CHARMIAN, WHAT'S ALL THIS ABOUT AN EXTRAORDINARY CORNISH GENIUS?
D'YOU LIKE HIM SO MUCH?"—[Page 76]

THE
WAY OF AMBITION

BY

ROBERT HICHENS

Author of "The Garden of Allah,"
"The Fruitful Vine," "The Woman with the Fan," "Tongues of Conscience," "Felix," etc.

WITH A FRONTISPIECE IN COLOR
AND FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS IN BLACK-AND-WHITE BY
J. H. GARDNER SOPER

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1913, by
Robert Hichens
Copyright, 1912, 1913, by
The Butterick Publishing Co.
August, 1913

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE WAY OF AMBITION

CHAPTER I

"We want a new note in English music," said Charmian, in her clear and slightly authoritative voice. "The Hallelujah Chorus era has gone at last to join all the Victorian relics. And the nation is drifting musically. Of course we have a few composers who are being silly in the attempt to be original, and a few others who still believe that all the people can stand in the way of home-grown products is a ballad or a Te Deum. But what we want is an English composer with a soul. I'm getting quite sick of heads. They are bearable in literature. But when it comes to music, one's whole being clamors for more."

"I have heard a new note in English music," observed a middle-aged, bald and lively-looking man, who was sitting on the opposite side of the drawing-room in Berkeley Square.

"Oh, but, Max, you always—"

"An absolutely new note," interrupted Max Elliot with enthusiastic emphasis, turning to the man with the sarcastic mouth who had just spoken. "Your French blood makes you so inclined to incredulity, Paul, that you are incapable of believing anything but that I am carried away."

"As usual!"

"As sometimes happens, I admit. But you will allow that in matters musical my opinion is worth something, my serious and deliberately formed opinion."

"How long has this opinion been forming?"

"Some months."

"Some months!" exclaimed Charmian. "You've kept your new note to yourself all that time! Is it a woman? But of course it can't be. I don't believe there will ever be a great woman composer."

"It is not a woman."

"Was it born in the gutter?" asked Paul Lane.

"No."

"Don't say it's aristocratic!" said Charmian, slightly screwing up her rather Japanese-looking eyes. "I cannot believe that anything really original in soul, really intense, could emanate from the British peerage. I know it too well."

"It is neither aristocratic nor from the gutter. It is of the middle classes. Its father is a banker in the West of England."

"A banker!" said Charmian in a deplorable voice.

"It is Cornish."

"Cornish! That's better. Strange things sometimes come out of Cornwall."

"It has a little money of its own."

"And its name—"

"Is Claude Heath."

"Claude Heath," slowly repeated Charmian. "The name means nothing to me. Do you know it, Mr. Lane?"

Paul Lane shook his smooth black head.

"Heath has not published anything," said Max Elliot, quite unmoved by the scepticism with which the atmosphere of Mrs. Mansfield's drawing-room was obviously charged.

"Not even a Te Deum?" asked Charmian.

"No, though I confess he has composed one."

"If he has composed a Te Deum I give him up. He is vieux jeu. He should go and live in the Crystal Palace."

"And it's superb!" added Max Elliot. "Till I heard it I never realized what the noble words of the Te Deum meant."

Suddenly he got up and moved toward the window murmuring, "All the Earth doth worship Thee, the Father Everlasting."

There was a silence in the room. Charmian's eyes suddenly filled with tears, she scarcely knew why. She felt as if a world was opening out before her, as if there were wide horizons to call to the gaze of those fitted to look upon them, and as if, perhaps, she were one of these elect.

"Father Everlasting!" The words, and the way in which Max Elliot had spoken them, struck into her heart, and so made her feel keenly that she was a girl who had a heart that was not hard, that was eager, desirous, perhaps deep. As to Paul Lane, he stared at his remarkably perfect boots, and drew down the corners of his lips, and his white face seemed to darken as if a cloud floated through his mind and cast a shadow outward.

In the pause the drawing-room door opened, and a woman with blazing dark eyes and snow-white hair, wearing a white tea-gown and a necklace of very fine Egyptian scarabs, came in, with an intense, self-possessed and inquiring look. This was Mrs. Mansfield, "my only mother," as Charmian sometimes absurdly called her.

"You are talking, or you were talking, of something or somebody interesting," she said at once, looking round her at the three occupants of the room.

Max Elliott turned eagerly toward her. He rejoiced in Mrs. Mansfield, and often came to her to "warm his hands at her delightful blaze."

"Of somebody very interesting."

"Whom we don't know?"

"Whom very few people in London know."

"A composer, my only mother, who never publishes, and who is the son of a banker in the West of England."

Charmian seemed suddenly to have recovered her former mood, but she blinked away two tears as she spoke.

"Why shouldn't he be?" said Mrs. Mansfield, sitting down on a large sofa which stood at right angles to the wood fire.

"I know, but it doesn't seem right."

"Don't be ridiculously conventional, my only child."

Charmian laughed, showing lovely, and very small teeth. She was not unlike her mother in feature, but she was taller, more dreamy, less vivid, less straightforward in expression. At times there was a hint of the minx in her. She emerged from her dreams to be impertinent. A certain shrewdness mingled with her audacity. At such moments, as men sometimes said, "you never knew where to have her." She was more self-conscious and more worldly than her mother. Secret ambition worried at her mind, and made her restless in body. When she looked at a crowd she sometimes felt an almost sick sensation as of one near to drowning. "Oh, to rise, to be detached from all these myriads!" she thought. "To be apart and recognized as apart! Only that can make life worth the living." She had been heard to say, "I would rather sink forever in the sea than in the sea of humanity. I would rather die than be one of the unknown living." Charmian sometimes exaggerated. But she was genuinely tormented by the modern craze for notoriety. Only she called it fame.

Once she had said something to her mother of her intense desire to emerge from the crowd. Mrs. Mansfield's reply was: "Do you believe you have creative force in you then?" "How can I know?" Charmian had answered. "I'm so young." "Try to create something and probably you'll soon find out," returned her mother. Since that day Charmian had tried to create something, and had found out. But she had not told Mrs. Mansfield. She was now twenty-one, and had been just eighteen when her mother's advice had driven her into the energy which had proved futile.

Max Elliot crossed the room and sat down on the sofa by Mrs. Mansfield. He adored her quite openly, as many men did. The fact that she was a widow and would never marry again made adoration of her agreeably uncomplex. Everybody knew that Mrs. Mansfield would never marry again, but nobody perhaps could have given a perfectly clear explanation of how, or why, that knowledge had penetrated him. The truth was that she was a woman with a great heart, and had given that heart to the husband who was dead, and for whom she had never worn "weeds."

"What are we to do for Charmian, my dear Max?" continued Mrs. Mansfield, throwing a piteous look into her mobile face, a piteous sound into her voice. "What can anyone do for a young woman of twenty-one who, when she is thinking naturally, thinks it impossible for a West of England banker to cause the birth of a son talented in an art?"

"I always said there was intellectual cruelty in mother," said Charmian, drawing her armchair nearer to the fire.

"It's bracing, tones up the mind," said Paul Lane. "But what about this new note? All we know is a Cornish extraction, a banker papa and a Te Deum."

"Oh—a Te Deum!" observed Mrs. Mansfield, looking suddenly sceptical.

"I know! I know!" said Max Elliot. "I didn't want to hear it till I had heard it. And then I wanted to hear nothing else. The touch of genius startles everything into life."

"Another genius!" said Paul Lane.

And thereupon, as if acting on a sudden impulse, he got up, said good-bye, and went away with his curiosity, if he had any, ungratified.

"He's spoilt by the French blood his mother gave him," said Mrs. Mansfield as the door closed. "If he had been all French, one might have delighted in him, taken him on the intellectual side, known where one was, skipped the coldness and the irony, clung to the wit, vivacity and easy charm. But he's a modern Frenchman, boxing with an Englishman and using his feet half the time. And that's dreadful. In an English drawing-room I don't like the Savate. Now tell us, tell us! I am so thankful he is not a celebrity."

"Nor ever likely to be unless he marries the wrong woman."

"What do you mean by that?" asked Charmian with curiosity.

"A woman who is ambitious for him and pushes him."

"But if this Claude Heath has so much talent, surely it would be a fine thing to make him give it to the world."

"That depends on his temperament, I daresay," said Mrs. Mansfield. "I believe there are people who ought to hide their talents in a napkin."

"Oh, mother! Explain!"

"Some plants can only grow in darkness."

"Very nasty ones, I should think! Deadly nightshade! That sort of thing!"

"Poor dear! I gave her light in a vulgar age. She can't help it," said Mrs. Mansfield to Max Elliot. "We are her refined seniors. But sheer weight of years has little influence. Never mind. Go on. You and I at least can understand."

As she spoke she laid her hand, on which shone several curious rings, over Charmian's, and she kept it there while Max Elliot gave some account of Claude Heath.

"He's not particularly handsome in features. He's quite conventional in dress. His instinct would probably be to use the shell as a close hiding-place for anything strange, unusual that it contains. He crops his hair, and, I should think, wets it two or three times a day for fear people should see that it has a natural wave in it. His neckties are the most humdrum that can be discovered in the shops."

"Does he dislike his appearance?" asked Charmian.

"I daresay. The worst of it is that he has eyes that give the whole thing away to a Mrs. Mansfield."

"What, and not to me?" said Charmian, in an injured note.

"She's fairly sharp, poor dear!" observed Mrs. Mansfield, in a rescuing voice. "You mustn't be too hard on her."

Max Elliot smiled.

"And a Charmian Mansfield."

"What color are his eyes?" inquired Charmian.

"I really can't tell you for certain, but I should think dark gray."

"And where does he live?"

"In a little house not far from St. Petersburg Place on the north side of the Park, Mullion House he calls it. He's got a studio there which opens into a pocket-handkerchief of a garden. He keeps two women servants."

"Any dogs?" said Charmian.

"No."

"Cats?"

"Not that I know of."

"I don't feel as if I should like him. Does he compose at the piano?"

"No, away from it."

"He's unsympathetic. Cropped hair watered down, humdrum neckties, composing away from the piano, no animals—it's all against me except the little house."

"Because you take the wholly conventional view of the musician," said her mother. "If I dared to say such a thing to my own child I might add, without telling a dangerous lie, because you are so old-fashioned in your views. You can't forget having read the Vie de Bohême, and having heard, and unfortunately seen, Paderewski when you were a schoolgirl at Brighton."

"It is my beloved mother's fault that I ever was a schoolgirl at Brighton."

"Ah, don't press down that burden of crime upon my soul! Lift it, by freeing yourself from the Brighton tradition, which I ought to have kept for ever from you. And now, Max, tell us, whom does Mr. Heath know?"

"I know very little about his acquaintance. I met him first at Wonderland."

"What's that?" asked Charmian. "It sounds more promising."

"It's gone now, but it was a place in Whitechapel, where they had boxing competitions, Conky Joe against the Nutcracker—that kind of thing."

"I give him up, Te Deum, Conky Joe and all!" she exclaimed in despair.

"Do you mean me to meet him, Max?" asked Mrs. Mansfield.

"Yes. I can't keep him to myself any longer. I must share him with someone who understands. Come to-morrow evening, won't you, after dinner? Heath is dining with me."

"Yes. Is Charmian invited?"

Max Elliot looked at Charmian, and she steadily returned his gaze.

"You know," he said after a pause, "that you've got a certain hankering after lions?"

"Hankering! Don't, don't!"

"But you really have!"

"I will not be put with the vulgar crowd like that. I do not care for lions. Tigers are my taste."

He laughed.

"Do come then. But remember, there are plants which can only grow in darkness. And I believe this is one of them."

When Max Elliot had gone, Charmian sat for two or three minutes looking into the fire, where pale, steely-blue lights played against the prevailing gold and red. All the absurdity, the nonsense, had dropped away from her.

"Max Elliot seems quite afraid of me," she said at last. "Am I so very vulgar?"

"Not more so than most intelligent young women who are rather 'in it' in London," returned her mother.

"Surely I'm not a climber, without knowing it!"

"No, I don't think so. But your peculiar terror of mixing with the crowd naturally makes you struggle a little, and puff and blow in the effort to keep your head above water."

"How very awful! I don't know why it is, but your head always is well above water without your making any effort."

"I don't bother as to whether it is or not, you see."

"No. But what has it all to do with this Mr. Heath?"

"Perhaps we shall find out to-morrow night. Max may think you'll be inclined to rave about him."

"Rave about a cropped head that composes away from the piano!"

"Ah, that Brighton tradition!" said Mrs. Mansfield, taking up Steiner's Teosofia.

CHAPTER II

In the comedy of London Mrs. Mansfield and her daughter did not play leading parts, but they were, in the phrase of the day, "very much in it." Mrs. Mansfield's father had been a highly intelligent, cultivated, charming and well-off man, who had had a place in the Isle of Wight, and been an intimate friend of Tennyson, and of most of the big men of his day. Her mother had possessed the peculiar and rather fragile kind of beauty which seems to attract great English painters, and had been much admired and beloved in Melbury Road, Holland Park, and elsewhere. She, too, had been intelligent, intellectual and very musical. From Frederick Leighton's little parties, where Joachim or Norman Neruda played to a chosen few, the beautiful Mrs. Mortimer and her delightful husband were seldom missing. They were prominent members of that sort of family party which made the "Monday Pops" for years a social as well as an artistic function. And their small, but exquisite house in Berkeley Square, now inherited by their daughter, was famous for its "winter evenings," at which might be met the crème de la crème of the intellectual and artistic worlds, and at which no vulgarian, however rich and prominent, was ever to be seen.

Mrs. Mansfield, quite instinctively and naturally, had carried on the family tradition; at first with her husband, Arthur Mansfield, one of the most cultivated and graceful members of their "set," and after his death alone. She was well off, had a love of beauty and comfort, but a horror of display, and knew everyone she cared to know, without having the vaguest idea who was, or was not, included in "the smart set." Having been brought up among lions, she had never hunted a lion in her life, though she had occasionally pulled the ears of one, or stroked its nose. She had been, and was, the intimate friend of many men and women who were "doing things" in the world. But she had never felt within herself the power to create anything original, and was far too intelligent, far too aristocratic in mind, to struggle impotently to be what she was not meant to be, or to fight against her own clearly seen limitations.

Unlike Mrs. Mansfield in this respect Charmian struggled, and her mother knew it.

On the following evening, when Charmian and her mother were dining together before going to Max Elliot's, she said rather abruptly:

"Why didn't Mr. Elliot invite us to dinner to-night, do you think?"

"Why should he have invited us?"

"Well, perhaps it wasn't necessary. But surely it would have been quite natural."

"Probably he wanted to prepare the new note for you."

"Why should I require preparation?"

"The new note!"

"Why should the new note require preparation against me?"

"I said for you. Possibly we may find out this evening. Besides Delia is in a rest cure as usual. So there is no hostess."

Delia was Max Elliot's wife, a graceful nonentity who, having never done a stroke of work in her life, was perpetually breaking down, and being obliged to rest expensively under the supervision of fashionable doctors. She was now in Hampstead, enclosed in a pale green chamber, living on milk and a preparation called "Marella," and enjoying injections of salt water. She was also being massaged perpetually by a stout young woman from Sweden, and was deprived of her letters. "No letters!" was a prescription which had made her physician celebrated.

"Oh, the peace of it!" Mrs. Elliot was faintly murmuring to the athletic masseuse, at the very moment when Charmian said:

"There very seldom is a hostess. Poor Max Elliot!"

"He's accustomed to it. And Delia must be doing something. This time she may be cured. Life originally issued from the sea, they say."

"Near Margate, I suppose. What a mystery existence is!"

"Are you going to be tiresome to-night?"

"No, I won't, I won't. But if he plays his Te Deum I know I shall sleep like a tired child."

"I don't suppose he will."

"I feel he's going to."

"Then why were you so anxious to go?"

"I don't like to be left out of things. No one does."

"Except the elect. How thoughtful of you to dress in black!"

"Well, dearest, you are always in white. And I love to throw up my beautiful mother."

Mrs. Mansfield put an arm gently round her as they left the dining-room.

"You could make any mother be a sister to you."

