Madame von Marwitz sat in the deep chintz sofa with Karen beside her, and while she talked to the young couple, Karen's hand in hers, her eyes continually went about the room with an expression that did not seem to match her alert, if rather mechanical, conversation. Karen had already seen her, the day before, when she had gone to the station to meet her and had driven with her to Mrs. Forrester's. But Miss Scrotton had been there, too, almost tearful in her welcoming back of her great friend, and there had been little opportunity for talk in the carriage. Tante had smiled upon her, deeply, had held her hand, closely, and had asked, with the playful air which forestalls gratitude, how she liked her present. "You will see it, my Scrotton; a Bouddha in his shrine—of the best period; a thing really rare and beautiful. Mr. Asprey told me of it, at a sale in New York; and I was able to secure it. Hein, ma petite; you were pleased?"

"Oh, Tante, my letter told you that," said Karen.

"And your husband? He was pleased?"

"He thought that it was gorgeous," said Karen, but after a momentary hesitation not lost upon her guardian.

"I was sorely tempted to keep it myself," said Madame von Marwitz. "I could see it in the music-room at Les Solitudes. But at once I felt—it is Karen's. My only anxiety was for its background. I have never seen Mr. Jardine's flat. But I knew that I could trust the man my child had chosen to have beauty about him."

"It isn't exactly a beautiful room," Karen confessed, smiling. "It isn't like the music-room; you won't expect that from a London flat—or from us. But it is very bright and comfortable and, yes, pretty. I hope that you will like my home."

Miss Scrotton, Karen felt, while she made these preparatory statements, had eyed her in a somewhat gaunt manner; but she was accustomed to a gaunt manner from Miss Scrotton, and Miss Scrotton's drawing-room, certainly, was not as nice as Gregory's. Karen had not cared at all for its quality of earnest effort. Miss Scrotton, not many years ago, had been surrounded with art-tinted hangings and photographs from Rossetti, and the austerity of her eighteenth-century reaction was now almost defiant. Her drawing-room, in its arid chastity, challenged you, as it were, to dare remember the æsthetics of South Kensington.

Karen did not feel that Gregory's drawing-room required apologies and Tante had been so mild and sweet, if also a little absent, that she trusted her to show leniency.

She had, as yet, to-day, said nothing about the Bouddha or the background on which she found him. She talked to Gregory, while they waited for tea, asking him a great many questions, not seeming, always, to listen to his answers. "Ah, yes. Well done. Bravo," she said at intervals, as he told her about their wedding-trip and how he and Karen had enjoyed this or that. When Barker brought in the tea-tray and set it on a little table before Karen, she took up one of the cups—they were of an old English ware with a wreath of roses inside and lines of half obliterated gilt—and said—it was her first comment on the background—"Tiens, c'est joli. Is this one of your presents, Karen?"

Karen told her that the tea-set was not a present; it had belonged to a great-grandmother of Gregory's.

Madame von Marwitz continued to examine the cup and, as she set it down among the others, with the deliberate nicety of gesture that gave at once power and grace to her slightest movement, she said: "You were fortunate in your great-grandmother, Mr. Jardine."

Her voice, her glance, her gestures, were already affecting Gregory unpleasantly. There was in them a quality of considered control, as though she recognised difficulty and were gently and warily evading it. Seated on his chintz sofa in the bright, burnished room, all in white, with a white lace head-dress, half veil, half turban, binding her hair and falling on her shoulders, she made him think, in her inappropriateness and splendour, of her own Bouddha, who, in his glimmering shrine, lifted his hand as if in a gesture of bland exorcism before which the mirage of a vulgar and trivial age must presently fade away. The Bouddha looked permanent and the room looked transient; the only thing in it that could stand up against him, as it were, was Karen. To her husband's eye, newly aware of æsthetic discriminations, Karen seemed to interpret and justify her surroundings, to show their commonplace as part of their charm and to make the Bouddha and Madame von Marwitz herself, in all their portentous distinction, look like incidental ornaments.

Madame von Marwitz's silence in regard to the Bouddha had already become a blight, but it was, perhaps, the growing crisp decision in Gregory's manner that made Karen first aware of constraint. Her eyes then turned from Tante to the shrine at the end of the room, and she said: "You don't care for the way it looks here, Tante, do you—your present?"

Madame von Marwitz had finished her tea and she turned in the sofa so that she could consider the Bouddha no longer incidentally but decisively. "I am glad that it is yours, ma chérie," she said, after the pause of her contemplation. "Some day you must place it more happily. You don't intend, do you, Mr. Jardine, to live for any length of time in these rooms?"

"Oh, but I like it here so much, Tante," Karen took upon herself the reply. "I want to go on living where Gregory has lived for so long. We have such a view, you see; and such air."

Madame von Marwitz mused upon her for a moment and then giving her chin a little pinch, half meditative, half caressing, she inquired, with Continental frankness: "A very pretty sentiment, ma petite, but what will you do when the babies come?"

Karen was not disconcerted. "I rather hope we may not have babies for a year or two, Tante; and when they do come there will be room, quite happily, for several. You don't know how big the flat is; you will see. Gregory has always been able to put up his married sister and her husband; that gives us one quite big room over and a small one."

"But then you can have no friends if your rooms are full of babies," Madame von Marwitz objected, still with mild playfulness.

"No," Karen had to admit it; "but while they were very small I do not think I should have much time for friends in the house, should I. And we think, Gregory and I, of soon taking a tiny cottage in the country, too."

"Then, while you remain here, and unless my Bouddha is to look very foolish," said Madame von Marwitz, "you must, I think, change your drawing-room. It can be changed," she gazed about her with a touch of wildness. "Something could be done. It could be darkened; quieted; it talks too much and too loudly now, does it not? But you could move these so large chairs and couches away and have sober furniture, of a good period; one can still pick up good things if one is clever; a Chinese screen here and there; a fine old mirror; a touch of splendour; a flavour of dignity. The shape of the room is not impossible; the outlook, as you say, gives space and breathing; something could be done."

