I

One by one the guests had gone, and with Trella now there was but a poet who had elevated rhyme to the dignity of a sport. His name was Villiers. In addition to rhyme and other gymnastics less violent, he cultivated paradox. At the moment, he was twisting his painted fingers, fumbling his hostess with his yellow eyes. Then, pontifically, he addressed her:

“There is but one enduring delight⁠—certainty in love. Certainty that it exists, certainty that it is returned, certainty that it will never diminish.”

Trella looked at him so fixedly that he tacked.

“The idea suggests itself,” he hastened to add, “in connection with the Infanta of whom we were talking at dinner. Nobody seems to recognize that the one to blame for her conduct is her father. Don Carlos is a most ordinary person. He goes about talking, ‘God and my country,’ by day, wrecking households at night, as ignorant of Molière as my masseur. Evil exists only in the noise that it makes.

“ ‘Le scandale du monde est ce qui fait l’offense
Et ce n’est pas pécher que pécher en silence.”

“Have you been hearing things about me?” Trella interrupted.

Villiers promptly assumed the appearance of an idiot.

“Do you believe them?” she asked.

He waved his painted fingers. “Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I have heard so many lies concerning myself that how can you expect me to believe the stories I hear of others? No,” he continued, remotely, “had Don Carlos only known enough to cram Tartuffe down the girl’s throat she might not have carried on as she has. And then, again, she might have. Bad taste is in the Bourbon blood. The Princess Isabelle let herself down thirty feet out of a window, and ran off with a Polish mucker. They were caught and married by main strength.”

Trella patted a yawn.

“Tell me of yourself,” he agilely added. “What have you been doing? Or, rather, what have you not been doing? Do you know, I should love so to put my ideas of you in a poem. For private circulation, of course. It would have to be, wouldn’t it, unless it appeared in Latin?”

But, as for all reply she smiled indifferently; the poet stood up, and, balancing himself on his heels, smiled, too.

“ ‘Our Lady of the Immaculate Conversation,’ would, I think, be a very good title for that poem. Bonsoir, belle dame.”

Raising her wrist, he brushed it with his lips. In a moment he had gone.

As he passed from the room a servant entered. On a little tray he had a telegram which he brought her. Dated London and addressed to the Countess of Cloden, Avenue Marceau, Paris, it contained these words: “Will be with you tonight.”

With a gesture, she dismissed the man, and, leaning on a mantel, stared in a mirror, stared through it into the past, stared beyond it into the future, and then at herself, at her royal beauty, at the sunburst of flesh which she was.

In all our great Northwest, her grandfather, Commodore Verelst, had been accounted the richest and hardest of men. As a lad he tracked muskrats in the Michigan marshes. As a man, he constructed and commanded a fleet of lake steamers. As a corpse, he left millions. He had one son, who took them all, took them away to New York, and married. The result of the union was Trella. The original Verelst was a German, his wife was French. There was the gold of the Rhine in the glisten of Trella’s hair. In the faint umber of her skin, in the mobility and droop of her lips there was France. When Teuton and Latin combine there can be some very fetching results. Witness the Venetian. But when to these elements is added the magic of Manhattan the result not merely fetches, it astounds. Trella developed into an astounding young person.

As a girl, she reminded you of what the Argive Helen may have been in her teens. Her mouth seemed to promise more than any mortal mouth could give. Her voice was so insinuating that it conveyed the sensation of a kiss. She had glances as she had intonations, which dispensed a charm quite incandescent. Her eyes were particularly enthralling. They were large and blue, blue as the sea and bluer. Generally, she was prudent enough to keep them half closed. When she opened them they revealed a number of things⁠—curiosity, restlessness and that je-m’en-ficheisme which is mistaken for frankness. When she chose, she could flood them with languors. She just lacked being tall.

In the process of the production and development of these witcheries her father concluded to leave for another world. After a proper period of regret, his widow left for another world, also. But it was Europe she selected. Though a New Yorker by birth, and inordinately rich, she had never succeeded in forcing certain portals. Such things annoy a woman. Hence the migration.

The migration effected, Mrs. Verelst discovered that to be decently lodged, two domiciles are obligatory. Mrs. Verelst took three. One in Paris, one on the Riviera, and one in Normandy. To these she added a fourth. The last was a cemetery. Her residence in that resort was not, however, immediate. She waited for certain things, primarily until her daughter was married.

It was on the Riviera that the preliminaries to this event occurred. Entrance to the penal colony, which is called Society there, is a matter of entire ease. Mrs. Verelst knocked and it was opened. There was a sesame in her dollars. There was another in Trella’s looks.

