The clouds have floated slowly away to Italy, and left us to another day of intense, burning heat.

I don't believe the weather will ever break up. Not, anyhow, for a long time. Not, anyhow, before I have heard Merivale to the end.

August 28th.

In the morning when I get up and go and look out of my window at the splendid east I don't care about Merivale. I defy him. And I make up my mind that though my body may be present at the reading of him so as to avoid distressing Mrs. Barnes and driving her off the terrace—we are minute in our care not to drive each other off the terrace—my ears shall be deaf to him and my imagination shall wander. Who is Merivale, that he shall burden my memory with even shreds of his unctuous imitations? And I go down to breakfast with a fortified and shining spirit, as one who has arisen refreshed and determined from prayer, and out on the terrace I do shut my ears. But I think there must be chinks in them, for I find my mind is much hung about, after all, with Merivale. Bits of him. Bits like this.

Propertius is deficient in that light touch and exquisitely polished taste which volatilize the sensuality and flattery of Horace. The playfulness of the Sabine bard is that of the lapdog, while the Umbrian reminds us of the pranks of a clumsier and less tolerated quadruped.

This is what you write if you want to write like Gibbon, and yet remain at the same time a rector and chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons; and this bit kept on repeating itself in my head like a tune during luncheon to-day. It worried me that I couldn't decide what the clumsier and less tolerated quadruped was.

'A donkey,' said Mrs. Jewks, on my asking my guests what they thought.

'Surely yes—an ass,' said Mrs. Barnes, whose words are always picked.

'But why should a donkey be less tolerated than a lapdog?' I asked. 'I would tolerate it more. If I might tolerate only one, it would certainly be the donkey.'

'Perhaps he means a flea,' suggested Mrs. Jewks.

'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes.

'But fleas do go in for pranks, and are less tolerated than lapdogs,' said Mrs. Jewks.

'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes again.

'Except that,' I said, not heeding Mrs. Barnes for a moment in my pleasure at having got away from the usual luncheon-table talk of food, 'haven't fleas got more than four legs?'

'That's centipedes,' said Dolly.

'Then it's two legs that they've got.'

'That's birds,' said Dolly.

We looked at each other and began to laugh. It was the first time we had laughed, and once we had begun we laughed and laughed, in that foolish way one does about completely idiotic things when one knows one oughtn't to and hasn't for a long while.

There sat Mrs. Barnes, straight and rocky, with worried eyes. She never smiled; and indeed why should she? But the more she didn't smile the more we laughed,—helplessly, ridiculously. It was dreadful to laugh, dreadful to mention objects that distressed her as vulgar; and because it was dreadful and we knew it was dreadful, we couldn't stop. So was I once overcome with deplorable laughter in church, only because a cat came in. So have I seen an ill-starred woman fall a prey to unseasonable mirth at a wedding. We laughed positively to tears. We couldn't stop. I did try to. I was really greatly ashamed. For I was doing what I now feel in all my bones is the thing Mrs. Barnes dreads most,—I was encouraging Dolly.

Afterwards, when we had settled down to Merivale, and Dolly finding she had left the book upstairs went in to fetch it, I begged Mrs. Barnes to believe that I wasn't often quite so silly and didn't suppose I would be like that again.

She was very kind, and laid her hand for a moment on mine,—such a bony hand, marked all over, I thought as I looked down at it, with the traces of devotion and self-sacrifice. That hand had never had leisure to get fat. It may have had it in the spacious days of Mr. Barnes, but the years afterwards had certainly been lean ones; and since the war, since the selling of her house and the beginning of the evidently wearing occupation of what she had called standing by Dolly, the years, I understand, have been so lean that they were practically bone.

'I think,' she said, 'I have perhaps got into the way of being too serious. It is because Dolly, I consider, is not serious enough. If she were more so I would be less so, and that would be better for us both. Oh, you musn't suppose,' she added, 'that I cannot enjoy a joke as merrily as anybody.' And she smiled broadly and amazingly at me, the rockiest, most determined smile.