Karen's gaze followed hers, cogitating but not acquiescent. "But you see, Tante," she remarked, "these are things that Gregory has lived with. And I like them so, too. I should not like them changed."

"But they are not things that you have lived with, parbleu!" said Madame von Marwitz laughing gently. "It is a pretty sentiment, ma petite, it does you honour; you are—but oh! so deeply—the wife, already, are you not, my Karen? but I am sure that your husband will not wish you to sacrifice your taste to your devotion. Young men, many of them do not care for these domestic matters; do not see them. My Karen must not pretend to me that she does not care and see. I am right, am I not, Mr. Jardine? you would not wish to deprive Karen of the bride's distinctive pleasure—the furnishing of her own nest."

Gregory's eyes met hers;—it seemed to be their second long encounter;—eyes like jewels, these of Madame von Marwitz; full of intense life, intense colour, still, bright and cold, tragically cold. He seemed to see suddenly that all the face—the long eyebrows, with the plaintive ripple of irregularity bending their line, the languid lips, the mournful eyelids, the soft contours of cheek and throat,—were a veil for the coldness of her eyes. To look into them was like coming suddenly through dusky woods to a lonely mountain tarn, lying fathomless and icy beneath a moonlit sky. Gregory was aware, as if newly and more strongly than before, of how ambiguous was her beauty, how sinister her coldness.

Above the depths where these impressions were received was his consciousness that he must be careful if Karen were not to guess how much he was disliking her guardian. It was not difficult for him to smile at a person he disliked, but it was difficult not to smile sardonically. This was an apparently trivial occasion on which to feel that it was a contest that she had inaugurated between them; but he did feel it. "Karen knows that she can burn everything in the room as far as I'm concerned," he said. "Even your Bouddha," he added, smiling a little more nonchalantly, "I'd gladly sacrifice if it gave her pleasure."

Nothing was lost upon Madame von Marwitz, of that he was convinced. She saw, perhaps, further than he did; for he did not see, nor wish to, beyond the moment of guarded hostility. And it was with the utmost gentleness and precaution, with, indeed, the air of one who draws softly aside from a sleeping viper found upon the path, that she answered: "I trust, indeed, that it may never be my Karen's pleasure, or yours, Mr. Jardine, to destroy what is precious; that would hurt me very much. And now, child, may I not see the rest of this beloved domain?" She turned from him to Karen.

Gregory rose; he had told Karen that he would leave them alone after tea; he had letters to write and he would see Madame von Marwitz before she went. He had the sense, as he closed the door, of flying before temptation. What might he not say to Madame von Marwitz if he saw too much of her?

When she and Karen were left alone, Madame von Marwitz's expression changed. The veils of lightness fell away; her face became profoundly melancholy; she gazed in silence at Karen and then held out her arms to her; Karen came closer and was enfolded in their embrace.

"My child, my child," said Madame von Marwitz, leaning, as was her wont at these moments, her forehead against Karen's cheek.

"Dear Tante," said Karen. "You are not sad?" she murmured.

"Sad?" her guardian repeated after a moment. "Am I ever anything but sad? But it is not of my sadness that I wish to speak. It is of you. Are you happy, my dear one?"

"Oh, Tante—so happy, so very happy; more than I can say."

"Is it so?" Madame von Marwitz lifted her head and stroked back the girl's hair. "Is it so indeed? He loves you very much, Karen?"

"Oh, yes, Tante."

"It is a great love? selfless? passionate? It is a love worthy of my child?"

"Yes, indeed." A slight austerity was now apparent in Karen's tone. Silence fell between them for a moment, and then, stroking again the golden head, Madame von Marwitz continued, with great tenderness; "It is well. It is what I have prayed for—for my child. And let me not cast one shadow, even of memory, upon your happiness. Yet ah—ah Karen—if you could have let me share in the sunshine a little. If you could have remembered how dark was my way, how lonely. That my child should have married without me. It hurts. It hurts—"

She did not wish to cast a shadow, yet she was weeping, the silent, undisfigured weeping that Karen knew so well, showing only in the slow welling of tears from darkened eyes.

"Oh, Tante," Karen now leaned her head to her guardian's shoulder, "I did not dream you would mind so much. It was so difficult to know what to do."

"Have I shown myself so indifferent to you in the past, my Karen, that you should have thought I would not mind?"

"I do not mean that, Tante. I thought that you would feel that it was what it was best for me to do. I had given my word. All the plans were made."

"You had given your word? Would he not have let you put me before your word? For once? For that one time in all our lives?"

"It was not that, Tante. Gregory would have done what I wished. You must not think that I was forced in any way." Karen now had raised her head. "But we had waited for you. We thought that you were coming. It was only at the last moment that you let us know, Tante, and you did not even say when you were coming back."

Madame von Marwitz kept silence for some moments after this, savouring perhaps in the words—though Karen's eyes, in speaking them, had also filled with tears—some hint of resistance. She looked away from the girl, keeping her hand in hers, as she said: "I could not come. I could not tell you when I was to come. There were reasons that bound me; ties; claims; a tangle of troubled human lives—the threads passing through my fingers. No; I was not free; and there I would have had you trust me. No, no, my Karen, we will speak of it no farther. I understand young hearts—they are forgetful; they cannot dwell on the shadowed places. Let us put it aside, the great grief. What surprises me is to find that the littlest, littlest ones cling so closely. I am foolish, Karen. I have had much to bear lately, and I cannot shake off the little griefs. That others than myself should have chosen my child's trousseau; oh, it is small—so very small a thing; yet it hurts; it hurts. That the joy of seeking all the pretty clothes together—that, that, too, should have been taken from me. Do not weep, child."

