hedges thickly starred with blackthorn. Over the great Goonhilly Downs a silvery sheen trembled with impalpable colour and the gorse everywhere was breaking into gold. It was a day of azure, illimitable distances; of exultation and delight. Even if one were not in love one would feel oneself a lover on such a day.

Gregory had told himself that he would be wise; that he would go discreetly and make sure not only that he was really in love, but that there was in his love a basis for life. Marriage must assure and secure his life, not disturb and disintegrate it; and a love resisted and put aside unspoken may soon be relegated to the place of fond and transient dream. Perhaps the little Hans Andersen heroine would settle happily into such a dream. How little he had seen of her. But while he thus schooled himself, while the white roads curved and beckoned and unrolled their long ribbons, the certainties he needed of himself merged more and more into the certainties he needed of her. And he felt his heart, in the singing speed, lift and fly towards the beloved.

He had written to her and told her the hour of his arrival, and at a turning he suddenly saw her standing above the road on one of the stone stiles of the country. Dressed in white and poised against the blue, while she kept watch for his coming, she was like a calm, far-gazing figure-head on a ship, and the ship that bore her seemed to have soared into sight.

She was new, yet unchanged. Her attitude, her smile, as she held up an arresting hand to the chauffeur, filled him with delight and anxiety. It disconcerted him to find how new she was. He felt that he spoke confusedly to her when she came to shake his hand.

"People often lose their way in coming to see Tante," she said, and it struck him, even in the midst of his preoccupation with her, as too sweetly absurd that the first sentence she spoke to him should sound the familiar chime. "They have gone mistakenly down the lane that leads to the cliff path, that one there, or the road that leads out to the moors. And one poor man was quite lost and never found his way to us at all. It meant, for he had only a day or two to spend in England, that he did not see her for another year. Tante has had signs put up since then; but even now people can go wrong."

She mounted beside the chauffeur so that she could guide him down the last bit of road, sitting sideways, her arm laid along the back of the seat. From time to time she smiled at Gregory.

She was a person who accepted the unusual easily and with no personal conjecture. She was so accustomed, no doubt, to the sudden appearance of all sorts of people, that she had no discriminations to apply to his case. There was no shyness and no surmise in her manner. She smiled at him as composedly as she had smiled over the Great Wall of China in Mrs. Forrester's drawing-room, and her pleasure in seeing him was neither less frank nor more intimate.

She wore a broad hat of sun-burnt straw and a white serge coat and skirt that looked as if they had shrunk in frequent washings. Her white blouse had the little frills at neck and wrists and around her throat was the gold locket on its black ribbon. Her eyes, when she turned them on him and smiled, seemed to open distances like the limitlessness of the moorland. Her tawny skin and shining golden hair were like the gorse and primroses and she in her serenity and gladness like the day personified.

They did not attempt to talk through the loudly purring monotones of the car, which picked its way swiftly and delicately down the turning road and then skimmed lightly on the level ground between hedges of fuchsia and veronica. As the prospect opened Karen pointed to the golden shoulder of a headland bathed in sunlight and the horizon line of the sea beyond. They turned among wind-bitten Cornish elms, leaning inland, and Gregory saw among them the glimmer of Les Solitudes.

It was a white-walled house with a high-pitched roof of grey shingles, delicately rippling; a house almost rustic, yet more nearly noble, very beautiful; simple, yet unobtrusively adapted to luxury. Simplicity reigned within, though one felt luxury there in a chrysalis condition, folded exquisitely and elaborately away and waiting the return of the enchantress.

Karen led him across the shining spaces of the hall and into the morning-room. Books, flowers and sunlight seemed to furnish it, and, with something austere and primitive, to make it the most fitting background for herself. But while her presence perfected it for him, it was her guardian's absence that preoccupied Karen. Again, and comically, she reminded Gregory of the sacristan explaining to the sight-seer that the famous altar-piece had been temporarily removed and that he could not really judge the chapel without its culminating and consecrating object. "If only Tante were here!" she said. "It seems so strange that anyone should see Les Solitudes who has not seen her in it. I do not remember that it has ever happened before. This is the dining-room—yes, I like to show it all to you—she planned it all herself, you know—is it not a beautiful room? You see, though we are Les Solitudes, we can seat a large dinner-party and Tante has sometimes many guests; not often though; this is her place of peace and rest. She collected all this Jacobean furniture; connoisseurs say that it is very beautiful. The music-room, alas, is closed; but I will show you the garden—and Mrs. Talcott in it. I am eager for you and Mrs. Talcott to meet."

