What Must Be, Shall Be

When Gerard Sliepley was sent to Penorth to plant conifers in that part of the county, he was a carefree young man, who had up to that time kept clear of emotional entanglements. If he was interested in people, it was purely for their own sakes and not for anything they could contribute to his inner life or to his self-­esteem; and that perhaps was the reason why he received so many confidences and was called upon to give out so much sympathy.

Penorth is an exquisite place, and he fell in love with it. He had lodgings up the hill on the west side of the river that cuts the town in two as it runs down to the sea, and the view from his windows was of steep-­pitched fields making a pattern of squares and triangles above the river; and beyond them, against the horizon, was the faint blue haze of the moors, like a bank of Parma violets. But sometimes there was no haze, only a straight dark line drawn at the edge of the world. Rainbows were often flung across the valley several times a day. He had never seen so many rainbows. They would fall across a larch wood and shower it with rhinestones, or touch up a white farm and make it look like a spot-­lit palace. And once he even saw a lunar rainbow. It excited him very much . . . like a word from the moon whispered behind the back of her golden lord.

Tucked away in the folds of the valleys in those parts are many old houses, each with its distinctive character. Some are inhabited by lonely old ladies like the last surviving mammoths of their lost world. By chance, Gerard was taken to one or two of these by someone who had to pay a call about hens, or cuttings, or a library book, or whatever tenuous link the antediluvian owner might have with the outside world. And somehow these old ladies, who seldom put their noses out of doors because of their arthritis, or heart, or other melancholy cause, seemed to reach out their personalities as far as the outskirts of their domains. The dense thickets of rhododendron, the camellia or two, with its cheating blossoms that wither at the tips before their prime, the ill-­kept mossy drive, seemed but an extension of themselves. So that, for Gerard, the acquaintance began at the gates, and he knew before the house came into view the look of resignation it would have, waiting with shut eyelids for the day of doom.

And the old ladies waited, too, in their vast drawing-rooms, against a background of fading water-­colours, with a gaiety and gallantry that touched him. They spoke with detachment of the death of others, as if death were not an event that could concern them deeply. Soon Gerard, the third person, would find them addressing themselves more and more to him. It must have been that way of his of drinking people in, of being fascinated with them. They asked him to come again, and he went—next time, alone. He went, even if it meant walking a long distance in the rain. They talked of flowers and Beethoven and Italy. He liked them very much, and they liked him. Sometimes he made their old pianos sing and shout triumphantly, for he played the Waldstein sonata really very well; and under the spell of music something perhaps was said that pleased him very much, some delicate and touching remark like a tune played by an old musical-­box.

One day, calling on Mrs. Tremayne, he found a strange woman in the drawing-­room; and for the first time he had a foreboding that he was going to be more entangled with Penorth than he had anticipated. Her face gave him a shock of surprise. He stared at her as one stares at a picture or a statue, but with the added excitement of knowing that the mind behind this beauty was aware of his delight. Her eyelids flickered a little, and she looked beyond him at the door.

‘Mrs. Tremayne will be coming directly,’ she said; and, rising, she opened the French window into the garden and disappeared. He realised then that she was dressed in well-­cut tweeds, had her hair fashionably coiffed, and was an expensive modern young woman. But in his mind he had met her naked on the slopes of Mount Ida, clothed only in light, like a lily.

‘I am afraid I have driven your other visitor away,’ he said, when his friend, Mrs. Tremayne, at length appeared, leaning on her ebony stick.

‘That was Chloe Wilmot, with a message from her mother. She might have waited for an answer, the hussy!’

‘Chloe? But could they have known when she was a baby that she was going to be pure Greek?’ said Gerard, still looking rather dazed. ‘She is the nearest thing to Aphrodite I’ve ever seen in my life.’

‘Now, don’t let her break your heart,’ said the old lady, patting his arm.

‘Surely not! One doesn’t aspire to a goddess. He laughed rather hollowly. ‘One knows that if one marries at all, it will probably be some mousey girl. But who is she, Mrs. Tremayne?’

