Chapter III

Next morning, with seared eyelids, and heart a red raw wound, conscious of the peasant’s disapproving inspection, my feet carried me unreluctantly toward torture. It was part of my implacable fate that I should diagnose my own misery through the happiness of the two beings who bounded the limits of sensation for me. Trueberry was alone, and greeted me with a vagueness of glance that denoted retrospective bliss. He was glad to see me in a quiet way, as a feature in enchanting environment.

We smoked in silence until our incommunicative companionship was abruptly disturbed by the arrival of a couple of officers from a neighbouring garrison town. Pleasant fellows both, carrying a rollicking breath of Lever into the surcharged atmosphere. They spoke at the top of their voices, hailed us with obvious delight, joked, quizzed, and gallantly misconducted themselves from the point of view of lucky and unlucky lover. I was reminded that I was French, and made an effort to do honour to my land. While they stayed, I shook off melancholy, and matched their breezy recklessness with the intoxication of despair. Heaven knows what we laughed at, but everybody except Trueberry shouted hearty guffaws, and seemed to regard life as the most entertaining of jokes. They chaffed Trueberry on his captivity to isolated beauty, and hinted in their broad barrack way at the perils of bewitchment. Trueberry went white with repressed anger, and I dusky as a savage. I wanted to fell the harmless fool for a pleasantry common enough in affairs of gallantry between men, but Trueberry passed it off with his superlative breeding, and the officer adroitly changed the conversation.

When Brases joined us before lunch, the younger of the two again provoked me by approaching her with a slight military swagger, his air, as he took her beautiful hand, so clearly saying: ‘Madame, allow me to observe that you are a remarkably handsome woman, and I shouldn’t mind being your captive myself.’ Not that he was impertinent or fatuous, but his admiration was of a crude and youthful and self-assured flavour. Trueberry lifted a dolorous lid upon me, as if seeking sympathy in me for the exquisite torment of this outer desecrating breath upon the divine and hidden.

They left us as cheerily as they had come, bidding me persuade Lady Fitzowen to come to their garrison ball next week. The major begged to know what sins the county had committed, to be so punished by its fairest woman. I saw Trueberry’s fingers clench ominously, and my own lips shut upon a grim twist for all response. Brases stared at them softly, as if they were a long way off, and then a little puzzled smile stirred her eyes as she sought Trueberry’s glance.

‘I wish you could persuade Monsieur d’Harcourt to go,’ was her acknowledgment of their invitation. ‘He does not look nearly so well as when he first came.’

I grasped this notice as a famished dog pounces on a stale crust. I flung her an enchanted beam of gratitude, and red ran momently through the grey universe. She came out, and stood beside me on the broad gravel, when the officers had driven away, and I found courage to urge her to come with me to the ball at Kilstern. It was no baseness to my friend, surely, that I should hunger and thirst and pray for one little moment of her life unshared with him!

‘Had I any such foolish desire, Monsieur, my obligations as hostess would still prevent me. It is so little I can do for your friend, so much I would gladly do. But it is no privation for me to dispense with society. I never liked it, and have only bitter recollections of it. I ask nothing now from life but peace,--and strength to live my days for my children’s sake, striving not to wish them shortened, and remembering that there is much else besides personal hope and happiness. One despairs so quickly in youth, and then the children come, with their sweet faces made up of morning light, soft as flowers, with the smile of paradise in their clear eyes. And youth for me lies so far away,’ she added, with a scarce perceptible change of voice, and a ray lighting up her delicate face, showed a smile so wan and faint as rather to resemble the memory of a smile, reminiscent as the spectre of that youth she greeted as an alien, and I listening, wished I had died before hearing words so sad from her lips.

Her gesture in one less superlatively sincere might have been taxed with coquetry, so exquisite was its expression; her white hands fell in a gentle depression with the finger-tips curved inward.

‘Even music no longer pleases me,’ she continued, sweeping the circumscribed scene with a flame of revolt under the drawn arch of the lovely brows. ‘It is not sad enough. That is why I am so fond of the ravening melancholy of ocean’s song down upon the desolate beach. I listen for it at night as I lie awake, and it is the eternal funeral march of my dead youth.’

It was hardly by an effort of will that she ceased speaking: speech dropped from her as sound drops from the receding wave, and I could have cried aloud in passionate protest as I saw the veil drawn over this transient revelation of herself. Never had she spoken to me so before. Never had she referred to her past. And the hint that all joy for her lay in her children fired my brain with hope’s delirium. Surely I had been mistaken in my haunting dread, and stupidly interpreted the looks between her and Trueberry. He might love her, as I loved her, but her feeling was only the soft interest of compassion. And yet--and yet----!

Leaving her, I walked slowly down the path. At the gate I looked back. She was still standing there, staring across the hills, with the sunset hues upon the amber of her head, and revealing the matchless purity of line and tint of face and throat. Not surrender, not love, did that dejection of air denote. The thought went with me, rooted in my heart, and kept me awake, tossing on a fever-troubled pillow. I started up, and stood at the window to watch the stars till dawn sent a grey glimmer down the dusk, and a white cloud sped like a wing over the sky. I had a foreboding of rashness, of perilous explosion on the morrow, unless I had the wisdom to steal out alone into the empty world. If they loved one another, it was plainly my duty. But, oh! to be able to look into her eyes, and cry: ‘I love you, yet I leave you. For me death were easier, but my death would stain your bliss with regret’s shadow.’

I questioned the stars in my blind anguish to learn if there were no resources in nature to wall in this terrible blank of being that stretched so miserably, so limitlessly before me as a future without Brases or Trueberry. Old interests, old tastes, old desires had dropped from me, and I stood beggared of sum and aim of life.’

I was abroad upon the moors by sunrise, lessening my feeling of personal diminution in the earth’s grandeur and the wavering immensity of the Atlantic as it rolled under the lemon-tinted horizon. I took my last look of forked mountains against the grey-shot blue of the heaven, of shattered rocks, and sombre tarn seen through the opening of a valley, and the distant plain, an inner sea of bracken and heather. Ever the sound of water, of moaning wave, of mingling rill, of foaming fall, the shrill cry of eagle and curlew, and the melody of the early birds. An hour hence should find me trudging to Kilstern, away from the wild beauty of this place--the home of Brases! On my way back, I met my host, and mentioned my intention. ‘That’s as it should be,’ was all he said.