Just before ten their motor glided up to the Elliots' green door in Cadogan Place.

Max Elliot was the very successful senior partner of an old-established stockbroking firm in the City. This was a fact, so people had to accept it. But acceptance was made difficult by his almost strangely unfinancial appearance and manner. Out of the City he never spoke of the City. He was devoted to the arts, and especially to music, of which he had a really considerable knowledge. All prominent musicians knew him. He was the friend of prime donne, a pillar of the opera, an ardent frequenter of all the important concerts. Where Threadneedle Street came into his life nobody seemed to know. Nevertheless, his numerous clients trusted him completely as a business man. And more than one singer, whose artistic temperament had brought her—or him, as the case might be—to the door of the poorhouse, had reason to bless Max Elliot's shrewd business head and generous industry in friendship. He had a good heart as well as a fine taste, and his power of criticism had not succeeded in killing his capacity for enthusiasm.

"He's not begun yet!" murmured Charmian to her mother, as the butler led them sedately down a rather long hall, past two or three doors, to the music-room which Elliot had built out at the back of his house.

"I never heard that he was going to begin at all. We haven't come here for a performance, but to make an acquaintance."

Charmian twisted her lips, and the butler opened the door and announced them.

At the end of the room, which was panelled with wood and was high, by a large open fireplace, Max Elliot was sitting with Paul Lane and two other people, a woman and a young man. The woman was large and broad, with brown hair, reckless hazel eyes, and a nose and mouth which suggested a Roman emperor. She looked about thirty-five. In her large ears, which were set very flat against her head, there were long, diamond earrings, and diamonds glittered round her neck. She was laughing when the Mansfields came in, and went on laughing while Max Elliot went to receive them.

"Mrs. Shiffney has just come," he said. "Paul has been dining."

"And—the other?" murmured Charmian, with a hushed air of awed expectation which was not free from a hint of mockery.

Mrs. Mansfield sent her a glance of half-humorous rebuke.

"Claude Heath," answered Elliot.

"How wonderful he is."

"Charmian, don't be tiresome!" observed her mother, as they went toward the fire.

The two men got up, and Charmian had an impression of height, of a bony slimness that was almost cadaverous, of irregular features, rather high cheek-bones, brown, very short hair, and large, enthusiastic and observant eyes that glanced almost piercingly at her, and quickly looked away.

Mrs. Shiffney remained in her armchair, moved her shoulders, and said in a rather deep, but not disagreeable voice:

"Mr. Heath and I are hearing all about 'Marella.' It builds you up if you are a skeleton and pulls you down if you are enormous, as I am. It makes you sleep if you suffer from insomnia, and if you have the sleeping sickness it wakes you up. Dr. Curling has patented it, and feeds his patients on nothing else. Delia is living entirely on it, and is to emerge looking seventeen and a female Sandow. Mr. Heath is longing to try it."

She had held out a powerful hand to the new arrivals, and now turned toward the composer, who stood waiting to be introduced.

"Oh, but no, please!" said Heath, speaking quickly and almost anxiously, with a certain naïveté that was attractive, but that did not suggest simplicity, but rather great sensitiveness of mind. "I never take quack medicines or foods. I have no need to. And I think they're all invented to humbug us."

Max Elliot took him by the arm.

"I want to introduce you to a dear friend of mine, Mrs. Mansfield."

He paused and added:

"Mr. Claude Heath—Miss Mansfield."

Paul Lane began talking to Charmian when the two handshakes—Heath had shaken hands quickly—were over. She looked across the room, and saw her mother in conversation with the composer. And she knew immediately that he had conceived a strong liking for her mother. It seemed to her in that moment as if his liking for her mother might prevent him from liking her, and, she did not know why, she was aware of a faint sensation of hostility toward him. Yet usually the fact that a man admired, or was fond of, Mrs. Mansfield predisposed Charmian in his favor.

Perhaps to-night she was in a tiresome mood, as her mother had hinted.

As she talked to Paul Lane, whom she had known pretty well for years, and liked as much as she could ever like him, she was secretly intent on the new note. Her quick mind of an intelligent girl, who had seen many people and been much in contact with the London world, was pacing about him, measuring, weighing, summing up with the audacity of youth. Whether he pleased her eyes she was not sure. But through her eyes he interested her.

Heath was tall, and looked taller than he was because he was almost emaciated, and he was a plain man whom something made beautiful, not handsome. This was a strange, and almost mysterious imaginativeness which was expressed by his face, and even, perhaps, by something in his whole bearing and manner. It looked out certainly at many moments from his eyes. But not only his eyes shadowed it forth. The brow, the rather thin lips, the hands, and occasionally their movements, suggested it. His face was not what is often called "an open face." Although quite free from slyness, or anything unpleasantly furtive, it had a shut, reserved look when his eyes were cast down. There was something austere, combined with something eager and passionate, in his expression and manner. Charmian guessed him to be twenty-six or twenty-seven.

He was now turned sideways to Charmian, and was moving rather restlessly on the sofa beside Mrs. Mansfield, but was listening with obvious intentness to what she was saying. Charmian found herself wondering how she knew that he had taken a swift liking to her mother.

"Did you have an interesting time at dinner?" she asked Paul Lane.

"Not specially so. Music was never mentioned."

"Was boxing?"

"Boxing!"

"Well, Mr. Elliot said he and Mr. Heath met first at a place in Whitechapel where Conky somebody was fighting the Nutcracker."

Lane smiled with his mouth.

"I suspect the new note to be a poseur, not quite of the usual species, but a poseur. Most musicians are ludicrously of their profession. This one is too much apparently detached from it to be quite natural. But the truth is, nobody is really natural. And no doubt it's a great mercy that it is so."

Charmian looked at him for a few seconds in silence. Then she observed:

"You know there's something in you that I can't abide, as old dames say."

This time Lane really smiled.

"I hope so," he said. "Or else I should certainly lack variety. Well, Max, what is it?"

"Mrs. Shiffney wants you."

"I always want him. I swim in his irony and can't sink, like a tourist in the Dead Sea."

"What a left-handed compliment!"

"A right-handed one would bore you to death, and my aim in life is—"

"To avoid being bored. How often do you succeed in your aim?"

"Whenever I am with you in this delightful house."

"It is delightful," said Charmian to her host. "But why? Of course it is beautiful. But that's not all. It's personal. Perhaps that's it."

She got up, and walked slowly away from the fire, very naturally, with a gesture, just touching her soft cheek and fluttering her fingers toward the glow, as if she were too hot. Max Elliot accompanied her.

"And all the lovely music that has sounded here," she continued, "perhaps lingers silently in the air, and, without being aware of it, we feel the vibrations."

She sat down on a sofa near the Steinway grand piano, which stood on a low dais, looked up at Max Elliot, and added, in quite a different voice:

"Shall we hear any of his music to-night?"

"I believe now we may."

"Why—now?"

Elliot looked toward Mrs. Mansfield.

"Because of mother, you mean?"

"He likes her."

"Anyone can see that."

After a moment she added, with a touch of irritation:

"He's evidently very difficile for an unknown man."

"No, it isn't that at all. If you ever know him well, you will understand."

"What?" she asked with petulance.

"That his reserve is a right instinct, nothing more. Between ourselves," he bent toward her, "I made a little mistake in asking Mrs. Shiffney, delightful though she is."

"I wondered why you had asked her, when you didn't want even to ask me."

"Middle-aged as I am, I get carried away by people. I met Mrs. Shiffney to-day at a concert. She was so absolutely right in her enthusiasm, so clever and artistic—though she's ignorant of music—over the whole thing, that—well, here she is."

"And here I am!"

"Yes, here you are!" he said genially.

He had been standing. Now he sat down beside her, crossed one leg over the other, held his knee with his clasped hands, and continued:

"The worst of it is Mrs. Shiffney has made him bolt several doors. When she looked at him I could see at once that she made him feel transparent."

"Poor thing! Tell me, do you enjoy very much protecting all the sensitive artistic temperaments that come into this room? Do you enjoy arranging the cotton-wool wadding so that there may be no chance of a nasty jar, to say nothing of a breakage?"

He pursed his rather thick lips, that smiled so easily.

"When the treasure is a treasure, genuinely valuable, I don't mind it. I feel then that I am doing worthy service."

"You really are a dear, you know!" she said, with a sudden change, a melting. "It was good of you to ask me, when you didn't want to."

She leaned a little toward him, with one light hand palm downward on the cushion of the sofa, and her small, rather square chin thrust forward in a way that made her look suddenly intense.

"I'll try not to be like Mrs. Shiffney. I'll try not to make him feel transparent."

"I'm not sure that you could," he said, smiling at her.

"How horrid of you to doubt my powers! Why, why will nobody believe I have anything in me?"

She brought the words out with a force that was almost vicious. As she said them it happened that Claude Heath turned a little. His eyes travelled down the room and met hers. Perhaps her mother had just been speaking to him of her, had been making some assertion about her. For he seemed to look at her with inquiry.

When Charmian turned away her eyes from his she added to Max Elliot:

"But what does it matter? Because people, some people, can't see a thing, that doesn't prove that it has no existence. And I don't really care what people think of me."

"This—to your old friend!"

"Yes. And besides, I expect one must possess to discover."

Her voice was almost complacent.

"You deal in enigmas to-night."

"One ought to carry a light when one goes into a cave to seek for gold."

But Elliot would not let her see that he had from the first fully understood her impertinence.

"Let us go back to the fire," he said. "Unless you are really afraid of the heat. Let us hear what your mother and Heath are talking about."

"I'm not afraid of anything except a Te Deum."

"There's Mrs. Shiffney speaking to him. I don't think we shall have it to-night."

"Then I'll venture to draw near," said Charmian, again assuming a semblance of awe.

The minx was evidently uppermost in her as they approached the others. She walked with a dainty slowness, a composed consciousness, that were almost the least bit affected, and as she stood still for a minute close to her mother, with her long eyes half shut, she looked typically of the world worldly, languid, almost prettily disdainful.

Mrs. Shiffney was speaking of the concert of that afternoon with discrimination and with enthusiasm.

"Of course he's a little monkey," she concluded, evidently alluding to some artist. "But what a little monkey! I was in the front row, and he called my attention to everything he was going to do, sometimes in Russian, sometimes in dreadful French, or in English that was really a criminal offense, and very often with his right elbow. He has a way of nudging the air in one's direction so that one feels it in one's side. Animal magnetism, I suppose. And he begs for sympathy as if it were a biscuit. Do you know him, Mr. Heath?"

"No, not at all. I know very few big artists."

"But all the young coming ones, I suppose? Did you study abroad?"

"I went to the Royal College at Kensington Gore."

Mrs. Shiffney, who was very cosmopolitan, had a flat in Paris, and was more often out of England than in it, slightly raised her eyebrows.

"You haven't studied in France or Germany?"

Heath began to look rather uncomfortable, and slightly self-conscious.

"No," he said quickly.

He paused, then as if with a decided effort he added:

"I think the training a student gets at the Royal College is splendid."

"Of course it is," said Max Elliot, heartily.

Mrs. Shiffney shook her shoulders.

"I'm sure it's quite perfect," she said, in her rather deep voice, gazing at the young composer with eyes in which a light satire twinkled. "Don't think I'm criticizing it. Only I'm so dreadfully un-English, and I think English musicians get rather into a groove. The Hallelujah bow-wow, you know!"

At this point in the conversation Charmian tranquilly interposed.

"Mr. Heath," she said, slightly protruding her chin, "when you've done with my only mother"—Mrs. Shiffney's lips tightened ever so little—"I want you to be very nice to me."

"Please tell me," said Heath, with the almost anxious eagerness that seemed to be characteristic of him.

Mrs. Mansfield fixed her blazing eyes on her daughter, slightly drawing down her gray eyebrows.

"Well, it's rather a secret."

Charmian glanced round at the others, then she added:

"It's about the Nutcracker."

"The Nutcracker!"

Heath puckered up his forehead.

"Yes." She moved a little, and looked at the chair not far from the fire on which she had sat when first she came into the room. "I care rather for boxing. Now"—she went slowly toward the chair, followed by Heath, "what I want to know, and what you can tell me, is this"—she sat down, and leaned her chin on her upturned palm—"on present form do you believe the Nutcracker is up to Conky Ja-ky Joe?"

As Claude Heath sat down to reply to this question, Mrs. Shiffney said:

"Conky Jarky Joe! I thought I was dans le mouvement up to my dog-collar, but I know nothing about the phenomenon. Where does it belong to?"

"Wonderland," said Elliot, in a gravely romantic voice.

"That's the land I've never seen, although I've had the yacht for so many years."

"Nor I!" said Paul Lane. "I don't believe it exists, or we must have been there. We have both been everywhere."

"Tell the poor things about it," said Mrs. Mansfield. "Then Adelaide can get up steam on The Wanderer and realize her dreams."

"But Mr. Elliot told me he met you there, and I remember distinctly his saying the fight was on between those two pets of the ring," said Charmian plaintively, after a certain amount of negation from Claude Heath.

"Yes, but I'm sure he didn't tell you I was an authority on boxing form."

"You aren't?"

"No, indeed!"

"But you want to be?"

"I shouldn't mind. But it isn't my chief aim in life."

Charmian was silent. She leaned back, taking her chin from her hand, and at last said gravely:

"It isn't that, then?"

"That—what?" exclaimed Heath, looking at her and away from her.

"That you want. It's something else. Because you know you want a very, very great deal of something."

"Oh, a good many of us do, I suppose."

"I don't think I do. I'm quite satisfied with my life. I have a good mother, a comfortable home. What should a properly-brought-up English girl, who has been educated at Brighton, want more?"

"I'm very glad indeed to know that a Brighton education stands its receiver in such good stead in the after years, very glad indeed!"

"You are laughing at me. And that's unchristian."

"Oh, but—but you were laughing at me!"

Despite Heath's eagerness, and marked social readiness of manner, Charmian was disagreeably conscious of a mental remoteness in him. Only the tip of his mind, perhaps scarcely that, was in touch with hers. Now she almost regretted that she had chosen to begin their acquaintance with absurdity, that she had approached Heath with a pose. She scarcely knew why she had done so. But she half thought, only half because of her self-respect, that she had been a little afraid of him, and so had instinctively caught up some armor, put a shield in front of her. Was she really impressed by a well-spoken-of Te Deum? She glanced at Heath inscrutably, as only woman can, and knew that she was not. It was the man himself who had caused her to fall into what she already thought of as a mistake. There was in Heath something that almost confused her. And she was not accustomed to be confused.

"I've made a bad beginning," she almost blurted out, not able to escape from artifice, yet speaking truth. "And I'm generally rather good at beginnings. It's so easy to take the first step, I think, despite that silly saying which, of course, I'm not going to quote. It's when one is getting to know a person really well that difficulties generally begin."

"Do they?"

"Yes, because it's then that very reserved people begin hurriedly building barricades, isn't it? I ask you, because I'm not at all reserved."

"But how should I know any better than you?"

"You mean, when you're so unreserved, too? No, that's true."

Heath's eyes troubled Charmian. She was feeling with every moment less at ease in his companionship and more determined to seem at ease. Being generally self-possessed, she had a horror of slipping into shyness and so retrograding from her usual vantage ground. She expected him to speak. It was his turn. But he said nothing. She felt sure that he had seen through her last lie, and that he was secretly resenting it as a heavy-footed approach to sacred ground. What a blunderer she was to-night! Desperation seized her.

"We must leave the question to the reserved," she said. "Poor things! I always pity them. They can never taste life as you and I and our kind are able to. We are put here to try to know and to be known. I feel sure of that. So the reserved are for ever endeavoring to escape their destiny. No wonder they are punished!"

"I am not sure that I entirely agree with your view as to the reason why we are put here," observed Heath, without a trace of obvious sarcasm. Nevertheless, the mere words stung Charmian's almost childish self-conceit.

"But I wasn't claiming to have pierced the Creator's most secret designs!" she exclaimed. "I was simply endeavoring to state that it can scarcely be natural for men and women to try to hide all they are from each other. I think there's something ugly in hiding things; and ugliness can't be meant."