He would rather have stayed and talked to her in the morning-room; but she compelled him, rather as a sacristan compels the slightly bewildered sight-seer, to pass on to the next point of interest. She led him out to the upper terrace of the garden, which dropped, ledge by ledge, with low walls and winding hedges, down the cliff-side. She pointed out to him the sea-front of the house, with its wide verandah and clustered trees and the beautiful dip of the roof over the upper windows, far gazing little dormer windows above these. Tante, she told him, had designed the house. "That is her room, the corner one," she said. "She can see the sunrise from her bed."

Gregory was interested neither in Madame von Marwitz's advantages nor in her achievements. He asked Karen where her own room was. It was at the back of the house, she said; a dear little room, far up. She, too, had a glimpse of the Eastern headland and of the sunrise.

They were walking along the paths, their borders starred as yet frugally with hints of later glories; but already the aubrietia and arabis made bosses of white or purple on the walls, and in a little copse daffodils grew thickly.

"There is Mrs. Talcott," said Karen, quickening her pace. Evidently she considered Mrs. Talcott, in her relation to Tante, as an important feature of Les Solitudes.

It was her relation to Karen that caused Gregory to look with interest at the stout old lady, dressed in black alpaca, who was stooping over a flower-border at a little distance from them. He had often wondered what this sole companion of Karen's cloistered life was like. Mrs. Talcott's skirts were short; her shoes thick-soled and square-toed, fastening with a strap and button over white stockings at the ankle. She wore a round straw hat, like a child's, and had a basket of gardening implements beside her.

"Mrs. Talcott, here is Mr. Jardine," Karen announced, as they approached her.

Mrs. Talcott raised herself slowly and turned to them, drawing off her gardening gloves. She was a funny looking old woman, funnier than Karen had prepared him for finding her, and uglier. Her large face, wallet-shaped and sallow, was scattered over with white moles, or rather, warts, one of which, on her eyelid, caused it to droop over her eye and to blink sometimes, suddenly. She had a short, indefinite nose and long, large lips firmly folded. With its updrawn hair and impassivity her face recalled that of a Chinese image; but more than of anything else she gave Gregory the impression, vaguely and incongruously tragic, of an old shipwrecked piece of oaken timber, washed up, finally, out of reach of the waves, on some high, lonely beach; battered, though still so solid; salted through and through; crusted with brine, and with odd, bleached excrescences, like barnacles, adhering to it. Her look of almost inhuman cleanliness added force to the simile.

"Mr. Jardine heard Tante last winter, you know," said Karen, "and met her at Mrs. Forrester's."

"I'm very happy to make your acquaintance, Sir," said Mrs. Talcott, giving Gregory her hand.

"Mrs. Talcott is a great gardener," Karen went on. "Tante has the ideas and Mrs. Talcott carries them out. And sometimes they aren't easy to carry out, are they, Mrs. Talcott!"

Mrs. Talcott, her hands folded at her waist, contemplated her work.

"Mitchell made a mistake about the campanulas, Karen," she remarked. "He's put the clump of blue over yonder, instead of the white."

"Oh, Mrs. Talcott!" Karen turned to look. "And Tante specially wanted the white there so that they should be against the sea. How very stupid of Mitchell."

"They'll have to come out, I presume," said Mrs. Talcott, but without emotion.

"And where is the pyramidalis alba?"

"Well, he's got that up in the flagged garden where she wanted the blue," said Mrs. Talcott.

"And it will be so bad for them to move them again! What a pity! They have been sent for specially," Karen explained to Gregory. "My guardian heard of a particularly beautiful kind, and the white were to be for this corner of the wall, you see that they would look very lovely against the sea, and the blue were to be among the white veronica and white lupins in the flagged garden. And now they are all planted wrong, and so accurately and solidly wrong," she walked ahead of Mrs. Talcott examining the offending plants. "Are you quite sure they're wrong, Mrs. Talcott?"

"Dead sure," Mrs. Talcott made reply. "He did it this morning when I was in the dairy. He didn't understand, or got muddled, or something. I'll commence changing them round as soon as I've done this weeding. It'll be a good two hours' work."

"No, you must not do it till I can help you," said Karen. "To-morrow morning." She had a manner at once deferential and masterful of addressing the old lady. They were friendly without being intimate. "Now promise me that you will wait till I can help you."

"Well, I guess I won't promise. I like to get things off my mind right away," said Mrs. Talcott. If Karen was masterful, she was not yielding. "I'll see how the time goes after tea. Don't you bother about it."