‘They have a house in Penorth, but they spend most of their time abroad. I suspect that cavalry officers in pale-­blue uniforms, and sallow Roman princes with scent on their handkerchiefs are more Signora Chloe’s cup of tea than nice humdrum Englishmen. Lingua toscana in bocca romana—what a medium for fantastic compliments! And to the Latin temperament what more tantalising than the rôle of the Snow Queen! Never forget that she is the aloofest white rose on the highest bough. That is her pose; that is why she went out of the window just now.’

‘I’ve never heard you speak so bitterly before,’ said Gerard, with a hint of reproach in his voice. (Like some worldly old woman in Henry James, he thought—dear, delicate, wise old Mrs. Tremayne, who was herself like a rose, an old rose with one last frail petal fluttering in the wind.)

The next time he met Chloe Wilmot was at a garden party. Crossing the lawn in search of his hostess, he suddenly saw Chloe in the midst of a group of people, and again he felt that shock of surprise. So she really was as beautiful as all that! Turning her lovely, peaceful face from one to another, she seemed to be holding a little court. His eyes rested on her face. It was like throwing oneself down on a couch of moss and primroses and letting peace and coolness flow through one’s being. But presently, through some sixth sense, he became aware that, without looking at him, she was conscious of his presence, that his intentness had dramatised her to herself, and that with the limelight of his regard thrown upon her, she was constrained to act for his benefit the role she conceived him to be seeing her in. The aloofest white rose, Mrs. Tremayne had said. She was playing the part with the most delicate condescension, with a half-­smile, a raised eyebrow, a little laugh, turning her turquoise eyes from one to another. A tenseness had come into the atmosphere, the lawn with its background of spreading cedar had become a set on the stage of life, and unheard strings were vibrating.

He turned away towards a Dutch garden that seemed to offer a retreat, and gusts of rose-­fragrance pursued him, as if Chloe were sending out emanations of her personality to draw him back into the charmed circle.

In the Dutch garden, with its sad yews and faintly aromatic smell as of cedar-­wood pencils, he found one of those Pym girls whom one met sometimes at parties—nondescript, dark girls, very much alike, who hung together and had an air of feeling themselves out of things. She was passing her hand over a tree cut into the shape of a peacock, stroking it, as if she liked the feel of the close shorn leaves, and he grinned at her rather shame­facedly as he stepped between two trees into that remote and shady place that seemed like a dark private apartment in some bright palace.

‘Hullo! Are you taking refuge, too? Have you run away from something?’

‘Have you?’ she countered, lightly dusting the palms of her hands together.

‘Perhaps,’ said Gerard, ‘I have run away from Fate.’

‘It’s no good doing that,’ said this Miss Pym, shaking her head. ‘What must be, shall be.’

‘Juliet! She said that, didn’t she? Like a bell tolling.’

‘I’ve always thought that, too,’ she said, with a startled look.

‘Have you?’ he said, eagerly. ‘It would be interesting to compare notes about Shakespeare; but he is difficult to talk about—as difficult as music.’ He sighed.

‘It would have to be to someone so much in sympathy that it would be like talking to oneself,’ Miss Pym said, in a low voice.

But at this point their solitude was invaded, and the brief exchange in the Dutch garden became as a record that is played but once and laid aside.

For it was Chloe Wilmot who came stepping lightly down the alley attended by her host, like a queen withdrawing with her chief minister from the glitter of the audience chamber for private converse in a closet. Miss Pym disappeared unobtrusively, with the dexterity one might have thought (only she was not that kind of girl) of a lady-­in-­waiting caught in forbidden dalliance. He stayed where he was, for he could not without clumsiness have made his escape.