"Ugliness is certainly not meant," said Heath, and for the first time she felt as if she were somewhere not very far from him. "Except very often by man. Isn't it astonishing that men created Venice and that men have now put steam launches in the canals of Venice!"

Venice! Charmian seized upon the word, mentally leaped upon and clung to the city in the sea. From that moment their conversation became easier, and gradually Charmian began to recover from her strange social prostration. So she thought of it. She forced the note, no doubt. Afterward she was unpleasantly conscious of that. But at any rate the talk flowed. There was some give and take. The joints of their intercourse did not creak as if despairingly appealing to be oiled. Of course it was very banal to talk about Italy. But, still, these moments must come sometimes to all those who go much into the world. And what is Italy, beautiful, siren-like Italy, for if not to be talked about? Charmian said that to herself afterward, and was amazed at her own vulgarity of mind. Ah, yes! That was what she had disliked in Claude Heath—his faculty of making her feel almost vulgar-minded, vulgar-intellected! She coined horrible bastard words in her efforts to condemn him. But all that was later on, when she had even said good-night to her only mother.

Their tête-à-tête was broken by Mrs. Shiffney's departure to a reception at the Ritz. She must surely have been disappointed in the musician; but, if so, she was too clever to show it. And she was by way of being a good-natured woman and seldom seemed to think ill of anybody. "I have so many sins on my own conscience," she sometimes said, "that I decline to see other people's. I want them to be blind to mine. Sin and let sin is an excellent rule in social life." She seldom condemned anyone except a bore.

"If you ever pay a call, which I doubt," she said to Claude Heath as she was going, "I'm in Grosvenor Square. The Red Book will tell you."

She looked at him with her almost insolently self-possessed and careless eyes, and added:

"Perhaps some day you'll come on the yacht and show me the course to set for Wonderland. Mr. Elliot says you know it. And of course we all want to. I've been everywhere except there."

"I doubt if a yacht could take us there," said Heath, smiling as if to cover something grave or sad.

A piercing look again came into Mrs. Shiffney's eyes.

"I really hope I shall see you in Grosvenor Square," she said.

Without giving him time to say anything more she went away, accompanied from the room by Max Elliot, walking carelessly and looking very powerful and almost outrageously self-possessed.

Within the music-room there was a moment's silence. Then Paul Lane said:

"Delightful creature!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Mansfield. "Adelaide is delightful. And why? She always thinks of herself, lives for herself. She wouldn't put herself out for anyone. I've known her for years and would never go to her in a difficulty or trust her with a confidence. And yet I delight in her. I think it's because she's so entirely herself."

"She's a darling!" said Lane. "She's so preposterously human, in her way, and yet she's always distinguished. And she's so clever as well as so ignorant. I love that combination. Even on a yacht she never seems to have a bad day."

Charmian looked at Claude Heath, who was silent. She was wondering whether he meant to call in Grosvenor Square, whether he would ever set sail with Mrs. Shiffney on The Wanderer.

CHAPTER III

When Max Elliot came back they gathered round the fire, no longer split up into duets, and the conversation was general. Heath joined in frequently, and with the apparent eagerness which was evidently characteristic of him. He had facility in speaking, great quickness of utterance, and energy of voice. When he listened he suggested to Charmian a mind so alive as to be what she called "on the pounce." He had an odd air of being swayed, carried away, by what those around him were saying, even by what they were thinking, as if something in his nature demanded to acquiesce. Yet she fancied that he was secretly following his own line of thought with a persistence that was almost cold.

Lane led the talk at first, and displayed less of his irony than usual. He was probably not a happy man, though he never spoke of being unhappy. His habitual expression was of discontent, and he was too critical of life, endeavor, character, to be easily satisfied. But to-night he seemed in a softer mood than usual. Perhaps he had an object in seeming so. He was a man very curious in the arts. Elliot, who knew him well, was conscious that something in Heath's personality had made a strong impression upon him, and thought he was trying to create a favorable atmosphere in the hope that music might come of it. If this was so, he labored in vain. And soon doubtless he knew it. For he, too, pleaded another engagement, and, like Mrs. Shiffney, got up to go.

Directly the door shut behind him Charmian was conscious of relief and excitement. She even, almost despite herself, began to hope for a Te Deum; and, hoping, she found means to be wise. She effaced herself, so she believed, by withdrawing a little into a corner near the fire, holding up her Conder fan open to shield her face from the glow, and taking no part in the conversation, while listening to it with a pretty appearance of dreaminess. She was conscious of her charming attitude, of the line made by her slender upraised arm, and not unaware of the soft and almost transparent beauty the light of a glowing fire gives to delicate flesh. Nevertheless, she really tried, in a perhaps half-hearted way, to withdraw her personality into the mist. And this she did because she knew well that her mother, not she, was en rapport with Claude Heath.

"I'm out of it," she said to herself, "and mother's in it."

Mrs. Shiffney had been a restraint, Lane had been a restraint. It would be dreadful if she were the third restraining element. She would have liked to be triumphantly active in bringing things about. Since that was evidently quite out of the question she was resolved to go to the other extreme.

"My only chance is to be a mouse!" she thought.

At least she would be a graceful mouse.

She gazed at the delicate figures on her Conder fan. They, those three a little way from her, were talking now, really talking.

Mrs. Mansfield was speaking of the endeavor of certain Londoners to raise the theater out of the rut into which it had fallen, and to make of it something worthy to claim the attention of those who did not use it merely for digestive purposes. She related a story of a disastrous theater-party which she had once joined, and which had been arranged by an aspiring woman with little sense of fitness.

"We dined with her first. She had, somehow, persuaded Burling, the Oxford historian, Mrs. Hartford, the dear poetess who never smiles, and her husband, and Cummerbridge, the statistician, to be of the party. After dinner where do you think she took us?"

"To the Oxford?" said Elliot, flinging his hands round his knee and beginning to smile.

"To front row stalls at the Criterion, where they were giving a knockabout farce called My Little Darling in which a clergyman was put into a boiler, a guardsman hidden in a linen cupboard, and a penny novelette duchess was forced to retreat into a shower-bath in full activity. I confess that I laughed more than I had ever done in my life. I sat between Burling, who looked like a terrified hen, and Mr. Hartford, who was seriously attentive from beginning to end, and kept murmuring, 'Really! Really!' And I had the poetess's sibylline profile in full view. I was almost hysterical when it was over. As we were coming out Mr. Hartford said to his wife, 'Henrietta, I'm glad we came.' She rolled an eye on him and answered, with tears in the voice, 'Why?' 'It's a valuable lesson. We now know what the British public needs.' Her reply was worthy of her."

"What was it?" said Elliot, eagerly.

"'There are many human needs, Gabriel, which it is criminal to gratify.' Burling went home in a four-wheeler. Cummerbridge had left after the first act—a severe attack of neuralgia in the right eye."

Elliot's full-throated laugh rang through the room. Heath was smiling, but almost sadly, Charmian thought.

"Perhaps it was My Little Darling which brought about the attempt at better things you were speaking of," he said to Mrs. Mansfield.

"Ah, but their prophet is not mine!" she answered.

An almost feverish look of vitality had come into her face, which was faintly pencilled by the fingers of sorrow.

"Sometimes I think I hate the disintegrating drama more than I despise the vulgar idiocies which, after all, never really touch human life," she continued. "No doubt it is sheer weakness on my part to be affected by it. But I am. Only last week Charmian and I saw the play that they—the superior ones—are all flocking to. The Premier has seen it five times already. I loathed its cleverness. I loathed the element of surprise in it. I laughed, and loathed my own laughter. The man who wrote it would put cap and bells on St. Francis of Assisi and make a mock of Œdipus."

She paused, then, leaning forward, in a low and thrilling voice she quoted, "'For we are in Thy hand; and man's noblest task is to help others by his best means and powers.'"

Claude Heath gazed at her while she was speaking, and in his eyes Charmian, glancing over her fan, saw what she thought of as two torches gleaming.

"I came out of the theater," continued Mrs. Mansfield, "and I confess it with shame, feeling as if I should never find again the incentive to a noble action, as if the world were turned to chaff. And yet I had laughed—how I had laughed!"

Suddenly she began to laugh at the mere recollection of something in the play.

"The wretch is terribly clever!" she exclaimed. "But he seems to me destructive."

"Well, but—" began Elliot. "Some such accusation has been brought against many really great men. The Empress Frederick told a friend of mine that no one who had not lived in Germany, and observed German life closely, could understand the evil spread through the country by Wagner's Tristan."

"Then the fault, the sin if you like, was in the hearers," said Heath, almost with excitement.

He got up and stood by the fire.

"Wagner was a builder. I believe Germany is the better for a Tristan, and I believe we should be the better for an English Tristan. But I doubt if we gain essentially by the drama in cap and bells."

Elliot, who was fond of defending his friends, came vigorously to the defense of the playwright, to whom he was devoted and whose first nights he seldom missed. In the discussion which followed Charmian saw more clearly how peculiarly in tune her mother's mind was with Heath's.

"This is the beginning of a great intimacy," she said to herself. "One of mother's great intimacies."

And, for the first time she consciously envied her mother, consciously wished that she had her mother's brains, temperament, and unintentional fascination. The talk went on, and presently she drifted into it, took her small part in it. But she felt herself too brainless, too ignorant to be able to contribute to it anything of value. Her usually happy and innocent self-conceit has deserted her, with all her audacities. She was oddly subdued, was almost sad.

"How old is he really?" she thought more than once as she looked at Claude Heath.

There was no mention of music, and at last Mrs. Mansfield got up to go.

As they said good-night she looked at Heath and remarked:

"We shall meet again?"

He clasped her hand, and answered, slightly reddening:

"Oh, I hope so! I do hope so!"

That was all. There was no mention of the Red Book, of being at home on Thursdays, no "If you're ever near Berkeley Square," etc. All that was unnecessary. Charmian touched a long-fingered hand and uttered a cold little "Good-night." A minute more and her mother and she were in the motor gliding through damp streets in the murky darkness.

After a short silence Mrs. Mansfield said:

"Well, Charmian, you escaped! Are you very thankful?"

"Escaped!" said a rather plaintive voice from the left-hand corner of the car.

"The dreaded Te Deum."

"Is he a musician at all? I believe Max Elliot has been humbugging us."

"He warned you not to expect too much in the way of hair."

"It isn't that. How old do you think he is?"

"Certainly not thirty."

"What did you tell him about me?"

"About you? I don't remember telling him anything."

"Oh, but you did, mother!"

"What makes you think so?"

"I know you did, when I was sitting near the piano with Max Elliot."

"Perhaps I did then. But I can't remember what it was. It must have been something very trifling."

"Oh, of course I know that!" said Charmian almost petulantly.

Mrs. Mansfield realized that the girl had not enjoyed her evening, but she was too wise to ask her why. Indeed she was not much given to the putting of intimate questions to Charmian. So she changed the subject quietly, and they were soon at home.

Twelve o'clock was striking as they entered the house. The evening, Mrs. Mansfield thought, had passed quickly. She was a bad sleeper, and seldom went to bed before one, but she never kept a maid sitting up for her.

"I'm going to read a book," she said to Charmian, with her hand on the door of the small library on the first floor, where she usually sat when she was alone.

Charmian, taller than she was, bent a little and kissed her.

"Wonderful mother!"

"What nonsense you talk; but only to me, I know!"

"Other people know it without my telling them. You jump into minds and hearts, and poor little I remain outside, squatting like a hungry child."

"And that is greater nonsense still. Come and sit up with me for a little."

"No, not to-night, you darling!"

Almost with violence Charmian kissed her again, released her, and went away up the stairs between white walls to bed.

CHAPTER IV

Charmian had been right when she had said to herself, "This is the beginning of one of mother's great intimacies."

Claude Heath called almost at once in Berkeley Square; and in a short time he established a claim to be one of Mrs. Mansfield's close friends. She had several, but Heath stood out from among them. There was a special bond between the white-haired woman of forty-five and the young man of twenty-eight. Perhaps their freemasonry arose from the fact that each held tenaciously a secret: Mrs. Mansfield her persistent devotion to the memory of her dead husband, Heath his devotion to his art. Perhaps the two secrecies in some mysterious way recognized each other, perhaps the two reserves clung together.

These two in silence certainly understood each one something in the other that was hidden from the gaze of the world.

A fact in connection with their intimacy, which set it apart from the other friendships of Mrs. Mansfield, was this—Charmian was not included in it.

This exclusion was not owing to any desire of the mother. She was incapable of shutting any door, beyond which she did not stand alone, against her child. The generosity of her nature was large, warm, chivalrous, the link between her and Charmian very strong. The girl was wont to accept her mother's friends with a pretty eagerness. They spoiled her, because of her charm, and because she was the child of the house in which they spent some of their happiest hours. Never yet had there lain on Charmian's life a shadow coming from her mother. But now she entered a faintly shadowed way, as it seemed deliberately and of her own will. She tacitly refused to accept the friendship between her mother and Claude Heath as she had accepted the other friendships. Gently, subtly, almost mysteriously, she excluded herself from it.

Or was she gently, subtly, almost mysteriously excluded from it by Claude Heath?

She chose to think so. And there were moments in which he chose to think that she obstinately declined to accept him as her mother accepted him, because she disliked him, was perhaps jealous of his intimacy with Mrs. Mansfield.

All this was below the surface. Charmian seemed friendly with Heath, and he, generally, at ease with her. But when he was alone with Mrs. Mansfield he was a different man. At first she thought little of this. She attributed it to the fact that Heath had a reserved nature and that she happened to hold a key which could unlock it, or unlock a room or two of it, leaving, perhaps, many rooms closed. But, being not only a very intelligent but a delicately sensitive woman, she presently began to think that there was some secret antagonism between her child and Heath.

This pained her. She even considered whether she ought not to put an end to her intimacy with Heath. She had grown to value it. She was incapable of entering into a sentimental relation with any man. She had loved deeply, had had her beautiful summer. It had died. The autumn was upon her. She regretted. Often her heart was by a grave, often it was beyond, seeking, like a bird with spread wings above dark seas seeking the golden clime it needs and instinctively knows of. But she did not repine. And she was able to fill her life, to be strongly interested in people and in events. She mellowed with her great sorrow instead of becoming blunted by it or withering under it. And so she drew people to her, and was drawn, in her turn, to them.

Claude Heath had brought into her life something her other friends had not given her. She realized this clearly when she first considered Charmian in connection with herself and him. If he ceased from her life, sank away into the crowd of unseen men, he would leave a gap which another could not fill. She had a feeling that she was valuable to him. She did not know exactly how or why. And he was valuable to her.

But of course Charmian was the first interest in her life, had the first claim upon her consideration. She sat wondering what it was in Heath which the girl disliked, what it was in Charmian which, perhaps, troubled or irritated Heath.

Charmian was out that day at an afternoon concert, and Mrs. Mansfield had made an engagement to go to tea with Heath in his little old house near St. Petersburg Place. She had never yet visited him, although she had known him for nearly three months. And she had never heard a note of his music. The latter fact did not strike her as strange. She had never mentioned her dead husband to him.

Max Elliot had at first been perturbed by this reticence of the musician. He had specially wished Mrs. Mansfield to hear what he had heard. After that evening in Cadogan Square he had several times asked: "Well, have you heard the Te Deum?" or "Has Heath played any of his compositions to you yet?" To Mrs. Mansfield's invariable unembarrassed "No!" he gave a shrug of the shoulders, a "He's an extraordinary fellow!" or a "Well, I've made a failure of it this time!" Once he added: "Don't you want to hear his music?" "Not unless he wants me to hear it," Mrs. Mansfield replied. Elliot looked at her for a minute with his large, prominent and kind eyes, and said: "No wonder you're adored by your friends!" Several times since the evening in Cadogan Square he had heard Heath play his compositions, and he now began to feel as if he owed this pleasure to his busy and almost vulgar curiosity about musical development and the progress of artists, as if Heath's reserve were his greatest proof of regard and friendship. He had not succeeded in persuading Heath to come to one of his Sunday musical evenings, at which crowds of people in society and many artists assembled. Mrs. Mansfield taught him not to attempt any more persuasion. He realized that his first instinct had been right. The plant must grow in darkness. But he was always being carried away by artistic enthusiasms, and had an altruistic desire to share good things. And he dearly loved "a musical find." He had a certain name as a discoverer of talent, and there's so much in a name. The lives that have been changed, moulded, governed by a hastily conferred name!