They left her bending again over her beds. "She is very strong, but I think sometimes she works too hard," said Karen.

By a winding way she led him to the high flagged garden with its encompassing trees and far blue prospect, and here they sat for a little while in the sunlight and talked. "How different all this must be from your home in Northumberland," said Karen. "I have never been to Northumberland. Is your brother much there? Is he like you? Have you brothers and sisters?"

She questioned him with the frank interest with which he wished to question her. He told her about Oliver and said that he wasn't like himself. A faint flavour of irony came into his voice in speaking of his elder brother and finding Karen's calm eyes dwelling on him he wondered if she thought him unfair. "We always get on well enough," he said, "but we haven't much in common. He is a good, dull fellow, half alive."

"And you are very much alive."

"Yes, on the whole, I think so," he answered, smiling, but sensitively aware of a possible hint of irony in her. But she had intended none. She continued to look at him calmly. "You are making use of all of yourself; that is to be alive, Tante always says; and I feel that it is true of you. And his wife? the wife of the dull hunting brother? Does she hunt too and think of foxes most?"

He could assure her that Betty quite made up in the variety of her activities for Oliver's deficiencies. Karen was interested in the American Betty and especially in hearing that she had been at the concert from which their own acquaintance dated. She asked him, walking back to the house, if he had seen Mrs. Forrester. "She is an old friend of yours, isn't she?" she said.

"That must be nice. She was so kind to me that last day in London. Tante is very fond of her; very, very fond. I hardly think there is anyone of all her friends she has more feeling for. Here is Victor, come to greet you. You remember Victor, and how he nearly missed the train."

The great, benignant dog came down the path to them and as they walked Karen laid her hand upon his head, telling Gregory that Sir Alliston had given him to Tante when he was quite a tiny puppy. "You saw Sir Alliston, that sad, gentle poet? There is another person that Tante loves." It was with a slight stir of discomfort that Gregory realised more fully from these assessments how final for Karen was the question of Tante's likes and dislikes.

They were on the verandah when she paused. "But I think, though the music-room is closed, that you must see the portrait."

"The portrait? Of you?" Actually, and sincerely, he was off the track.

"Of me? Oh no," said Karen, laughing a little. "Why should it be of me? Of my guardian, of course. Perhaps you know it. It is by Sargent and was in the Royal Academy some years ago."

"I must have missed it. Am I to see it now?"

"Yes. I will ask Mrs. Talcott for the key and we will draw all the blinds and you shall see it." They walked back to the garden in search of Mrs. Talcott.

"Do you like it?" Gregory asked.

Karen reflected for a moment and then said; "He understands her better than Mr. Drew does, or, at all events, does not try to make up for what he does not understand by elaborations. But there are blanks!—oh blanks!—However, it is a very magnificent picture and you shall see. Mrs. Talcott, may I have the key of the music-room? I want to show the Sargent to Mr. Jardine."

They had come to the old woman again, and again she slowly righted herself from her stooping posture. "It's in my room, I'll come and get it," said Mrs. Talcott, and on Karen's protesting against this, she observed that it was about tea-time, anyway. She preceded them to the house.

"But I do beg," Karen stopped her in the hall. "Let me get it. You shall tell me where it is."

Mrs. Talcott yielded. "In my left top drawer on the right hand side under the pile of handkerchiefs," she recited. "Thanks, Karen."

While Karen was gone, Mrs. Talcott in the hall stood in front of Gregory and looked past him in silence into the morning-room. She did not seem to feel it in any sense incumbent upon her to entertain him, though there was nothing forbidding in her manner. But happening presently, while they waited, to glance at the droll old woman, he found her eyes fixed on him in a singularly piercing, if singularly impassive, gaze. She looked away again with no change of expression, shifting her weight from one hip to the other, and something in the attitude suggested to Gregory that she had spent a great part of her life in waiting. She had a capacity, he inferred, for indefinite waiting. Karen came happily running down the stairs, holding the key.

They went into the dim, white room where swathed presences stood as if austerely welcoming them. Karen drew up the blind and Mrs. Talcott, going to the end of the room, mounted a chair and dexterously twitched from its place the sheet that covered the great portrait. Then, standing beside it, and still holding its covering, she looked, not at it, but, meditatively, out at the sea that crossed with its horizon line the four long windows. Karen, also in silence, came and stood beside Gregory.