"Tante, you could not come, and the things had to be made ready. They all—Mrs. Forrester—Betty—seemed to feel there was no time to lose. And I have always chosen my own clothes; I did not know that you would feel this so."

"Betty? Who is Betty?" Madame von Marwitz mournfully yet alertly inquired.

"Lady Jardine, Gregory's sister-in-law. You remember, Tante, I have written of her. She has been so kind."

"Betty," Madame von Marwitz repeated, sadly. "Yes, I remember; she was at your wedding, I think. There, dry your eyes, child. I understand. It is a loving heart, but it forgot. The sad old Tante was crowded out by new friends—new joys."

"No, you must not say that, Tante. It is not true."

The hardness that Madame von Marwitz knew how to interpret was showing itself on Karen's face, despite the tears. Her guardian rose, passing her arm around her shoulders. "It is not true, then, chérie. When one is very sad one is foolish. Ah, I know it; one imagines too quickly things that are not true. They float and then they cling, like the tiny barbed down of the thistle, and then, behold, one's brain is choked with thorny weeds. That is how it comes, my Karen. Forgive me. There; kiss me."

"Darling Tante," Karen murmured, clasping her closely. "Nothing, nothing crowded you out. Nothing could ever crowd you out. Say that you believe me. Say that all the thistles are rooted up and thrown away."

"Rooted up and burned—burned root and branch, my child. I promise it. I trust my child; she is mine; my loving one. Ainsi soit-il. And now," Madame von Marwitz spoke with sudden gaiety, "and now show me your home, my Karen, show me all over this home of yours to which already you are so attached. Ah—it is a child in love!"

They went from room to room, their arms around each other's waists. Madame von Marwitz cast her spell over Mrs. Barker in the kitchen, and smiled a long smile upon Rose, the housemaid. "Yes, yes, very nice, very pretty," she said, in the spare-room, the little dressing-room, the dining-room and kitchen. In Karen's room, with its rose-budded chintz and many photographs of herself, of Gregory, she paused and looked about. "Very, very pretty," she repeated. "You like bedsteads of brass, my Karen?"

"Yes, Tante. They look so clean and bright."

"So clean and bright. I do not think that I could sleep in brass," Madame von Marwitz mused. "But it is a simple child."

"Yes, that is just it, Tante," said Karen, smiling. "And I wanted to explain to you about the drawing-room. You see it is that; I am simple; not a sea-anemone of taste, like you. I quite well see things. I see that Les Solitudes is beautiful, and that this is not like Les Solitudes. Yet I like it here just as it is."

"Because it is his, is it not so, my child-in-love? Ah, she must not be teased. You can be happy, then, among so much brass?—so many things that glitter and are highly coloured?"

"Yes, indeed. And it is a pretty bedroom, Tante. You must say that it is a pretty bedroom?"

"Is it? Must I? Pretty? Yes, no doubt it is pretty. Yet I could have wished that my Karen's nest had more distinction, expressed a finer sense of personality. I imagine that every young woman in this vast beehive of homes has just such a bedroom."

"You think so, Tante? I am afraid that if you think this like everybody's room you will find Gregory's library even worse. You must see that now; it is all that you have not seen." Karen took her last bull by the horns, leading her out.

"Has it red wall-paper, sealing-wax red; with racing prints on the walls and a very large photograph over the mantelpiece of a rowing-crew at Oxford?" Madame von Marwitz questioned with a mixture of roguishness and resignation.

"Yes, yes, you wicked Tante. How did you know?"

"I know; I see it," said Madame von Marwitz. "But a man's room expresses a man's past. One cannot complain of that."

They went to the library. Madame von Marwitz had described it with singular accuracy. Gregory rose from his letters and his eyes went from her face to Karen's, both showing their traces of tears.

"It is au revoir, then," said Madame von Marwitz, standing before him, her arm round Karen's shoulders. "I am happy in my child's happiness, Mr. Jardine. You have made her happy, and I thank you. You will lend her to me, sometimes? You will be generous with me and let me see her?"

"Of course; whenever you want to; whenever she wants to," said Gregory, leaning his hands on the back of his chair and tilting it a little while he smiled the fullest acquiescence.

Madame von Marwitz's eyes brooded on him. "That is kind," she said gently.

"Oh no, it isn't," Gregory returned.

"I think," said Madame von Marwitz, becoming even more gentle, "that you misunderstand my meaning. When people love, it is hard sometimes not to be selfish in the joy of love, and the lesser claims tend to be forgotten. I only ask that you should make it easy for Karen to come to me."

To this Gregory did not reply. He continued to tilt his chair and to smile at Madame von Marwitz.

"This husband of yours, Karen," said Madame von Marwitz, "does not understand me yet. You must interpret me to him. Adieu, Mr. Jardine. Will you come with me alone to the door, Karen. It is our first farewell in a home I do not give you."

She gave Gregory her hand. They left him and went down the passage together. Madame von Marwitz kept her arm round the girl's shoulders, but its grasp had tightened.

"My child! my own child!" she murmured, as, at the door, she turned and clasped her. Her voice strove with deep emotion.

"Dear, dear Tante," said Karen, also with a faltering voice.

Madame von Marwitz achieved an uncertain smile. "Farewell, my dear one. I bless you. My blessing be upon you." Then, on the threshold she paused. "Try to make your husband like me a little, my Karen," she said.

Karen did not come back to him in the smoking-room and Gregory presently got up and went to look for her. He found her in the drawing-room, sitting in the twilight, her elbow on her knee, her chin in her hand. He did not know what she could be feeling; the fact that dominated in his own mind was that her guardian had made her weep.

"Well, darling," he said. He stooped over her and put his hand on her shoulder.

The face she lifted to him was ambiguous. She had not wept again; on the contrary, he felt sure that she had been intently thinking. The result of her thought, now, was a look of resolute serenity. But he was sure that she did not feel serene. For the first time, Karen was hiding her feeling from him. "Well, darling," she replied.