Mrs. Mansfield was inclined to believe that Heath had invited her to tea with the intention of at last submitting his talent to her opinion. They had sometimes talked together of music, but much oftener of books, character, people, national movements, topics of the day. As she went to her bedroom to dress for her expedition, she felt a certain hesitation, almost a disinclination to go. To go was to draw a step or two nearer to Heath, and so, perhaps, to retreat a step or two from her child. To-day the fact that Charmian and Heath did not quite "hit it off together" vexed her spirit, and the slight mystery of their relation troubled her. As she went down to get into the motor she was half inclined to speak to Heath on the subject. She was quite certain that she would not speak to Charmian.

The month was February, and by the time Mrs. Mansfield reached Mullion House evening was falling. A large motor was drawn up in front of the house, and as Mrs. Mansfield's chauffeur sounded a melodious chord the figure of a smartly dressed woman walked across the pavement and stepped into it. After an instant of delay, caused by this woman's footman, who spoke to her at the window, the car moved off and disappeared rapidly in the gathering darkness.

"Was that Adelaide?" Mrs. Mansfield asked herself as she got out.

She was not certain, but she thought the passing figure had looked like Mrs. Shiffney's.

The door of Mullion House stood open, held by a thin woman with very large gray eyes, who smiled at Mrs. Mansfield and made a slight motion, almost as if she mentally dropped a curtsey, but physically refrained out of respect for London ways.

"Oh, yes, ma'am, he is in! He's expecting you."

The emphasis on the last word was marked. Mrs. Mansfield looked at this woman, toward whom at once she felt friendly.

"There's some here and there that would bother him to death, I'm sure, if they was let!" continued the woman, closing the little front door gently. "But it will be a pleasure to him to see you. We all knows that!"

"I'm very glad to hear it!" responded Mrs. Mansfield, liking this unconventional but very human servant. "Mr. Heath has spoken of my coming, then?"

"I should think so, ma'am. This way, if you please!"

Mrs. Searle, Heath's cook-housekeeper, crossed the little dimly lit hall and walked quickly down a rather long and narrow passage.

"He's in the studio, ma'am," she remarked over her narrow shoulder, sharply turning her head. "Fan is with him."

"Who's Fan? A dog?"

"My little girl, ma'am."

"Oh, I beg your pardon!"

"Not knowing you were there, when the other lady went I sends her in to him for company as he wasn't working. 'Run, Fan!' says I. 'Go and cheer Mr. Heath up, there's a good girl!' I says. I knows very well there's nothing like a child to put you right after you've been worried. They're so simple, aren't they, ma'am? And we're all simple, I b'lieve, at 'eart, though we're ashamed to show it. I'm sure I don't know why!"

As she concluded she opened a door and ushered Mrs. Mansfield into the composer's workroom.

At the far end of it, in a flicker of firelight, Mrs. Mansfield saw him stooping down over a very fair and Saxon-looking child of perhaps three years old, whose head was thickly covered with short yellow hair inclined to be curly, and who was dressed in a white frock with an almost artful blue bow in the front. As Mrs. Mansfield came in the child was holding up to Heath a small naked doll of a rather blurred appearance, and was uttering some explanatory remarks in the uneven but arresting voice that seems peculiar to childhood.

"Mrs. Mansfield, if you please, sir!" said Mrs. Searle. Then, with a change of voice: "Come along, Fan! And bring Masterman with you, there's a good girl! We must get on his clothes or he'll catch cold." (To Mrs. Mansfield.) "You'll excuse her, ma'am, but she's that nat'ral, clothes or no clothes it's all one to her."

Fan turned round, holding Masterman by one leg and staring with bright blue eyes at Mrs. Mansfield. Her countenance expressed a dignified inquiry combined, perhaps, with a certain amount of very natural surprise at so unseemly an interruption of her strictly private interview with Claude Heath and Masterman. Her left thumb mechanically sought the shelter of her mouth, and it was obvious that she was "sizing up" Mrs. Mansfield with all the caution, if not suspicion, of the female nature in embryo.

Heath took her gently by the shoulder as he came forward, smiling, and propelled her slowly toward the middle of the large dim room.

"Welcome!" he said, holding out his hand. "Yes, Fantail, I quite understand. He's been sick and now he's getting better. Go with mother!"

Fan was exchanged for Mrs. Mansfield and vanished, speaking slowly and continuously about Masterman's internal condition and "the new lydy," while Mrs. Mansfield took off her fur coat and looked around her and at Heath.

"I didn't kiss her," she said, "because I think it's a liberty to kiss one of God's creatures at first sight without a special invitation."

"I know—I know!"

Heath seemed restless. His face was slightly flushed, and his eyes, always full of a peculiar vitality, looked more living even than usual. He glanced at Mrs. Mansfield, then glanced away, almost guiltily, she thought.

"Do come and sit down by the fire. Would you like a cushion?"

"No, thank you! What a nice old settle!"

"Yes, isn't it? I live in this room. Alling, the painter, built it for his studio. The other rooms are tiny."

"What a delightful servant you have!"

"Mrs. Searle—yes. She's a treasure! Humanity breaks out of her whatever the occasion. And my goodness, how she understands men!"

He laughed, but the laugh sounded slightly unnatural.

"Fantail's delightful, too!" he added.

"What is her real name?"

"Fanny. I call her Fantail." He paused. "Well, because I like her, I suppose."

"I know."

There was a moment of silence, in which Mrs. Mansfield glanced about the room. Despite its size it was cozy. It looked as if it were lived in, perpetually and intimately used. There was nothing in it that was very handsome or very valuable, except a fine Steinway grand pianoforte; but there was nothing ugly or vulgar. And there were quantities of books, not covered with repellent glass. They were ranged in dark cases, which furnished the walls, and lay everywhere on tables, among magazines and papers, scores and volumes of songs and loose manuscript music. The piano was open, and there was more music on it. The armchairs were well worn but comfortable, and looked "sat in." Over the windows there were dim orange-colored curtains that looked old but not shabby. On the floor there were some rather good and very effective Oriental rugs. The only flowers in the room were bright yellow tulips, grouped together in a mass on an oak table a long way from the fire. Opposite to the piano there was a large ebony crucifix mounted on a stand, and so placed that anyone seated at the piano faced it. The room was lit not strongly by oil lamps with shades. A few mysterious oil paintings, very dark in color, hung on the walls between the bookcases. Mrs. Mansfield could not discern their subjects. On the high wooden mantelpiece there were a few photographs, of professors and students at the Royal College of Music and of a serious and innocent-looking priest in black coat and round white collar.

To Mrs. Mansfield the room suggested a recluse who liked to be cosy, who, perhaps, was drawn toward mystery, even mysticism, and who loved the life of the brain.

"And you've a garden?" she asked, breaking the little pause.

"The size of a large pocket-handkerchief. I'm not at all rich, you know. But I can just afford my little house and to live without earning a penny."

A woman servant, not Mrs. Searle, came in with tea and retreated, walking very softly and slowly. She looked almost rustic.

"That's my only other servant, Harriet," said Heath, pouring out tea.

"There's something very un-Londony in it all," said Mrs. Mansfield, again looking round, almost with a puzzled air.

"That's what I try for. I'm fond of London in a way, but I can't bear anything typical of London in my home."

"It is quite a home," she said; "and the home of a worker. One gets weary of being received in reception-rooms. This is a retreat."

Heath looked at her with his bright almost too searching and observant eyes.

"I wonder," he said almost reluctantly, "whether—may I talk about myself to-day?" he interrupted himself.

"Do, if you like to."

"I think I should."

"Do, then."

"I wonder whether a man is a coward to raise up barriers between himself and life, whether it is a mistake to have a retreat, as you rightly call this room, this house, and to spend the greater part of one's time alone in it? But"—he moved restlessly—"the real question is whether one ought to let oneself be guided by a powerful instinct."

"I expect one ought to."

"Do you? Oh, you're not eating anything!"

"I will help myself."

"Mrs. Shiffney wouldn't agree with you."

"No."

"Didn't—didn't you see her? She went just before you came."

"I saw someone. I thought it might be Adelaide. I wasn't sure."

"It was she. I hadn't asked her to come and wasn't expecting her."

He stopped, then added abruptly:

"It was wonderfully kind of her to come, though. She is kind and clever, too. She has fascination, I think...."

"I'm sure she has."

"And yet, d'you know, there's something in her, and in lots of people I might get to know, I suppose, through her and Max Elliot, that I—well, I almost hate it."

"What is it?"

"Well, whenever I come across one of them by chance I seem to hear a voice repeating, 'To-morrow we die—to-morrow we die—to-morrow we die.' And I seem to see something inside of them with teeth and claws fastening on pleasure. It's—it's like a sort of minotaur, and it gives me horrors. And yet I might go to it."

Mrs. Mansfield said nothing for a moment. She had finished her cup of tea, and now, with a little gesture, refused to have another.

"It's quite true. There is the creature with teeth and claws, and it is, perhaps, horrible. But it's so sad that I scarcely see anything but its sadness."

"You are kinder than I."

He leaned forward.

"D'you know, I think you're the kindest human being I ever met, except one, that priest up there on the mantelpiece."

"Forgive me," she said, making allowance for herself to-day because of Heath's evident desire to talk intimately, a desire which she believed she ought to help, "but are you a Roman Catholic?"

"Oh, no! I wish I was!"

"But I suppose you can't be?"

"Oh, no! I suppose I'm one of those unsatisfactory people whose soul and whose brain are not in accord. That doesn't make for inward calm or satisfaction. But I can only hope for better days."

There was something uneasy in his speech. She felt the strong reserve in him always fighting against the almost fierce wish to be unreserved with her.

"They will come, surely!" she said. "If you are quite sincere, sincere with yourself always and sincere with others as often as is possible."

"You're right about its not being possible to be always sincere with others."

She smiled.

"They simply wouldn't let you!"

"No," he said. "I feel as if I could be rather sincere with you sometimes."

"Specially to-day, perhaps."

"Yes, I think so. We do get on, don't we?"

"Yes, we do."

"I often wonder why. But we do. I'll move the table if you've really finished."

He put the table away and sat down on the settle beside her, at the far end. And he turned, leaning his back against the upright end, and stretching one arm along the wooden top, on which his long fingers restlessly closed.

"I was sorry I went to Max Elliot's till you came into the room," he said. "And ever since then I've been partly very glad."

"But only partly?"

"Yes, because I've always had an instinctive dread of getting drawn in."

"To the current of our modern art life. I'm sure you mean that."

"I do. And of course Elliot is in the thick of it. Mrs. Shiffney's in it, and all her lot, which I don't know. And that fellow Lane is in it too."

"And I suppose I am in it with Charmian."

Heath looked at the floor. Ignoring Mrs. Mansfield's remark, he continued:

"I have some talent. It isn't the sort of talent to win popularity. Fortunately, I don't desire—in fact, I'm very much afraid of popularity. But as I believe my talent is—is rather peculiar, individual, it might easily become—well, I suppose I may say the rage in a certain set. They might drop me very soon. Probably they would—I don't know. But I have a strong feeling that they'd take me up violently if I gave them a chance. That's what Max Elliot can't help wanting. He's such a good fellow, but he's a born exploiter. Not in any nasty way, of course!" Heath concluded hastily.

"I quite understand."

"And, I don't want to seem conceited, but I see there's something about me that set would probably like. Mrs. Shiffney's showed me that. I have never called upon her. She has sent me several invitations. And to-day she called. She wants me to go with her on The Wanderer for a cruise."

"To Wonderland?"

Heath shrugged his shoulders.

"In the Mediterranean, I believe."

"Doesn't that tempt you?"

"Yes, terribly. But I flatly refused to go. But she knew I was tempted. It's only curiosity on her part," he added, with a sort of hot, angry boyishness. "She can't make me out, and I didn't call. That's why she asked me."

Mrs. Mansfield mentally added a "partly" to the last sentence.

"You're very much afraid of exposing yourself—or is it your talent?—to the influence of what we may as well call the world," she said.

"I suppose one's talent is oneself, one's best self."

"Perhaps so. I have none. You know best about that. I expect you are right in being afraid."

"You don't think I'm merely a rather absurd coward and egoist?"

"Oh, no! But some people—many, I think—would say a talent is meant to be used, to be given to the light."

"I know. But I don't think the modern world wants mine. I"—he reddened—"I always set words from the Bible nearly or from the Prayer-Book."

Smiling a little, as if saving something by humor, he added:

"Not the Song of Solomon."

"But don't the English—"

He stopped her.

"Good heavens! I know you are thinking of the Handel Festival and Elijah in the provinces!" he exclaimed. "I know you are!"

She laughed.

"I should like to play you one or two of my things," he said impulsively. "Then you'll see at once."

He went toward the piano. She sat still. She was with the striking unreserve of the reserved man when he has cast his protector or his demon away. With his back to her Heath turned over some music, moved a pile of sheets, set them down on the floor under the piano, searched.

"Oh, here it is!"

"'THIS IS THE LAST THING I'VE DONE'"—[Page 41]

He grasped some manuscript, put it on the music-stand, and sat down.

"This is the last thing I've done. The words are taken from the sixteenth chapter of Revelation—'And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, "Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth."' And so on."

With a sort of anger his hands descended and struck the keys. Speaking through his music he gave Mrs. Mansfield indications of what it was expressing.

"This is the sea. 'The second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man.... The fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun, and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire.... The sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great River Euphrates, and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the Kings of the East might be prepared.'"

The last words which Heath had set were those in the fifteenth verse of the chapter—"Behold, I come as a thief. Blessed is he that watcheth and keepeth his garments lest he walk naked and they see his shame."

When he had finished he got up from the piano with a flushed face and, again speaking in a boyish and almost naive manner, said quickly:

"There, that gives you an idea of the sort of thing I do and care about doing. For, of course, I never will attempt any subject that doesn't thoroughly interest me."

He stood for a moment, not looking toward Mrs. Mansfield; then, as if struggling against an inward reluctance, he again sat down on the settle.

"Have you orchestrated it?" she asked.

"Yes. I've just finished the orchestration."

"Surely you want to hear it given with voices and the orchestra? Frankly, I won't believe you if you say you don't."

"I do."

The reluctance seemed to fade out of him.

"The fact is I'm torn between the desire to hear my things and a mighty distaste for publicity."

He sprang up.

"If you'll allow me I'll just give you an idea of my Te Deum. And then I'll have done."

He went once more to the piano.

When he was sitting beside her again Mrs. Mansfield felt shy of him. After a moment she said:

"You are sincere in your music?"

"Yes."

He did not seem specially anxious to get at her exact opinion of his work, and this fact, she scarcely knew why, pleased Mrs. Mansfield.

"I had two or three things done at the College concerts," Heath continued. "I don't think they were much liked. They were considered very clever technically. But what's that? Of course, one must conquer one's means or one can't express oneself at all."

"And now you work quite alone?"

"Yes. I've got just a thousand a year of my own," he said abruptly.

"You are independent, then."

"Yes. It isn't a great deal. Of course, I quite realize that the sort of thing I do could never bring in a penny of money. So I've no money temptation to resist in keeping quiet. There isn't a penny in my compositions. I know that."

Mrs. Mansfield thought, "If he were to get a mystical libretto and write an opera!" But she did not say it. She felt that she would not care to suggest anything to Heath which might indicate a desire on her part to see him "a success." In her ears were perpetually sounding the words, "and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the Kings of the East might be prepared." They took her away from London. They set her in the midst of a great strangeness. They even awoke in her an almost riotous feeling of desire. What she desired she could not have said exactly. Some form of happiness, that was all she knew. But how the thought of happiness stung her soul at that moment! She looked at Heath and said:

"I quite understand about Mrs. Shiffney now."

"Yes?"

"You have the dangerous gift of a very peculiar and very powerful imagination. I think your music might make you enemies."

Heath looked pleased.

"I'm glad you think that. I know exactly what you mean."