'There wasn't any joke, and we were just absurd,' I said penitently, in my turn laying my hand on hers. 'Forgive me. I'm always sorry and ashamed when I have behaved as though I were ten. I do try not to, but sometimes it comes upon one unexpectedly—'

'Dolly is a little old to behave as though she were ten,' said Mrs. Barnes, in sorrow rather than in anger.

'And I'm a little old too. It's very awkward when you aren't so old inside as you are outside. For years I've been trying to be dignified, and I'm always being tripped up by a kind of apparently incurable natural effervescence.'

Mrs. Barnes looked grave.

'That is what is the matter with Dolly,' she said. 'Just that. How strange that you should have met. For it isn't usual. I cannot believe it is usual. All her troubles have been caused by it. I do not, however, regard it as incurable. On the contrary—I have helped her to check it, and she is much better than she was.'

'But what are you afraid she will do now?' I asked; and Dolly, coming out with, the book under her arm and that funny little air of jauntiness that triumphs when she walks over her sobering black skirt and white cotton petticoat, prevented my getting an answer.

But I felt in great sympathy with Mrs. Barnes. And when, starting for our walk after tea, something happened to Dolly's boot—I think the heel came off—and she had to turn back, I gladly went on alone with her sister, hoping that perhaps she would continue to talk on these more intimate lines.

And so she did.

'Dolly,' she said almost immediately, almost before we had got round the turn of the path, 'is the object of my tenderest solicitude and love.'

'I know. I see that,' I said, sympathetically.

'She was the object of my love from the moment when she was laid, a new born baby, in the arms of the little ten year old girl I was then, and she became, as she grew up and developed the characteristics I associate with her name, the object of my solicitude. Indeed, of my concern.'

'I wish,' I said, as she stopped and I began to be afraid this once more was to be all and the shutters were going to be shut again, 'we might be real friends.'

'Are we not?' asked Mrs. Barnes, looking anxious, as though she feared she had failed somewhere in her duties as a guest.

'Oh yes—we are friends of course, but I meant by real friends people who talk together about anything and everything. Almost anything and everything,' I amended. 'People who tell each other things,' I went on hesitatingly. 'Most things,' I amended.

'I have a great opinion of discretion,' said Mrs. Barnes.

'I am sure you have. But don't you think that sometimes the very essence of real friendship consists in—'

'Mr. Barnes always had his own dressing-room.'

This was unexpected, and it silenced me. After a moment I said lamely, 'I'm sure he did. But you were saying about Dol—about Mrs. Jewks—'

'Yes.' Mrs. Barnes sighed. 'Well, it cannot harm you or her,' she went on after a pause, 'for me to tell you that the first thing Dolly did as soon as she was grown up was to make an impetuous marriage.'

'Isn't that rather what most of us begin with?'

'Few are so impetuous. Mine, for instance, was not. Mine was the considered union of affection with regard, entered into properly in the eye of all men, and accompanied by the good wishes of relations and friends. Dolly's—well, Dolly's was impetuous. I cannot say ill-advised, because she asked no one's advice. She plunged—it is not too strong a word, and unfortunately can be applied to some of her subsequent movements—into a misalliance, and in order to contract it she let herself down secretly at night from her bedroom window by means of a sheet.'

Mrs. Barnes paused.

'How very—how very spirited,' I couldn't help murmuring.

Indeed I believe I felt a little jealous. Nothing in my own past approaches this in enterprise. And I not only doubted if I would ever have had the courage to commit myself to a sheet, but I felt a momentary vexation that no one had ever suggested that on his account I should. Compared to Dolly, I am a poor thing.

'So you can understand,' continued Mrs. Barnes, 'how earnestly I wish to keep my sister to lines of normal conduct. She has been much punished for her departures from them. I am very anxious that nothing should be said to her that might seem—well, that might seem to be even slightly in sympathy with actions or ways of looking at life that have in the past brought her unhappiness, and can only in the future bring her yet more.'

