Gregory went down to Cornwall again only nine days after he had left it. He and Karen met as if under an arch of infinite blessings. He had his cable to show her and she hers to show him, and, although Gregory did not see them as the exquisite documents that Karen felt them to be, they did for him all that he asked Madame von Marwitz to do.

"I give her to you. Be worthy of my trust. Mercedes von Marwitz"—his read. And Karen's: "I could only yield you to a greater joy than you can find with me—but it could not be to a greater love. Do not forget me in your happiness. You are mine, my beloved child, not less but more than ever.—Tante."

Karen's joy was unshadowed. It made him think of primroses and crystal springs. She was not shy; he was shyer than she, made a little dumb, a little helpless, by his man's reverence, his man's awed sense of the beloved's dawn-like wonder. She was not changed; any change in Karen would come as quiet growth, not as transformation. Gregory's gladness had not this simplicity. It revealed to him a new world, a world newly beautiful but newly perilous, and a changed self,—the self of boyhood, renewed yet transformed, through whose joy ran the reactionary melancholy that, in a happiness attained, glances at fear, and at a climax of life, is aware of gulfs of sorrow as yet unsounded. More than his lover's passion was a tenderness for her and for her unquestioning acceptances that seemed near tears. Karen was in character so wrought and in nature so simple. Her subtleties were all objective, subtleties of sympathy, of recognition, of adaptation to the requirements of devoted action; her simplicity was that of a whole-heartedness unaware at high moments of all but the essential.

She had to tell him fully, holding his hand and looking into his eyes, all about her side of it; what she had thought when she saw him at the concert—certain assumptions there gave Gregory his stir of uneasiness—"You were caring just as much as I was—in the same way—for her music"; what she had thought at Mrs. Forrester's, and at the railway station, and when the letters went on and on. She had of course seen what was coming that evening after they had been to the Lavington's; "When you didn't understand about me and Tante, you know; and I made you understand." And then he had made her understand how much he cared for her and she for him; only it had all come so quietly; "I did not think a great deal about it, or wonder; it sank into me—like stars one sees in a still lake, so that next day it was no surprise at all, when you told me; it was like looking up and seeing all the real stars in the sky. Afterwards it was dreadful for a little while, wasn't it?" Karen held his hand for a moment to her cheek.

When all the past had been looked at together, Gregory asked her if she would not marry him quite soon; he hoped, indeed, that it might be within the month. "You see, why not?" he said. "I miss you so dreadfully and I can't be here; and why should you be? Let me come down and marry you in that nice little church on the other side of the village as soon as our banns can be called."

But, for the first time, a slight anxiety showed in her eyes. "I miss you dreadfully, too," she said. "But you forget, Tante will not be back till July. We must wait for Tante, Gregory. We are in May now, it is not so far to July. You will not mind too much?"

He felt, sitting under the arch of blessings as he was, that it would be most ungrateful and inappropriate to mind. But then, he said, if they must put it off like that, Karen would have to come to London. She must come and stay with Betty. "And get your trousseau"; this was a brilliant idea. "You'll have to get your trousseau, you know, and Betty is an authority on clothes."

"Oh, but clothes. I never have clothes in that sense," said Karen. "A little seamstress down here makes most of them and Louise helps her sometimes if she has time. Tante gave me twenty pounds before she went away; would twenty pounds do for a trousseau?"

"Betty would think twenty pounds just about enough for your gloves and stockings, I imagine," said Gregory.

"And will you expect me to be so luxurious? You are not rich? We shall not live richly?"

"I'm not at all rich; but I want you to have pretty things—layers and layers of the nice, white, soft things brides always have, and a great many new hats and dresses. Couldn't I give you a little tip—to begin the trousseau?"

"Ah, it can wait, can't it?" said Karen easily. "No; you can't give me a tip. Tante, I am sure, will see that I have a nice trousseau. She may even give me a little dot when I marry. I have no money at all; not one penny, you know. Do you mind?"

"I'd far rather have you without a penny because I want to give you everything. If Tante doesn't give you the little dot, I shall."

Karen was pondering a little seriously. "I don't know what Tante will feel since you have enough for us both. It was when she wished me to marry Franz that she spoke of a dot. And Franz is of course very poor and has a great family of brothers and sisters to help support. You will know Franz one day. You did not speak very nicely of Franz that time, you know; that was another reason why I thought you were so angry. And it made me angry, too," said Karen, smiling at him.

"Wasn't I nice? I am sure Franz is."

"Oh, so good and kind and true. And very talented. And his mother would be a wonderful musician if she had not so many children to take care of; that has harmed her music. And she, too, is a golden-hearted person; she used often to help me with my dresses. Do you remember that little white silk dress of mine? perhaps so; I wore it at the concert, such a pretty dress, I think. Frau Lippheim helped me with that—she and a little German seamstress in Leipsig. I see us now, all bending over the rustling silk, round the table with the lamp on it. We had to make it so quickly. Tante had sent for me to come to her in Vienna and I had nothing to wear at the great concert she was to give. We sat up till twelve to finish it. Franz and Lotta cooked our supper for us and we only stopped long enough to eat. Dear Frau Lippheim. Some day you will know all the Lippheims."