They sat together on the settle and talked for more than an hour. Mrs. Mansfield's feeling of shyness speedily vanished, was replaced by something maternal with which she was much more at ease.

Mrs. Searle let her out. She had said good-bye to Heath in the studio and asked him not to come to the front door.

"Good-night, Mrs. Searle!" she said, with a smile. "I hope I haven't stayed too long?"

"No, indeed, ma'am. I'm sure you'd ado him good. He do like them that's nat'ral. But he don't like to be bothered. And there's people that do keep on, ma'am, isn't there?"

"I daresay there are."

"Specially with a young gentleman, ma'am. I always do say it's the women runs after the men. More shame to us, ma'am."

"Has Fan begun yet?"

Mrs. Searle blushed.

"Well, ma'am, really I don't know. But she's awfully put out if anyone interrupts her when she's with Mr. Heath."

"I must take care what I'm about."

"Oh, ma'am, I'm sure—"

The motor moved away from the little old house. As Mrs. Mansfield looked out she saw a faint gleam in the studio. Involuntarily she listened, almost strained her ears. And she murmured, "And the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the Kings of the East might be prepared."

The gleam was lost in the night. She leaned back and found herself wondering what Charmian would have thought of the music she had just heard.

CHAPTER V

Mrs. Shiffney had more money than she knew how to spend, although she was recklessly extravagant. Her mother, who was dead, had been an Austrian Jewess, and from her had come the greater part of Mrs. Shiffney's large personal fortune. Her father, Sir Willy Manning, was still alive, and was a highly cultivated and intelligent Englishman of the cosmopolitan type; Mrs. Shiffney derived her peculiar and attractive look of high breeding and her completely natural manner from him. From her mother she had received the nomadic instinct which kept her perpetually restless, and which often drove her about the world in search of the change and diversion which never satisfied her. Lady Manning had been a feverish traveller and had written several careless and clever books of description. She had died of a fever in Hong-Kong while her husband was in Scotland. Although apparently of an unreserved nature, he had never bemoaned her loss.

Mrs. Shiffney had a husband, a lenient man who loved comfort and who was fond of his wife in an altruistic way. She and he got on excellently when they were together and quite admirably when they were parted, as they very often were, for yachting made Mr. Shiffney feel "remarkably cheap." As he much preferred to feel expensive he had nothing to do with The Wanderer unless she lay snug in harbor. His hobby was racing. He was a good horseman, disliked golf, and seldom went out of the British Isles, though he never said that his own country was good enough for him. When he did cross the Channel he visited Paris, Monte Carlo, Homburg, Biarritz, or some place where he was certain to be in the midst of his "pals." The strain of wildness, which made his wife uncommon and interesting, did not exist in him, but he was rather proud of it in her, and had been heard to say more than once, "Addie's a regular gipsy," as if the statement were a high compliment. He was a tall, well-built, handsome man of fifty-two, with gray hair and moustache, an agreeable tenor voice, which was never used in singing, and the best-cut clothes in London. Although easily kind he was thoroughly selfish. Everybody had a good word for him, and nobody, who really knew him, ever asked him to perform an unselfish action. "That isn't Jimmy's line" was their restraining thought if they had for a moment contemplated suggesting to Mr. Shiffney that he might perhaps put himself out for a friend. And Jimmy was quite of their opinion, and always stuck to his "line," like a sensible fellow.

Two or three days after Mrs. Shiffney's visit to Claude Heath her husband, late one afternoon, found her in tears.

"What's up, Addie?" he asked, with the sympathy he never withheld from her. "Another gown gone wrong?"

Mrs. Shiffney shook her powerful head, on which was a marvellous black hat crowned with a sort of factory chimney of stiff black plumes.

Mr. Shiffney lit a cigar.

"Poor old Addie!" he said. He leaned down and stroked her shoulder. "I wish you could get hold of somebody or something that'd make you happy," he remarked. "I'm sure you deserve it."

His wife dried her tears and sniffed two or three times almost with the frankness of a grief-stricken child.

"I never shall!"

"Why not, Addie?"

"There's something in me—I don't know! I should get tired of anyone who didn't get tired of me!"

She almost began to cry again, and added despairingly:

"So what hope is there? And I do so want to enjoy myself! I wonder if there ever has been a woman who wanted to enjoy herself as much as I do?"

Mr. Shiffney blew forth a cloud of smoke, extending the little finger of the hand which held his cigar.

"We all want to have a good time," he observed. "A first-rate time. What else are we here for?"

He spoke seriously.

"We are here to keep things going, I s'pose—to keep it up, don't you know? We mustn't let it run down. But if we don't enjoy ourselves down it goes. And that doesn't do, does it?"

He flicked the ash from his cigar.

"What's the special row this time?" he continued, without any heated curiosity, but with distinct sympathy.

Mrs. Shiffney looked slightly more cheerful. She enjoyed telling things if the things were closely connected with herself.

"Well, I want to start for a cruise," she began. "I can't remain for ever glued to Grosvenor Square. I must move about and see something."

She had just been for a month in Paris.

"Of course. What are we here for?" observed her husband.

"You always understand! Sit down, you old thing!"

Mr. Shiffney sat down, gently pulling up his trousers.

"And the row is," she continued, shaking her shoulders, "that I want Claude Heath to come and he won't. And, since he won't, he's really the only living man I want to have on the cruise."

"Who is he?" observed Mr. Shiffney. "I've never heard of him. Is he one of your special pals?"

"Not yet. I met him at Max's. He's a composer, and I want to know what he's like."

"I expect he's like all the rest."

"No, he isn't!" she observed decisively.

"Why won't he come? Perhaps he's a bad sailor."

"He didn't even trouble himself to say that. He was in such a hurry to refuse that he didn't bother about an excuse. And this afternoon he called, when I was in, and never asked for me, only left cards and bolted, although I had been to his house to ask him to come on The Wanderer."

"Afraid of you, is he?"

"I don't know, I'm sure. He's never been among us."

"Poor chap! But surely that's a reason for him to want to get in?"

"Wouldn't you think so? Wouldn't anyone think so? The way I'm bombarded! But he seems only anxious to keep out of everything."

"A pose very likely."

"I don't believe it is."

"I leave it to you. No one sharper in London. Is he a gentleman—all that sort of thing?"

"Oh, of course!"

Mr. Shiffney pulled up his trousers a little more, exposing a pair of striped silk socks which emerged from shining boots protected by white spats.

"To be sure. If he hadn't been he'd have jumped at you and The Wanderer."

"Naturally. I shan't go at all now! What an unlucky woman I always am!"

"You never let anyone know it."

"Well, Jimmy, I'm not quite a fool. Be down on your luck and not a soul will stay near you."

"I should think not. Why should they? One wants a bit of life, not to hear people howling and groaning all about one. It's awful to be with anyone who's under the weather."

"Ghastly! I can't stand it! But, all the same, it's a fearful corvée to keep it up when you're persecuted as I am."

"Poor old Addie!"

Mr. Shiffney threw his cigar into the grate reflectively and lightly touched his moustaches, which were turned upward, but not in a military manner.

"Things never seem quite right for you," he continued.

"And other women have such a splendid time!" she exclaimed. "The disgusting thing is that he goes all the while to Violet Mansfield."

"She's dull enough and quite old too."

"No, she isn't dull. You're wrong there."

"I daresay. She doesn't amuse me."

"She's not your sort."

"Too feverish, too keen, brainy in the wrong way. I like brains, mind you, and I know where they are. But I don't see the fun of having them jumped at one."

"He does, apparently, unless it's really Charmian."

"The girl? She's not bad. Wants to be much cleverer than she is, of course, like pretty nearly all the girls, except the sporting lot; but not bad."

"Jimmy"—Mrs. Shiffney's eyes began once more to look audacious—"shall I ask Charmian Mansfield to come on the yacht?"

"You think that might bring him? Why not ask both of them?"

"No; I won't have the mother!"

"Why not?"

"Because I won't!"

"The best of reasons, too."

"You understand us better than any man in London."

She sat reflecting. She was beginning to look quite cheerful.

"It would be rather fun," she resumed, after a minute. "Charmian Mansfield, Max—if he can get away—Paul Lane. It isn't the party I'd thought of, but still—"

"Which of them were you going to take?"

"Never mind."

"I don't. And where did you mean to go?"

"I told him to the Mediterranean."

"But it wasn't!"

"Oh, I don't know! Where can one go? That's another thing. It's always the same old places, unless one has months to spare, and then one gets bored with the people one's asked. Things are so difficult."

"One place is very much like another."

"To you. But I always hope for an adventure round the corner."

"I've been round a lot of corners in my time, but I might almost as well have stuck to the club."

"Of course you might!"

She got up.

"I must think about Charmian," she said, as she went casually out of the room.

Mrs. Shiffney turned the new idea over and over in her restless mind, which was always at work in a desultory but often clever way. She could not help being clever. She had never studied, never applied herself, never consciously tried to master anything, but she was quick-witted, had always lived among brilliant and highly cultivated people, had seen everything, been everywhere, known everyone, looked into all the books that had been talked about, cast at least a glance at all the pictures which had made any stir. And she gathered impressions swiftly, and, moreover, had a natural flair for all that was first-rate, original, or strange. As she was quite independent in mind, and always took her own line, she had become an arbiter, a leader of taste. What she liked soon became liked in London and Paris throughout a large circle. Unfortunately, she was changeable and apt to be governed by personal feeling in matters connected with art. When she cast away an artist she generally cast away his art with him. If it was first-rate she did not condemn it as bad. She contented herself with saying that she was "sick of it." And very soon a great many of her friends, and their friends, were sick of it, too. She was a quicksand because she was a singularly complete egoist. But very few people who met her failed to come under the spell of her careless charm, and many, because she had much impulse, swore that she had a large heart. Only to her husband, and occasionally, in a fit of passion, to someone who she thought had treated her badly, did she show a lachrymose side of her nature. She was noted for her gaiety and joie de vivre and for the energy with which she pursued enjoyment. Her cynicism did not cut deep, her irony was seldom poisoned. She spoke well of people, and was generous with her money. With her time she was less generous. She was not of those who are charitable with their golden hours. "I can't be bothered!" was the motto of her life. And wise people did not bother her.

She had seen that, for a moment, Claude Heath had been tempted by the invitation to the cruise. A sudden light had gleamed in his eyes, and her swift apprehension had gathered something of what was passing in his imagination. But almost immediately the light had vanished and the quick refusal had come. And she knew that it was a refusal which she could not persuade him to cancel unless she called someone to her assistance. His austerity, which attracted her whimsical and unscrupulous nature, fought something else in him and conquered. But the something else, if it could be revived, given new strength, would make a cruise with him, even to all the old places, quite interesting, Mrs. Shiffney thought. And any refusal always made her greedy and obstinate. "I will have it!" was the natural reply of her nature to any "You can't have it!"

She often acted impulsively, hurried by caprices and desires, and that same evening she sent the following note to Charmian:

Grosvenor Square,
Thursday.

Dear Charmian,—You've never been on the yacht, though I've always been dying to have you come. I've been glued to London for quite a time, and am getting sick of it. Aren't you? Always the same things and people. I feel I must run away if I can get up a pleasant party to elope with me. Will you be one? I thought of starting some time next month on The Wanderer for a cruise, to the Mediterranean or somewhere. I don't know yet who'll tuck in, but I shall take Susan Fleet to play chaperon to us and the crew and manage things. Max Elliot may come, and I thought of trying to get your friend, Mr. Heath, though I hardly know him. I think he works too hard, and a breeze might do him good. However, it's all in the air. Tell me what you think about it. Love to the beautiful mother.—In tearing haste, Yours,

Adelaide Shiffney.

"Why has she asked me?" said Charmian to herself, laying this note down after reading it twice.

She had always known Mrs. Shiffney, but she had never before been asked to go on a cruise in the yacht. Mrs. Shiffney had always called her Charmian, as she called Mrs. Mansfield Violet. But there had never been even a hint of genuine intimacy between the girl and the married woman, and they seldom met except in society, and then only spoke a few casual and unmeaning words. They had little in common, Charmian supposed, except their mutual knowledge of quantities of people and of a certain social life.

Claude Heath on The Wanderer!

Charmian took the note to her mother.

"Mrs. Shiffney has suddenly taken a fancy to me, Madretta," she said. "Look at this!"

Mrs. Mansfield read the note and gave it back.

"Do you want to go?" she asked, looking at the girl, not without a still curiosity.

Charmian twisted her lips.

"I don't know. You see, it's all very vague. I should like to be sure who's going. I think it's very reckless to take any chances on a yacht."

"Claude Heath isn't going."

Charmian raised her eyebrows.

"But has she asked him?"

"Yes. And he's refused. He told me so on Monday."

"You're quite sure he won't go?"

"He said he wasn't going."

Charmian looked lightly doubtful.

"Shall I go?" she said. "Would you mind if I did?"

"Do you really want to?"

"I don't think I care much either way. Why has she asked me?"

"Adelaide? I daresay she likes you. And you wouldn't be unpleasant on a yacht, would you?"

"That depends, I expect. You'd allow me to go?"

"If I knew who the rest of the party were to be—definitely."

"I won't answer till to-morrow."

Mrs. Mansfield did not feel sure what was Charmian's desire in the matter. She did not quite understand her child. She wondered, too, why Mrs. Shiffney had asked Charmian to go on the yacht, why she implied that Claude Heath might make one of the party when he had refused to go. It occurred to Mrs. Mansfield that Adelaide might mean to use Charmian as a lure to draw Heath into the expedition. But, if so, surely she quite misunderstood the acquaintanceship between them. Heath was her—Mrs. Mansfield's—friend. How often she had wished that Charmian and he were more at ease together, liked each other better. It was odd that Adelaide should fall into such a mistake. And yet what other meaning could her note have? She wrote as if the question of Heath's going or not were undecided.

Was it undecided? Did Adelaide, with her piercing and clever eyes, see more clearly into Heath's nature than Mrs. Mansfield could?

Mrs. Shiffney had an extraordinary capacity for getting what she wanted. The hidden tragedy of her existence was that she was never satisfied with what she got. She wanted to draw Claude Heath out of his retirement into the big current of life by which she and her friends were buoyantly carried along through changing and brilliant scenes. His refusal had no doubt hardened a mere caprice into a strong desire. Mrs. Mansfield realized that Adelaide would not leave Heath alone now. The note to Charmian showed an intention not abandoned. But why should Adelaide suppose that Heath's acceptance might be dependent on anything done by Charmian?

Mrs. Mansfield knew well, and respected, Mrs. Shiffney's haphazard cleverness, which, in matters connected with the worldly life, sometimes almost amounted to genius. That note to Charmian gave a new direction to her thoughts, set certain subtleties of the past which had vaguely troubled her in a new and stronger light. She awaited, with an interest that was not wholly pleasant, Charmian's decision of the morrow.

Charmian had been very casual in manner when she came to her mother with the surprising invitation. She was almost as casual on the following morning when she entered the dining-room where Mrs. Mansfield was breakfasting by electric light. For a gloom as of night hung over the Square, although it was ten o'clock.

"Have you been thinking it over, Charmian?" said her mother, as the girl sat languidly down.

"Yes, mother—lazily."

She sipped her tea, looking straight before her with a cold and dreamy expression.

"Have you been active enough to arrive at any conclusion?"

"I got up quite undecided, but now I think I'll say 'Yes,' if you don't mind. When I looked out of the window this morning I felt as if the Mediterranean would be nicer than this. There's only one thing—why don't you come, too?"

"I haven't been asked."

"And why not?"

"Adelaide's too modern to ask mothers and daughters together," said Mrs. Mansfield, smiling.

"Would you go if she asked you?"

"No. Well, now the thing is to find out what the party is to be. Write the truth, and say you'll go if I know who's to be there and allow you to go. Adelaide knows quite well she has lots of friends I shouldn't care for you to yacht with. And it's much better to be quite frank about it. If Susan Fleet and Max go, you can go."

"I believe you are really the frankest person in London. And yet people love you—miracle-working mother!"

