While his wife grew more and more vehement, Westfield lay back in a garden-chair, half succumbing to the drowsy warmth of the afternoon.

  “It seems to me,” he remarked, with a discreet yawn, “that the poor child is only putting up a good fight against the tormenting suspicion that she hasn’t got into anything. She may be just decently trying to conceal her uncertainty.”

  Harriet looked at him intently for a moment, watching the shadows of the sycamore-leaves play across his face, and then laughed indulgently. “The idea of her decently trying to conceal anything amuses me. So that’s how much you know of her!” she sighed. “She’s taken you in just as she took him. He doubtless thought she wouldn’t poke; that she would go on keeping the door of the chamber, breathing faint benedictions and smiling her moonbeam smile as he came and went. But, under all her meekness and air of poetically foregoing, she has a forthcomingness and an outputtingness which all the brutality he’s driven to can’t discourage. I’ve known her kind before! You may clip their tendrils every day of your life only to find them renewed and sweetly taking hold the next morning. She’d find the crevices in polished alabaster. Can’t you see what she wants?” Mrs. Westfield sat up with flashing eyes. “She wants to be to him what Eleanor was; she sees no reason why she shouldn’t be!”

  Westfield rubbed the stiff blond hair above his ear in perplexity. “Well, why, in Heaven’s name, shouldn’t she be? He married her. What less can she expect?”

  “Oh, Robert!” cried Harriet, as if he had uttered something impious. “But then, you never knew them. Why, Eleanor made him. He is the work of her hands. She saved him from being something terrible.”

  Westfield smiled ironically.

  “Was he, then, in his natural state, so — so very much worse?”

  “Oh, he was better than he is now, even then. But he was somehow terribly off the key. He was the most immature thing ever born into the world. Youth was a disease with him; he almost died of it. He was so absorbed in his own waking up, and he so overestimated its importance. He made such a clamor about it and so thrust it upon one that I used to wonder whether he would ever get past the stage of opening packages under the Christmas tree and shouting. I suppose he did know that his experiences were not unique, but I’m sure he felt that the degree of them was peculiarly his.

  “When he met Eleanor he lost himself, and that was what he needed. She happened to be born tempered and poised. There never was a time when she wasn’t discriminating. She could enjoy all kinds of things and people, but she was never, never mistaken in the kind. The beauty of it was that her distinctions had nothing to do with reason; they were purely shades of feeling.

  “Well, you can conjecture what followed. She gave him the one thing which made everything else he had pertinent and dignified. He simply had better fiber than any of us realized, and she saw it. She was infallible in detecting quality.

  “Two years after their marriage, I spent six weeks with them at Fortuney, and even then I saw their possibilities, what they would do for each other. And they went on and on. They had all there is — except children. I suppose they were selfish. As Eleanor once said to me, they needed only eternity and each other. But, whatever it was, it was Olympian.”

  II

  Harriet was walking one morning on the green hill that rises, topped by its sprawling feudal ruin, behind Arques-la-Bataille. The sunlight still had the magical golden hue of early day, and the dew shone on the smooth, grassy folds and clefts that mark the outlines of the old fortifications. Below lay the delicately colored town, — seen through a grove of glistening white birches, — the shining, sinuous curves of the little river, and the green, open stretches of the pleasant Norman country.

  As she skirted the base of one of the thick towers on the inner edge of the moat, her sunshade over her shoulder and her white shoes gray with dew, she all but stepped upon a man who lay in a shaded corner within the elbow of the wall and the tower, his straw hat tilted over his eyes.

  “Why, Harold Forscythe!” she exclaimed breathlessly.

  He sprang to his feet, baring his head in the sun.

  “Sit down, do,” he urged. “It’s quite dry there — the masonry crops out — and the view’s delightful.”

  “You didn’t seem to be doing much with the view as I came up.” Harriet put down her sunshade and stood looking at him, taking in his careless morning dress, his gray, unshaven face and heavy eyes. “But I shall sit down,” she affectionately assured him, “to look at you, since I have so few opportunities. Why haven’t you been to see me?”

  Forscythe gazed attentively at her canvas shoes, hesitating and thrusting out his lower lip, an impetuous mannerism she had liked in him as a boy. “Perhaps — perhaps I haven’t quite dared,” he suggested.

  “Which means,” commented Harriet reproachfully, “that you accredit me with a very disagreeable kind of stupidity.”

  “You? Oh, dear, no! I didn’t — I don’t. How could you suppose it?” He helped her to her seat on the slant of gray rock, moving about her solicitously, but avoiding her eyes.

  “Then why do you stand there, hesitating?”

  “I was just thinking” — he shot her a nervous glance from under a frown— “whether I ought not to cut away now, on your account. I’m in the devil of a way in the early morning sometimes.”

  Mrs. Westfield looked at him compassionately as he stood poking the turf with his stick. She wondered how he could have reached eight-and-thirty without growing at all older than he had been in his twenties. And yet, that was just what their happiness had done for them. If it had kept them young, gloriously and resplendently young, it had also kept them from arriving anywhere. It had prolonged his flowering time, but it hadn’t mellowed him. Growing older would have meant making concessions. He had never made any; had not even learned how, and was still striking back like a boy.

  Harriet pointed to the turf beside her, and he dropped down suddenly.

  “I’m really not fit to see any one this morning. These first hours—” He shrugged his shoulders and began to pull the grass-blades swiftly, one at a time.

  “Are hard for you?”

  He nodded.

  “Because they used to be your happiest?” Harriet continued, feeling her way.