Miss Wilmot’s eyes fluttered uncertainly towards him like two blue butterflies. They seemed to hover over his face and to settle on his mouth, as if in that feature she sought a clue to the riddle of an unknown personality. He was dizzily aware that, for whatever reason, she was set on following up any clue she might light on, and he braced himself for the contact he could not avoid. She bore upon him in her white muslin like a ship in full sail, with Sir Ralph in tow, and by some social legerdemain that was too swift and dexterous to be assessed, contrived to be rid of her host and have herself confided to Gerard’s keeping. ‘God knows why she should take the trouble for a scallywag like me. She’ll peel me skin by skin, till she finds I’m onion all through,’ he thought, following apprehensively in her wake. Sir Ralph had gone off supposing that of his own volition he had invited young Shepley to show her the greenhouses. And to the greenhouses they went.

Hooded flowers with wicked little faces looked through the glass, like the fairies in a sophisticated production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Inside, intoxicating gusts of fragrance greeted them.

Suddenly, among the lilies, she became enchanting. ‘Oh, look!’ she said, ‘at the speckled drugget laid down for the bees to the golden throne.’ She dipped her perfect nose into the trumpets of lilium auratum and breathed sighs of delight.

‘You are more at home with flowers than people, aren’t you?’ he said, touched to the quick.

She opened her eyes very wide and looked at him, as if she were startled at the rapidity with which he had discovered the real Chloe.

‘People,’ she said, with a faint sigh, ‘make such demands on one. One gets so tired of it.’

‘I am sorry—so very sorry,’ he murmured.

‘Perhaps I am a peculiar girl. I like to belong to myself,’ she said.

Later on, when he came to know her better, he found that she often made one naïve little confidences about herself. But she did not expect one to presume on this habit of hers. She could subject one to a lift of the eyebrows and a cool stare that were very disconcerting. It was not that she was averse from flattery. Oh, no! But she liked it to be conveyed in a delicate and oblique way that left her some excuse for not understanding.

She began to haunt his dreams, vague, troubled dreams in which he was always trying to break through some barrier to reach her, in which she passed him in the street averting her head, or went through a doorway and closed the door in his face. She was an enigma, a strange mixture of childishness and sophistication. One noticed her expensive clothes because one was in love with her, but she could have worn an old wrapper and looked just as beautiful. He was even a little shocked when she appeared once in sandals with her toe-­nails painted. It was as if he had caught her reading a novel by Colette disguised as a book of poems, though he couldn’t help looking at her lovely feet.

He had to find excuses for calling on the Wilmots, for he scarcely ever received a direct invitation from Chloe. He would bring her a book, or a new gramophone record, or a basket of fish he had caught. He lent her poetry.

‘Simply divine!’ she would say, returning it, with her little sigh of delight, that expressed so much more than she ever said.

And then one day, when the summer flowers had given place to the scarlets and mauves of autumn, when the fields were a pattern of squares and triangles delicately coloured by September, pewter and silver and molten gold, she stepped from her pedestal. They were sitting together on the sofa, looking at a book of engravings. A friend in Rome had sent it, she said.

‘I suppose you have friends all over the world cudgelling their brains what beautiful thing they can send you,’ said Gerard, in the half-­voice he used to slip across oblique declarations of love.

‘You know,’ said Chloe, softly, turning over a page, ‘you are rather touching, sometimes.’

‘That is the first personal thing you have ever said to me,’ said Gerard, after a palpitating silence. ‘You had better be careful, or I might lose my head,’ he added in carefully even tones.

‘Might you? I wonder what would happen then.’ She looked down at the tip of her shoe, with a faint smile on her lips.

‘You must know very well,’ he said, shakily, looking straight before him.

But at that moment, when the air was tense with drama, the door opened suddenly, and Mrs. Wilmot came in. He felt febrile, disintegrated, and when he opened his lips, a nonsensical remark came out.

‘Rome,’ he said, in a high, excited voice, ‘it’s no good spending three weeks. You want years and years. I mean, all those Apollos and Dianas—simply terrific.’

Chloe gave a little gurgle of laughter and closed the book composedly.

‘No doubt,’ said Mrs. Wilmot, raising her eyebrows. ‘Won’t you sit down again? Or were you just going?’