Charmian turned the conversation to other subjects and seemed to forget all about The Wanderer. But when breakfast was over, and she was alone before her little Chippendale writing-table, she let herself go to her excitement. Although she loved, even adored her mother, she sometimes acted to her. To do so was natural to Charmian. It did not imply any diminution of love or any distrust. It was but an instinctive assertion of a not at all uncommon type of temperament. The coldness and the dreaminess were gone now, but her excitement was mingled with a great uncertainty.

On receiving Mrs. Shiffney's note Charmian had almost instantly understood why she had been asked on the cruise. Her instinct had told her, for she had at that time known nothing of Heath's refusal. She had supposed that he had not yet been invited. Mrs. Shiffney had invited her not for herself, but as a means of getting hold of Heath. Charmian was positive of that. Months ago, in Max Elliot's music-room, the girl had divined the impression made by Heath on Mrs. Shiffney, had seen the restless curiosity awake in the older woman. She had even noticed the tightening of Mrs. Shiffney's lips when she, Charmian, had taken Heath away from the little group by the fire, with that "when you've quite done with my only mother," which had been a tiny slap given to Mrs. Shiffney. And she had been sure that Mrs. Shiffney meant to know Heath. She had a great opinion of Mrs. Shiffney's social cleverness and audacity. Most girls who were much in London society had. She did not really like Mrs. Shiffney, or want to be intimate with her, but she thoroughly believed in her flair, and that was why the note had stirred in Charmian excitement and uncertainty. If Mrs. Shiffney thought she saw something, surely it was there. She would not take shadow for substance.

But might she not fire a shot in the dark on the chance of hitting something?

"Why did she ask me instead of mother?" Charmian said to herself again and again. "If she had got mother to go Claude Heath would surely have gone. Why should he go because I go?"

And then came the thought, "She thinks he may, perhaps thinks he will. Will he? Will he?"

The note had abruptly changed an opinion long held by Charmian. Till it came she had believed that Claude Heath secretly disliked, perhaps even despised her. Mrs. Shiffney on half a sheet of note-paper had almost reassured her. But now would come the test. She would accept; Mrs. Shiffney would ask Claude Heath again, telling him she was to be of the party. And then what would Heath do?

As she wrote her answer Charmian said to herself, "If he accepts Mrs. Shiffney was right. If he refuses again I was right."

She sent the note to Grosvenor Square by a boy messenger, and resigned herself to a period of patience.

CHAPTER VI

By return there came a note hastily scribbled:

"Delighted. I will let you know all the particulars in a day or two.—A. S."

But two days, three days, a week passed by, and Charmian heard nothing more. She grew restless, but concealed her restlessness from her mother, who asked no questions. Claude Heath did not come to the house. As they never met him in society they did not see him at all, except now and then by chance at a concert or theater, unless he came to see them. Excited by Mrs. Mansfield's visit to him, he was much shut in, composing. There were days when he never went out of his little house, and only refreshed himself now and then by a game with Fan or a conversation with Mrs. Searle. When he was working really hard he disliked seeing friends, and felt a strange and unkind longing to push everybody out of his life. He was, therefore, strongly irritated one afternoon, eight days after Charmian had written her note of conditional acceptance to Mrs. Shiffney, when his parlor-maid, Harriet, after two or three knocks, which made a well planned and carried out crescendo, came into the studio with the announcement that a lady wished to see him.

"Harriet, you know I can't see anyone!" he exclaimed.

He was at the piano, and had been in the midst of exciting himself by playing before sitting down to work.

"Sir," almost whispered Harriet in her very refined voice, "she heard you playing, and knew you were in."

"Oh, is it Mrs. Mansfield?"

"No, sir, the lady who called the other day just before that lady came."

Claude Heath frowned and lifted his hands as if he were going to hit out at the piano.

"Where is she?" he said in a low voice.

"In the drawing-room, sir."

"All right, Harriet. It isn't your fault."

He got up in a fury and went to the tiny drawing-room, which he scarcely ever used unless some visitor came. Mrs. Shiffney was standing up in it, looking, he thought, very smart and large and audacious, bringing upon him, so he felt as he went in, murmurs and lights from a distant world with which he had nothing to do.

"How angry you are with me!" she said, lifting her veil and smiling with a careless assurance. "Your eyes are quite blazing with fury."

Claude, in spite of himself, grew red and all his body felt suddenly stiff.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "But I was working, and—"

He touched her powerful hand.

"You had sprouted your oak, and I have forced it. I know it's much too bad of me."

He saw that she could not believe she was wholly unwanted by such a man as he was, in such a little house as he had. People always wanted her. Her frankness in running after him showed him her sense of her position, her popularity, her attraction. How could she think she was undignified? No doubt she thought him an oddity who must be treated unconventionally. He felt savage, but he felt flattered.

"I'll show her what I am!" was his thought.

Yet already, as he begged her to sit down on one of his chintz-covered chairs, he felt a sort of reluctant pleasure in being with her.

"May I give you some tea?"

Her hazel eyes still seemed to him full of laughter. Evidently she regarded him as a boy.

"No, thank you! I won't be so cruel as to accept."

"But really, I am—"

"No, no, you aren't. Never mind! We'll be good friends some day. And I know how artists with tempers hate to be interrupted."

"I hope my temper is not especially bad," said Claude, stiffening with sudden reserve.

"I think it's pretty bad, but I don't mind. What a dear, funny little room! But you never sit in it."

"Not often."

"I long to see your very own room. But I'm not going to ask you."

There was a slight pause. Again the ironical light came into her eyes.

"You're wondering quite terribly why I've come here again," she said. "It's about the yacht."

"I'm really so very sorry that—"

"I know, just as I am when I'm refusing all sorts of invitations that I'd rather die than accept. Slipshod, but you know what I mean. You hate the idea. I'm only just going to tell you my party, so that you may think it over and see if you don't feel tempted."

"I am tempted."

"But you'd rather die than come. I perfectly understand. I often feel just like that. We shall be very few. Susan Fleet—she's a sort of chaperon to me; being a married woman, I need a chaperon, of course—Max Elliot, Mr. Lane, perhaps—if he can't come some charming man whom you'd delight in—and Charmian Mansfield."

Again there was a pause. Then Heath said:

"It's very, very kind of you to care to have me come."

"I know it is. I am a kind-hearted woman. And now for where we'll go."

"I really am most awfully sorry, but I'm obliged to stick to work."

"We might go down along the Riviera as far as Genoa, and then run over to Sicily and Tunis."

She saw his eyes beginning to shine.

"Or we might go to the Greek Islands and Smyrna and Constantinople. It's rather early for Constantinople, though, but perfect for Egypt. We could leave the yacht at Alexandria—"

"I'm very sorry, Mrs. Shiffney, and I hope you'll have a splendid cruise. But I really can't come much as I want to. I have to work."

"When you say that you look all chin! How terribly determined you are not to enjoy life!"

"It isn't that at all."

"How terribly determined you are not to know life. And I always thought artists, unless they wished to be provincial in their work, claimed the whole world as their portion, all experience as their right. But I suppose English artists are different. I often wonder whether they are wise in clinging like limpets to the Puritan tradition. On the Continent, you know, in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Milan, and, above all, in Moscow and Petersburg, they are regarded with pity and amazement. Do forgive me! But artists abroad, and I speak universally, though I know it's generally dangerous to do that, think art is strangled by the Puritan tradition clinging round poor old England's throat."

She laughed and moved her shoulders.

"They say how can men be great artists unless they steep themselves in the stream of life."

"There are sacred rivers like the Ganges, and there are others that are foul and weedy and iridescent with poison," said Heath hotly.

She saw anger in his eyes.

"Perhaps you are getting something—some sacred cantata—ready for one of the provincial festivals?" she said. "If that is so, of course, you mustn't break the continuity with a trip to the Greek Islands or Tunis. Besides, you'd get all the wrong sort of inspiration in such places. I shall never forget the beautiful impression I received at—was it Worcester?—once when I saw an English audience staggering slowly to its feet in tribute to the Hallelujah Chorus. I am sure you are writing something that will bring Worcester to its feet, aren't you?"

He forced a very mirthless laugh.

"I'm really not writing anything of that kind. But please don't let us talk about my work. I am sure it's very uninteresting except to me. I feel very grateful to you for your kind and delightful offer, but I can't accept it, unfortunately for me."

"Mal-au-cœur?"

"Yes, yes. I don't think I'm a good sailor."

"Mal-au-cœur!" she repeated, smiling satirically at him.

"I'm in the midst of something."

"The Puritan tradition?"

"Perhaps it is that. Whatever it is, I suppose it suits me; it's in my line, so I had better stick to it."

"You are bathing in the Ganges?"

Her eyes were fixed upon him.

"Poor Charmian Mansfield! Whom can I get for her?"

Claude looked down.

"I must leave that to you. I am sure you will have a very delightful party."

Mrs. Shiffney got up. She was looking the soul of careless good-nature, and quite irresistible, though very Roman.

"I don't believe in hurried negatives," she said. "That sounds like a solemn photographer laying down the law, doesn't it? But I don't. I'll give you till Sunday to think it quietly over. Write and let me know on Sunday. Till then I'll keep one of the best cabins open for you. No berths, all beds! Myself, Charmian Mansfield, Susan Fleet, Max Elliot, Paul Lane, and you—I still hope. Good-bye! Thank you for being kind to me. I love to be well received. I'm a horribly sensitive woman, really, though I don't look it. I curl up at a touch, or because I don't get one!"

Claude tried to reiterate that he could not possibly get away, but something in the expression of her eyes made him feel that to do so just then would be to play the child, or, worse, the fool to this woman of the world. As she got into her motor she said:

"A note on Sunday. Don't forget!"

The machine purred. He saw a hand in a white glove carelessly waved. She was gone. The light of that other world faded; its murmurs died down. He went back to his studio. He sat down at the piano. He played; he tried to excite himself. The effort was vain. A sort of horror of the shut-in life had suddenly come upon him, of the life of the brain, or of the spirit, or of both, which he had been living, if not with content at least with ardor—a stronger thing than content. He felt unmanly, absurd. All sense of personal dignity and masculine self-satisfaction had fled from him. He was furious with himself for being so sensitive. Why should he care, even for half an hour, what Mrs. Shiffney thought of him? But there was within him—and he knew it—a surely weak inclination to give people what they wanted, or expected of him, when he was, or had just been, with them. Strangely enough it lay in his nature side by side with an obstinate determination to do what he chose, to be what he intended to be. These badly-assorted companions fought and kept him restless. They prevented him from working now. And at last he left the piano, put on hat and coat, and started for a walk in the evening darkness.

He felt less irritated, even happier, when he was out in the air.

How persistent Mrs. Shiffney had been! He still felt flattered by her persistence, not because he was a snob and was aware of her influential position and great social popularity, but because he was a young unknown man, and she had troops of friends, battalions of acquaintances. She could get anyone she liked to go on the yacht, and she wanted him. It was flattering to his masculine vanity. He felt that there was something in him which stretched out and caught at people, without intention on his part, which grasped and held them. It was not his talent, he told himself, for he kept that in the dark. It was himself. Although he was less conceited than the average Englishman of talent, for a few minutes he braced his legs and had the cordial conquering sensation.

He had till Sunday to decide.

How absurd to say that to himself when he had decided, told Mrs. Shiffney, and even told Mrs. Mansfield, his great friend! There was really no reason why he should send any note on Sunday. He had refused again and again. That ought to be enough for Mrs. Shiffney, for any woman. But, of course, he would write, lest he should seem heedless or impolite.

What a bore that strong instinct within him was, that instinct which kept him, as it were, moored in a sheltered cove when he might ride the great seas, and possibly with buoyant success! Perhaps he was merely a coward, a rejector of life's offerings.

Well, he had till Sunday.

Claude was a gentleman, but not of aristocratic birth. His people were Cornish, of an old and respected Cornish family, but quite unknown in the great world. They were very clannish, were quite satisfied with their position in their own county, were too simple and too well-bred to share any of the vulgar instincts and aspirations of the climber. Comfortably off, they had no aching desire to be richer than they were, to make any splash. The love of ostentation is not a Cornish vice. The Heaths were homely people, hospitable, warm-hearted, and contented without being complacent. Claude had often felt himself a little apart from them, yet he derived from them and inherited, doubtless, much from them of character, of sentiment, of habit. He was of them and not of them. But he liked their qualities well in his soul, although he felt that he could not live quite as they did, or be satisfied with what satisfied them.

Although he had lived for some years in London he had never tried, or even thought of trying, to push his way into what are called "the inner circles." He had assiduously cultivated his musical talent, but never with a view to using it as a means of opening shut doors. He knew comparatively few people, and scarcely any who were "in the swim," who were written of in social columns, whose names were on the lips of the journalists and of the world. He never thought about his social position as compared with that of others. Accustomed to being a gentleman, he did not want to be more or other than he was. Had he been poor the obligation to struggle might have roused within him the instinct to climb. A forced activity might have bred in him the commoner sort of ambition. But he had enough money and could gratify his inclination toward secrecy and retirement. For several years, since he had left the Royal College of Music and settled down in his little house, he had been happy enough in his sheltered and perhaps rather selfish existence. Dwelling in the center of a great struggle for life, he had enjoyed it because he had had nothing to do with it. His own calm had been agreeably accentuated by the turmoil which surrounded and enclosed it. How many times had he blessed his thousand a year, that armor of gold with which fate had provided him! How often had he imagined himself stripped of it, realized mentally the sudden and fierce alteration in his life and eventually, no doubt, in himself that must follow if poverty came!

He had a horror of the jealousies, the quarrels, the hatreds, the lies, the stabbings in the dark that make too often hideous, despicable, and terrible a world that should be very beautiful. During his musical education he had seen enough to realize that side by side with great talent, with a warm impulse toward beauty, with an ardor that counts labor as nothing, or as delight, may exist coldness, meanness, the tendency to slander, egoism almost inhuman in its concentration, the will to climb over the bodies of the fallen, the tyrant's mind, and the stony heart of the cruel. Art, so it seemed to Claude, often hardened instead of softening the nature of man. That, no doubt, was because artists were generally competitors. Actors, writers, singers, conductors, composers were pitted against each other. The world that should be calm, serene, harmonious, and perfectly balanced became a cock-pit, raucous with angry voices, dabbled with blood, and strewn with the torn feathers of the fallen.

The many books which he had read dealing with the lives of great artists, sometimes their own autobiographies, had only confirmed him in his wish to keep out of the struggle. Such books, deeply interesting though they were, often made him feel almost sick at heart. As he read them he saw genius slipping, or even wallowing in pits full of slime. Men showered their gold out of blackness. They rose on strong pinions only to sink down below the level surely of even the average man. And angry passions attended them along the pilgrimage of their lives, seemed born and bred of their very being. Few books made Claude feel so sad as the books which chronicled the genius of men submitted to the conditions which prevail in the ardent struggle for life.

He closed them, and was happy with his own quiet fate, his apparently humdrum existence, which provided no material for any biographer, the fate of the unknown man who does not wish to be known.

But, of course, there was in him, as there is in almost every man of strong imagination and original talent, a restlessness like that of the physically strong man who has never tried and proved his strength in any combat.

Mrs. Shiffney had appealed to his restlessness, which had driven Claude forth into the darkness of evening and now companioned him along the London ways. He knew no woman of her type well, and something in him instinctively shrank from her type. As he had said to Mrs. Mansfield, he dreaded, yet he was aware that he might be fascinated by, the monster with teeth and claws always watchful and hungry for pleasure. And the voice that murmured, "To-morrow we die! To-morrow we die!" was like a groan in his ears. But now, as he walked, he was almost inclined to scold his imagination as a companion which led him into excesses, to rebel against his own instinct. Why should he refuse any pleasant temptation that came in his way? Why should he decline to go on the yacht? Was he not a prude, a timorous man to be so afraid for his own safety, not of body, but of mind and soul? Mrs. Shiffney's remarks about Continental artists stuck in his mind. Ought he not to fling off his armor, to descend boldly into the mid-stream of life, to let it take him on its current whither it would?

He was conscious that if once he abandoned his cautious existence he might respond to many calls which, as yet, had not appealed to him. He fancied that he was one of those natures which cannot be half-hearted, which cannot easily mingle, arrange, portion out, take just so much of this and so much of that. The recklessness that looked out of Mrs. Shiffney's eyes spoke to something in him that might be friendly to it, though something else in him disliked, despised, almost dreaded it.