The particular section of the Riviera which she had selected is, geologically speaking, a Mediterranean cliff; descriptively, it is a sublimate of Paris in a tropic frame; pictorially, it is a fairyland in duodecimo; socially, it is striated with all the variegated hues of beautiful cosmopolitanism, and, familiarly, it is Monte Carlo. You may meet there kings, outlaws, demireps, professional beauties, cheap trippers, and Spanish grandees.

In the air is a smell of vitriol and violets, of vice, patented, prodigal, and perfumed. There is not an old-fashioned virtue in the place. There are tears, though, rivers of them, heightened by the click of the ball on the roulette table, the call of the dealers at trente-et-quarante, the music and monotony of Rien ne va plus. People go mad there. Others kill themselves. Some fall in love. Among the latter was Trella.

This extraordinary event occurred in a commonplace manner. At a rout given by the morganatic widow of an emperor the girl and her mother were present. During a pause in a dance, in a crash and subsidence of the orchestra, an Englishman caused himself to be presented. Before speech was possible there arose from beyond the voice of the world’s best tenor. It was an aria from the Somnambula that he was singing, the “Perche non posso odiarte,” which, for sheer beauty, is perhaps the most entrancing in all of Italy’s enchanting repertory.

The melting measures proceeded. The Englishman looked at the American girl and she at him. As they looked, the madness of the music seemed at first but the accompaniment of their thoughts, and then at once to transmit those thoughts from one to the other. Involuntarily, he moistened his lips. Into the perfection of the girl’s features a flush had come. To use a localism of the land, c’était le coup de foudre.

Trella let her long lashes fall. It was as though she had dropped a curtain. The man turned to her mother. That lady was whispering something. Yet what, he neither knew nor cared. The measures had swooned. The hush was broken by a ripple of applause.

“It is very warm,” Mrs. Verelst announced.

Before anyone could engage with her in meteorological observations, the tenor, by way of encore, was distributing the enchantment of his notes anew.

Back of Trella a balconied window opened on the April night. Already she had investigated its possibilities, and raising those lashes again, she led the Englishman to the stars without. The aria followed them. He never forgot that song. Nor, perhaps, did she.

II

Life is packed with pleasures. One of the most delightful is to awake with the consciousness of being in love. On the morning succeeding the rout Shane Wyvill awoke to just that delight. He was turbulently intoxicated by a girl whom he had never seen before, and whose name he did not know.

But the morning was a replica of others. Moreover, it was a family trait to wake up with that sensation. So far back as the family went, and it went as far back as any of the other families which Mr. Burke has so diligently catalogued, the Shane Wyvills⁠—the Shame Wyvills as custom had corrupted the name⁠—had, in love, been freebooters. Titularly lords of Cloden, typically they were a bad lot.

The last earl, after filling the Continent with the uproar of his debauches, gave up the ghost with a shriek. What visions he beheld he lacked the time to relate. It may be assumed that they were not very cheerful. The youth of the existing incumbent had been what the French call stormy. After the storm, the calm. The past twenty years he had passed at Shane Towers, contemplating the landscape. That landscape had been so successfully postobited that it produced less than would suffice for a sweep.

The wants of the earl were many. But they were entirely spiritual. Pending their attainment he sat in a dressing-gown at peace with all the world, including his nephew, Shane Wyvill, who was incidentally his heir.

In the latter’s father, hereditary characteristics had been so in abeyance that he had been regarded as a nonentity. He had married one of the Villiers girls, and done nothing worse than lose a portion of her portion in the City. Then he had died, she, also, leaving this heir and what was left of her property. The amount was just enough to enable him to get along on.

Apart, then, from the advantage of being in line for an empty earldom and the further advantage of good teeth and good looks, Shane Wyvill had, from the point of view of the world at large, nothing whatever to boast of.

Even otherwise, he was not of a boastful nature. By way of compensation he enjoyed the formidable repute of being the best-dressed man in London. But the repute was unrighteous. He was too sensible to do more than put himself in the hands of the right people and then forget all about them⁠—except their bills, which he paid, as he paid all such things, on presentation. It will be seen, therefore, that if not boastful, at any rate, he was proud. No one is perfect.