'But why,' I asked, still thinking of the sheet, 'didn't she go out to be married through the front door?'

'Because our father would never have allowed his front door to be used for such a marriage. You forget that it was a school, and she was running away with somebody who up till a year or two previously had been one of the pupils.'

'Oh? Did she marry a foreigner?'

Mrs. Barnes flushed a deep, painful red. She is brown and weather-beaten, yet through the brownness spread unmistakeably this deep red. Obviously she had forgotten what she told me the other day about the boys all being foreigners.

'Let us not speak evil of the dead,' she said with awful solemnity; and for the rest of the walk would talk of nothing but the view.

But in my room to-night I have been thinking. There are guests and guests, and some guests haunt one. These guests are that kind. They wouldn't haunt me so much if only we could be really friends; but we'll never be really friends as long as I am kept from talking to Dolly and between us is fixed the rugged and hitherto unscaleable barrier of Mrs. Barnes. Perhaps to-morrow, if I have the courage, I shall make a great attempt at friendship,—at what Mrs. Barnes would call being thoroughly indiscreet. For isn't it senseless for us three women, up here alone together, to spend the precious days when we might be making friends for life hiding away from each other? Why can't I be told outright that Dolly married a German? Evidently she did; and if she could bear it I am sure I can. Twenty years ago it might have happened to us all. Twenty years ago I might have done it myself, except that there wasn't the German living who would have got me to go down a sheet for him. And anyhow Dolly's German is dead; and doesn't even a German leave off being one after he is dead? Wouldn't he naturally incline, by the sheer action of time, to dissolve into neutrality? It doesn't seem humane to pursue him into the recesses of eternity as an alien enemy. Besides, I thought the war was over.

For a long while to-night I have been leaning out of my window thinking. When I look at the stars I don't mind about Germans. It seems impossible to. I believe if Mrs. Barnes would look at them she wouldn't be nearly so much worried. It is a very good practice, I think, to lean out of one's window for a space before going to bed and let the cool darkness wash over one. After being all day with people, how blessed a thing it is not to be with them. The night to-night is immensely silent, and I've been standing so quiet, so motionless that I would have heard the smallest stirring of a leaf. But nothing is stirring. The air is quite still. There isn't a sound. The mountains seem to be brooding over a valley that has gone to sleep.

August 29th.

Antoine said to me this morning that he thought if ces dames—so he always speaks of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly—were going to stay any time, perhaps an assistant for Mrs. Antoine had better be engaged; because Mrs. Antoine might otherwise possibly presently begin to find the combination of heat and visitors a little—

'Of course,' I said. 'Naturally she might. I regret, Antoine, that I did not think of this. Why did you not point it out sooner? I will go myself this very day and search for an assistant.'

Antoine said that such exertions were not for Madame, and that it was he who would search for the assistant.

I said he couldn't possibly leave the chickens and the cow, and that it was I who would search for the assistant.

So that is what I have been doing all day—having a most heavenly time wandering from village to village along the mountain side, my knapsack over my arm and freedom in my heart. The knapsack had food in it and a volume of Crabbe, because it was impossible to tell how long the search might last, and I couldn't not be nourished. I explained to my guests how easily I mightn't be back till the evening, I commended them to the special attentiveness of the Antoines, and off I went, accompanied by Mrs. Barnes's commiseration that I should have to be engaged on so hot a day in what she with felicitous exactness called a domestic pursuit, and trying very hard not to be too evidently pleased.

I went to the villages that lie in the direction of my lovely place of larches, and having after some search found the assistant I continued on towards the west, walking fast, almost as if people would know I had accomplished what I had come out for, and might catch me and take me home again.