His curt approval galled me, and to silence discourteous retort, I flung myself over the stone ledge, and took the manor path like a chased creature. With what unconscious accuracy of observation I noted each leaf, each colour and form of a scene memory was destined to retain for evermore! following with eager eyes the light as it made its own short road of gold among the dense shadows, and these as they picked out in blots the sunny spaces.

The hall door as usual was open, and in passing the portraits, I took my last look of the boy with curls and ruffles, and beyond of the girl with the proud fair face that might be a portrait of Brases in younger days. I inspected it steadily, and traced where resemblance stopped in the lack of the subtle stamp of the soul, the ennobling seal of grief. It was a Brases who had never wept, never thought, a creature of mere bodily beauty.

I found Trueberry walking up and down in restless expectation. I could see that sight of me brought an uncontrollable smart of disappointment to his eyelids, and his expressive mouth twitched like a child’s.

‘What’s the matter, Gontran?’ he asked, with an affectionate effort, and placed one hand on my shoulder. ‘You look frightfully battered, my poor fellow.’

‘Last night I meant to go away in silence,’ I said, not able to meet his kind glance, ‘but to-day I decided I owed my friend a franker course. Neither of us is responsible for the fact, but we must separate now.’

‘You would desert me, Gontran--now!’ he cried, and the bitter tone of his reproach fetched a sob to my throat.

‘I wish to God it should not be, that I had the unselfish courage to stay and witness your happiness----’

‘Happiness!’ he shouted frantically. ‘My poor boy, I am more miserable than yourself,’ he added, with a dejected movement.

‘Then you are deceiving yourself,’ I said, shrugging and turning impatiently on my heel. ‘She loves you. I have seen it in her eyes, felt it to the inmost fibres of consciousness in her voice.’

‘And if it were so!’ Trueberry cried, in a soft, fond tone of interjection, that brought my fierce look back to his face. He called himself miserable, but bliss sparkled out of the depths of his frank eyes. He fronted daylight, the proud and conscious lover, and the shadow upon his radiance was, after all, but a becoming tone to temper fatuity to my amazed and acrid scrutiny. Without it, I might have longed to strike him, in my state of moral degradation.

‘How much nearer am I to her for that?’ he went on, in reply to my hateful look. ‘My dear friend, there is nothing for us both but to take up our staff and knapsack, and trudge wearily out of this enchanted valley into the busy garish world, carrying with us the remembrance of an unstable and beautiful dream. We are equals in fortune, Gontran.’

‘Equals,’ I roared, goaded by the fiery bar of his speech. ‘What equality exists between success and unsuccess? between the chosen and the neglected? between heat and cold, sun and ice, glory and shame, tears and laughter? The barrier to your happiness may be levelled by fate at any moment. You have but to wait and watch the newspapers. While I----’

‘Don’t be rough, old man. You would be sorrier than I if you hurt me now, when I can ill bear more pain. For I am dismissed, sent away. Oh!’

He sat down and covered his face with both hands, and I, in awakened wickedness of spirit, gloated over his convulsive wretchedness. Suffering had blunted conscience, and the finer feelings, and left me abjectly enslaved to all the baser sensations that assail weakened humanity. In such moments, happily brief, the savage is uppermost, whatever the training of the gentleman. The soul sleeps, and the body, with all its frenzied needs and desires, stands naked, primitive, elemental, the mere animal living through the senses. The handsome sobbing creature had all, and I had nothing. Yet he dared to speak of equality in misery between us.

‘Good-bye,’ I said, and moved to the door.

Trueberry sprang up, and clutched my arm. His dear, simple nature could understand nothing of the vileness that the finer and more complex order of being may contain. To him I was not an embittered rival, but a cherished friend to whom he boyishly clung in his unbearable sorrow.

‘Must we separate, Gontran?’ he entreated. ‘Why, since we both go to-day?’

The inalterable sweetness of his temper shook me on a crest of remorse, and conquered assaulting vindictiveness. I felt so mean beside him that I could have begged his pardon for unuttered insult. His superiority more than justified Brases’ choice, though the dear fellow lacked my brains, and my name commanded considerable stir.

I consented to go with him, and hurried back to the cottage, where I found my host busy over my portmanteau. I told him my friend was coming with me too, upon which he scrutinised my face mildly, and, I thought, with satisfaction. He strapped the portmanteau, and remarked in a dry tone: ‘That, too, is as it should be, and I am glad there is no quarrel.’ Taking no note of my astonishment at his incredible discernment, he added: ‘You’ll drink a last drop of the mountain dew to your success and happiness in another spot, sir, where the girls, God bless them! are fresh and pretty and plentiful as the flowers in May.’

He went into the kitchen, and I stood at the window watching light chase shadow over the bold visage of a reek, and assured myself gloomily that there were a thousand ways, after all, of threading a path through despair. Whose life is crowned with happiness?--and hope of it must come to an end sooner or later. Pleasure still remains when we have shed the last tear, and whatever may be said to the contrary in pessimistic moments, pleasure to the last peeps out at us through the thorniest brambles, with its varied allurements. This I told myself, and though I could think of no possible pleasure at the time, or compensation for the miserable duty of facing life, I drearily supposed I would come, like another, to find my round of petty joys and mean delights. There was something to be done even by a fellow so sick at heart as I: books to be written, books to be read, people to see, and people to avoid, countries to travel in, and women to criticise. My host stood at the top of the path, bareheaded, cheering me on with his gracious ‘God speed ye, sir!’ until the bend of the hill hid his honest friendly face from me. I sought Trueberry in his room, and saw his gloves, and hat, and portmanteau on the table. I wandered about the house, through unfamiliar chambers, till, on lifting a curtain, a picture arrested me with a curdling thrill. The blood flowed from heart to brain on a dizzy wave, where it surged, so that I had some knowledge of the sensation of insanity. This explains my sin against honour in standing there. I could not have left the spot by any imperative order of conscience. I stood as immovable as a hypnotised figure. Like a spectator of the drama, with feelings unconcerned, I was quick to note the searching pathos and beauty of the picture.

They two stood together in the middle of the room, she with her hands on his shoulders, he with an arm round her waist, holding one of her little hands clasped above. The passionate gaze of both was matchless in its eloquence. Both faces were white and luminous, as if touched with a ray from heaven, anguish adequately mixed with transport. Such a look from a woman’s eyes was surely worth dying for.

‘Brases, must I go away?’ Trueberry asked brokenly.

She moved a little in his embrace, and pressed her face against his breast, then recovered herself, and said firmly--

‘You must, dear friend.’