He had answered. Yet on Sunday he must answer again. How he wished Mrs. Shiffney had not called upon him a second time! In her persistence he read her worldly cleverness. She divined the instability which he now felt within him. It must be so. It was so. The first time he had met her he had had a feeling as if to her almost impertinent eyes he were transparent. And she had evidently seen something he had supposed to be hidden, something he wished were not in existence.

Her remarks about English musicians, her banter about the provincial festivals had stung him. The word "provincial" rankled. If it applied to him, to his talent! If he were merely provincial and destined to remain so because of his way of life!

Abruptly he became solicitous of opinion. He thought of Mrs. Mansfield, and wondered what had been her opinion of his music. Almost mechanically he crossed the broad road by the Marble Arch, turned into the windings of Mayfair, and made his way to Berkeley Square.

"I'll ask her. I'll find out!" was his thought.

He rang Mrs. Mansfield's bell.

"Is Mrs. Mansfield at home?"

"Yes, sir."

"Is she alone?"

"Yes, sir."

Heath stepped in quickly. He still felt excited, uncertain of himself, even self-conscious under the eyes of the butler. There was no one in the drawing-room. As he waited he wondered whether Charmian was in the house, whether he would see her. And now, for the first time, he began to wonder also why Mrs. Shiffney had made so much of the fact that Charmian was to be on the yacht. He recalled her words, "Poor Charmian Mansfield! Whom can I get for her?" Had he been asked on Charmian's account? That seemed to him very absurd. She certainly disliked him. They were not en rapport. In the yacht they would be thrown together incessantly. He thought of the expression in Mrs. Shiffney's eyes and felt positive that she had pressed him to come for herself. But possibly she fancied he liked Charmian because he came so often to Berkeley Square. The cleverest woman, it seemed, made mistakes. But he could not quite understand Mrs. Shiffney's proceedings. If he did, after all, go on the yacht it would be rather amusing to study her. And Charmian? Heath said to himself that he did not want to study her. She was too uncertain, not without a certain fascination perhaps, but too ironic, too something. He scarcely knew what it was that he disliked, almost dreaded, in her. She was mischievous at wrong moments. The minx peeped up in her and repelled him. She watched him in surely a hostile way and did not understand him. So he was on the defensive with her, never quite at his ease.

The door opened and Mrs. Mansfield came in. Heath went toward her and took her hands eagerly. This evening he felt less independent than he usually did, and in need of a real friend.

"What is it?" she said, after a look at him.

"Why should it be anything special?"

"But it is!"

He laughed almost uneasily.

"I wish I hadn't a face that gives me away always!" he exclaimed. "Though to you I don't mind very much. Well, I wanted to ask you two or three things, if I may."

Mrs. Mansfield sat down on her favorite sofa, with her feet on a stool.

"Anything," she said.

"Do you mind telling me exactly what you thought of my music the other evening? Did you—did you think it feeble stuff? Did you, perhaps, think it"—he paused—"provincial?" he concluded, with an effort.

"Provincial!"

Heath was answered, but he persisted.

"What did you think?"

"I thought it alarming."

"Alarming?"

"Disturbing. It has disturbed me."

"Disturbed your mind?"

"Or my heart, perhaps."

"But why? How?"

"I'm not sure that I could tell you that."

Heath sat down. When he was not composing or playing he sometimes felt very uncertain of himself, lacking in self-confidence. He often had moments when he felt not merely doubtful as to his talent, but as if he were less in almost every way than the average man. He endeavored to conceal this disagreeable weakness, which he suffered under and despised, but could not rid himself of; and in consequence his manner was sometimes uneasy. It was rather uneasy now. He longed to be reassured. Mrs. Mansfield found him strangely different from the man who had played to her, who had scarcely seemed to care what she thought, what anyone thought of his music.

"I do wish you would try to tell me!" he said anxiously.

"Why should you care what I think?" she said, almost as if in rebuke.

"Perhaps my music is terrible rubbish!"

"It certainly is not, or it could not have made a strong impression upon me."

"It did really make a strong impression?"

"Very strong."

"Then you think I have something in me worth developing, worth taking care of?"

"I am sure you have."

"I wonder how I ought to live?" he exclaimed.

"Is that what you came to ask me?"

Her fiery eyes seemed to search him. She sat very still, looking intensely alive.

"To-night I feel as if I didn't know, didn't know at all! You see, I avoid so many things, so many experiences that I might have."

"Do you?"

"Yes. I think I've done that for years. I know I'm doing it now."

He moved restlessly.

"Mrs. Shiffney has asked me again to go yachting with her."

"But I thought you had refused."

"I did. But she has been again to-day. She says your daughter is going."

"Charmian has been asked."

"Mrs. Shiffney said she had accepted the invitation."

"Yes."

"And now I'm to give my answer on Sunday."

"You seem quite upset about it," she said, without sarcasm.

"Of course it seems a small matter. People would laugh at me, I know, for worrying. But what I feel is that if I go with Mrs. Shiffney, or go to Max Elliot's parties, I shall very soon be drawn into a life quite different from the one I have always led. And I do think it matters very much to—to some people just how they live, whom they know well, and so on. Men say, of course, that a man ought to face the rough and tumble of life. And some women say a man ought to welcome every experience. I wonder what the truth is?"

Still with her eyes on him, Mrs. Mansfield said:

"Follow your instinct."

"Can't one have conflicting instincts?"

"Oh, no!"

"Then one's instinct may not be strong enough to make itself known."

"I doubt that."

"But I am a man, you a woman. Women are said to have stronger instincts than men."

"Aren't you playing with your own convictions?"

"Am I?"

He stared at her, but for a moment his eyes looked unconscious of her.

"Mrs. Shiffney said something to me that struck me," he said presently. "She implied that experiences of all kinds are the necessary food for anyone who wishes to be at all a big artist. She evidently thinks that England has failed to produce great musicians because the English are hampered by tradition."

"She thinks uncleanliness necessary to the producing of beauty perhaps!"

"Ah, I believe you have put into words what I have been thinking!"

"Is it wisdom to grope for stars in the mud?"

"No, no! It can't be!"

He was silent. Then he said:

"St Augustine, and many others, went through mud to the stars though."

"St. Francis didn't—if we are to talk of the saints."

"I believe you could guide me."

Mrs. Mansfield looked deeply touched. For an instant tears glistened in her eyes. Nevertheless, her next remark was almost sternly uncompromising.

"Even if I could, don't let me."

"Why?"

"I want the composer of the music I heard at the little house to be very strong in every way. No, no; I am not going to try to guide you, my friend!"

There was a sound in her voice as if she were speaking to herself.

"I never met anyone so capable of comradeship—no woman, I mean—as you."

"That's a compliment I like!"

At this moment the door opened and Charmian came in, wrapped in furs, her face covered by a veil. When she saw Heath with her mother she pushed the veil up rather languidly.

"Oh, Mr. Heath! We haven't seen you for ages. What have you been about?"

"Nothing in particular."

"Haven't you?"

"Take off that thick coat, Charmian, and come and talk to us."

"Shall I?"

She unbuttoned the fur slowly. Claude helped her to take it off. As she emerged he thought, "How slim she is!" He had often before looked at girls and wondered at their slimness, and thought that it seemed part of their mystery. It both attracted and repelled him.

"Are you talking of very interesting things?" she asked, coming toward the fire.

"I hear you are going for a cruise with Mrs. Shiffney," said Claude, uneasily.

"I believe I am. It would be rather nice to get out of this weather. But you don't mind it."

"How can you know that?"

"It's very simple, almost as simple as some of Sherlock Holmes's deductions. You have refused the cruise which I have accepted. I expect you were right. No doubt one might get terribly bored on a yacht, unable to get away from people. I almost wonder that I dared to say 'Yes!'"

"Where are you going to sit, Charmian?" said Mrs. Mansfield.

"Dearest mother, I'm afraid I must go upstairs. I've got to try on coats and skirts."

She turned toward Heath.

"The voyage, you know. I wish you could have come!"

She held out her thin hand, smiling. She was looking very serene, very sure of herself.

"I'm to answer Mrs. Shiffney on Sunday," said Heath abruptly.

Something in Charmian's voice and manner had made him feel defiant.

"Oh, I thought you had answered! Is Sunday your day for making up your mind?"

Before he could reply she went out of the room slowly, smiling.

CHAPTER VII

On the following Sunday night at ten o'clock Max Elliot gave one of his musical parties.

Delia had long since emerged from her rest cure, but was still suffering severely from its after-effects. It had completely broken her down, poor thing. The large quantities of "Marella" which she had imbibed had poisoned the system. The Swedish massage had made her bulky. And the prohibition as to letters had so severely shaken her nerve ganglions that she had been forced to seek the strengthening air of an expensive Swiss altitude, from which she had only just returned by way of Paris, where she had been nearly finished off by the dressmakers. However, being a woman of courage, she was down in peach color, with a pale turquoise-blue waist-belt, to receive her guests and to help to make things cheery. And she devoured condolences with an excellent appetite.

"Whatever you do, never touch 'Marella'!" she was saying in her quick, light voice as Mrs. Mansfield and Charmian came into the music-room. "It's poison. It turns everything to I forget what, but something that develops the microbes instead of destroying them. I nearly died of it. Ah, Violet! Don't let Charmian be massaged by a Swede. It will ruin her figure. I've had to starve in Switzerland, or I couldn't have got into any of my new gowns. There's nothing so fatal as a rest cure. It sets every nerve on edge. The terrible monotony, and not knowing whether those one loves are alive or dead, whether the Government's gone out, or if there's a new King, or anything. Quite unnatural! It unfits one to face life and cope with one's friends. But Max would make me. Dear old Max! He's such a faddist. Men are the real faddists. I'll tell you about a marvellous new Arab remedy presently. I heard about it in Paris. We are going to have a lot of music in a minute. Yes, yes!"

She spoke rapidly, looking about the room and seldom hearing what was said to her. Perpetual society had destroyed in her all continuity of mind. Ever since she could remember she had forgotten how to listen. She wanted to see, hear, know everybody, everything. Her mind hovered on the horizon, her restless and pale-blue eyes sought the farthest corners of the chamber to see what was happening in them, while she spoke to those within a foot or two of her. She laughed at jokes she did not catch or want to catch. She replied to questions she had divined by the expression on a face while she was glancing over the head it belonged to. She asked for information and travelled away ere it was given. Yet many people liked her. She was one of those very fair and small women who always look years younger than almost anyone really is, was full of vague charm, was kind, not stupid, and a good little thing, had two children and was only concentrated when at the dressmaker's or trying on hats.

Max was devoted to her and rejoiced in spoiling her. He was one of those men who like to have a butterfly in the room with them.

Mrs. Mansfield never tried to talk to Delia in a crowd, and she and Charmian went on into the big room. It was already full of people, many of whom were sitting on chairs grouped about the dais on which was the piano, while others stood about, and still others looked down upon the throng from recessed balconies, gained from a hidden corridor with which the main staircase of the house communicated.

Charmian saw Mrs. Shiffney not far off, talking and laughing with a great portrait painter, who looked like a burly farmer, and with a renowned operatic baritone, whose voice had left him in the prime of his life and who now gave singing lessons, and tried to fight down the genius which was in him and to which he could no longer give expression. He had a pale, large, and cruel face, and gray eyes that had become sinister since the disaster which had overtaken him. Near this group were three men, a musical critic, Paul Lane, and a famous English composer, prop and stay of provincial festivals. The composer was handsome, with merry eyes and a hearty laugh which seemed to proclaim "Sanity! Sanity! Sanity! Don't be afraid of the composer!" The critic was tall, gay, and energetic, and also looked—indeed, seemed to mean to look—a thorough good fellow who had a hatred of shams. Lane, pale and discontented, had an air of being out of place in their company. Pretty women were everywhere, and there were many young and very smart men. On a sofa close to Charmian a dégagée-looking Duchess was telling a "darkie" story to a lively and debonair writer, who was finding his story to cap it while he listened and smiled. Just beyond them were two impertinent and picturesquely dressed girls, sisters, whom Charmian knew intimately and met at almost every party she went to. One of them, who wore gold laurel leaves in her dark hair, made a little face at Charmian, which seemed to express a satirical welcome and the promise of sarcasm when they should be near enough to talk. The other was being prettily absurd with an excellent match. Close to the piano stood a very beautiful woman dressed in black, without jewels or gloves, who had an exquisite profile, hollow cheeks and haggard but lovely brown eyes. She was talking to several people who were gathered about her, and never smiled. It was impossible to imagine that she could ever smile. Her name was Lady Mildred Burnington, and she was an admirable amateur violinist, married to Admiral Sir Hilary Burnington, one of the Sea Lords. Max Elliot was in the distance, talking eagerly in the midst of a group of musicians. A tall singer, a woman from the Paris Opéra Comique, stood by him with her right hand on his arm, as if she wanted to interrupt him. She was deathly pale, with hair like the night, ebon, and a face almost as exaggeratedly expressive as a tragic pierrot's. People pointed her out as Millie Deans, a Southern American never yet heard in London. She spoke to Max Elliot, then looked round the room, with sultry, defiant and yet anxious eyes.

As if in answer to Millie Deans's words, Max Elliot moved away with her, and took her through the throng to Mrs. Shiffney, who turned round with her movement of the shoulders as they came up. Charmian, watching, saw Mrs. Shiffney's gay and careless smile, the piercing light in her eyes as she looked swiftly at the singer, who faced her with a tragic and determined expression. The portrait painter stood by, with his rather protruding eyes fixed on Miss Deans.

As Charmian glanced round at the crowd and spoke to one person and another she was seized again by her horror of being one of the unknown lives. She saw many celebrities. She yearned to be numbered among them. If she could even be as Mrs. Shiffney, an arbiter of taste, a setter of fashions in admiration; if she could see people look at her, as Millie Deans looked at Mrs. Shiffney, with the hard determination to win her over to their side in the battle of art, she thought she could be happy. But to be nobody, "that pretty little Charmian," "that graceful Charmian Mansfield, but she's not half as clever as her mother"! To-night she felt as if she could not bear it.

Mrs. Shiffney had turned away from the singer, and now her eyes rested on Charmian. She nodded and smiled and made a beckoning motion with her left hand. But at this moment a singer and composer, half Spanish, half nobody knew what, who called himself Ferdinand Rades, sat down before the piano with a lighted cigarette in his mouth and struck a few soft chords, looking about him with a sort of sad and languid insolence and frowning till his thick eyebrows came down to make a penthouse roof above his jet black eyes.

"Hush—hush, please!" said Max Elliot, loudly. "'Sh—'sh—'sh! Monsieur Rades is going to sing."

He bent to Rades.

"What is it? Monsieur Rades will sing Le Moulin, and Le Retour de Madame Blague."

There was a ripple of applause, and Mrs. Shiffney hastily made her way to a chair just in front of the piano, sat down on it, and gazed at Rades, who turned and stared at her. Then, taking the cigarette from his mouth, he sang Le Moulin at her, leaning back, swaying and moving his thick eyebrows. It was a sad song, full of autumnal atmosphere, a delicate and sensual caress of sorrow. The handsome composer and the lusty musical critic listened to it, watched the singer with a sort of bland contempt. But when he threw away his cigarette and sang Le Retour de Madame Blague, an outrageous trifle, full of biting esprit and insolent wit, with a refrain like the hum of Paris by night, and a long bouche fermée effect at the end, even they joined in the laughter and the applause, though with a certain reluctance, as if, in doing so, they half feared to descend into a gutter where slippery and slimy things made their abode.

Mrs. Shiffney got up and begged Ferdinand to sing again, mentioning several songs by name. He shook his head, letting his apparently boneless and square-nailed hands stray about over the piano all the time she was speaking to him.

"Non, non! Ce soir non! Impossible!"

"Then sing Petite Fille de Tombouctou!" she exclaimed at last.

And before he could answer she turned round, smiling, and said: "Petite Fille de Tombouctou."