But the imperfections of Wyvill will be the better understood through a showing that this mid-April morning, on which he awoke with the consciousness of being in love, was but a return of sundry others. Fed, as every decently educated lad in England is, on the psalms of Aristophanes, he had also taken a course in Theocritus. In the green pastures of a long vacation he encountered a maiden whose studies had been less elaborate. Their defects he undertook to remedy. One noon he read to her an episode from an eclogue. At its close their eyes met. To quote Dante, they read no more that day. Subsequently, he encountered her, not in green pastures, but in Piccadilly, and at an hour nearer midnight than noon. In the interval she had convoluted into a chorus girl. Her salary was precisely twenty-five shillings a week. At no properly conducted London theatre is it permissible for a lady whose salary does not exceed thirty shillings to drive to the stage door in her brougham. The rule may seem arbitrary, but there it is, and in this case there it was. The young person who perhaps had grown luxurious, regarded it not merely as arbitrary, but awkward. For the sake of old times, Wyvill got her higher pay. Then for the sake of old times, also, she blackmailed him pretty nearly out of his boots. Such was his initiation into the charms of love and Leicester Square.

In politer spheres he presently discovered consolations. These consolations lasted until the lady’s husband began uncivil proceedings, from the result of which Wyvill was saved by a succession of events which converted him to a belief in miracles. The lady explained everything so satisfactorily to her husband that the proceedings were withdrawn, whereupon she eloped with another and a richer man. Such was his initiation into the horrors of matrimony and Mayfair.

It is said of those who beheld the mysteries at Eleusis that thereafter they ceased to smile. Wyvill’s experiences were quite as chastening. The pleasure in things that had pleased him waned. He tried hunting, and gave it up. It cost too much. He went forth to shoot in Canada, and returned disillusioned. Yet, in default of wealth, one must have a raison d’être. It was in the search for that raison that he encountered Trella. Her effect on him was instantaneous. Before he slept he was conscious of a new conception of beauty. When he awoke it was to the consciousness of a new conception of life. From the conjunction of these conceptions there mounted like a flame the delight of a dream of possessing the girl.

In fairyland you have but to ask and it is given. Since Perrault lived and labored, Monte Carlo is the nearest approach to that country. In its sorceries are solvents so surprising that you may land there a pauper and leave a plutocrat. You may also reverse the order of things. Where the enchanted rose is, there, too, is the disenchanting thorn.

But on the slopes which a syndicate in collaboration with nature has strewn with diaphanous days and electric lights, such thorns as grew Wyvill passed unheeding, and, in passing, promenaded straight into the domain of a beauty who, however, was not sleeping, but thoroughly wide-awake.

On the way, Wyvill gathered certain facts, which were so many flowers; the domain’s precise position, for instance, its name and the kilometers it took to get there. For even in fairyland, and perhaps particularly in fairyland, there are always mileposts in high hats and others in low neck to provide you with just such information.

In serving Prince Charming they also served the Wide-Awake Beauty. As a consequence, when, in due course, the two met again, had they been first cousins they could not have known more of each other. To Prince Charming the Wide-Awake Beauty was an American heiress, and to the Wide-Awake Beauty Prince Charming was heir to an earldom. What could be more succinct, what more satisfactory? Especially when it is remembered that it had required but one meeting, complicated by nothing more quotable than the melting measures of an aria, for the parties concerned to experience the coup de foudre.

To Trella the coup had all the charm of entire novelty. In New York she had flirted right and left. She liked men, liked admiration and a bold glance, and a squeeze of the hand she was none too shy to return. Apart from a liking for such things, they left her unaffected. After the boldest glance and the tightest squeeze her pulse registered normal. That, however, was less to her credit than to the discredit of the glancers and squeezers. Their seductions were limited to gymnastics.

In Paris and on the Riviera the liking for men continued, but men were scarce. One look at Wyvill had told her that he was of a different breed. Never before had she met anyone with less manner and more ease. Never before had she beheld a human being so perfectly sent out. Never before had a presence impressed her so suddenly and so absolutely. For the first time, her pulse ceased to be normal. For the first time she saw a man, and in that man she saw, also, and for the first time, too⁠—or thought she did⁠—her master. At sight of him she flushed. Why, she did not know. But it seemed to her all very new and inexpressibly delightful.

In spite of which, or, perhaps, precisely on that account, when on the Casino’s esplanade, chance brought these two people face to face again, only an exchange of platitudes resulted. Yet, in circumstances not similar, perhaps, but cognate, people do not say what they think. As a rule, they do not think at all. They occupy themselves as best they may in sparring for wind. Such sparring as then occurred was rendered more vigorous than otherwise it might have been by the presence of the girl’s mother, who stuck to her, not with any un-American view to the observance of the proprieties, but simply because she had come out with her, and objected to being stranded.