He listened to her with dreamy, amused delight, seeing her bending in the ugly German room over the little white silk dress and only vaguely aware of the queer figures she put before him. He had no inclination to know Franz and his mother, and no curiosity about them. But Karen continued. "That is the one, the only thing I can give you," she said, reflecting. "You know so few artists, don't you; so few people of talent. As to people, your life is narrow, isn't it so? I have met so many great people in my life, first through my father and then through Tante. Painters, poets, musicians. You will probably know them now, too; some of them certainly, for some are also friends of mine. Strepoff, for example; oh—how I shall like you to meet him. You have read him, of course, and about his escape from Siberia and his long exile."

"Strepoff? Yes, I think so. A dismal sort of fellow, isn't he?"

Gregory's delight was merging now in a more definite amusement, tinged, it may be confessed, with alarm. He remembered to have seen a photograph of this celebrity, very turbulently haired and very fixed and fiery of eye. He remembered a large bare throat and a defiant neck-tie. He had no wish to make Strepoff's acquaintance. It was quite enough to read about him in the magazines and admire his exploits from a distance.

"Dismal?" Karen had repeated, with a touch of severity. "Who would not be after such a life? Yes, he is a sad man, and the thought of Russia never leaves him. But he is full of gaiety, too. He spent some months with us two years ago at the Italian lakes and I grew so fond of him. We had great jokes together, he and I. And he sometimes writes to me now, such teasing, funny letters. The last was from San Francisco. He is giving lectures out there, raising money; for he never ceases the struggle. He calls me Liebchen. He is very fond of me."

"What do you call him?" Gregory inquired.

"Just Strepoff; everybody calls him that. Dear Belot, too," Karen pursued. "He could not fail to interest you. Perhaps you have already met him. He has been in London."

"Belot? Does he write poetry?"

"Poetry? No. Belot is a painter; a great painter. Surely you have heard of Belot?"

"Well, I'm afraid that if I have I've forgotten. You see, as you say, I live so out of the world of art."

"Did you not see his portrait of Susanne Mauret—the great French actress? It has been exhibited through all the world."

"Of course I have. Belot of course. The impressionist painter. It looked to me, I confess, awfully queer; but I could see that it was very clever."

"Impressionist? No; Belot would not rank himself among the impressionists. And he would not like to hear his work called clever; I warn you of that. He has a horror of cleverness. It was not a clever picture, but sober, strange, beautiful. Well, I know Belot and his wife quite intimately. They are great friends of the Lippheims, too, and call themselves the Franco-Prussian alliance. Madame Belot is a dear little woman. You must have often seen his pictures of her and the children. He has numbers of children and adores them. La petite Margot is my special pet and she always sends me a little present on my birthday. Madame Belot was once his model," Karen added, "and is quite du peuple, and I believe that some of his friends were sorry that he married her; but she makes him very happy. That beautiful nude in the Luxembourg by Chantefoy is of her—long before she married, of course. She does not sit for the ensemble now, and indeed I fear it has lost all its beauty, for she is very fat. It would be nice to go to Paris on our wedding-tour and see the Belots," said Karen.

Gregory made an evasive answer. He reflected that once he had married her it would probably be easy to detach Karen from these most undesirable associates. He hoped that she would take to Betty. Betty would be an excellent antidote. "And you think your sister-in-law will want me?" said Karen, when he brought her from the Belots back to Betty. "She doesn't know me."

"She must begin to know you as soon as possible. You will have Mrs. Forrester at hand, you see, if my family should oppress you too much. Barring Betty, who hardly counts as one of them, they aren't interesting, I warn you."

"I may oppress them," said Karen, with the shrewdness that often surprised him. "Who will they take refuge with?"

"Oh, they have all London to fall back upon. They do nothing when they're up but go out. That's my plan; that they should leave you a good deal when they go out, and leave you to me."

"That will be nice," said Karen. "But Mrs. Forrester, you know," she went on, "is not exactly an intimate of mine that I could fall back upon. I am, in her eyes, only a little appendage of Tante's."

"Ah, but you have ceased, now, to be an appendage of Tante's. And Mrs. Forrester is an intimate, an old one, of mine."

"She'll take me in as your appendage," Karen smiled.

"Not at all. It's you, now, who are the person to whom the appendage belongs. I'm your appendage. That quite alters the situation. You will have to stand in the foreground and do all the conventional things."

"Shall I?" smiled Karen, unperturbed. She was, as he knew, not to be disconcerted by any novel social situation. She had witnessed so many situations and such complicated ones that the merely conventional were, in her eyes, relatively insignificant and irrevelant. There would be for her none of the débutante's sense of awkwardness or insufficiency. Again she reminded him of the rustic little princess, unaware of alien customs, and ready to learn and to laugh at her own blunders.

It was arranged, Mrs. Talcott's appearance helping to decisions, that as soon as Karen heard from her guardian, who might have plans to suggest, she should come up to London and stay with Lady Jardine.

Mrs. Talcott, on entering, had grasped Gregory's hand and shaken it vigorously, remarking: "I'm very pleased to see you back again."

"I didn't tell Mrs. Talcott anything, Gregory," said Karen. "But I am sure she guessed."