She had one of those cat-­faces with small deep-­set eyes that call to mind a she-­leopard, and her blueish-­white hair had the crispness of snow. It was wily of her to wear a green stone in each ear that intensified the green of her eyes.

‘Yes, yes. I’m afraid I must,’ said Gerard. He felt curiously light-­headed. The floor seemed to slip away from beneath his feet and leave him treading on air. He shook hands so fervently with Mrs. Wilmot that he made her wince, and the sharp impress of her diamonds remained on his palm like the marks of little teeth.

Chloe came with him to the door. He didn’t look at her as they crossed the hall, but when on the steps he turned and faced her, he saw from her expression that they were back where they had been. It was as if that dizzy moment had never been, as if it had existed only in his imagination. It was like the dream of the closed door.

‘Good-­bye,’ she said, in her most distant voice. ‘There is going to be a quite spectacular sunset.’

There was a smell of cut grass and watered earth. The red-­hot pokers and dahlias in the herbaceous border shone crimson and yellow, purple and wine-­red, and a maple and a cherry by the gate, catching the evening light, were like a golden and a ruby tree in a Chinese fairy-­tale.

But Chloe had gone in and closed the front door. He did not like the word ‘spectacular’. It was a cold, unfeeling word. The trees on the opposite hillside were on fire. A golden cow cut the sky-­line, and out at sea the fishing-­boats making for port were silver and their sails of gold. He felt at the same time a sense of frustration and strangely elated. It almost seemed that there was the taste of salt on his lips because he had so nearly kissed the Foam-­Born.

As he descended into the little huddled town clustered about the quays on both sides of the river, the twilight breath of Penorth greeted his nostrils, a smell of sea-­weed and tarred fishing-­nets, of leaf-­mould and the smoke of wood-­fires. A girl was leaning on the bridge, looking into the water. An earring against the line of her cheek caught the light and shone like a drop of dew. He recognized that Miss Pym who had spoken to him many weeks ago of Fate. He had scarcely thought of her since, and had doubtless often passed her in the street without seeing her, for he had been very absent-­minded of late.

But now he felt impelled to share the beauty of the evening with someone who seemed to be under its spell.

‘Good evening!’ he said, raising his hat.

She slowly turned her head, and for some reason he thought suddenly of Fanny Brawne—that perhaps she had a face like this.

‘Isn’t it fantastically lovely—like a dream,’ he said.

‘Like a dream dreamed by Keats,’ said Carlotta Pym, in her husky voice.

‘Good heavens! I was just thinking of him. Do you often guess people’s thoughts like that?’

‘Perhaps it was you who guessed mine, because I was thinking of him before I saw you. But perhaps the thoughts of passers-­by coincide more often than they imagine.’

‘That sounds an interesting theory. What a changed outlook one might have if one could suddenly have the gift of reading other people’s minds,’ said Gerard, approaching her side. He leaned his elbow on the bridge and looked down at the water. His thoughts, of course, were still with Chloe. If one were not so bemused, so obsessed, perhaps one could stand back a little and consider her dispassionately. If one could know what went on inside that little head, perhaps the spell would be broken, or one might be more terribly involved than ever.

‘Someone,’ he said, ‘called it spectacular; the sunset, I mean. I don’t call it a very apt word, do you?’

She seemed to take the word into her mind and consider it. After a pause, she said—‘It’s like the wrong thing said about music, when you’ve nearly died of bliss . . . like someone saying, “Now play the Hungarian Rhapsody”, when you’ve just been listening to Bach.’

A faint sweet breath of violets stole from her, delicate and evocative. It occurred to Gerard that she was rather a dear little creature. He felt quite drawn towards her, as he might have been towards a small antique chair, or some appealing wild creature—a gazelle perhaps.

‘One wouldn’t,’ went on Carlotta, thoughtfully, ‘expect that person to share an unspoken thought, or a dream.’

‘A dream?’ he echoed. ‘That would be a strange thing. Do you mean that you think two people can dream the same dream at the same time?’