‘Think of it, beloved,’ he cried, holding her closer to him. ‘Such links as chain us. We two as one, is it not madness to dream of living apart? Every beat of life within you, Brases, must cry out against this parting. It is murder of our souls. Go, I may, but with you, Brases.’

‘Don’t make me go over it again,’ she pleaded, in a tired voice, ‘it was so hard before. While a man lives who calls me wife, can I come to you with a tarnished name?’

‘Tarnished!’ The smile he shed upon her was convincing enough to redeem a fallen angel, it was so warm, and soft, and indulgent, with all love’s sweetness and shelter. ‘The stain is on his name, and that you would drop. The law will release you. Come, come. You cannot live alone now, any more than I can. Think of what it means--craving light and love and happiness, all within reach, and we dying apart on the brink.’

‘No, no, don’t tempt me. Your desire is my weakness. Your voice draws my being from its roots, and my pulses beat to the rhythm of yours. See how much I confess, and then be merciful, and go.’

‘Is it always right to follow our ideal of duty, when nature points so clearly another way?’ he still urged. ‘What reason have we always to regard our judgment as better than hers, since she is so big and mighty, and we so small and helpless.’ He held her hand pressed against his lips, and I could hear his murmuring speech through the trembling fingers. ‘What is the past with such a present as ours, such a future as we might have? My love would soon blot it from your memory. Trust me, Brases, I too have my past with its burden of regrets I would fain forget.’

‘Ah, had I met you before fatality crossed my path,’ she said, upon a quick sob, ‘when my palm was as clean as a child’s, how my spirit would have bounded to the wedding of yours! But that may never be now.’

Her arms dropped renouncingly, and the smile that travelled slowly over her blanched face shed a rapturous light upon his. His eyes held hers in willing bondage. Though this was her farewell I could divine the supreme effort that kept her from his arms, by the fingers fluttering like the wings of a bird against her dress, while it were hard to say which her half-lifted, gently averted face, with the eyes straining back to his, most eloquently expressed: surrender or renouncement.

Trueberry sprang to her and caught her to him, and their lips met in a kiss that had the solemnity of a sacrament. I staggered back, clapping my hand over my mouth to prevent a shout of white-hot anguish, and could see the darkness sweep down upon me like a big comforting wing. I hoped it was death come to gather me like a suffering, inarticulate child, into its soft mother’s arms.

But I struggled back into life, and had again to front the road of care and blind endeavour. How long later I cannot say, but I saw Brases standing over me, looking at me in pitying wonder. She took my hand in both of hers, and bending, softly kissed my cheek. This was the mother’s kiss I hoped death had given me. I stared at her, too broken for wonder or emotion, and sitting down beside me, with my hand still in hers, she said--

‘We were very much frightened, you were so long unconscious. Mr. Trueberry told me you have not slept of late, and that you are very unhappy. I, too, am unhappy, and that is why I kissed you. But you are better now, and you will try to forget your pain, or, at least, to bear it well. It is the best any of us can do. They will drive you to Kilstern, and you will return to France alone, carrying my best wishes for your welfare. Mr. Trueberry has gone already.’

I struggled to my feet, swallowed the wine she poured out for me, and then, in a dull, uneager voice, asked, ‘Did Trueberry leave no message for me, Madame?’

‘He was very much concerned, and full of sympathy, but he has his own trouble to bear, and thinks he will bear it best alone. He will write to you to Paris in a few days.’

A trap was at the door, and she came out with me, and when we had shaken hands in silence, stood looking after me, as I was indeed forcibly carried away. She was dim to my sight, a mere blurred grey figure, with light about her head, and the landscape looked watery and broken, as if seen through bits of bobbing glass.

A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHY

_À M. Gaston, Paris
de l’Institut de France_

A PAGE OF PHILOSOPHY

THERE was a break in the soft stream of Rameau’s eloquence when somebody spoke of Krowtosky. The interruption came from Louis Gaston, a brilliant young journalist, whose air of sanctified rake and residence in the Rue du Bac, in front of a well-known shop, earned him the nickname of _Le Petit Saint Thomas_.

Krowtosky’s name diverted the channel of the murmurous, half-abstracted discourse to which we had lent an attentive ear, physically lulled, and though charmed, not boisterously amused by Rameau’s sly anecdotal humour and complaisant lightness of tone. Rameau always talked delightfully, without any apparent consciousness of the fact; above all, without any apparent effort. He never raised his voice, gesticulated slightly, accentuated no point, and left much to his listener’s discretion; and his calm drollery was all the more delicious because of the sedate and equable expression of his handsome face.

‘Krowtosky,’ he repeated, as he turned his picturesque grey head in Gaston’s direction; with a deliberate air he removed his glasses, slowly polished them, and interjected, ‘Ah!’

‘You must remember that queer Russian who used to hold forth here some years ago,’ Louis Gaston continued, in an explanatory tone; ‘a heavy, unemotional fellow, with desperate views. He began by amusing us, and ended by nearly driving us mad with his eternal _Nirvana_.’

‘Oh, yes,’ somebody else cried, suddenly spurred to furnish further reminiscences. ‘His trousers were preternaturally wide, and his coat-sleeves preternaturally short. You always imagined that he carried dynamite in his pockets, and apprehended an explosion if you accidentally threw a lighted match or a half-smoked cigarette in his neighbourhood.’

‘He had small eyes, and a big nose, the head of an early Gaul, and a hollow voice,’ I remarked.

‘A monster to convince the Tartars themselves of their superior ugliness, if they entertained any doubt of it,’ half lisped a Frenchman recently crowned by the Academy, and as unconscious of his own ill-looks as only a man, and above all a Frenchman, can be.

‘The good-nature of your remarks and your keen remembrance of Krowtosky prove that he must be a personage in his way,’ said Rameau mockingly.

‘What became of him?’ asked Le Petit Saint Thomas, between slow puffs of his cigarette.

‘Poor fellow! He has fallen upon grief.’

‘Naturally; it is the great result of birth. A love affair?’

‘Worse.’

‘Blasphemy, Professor! ’Tis the sole sorrow of life. The rest are but the trifling ills of humanity.’ Gaston spoke with all the authority of a young man who is perpetually in and out of love, is backed upon the thorny path of literature by rich and devoted relatives, and has never known a day’s illness upon his road.

‘It can’t be marriage, for that violent resource would merely drift him into deeper depths of Pessimism, which would be a gratifying confirmation of his theories.’