"Mrs. Talcott and I had our understandings," said Gregory, "but I'm sure she guessed from the moment she saw me down here. She was much quicker than you, Karen."

"I've seen a good many young folks in my time," Mrs. Talcott conceded.

Gregory's sense of the deepened significance in all things lent a special pathos to his conjectures to-day about Mrs. Talcott. He did not know how far her affection for Karen went and whether it were more than the mere kindly solicitude of the aged for the young; but the girl's presence in her life must give at least interest and colour, and after Mrs. Talcott had spoken her congratulations and declared that she believed they'd be real happy together, he said, the idea striking him as an apt one, "And Mrs. Talcott, you must come up and stay with us in London sometimes, won't you?"

"Oh, Mrs. Talcott—yes, yes;" said Karen, delighted. He had never seen her kiss Mrs. Talcott, but she now clasped her arm, standing beside her. Mrs. Talcott did not smile; but, after a moment, the aspect of her face changed; it always took some moments for Mrs. Talcott's expression to change. Now it was like seeing the briny old piece of shipwrecked oak mildly illuminated with sunlight on its lonely beach.

"That's real kind of you; real kind," said Mrs. Talcott reflectively. "I don't expect I'll get up there. I'm not much of a traveller these days. But it's real kind of you to have thought of it."

"But it must be," Karen declared. "Only think; I should pour out your coffee for you in the morning, after all these years when you've poured out mine; and we would walk in the park—Gregory's flat overlooks the park you know—and we would drive in hansoms—don't you like hansoms—and go to the play in the evening. But yes, indeed, you shall come."

Mrs. Talcott listened to these projects, still with her mild illumination, remarking when Karen had done, "I guess not, Karen; I guess I'll stay here. I've been moving round considerable all my life long and now I expect I'll just stay put. There's no one to look after things here but me and they'd get pretty muddled if I was away, I expect. Mitchell isn't a very bright man."

"The real difficulty is," said Karen, holding Mrs. Talcott's arm and looking at her with affectionate exasperation, "that she doesn't like to leave Les Solitudes lest she should miss a moment of Tante. Tante sometimes turns up almost at a moment's notice. We shall have to get Tante safely away to Russia, or America again, before we can ask you; isn't that the truth, Mrs. Talcott?"

"Well, I don't know. Perhaps there's something in it," Mrs. Talcott admitted. "Mercedes likes to know I'm here seeing to things. She mightn't feel easy in her mind if I was away."

"We'll lay it before her, then," said Karen. "I know she will say that you must come."

It was not until some three weeks after that Karen paid her visit to London. Tante had not written at once and Gregory had to control his discontent and impatience as best he might. He and Karen wrote to each other every day and he was aware of a fretful anxiety in his letters which contrasted strangely with the serenity of hers. Once more she made him feel that she was the more mature. In his brooding imaginativeness he was like the most youthful of lovers, seeing his treasure menaced on every hand by the hazards of life. He warned Karen against cliff-edges; he warned her, now that motors were every day becoming more common, against their sudden eruption in "cornery" lanes; he begged her repeatedly to keep safe and sound until he could himself take care of her. Karen replied with sober reassurances and promises and showed no corresponding alarms on his behalf. She had, evidently, more confidence in the law of probability.

She wired at last to say that she had heard from Tante and would come up next day if Lady Jardine could have her at such short notice. Gregory had made his arrangements with Betty, who showed a most charming sympathy for his situation, and when, at the station, he saw Karen's face smiling at him from a window, when he seized her arm and drew her forth, it was with a sense of relief and triumph as great as though she were restored to him after actual perils.

"Darling, it has seemed such ages," he said.

He was conscious, delightedly, absorbedly, of everything about her. She wore her little straw hat with the black bow and a long hooded cape of thin grey cloth. In her hand she held a small basket containing her knitting—she was knitting him a pair of golf stockings—and a book.

He piloted her to the cab he had in waiting. Her one small shabby box was put on the top and a very large dressing-case, curiously contrasting in its battered and discoloured magnificence with the box, placed inside; it was a discarded one of Madame von Marwitz's, as its tarnished initials told him. It was only as the cab rolled out of the station, after he had kissed Karen and was holding her hand, that he realized that she was far less aware of him than he of her. Not that she was not glad; she sighed deeply with content, smiling at him, holding his hand closely; but there was a shadow of preoccupation on her.

"Tell me, darling, is everything all right?" he asked. "You have had good news from your guardian?"

She said nothing for a moment, looking out of the window, and then back at him. Then she said: "She is beautiful to me. But I have made her sad."

"Made her sad? Why have you made her sad?" Gregory suppressed—only just suppressed—an indignant note.

"I did not think of it myself," said Karen. "I didn't think of her side at all, I'm afraid, because I did not realise how much I was to her. But you remember what I told you I was, the little home thing; I am that even more deeply than I had thought; and she feels—dear, dear one—that that is gone from her, that it can never be the same again." She turned her eyes from him and the tears gathered thickly in them.

"But, dearest," said Gregory, "she can't want to make you sad, can she? She must really be glad to have you happy. She herself wanted you to get married, and had found Franz Lippheim for you, you know." Instinct warned him to go carefully.

Karen shook her head with a little impatience. "One may be glad to have someone happy, yet sad for oneself. She is sad. Very, very sad."

