CONTENTS

PAGE
I.[The Odour of the Ointment]1
II.[The Matinée]27
III.[The Path of In-the-Spring]45
IV.[The Elopement]72
V.[The Dance]93
VI.[The Honeymoon]115
VII.[The Other Two]134
VIII.[A Fountain of Gardens]148
IX.[The Baby]171
X.[The Marriage of Katinka]190
XI.[The Christening]208
XII.[An Interlude]229
XIII.[The Return of Endymion]246
XIV.[The Golden Wedding]265
XV.[The Wedding]291
XVI.[“So the Carpenter encouraged the Goldsmith”]312
XVII.[Christmas Roses]336

The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre

I

THE ODOUR OF THE OINTMENT

Ascension lilies were everywhere in our shabby drawing-room. They crowded two tables and filled a corner and rose, slim and white, atop a Sheraton cabinet. Every one had sent Pelleas and me a sheaf of the flowers—the Chartres, the Cleatams, Miss Willie Lillieblade, Enid, Lisa and dear Hobart Eddy had all remembered us on Easter eve, and we entered our drawing-room after breakfast on Easter morning to be all but greeted with a winding of the white trumpets. The sun smote them and they were a kind of candle, their light secretly diffused, premonitory of Spring, of some resurrection of light as a new element. It was a wonderful Easter day, and in spite of our sad gray hair Pelleas and I were never in fairer health; yet for the first time in our fifty years together Easter found us close prisoners. Easter morning, and we were forbidden to leave the house!

“Etarre,” Pelleas said, with some show of firmness, “there is no reason in the world why we should not go.”

“Ah, well now,” I said with a sigh, “I wish you could prove that to Nichola. Do I not know it perfectly already?”

It is one sign of our advancing years, we must suppose, that we are prone to predicate of each other the trifles which heaven sends. The sterner things we long ago learned to accept with our hands clasped in each other’s; but when the postman is late or the hot water is cold or we miss our paper we have a way of looking solemnly sidewise.

We had gone upstairs the night before in the best of humours, Pelleas carrying an Ascension lily to stand in the moonlight of our window, for it always seems to us the saddest injustice to set the sullen extinguisher of lowered lights on the brief life of a flower. And we had been looking forward happily to Easter morning when the service is always inseparable from a festival of Spring. Then, lo! when we were awakened there was the treacherous world one glitter of ice. Branches sparkled against the blue, the wall of the park was a rampart of silver and the faithless sidewalks were mockeries of thoroughfare. But the grave significance of this did not come to us until Nichola entered the dining-room with the griddle-cakes and found me dressed in my gray silk and Pelleas in broadcloth.