‘It can’t be love either,’ I suggested. ‘Pessimism and love don’t mate. Marriage it might be; for even a pessimist may be conceded the weakness of objecting to a demonstration of the nothingness of marriage in the person of his own wife.’

‘It might be debt, if that were not a modified trouble since the inhuman law of imprisonment was abolished.’

‘Behold the force of imagination, Professor,’ exclaimed Gaston, pointing to a visionary perspective with his cigarette, in answer to Rameau’s glance of contemplative irony. ‘I see our monster married to an unvirtuous _grisette_, or an amiable young laundress, who discovers the superior attractiveness of an optimist poet on the opposite side of the way. She can hardly be blamed for the discovery; for though we may applaud the courage of a woman who marries a monster, it would be both rash and cruel to expect her to add fidelity to her courage. Where women are concerned, it is a wise precaution to count upon a single virtue.’

‘Your wit, the outcome of natural perversity, flies beyond the mark,’ said Rameau, shrugging his shoulders. ‘The real sorrows of life are very simple, and command respect by their simplicity. The others are the complications, the depravities of civilisation at which we cavil and laugh. Krowtosky has not stumbled in double life, but he has just lost a baby girl.’

There was dead silence. A perceptible start of emotion found expression in an interjectionary arch of brow, a sigh blown on the puff of a cigarette, and an uneasy shifting of attitudes. A baby girl! What a slight thing in the hurry of life, what a simple thing in its crowding perplexities! The tragic end of men and women whom the years have worn and fretted; the sudden death of happy youth in the midst of its bright promises; the peaceful sadness that accompanies the departure of the old, who have honourably lived their lives and accomplished all natural laws:--but the closed eyes of a little baby girl! What is it more than tumble of a new-born bird from its nest, leaving no empty space? Upon a boy paternal pride might have feasted, and the sting might remain that new avenues to fame and fortune were closed by his sharp withdrawal.

Yet despite the insignificance of the loss, none of the faces round Rameau wore a look of indifference or surprise. For a moment each man was serious, touched, and uninclined for wit at poor Krowtosky’s expense. Upon dropped lids I seemed to see the big grotesque head, so full of honesty and strife, bent in grief over an empty cradle; and I was wrung by a smart of anger when Gaston lightly asked, ‘Is there then a legitimate Madame Krowtosky?’

‘All that is most legitimate,’ replied Rameau gravely.

‘You have followed the story?’

‘Since I played the part of confidential friend--why, I know as little as you.’

‘And the lady?’

‘Ah, the lady! Her I only know on report that cannot exactly be described as impartial.’

‘Is it a story worth telling?’

‘In its way it is curious enough, especially unfolded in the illumination of Krowtosky’s jumble of crude philosophy and speculative theories, and, above all, told in his queer French. He has honoured me with a correspondence in the form of a journal. It is extremely interesting, and I have preserved it. Some day I will publish it,--when the philosopher is dead, of course.’

‘Then begin now, my dear Professor,’ I urged. ‘Try its effect _en petit comité_.’ We read assent in the Professor’s way of crossing his legs, while he drew one hand slowly round the back of his head. When he had carefully polished and adjusted his glasses, each of us chose a commodious attitude, and looked expectantly at him. After a pause, Rameau began in his soft conversational tone, subdued like the indefinite shade of the lamp-screen that cast its glimmer over heads and profiles, showing vaguely upon a background of dull tapestries.

‘Krowtosky looked much older than his age. He was, in fact, very young, Pessimism being one of the most pronounced symptoms of the malady of youth. He is still young, and the malady has yet some years to run. He came here with a letter to me from an old friend in Moscow, and a very big bundle of hopes.

‘I hardly know what he expected to make of Paris, but Paris, I imagine, made nothing of him. I did what I could for him, which was not much, and from the first I had no illusions whatever upon the nature of his probable success. I found a lady ambitious to read Turgenieff and Tolstoï in Russian. I sent Krowtosky to her; but after the second lesson she dismissed him on the plea of his unearthly ugliness; his heavy Calmuck face diverted her attention from Turgenieff’s charming women and Tolstoï’s philosophy, and gave her nightmares. I encouraged the poor fellow to come here, which he did, and most of you met him frequently. He was interesting in his way, very, but crude and boundlessly innocent. He had the queerest notions upon all things, and having sounded the _Décadents_, he professed to find them hollow. I think he suspected those gentlemen of an unreasonable sanity and an underhand enjoyment of life. The French Realists he dismissed as caricaturists; he said they were reading for the devil when he was drunk and in a merry mood. I daresay he meant the Czar.

‘He railed at the mock decay of modern civilised life, and imagined that a glimpse of Pessimism beyond the Pyrenees would prove instructive. He was convinced that he would find it there of less noxious quality, exhibiting the sombre melancholy and dignity of a great race fallen into poetic decay and unvexed by the wearisome febrile conditions of its development here. “You understand nothing of the spirit of calm fatality,” he would say, apostrophising the nation in my humble person for lack of a more enlightened audience. “You are everlastingly in strife with your own emotions and despairs; and these you decorate, as you idly decorate your persons, with persistent vanity and with wasteful care.” I deprecated the charge upon my own account, and assured him that it took me exactly four minutes to decorate my person each morning. Four minutes, I claimed, cannot be described as an exorbitant charge upon Time for the placing and adjusting of eighteen articles, and as he seemed to doubt the number, I told them off, including my hat and _pince-nez_. I mentioned a few Frenchmen who I thought accepted the luxury of unemotional despair calmly enough, and were as incapable of strife as a tortoise. He shook his head; he was not easily to be convinced. His Pessimism was so black that our sombre Maupassant was a captivating Optimist beside him. And provided with this meagre intellectual baggage, he set out for half-forgotten and ruined lands, beginning with Spain.’

‘He fell in for a fortune, I suppose,’ Gaston interrupted.

‘He had not a sou, which is the best explanation of an expensive voyage. Remark, my friends, that a man only becomes really extravagant and reckless upon an empty purse. An empty purse and an empty stomach are equally effectual in producing light-headedness, and vest us in the cloak of illusion. Illusion I opine to be one of the things that look best in rags. Krowtosky travelled third class, and was prodigiously uncomfortable, which, after all, is another method of enjoying life upon his theory. He ate Bologna sausages, and refreshed himself with grapes upon the wayside.