There was a murmur of delight, and the impertinent girl with laurel leaves in her dark hair suddenly looked exotic and full of languors. And Charmian thought of the yacht. Had Mrs. Shiffney received Claude Heath's answer yet? He was to make up his mind on Sunday. Rades was singing. His accompaniment was almost terribly rhythmical, with a suggestion of the little drums that the black men love. She saw fierce red flowers while he sang, strange alleys with houses like huts, trees standing stiffly in a blaze of heat, sand, limbs the color of slate. The sound of the curious voice had become Eastern, the look in the insolent black eyes Eastern. There seemed to be an odd intoxication in the face, pale, impassive, and unrighteous, as if the effects of a drug were beginning to steal upon the senses. And the white, square-nailed hands beat gently upon the piano till many people, unconsciously, began to sway ever so little to and fro. An angry look came into Millie Deans's eyes, and when the last drum throb died away and the little girl of Tombouctou slept for ever in the sand, slain by her Prince of Darkness, for a reason that seemed absurdly inadequate to the British composer who was a prop of the provincial festivals, but quite adequate to almost every woman in the room, her mouth set in a hardness that was almost menacing.

After ten minutes' conversation an English soprano sang Bach's Heart Ever Faithful. Variety was always welcomed at the parties in Cadogan Square.

"Glorious, old chap!" said the British composer. "We've come up into God's air now."

The critic swung his right arm like a man who enjoyed bowling practice at the nets.

"Lung exercise! Lung exercise!" he breathed. "And that drop at the end! What a stroke of genius!"

Mrs. Shiffney had disappeared with Rades. She loved Bach—in the supper room. In the general movement which took place when the soprano had left the dais, escorted by Max Elliot, to have a glass of something, Charmian found herself beside Margot Drake, the girl with the laurel leaves.

Margot and her sister Kit were extremely well known in London. Their father was a very rich iron-master, a self-made man, who had been created a Baronet and had married an ultra-aristocratic woman, the beautiful Miss Enid Blensover, related to half the Peerage. The blend had resulted in the two girls, who were certainly anything rather than ordinary. They were half Blensovers and half Drakes: delicate, languid, hot-house plants; shrewd, almost coarse, and pushing growths, hardy and bold, and inclined to be impudent. In appearance they resembled their mother, and they had often much of her enervated and almost decaying manner. Her beauty was of the dropping-to-pieces type, bound together by wonderful clothes of a fashion peculiar to herself and very effective. But they had the energy, the ruthlessness, and the indifference to opinion of their father, and loved to startle the world he had won for himself. They were shameless, ultra-smart, with a sort of half-condescending passion for upper Bohemia. And as neither their mother nor they cared about anybody's private life or morals, provided the sinner was celebrated, lovely, or amusing, they knew intimately, even to calling by Christian names, all sorts of singers, actresses, dancers, sculptors, writers, and painters, who were never received in any sort of good society on the Continent or in America. London's notorious carelessness in such matters was led gaily by their mother and by them. Their house in Park Lane was popularly known as "the ragbag," and they were perpetually under the spell of some rage of the moment. Now they were twin Bacchantes, influenced by a Siberian dancer at the Palace; now curiously Eastern, captured by a Nautch girl whom they had come to know in Paris. For a time they were Japanese, when the Criterion opened its doors to a passionate doll from Yokohama, who became their bosom friend. Italy touched them with the lovely hands of La Divina Carlotta, our lady of tears from a slum of Naples. The Sicilians turned them to fire and the Swedish singers to snow. At this moment Margot was inclined to be classic, caught by a plastic poseuse from Athens, who, attired solely in gold-leaf, was giving exhibitions at the Hippodrome to the despair of Mrs. Grundy. And Kit was waiting for a new lead and marking time in the newest creations from Paris.

"Charmian, come and sit down for just a moment! Run away and play, Lord Mark!"

"With whom?" said a handsome boy plaintively.

"With Jenny Smythe, with Lady Dolly, anyone who can play pretty. Come back in ten minutes and I'll be bothered with you again—perhaps. Let's sit here, Charmian. Wasn't the Fille too perfect? But the Bach was like the hewing of wood and the drawing of water. Max shouldn't have allowed it. What do you think of my gold gown?"

"It's lovely!"

"The Greeks knew everything and we know nothing. This dress hangs in such a calm way that one can't be anything but classic in it. Since I've known the Persephone I've learnt how to live. You must go to the Hippodrome. But what's all this about your going yachting with the Adelaide and an extraordinary Cornish genius? What's the matter?"

The last words came out in a suddenly business-like and almost self-made voice, and Margot's deep eyes, full hitherto of a conscious calm, supposed to be Greek, abruptly darted questioning fires which might have sprung from a modern hussy.

"D'you like him so much?" continued Margot, before Charmian had time to answer.

"You're making a great mistake," said Charmian, with airy dignity. "I was only surprised to hear that Claude Heath was coming. I didn't know it. I understood he had refused to come. He always refuses everything. How did you hear of him?"

"The Adelaide has been talking about him. She says he's a genius who hates the evil world, and will only know her and your mother, and that he's going with her and you and Max Elliot to the Greek Isles on one condition—that nobody else is to be asked and that he is to be introduced to no one. If it's really the Greek Isles, I think I ought to be taken. I told the Adelaide so, but she said Claude Heath would rather die than have a girl like me with him on the yacht."

"So he really has accepted?"

"Evidently. Now you don't look pleased."

"Mr. Heath's Madretta's friend, not mine," said Charmian.

"Really? Then your mother should go to Greece. Why did the Adelaide ask you?"

"I can't imagine."

"Now, Charmian!"

"I assure you, Margot, I was amazed at being asked."

"But you accepted."

"I wanted to get out of this weather."

"With a Cornish genius?"

"Mr. Heath only looks at middle-aged married women," said Charmian. "I think he has a horror of girls. He and I don't get on at all."

"What is he like?"

"Plain and gaunt."

"Is his music really so wonderful?"

"I've never heard a note of it."

"Hasn't your mother?"

With difficulty Charmian kept a displeased look out of her face as she answered sweetly:

"Once, I think. But she has said very little about it."

At this moment the tragic mask of Miss Deans was seen in a doorway, and Margot got up quickly.

"There's that darling Millie from Paris!"

"Who? Where?"

"Millie Deans, the only real actress on the operatic stage. Until you've seen her in Crêpe de Chine you've never seen opera as it ought to be. Millie! Millie!"

She went rather aggressively toward Miss Deans, forgetting her calm gown for the moment.

So Claude Heath had accepted. Charmian concluded this from Margot Drake's remarks. No doubt Mrs. Shiffney had received his answer that day. She loved giving people the impression that she was adventurous and knew strange and wonderful beings who wouldn't know anyone else. So she had not been able to keep silence about Claude Heath and the Greek Isles. Charmian's heart bounded. The peculiar singing of Ferdinand Rades, which had upon hearers much of the effect made upon readers by the books of Pierre Loti, had excited and quickened her imagination. Secretly Charmian was romantic, though she seldom seemed so. She longed after wonders, and was dissatisfied with the usual. Yet she was capable of expecting wonders to conform to a standard to which she was accustomed. There was much conventionality in her, though she did not know it. "The Brighton tradition" was not a mere phrase in her mother's mouth. Laughingly said it contained, nevertheless, particles of truth. But at this moment it seemed far away from Charmian, quite foreign to her. The Greek Isles and—

Millie Deans had stepped upon the dais, accompanied by a very thin, hectic French boy, who sat down at the piano. But she did not seem inclined to sing. She looked round, glanced at the hectic boy, folded her hands in front of her, and waited. Max Elliot approached with his genial air and spoke to her. She answered, putting her dead-white face close to his. He also looked round the room, then hurried out. There was a pause.

"What is it?" people murmured, turning their heads.

Paul Lane bent down and said to the dégagée Duchess:

"She won't sing till Mr. Brett, of the opera, comes."

His lips curled in a sarcastic smile.

"What a fuss they all make about themselves!" returned the Duchess. "It's a hard face."

"Millie's? She's in a violent temper. You'll see; until Mr. Brett comes she won't open her mouth."

Miss Deans stood rigid, with her hands always crossed in front of her and her eyes watching the door. The boy at the piano moved his hands over the keys without producing any sound. There was the ripple of a laugh, and Mrs. Shiffney came carelessly in with Rades, followed by a small, stout man, Mr. Brett, and Max Elliot. When he saw Miss Deans the stout man looked humorously sarcastic. Max Elliot wanted Mrs. Shiffney to come near to the dais, but she refused, and sat down by the door. Rades whispered to her and she laughed again. Max Elliot went close to Millie Deans. She frowned at her accompanist, who began to play, looking sensitive. Mr. Brett leaned against the wall looking critical.

Charmian was in one of the balconies now with a young man. She saw her mother opposite to her with Sir Hilary Burnington, looking down on the singer and the crowd, and she thought her mother must have heard something very sad. Millie Deans sang an aria of Mozart in a fine, steady, and warm soprano voice. Then she sang two morceaux from the filmy opera, Crêpe de Chine, by a young Frenchman, which she had helped to make the rage of Paris. Her eyes were often on Mr. Brett, commanding him to be favorable, yet pleading with him too.

As Mrs. Mansfield looked down she was feeling sad. The crowded room beneath her was a small epitome of the world to which talent and genius are flung, to be kissed or torn to pieces, perhaps to be kissed then torn to pieces. And too often the listeners felt that they were superior to those they listened to, because to them an appeal was made, because they were in the position of judges. "Do we like her? Shall we take her?" Many faces expressed such questions as this strange-looking woman sang. "What does Mr. Brett think of her?" and eyes turned toward the stout man leaning against the wall.

Did not Claude Heath do well to keep out of it all?

The question passed through Mrs. Mansfield's mind as she felt the humiliation of the yoke which the world fastens on the artist's neck. She had come to care for Heath almost a little jealously, but quite unselfishly. She was able to care unselfishly, because she had given all of herself that was passionate long ago to the man who was dead. Never again could she be in love. Never again could she desire the closest relation woman can be in with man. But she felt protective toward Heath. She had the strong instinct, to shelter his young austerity, his curious talent, his reserve, and his sensitiveness. And she was thinking now, "If he goes yachting with Adelaide! If he allows Max to exploit him! If he becomes known, perhaps the fashion, even the rage! And if they get sick of him?" Yet what is talent for? Why is it given to any man? Surely to be used, displayed, bestowed.

There was a hard and cruel expression on many of the listening faces below. Singers were there, appraising; professional critics coldly judging, jaded, sated, because they had heard too much of the wonderful sounds of the world; men like Paul Lane, by temperament inclined to sneer and condemn; women who loved to be in camps and whose idea of setting an artist on high was to tear all other artists down. Battlefields! Battlefields! Mrs. Mansfield was painfully conscious that the last thing to be found in any circle of life is peace. Too often there was poison in the cup which the artist had to drink. Too often to attract the gaze of the world was to attract and concentrate many of the floating hatreds of the world. The little old house near Petersburg Place was a quiet refuge. Mrs. Searle, a kindly dragon, kept the door. Yellow-haired Fan was the fairy within. The faded curtains of orange color shut out very much that was black and horrid. And there the Kings of the East passed by. But there, also, the sea was as the blood of a dead man.

"Well, what do you think of her?" Sir Hilary was speaking.

He had a face like a fairly good-natured bulldog, and, like the bulldog, looked as if, once fastened on an enemy, he would not easily be detached.

"I think it's a very beautiful voice and remarkably trained."

"Do you? Well, now I don't think she's a patch on Dantini."

The Admiral was wholly unmusical, but, having married an accomplished violinist, he was inclined to lay down the law about music.

"Don't you?"

"No, I don't. No lightness, no agility; too heavy."

"There are holes in her voice," observed a stout musical critic standing beside him. "The middle register is all wrong."

"That's it," said the Admiral, snapping his jaws. "Holes in the voice and the—the what you may call it all wrong."

"I wonder what Adelaide Shiffney thinks?" said a small, dark, and shrewish-looking woman just behind them. "I must go and find out."

"My wife won't have her. I'm dead certain of that," said the Admiral.

"She ought to start again with De Reszke," said the musical critic, puffing out his fat cheeks and looking suddenly like a fish.

"Well, I must go down. It's getting late," said Mrs. Mansfield.

"It isn't a real soprano," said someone in a husky voice. "It's a forced-up mezzo."

Beneath them Millie Deans was standing by Mrs. Shiffney, who was saying:

"Charming! No, I haven't heard Crêpe de Chine. I don't care much for Fournier's music. He imitates the Russians. Such a pity! Are you really going back to-morrow? Good-bye, then! Now, Rades, be amiable! Give us Enigme." Mr. Brett had disappeared.

"No, Mr. Elliot, it's no use talking to me, not a bit of use!" Millie Deans exclaimed vehemently in the hall as Rades began Enigme in his most velvety voice. "London has no taste, it has only fashions. In Paris that man is not a singer at all. He is merely a diseur. No one would dream of putting him in a programme with me."

"But, my dear Miss Deans, you knew he was singing to-night. And my programmes are always eclectic. There is no intention—"

"I don't know anything about eplectic," said Millie Deans, whose education was one-sided, but who had temperament and talent, and also a very strong temper. "But I do know that Mr. Brett, who seems to rule you all here, is as ignorant of music as—as a carp, isn't it? Isn't it, I say!"

"I daresay it is. But, my dear Miss Deans, people were delighted. You will come back, you—"

"Never! He means to keep me out. I can see it. He has that Dantini in his pocket. A woman with a voice like a dwarf in a gramophone!"

At this moment, perhaps fortunately, Miss Deans's hired electric brougham came up, and Max Elliot got rid of her.

Although she had lost her temper Miss Deans had not lost her shrewdness. Mr. Brett shrugged his shoulders and confessed that the talent of Miss Deans did not appeal to him.

"Her singing bored me," was the verdict of Mrs. Shiffney.

And many of Max Elliot's guests found that they had been subject to a similar ennui when the American was singing.

"Poor woman!" thought Mrs. Mansfield, who was unprejudiced, and who, with Max Elliot and other genuine musicians, recognized the gifts of Miss Deans.

And again her mind went to Claude Heath.

"Better to keep out of it! Better to keep out of it!" a voice said within her.

And apparently Heath was of one mind with her on this matter.

As Mrs. Mansfield and Charmian were going away they met Mrs. Shiffney in the hall with Ferdinand, who was holding her cloak.

"Oh, Charmian!" she said, turning quickly, with the cloak over one of her broad shoulders. "I heard from Claude Heath to-day."

"Did you?" said Charmian languidly, looking about her at the crowd.

"Yes. He can't come. His mother's got a cold and he doesn't like to leave her, or something. And he's working very hard on a composition that nobody is ever to hear. And—I forget what else. But there were four sides of excuses."

She laughed.

"Poor boy! He hasn't much savoir-faire. Good-night! I'll let you know when we start."

Her eyes pierced Charmian.

"Come, Ferdinand! No, you get in first. I hate being passed and trodden on when once I'm in, and I take up so much room."

That night, when Charmian was safely in her bedroom and had locked the door against imaginary intruders, she cried, bitterly, impetuously:

"If only Rades had not sung Petite Fille de Tombouctou!"

That song seemed to have put the finishing touch to desires which would never be gratified. Charmian could not have explained why. But such music was cruel when life went wrong.

"Why won't he come? Why won't he come?" she murmured angrily.

Then she looked at herself in the glass, and thought she realized that from the first she had hated Claude Heath.

CHAPTER VIII

A fortnight later The Wanderer lay at anchor in the harbor of Algiers. But only the captain and some of the crew were on board. Mrs. Shiffney, Max Elliot, and Paul Lane had gone off in a motor to Bou-Saada. Alfred Waring, the extra man who had come instead of Claude Heath, had run over to Biskra to see some old friends, and Charmian and Susan Fleet were at the Hôtel St. George at Mustapha Supérieur.

Charmian was not very well. The passage from Marseilles had been rough, and she had suffered. As she had never before seen Algiers she had got out of the expedition to Bou-Saada. And Susan Fleet had, apparently, volunteered to stay with her, but had really stayed, as she did a great many things when she was with Mrs. Shiffney, because there was no one else to do it and Mrs. Shiffney had told her so.