"May I see her letter?" Gregory asked after a moment, and Karen, hesitating, then drew it from the pocket of her cloak, saying, as she handed it to him, and as if to atone for the impatience, "It doesn't make me love you any less—you understand that, dear Gregory—because she is sad. It only makes me feel, in my own happiness, how much I love her."

Gregory read. The address was "Belle Vue."

Gregory read, and instinctively, while he read, he glanced at Karen, steadying his face lest she should guess from its tremor of contempt how latent antagonisms hardened to a more ironic dislike. But Karen gazed from the window—grave, preoccupied. Such suspicions were far indeed from her. Gregory could give himself to the letter and its intimations undiscovered. Suffering? Perhaps Madame von Marwitz was suffering; but she had no business to say it. Forgive him indeed; well, if those were the terms of forgiveness, he promised himself that he should deserve it. Meanwhile he must conceal his resentment.

"I'm so sorry, darling," he said, giving the letter back to Karen. "We shall have to cheer her up, shan't we? When she sees how very happy you are with me I am sure she'll feel happier." He wasn't at all sure.

"I don't know, Gregory. I am afraid that my happiness cannot make her less lonely."

Karen's griefs were not to be lightly dispersed. But she was not a person to enlarge upon them. After another moment she pointed out something from the window and laughed; but the unshadowed gladness that he had imagined for their meeting was overcast.

Betty awaited them with tea in her Pont Street drawing-room, a room of polished, glittering, softly lustrous surfaces. Precious objects stood grouped on little Empire tables or ranged in Empire cabinets. Flat, firm cushions of rose-coloured satin stood against the backs of Empire chairs and sofas. On the walls were French engravings and a delicate portrait of Betty done at the time of her marriage by Boutet de Monvel. The room, like Betty herself, combined elegance and cordiality.

"I was there, you know, at the very beginning," she said, taking Karen's hands and scanning her with her jewel-like eyes. "It was love at first sight. He asked who you were at once and I'm pleased to think that it was I who gave him his first information. Now that I look back upon it," said Betty, taking her place at the tea-table and holding Karen still with her bright and friendly gaze, "I remember that he was far more interested in you than in anything else that evening. I don't believe that Madame Okraska existed for him." Betty was drawing on her imagination in a manner that she took for granted to be pleasing.

"I should be sorry to think that," Karen observed and Gregory was relieved to see that she did not take Betty's supposition seriously. She watched her pretty hands move among the teacups with an air of pleased interest.

"Would you really? You would want him to retain all his æsthetic faculties even while he was falling in love? Do you think one could?" Betty asked her questions smiling. "Or perhaps you think that one would fall in love the more securely from listening to Madame Okraska at the same time. I think perhaps I should. I do admire her so much. I hope now that some day I shall know her. She must be, I am sure, as lovely as she looks."

"Yes, indeed," said Karen. "And you will meet her very soon, you see, for she comes back in July."

Gregory sat and listened to their talk, satisfied that they were to get on, yet with a slight discomfort. Betty questioned and Karen replied, unaware that she revealed aspects of her past that Betty might not interpret as she would feel it natural that they should be interpreted, supremely unaware that any criticism could attach itself to her guardian as a result of these revelations. Yes; she had met so-and-so and this and that, in Rome, in Paris, in London or St. Petersburg; but no, evidently, she could hardly say that she knew any of these people, friends of Tante's though they were. The ambiguity of her status as little camp-follower became defined for Betty's penetrating and appraising eyes and the inappropriateness of the letter, with its broken-hearted maternal tone, returned to Gregory with renewed irony. He didn't want to share with Betty his hidden animosities and once or twice, when her eye glanced past Karen and rested reflectively upon himself, he knew that Betty was wondering how much he saw and how he liked it. The Lippheims again made their socially unillustrious appearance; Karen had so often stayed with them before Les Solitudes had been built and while Tante travelled with Mrs. Talcott; she had never stayed—Gregory was thankful for small mercies—with the Belots; Tante, after all, had her own definite discriminations; she would not have placed Karen in the charge of Chantefoy's lady of the Luxembourg, however reputable her present position; but Gregory was uneasy lest Karen should disclose how simply she took Madame Belot's past. The fact that Karen's opportunities in regard to dress were so obviously haphazard, coming up with the question of the trousseau, was somewhat atoned for by the sum that Madame von Marwitz now sent—Gregory had forgotten to ask the amount. "A hundred pounds," said Betty cheerfully; "Oh, yes; we can get you very nicely started on that."

"Tante seems to think," said Karen, "that I shall have to be very gay and have a great many dresses; but I hope it will not have to be so very much. I am fond of quiet things."

"Well, especially at first, I suppose you will have a good many dinners and dances; Gregory is fond of dancing, you know. But I don't think you lead such a taxing social life, do you, Gregory? You are a rather sober person, aren't you?"

"That is what I thought," said Karen. "For I am sober, too, and I want to read so many things, in the evening, you know, Gregory. I want to read Political Economy and understand about politics; Tante does not care for politics, but she always finds me too ignorant of the large social questions. You will teach me all that, won't you? And we must hear so much music; and travel, too, in your holidays; I do not see how we can have much time for many dinners. As for dances, I do not know how to dance; would that make any difference, when you went? I could sit and look on, couldn't I?"