She got up and put her arms around his neck; she looked at him, smiling calmly; then, as if struck by a sudden memory, she said: "It is the night of the dance, Gregory."

They were to dine at Edith Morton's and go on to Karen's first dance. Under Betty's supervision she had already made progress through half-a-dozen lessons, though she had not, she confessed to Gregory, greatly distinguished herself at them. "I'll get you round all right," he had promised her. They looked forward to the dance.

"So it is," said Gregory. "It's not time to dress yet, is it?"

"It's only half-past six. Shall I wear my white silk, Gregory, with the little white rose wreath?"

"Yes, and the nice little square-toed white silk shoes—like a Reynolds lady's—and like nobody else's. I do so like your square toes."

"I cannot bear pinched toes," said Karen. "My father gave me a horror of that; and Tante. Her feet are as perfect as her hands. She has all her shoes made for her by a wonderful old man in Vienna who is an artist in shoes. She was looking well, wasn't she, Tante?" Karen added, in even tones. Gregory and she were sitting now on the sofa together, their arms linked and hand-in-hand.

"Beautiful," said Gregory with sincerity. "How well that odd head-dress became her."

"Didn't it? It was nice that she liked those pretty teacups, wasn't it. And appreciated our view; even though," Karen smiled, taking now another bull by the horns, "she was so hard on our flat. I'm afraid she feels her Bouddha en travestie here."

"Well, he is, of course. I do hope," said Gregory, also seizing his bull, "that she didn't think me rude in my joke about being willing to burn him. And you will change everything—burn anything—barring the Bouddha and the teacups—that you want to, won't you, dear?"

"No; I wouldn't, even if I wanted to; and I don't want to. Perhaps Tante did not quite understand. I think it may take a little time for her to understand your jokes or you her outspokenness. She is like a child in her candour about the things she likes or dislikes." A fuller ease had come to her voice. By her brave pretence that all was well she was persuading herself that all could be made well.

Perhaps it might be, thought Gregory, if only he could go on keeping his temper with Madame von Marwitz and if Karen, wise and courageous darling, could accept the unspoken between them, and spare him definitions and declarations. A situation undefined is so often a situation saved. Life grows over and around it. It becomes a mere mummied fly, preserved in amber; unsightly perhaps; but unpernicious. After all, he told himself—and he went on thinking over the incidents of the afternoon while he dressed—after all, Madame von Marwitz might not be much in London; she was a comet and her course would lead her streaming all over the world for the greater part of her time. And above all and mercifully, Madame von Marwitz was not a person upon whose affections one would have to count. He seemed to have found out all sorts of things about her this afternoon: he could have given Sargent points. The main strength of her feeling for anyone, deep instinct told him, was an insatiable demand that they should feel sufficiently for her. And the chief difficulty—he refused to dignify it by the name of danger—was that Madame von Marwitz had her deep instincts, too, and had, no doubt, found out all sorts of things about him. He did not like her; he had not liked her from the first; and she could hardly fail to feel that he liked her less and less. He was able to do Madame von Marwitz justice. Even a selflessly devoted mother could hardly rejoice wholeheartedly in the marriage of a daughter to a man who disliked herself; and how much less could Madame von Marwitz, who was not a mother and not selflessly devoted to anybody, rejoice in Karen's marriage. She was right in feeling that it menaced her own position. He did her justice; he made every allowance for her; he intended to be straight with her; but the fact that stood out for Gregory was that, already, she was not straight with him. Already she was picking surreptitiously, craftily, at his life; and this was to pick at Karen's.

He would give her a long string and make every allowance for the vexations of her situation; but if she began seriously to tarnish Karen's happiness he would have to pull the string smartly. The difficulty—he refused to see this as danger either—was that he could not pull the string upon Madame von Marwitz without, by the same gesture, upsetting himself as well.

The unspoken, for the first month or so of Madame von Marwitz's return, remained accepted. There were no declarations and no definitions, and Gregory's immunity was founded on something more reassuring than the mere fact that Madame von Marwitz frequently went away. When she was in London, it became apparent, he was to see very little of her, and as long as they did not meet too often he felt that he was, in so far, safe. Madame von Marwitz was tremendously busy. She paid many week-end visits; she sat to Belot—who had come to London to paint it—for a great portrait; she was to give three concerts in London during the winter and two in Paris, and it was natural enough that she had not found time to come to the flat again.

But although Gregory saw so little of her, although she was not in his life as a presence, he felt her in it as an influence. She might have been the invisible but portentous comet moving majestically on the far confines of his solar system; and one accounted for oddities of behaviour in the visible planets by inferring that the comet was the cause of them. If he saw very little of Madame von Marwitz, he saw, too, much less of his twin planet, Karen. It was not so much that Karen's course was odd as that it was altered. If Madame von Marwitz sent for her very intermittently, she had, all the same, in all her life, as she told Gregory, never seen so much of her guardian. She frankly displayed to him the radiance of her state, wishing him, as he guessed, to share to the full every detail of her privileges, and to realise to the full her gratitude to him for proving so conclusively to Tante that there was none of the selfishness of love in him. Tante must see that he made it very easy for her to go to her, and Gregory derived his own secret satisfaction from the thought that Karen's radiance was the best of retorts to Madame von Marwitz's veiled intimations. As long as she made Karen happy and let him alone, he seemed to himself to tell her, he would get on very well; and he suspected that her clutch of Karen would soon loosen when she found it unchallenged. In the meantime there was not much satisfaction for him elsewhere. Karen's altered course left him often lonely. Not only had the readings of Political Economy, begun with so much ardour in their spare evenings, almost lapsed for lack of consecutiveness; but he frequently found on coming home tired for his tea, and eager for the sight of his wife, a little note from her telling him that she had been summoned to Mrs. Forrester's as Tante was "with Fafner in his cave" and wanted her.