As I walked it positively was quite difficult not to sing. Only hostesses know this pure joy. To feel so deep and peculiar an exhilaration you must have been having guests and still be having them. Before my guests came I might and did roam about as I chose, but it was never like to-day, never with that holiday feeling. Oh, I have had a wonderful day! Everything was delicious. I don't remember having smelt the woods so good, and there hasn't ever been anything like the deep cool softness of the grass I lay on at lunch-time. And Crabbe the delightful,—why don't people talk more about Crabbe? Why don't they read him more? I have him in eight volumes; none of your little books of selections, which somehow take away all his true flavour, but every bit of him from beginning to end. Nobody ever made so many couplets that fit in to so many occasions of one's life. I believe I could describe my daily life with Mrs. Barnes and Dolly entirely in couplets from Crabbe. It is the odd fate of his writings to have turned by the action of time from serious to droll. He decomposes, as it were, hilariously. I lay for hours this afternoon enjoying his neat couplets. He enchants me. I forget time when I am with him. It was Crabbe who made me late for supper. But he is the last person one takes out for a walk with one if one isn't happy. Crabbe is a barometer of serenity. You have to be in a cloudless mood to enjoy him. I was in that mood to-day. I had escaped.

Well, I have had my outing, I have had my little break, and have come back filled with renewed zeal to my guests. When I said good-night to-night I was so much pleased with everything, and felt so happily and comfortably affectionate, that I not only kissed Dolly but embarked adventurously on an embrace of Mrs. Barnes.

She received it with surprise but kindliness.

I think she considered I was perhaps being a little impulsive.

I think perhaps I was.

August 30th.

In the old days before the war this house was nearly always full of friends, guests, for they were invited, but they never were in or on my mind as guests, and I don't remember ever feeling that I was a hostess. The impression I now have of them is that they were all very young. But of course they weren't; some were quite as old as Mrs. Barnes, and once or twice came people even older. They all, however, had this in common, that whatever their age was when they arrived, by the time they left they were not more than twenty.

I can't explain this. It couldn't only have been the air, invigorating and inspiriting though it is, because my present guests are still exactly the same age as the first day. That is, Mrs. Barnes is. Dolly is of no age—she never was and never will be forty; but Mrs. Barnes is just as firmly fifty as she was a fortnight ago, and it only used to take those other guests a week to shed every one of their years except the first twenty.

Is it this static, rock-like quality in Mrs. Barnes that makes her remain so unchangeably a guest, that makes her unable to develope into a friend? Why must I, because she insists on remaining a guest, be kept so firmly in my proper place as hostess? I want to be friends. I feel as full of friendliness as a brimming cup. Why am I not let spill some of it? I should love to be friends with Dolly, and I would like very much to be friends with Mrs. Barnes. Not that I think she and I would ever be intimate in the way I am sure Dolly and I would be after ten minutes together alone, but we might develope a mutually indulgent affection. I would respect her prejudices, and she would forgive me that I have so few, and perhaps find it interesting to help me to increase them.

But the anxious care with which Mrs. Barnes studies to be her idea of a perfect guest forces me to a corresponding anxious care to be her idea of a perfect hostess. I find it wearing. There is no easy friendliness for us, no careless talk, no happy go-as-you-please and naturalness. And ought a guest to be so constantly grateful? Her gratitude is almost a reproach. It makes me ashamed of myself; as if I were a plutocrat, a profiteer, a bloated possessor of more than my share, a bestower of favours—of all odious things to be! Now I perceive that I never have had guests before, but only friends. For the first time I am really entertaining; or rather, owing to the something in Mrs. Barnes that induces in me a strange submissiveness, a strange acceptance of her ordering of our days, I am for the first time, not only in my own house, but in any house that I can remember where I have stayed, being entertained.

What is it about Mrs. Barnes that makes Dolly and me sit so quiet and good? I needn't ask: I know. It is because she is single-minded, unselfish, genuinely and deeply anxious for everybody's happiness and welfare, and it is impossible to hurt such goodness. Accordingly we are bound hand and foot to her wishes, exactly as if she were a tyrant.