"No, indeed; you can't sit and look on; you'll have to dance with me," said Gregory. "I will teach you dancing as well as Political Economy. She must have lessons, mustn't she, Betty? Of course you must learn to dance."

"I do not think I shall learn easily," Karen said, smiling from him to Betty. "I do not think I should do you credit in a ballroom. But I will try, of course."

Gregory was quite prepared for Betty's probes when Karen went upstairs to her room. "What a dear she is, Gregory," she said; "and how clever it was of you to find her, hidden away as she has been. I suppose the life of a great musician doesn't admit of formalities. She never had time to introduce, as it were, her adopted daughter."

"Well, no; a great musician could hardly take an adopted or a real daughter around to dances; and Karen isn't exactly adopted."

"No, I see." Betty's eyes sounded him. "She is really very nice I suppose, Madame von Marwitz? You like her very much? Mrs. Forrester dotes upon her, of course; but Mrs. Forrester is an enthusiast."

"And I'm not, as you know," Gregory returned, he flattered himself, with skill. "I don't think that I shall ever dote on Madame von Marwitz. When I know her I hope to like her very much. At present I hardly know her better than you do."

"Ah—but you must know a great deal about her from Karen," said Betty, who could combine tact with pertinacity; "but she, too, in that respect, is an enthusiast, I suppose."

"Well, naturally. It's been a wonderful relationship. You remember you felt that so much in telling me about Karen at the very first."

"Of course; and it's all true, isn't it; the forest and all the rest of it. Only, not having met Karen, one didn't realize how much Madame von Marwitz was in luck." Betty, it was evident, had already begun to wonder whether Tante was as lovely as she looked.

"Dear Mrs. Forrester, you know that I worship the ground she treads on," said Miss Scrotton; "but it can't be denied—can you deny it?—that Mercedes is capricious."

It was one day only after Miss Scrotton's return from America and she had returned alone, and it was to this fact that she alluded rather than to the more general results of Madame von Marwitz's sudden postponement. Owing to the postponement, Karen to-day was being married in Cornwall without her guardian's presence. Miss Scrotton had touched on that. She had said that she didn't think Mercedes would like it, she had added that she couldn't herself, however inconvenient delay might have been, understand how Karen and Gregory could have done it. But she had not at first much conjecture to give to the bridal pair. It was upon the fact that Mercedes, at the last moment, had thrown all plans overboard, that she dwelt, with a nipped and tightened utterance and a gaze, fixed on the wall above the tea-table, almost tragic. Mrs. Forrester was the one person in whom she could confide. It was through Mrs. Forrester that she had met Mercedes; her devotion to Mercedes constituted to Mrs. Forrester, as she was aware, her chief merit. Not that Mrs. Forrester wasn't fond of her; she had been fond of her ever since, as a relative of the Jardines' and a precociously intelligent little girl who had published a book on Port-Royal at the age of eighteen, she had first attracted her attention at a literary tea-party. But Mrs. Forrester would not have sat so long or listened so patiently to any other theme than the one that so absorbed them both and that so united them in their absorption. Miss Scrotton even suspected that a tinge of bland and kindly pity coloured Mrs. Forrester's readiness to sympathize. She must know Mercedes well enough to know that she could give her devotees bad half hours, though the galling thing was to suspect that Mrs. Forrester was one of the few people to whom she wouldn't give them. Mrs. Forrester might worship as devoutly as anybody, yet her devotion never let her in for so much forbearance and sacrifice. Perhaps, poor Miss Scrotton worked it out, the reason was that to Mrs. Forrester Mercedes was but one among many, whereas to herself Mercedes was the central prize and treasure. Mrs. Forrester was incapable of a pang of jealousy or emulation; she was always delighted yet never eager. When, in the first flow of intimacy with Mercedes, Miss Scrotton had actually imagined, for an ecstatic and solemn fortnight, that she stood first with her, Mrs. Forrester had met her air of irrepressible triumph with a geniality in which was no trace of grievance or humiliation. The downfall had been swift; Mercedes had snubbed her one day, delicately and accurately, in Mrs. Forrester's presence, and Miss Scrotton's cheek still burned when she remembered it. There were thus all sorts of unspoken things between her and Mrs. Forrester, and not the least of them was that her folly should have endeared her. Miss Scrotton at once chafed against and relied upon her old friend's magnanimity. Her intercourse with her was largely made up of a gloomy demand for sympathy and a stately evasion of it.

Mrs. Forrester now poured her out a second cup of tea, answering, soothingly, "Yes, she is capricious. But what do you expect, my dear Eleanor? She is a force of nature, above our little solidarities and laws. What do you expect? When one worships a force of nature, il faut subir son sort." It was kind of Mrs. Forrester to include herself in these submissions.

"I had really built all my summer about the plans that we had made," Miss Scrotton said. "Mercedes was to have come back with me, I was to have stopped in Cornwall for Karen's marriage and after my month here in London I was to have joined her at Les Solitudes for August. Now August is empty and I had refused more than one very pleasant invitation in order to go to Mercedes. She isn't coming back for another three months."