Fafner was the name that Madame von Marwitz gave to her moods of sometimes tragic and sometimes petulant melancholy. Karen had told him all about Fafner and how, in the cave, Tante would lie sometimes for long hours, silent, her eyes closed, holding her hand; sometimes asking her to read to her, English, French, German or Italian poetry; their range of reading always astonished Gregory.

He gathered, too, from Karen's confidences, how little, until now, he had gauged the variety of the great woman's resources, how little done justice to her capacity for being merely delightful. She could be whimsically gay in the midst of melancholy, and her jests and merriment were the more touching, the more exquisite, from the fact that they flowered upon the dark background of the cave. It was, he saw, with a richer flavour that Karen tasted again the charm of old days, when, after some great musical or social event, in which the girl had played her part of contented observer, they had laughed together over follies and appreciated qualities, in the familiar language of allusion evolved from long community in experience.

Karen repeated to him Tante's sallies at the expense of this or that person and the phrase with which she introduced these transformations of human foolishness to the service of comedy. "Come, let us make méringues of them."

The dull or ludicrous creatures, so to be whipped up and baked crisp, revealed, in the light of the analogy, the tempting vacuity of a bowl of white of egg. When Tante introduced her wit into the colourless substance she frothed it to a sparkling work of art.

Gregory was aware sometimes of a pang as he listened. He and Karen had, indeed, their many little jokes, and their stock of common association was growing; but there was nothing like the range of reference, nothing like the variety of experience, that her life with Madame von Marwitz had given her to draw upon. It was to her companionship, intermittent as it had been, with the world-wandering genius that she owed the security of judgment that often amused yet often disconcerted him, the catholicity of taste beside which, though he would not acknowledge its final validity, he felt his own taste to be sometimes narrow and sometimes guileless. He saw that Karen had every ground for feeling her own point of view a larger one than his. It was no personal complacency that her assurance expressed, but the modest recognition of privilege. Beyond their personal tie, so her whole demeanour showed him, he had nothing to add to her highly dowered life.

Gregory had known that his world would mean nothing to Karen; yet when, under Betty's guidance, she fulfilled her social duties, dined out, gave dinners, received and returned visits, the very compliance of her indifference, while always amusing, vexed him a little, and a little alarmed him, too. He had known that he would have to make all the adjustments, but how adjust oneself to a permanent separation between one's private and one's social life? Old ties, lacking new elements of growth, tended to become formalities. When Karen was not there, he did not care to go without her to see people, and when she was with him the very charm of her personality was a barrier between him and them. His life became narrower as well as lonelier. There was nothing much to be done with people to whom one's wife was indifferent.

It was very obvious to him that she found the sober, conventional people who were his friends very flavourless, especially when she came to them from Fafner's cave. He had always taken his friends for granted, as part of the pleasant routine of life, like one's breakfast or one's bath; but now, seeing them anew, through Karen's eyes, he was inclined more and more to believe that they weren't as dull as she found them. She lacked the fundamental experience of a rooted life. She was yet to learn—he hoped, he determined, she should learn—that a social system of harmonious people, significant perhaps more because of their places in the system than as units, and bound together by a highly evolved code, was, when all was said and done, a more satisfactory place in which to spend one's life than an anarchic world of erratic, undisciplined, independent individuals. Karen, however, did not understand the use of the system and she saw its members with eyes as clear to their defects as were Gregory's to the defects of Madame von Marwitz.

Gregory's friends belonged to that orderly and efficient section of the nation that moves contentedly between the simply professional and the ultra fashionable. They had a great many duties, social, political and domestic, which they took with a pleasant seriousness, and a great many pleasures which they took seriously, too. They "came up" from the quiet responsibilities of the country-side for a season and "did" the concerts and exhibitions as they "did" their shopping and their balls. Art, to most of them, was a thing accepted on authority, like the latest cut for sleeves or the latest fashion for dressing the hair. A few of them, like the Cornish Lavingtons, had never heard Madame Okraska; a great many of them had never heard of Belot. The Madame Okraskas and the Belots of the world were to them a queer, alien people, regarded with only a mild, derivative interest. They recognized the artist as a decorative appurtenance of civilized life, very much as they recognized the dentist or the undertaker as its convenient appurtenances. It still struck them as rather strange that one should meet artists socially and, perhaps, as rather regrettable, their traditional standard of good faith requiring that the people one met socially should, on the whole, be people whom one wouldn't mind one's sons and daughters marrying; and they didn't conceive of artists as entering that category.

Gregory, with all his acuteness, did not gauge the astonishment with which Karen came to realize these standards of his world. Her cheerful evenness of demeanour was a cloak, sometimes for indignation and sometimes for mirth. She could only face the fact that this world must, in a sense, be hers, by relegating it and all that it meant to the merest background in their lives. Her real life consisted in Gregory; in Tante. All that she had to do with these people—oh, so nice and kind they were, she saw that well, but oh so stupid, most of them, so inconceivably blind to everything of value in life—all that she had to do was, from time to time, to open their box, their well-padded, well-provendered box, and look at them pleasantly. She felt sure that for Gregory's sake, if not for theirs, she should always be able to look pleasantly; unless—she had been afraid of this sometimes—they should say or do things that in their blindness struck at Tante and at the realities that Tante stood for. But all had gone so well, so Karen believed, that she felt no misgivings when Tante expressed a wish to look into the box with her and said, "You must give a little dinner-party for me, my Karen, so that I may see your new milieu."

Gregory controlled a dry little grimace when Karen reported this speech to him. He couldn't but suspect Tante's motives in wanting them to give a little dinner-party for her. But he feigned the most genial interest in the plan and agreed with Karen that they must ask their very nicest to meet Tante.

Betty had helped Karen with all her dinners; she had seen as yet very little of the great woman, and entered fully into Karen's eagerness that everything should be very nice.