‘His first letter was dated from Bayonne. It was a long and a curious letter, and so interested me that I resolved to follow up the correspondence with vigorous encouragement, for it was not an occasion to be missed by a student of mankind. I will read you some extracts from these letters, which I have here in a drawer of my writing-table.’

The packet of letters found, Rameau went on reading, with the perfect and polished irony and charm of enunciation that could cast an intellectual glamour over an auctioneer’s inventory. ‘“I have chosen you as the recipient of the impressions and incidents of my voyage,--why, I hardly know; I am not inspired by any strong sympathy for you. My esteem and my liking are very moderate indeed; you have a face that rather repels than invites confidence, and I ought to be discouraged by the fact that I have no faith in your sympathy for me, and have every conviction that you are the last person likely to understand me. The friend who would understand me, and for whom I should enjoy writing these impressions and the adventures that may lie ahead, is at present voyaging in far-off waters; I think he is somewhere about the Black Sea, but I don’t know his address, or when or where communication might chance to reach him. So, having cast about me for a confidant, choice alighted upon you; but you need not read my letters if they bore you. They are written rather for my own gratification than for yours. If I possessed literary talent, the public would be my natural victim....”

‘This was a flattering beginning, you will admit, but it sharpened my curiosity. After that I began to look forward to Krowtosky’s post-day, as some people look forward to the _feuilleton_ of the morning paper. His queer minute handwriting never found me indifferent or unexpectant of diversion.

‘At Toulouse he wrote again: “A young girl got into the carriage with me. We were alone, and she soon gave me a visible demonstration of the strange eccentricities oddly explained by the single word _love_. Why _love_? It is simply a malady more or less innocuous and only sometimes deadly; but love, no! I was not flattered; I am above that weakness, because nothing pleases me. I was interested, however, and investigated the case with scientific calm. So might any physician have diagnosed a disease. It struck me for the first time as a form of mild insanity. I asked myself why the poets and romancers amuse themselves in writing of it rather than of the other fevers and bodily illnesses that overcome us. For everything about this young girl convinced me that love is but a sickness. I studied her gestures, her expression, her tones of voice and her attitudes; all served to prove my theory. One minute I offered to open the window, and the next I suggested that perhaps it would be better to close it. She assented. Though curious, it was rather monotonous, but she assented to everything I proposed. If I looked at her, she looked at me; if I looked away, she continued to look at me. After a couple of hours’ study, I felt that I quite understood love and all its phases. I found it in the main a silly game, and an excitement only fit for brainless boys and girls in their first youth. But the most remarkable feature of humanity is its crass stupidity; it is a monstrously shabby and feeble institution, male and female. This young girl, now; I daresay you and others would call her pretty. Bah! I can see but the ugliness of women. Behind their forehead thought does not work; their eyes only express the meanest and most personal sentiments. Big black empty eyes and sensual red lips; a round lazy figure and nerveless hands! I protest there is more intelligence and matter for study in a dog than in these insipid creatures, all curves and no muscles. Men, say they, don’t understand them. Are dolls worth understanding? They are actuated solely by impulse and personal claims. What is there in this worth understanding? I escaped from my conquest, now grown irksome, upon the frontier, and I am resolved never to give evidence of a similar weakness. It is degrading folly. What, for instance, can women see in us to inspire this most infelicitously-called tender passion, and, in the name of all that is eternal, what are we supposed to see in them to justify it?...”’

‘A sympathetic dog, to go snarling in that cantankerous way through life because the Almighty has seen fit to cast a flower or two across his path,’ growled the indignant Petit Saint Thomas, to whom love was the main object of existence.

‘Scenery does not interest him much,’ Rameau went on, with an acquiescent nod; ‘but he has a good deal to say upon his impressions of the Spanish race in particular, and of all other races in general. The subject is not a new one, and Krowtosky is only really entertaining when he is talking of himself, or of his next-door neighbour in connection with himself.

‘“I am on the whole much disappointed in Madrid,” he continues further on, “not because it is a duller town than I had imagined, but because local colour and national individuality are almost extinct. It proves the disastrous tendencies of all races to amalgamation and imitation. Yet, after all, Rameau, what is the real value of local colour? It is more often than not a mere matter of imagination, and one of the illusions we fancy we enjoy. Any one with a lively imagination can invent a more vivid local colour for all the countries he has never visited than he is likely to find in any of them. Witness Merimée and his band. They duped their public like the vulgarest literary conjurors, and showed us that a trick will serve us instead of what we are pleased to call Nature. And the deception was but the result of our stupid hunger for the unusual. As if anything under the monotonous stars of an unchanging heaven can be unusual; and as if everything in this old and ugly world is not hideously familiar! The more varied our travels the more similar our experience. For, Rameau, our real ills are monotony and stupidity. Man resembles man, as rats resemble rats, only he is a good deal less interesting and more noxious. You have a fine head, and I have a misshapen one. Well, the same perplexities, needs, instincts, appetites, passions, and impulses agitate us, and explain our different actions, which, _au fond_, have no variety in them whatever. We change the symbols of our faiths, while these remain fundamentally the same, and we give our countries different names to represent the unchangeable miseries of humanity....”