Dolly of course must be bound by a thousand reasons for gratitude. Hasn't Mrs. Barnes given up everything for her? Hasn't she given up home, and livelihood, and country and friends to come and be with her? It is she who magnanimously bears the chief burden of Dolly's marriage. Without having had any of the joys of Siegfried—I can't think Dolly would mutter a name in her sleep that wasn't her husband's—she has spent these years of war cheerfully accepting the results of him, devoting herself to the forlorn and stranded German widow, spending her life, and what substance she has, in keeping her company in the dreary pensions of a neutral country, unable either to take her home to England or to leave her where she is by herself.

Such love and self-sacrifice is a very binding thing. If these conjectures of mine are right, Dolly is indeed bound to Mrs. Barnes, and not to do everything she wished would be impossible. Naturally she wears those petticoats, and those long, respectable black clothes: they are Mrs. Barnes's idea of how a widow should be dressed. Naturally she goes for excursions in the mountains with an umbrella: it is to Mrs. Barnes both more prudent and more seemly than a stick. In the smallest details of her life Dolly's gratitude must penetrate and be expressed. Yes; I think I understand her situation. The good do bind one very heavily in chains.

To an infinitely less degree Mrs. Barnes's goodness has put chains on me too. I have to walk very carefully and delicately among her feelings. I could never forgive myself if I were to hurt anyone kind, and if the kind person is cast in an entirely different mould from oneself, has different ideas, different tastes, a different or no sense of fun, why then God help one,—one is ruled by a rod of iron.

Just the procession each morning after breakfast to the chairs and Merivale is the measure of Dolly's and my subjection. First goes Dolly with the book, then comes Mrs. Barnes with her knitting, and then comes me, casting my eyes about for a plausible excuse for deliverance and finding none that wouldn't hurt. If I lag, Mrs. Barnes looks uneasily at me with her, 'Am I driving you off your own terrace?' look; and once when I lingered indoors on the pretext of housekeeping she came after me, anxiety on her face, and begged me to allow her to help me, for it is she and Dolly, she explained, who of course cause the extra housekeeping, and it distressed her to think that owing to my goodness in permitting them to be here I should be deprived of the leisure I would otherwise be enjoying.

'In your lovely Swiss home,' she said, her face puckered with earnestness. 'On your summer holiday. After travelling all this distance for the purpose.'

'Dear Mrs. Barnes—' I murmured, ashamed; and assured her it was only an order I had to give, and that I was coming out immediately to the reading aloud.

August 31st.

This morning I made a great effort to be simple.

Of course I will do everything in my power to make Mrs. Barnes happy,—I'll sit, walk, be read to, keep away from Dolly, arrange life for the little time she is here in the way that gives her mind most peace; but why mayn't I at the same time be natural? It is so natural to me to be natural. I feel so uncomfortable, I get such a choked sensation of not enough air, if I can't say what I want to say. Abstinence from naturalness is easily managed if it isn't to last long; every gracefulness is possible for a little while. But shut up for weeks together in the close companionship of two other people in an isolated house on a mountain one must, sooner or later, be natural or one will, sooner or later, die.

So this morning I went down to breakfast determined to be it. More than usually deep sleep had made me wake up with a feeling of more than usual enterprise. I dressed quickly, strengthening my determination by many good arguments, and then stood at the window waiting for the bell to ring.

At the first tinkle of the bell I hurry downstairs, because if I am a minute late, as I have been once or twice, I find my egg wrapped up in my table napkin, the coffee and hot milk swathed in a white woollen shawl Mrs. Barnes carries about with her, a plate over the butter in case there should be dust, a plate over the honey in case there should be flies, and Mrs. Barnes and Dolly, carefully detached from the least appearance of reproach or waiting, at the other end of the terrace being tactfully interested in the view.

This has made me be very punctual. The bell tinkles, and I appear. I don't appear before it tinkles, because of the peculiar preciousness of all the moments I can legitimately spend in my bedroom; but, if I were to, I would find Mrs. Barnes and Dolly already there.