"Gregory will take her in," said Betty; "and we'll put Bertram Fraser on her other side. He's always delightful. And we'll have the Canning-Thompsons and the Overtons and the Byngs; the Byngs are so decorative!" Constance Armytage was now Mrs. Byng.

"And my dear old General," said Karen, sitting at her desk with a paper on her knee and an obedient pencil in her hand; "I forget his name, but we met him at the dinner that you gave after we married; you know, Betty, with the thin russet face and the little blue eyes. May he take me in?"

"General Montgomery. Yes; that is a good idea; glorious old man. Though Lady Montgomery is rather a stodge," said Betty; "but Oliver can have her."

"I remember, a sleek, small head—like a turtle—with salmon-pink feathers on it. Poor Oliver. Will he mind?"

"Not a bit. He never minds anything but the dinner; and with Mrs. Barker we can trust to that."

"Tante often likes soldiers," said Karen, pleased with her good idea. "Our flags, she says, they are, and that the world would be drab-coloured without them."

So it was arranged. Bertram Fraser was an old family friend of the Jardines'. His father was still the rector of their Northumberland parish, and he and Gregory and Oliver had hunted and fished and shot and gone to Oxford together. Bertram had been a traveller in strange countries since those days, had written one or two clever books and was now in Parliament. The Overtons, also country neighbours, were fond of music as well as of hunting, and Mr. Canning-Thompson was an eminent, if rather ponderous, Q.C., for whose wife, the gentle and emaciated Lady Mary, Gregory had a special affection. She was a great philanthropist and a patient student of early Italian art, and he and she talked gardens and pictures together.

Betty and Oliver were the first to arrive on the festal night, Betty's efficiency, expressed by all her diamonds and a dress of rose-coloured velvet, making up for whatever there might be of inefficiency in Karen's appearance and deportment. Karen was still, touchingly so to her husband's eyes, the little Hans Andersen heroine in appearance. She wore to-night the white silk dress and the wreath of little white roses.

Oliver and Gregory chatted desultorily until the Byngs arrived. Oliver was fair and ruddy and his air of dozing contentment was always vexatious to his younger brother. He had every reason for contentment. Betty's money had securely buttressed the family fortunes and he had three delightful little boys to buttress Betty's money. Gregory grew a little out of temper after talking for five minutes to Oliver and this was not a fortunate mood in which to realise, as the Montgomerys, the Overtons and the Canning-Thompsons followed the Byngs, at eight-fifteen, that Madame von Marwitz was probably going to be late. At eight-thirty, Karen, looking at him with some anxiety expressed in her raised brows, silently conveyed to him her fear that the soup, at the very least, would be spoiled. At eight-forty Betty murmured to Karen that they had perhaps better begin without Madame von Marwitz—hadn't they? She must, for some reason, be unable to come. Dinner was for eight. "Oh, but we must wait longer," said Karen. "She would have telephoned—or Mrs. Forrester would—if she had not been coming. Tante is always late; but always, always," she added, without condemnation if with anxiety. "And there is the bell now. Yes, I heard it."

It was a quarter to nine when Madame von Marwitz, with Karen, who had hastened out to meet her, following behind, appeared at last, benign and unperturbed as a moon sliding from clouds. In the doorway she made her accustomed pause, the pause of one not surveying her audience but indulgently allowing her audience to survey her. It was the attitude in which Belot was painting his great portrait of her. But it was not met to-night by the eyes to which she was accustomed. The hungry guests looked at Madame von Marwitz with austere relief and looked only long enough to satisfy themselves that her appearance really meant dinner.

Gregory led the way with her into the dining-room and suspected in her air of absent musing a certain discomfiture.

She was, as usual, strangely and beautifully attired, as though for the operatic stage rather than for a dinner-party. Strings of pearls fell from either side of her head to her shoulders and a wide tiara of pearls banded her forehead in a manner recalling a Russian head-dress. She looked, though so lovely, also so conspicuous that there was a certain ludicrousness in her appearance. It apparently displeased or surprised Lady Montgomery, who, on Gregory's other hand, her head adorned with the salmon-pink, ostrich feathers, raised a long tortoiseshell lorgnette and fixed Madame von Marwitz through it for a mute, resentful moment. Madame von Marwitz, erect and sublime as a goddess in a shrine, looked back. It was a look lifted far above the region of Lady Montgomery's formal, and after all only tentative, disapprobations; divine impertinence, sovereign disdain informed it. Lady Montgomery dropped her lorgnette with a little clatter and, adjusting her heavy diamond bracelets, turned her sleek mid-Victorian head to her neighbour. Gregory did not know whether to be amused or vexed.

It was now his part to carry on a conversation with the great woman: and he found the task difficult. She was not silent, nor unresponsive. She listened to his remarks with the almost disconcerting closeness of attention that he had observed in her on their meeting of the other day, seeming to seek in them some savour that still escaped her good-will. She answered him alertly, swiftly, and often at random, as though by her intelligence and competence to cover his ineptitude. Her smile was brightly mechanical; her voice at once insistent and monotonous. She had an air, which Gregory felt more and more to be almost insolent, of doing her duty.

Bertram Fraser's turn came and he rose to it with his usual buoyancy. He was interested in meeting Madame von Marwitz; but he was a young man who had made his way in the world and perhaps exaggerated his achievement. He expected people to be interested also in meeting him. He expected from the great genius a reciprocal buoyancy. Madame von Marwitz bent her brows upon him. Irony grew in her smile, a staccato crispness in her utterance. Cool and competent as he was, Bertram presently looked disconcerted; he did not easily forgive those who disconcerted him, and, making no further effort to carry on the conversation, he sat silent, smiling a little, and waited for his partner to turn to him again. Had Gregory not taken up his talk, lamely and coldly, with Madame von Marwitz, she would have been left in an awkward isolation.