‘Here you have the malady of youth in its crisis. A _décadent_ poet could not chant more lugubriously, though perhaps less intelligibly. The sick youth laments in the same irritable tone the vulgarity of the _madrileñas_, the exaggerated prowess of the gentlemen of the arena, exalts the patient and noble bulls, rails at the puny byplay of the picadors and at the silly enthusiasm of the spectators. He rushes distractedly from an inexpensive inn, where a band of merry rascals joined him and over wine sang the praises of the Fair. Praise of the eternal feminine he cannot stand. Poor wretch! Had he been Adam in the Garden of Paradise, Eden would have ceased to be Eden upon the impertinent introduction of Eve. We find him complaining that he should have left a score of maundering youths in Paris doing dismal homage to the Sex, to drop upon a sillier band in Madrid hymning the everlasting subject. He protests the Spanish women, for all their eyes and arched feet, are untempting and insipid, like the rest. They are not the dolls of the North; they are the animals of the South. He confines his curiosity to Spanish literature, and is in pursuit of its apostle of Pessimism. “I am taking lessons in Spanish,” he writes from another inn. “I teach Russian to as poor a devil as myself, in exchange for his help in his own tongue. Between us we are making creditable progress. He is writing an article on the Russian novelists for a review that will pay him something like twopence a page. Yet he preserves his faith in literature! Mighty indeed is man’s capacity for cherishing illusions. I advised him to break stones for a lucrative change, but he seems to doubt the value of the advice since I do not follow it myself. This is one of the things that prove man a rational being. We read Castrès together. You have doubtless heard of Castrès, the poet of Spain, and said to be sufficiently sedative as regards the happy hopes of youth. Such is my Spaniard’s description in reply to a question of mine upon his tendencies. I have inserted the phrase as a concession to the perverse taste for local colouring. The phrase paints the man; he lives upon onions and bread into the bargain, and dreams with a cigarette between his lips. This morning I went to see Castrès.... I found the great man writing and smoking at the same time in a big sparsely furnished bedroom. He is low-sized and heavily built, with soft black eyes and a forest of hair round and about his sallow face. He looks as if he dined well and liked women. There is always something unctuous and fatuous about a man who likes women, which becomes intolerably accentuated if women should happen to like him too. The expression suggests a mixture of oil and sugar. We discussed the _Décadents_ under their new name, and hardly appreciated the advantage of exchange, symbolism being no whit less empty and vapid; another demonstration of the worthlessness of novelty, since, however much we vary things, we end where we start, at the Unchangeable. Castrès agrees with me that Naturalism is dead; but what the devil, he asked, is going to take its place? Naturalism under a new name, I replied, which is only romance upside down. Whether we invent animals or angels, it matters little. It is romancing all the same, and only proves that one man likes _eau sucrée_ and another likes _absinthe_. It is a concoction either way, and about as useful in one form as in the other.... Of Castrès the man I thought as indifferently as I did of Castrès the poet. I asked him how Pessimism stood in Spain, and who were its representatives. He shrugged, spat, and surveyed me dismissingly, and with his big soft eyes.... ‘_Caramba!_ I can’t say I know much about it. But I believe it will never flourish here. We have too much sun, and life is, on the whole, easy enough for us. An hour of sunshine, a crust of bread, and a bunch of grapes, or the taste of an onion and a lifted wine-skin upon the roadside, and there you have a Spaniard built and ready for love-making. What more does he want? And in a land where women are fair and facile, wherefore should he whine, and see black where God made blue? I have here a volume of poems just published by a young girl--Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I have glanced through the volume, and I don’t think you can ask for anything finer in the way of Pessimism. It is enough to make a sane man cut his throat, if he had not the good sense to pause beforehand, in distrust of the sincerity of the writer who could survive the proof-reading of such dismal stuff. It reminds me of what I have heard of Schopenhauer, who, after wrecking all our altars, could sit down and enjoy a heavy dinner. He despised none of the pleasures of life in practice, while decrying them all in theory. You’ll probably find that this young woman dines heartily, and employs her evenings over her wedding outfit, if she is not already married and nursing her first baby. I took the book away and read it with my poor devil that evening. You will not be surprised to learn that I found it very much superior to anything of Castrès’ I have read. He might well sneer at her in self-preservation, that being the weapon the strong have ever preferred to use against the weak. It is bad enough to find real talent in a young woman, but absolute unbelief, the doctrine of complete negation! To find in this land of To-morrow, a feminine apostle of the _Nirvana_....”’

‘Ah,’ interrupted Gaston, ‘I was wondering what had become of the word.’

‘“A feminine apostle of the _Nirvana_,”’ continued Rameau, with an expressive smile. ‘“Judge if masculine opinion in Spain would be indulgent. Even my poor devil, though no less struck than I with the poetry, found it much too strong for a woman. ‘But she is doubtless old, and then it matters less. The discontents and disappointments of old maidenhood have drifted her into deep learning and irreligion,’ he added, by way of consolation. ‘Old or young,’ I exclaimed, ‘it is all one to me. For me she is a thinker, not a woman. And I am going straight off to her publisher, from whom I’ll wrest her address, if need be, by reason of a thick stick.’

‘“The services of a stick were not required. My request was immediately complied with. I carried the lady’s book in my hand, and was no doubt mistaken for a recent purchaser. My poet lives on the fourth floor in a very shabby house, in a very shabby street at the other end of Madrid. I deemed it wise to defer my visit until after dinner. It was half-past eight when I climbed the four flights, and stood on the landing, anxiously asking myself if I had made up my mind to ring. Had it not the air of an invasion? While I was yet debating the door opened, and an untidy-looking maid shot out into the passage. I captured her before the twilight of the stairs had swallowed her, and demanded to see the Señorita Pilar Villafranca y Nuño. I understood that it would not serve me in her eyes to give evidence of uncertainty or bashfulness. ‘She is inside; knock at the middle door and you’ll find her,’ screamed the untidy maid, and in another moment she was whirling down the stairs, and I was left to shut the hall door and announce myself.

‘“The house was tidier than the maid. I crossed a scrupulously clean hall and knocked at the middle door, as I had been directed. A low, deep voice shouted, _Come in!_ While turning the handle gingerly, I thought to myself, the poor devil was right; only a woman of massive proportions and very advanced years could bellow that order. The scene that met my eyes was prettier than absolute conformity to my ideas demanded. In a neat little sitting-room, lit by a shaded lamp, were seated three persons; a stout Spanish woman engaged with a basket of stockings, a pale, thin young girl with melancholy eyes of an unusual intensity of gaze, and a small lad sitting at her feet, and reading aloud from a book they held together. The child had the girl’s eyes, but while curiosity, belonging to his years, brightened their sombreness with the promise of surprise and laughter, hers held an expression of permanent sadness and soft untroubled gloom. It was superfluous information on the mother’s part, in response to my mention of the poet’s name, to indicate her daughter majestically, as if she wished it to be understood that she herself had no part in the production of matter so suspicious in a woman as poetry. I was on the brink of assuring her that nobody would ever deem her capable of such folly, and begging her to return to her stockings as occupation more appropriate than the entertainment of an admirer of the Muse she despised, when Pilar quietly said, ‘Be seated, sir.’ From that moment I took no further heed of the Señora Villafranca than if she had been the accommodating _dueña_ of Spanish comedy and I the unvirtuous, or noble but thwarted, lover who had bribed her. In ten minutes Pilar and I were talking as freely as if we had known one another from infancy; far more freely, possibly, for in the latter case we should long ago have talked ourselves to silence. How do these young girls manage to get hold of books, Rameau, when all the forces of domestic law are exercised to keep them apart? There is not a living Spanish or French writer with whom this child, barely out of her teens, is not acquainted. Her judgment may often be at fault,--whose is not, if backed by anything like originality? But to hear her discuss Naturalism! Castrès, puffing his eternal cigarette, walks you through _les lieux communs_, but this girl takes flights that fairly dazzle you. And then her Pessimism! The queer thing is that she has found it for herself, and Schopenhauer has nothing to do with it. For that matter, nobody living or dead seems to have had anything to do with the forming of her. She is essentially _primesautière_. You French do manage to hit upon excellent words; _primesautière_ perfectly describes this Spanish maid. She is all herself, first of the mould, fresh, though so burdened with the century’s malady. So young, and she believes in nothing--but nothing, Rameau! She hopes for nothing, for nothing! She plays with no emotions, feigns no poetic despairs, utters no paradoxes, and is simplicity itself in her gestures, expressions, and ideas. She calmly rejects all the pretty illusions of her sex, without a pang or regret, because, for her, truth is above personal happiness.