"You didn't care to go with the Aspreys to the Adirondacks?"

"How could I go, dear Mrs. Forrester, when I was full of engagements here in London for July? And, moreover, they didn't ask me. It is rather curious when one comes to think of it. I brought the Aspreys and Mercedes together, I gave her to them, one may say, but, I am afraid I must own it, they seized her and looked upon me as a useful rung in the ladder that reached her. It has been a disillusionizing experience, I can't deny it; but passons for the Aspreys and their kind. The fact is," said Miss Scrotton, dropping her voice a little, "the real fact is, dear Mrs. Forrester, that the Aspreys aren't responsible. It wasn't for them she'd have stayed, and I think they must realize it. No, it is all Claude Drew. He is at the bottom of everything that I feel as strange and altered in Mercedes. He has an unholy influence over her, oh, yes, I mean it, Mrs. Forrester. I have never seen Mercedes so swayed before."

"Swayed?" Mrs. Forrester questioned.

"Oh, but yes, indeed. He managed the whole thing—and when I think that he would in all probability never have seen the Aspreys if it had not been for me!—Mercedes had him asked there, you know; they are very, but very, very fashionable people, they know everybody worth knowing all over the world. I needn't tell you that, of course. But it was all arranged, he and Mercedes, and Lady Rose and the Marquis de Hautefeuille, and a young American couple—with the Aspreys in the background as universal providers—it made a little group where I was plainly de trop. Mr. Drew planned everything with her. She is to have her piano and he is to write a book under her aegis. And they are to live in the pinewoods with the most elaborate simplicity. However, I am sure the Adirondacks will soon bore her."

"And how soon will Mr. Drew bore her?" asked Mrs. Forrester, who had listened to these rather pitiful revelations with, now and then, a slight elevation of her intelligent eyebrows.

The question gave Miss Scrotton an opportunity for almost ominous emphasis; she paused over it, holding Mrs. Forrester with a brooding eye.

"He won't bore her," she then brought out.

"What, never? never?" Mrs. Forrester questioned gaily.

"Never, never," Miss Scrotton repeated. "He is too clever. He will keep her interested—and uncertain."

"Well," Mrs. Forrester returned, as if this were all to the good, "it is a comfort to think that the poor darling has found a distraction."

"You feel it that? I wish I could. I wish I could feel it anything but an infatuation. If only he weren't so much the type of a great woman's folly; if only he weren't so of the region of whispers. It isn't like our wonderful Sir Alliston; one sees her there standing high on a mountain peak with the winds of heaven about her. To see her with Mr. Drew is like seeing her through some ambiguous, sticky fog. Oh, I can't deny that it has all made me very, very unhappy." Tears blinked in Miss Scrotton's eyes.

Mrs. Forrester was kind, she leaned forward and patted Miss Scrotton's hand, she smiled reassuringly, and she refused, for a moment, to share her anxiety. "No, no, no," she said, "you are troubling yourself quite needlessly, my dear Eleanor. Mercedes is amusing herself and the young man is an interesting young man; she has talked to me and written to me about him. And I think she needed distraction just now, I think this marriage of little Karen's has affected her a good deal. The child is of course connected in her mind with so much that is dear and tragic in the past."

"Oh, Karen!" said Miss Scrotton, who, drying her eyes, had accepted Mrs. Forrester's consolations with a slight sulkiness, "she hasn't given a thought to Karen, I can assure you."

"No; you can't assure me, Eleanor," Mrs. Forrester returned, now with a touch of severity. "I don't think you quite understand how deep a bond of that sort can be for Mercedes—even if she seldom speaks of it. She has written to me very affectingly about it. I only hope she will not take it to heart that they could not wait for her. I could not blame them. Everything was arranged; a house in the Highlands lent to them for the honeymoon."

"Take it to heart? Dear me no; she won't like it, probably; but that is a different matter."

"Gregory is radiant, you know."

"Is he?" said Miss Scrotton gloomily. "I wish I could feel radiant about that match; but I can't. I did hope that Gregory would marry well."

"It isn't perhaps quite what one would have expected for him," Mrs. Forrester conceded; "but she is a dear girl. She behaved very prettily while she was here with Lady Jardine."

"Did she? It is a very different marriage, isn't it, from the one that Mercedes had thought suitable. She told you, I suppose, about Franz Lippheim."

"Yes; I heard about that. Mercedes was a good deal disappointed. She is very much attached to the young man and thought that Karen was, too. I have never seen him."

"From what I've heard he seemed to me as eminently suitable a husband for Karen as my poor Gregory is unsuitable. What he can have discovered in the girl, I can't imagine. But I remember now how much interested in her he was on that day that he met her here at tea. She is such a dull girl," said Miss Scrotton sadly. "Such a heavy, clumsy person. And Gregory has so much wit and irony. It is very curious."

"These things always are. Well, they are married now, and I wish them joy."

"No one is at the wedding, I suppose, but old Mrs. Talcott. The next thing we shall hear will be that Sir Alliston has fallen in love with Mrs. Talcott," said Miss Scrotton, indulging her gloomy humour.

"Oh, yes; the Jardines went down, and Mrs. Morton;"—Mrs. Morton was a married sister of Gregory's. "Lady Jardine has very much taken to the child you know. They have given her a lovely little tiara."