The next day matters were more propitious. Wyvill dined with the Verelsts at their villa, took them afterward to the gambling rooms, and accompanied them home again, where he required no urging whatever to remain for a brandy and soda; no urging, either, to dispense with platitudes. After the good old American fashion, Mrs. Verelst made herself scarce, and the two were free to gaze at the Mediterranean moon and then at the avowals of each other’s eyes.

As weeds of the sea loosened by one current, stayed by another, mount slowly yet surely before achieving their gradual yet certain ascent, so did these avowals, arrested now by query, again by an objection, rise from the depths of their being and mount to their lips.

From avowals to action no appreciable time is required. In a moment they were in each other’s arms; in a week they were engaged; in a month they were married. In fairyland lovers don’t dillydally.

It was not, though, of course, at Monte Carlo that the marriage took place. Against its taking place at all Mrs. Verelst protested vehemently. She had an ardent desire to be the mother of a duchess, and the Duca di Cherella, a young Neapolitan, whom Trella treated as part of the landscape, had, in that desire, collaborated as ardently as she. Failing him, there were others. Besides, Mrs. Verelst, who, as the phrase is, had her police, knew that Wyvill’s uncle was capable of living forever. In accordance with a good old American custom, she wanted her money’s worth, and a title in futuro did not in the least satisfy her ideas of What’s What. As a consequence, she protested vehemently. She might just as well have held her tongue. Trella paid not the slightest attention to her. Seeing which, after another American fashion, Mrs. Verelst gave in. The marriage took place in Paris, and after the ceremony, through the scented streets, the bride and groom who had met in fairyland set out for paradise.

III

Love is a fever. Marriage is a febrifuge. That is the rule. This marriage was not an exception. Only its antipyretic effects were not immediately observable. At stations along the route the fever lifted them to chimerical altitudes, sank them to spaceless depths, lowered them deeper, lifted them vertiginously, caught and carried them beyond the earth, beyond the horizons of the known, beyond the confines of the real, disclosing through vistas undivined, those mysterious affinities that similarize the flesh and spirit. In fresh ascensions, the fair, illusory promises of love and life were uttered by them both. In new descents the vain, yet lovely vows, Forever, Never, were interchanged again. And so it went.

The duo is very archaic, but to them it seemed highly original, essentially unique, entirely their own composition. It seemed too capable of infinite variations. Through its interludes the memory of a murmur of other songs once filtered in on Wyvill, and jarred him as an oath will jar. Trella’s memories were less resonant. They were pages that girlhood had left quite blank, and at which along the route now and then she stopped and mused. With the refrain of that duo shaking constant stars in her ears it seemed inconceivable to her that such blankness there could be. Whereupon, after considering the past, she contemplated the future. The perspectives looked very spacious.

Meanwhile, impeded by nothing more than a maid and a valet, and delayed solely by a courier and a cargo of boxes, they journeyed circuitously from the scented Bois to the pink and crocus of Seville, and on through the ghosts and treasuries of Spain to its summer court at San Sebastian.

During the journey wherever Trella had shown herself admiration had been ambient. She had trailed it as a torch trails smoke. To that she had been always more or less accustomed. But in Seville, after the good old Andalusian custom, it was manifested vociferously, in open compliments of her mother’s handiwork, in shouts of Olle tu madre⁠—hurrahs for that absent lady, which infuriated Wyvill, but which, through their fascinating indirection, delighted Trella, as, indeed, every novelty did.

In Castile, the admiration, while quite as fervent, became less noisy, and at San Sebastian so sedate that it would have been colorless had not chance⁠—a function at the palace aiding⁠—embodied it in the Duke of Thule.

The duke, who had an amiable, aimless way, made up in guile what he lacked in sense. Seen across the room, you would have taken him for Teuton; close to, for a fool. Trella saw but the royal. Barring the Regent to whom she had just been presented, she had never met one before. The encounter seemed to her uplifting. It heightened her in her own esteem.

It was at that juncture that she contemplated the future. The more she considered it the more spacious it grew. Then presently, little by little, one after another the delayed effects of the febrifuge appeared. The duo rang less starlike in her ears. The heights began to assume the aspect of the déjà vu, the ascensions to horizons beyond the known acquired the proportions of undertakings, and the affinities, similarizing sufficiently, had nothing more to say.

Everything being possible, it may be that, in the course of time, Wyvill also would have experienced the premonitory effects of the antipyretic, but Trella’s symptoms, at first unnoticed, then misinterpreted, subsequently evident, yet wholly enigmatic, left him perplexed.

Where is the Vandal that invented marriage? Wyvill put to himself some such question, but long after, when San Sebastian was but a halt in the trip and they were back in Paris again.