‘“We talked, we talked--talked till far into the night, while the fat mother slumbered noisily in her chair, and the little boy slept curled up at his sister’s feet. Can you guess what first put it into my head to go? The smell of the lamp as the wick flickeringly lowered. ‘_Dios mio!_’ cried Pilar, ‘it is close on two o’clock, and we have been chattering while my mother sleeps comfortlessly in her chair, and my little brother is dreaming on the carpet instead of in his bed. Good-night, sir; I must leave you and carry my baby to bed.’ She stooped and lifted the sleeping boy with her arms. Such bodily strength in one so frail much astonished me. I would have offered her help, but the little lad had already found a comfortable spot in the hollow of her neck, and with a cordial nod to me she disappeared into the inner room. I had not expected this evidence of womanly tenderness from her, and the picture haunted me on my way down the dark staircase and through the dim starlit streets.”

‘The extracts from the next letters are singularly characteristic,’ said Rameau, well pleased by our profound attention. ‘Krowtosky, upon his return to Paris, has taken a third-class ticket from Madrid to Bayonne. To the poet he has said his last farewell, and probably wears upon his heart her precious autograph. Not that Krowtosky is ostensibly sentimental. He rejects the notion of such folly, and if by chance he dropped into pretty fooling, be sure he would find a philosophical way out of the disgrace deservedly attached to such weakness. “I am travelling to Bayonne,” he writes, “and I will reach it to-morrow afternoon, but I am convinced that once there I shall straightway take the train back to Madrid. Odd, is it not? Yet I feel that I shall be compelled to return to that young girl. And this is not love, mark you, Rameau; not in the least. I know all about that. Did I not study it in the case of that young girl I met at Toulouse? Well, nothing I feel for Pilar in any way resembles the foolish sentiment her gestures and looks expressed. I am quite master of myself, and do not hang on any one’s lips or glances; but I must see Pilar again. Do you know why I hesitated outside her door that first evening I called upon her? I had a presentiment, as I climbed up those stairs, that I should marry her. We may reject a faith in presentiments, but they shake us nevertheless. How slowly this train goes! The landscape, across which we speed in the leisurely movement of Spanish steam, is flat and ugly, an interminable view of cornfields. There is a wide-hatted priest in front of me with an open breviary in his hand. Perhaps I shall find myself craving service of one of his brothers some day. What an odd fellow I am, to be sure! I intend, oh certainly I intend to take the Paris train to-morrow night from Bayonne, and as certainly I know I shall find myself on my way back to Madrid! And it cannot be for the pleasure of passing a couple of days and nights in a beastly third-class carriage, which is nothing better here than a cattle-pen....”

‘Of his reception by the poet, of his sentiments and wooing, he writes very sparingly. His great terror is that I should detect the lover where he insists there is only a philosopher. Philosophy took him from Madrid, and Philosophy brought him back within forty-eight hours. Philosophy sued, wooed, and won the Muse, and led him to his wedding-morn. While engaged in its service, he writes in this jocose strain the very evening of his marriage: “This morning in a dark little church, in a dark little street of Madrid, we were married. Though neither of us believes in anything, we agreed to make the usual concession to conventional feeling and social law, and were married in the most legal and Christianlike fashion. Nothing was lacking,--neither rings nor signatures, nor church-bells nor church-fees, nor yet the excellent and venerable fat priest, a degree uglier than myself, who obligingly made us one. While this ceremony was being performed, I could not forget the inconvenient fact that neither of us brought the other much in the shape of promise of future subsistence, not even hope, of which there is not a spark between us. This preoccupation distracted me while the priest mumbled and sermonised, and a wicked little French couplet kept running through my head:

Un et un font deux, nombre heureux en galanterie,
Mais quand un et un font trois,--c’est diablerie!

Meanwhile the fat priest discoursed to my wife, most excellently, upon the duties and virtues of the true Christian spouse, to which discourse my wife lent an inattentive ear. Perhaps she also was thinking of the future,--somewhat tardily. My dear Rameau, have you ever reflected upon the amazing one-sidedness of religion on these occasions? Wives are eloquently exhorted to practise all the virtues, and not a word is flung at the husbands. It is something of course for us to learn, by the aid of the Church, that all the duty is on the other side, and that we have nothing to do but command, be worshipped, and fall foul of infidelity. The beautiful logic of man, and the profound Pessimism of woman! She never rebels, but accepts all without hope of remedy. The real Pessimists are women. They admit the fact that everything is unalterable, evil without amelioration; everything is, and everything will remain to the end. Man occasionally rises up, and takes his oppressor by the throat, but woman never. There is a point at which his patience vanishes, but hers is inexhaustible. She is the soul and spirit and body of the malady only diagnosed this century. Conviction that suffering is her only heritage is hers before birth, and she placidly bends to the law of fate often without a murmur, always without the faintest instinct of revolt. Is she an idiot or an angel? The latter rebelled in paradise; then she must be an idiot. Man is activity, she is inertia; that is why she yields so readily to his ruling. These are thoughts suitable to the marriage of two Pessimists. There will be on neither side revolt or stupid demands upon destiny. I am simply interested in the development of this strange union of the barbarous North and the barbarous South, and watch this unfamiliar person, my wife, placed in an enervating proximity by a queer social institution. I wonder if she will eventually prove explosive; meantime it is my privilege to kiss her. I have not mentioned it, but she has very sweet lips.”