She answered him now in a voice of lassitude and melancholy. Leaning back in her chair, strange and almost stupefying object that she was, her eyes moved slowly round the table with a wintry desolation of glance, until, meeting Karen's eyes, they beamed forth a brave warmth of cherishing, encouraging sweetness. "Yes, ma chérie," they seemed to say; "Bear up, I am bearing up. I will make méringues of them for you."

She could make méringues of them; Gregory didn't doubt it. Yet, and here was the glow of malicious satisfaction that atoned to him for the discomforts he endured, they were, every one of them, making méringues of her.

In their narrowness, in their defects, ran an instinct, as shrewd as it was unconscious, that was a match for Madame von Marwitz's intelligence. They were so unperceiving that no one of them, except perhaps Betty and Karen—who of course didn't count among them at all—was aware of the wintry wind of Madame von Marwitz's boredom; yet if it had been recognised it would have been felt as insignificant. They knew that she was a genius, and that she was very odd looking and that, as Mrs. Jardine's guardian, she had not come in a professional capacity and might therefore not play to them after dinner. So defined, she was seen, with all her splendour of association, as incidental.

Only perhaps in this particular section of the British people could this particular effect of cheerful imperviousness have been achieved. They were not of the voracious, cultured hordes who make their way by their well-trained appreciations, nor of the fashionable lion-collecting tribe who do not need to make their way but who need to have their way made amusing. Well-bred, securely stationed, untouched by boredom or anxiety, they were at once too dull and too intelligent to be fluttered by the presence of a celebrity. They wanted nothing of her, except, perhaps, that after their coffee she should give them some music, and they did not want this at all eagerly.

If Madame von Marwitz had come to crush, to subjugate or to enchant, she had failed in every respect and Gregory saw that her failure was not lost upon her. Her manner, as the consciousness grew, became more frankly that of the vain, ill-tempered child, ignored. She ceased to speak; her eyes, fixed on the wall over Sir Oliver's head, enlarged in a sullen despondency.

Lady Montgomery was making her way through a bunch of grapes and Lady Mary had only peeled her peach, when, suddenly, taking upon herself the prerogative of a hostess, Madame von Marwitz caught up her fan and gloves with a gesture of open impatience, and swept to the door almost before Gregory had time to reach it or the startled guests to rise from their places.

When the time came for going to the drawing-room, Gregory found Betty entertaining the company there, while Karen, on a distant sofa, was apparently engaged in showing her guardian a book of photographs. He took in the situation at a glance, and, as he took it in, he was aware that part of its significance lay in the fact that it obliged him to a swift interchange with Betty, an interchange that irked him, defining as it did a community of understanding from which Karen, in her simplicity, was shut out.

He went across to the couple on the sofa. Only sudden illness could have excused Madame von Marwitz's departure from the dining-room, yet he determined to ask no questions, and to leave any explanations to her.

Karen's eyes, in looking at him, were grave and a little anxious; but the anxiety, he saw, was not on his account. "Tante wanted to see our kodaks," she said. "Do sit here with us, Gregory. Betty is talking to everybody so beautifully."

"But you must go and talk to everybody beautifully, too, now, darling," said Gregory. He put his hand on her shoulder and looked down at her smiling. The gesture, with its marital assurance, the smile that was almost a caress, were involuntary; yet they expressed more than his tender pride and solicitude, they defined his possession of her, and they excluded Tante. "It's been a nice little dinner, hasn't it," he went on, continuing to look at her and not at Madame von Marwitz. "I saw that the General was enjoying you immensely. There he is, looking over at you now; he wants to go on talking about Garibaldi with you. He said he'd never met a young woman so well up in modern history."

Madame von Marwitz's brooding eyes were on him while he thus spoke. He ignored them.

Karen looked a little perplexed. "Did you think it went so well, then, Gregory?"

"Why, didn't you?"

"I am not sure. I don't think I shall ever much like dinners, when I give them," she addressed herself to her guardian as well as to her husband. "They make one feel so responsible."

"Well, as far as you were responsible for this one you were responsible for its being very nice. Everybody enjoyed themselves. Now go and talk to the General."

"I did enjoy him," said Karen, half closing her book. "But Tante has rather a headache—I am afraid she is tired. You saw at dinner that she was tired."

"Yes, oh yes, indeed, I thought that you must be feeling a little ill, perhaps," Gregory observed blandly, turning his eyes now on Madame von Marwitz. "Well, you see, Karen, I will take your place here, and it will give me a chance for a quiet talk with your guardian."

"People must not bother her," Karen rose, pleased, he could see, with this arrangement, and hoping, he knew, that the opportunity was a propitious one, and that in it her dear ones might draw together. "You will see that they don't bother her, Gregory, and go on showing her these."

"They won't bother a bit, I promise," said Gregory, taking her place as she rose. "They are all very happily engaged, and Madame von Marwitz and I will look at the photographs in perfect peace."

Something in these words and in the manner with which her guardian received them, with a deepening of her long, steady glance, arrested Karen's departure. She stood above them, half confident, yet half hesitating.

"Go, mon enfant," said Madame von Marwitz, turning the steady glance on her. "Go. Nobody here, as your husband truly says, is thinking of me. I shall be quite untroubled."

Still with her look of preoccupation Karen moved away.

Cheerfully and deliberately Gregory now proceeded to turn the pages of the kodak album, and to point out with painstaking geniality the charms and associations of each view, "Tu l'as voulu, Georges Dandin," expressed his thought, for he didn't believe that Madame von Marwitz, more than any person not completely self-abnegating, could tolerate looking at other people's kodaks. But since it was her chosen occupation, the best she could find to do with their dinner-party, she should be gratified; should be shown Karen standing on a peak in the Tyrol; Karen feeding the pigeons before St. Mark's; Karen, again—wasn't it rather nice of her?—in a gondola. Madame von Marwitz bent her head with its swinging pearls above the pictures, proffering now and then a low murmur of assent.