"Dear me," said Miss Scrotton; "it is a case of Cinderella. No; I can't rejoice over it, though, of course I wish them joy; I wired to them this morning and I'm sending them a very handsome paper-cutter of dear father's. Gregory will appreciate that, I think. But no; I shall always be sorry that she didn't marry Franz Lippheim."

The Jardines did not come back to London till October. They had spent a month in Scotland and a month in Italy and two weeks in France, returning by way of Paris, where Gregory passed through the ordeal of the Belots. He saw Madame Belot clasp Karen to her breast and the long line of little Belots swarm up to be kissed successively, Monsieur Belot, a short, stout, ruddy man, with outstanding grey hair and a square grey beard, watching the scene benignantly, his palette on his thumb. Madame Belot didn't any longer suggest Chantefoy's picture; she suggested nothing artistic and everything domestic. From a wistful Burne-Jones type with large eyes and a drooping mouth she had relapsed to her plebeian origins and now, fat, kind, cheerful, she was nothing but wife and mother, with a figure like a sack and cheap tortoiseshell combs stuck, apparently at random, in the untidy bandeaux of her hair.

Following Karen and Monsieur Belot about the big studio, among canvases on easels and canvases leaned against the walls, Gregory felt himself rather bewildered, and not quite as he had expected to be bewildered. They might be impossible, Madame Belot of course was impossible; but they were not vulgar and they were extremely intelligent, and their intelligence displayed itself in realms to which he was almost disconcertingly a stranger. Even Madame Belot, holding a stalwart, brown-fisted baby on her arm, could comment on her husband's work with a discerning aptness of phrase which made his own appreciation seem very trite and tentative. He might be putting up with the Belots, but it was quite as likely, he perceived, that they might be putting up with him. He realized, in this world of the Belots, the significance, the laboriousness, the high level of vitality, and he realized that to the Belots his own world was probably seen as a dull, half useful, half obstructive fact, significant mainly for its purchasing power. For its power of appreciation they had no respect at all. "Il radote, ma chèrie," Monsieur Belot said to Karen of a famous person, now, after years of neglect, loudly acclaimed in London at the moment when, by fellow-artists, he was seen as defunct. "He no longer lives; he repeats himself. Ah, it is the peril," Monsieur Belot turned kindly including eyes on Gregory; "if one is not born anew, continually, the artist dies; it becomes machinery."

Karen was at home among the Belot's standards. She talked with Belot, of processes, methods, technique, the talk of artists, not artistic talk. "Et la grande Tante?" he asked her, when they were all seated at a nondescript meal about a long table of uncovered oak, the children unpleasantly clamorous and Madame Belot dispensing, from one end, strange, tepid tea, but excellent chocolate, while Belot, from the other, sent round plates of fruit and buttered rolls. Karen was laughing with la petite Margot, whom she held in her lap.

"She is coming," said Karen. "At last. In three weeks I shall see her now. She has been spending the summer in America, you know; among the mountains."

One of the boys inquired whether there were not danger to Madame von Marwitz from les Peaux-Rouges, and when he was reassured and the question of buffaloes disposed of Madame Belot was able to make herself heard, informing Karen that the Lippheims, Franz, Frau Lippheim, Lotta, Minna and Elizabeth, were to give three concerts in Paris that winter. "You have not seen them yet, Karen?" she asked. "They have not yet met Monsieur Jardine?" And when Karen said no, not yet; but that she had heard from Frau Lippheim that they were to come to London after Paris, Madame Belot suggested that the young couple might have time now to travel up to Leipsig and take the Lippheims by surprise. "Voilà de braves gens et de bons artistes," said Monsieur Belot.

"You did like my dear Belots," Karen said, as she and Gregory drove away. She had, since her marriage, grown in perception; Gregory would have found it difficult, now, to hide ironies and antipathies from her. Even retrospectively she saw things which at the time she had not seen, saw, for instance, that the idea of the Belots had not been alluring to him. He knew, too, that she would have considered dislike of the Belots as showing defect in him not in them, but cheerfully, if with a touch of her severity. She had an infinite tolerance for the defects and foibles of those she loved. He was glad to be able to reply with full sincerity: "Ils sont de braves gens et de bons artistes."

"But," Karen said, looking closely at him, and with a smile, "you would not care to pass your life with them. And you were quite disturbed lest I should say that I wanted to go and take the Lippheims by surprise at Leipsig. You like les gens du monde better than artists, Gregory."

"What are you?" Gregory smiled back at her. "I like you better."

"I? I am gens du monde manqué and artiste manqué. I am neither fish, flesh nor fowl," said Karen. "I'm only—positively—my husband's wife and Tante's ward. And that quite satisfies me."