‘One likes to think so, but one can never know. Such dreams are only about the lo-­ost.’ (She gave the word a deep, forlorn sound, a chest note.) ‘Otherwise’, she added, tracing with her long thin forefinger an invisible pattern on the stones against which she leant, ‘there would be no need of them.’

‘You are drawing an ammonite,’ said Gerard, surprised. ‘That’s my secret pattern. I always scribble ammonites in the margin when I am waiting for an idea. How strange that we should share a symbol!’

How long was it that they stayed talking on the bridge? Having a conversation with Carlotta was rather like listening to music, to new, enchanting music with elusive themes that give you the slip, or like reading Chinese poetry, that means so much more than it says. She was always hesitating on the verge of some communication and then withholding that which you were most eager to hear, as if to tell were to bestow too much of herself.

‘You know,’ said Gerard, ‘you don’t talk like a modern girl. You are like one of those quiet girls in a novel of Hardy about whom he says almost nothing, except just one revealing thing, like “her quickly-­shutting eyes”, and one remembers them always.’

She turned and looked at him. ‘I think,’ she said, ‘I shall always remember your saying that. But to be on the safe side, I shall put it into a book I keep.’

‘A book? Do you record all the compliments you receive? Not that I meant it as a compliment. It just struck me, that’s all.’

‘Only those that make me feel all cold, like an eclipse of the moon, as if I saw my shadow cast on another person’s mind . . . not only compliments, but unkind remarks, too. And sometimes,’ she said, giving him a sideways look, ‘what people say of one reveals not only the image one projects on their consciousness, but themselves I think,’ she added, ‘I know you. I think I have you now in a nutshell . . . in the hollow of my hand.’ She opened her hand and looked down at her palm, as if she held in it some small and exquisite object.

‘I am honoured,’ he said, gravely, ‘to figure in a psychological document of such importance. Do other people read your book?’

‘Of course not. It would be like showing letters that are meant for oneself alone. Besides, flattery has no sweetness except for the person addressed, and malice, no bitterness. For a third person, they assume each other’s qualities.’

‘What a clear and precise person you can be when you choose! But you don’t always choose, not by any means. You wouldn’t tell me, for instance, what that minute thing was you held in your hand just now—the essential me?’

‘The whole of a person can be expressed by a very small symbol,’ she said in her provoking way. ‘A tune or a scent can be everything. Sometimes all one has,’ she added, unexpectedly, ‘to make do with.’

Colour had stolen away from the earth and more and more stars appeared in the sky. Shimmering bars of light fell across the river as the houses on the quays lit up.

They said good-­bye and went their separate ways. And it seemed to him that under their conversation had glittered all the time, like a drowned jewel on the bed of a brook, the thought of the kiss that had nearly been.

For a brief moment, some impulse had made Chloe his for the taking. To-­morrow he would have it out with her, even if it meant the end of everything.

That night he dr­eamed again of Chloe. But this time she turned her head as she reached the door through which she always disappeared, and laughed back at him. He sprang forward and caught her in his arms and kissed her lips. But when he looked into her face, he saw that it wasn’t Chloe after all, but Carlotta Pym. ‘You cheat! Oh, you little cheat!’ he said bitterly. ‘I wouldn’t have thought it of you.’ ‘But I have your heart in my hand and it is marked with my image,’ said Carlotta Pym, and she showed him, lying on her palm, a cornelian heart that his mother used to wear on a black ribbon. He snatched it from her, and when he woke, his first feeling was one of sharp anger that it wasn’t in his hand. So vivid had been the dream that it almost seemed as if Carlotta had that moment vanished through a hole in the impalpable wall that divides wake from dream. The very tones of her voice seemed to linger in the air.

The dream kept recurring to his thoughts all through the day, and when the time came to pay the fateful call on Chloe, he felt a great reluctance to take the risk of losing her for ever. He would cherish his wild hope a little longer, and in the meantime it would be soothing to talk a little more with someone who preferred Bach to Liszt, and to whom one could say anything that came into one’s head. He would take her Schweitzer’s book on Bach of which he had spoken. He turned his steps to the old house on the quay, which had a sideways view to where the Penorth river ran down to the sea.