It was indeed a remarkable picture; white and black; silver and green. To a painter's eye the arresting balance of these colours would have first appealed and the defiant charm with which the angular surfaces of the grand piano and the soft curves of the woman seated at it were combined. The almost impalpable white of an azalea with its flame-green foliage, and a silver statuette, poised high on a slender column of white chalcedony, were the only accessories. But after the first delighted draught of wonder it was the face of Madame Okraska—pre-eminently Madame Okraska in this portrait—that compelled one to concentration. She sat, turning from the piano, her knees crossed, one arm cast over them, the other resting along the edge of the key-board. The head drooped slightly and the eyes looked out just below the spectator's eyes, so that in poise and glance it recalled somewhat Michael Angelo's Lorenzo da Medici. And something that Gregory had felt in her from the first, and that had roused in him dim hostilities and ironies, was now more fully revealed. The artist seemed to have looked through the soft mask of the woman's flesh, through the disturbing and compelling forces of her own consciousness, to the very structure and anatomy of her character. Atavistic, sub-conscious revelations were in the face. It was to see, in terms of art, a scientific demonstration of race, temperament, and the results of their interplay with environment. The languors, the feverish indolences, the caprice of generations of Spanish exiles were there, and the ambiguity, the fierceness of Slav ancestry. And, subtly interwoven, were the marks of her public life upon her. The face, so moulded to indifference, was yet so aware of observation, so adjusted to it, so insatiable of it, that, sitting there, absorbed and brooding, lovely with her looped pearls and diamonds, her silver broideries and silken fringes, she was a product of the public, a creature reared on adulation, breathing it in softly, peacefully, as the white flowers beside her breathed in light and air. Her craftsmanship, her genius, though indicated, were submerged in this pervasive quality of an indifference based securely on the ever present consciousness that none could be indifferent to her. And more than the passive acceptance and security was indicated. Strange, sleeping potentialities lurked in the face; as at the turn of a kaleidoscope, Gregory could fancy it suddenly transformed, by some hostile touch, some menace, to a savage violence and rapacity. He was aware, standing between the girl who worshipped her and the devoted old woman, of the pang of a curious anxiety.

"Well," said Karen at last, and she looked from the picture to him. "What do you think of it?"

"It's splendid," said Gregory. "It's very fine. And beautiful."

"But does it altogether satisfy you?" Her eyes were again on the portrait. "What is lacking, I cannot say; but it seems to me that it is painted with intelligence only, not with love. It is Madame Okraska, the great genius; but it is not Tante; it is not even Madame von Marwitz."

The portrait seemed to Gregory to go so much further and so much deeper than what he had himself seen that it was difficult to believe that hers might be the deepest vision, but he was glad to take refuge in the possibility. "It does seem to me wonderfully like," he said. "But then I don't know 'Tante.'"

Karen now glanced at Mrs. Talcott. "It is a great bone of contention between us," she said, smiling at the old lady, yet smiling, Gregory observed, with a touch of challenge. "She feels it quite complete. That, in someone who does know Tante, I cannot understand."

Mrs. Talcott, making no reply, glanced up at the portrait and then, again, out at the sea.

Gregory looked at her with awakened curiosity. This agreement was an unexpected prop for him. "You, too, think it a perfect likeness?" he asked her. Her old blue eyes, old in the antique tranquillity of their regard, yet still of such a vivid, unfaded turquoise, turned on him and again he had that impression of an impassive piercing.

"It seems to me about as good a picture as anyone's likely to get," said Mrs. Talcott.

"Yes, but, oh Mrs. Talcott"—with controlled impatience Karen took her up—"surely you see,—it isn't Tante. It is a genius, a great woman, a beautiful woman, a beautiful and poetic creature, of course;—he has seen all that—who wouldn't? but it is almost a woman without a heart. There is something heartless there. I always feel it. And when one thinks of Tante!" And Mrs. Talcott remaining silent, she insisted: "Can you really say you don't see what I mean?"

"Well, I never cared much about pictures anyway," Mrs. Talcott now remarked.

"Well, but you care for this one more than I do!" Karen returned, with a laugh of vexation. "It isn't a question of pictures; it's a question of a likeness. You really think that this does Tante justice? It's that I can't understand."

Mrs. Talcott, thus pursued, again looked up at the portrait, and continued, now, to look at it for several moments. And as she stood there, looking up, she suddenly and comically reminded Gregory of the Frog gardener before the door in "Alice," with his stubborn and deliberate misunderstanding. He could almost have expected to see Mrs. Talcott advance her thumb and rub the portrait, as if to probe the cause of her questioner's persistence. When she finally spoke it was only to vary her former judgment: "It seems to me about as good a picture as Mercedes is likely to get taken," she said. She pronounced the Spanish name: "Mursadees."