This occurred in the autumn. At that time, pending the termination of touches on a house which the girl’s mother had bought, Wyvill and Trella were lodged at the Bristol. There, one noon, the duke breakfasted with them. Afterward, Wyvill, with the purchase of some horses in view, joined their owner, the Vicomte de Chose, at a neighboring club, and, by virtue of a previous arrangement, drove with him, at three o’clock, to Saint Cloud, where the horses were stabled. On the way, Trella, looking nice enough to eat, whirled by in a brougham. Wyvill turned and kissed his hand to her. But the salute was unnoticed. She had not seen him, and continuing his way, he reached the stables, saw the horses, put them through their paces, and returned to the Bristol just in time to dress for dinner.

“What did you do this afternoon?” he asked, when the soup had gone. Without waiting for an answer, he told her about the horses. “Ce sont des alezans superbes,” he added⁠—a phrase which he had caught from de Chose.

Trella did not know what alezans were. He explained. Then again he asked what she had done, but indifferently, as a husband may, not out of curiosity, but for the sake of talk.

“Nothing,” she answered. “After you went out my mother came and stayed here with me until nearly 5. Then I took a turn with her in the Bois.”

“Five is rather late nowadays for the Bois, is it not?” he asked, with the same air of indifference.

“The air does me good,” Trella replied, and let the subject drop.

Wyvill stared at her. Her hair made a garland of gold. Her eyes were sultry, her lips were scarlet. About her throat was a diamond collar. Her bodice was sewn with pearls. Between the diamonds and the pearls there glowed the silk of her skin. Never had she looked more beautiful. In the poise of her head, in her appearance and costume, she exhaled a charm almost intolerably aphrodisiac. She seemed created for love, for life at its fullest, and, as it now occurred to Wyvill, for lies.

The dinner proceeded. A maître d’hôtel after presenting a dish for inspection, superintended the serving of it by his underlings. Covers succeeded each other. Of what they consisted Wyvill did not notice. It had been arranged that he and Trella were to go that night to a première and afterward to the Embassy. This arrangement a remark of hers recalled.

Through the flowers and lights on the table he stared over at her again. When a man loves a woman, it is not an excess of ambition on his part to wish to trust her also. And suddenly a solution visited Wyvill. Might she not have accounted for her afternoon as she had, solely to save him and herself the boredom of the narration of some tiresome occurrence?

The solution was so stupid that it soothed. But even in the process of welcoming it there were incidents unconsciously recalled which trooped out and interfered. There was, for instance, a secretiveness which she had recently displayed in regard to such letters as were brought her. Recently, too, it had been obvious to him that she had preoccupations which she did not wish to disclose, thoughts to which he was a stranger. Moreover, there was that change in her, one that had filtered through such subtle gradations that only latterly the portent had perplexed.

Those who have suffered from jealousy know that it is physical, they know that it can no more be argued away than can any other distemper, and they know, too, to their own cost, perhaps, that its most torturesome form comes of thoughts that are hidden, and emotions they may not share.

To Wyvill the lie returned, but unvarnished now, and with it that determination to know which, in certain crises, is as imperious as famine. But of the inward tumult he gave no sign.

“What did your mother say?” he asked, leisurely.

By way of reply, Trella contented herself with shrugging her bare white shoulders.

“And you were here with her until nearly five?”

Trella nodded.

“Why not tell me the truth?”

At this she started. If he had struck her she could not have flushed more highly. But Wyvill omitted to pursue the advantage. At the sight of her confusion there came to him a sense not of anger, but of sorrow for himself and her.

The maître d’hôtel and his underlings had gone. Wyvill got from his chair and moved it nearer to her own.

“Distrust and affection don’t hit it off very well together, Trella. If you thought that I was deceiving you, you would think, too, that I was ceasing to care. It may be that you are ceasing to care for me. In that case, how shall I blame you? We cannot command affection. It commands us. Then, too, the quantity of it being limited, some day or other it must give out. When it does, love ends. No effort can prevent it. You have loved me now for a long time⁠—almost six months. Unfortunately for us both, this is not a love affair, it is a marriage.”

He hesitated, hoping for an interruption, for some explanation or protest, but as she sat, tantalizingly beautiful and irritatingly dumb, he bent forward and, probing her with his eyes, very deliberately he asked:

“Where were you this afternoon?”

“I have told you.”

“No, forgive me, you are mistaken, you have not. You told me you were here until five. At three you passed me in the Rue Royale. Where were you going?”

Trella stood up, and with a little princess air which she could assume very well when she chose, she looked him in the face.