Carlotta herself opened the door. He had never before seen her without a hat, or a scarf tied over her hair. What pretty hair she had, cut into soft ridges that fitted her head like a cap and waved up over her brow in a crest. Through an open door one could look through the width of the house into a walled garden, and the golden vista beyond the dark clutter of mahogany was as lovely as the remote, tranquil view in the background of an Old Master.

‘Come in,’ she said, not looking as surprised as he had expected; not, in fact, looking surprised at all. ‘I was just going to get tea.’ Long-­necked and thin-­waisted, in a dress of Venetian red, she led the way down a little flight of stairs and up another. He liked the way she walked, smoothly and soundlessly, as if her feet scarcely touched the ground, with a faintly swaying movement. He was reminded of a shot in a film of someone progressing endlessly down long corridors to the sound of music.

‘Mother, this is Mr. Shepley. We have met him all the summer, you know, at garden-­parties. But he hasn’t always remembered. Perhaps we are not very memorable girls.’

She stood in the doorway, with that peculiar stance of hers, as of an angel in a renaissance picture whose wings have dropped him squarely on his feet but left him swaying, and waved a hand over the assembly of thin, brown women which seemed to fill the room.

He had the oddest feeling, as of being in a wood with fawns watching him from the shadows with soft unwinking stares. He approached Mrs. Pym. Her small dry hand lay as lightly in his as a pinch of dried rose-­petals. The eldest Miss Pym, Barbie, the tall one, pushed forward a chair, and Maud and Katherine busied themselves clearing work-­boxes and embroidery off the table.

‘I have brought a book I promised to lend your daughter,’ said Gerard, in explanation. Barbie picked it up and looked at the title.

‘Are you sure you promised to lend it to her? She’s got it in her bookshelf.’

Glances were exchanged and lids dropped momentarily over dark eyes.

‘Now I come to think of it,’ said Gerard, embarrassed, ‘I offered to lend it, and she didn’t answer.’

‘Oh, well! She was probably thinking of something else,’ said Barbie, with a shrug.

‘I am so glad,’ said Mrs. Pym, ‘that Carlotta—it was Carlotta, wasn’t it?—was too distraite to enlighten you, for now I have the pleasure of making your acquaintance. Sometimes you have passed this window and I have thought—“I would like to know that young man who looks like a poet!” ’

‘I am in the Forestry Commission and have made Penorth my headquarters for the time being. We are planting conifers, you know.’

‘Such harsh, dark trees! They don’t go with our landscape. Definitely, it’s a pity,’ said Maud.

‘But I don’t agree. One cannot have too many varieties of tree,’ Mrs. Pym said. ‘When the cones of a fir are young, they sit like little grey parakeets on the branches. There was a pinewood that was an enchanted place to me as a child,’ she said, with the remote look of one who gazes through the window of the present into a small, gleaming landscape far back in time.

‘We often wondered,’ said Katherine, ‘why you had come to Penorth.’

‘We thought you might be an artist,’ said Maud.

‘That girl,’ said Barbie, ‘is a long time getting tea.’ She took a cloth out of a drawer and shook it over the table, smoothing it out with her strong capable hands. She had turned-­back thumbs, he noticed, and wore a signet ring on the third finger of her left hand. He glanced at the hands of the other girls. Katherine, too, wore a ring, but Maud’s hands were bare. And suddenly he found himself wondering whether Carlotta . . . It was with her right hand that she had drawn an ammonite on the stones of the bridge. He remembered the word ‘lo-­ost’, the long-­drawn deep sound of it. Oh! Carlotta, surely, was in the same boat as himself.

The door was flung open and she appeared with a tray in her hands. He fixed his eyes on her hands as she set down the tray and began to put out cups and saucers. They were brown and thin, with delicate pink nails like shells, and they were bare. He was aware of a deep, irrational sense of relief. He was in love with Chloe, oh! but terribly, irrevocably. But somehow he didn’t want Carlotta to belong to anyone. He wanted to know that she would always be there, the same as she was now, like hawthorn that comes always in May.