I don't know when they go down, but they are always there; and always I am greeted with the politest solicitude from Mrs. Barnes as to how I slept. This of course draws forth a corresponding solicitude from me as to how Mrs. Barnes slept; and the first part of breakfast is spent in answers to these inquiries, and in the eulogies to which Mrs. Barnes then proceeds of the bed, and the pure air, that make the satisfactoriness of her answers possible.

From this she goes on to tell me how grateful she and Dolly are for my goodness. She tells me this every morning. It is like a kind of daily morning prayer. At first I was overcome, and, not knowing how to ward off such repeated blows of thankfulness, stumbled about awkwardly among protests and assurances. Now I receive them in silence, copying the example of the heavenly authorities; but, more visibly embarrassed than they, I sheepishly smile.

After the praises of my goodness come those of the goodness of the coffee and the butter, though this isn't any real relief to me, because their goodness is so much tangled up in mine. I am the Author of the coffee and the butter; without me they wouldn't be there at all.

Dolly, while this is going on, says nothing but just eats her breakfast. I think she might help me out a little, seeing that it happens every morning and that she must have noticed my store of deprecations is exhausted.

This morning, having made up my mind to be natural, I asked her straight out why she didn't talk.

She was in the middle of her egg, and Mrs. Barnes was in the middle of praising the great goodness of the eggs, and therefore, inextricably, of my great goodness, so that there was no real knowing where the eggs left off and I began; and taking the opportunity offered by a pause of coffee-drinking on Mrs. Barnes's part, I said to Dolly, 'Why do you not talk at breakfast?'

'Talk?' repeated Dolly, looking up at me with a smile.

'Yes. Say things. How are we ever to be friends if we don't say things? Don't you want to be friends, Dolly?'

'Of course,' said Dolly, smiling.

Mrs. Barnes put her cup down hastily. 'But are we not—' she began, as I knew she would.

'Real friends,' I interrupted. 'Why not,' I said, 'let us have a holiday from Merivale to-day, and just sit together and talk. Say things,' I went on, still determined to be natural, yet already a little nervous. 'Real things.'

'But has the reading—is there any other book you would pref—do you not care about Merivale?' asked Mrs. Barnes, in deep concern.

'Oh yes,' I assured her, leaving off being natural for a moment in order to be polite, 'I like him very much indeed. I only thought—I do think—it would be pleasant for once to have a change. Pleasant just to sit and talk. Sit in the shade and—oh well, say things.'

'Yes,' said Dolly. 'I'd love to.'

'We might tell each other stories, like the people in the Earthly Paradise. But real stories. Out of our lives.'

'Yes,' said Dolly again. 'Yes. I'd love to.'

'We shall be very glad, I am sure,' said Mrs. Barnes politely, 'to listen to any stories you may like to tell us.'

'Ah, but you must tell some too—we must play fair.'

'I'd love to,' said Dolly again, her dimple flickering.

'Surely we—in any case Dolly and I—are too old to play at anything,' said Mrs. Barnes with dignity.

'Not really. You'll like it once you've begun. And anyhow I can't play by myself, can I,' I said, still trying to be gay and simple. 'You wouldn't want me to be lonely, would you.'

But I was faltering. Mrs. Barnes's eye was on me. Impossible to go on being gay and simple beneath that eye.

I faltered more and more. 'Sometimes I think,' I said, almost timidly, 'that we're wasting time.'

'Oh no, do you really?' exclaimed Mrs. Barnes anxiously. 'Do you not consider Merivale—' (here if I had been a man I would have said damn Merivale and felt better)—'very instructive? Surely to read a good history can never be wasting time? And he is not heavy. Surely you do not find him heavy? His information is always imparted picturesquely, remarkably so. And though one may be too old for games one is fortunately never too old for instruction.'

'I don't feel too old for games,' said Dolly.

'Feeling has nothing to do with reality,' said Mrs. Barnes sternly, turning on her.