“You appear to be cross-questioning me.”

“Ah!” said Wyvill, rising, too. “Very good. I shall not presume to do so again. But I will presume to call your attention to the fact that you have lied to me. You have lied stupidly, wantonly. Whether the lie was meant to cover something equally stupid and wanton, I do not know. I do, though, know that while a wanton act may be shameful yet human, a wanton lie is shameless and vile.

“What is it, Harris?” he interrupted himself to ask. “No one rang.”

“No, sir, thank you, sir,” his valet, who had entered, answered, producing a dispatch which he had brought. “The carriage is at the door, sir.”

Wyvill opened the message. “Then you may dismiss it,” he ordered.

He turned to Trella. “You cannot go out, with my permission at least. My uncle is dead. I leave for London tonight.”

IV

Wyvill left Paris in a fury, determined to discover what Trella was up to if he had to employ a detective to do it. In the Channel the fury evaporated. When he reached Shane Towers he was glad he had probed no deeper. When the funeral was over he was glad that he had not questioned more.

As to that he was right. To expect some women to tell the truth is as naive as to expect them to go about naked. They simply can’t. Then, too, there are mysteries concerning them which we may determine to solve, but which if time but intervene we prefer to ignore. Wyvill’s attitude was, therefore, perfectly natural. But in upbraiding the lady he had been absurd. There are complaints that are compliments, and reproaches which are testimonies of love.

Some inkling of this Trella probably intercepted. In any event, he was presently urged to return. But to return to what? He was still passionately in love with the girl who but a few months before had become his wife; the beauty and the charm of her were as dear to him as ever, dearer, even, by comparison; for in her place there seemed to have come a woman whom he had never known, and who, though her counterpart in charm, was otherwise a counterfeit.

Presently another letter came. He was urged again to return. But to whom? To Trella? Yes, and at once. The trains and the boats were not built that could take him to her fast enough. But with that stranger who had come in her place he had no concern whatever.

Then more letters came. Some were from his wife, offering to join him, and some were from Mrs. Verelst, whom Trella’s prompt elevation to the rank and attributes of peeress had entirely appeased.

It was then winter. But the winter passed and the spring came before he himself felt appeased. The appeasing was due to a note from the lady, in which she expressed a wish to explain.

As he read the note he could not but recall other explanations of which he had been cognizant. Yet, then, also, he could not but let them go. Time is a strange emollient. In its mysterious potency it softens without our knowledge. We are unaware that it has been acting on us, and suddenly a whisper, a breeze that passes, shows that it has done its work.

That night Trella received the telegram which was brought to her as Villiers was leaving her house.

Meanwhile she had found herself entertaining and being entertained by all that is best and worst in that curious cosmopolis which is called Tout-Paris. Yet there, even the worst have fits of propriety. Society abroad is very much the same as at home. It is not censorious. Provided a woman lives, outwardly, at least, on good terms with her husband; provided, as Villiers had noted, that there is an avoidance of open scandal, a lady is free to be as unladylike as she likes. With the men, at all times everything goes. Yet, now and then they do object to certain associations for their wives.

Of Lady Cloden stories began to be told. To begin with, she was not living with her husband, and it was rumored that, for reasons, which, however interesting, would not look well in print, he did not propose to live with her again. Such things dishearten. Moreover, it is not pleasant for a woman of position to see that position fade. Men acquire with her an easy form of address. They bow to her sometimes when they should not, and again omit to when they should. Matters had by no means come to that pass yet with Trella, but unless a halt were called social dégringolage was on the way.

And now on this particular night, as she stared in the mirror, at the sunburst of beauty which she was, it was of these things that she thought.

A step aroused her. She turned, glanced at the great, bare, brilliant room, then at the telegram which had been brought. Someone was approaching. She turned again. At the door her husband stood. With a little bleat which, if not of joy, was a very good imitation of it, she moved to meet and greet him, and at once, before he could speak, with a volubility to which she had not accustomed him, she acknowledged that she had been at fault, begging his forgiveness, relating things which he had never known, that she had a brother, that the latter had disgraced himself, that he had got into fresh difficulties, that that last afternoon at the Bristol she had gone to aid him, and that if she had hid the truth, it was out of delicacy, and the Lord knows what else, besides.

She paused, for lack of breath, perhaps. At the moment, from the avenue without, through the open window, came pouring the madness of a song of love. Wyvill had heard it somewhere, sometime, a long while ago, yet where or when he could not recall. Then suddenly he was back again in fairyland. The air was scented with flowers, he was speaking to someone, there was an aria that seemed to help his speech, that seemed to multiply the music of the replies. It was from the “Somnambula,” of course. He remembered now. Perhaps so, too, did she.