‘After this there is a long lapse of silence. I fear the delights of poor Krowtosky’s honeymoon were soon enough disturbed by the grim question of ways and means. As I was only a fair-weather friend in default of the sympathetic confidant voyaging in distant waters, I imagine at this period the traveller must have returned, and received the rest of the journal so wantonly intrusted to me, or Krowtosky must have confided his troubles to his wife. When next I hear from him, it is many months later, and he has just obtained a professorship in a dreary snow-bound place called Thorpfeld. From his description, it is evidently the very last place God Almighty bethought himself of making, and by that time all the materials of comfort, pleasure, and beauty had been exhausted. “As Thorpfeld is not my birthplace,” writes Krowtosky, “I may befoul it to my liking. It contains about seven thousand inhabitants, one poorer and more ignorant than another. What they can want with professors and what the authorities are pleased to call a college, the wicked government under which we sweat and suffer and groan alone can tell. Six out of a hundred cannot read, and three of these can barely write. The less reason have they for a vestige of belief in man, the more fervent is their faith in their Creator. Nothing but anticipation of the long-delayed joys of paradise can keep them from cutting their own and their neighbours’ throats. They ought to begin with the professors and the rascally magistrates. As if snow and broken weather were not enough to harass these poor wretches in pursuit of a precarious livelihood, what little money the magistrates or the professors leave them is wrung from them by the popes. Even Pilar is demoralised by her surroundings. She has left off writing pessimistic poetry, and has betaken herself to Christian charity. ’Tisn’t much we can do, for we have barely enough to live upon ourselves, but that little she manages to do somehow or other. These hearts of foolish women will ever make them traitor to their heads. I naturally growl when I find our sack of corn diminished in favour of a neighbour’s hungry children, or return frost-bitten from the college to find no fire, and learn that my wife has carried a basket of fuel to a peasant dying up among snow-hills. She does not understand these people, and they do not understand her, but they divine her wish to share their wretchedness, her own being hardly less; and then she is a pretty young woman! Timon himself could hardly have spurned her. But where’s her Pessimism? Has it vanished with the sun and vines of her own bright land, or has it found a grave in the half-frozen breast of a strange Sister of Charity unknown to me and born of the sight of snow-clad misery such as in Spain is never dreamed of? You see, I am on the road to poetry instead of my poor changed young wife.

‘“Last evening when I came home from a farmer’s house, where I had stopped to warm myself with a couple of glasses of _vodka_, I found her shivering over the remaining sparks of a miserable fire. She looked so white and unhappy and alone, so completely the image of a stranger in a foreign land, to whom I, too, her husband, am a foreigner, that I asked myself, in serious apprehension, if I might not be destined to lose her in the coming crisis. ‘Pilar,’ I cried, ‘what ails thee?’ And when she turned her head I saw that she was crying silently. ‘I want my own land; I want the sun and vines of Spain, where at least the peasants have wine and sunshine in abundance whatever else they may lack!’ I should think so, I grimly muttered, remembering that over there the mortar that built up the walls of a town was wet with wine instead of water, and that fields are sometimes moistened with last year’s wine when the new is ready. Pilar is right, my friend. There is no poverty so sordid and awful as that of the cold North. But what could I do? I could not offer her the prospect of change. She was sobbing bitterly now, and I had no words of comfort for her. If only she had not forsaken her principles and her poetry! But the baby may rouse her when it comes. She has not smiled since we left Spain, poor girl. We must wait meanwhile; but Rameau, it is very cold.”’

‘Poor little woman!’ murmured Gaston. ‘I hardly know which is the worst fortune for her, her transplantation or her marriage with that maundering owl Krowtosky. Krowtosky married to a pretty Spanish poet! Ye gods, it is a cruel jest! There would have been some appropriateness in the laundress or the _grisette_, but a Spanish girl with arched feet and melancholy eyes! I vow the jade Destiny ought to have her neck wrung for it. Is there a Perseus among us to free this modern unhappy Andromeda?’

‘Poor Krowtosky! he deserves a word too,’ I modestly ventured to suggest, touched by that little stroke, _It is very cold_, and his fear of losing his wife. ‘He is more human than he himself is aware, and we may be sorry for him too.’

‘Ah, yes,’ assented Rameau, and he dropped an easy sigh. ‘If he is a bear, he is an honest bear. His next letter was just a note to announce the birth of a little girl and the well-being of the mother, which was followed by a more philosophical communication later, as soon as the gracious content of motherhood had fallen upon the young Spaniard. Relieved of his fears, he plunges once again into high speculation, and throws out queer suggestions as to the result of such conflicting elements in parentage as those contributed by Spain and Russia. He has found an occupation of vivid interest,--that of watching the development of his child, which he is convinced will turn out something very curious. Pilar, he adds, has so far recovered her old self as to have written a delicious little poem, which has just appeared in the _Revista_. It is over there, if any of you can read Spanish.’

‘And the baby is now dead,’ said Gaston.

‘Dead, yes, poor mite! It had not time to show what the mingling of Spanish and Russian blood might mean. Krowtosky’s letter was most pitiful. That I will not read to you; it affected me too deeply. It was the father there who wrote. Unconsciously the little creature had forced a way into his heart, and discovered it a very big and human heart despite his Pessimism and Philosophy. What hurt him most was the cruel hammering of nails into the baby’s coffin, and the sound keeps haunting him through the long wakeful nights. Of the bereaved mother he says little. His mind is fixed on the empty cradle and the small fresh mound in the churchyard, whither he goes every day. I believe myself that it is the first time his heart has ever been stirred by passionate love, and now he speaks of never leaving Thorpfeld,--a place he has been moving heaven and earth to get away from the past six years.’

‘I promise you, Professor, that I’ll never laugh at him again,’ said Gaston, very gravely. ‘There can be nothing absurd about a man who mourns a little child like that. Give me his address, and I’ll write to him at once.’

‘It may be a distraction for him, and at any rate it will serve to show him that he is remembered in Paris,’ said Rameau, eager to comply with the request. We thanked the Professor for his story, with some surprise at the lateness of the hour. The door-bell rang, and the appearance of the servant with the evening letters arrested our departure. With a hand extended to the sobered St. Thomas, Rameau took the letters and glanced as he spoke at the top envelope, deeply edged with black. ‘_Tiens!_ a letter from poor Krowtosky,’ he exclaimed. He broke the seal and read aloud: ‘My dear friend, I thank you for your kind words in my bereavement. But I am past consolation; I am alone now; my wife is dead, and my heart is broken.’

ARMAND’S MISTAKE

_To Demetrius Bikélas_

ARMAND’S MISTAKE