'I only thought,' I said, 'that to-day we might talk together instead of reading. Just for once—just for a change. If you don't like the idea of telling stories out of our lives let us just talk. Tell each other what we think of things—of the big things like—well, like love and death for instance. Things,' I reassured her, 'that don't really touch us at this moment.'

'I do not care to talk about love and death,' said Mrs. Barnes frostily.

'But why?'

'They are most unsettling.'

'But why? We would only be speculating—'

She held up her hand. 'I have a horror of the word. All speculation is abhorrent to me. My brother-in-law said to me, Never speculate.'

'But didn't he mean in the business sense?'

'He meant it, I am certain, in every sense. Physically and morally.'

'Well then, don't let us speculate. Let us talk about experiences. We've all had them. I am sure it would be as instructive as Merivale, and we might perhaps—perhaps we might even laugh a little. Don't you think it would be pleasant to—to laugh a little?'

'I'd love to,' said Dolly, her eyes shining.

'Suppose, instead of being women, we were three men—'

Mrs. Barnes, who had been stiffening for some minutes, drew herself up at this.

'I am afraid I cannot possibly suppose that,' she said.

'Well, but suppose we were—'

'I do not wish to suppose it,' said Mrs. Barnes.

'Well, then, suppose it wasn't us at all, but three men here, spending their summer holidays together can't you imagine how they would talk?'

'I can only imagine it if they were nice men,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'and even so but dimly.'

'Yes. Of course. Well, let us talk together this morning as if we were nice men,—about anything and everything. I can't think,' I finished plaintively, 'why we shouldn't talk about anything and everything.'

Dolly looked at me with dancing eyes.

Mrs. Barnes sat very straight. She was engaged in twisting the honey-spoon round and round so as to catch its last trickling neatly. Her eyes were fixed on this, and if there was a rebuke in them it was hidden from me.

'You must forgive me,' she said, carefully winding up the last thread of honey, 'but as I am not a nice man I fear I cannot join in. Nor, of course, can Dolly, for the same reason. But I need not say,' she added earnestly, 'that there is not the slightest reason why you, on your own terrace, shouldn't, if you wish, imagine yourself to be a nice—'

'Oh no,' I broke in, giving up. 'Oh no, no. I think perhaps you are right. I do think perhaps it is best to go on with Merivale.'

We finished breakfast with the usual courtesies.

I didn't try to be natural any more.

September 1st.

Dolly forgot herself this morning.

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

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

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

'Yes,' said Dolly—

Reines Glück geniesst doch nie
Wer zahlen soll und weiss nicht wie.

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

Dolly had forgotten herself.

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

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

September 2nd.

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

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

September 3rd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Think of all the wood!'

'But it would only be a few logs—'

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

'But if we're cold—'

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

'But—'

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have learned this gradually.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mrs. Antoine watched me warming myself with respectful disapproval.

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

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

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

Evening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Thank you. What I wish to say is—'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 4th.

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

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

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

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

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

O schwöre nicht und küsse nur

And I thought it sensible advice.

September 5th.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

September 6th.

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

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

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

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

Our eyes met.

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

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

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

Evening.

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

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

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

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

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

Then she came and stood beside me.

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

'I know,' said Dolly.

'Then hadn't you better go back?'

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

I picked in silence.

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

'No,' I said.

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

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

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

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

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

'Well then,' said Dolly.

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

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

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

'Yes there is.'

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

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

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

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

She glanced at Antoine, digging.

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

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

'Oh—idiots!'

Dolly made a gesture as of including the whole world.

'Does one ever grow up?' I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'He wasn't Siegfried,' said Dolly.

'Not Siegfried?'

It was my turn to stop picking and look surprised.

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

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

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

'But he was my husband.'

I stared.

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

'So he was,' said Dolly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'But—how many?' I got out.

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

'What—Junkers?'

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

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

'In husbands as well?'

'Well yes—I think so.'

Dolly sighed.