Pretty as a peach, and just as witty, savorous as a pineapple and with quite as much heart, commonplace in everything except in beauty, that aria in filtering through her pulp, must have stirred a memory, encountered a fiber, awakened an echo, for to her face she raised a hand and from her eyes there fell a tear.

Wyvill saw that tear. At once his arms were about her, his lips on hers. It seemed to him that they had parted only to reunite, that the past was a nightmare, that she loved him, that he loved her, better, even, than on the route to Paradise.

V

There are lakes which a breeze from the valley disturbs, but which the high winds from the summits leave unruffled. Then, for no appreciable reason, they reverse the order of things. There are natures that resemble those lakes. You never know where you are with them.

In attempting to display the cumulative incidents of this drama, no better analogy occurs by which to explain the opposite effects that circumstances, relatively identical, produced on Wyvill.

They were then at Deauville. Meanwhile, the stranger had gone, and with her every doubt of Trella. She was charmful, the more so, perhaps, because she had had what is called an experience with her husband, and it is said that experience teaches. Mrs. Verelst, who had had something in the nature of an experience also, tried to profit by it in offering to restore Shane Towers, and to maintain the place in proper fashion. At this Wyvill protested. It was, he declared, the gloomiest keep in England. Mrs. Verelst paid no attention to his nonsense. Trella, either. Paris had palled on her. For reasons of her own she was glad to evolve from it into what her mother termed her rightful sphere. All this was pleasant to Wyvill. The present was pleasant, also, and the future looked, as the future always does look, even pleasanter. And so the days fell by until, the Grand Prix over, they went down to Deauville.

There Mrs. Verelst contented herself with a suite in a hotel. But for Wyvill and Trella there was a house. This house, known, locally, because of its arrangements, as the Villa Portugaise, squats sumptuously before the sea. It is of two stories. The bedrooms are on the ground floor, the dining and reception-rooms adjoining. Between the two principal suites is a wide hall. One of these suites Trella selected for herself. Wyvill took the other. Both are splendid, and the villa itself is a gem.

It was early in July when they reached there. At that period Deauville is usually delightful. But in August it becomes infernal. The season is then at its height, and to its confluence surges a mob of viveurs and rastas.

Among others who appeared there that year was the Duke of Thule. Yet, owing to an attack of Anglophobia with which France is periodically afflicted, he came incog., as a private gentleman, merely. For the purposes of his sojourn he also had a villa. About it night and day men in plain clothes strolled unobtrusively. So are the mighty guarded.

The royal villa was next to the Villa Portugaise, and there, occasionally, as a friend and neighbor may, the duke dropped in, sometimes in beautiful flannels for a game of tennis, sometimes alarmingly begoggled for a flight in an auto, but always amiable and aimless.

And so the days fell by, punctuated by the diversions of Deauville⁠—dips, drives, dinners, dances, polo matches, hurdle races and baccarat, but particularly by that general deviltry which, in an atmosphere dripping with ammonia and desire, scented with caprices and seaweed, those consorts of Society, wealth and idleness, inevitably produce.

Through the diversions and the deviltry of them the confidences apprehensible were truffled with a sans-gêne quite idyllic. In the flow of these confidences there was, apparently, not an honest woman in the place. Everything being possible, such may have been the case.

One night the possibility occurred to Wyvill. That afternoon the Prix de Deauville had been run. He and Trella had been driven to the course by the duke. At the track he left them for a look in the paddock. On the way back his progress was momentarily impeded. Before him were two men. In a brief halt which a congestion of the crowd occasioned he garnered a snatch of their talk.

“C’est sa maîtresse,” one was saying.

“Ah! ah! Et le mari?”

“Il faut croire qu’il trouve ça charmant.”

But the congestion had diffused, Wyvill passed on, mounted to the tribune, where, looking down, he saw two men looking up. They were raising their hats. Their names he might have remembered, but he had forgotten their faces. He raised his own hat. The duke raised his. There was a clamor, a scurry, a clearing of the track, a careering of thoroughbreds, a riot of color, a shout, the horses were off, the Prix was being run, and the incident forgot.

Truth is an objective phenomenon. It acts in us and on us like a chemical precipitate. You may have given it no thought, and there it is revealed. That night, apropos to nothing, the incident returned to Wyvill. With it, from the depths of his being, there issued an obsession vague and obscure, something opaque and formless, but which, little by little, took shape and changed from an impossibility into a monstrous fact. Wyvill disowned it, disavowed it, would have none of it. But there it was. Presently the disavowals ceased. In certain conditions we get used to monsters. The soul makes itself at home with what it must.