He knew that it did. Their happiness was flawless; flawless as far as her husband's wife was concerned. It was in regard to Tante's ward that Gregory was more and more conscious of keeping something from Karen, while more and more it grew difficult to keep anything from her. Already, if sub-consciously, she must have become aware that her guardian's unabated mournfulness did not affect her husband as it did herself. She had showed him no more of Tante's letters, and they had been quite frequent. She had told him while they were in Scotland that it had hurt Tante very much that they should not have waited till her return; but she did not enlarge on the theme; and Gregory knew why; to enlarge would have been to reproach him. Karen had yielded, against her own wishes, to his entreaties. She had agreed that their marriage should not be so postponed at the last minute. In his vehemence Gregory had been skilful; he had said not one word of reproach against Madame von Marwitz for her disconcerting change of plan. It was not surprising to him; it was what he had expected of Madame von Marwitz, that she would put Karen aside for a whim. Karen would not see her guardian's action in this light; yet she must know that her beloved was vulnerable to the charge, at all events, of inconsiderateness, and she had been grateful to him, no doubt, for showing no consciousness of it. She had consented, perhaps, partly through gratitude, though she had felt her pledged word, too, as binding. Once she had consented, whatever the results, Gregory knew that she would not visit them on him. It was of her own responsibility that she was thinking when, with a grave face, she had told him of Tante's hurt. "After all, dearest," Gregory had ventured, "we did want her, didn't we? It was really she who chose not to come, wasn't it?"

"I am sure that Tante wanted to see me married," said Karen, touching on her own hidden wound.

He helped her there, knowing, in his guile, that to exonerate Tante was to help not only Karen but himself. "Of course; but she doesn't think things out, does she? She is accustomed to having things arranged for her. I suppose she didn't a bit realise all that had been settled over here, nor what an impatient lover it was who held you to your word."

Her face cleared as he showed her that he recognised Tante's case as so explicable. "I'm so glad that you see it all," she said. "For you do. She is oh! so unpractical, poor darling; she would forget everything, you know, unless I or Mrs. Talcott were there to keep reminding her—except her music, of course; but that is like breathing to her. And I am so sorry, so dreadfully sorry; because, of course, to know that she hurt me by not coming must hurt her more. But we will make it up to her. And oh! Gregory, only think, she says she may come and stay with us."

One of her first exclamations on going over his flat with him was that they could put up Tante, if she would come. The drawing-room could be devoted to her music; for there was ample room for the grand piano—which accompanied Madame von Marwitz as invariably as her tooth-brush; and the spare-bedroom had a dressing-room attached that would do nicely for Louise. Now there seemed hope of this dream being realised.

Karen had not yet received a wedding-present from her guardian, but in Paris, on the homeward way, she heard that it had been dispatched from New York and would be awaiting her in London, and it was of this gift that she had been talking as she and Gregory drove from the station to St. James's on a warm October evening. Tante had not told her what the present was, but had written that Karen would care for it very much. "To find her present waiting for us is like having Tante to welcome us," Karen said. After her surmise about the present she relapsed into happy musings and Gregory, too, was silent, able only to give a side-glance of gratitude, as it were, at the thought that Tante was to welcome them by proxy.

His mood was one of almost tremulous elation. He was bringing her home after bridal wanderings that had never lost their element of dream-like unreality. There had always been the feeling that he might wake any day to find Italy and Karen both equally illusory. But to see Karen in his home, taking her place in his accustomed life, would be to feel his joy linking itself securely with reality.

The look of London at this sunny hour of late afternoon and at this autumnal season matched his consciousness of a tranquil metamorphosis. Idle still and empty of its more vivid significance, one yet felt in it the soft stirrings of a re-entering tide of life. Cabs passed, piled with brightly badged luggage; the drowsily reminiscent shop-windows showed here and there an adventurous forecast, and a house or two, among the rows of dumb, sleeping faces, opened wide eyes at the leisurely streets. The pale, high pinks of the sky drooped and melted into the greys and whites and buffs below, and blurred the heavy greens of the park with falling veils of rose. The scene seemed drawn in flat delicate tones of pastel.

Karen sat beside him in the cab and, while she gazed before her, she had slipped her hand into his. She had preserved much of the look of the unmarried Karen in her dress. The difference was in the achievement of an ideal rather than in a change. The line of her little grey travelling hat above her brows was still unusual; with her grey gloves and long grey silken coat she had an air, cool, competent, prepared for any emergency of travel. She would have looked equally appropriate dozing under the hooded light in a railway carriage, taking her place at a table d'hôte in a provincial French town, or walking in the wind and sun along a foreign plage. After looking at the London to which he brought her, Gregory looked at her. Marriage had worked none of its even superficial disenchantments in him. After three months of intimacy, Karen still constantly arrested him with a sense of the undiscovered, the unforeseen. What it consisted in he could not have defined; she was simple, even guileless, still; she had no reticences; yet she seemed to express so much of which she was unaware that he felt himself to be continually making her acquaintance. That quiet slipping now of her hand into his, while her gaze maintained its calm detachment, the charm of her mingled tenderness and independence, had its vague sting for Gregory. She accepted him and whatever he might mean with something of the happy matter-of-fact with which she accepted all that was hers. She loved him with a completeness and selflessness that had made the world suddenly close round him with gentle arms; but Gregory often wondered if she were in love with him. Rapture, restlessness and fear all seemed alien to her, and to turn from thoughts of her and of their love to Karen herself was like passing from dreams of poignant, starry ecstasy to a clear, white dawn, with dew on the grass and a lark rising and the waking sweetness of a world at once poetical and practical about one. She strengthened and stilled his passion for her. And she seemed unaware of passion.