Mrs. Pym poured the tea into the ancient Rockingham cups that were cracked in places.

‘China—I hope you like it. Yes? Carlotta has guessed right then. She claims that she always knows whether a visitor would prefer China to India tea.’

‘And, of course, she is seldom proved wrong,’ said Maud, with her little sniff, ‘because even persons of the highest rectitude are apt to be disingenuous in such matters.’

‘But I do like China tea,’ said Gerard. ‘I like everything Chinese, especially Chinese poetry.’

He looked across at Carlotta, who had perched herself on the piano stool, cup in hand. ‘You do like it?’ he asked her.

She nodded. ‘I make it up sometimes, as I walk, or dust the mantelpiece,’ she said.

‘Do you really, Carlotta? Do you really do that? I must write and tell Richard. He always asks about you, but always in a postscript,’ Katherine said, twisting her engagement ring round on her finger.

‘Is that flattering, I wonder? Should one be grateful for an afterthought?’ asked Carlotta, with a pensive look.

‘From somebody else’s fiancé, decidedly yes!’ said Barbie, in her deep voice.

‘Well, then, it’s sweet of Richard.’ Carlotta slipped off the music-­stool, and, crossing the window, the light from which caught momentarily her watery earrings, came and took a chair beside Gerard.

‘I would very much like to hear some of the poetry you make up,’ he said, turning sideways towards her profile and speaking in a low voice.

‘You know what Richard said once? He said you were a bit of a witch,’ said Katherine, with the crease in her young brow of one who has been pursuing a private train of thought.

‘In a postscript?’ asked Carlotta, in her honeyed, husky voice. (They are like the mother and the girls in a Russian play, like the different themes in a fugue, thought Gerard.)

He slipped his book unobtrusively under his arm when he rose to go. In the hall, looking down at Carlotta, he said—‘The scent of violets will always remind me of you, even if you never think me worthy to hear your Chinese poetry, even if you never give me another thought.’

‘Oh! But I shall!’ she exclaimed, stirring with a fingertip the chrysanthemums on the hall table.

‘Why should you? Your thoughts are fixed on someone else,’ he said, deliberately.

She gave him a startled look.

‘You cannot possibly know that. But I know your secret. Forgive me, but I know with whom you are in love,’ she said, dropping her eyelids in that way they all had.

‘I’ve never mentioned her name!’ cried Gerard, taken aback. ‘But we are quits, my dear, because I know the Christian name of . . . the lost one, who meets you in dreams, who mentions you only in postscripts.’

They gazed in amazement at each other.

‘Hush—for God’s sake!’ said Carlotta, very low. He saw that she was trembling.

‘I can’t help knowing about you, Carlotta. We’re in the same boat. No, not the same boat—because he loves you, I suppose, poor devil!’

‘It’s terrible,’ murmured Carlotta, very pale, ‘for two people’s minds to be such open books to each other.’

‘I wish to God,’ he burst out, ‘that we were not both in love with someone else—especially you. It’s . . . it’s absurd!’

‘Especially me?’ she echoed. ‘But why, Mr. Shepley?’

‘Mr. Shepley! After what’s happened. It’s like a slap in the face,’ he said, reproachfully.

‘But I don’t know your Christian name. After all, till yesterday you hardly knew that I existed,’ she protested, with the ghost of a laugh.

‘Well, then, good night, Miss Pym!’ he retorted, as if he had a right to be hurt by her lack of such elementary knowledge of him.

‘Good night, Mr. Shepley,’ she said very sweetly, in her husky voice.

She opened the front door and looked out.

‘It’s not a sunset like yesterday, to draw the heart out of one’s breast,’ she said.

Oh! why must she steal the very words that Chloe should have spoken?

‘I haven’t an earthly chance,’ he said to himself, walking slowly along the quay. ‘But even if I had, even if she came with me to the altar, I almost think it would be Carlotta Pym I’d find under the bridal veil.’