Karen, after this, abandoned her attempt to convince Mrs. Talcott. Tea was ready, and they went into the morning-room. Here Mrs. Talcott presided at the tea-table, and for all his dominating preoccupation she continued to engage a large part of Gregory's attention. She sat, leaning back in her chair, slowly eating, her eyes, like tiny, blue stones, immeasurably remote, immeasurably sad, fixed on the sea.

"Is it long since you were in America?" he asked her. He felt drawn to Mrs. Talcott.

"Why, I guess it's getting on for twenty-five years now," she replied, after considering for a moment; "since I've lived there. I've been over three or four times with Mercedes; on tours."

"Twenty-five years since you came over here? That is a long time."

"Oh, it's more than that since I came," said Mrs. Talcott. "Twenty-five years since I lived at home. I came over first nearly fifty years ago. Yes; it's a long time."

"Dear me; you have lived most of your life here, then."

"Yes; you may say I have."

"And don't you ever want to go back to America to stay?"

"I don't know as I do," said Mrs. Talcott.

"You're fonder of it over here, like so many of your compatriots?"

"Well, I don't know as I am," Mrs. Talcott, who had a genius it seemed for non-committal statements, varied; and then, as though aware that her answers might seem ungracious, she added: "All my folks are dead. There's no reason for my wanting to go home that I can think of."

"Besides, Mrs. Talcott," Karen now helped her on, "home to you is where Tante is, isn't it. Mrs. Talcott has lived with Tante ever since Tante was born. No one in the world knows her as well as she does. It is rather wonderful to think about." She had the air, finding Mrs. Talcott appreciated, of putting forward for her her great claim to distinction.

"Yes; I know Mercedes pretty well," Mrs. Talcott conceded.

"How I love to hear about it," said Karen; "about her first concert, you know, Mrs. Talcott, when you curled her hair—such long, bright brown hair, she had, and so thick, falling below her waist, didn't it?" Mrs. Talcott nodded with a certain complacency. "And she wore a little white muslin frock and white shoes and a blue sash; she was only nine years old; it was a great concert in Warsaw. And she didn't want her hair curled, and combed it all out with her fingers just before going on to the platform—didn't she?"

Mrs. Talcott was slightly smiling over these reminiscences. "Smart little thing," she commented. "She did it the last minute so as it was too late for me to fix it again. It made me feel dreadful her going on to the platform with her head all mussed up like that. She looked mighty pretty all the same."

"And she was right, too, wasn't she?" said Karen, elated, evidently, at having so successfully drawn Mrs. Talcott out. "Her hair was never curly, was it. It looked better straight, I'm sure."

"Well, I don't know about that," said Mrs. Talcott. "I always like it curled best, when she was little. But I had to own to myself she looked mighty pretty, though I was so mad at her."

"Tante has always had her own way, I imagine," said Karen, "about anything she set her mind on. She had her way about being an infant prodigy; though you were so right about that—she has often said so, hasn't she, and how thankful she is that you were able to stop it before it did her harm. I must show you our photographs of Tante, Mr. Jardine. We have volumes and volumes, and boxes and boxes of them. They are far more like her, I think, many of them, than the portrait. Some of them too dear and quaint—when she was quite tiny."

Tea was over and Karen, rising, looked towards the shelves where, evidently, the volumes and boxes were kept.

"I really think I'd rather see some more of this lovely place, first," said Gregory. "Do take me further along the cliff. I could see the photographs, you know, the next time I come."

He, too, had risen and was smiling at her with a little constraint.

Karen, arrested on her way to the photographs, looked at him in surprise. "Will you come again? You are to be in Cornwall so long?"

"I'm to be here about a fortnight and I should like to come often, if I may." She was unaware, disconcertingly unaware; yet her surprise showed the frankest pleasure.

"How very nice," she said. "I did not think that you could come all that way more than once."

While they spoke, Mrs. Talcott's ancient, turquoise eyes were upon them, and in her presence Gregory found it easier to say things than it would have been to say them to Karen alone. Already, he felt sure, Mrs. Talcott understood, and if it was easy to say things in her presence might that not be because he guessed that she sympathised? "But I came down to Cornwall to see you," he said, leaning on his chair back and tilting it a little while he smiled at Karen.

Her pleasure rose in a flush to her cheek. "To see me?"

"Yes; I felt from our letters that we ought to become great friends."