Wyvill was seated in the library. An hour previous Trella, pretexting some one or other of those many malaises which women always have within beck and call, had disappeared for the night. Latterly these malaises and their coincidental disappearances had been frequent, and in considering them the dialogue overheard at the track returned, but freighted now with significance. The soul may accustom itself to what it must, but it will struggle first. We believe less what we should than what we wish.

For relief from the obsession Wyvill got up. He would have gone to Trella. But, presumably, she was asleep. In any event, he divined that her door was locked, and he knew that if she answered his knock at all, it would be but to reproach him with having disturbed her. Even otherwise, what could he say? He had suspected her before, and she had been good enough to overlook that suspicion. She had done more, she had produced a brother. There was nothing to prevent her now from producing a sister. With a lady so resourceful conversation was futile.

Wyvill looked at his watch. It was after two, much later than he had thought. Trella must have been asleep for hours. But the obsession had left him restless as a panther. Through the open window he stepped out to the lawn.

It was a perfect night, starful, silent, serene. From beyond, the recurrent hush and retreating wash of the waves accentuated the quiet, calming him unconsciously, allaying his restlessness, reducing the tension of his nerves. Under their influence he sauntered about the grounds a while, and then, turning back, reached Trella’s window.

Through the curtains a dim light filtered. As he looked at it, there was projected on the curtains a silhouette, faint but defined. If he hesitated, he never knew it. The window, undefended, opened at his grasp, and tearing the curtains aside, he sprang into the room, sprang at a man that was there, and, with a blow that would have felled a bullock, struck him between the eyes, hurling him backward against a mantel where, falling, his head struck. It cracked like a nut.

Satisfied but not satiated, he turned to Trella. Before he could reach her, the window had become a passageway. A cry, “Au secours!” had rent the night, and men in plain clothes that guard the mighty were tumbling into the room.

“Hors d’ici, canaille!” Wyvill shouted. “Out of here, or I’ll brain the lot of you!”

Raising a chair above his head, with all his force he flung it at them, but, deflected in flight, it went crashing against the wall; he was struggling with three men at once, while a fourth, falling at the foot of the mantel, was screaming, “My God! my God! he has killed his Royal Highness!”

“Tant mieux,” Wyvill, struggling still, threw back. But he was struggling with men who had no wish to struggle, who were seeking and uttering words of pacification.

“On ne veut pas faire du mal à Monsieur le Comte,” one kept repeating. “N’est ce pas, Paul? n’est ce pas, Jules? Seulement⁠—”

With a manoevre which Wyvill had acquired in arguments with bargees on the Isis, Paul went spinning one way, Jules another, their mate rolling doubled in a corner.

“Hors d’ici!” he shouted again. “Hors d’ici, canaille, et enlevez votre crapule de prince.”

He turned in search of Trella. In the commotion she had vanished. But a door leading to the hall beyond was open, and leaving the men, in plain, and now tolerably tattered clothes, to their duty, through the door he passed to have a word with her.

Without, were scared and huddling servants. Scattering them to their quarters, Wyvill ransacked the house, searched the grounds. All he discovered was that an obsession had fled, and that Trella had got away through the night to her mother. Then, divining, perhaps, that she would regard any attempt to follow her as an excess of civility, he turned in and went to bed.

It was as well, perhaps. For what shall a man say to a woman who has ceased to care for him? That she has cared for him? It is better to let the subject drop. So, at least, Wyvill decided. Afterward he was glad that he had not tried to pursue the conversation further, glad that the dear departed had dispensed with the formality of farewell. And so, in the end, matters adjusted themselves, as, in the end, all matters do.

The next day the lady, chaperoned by her mother, journeyed from France, proceeded to this country and then to the land of the Dakotas, where, on the entirely justified plea of cruelty, complicated with desertion, she solicited and obtained a divorce.

The decree was received with general satisfaction. As a nation we do not approve of these matches. Moreover, through Mrs. Verelst, everybody knew that Wyvill was a sullen drunkard, with whom no self-respecting woman could live. Trella was more indulgent. She admitted that Wyvill was not, perhaps, all that he might have been, but she declared that she forgave him entirely. That certainly was very nice of her.

Of Thule she never spoke. The press of two worlds gave it out that he died of pneumonia, suddenly, as mortals do die, but decorously, as royals should. Trella never undeceived a soul on the subject. That certainly was nice of her, too.