But in the midst of the Paris pictures she lifted her head and looked at him. It was again the steady, penetrating look, and now it seemed, with the smile that veiled it, to claim some common understanding rather than seek it. "Enough," she said. She dismissed the kodaks with a tap of her fan. "I wish to talk with you. I wish to talk with you of our Karen."

Gregory closed the volume. Madame von Marwitz's attitude as she leaned back, her arms lightly folded, affected him in its deliberate grace and power as newly significant. Keeping his frosty, observant eyes upon her, Gregory waited for what she had to say. "I am glad, very glad, that you have given me this opportunity for a quiet conversation," so she took up the threads of her intention. "I have wanted, for long, to consult with you about various matters concerning Karen, and, in especial, about her future life. Tell me—this is what I wish in particular to ask you—you are going, are you not, in time, when she has learned more skill in social arts, to take my Karen into the world—dans le monde," Madame von Marwitz repeated, as though to make her meaning genially clear. "Skill she is as yet too young to have mastered—or cared to master. But she had always been at ease on the largest stage, and she will do you credit, I assure you."

It was rather, to Gregory's imagination—always quick at similes—as though she had struck a well-aimed blow right in the centre of a huge gong hanging between them. There she was, the blow said. It was this she meant. No open avowal of hostility could have been more reverberating or purposeful, and no open avowal of hostility would have been so sinister. But Gregory, though his ears seemed to ring with the clang of it, was ready for her. He, too, with folded arms, sat leaning back and he, too, smiled genially. "That's rather crushing, you know," he made reply, "or didn't you? Karen is in my world. This is my world."

Madame von Marwitz gazed at him for a moment as if to gauge his seriousness. And then she turned her eyes on his world and gazed at that. It was mildly chatting. It was placid, cheerful, unaware of deficiency. It thought that it was enjoying itself. It was, indeed, enjoying itself, if with the slightest of materials. Betty and Bertram Fraser laughed together; Lady Mary and Oliver ever so slowly conversed. Constance Byng and Mr. Overton discussed the latest opera, young Byng had joined Karen and the General, and a comfortable drone of politics came from Mrs. Overton and Mr. Canning-Thompson. Removed a little from these groups Lady Montgomery, very much like a turtle, sat with her head erect and her eyes half closed, evidently sleepy. It was upon Lady Montgomery that Madame von Marwitz's gaze dwelt longest.

"You are contented," she then said to Gregory, "with these good people; for yourself and for your wife?"

"Perfectly," said Gregory. "You see, Karen has married a commonplace person."

Madame von Marwitz paused again, and again her eyes dwelt on Lady Montgomery, whose pink feathers had given a sudden nod and then serenely righted themselves. "I see," she then remarked. "But she is not contented."

"Ah, come," said Gregory. "You can't shatter the conceit of a happy husband so easily, Madame von Marwitz. You ask too much of me if you ask me to believe that Karen makes confidences to you that she doesn't to me. I can't take it on, you know," he continued to smile.

He had already felt that the loveliness of Madame von Marwitz's face was a veil for its coldness, and hints had come to him that it masked, also, some more sinister quality. And now, for a moment, as if a primeval creature peeped at him from among delicate woodlands, a racial savagery crossed her face with a strange, distorting tremor. The blood mounted to her brow; her skin darkened curiously, and her eyes became hot and heavy as though the very irises felt the glow.

"You do not accept my word, Mr. Jardine?" she said. Her voice was controlled, but he had a disagreeable sensation of scorching, as though a hot iron had been passed slowly before his face.

Gregory shook his foot a little, clasping his ankle. "I don't say that, of course. But I'm glad to think you're mistaken."

"Let me tell you, Mr. Jardine," she returned, still with the curbed elemental fury colouring her face and voice, "that even a happy husband's conceit is no match for a mother's intuition. Karen is like my child to me; and to its mother a child makes confidences that it is unaware of making. Karen finds your world narrow; borné; it does not afford her the wide life she has known."

"You mean," said Gregory, "the life she led with Mrs. Talcott?"

He had not meant to say it. If he had paused to think it over he would have seen that it exposed him to her as consciously hostile and also as almost feminine in his malice. And, as if this recognition of his false move restored to her her full self-mastery, she met his irony with a masculine sincerity, putting him, as on the occasion of their first encounter, lamentably in the wrong. "Ah," she commented, her eyes dwelling on him. "Ah, I see. You have wondered. You have criticized. You have, I think, Mr. Jardine, misunderstood my life and its capacities. Allow me to explain. Your wife is the creature dearest to me in the world, and if you misread my devotion to her you endanger our relation. You would not, I am sure, wish to do that; is it not so? Allow me therefore to exculpate myself. I am a woman who, since childhood, has had to labour for my livelihood and for that of those I love. You can know nothing of what that labour of the artist's life entails,—interminable journeys, suffocating ennui, the unwholesome monotony and publicity of a life passed in hotels and trains. It was not fit that a young and growing girl should share that life. As much as has been possible I have guarded Karen from its dust and weariness. I have had, of necessity, to leave her much alone, and she has needed protection, stability, peace. I could have placed her in no lovelier spot than my Cornish home, nor in safer hands than those of the guardian and companion of my own youth. Do you not feel it a little unworthy, Mr. Jardine, when you have all the present and all the future, to grudge me even my past with my child?"

She spoke slowly, with a noble dignity, all hint of sultry menace passed; willing, for Karen's sake, to stoop to this self-justification before Karen's husband. And, for Karen's sake, she had the air of holding in steady hands their relation, hers and his, assailed so gracelessly by his taunting words. Gregory, for the first time in his knowledge of her, felt a little bewildered. It was she who had opened hostilities, yet she almost made him forget it; she almost made him feel that he alone had been graceless. "I do beg your pardon," he said. "Yes; I had wondered a little about it; and I understand better now." But he gathered his wits together sufficiently to add, on a fairer foothold: "I am sure you gave Karen all you could. What I meant was, I think, that you should be generous enough to believe that I am giving her all I can."