  “It’s queer,” he said quietly, “but in the morning I often feel such an absurd certainty of finding her. I suppose one has more vitality at this time of day, a keener sense of things.”

  “My poor boy! Is it still as hard as that?”

  “Did you for a moment suppose that it would ever be any — easier?” he asked, with a short laugh.

  “I hoped so. Oh, I hoped so!”

  Forscythe shook his head. “You know why I haven’t been to see you,” he brought out abruptly.

  Harriet touched his arm. “You ought not to be afraid with me. If I didn’t love her as much as you did, at least I never loved anything else so well.”

  “I know. That’s one reason I came here. You were always together when I first knew her, and it’s easy to see her beside you. Sometimes I think the image of her — coming down the stairs, crossing the garden, holding out her hand — is growing dimmer, and that terrifies me. Some people and some places give me the feeling of her.” He stopped with a jerk, and threw a pebble across the moat, where the sloping bank, softened and made shallower by the slow centuries, was yellow with buttercups.

  “But that feeling, Harold, must be more in you than anywhere. There’s where she willed it and breathed it and stored it for years.”

  Harold was looking fixedly at the bare spot under his hand and pulling the grass-blades out delicately. When he spoke, his voice fairly startled her with its sound of water working underground.

  “It was like that once, but now I lose it sometimes — for weeks together. It’s like trying to hold some delicate scent in your nostrils, and heavier odors come in and blur it.”

  “My poor boy, what can I say to you?” Harriet’s eyes were so dim that she could only put out a hand to be sure that he was there. He pressed it and held it a moment.

  “You don’t have to say anything. Your thinking reaches me. It’s extraordinary how we can be trained down, how little we can do with. If she could only have written to me — if there could have been a sign, a shadow on the grass or in the sky, to show that she went on with me, it would have been enough. And now — I wouldn’t ask anything but to be left alone with my hurt. It’s all that’s left me. It’s the most precious thing in the world.”

  “Oh, but that, my dear Harold, is too terrible! She couldn’t have endured your doing it,” murmured Harriet, overcome.

  “Yes, she could. She’d have done it. She’d have kept me alive in her anguish, in her incompleteness.”

  Mrs. Westfield put out her hand entreatingly to stop him. He had lain beside her on the grass so often in the days of his courtship, of his first tempestuous happiness. It was incredible that he should have changed so little. He hadn’t grown older, or wiser, or, in himself, better. He had simply grown more and more to be Eleanor. The misery of his entanglement touched her afresh, and she put her hands to her eyes and murmured, “Oh, that poor little Ethel! How could you do it?”

  She heard him bound up, and when she lifted her face he was half the length of the wall away. She called to him, but he waved his hat meaninglessly, and she watched him hurry across the smooth green swell of the hill. Harriet leaned back into the warm angle of masonry and tried to settle into the deep peace of the place, where so many follies and passions had spent themselves and ebbed back into the stillness of the grass. But a sense of pain kept throbbing about her. It seemed to come from the spot where poor Forscythe had lain, and to rise like a miasma between her and the farms and orchards and the gray-green windings of the river. When at last she rose with a sigh, she murmured to herself, “Oh, my poor Eleanor! If you know, I pity you. Wherever you are, I pity you.”

  III

  The silence once broken, Forscythe came often to Mrs. Westfield’s garden. He spent whole mornings there, watching her embroider, or walked with her about the ruins on the hilltop, or along the streams that wound through the fertile farm country. Though he said little himself, he made it supremely easy for her to talk. He followed her about in grateful silence while she told him, freely and almost lightly, of her girlhood with Eleanor Sanford; of their life at a convent-school in Paris; of the copy of “Manon Lescault” which they kept sewed up in the little pine pillow they had brought from Schenectady; of the adroit machinations by which, on her fête-day, under the guardianship of an innocent aunt from Albany, Eleanor had managed to convey all her birthday roses out to Père-la-Chaise and arrange them under de Musset’s willow.

  Harriet even found a quiet happiness in being with him. She felt that he was making amends; that she could trust him not to renew the terrible experience which had crushed her at their first meeting on the hill. When he spoke of Eleanor at all, it was only to recall the beauty of their companionship, a thing she loved to reflect upon. For if they had been selfish, at least their selfishness had never taken the form of comfortable indolence. They had kept the edge of their zest for action; their affection had never grown stocky and middle-aged. How, Harriet often asked herself, could two people have crowded so much into ten circumscribed mortal years? And, of course, the best of it was that all the things they did and the places they went to and the people they knew didn’t in the least matter, were only the incidental music of their drama.

  The end, when it came, had, by the mercy of Heaven, come suddenly. An illness of three days at Fortuney, their own place on the Oise, and it was over. He was flung out into space to find his way alone; to keep fighting about in his circle, forever yearning toward the center.

  One morning, when Harold asked her to go for a long walk into the country, Harriet felt from the moment they left the town behind them that he had something serious to say to her. They were having their déjeuner in the garden of a little auberge, sitting at a table beside a yellow clay wall overgrown with wall-peaches, when he told her that he was going away.

  “I don’t know for just how long. Perhaps a week; perhaps two. I’d hate to have you misunderstand. I don’t want you to underestimate the good you’ve done me these last weeks. But, you see, this is a sort of — a sort of tryst,” he explained, smiling faintly. “We got stranded once in an absurd little town down on the Mediterranean, not far from Hyères. We liked it and stayed for days, and when we left, Eleanor said we’d go back every year when the grapes were ripe. We never did go back, for that was the last year. But I’ve been there that same week every autumn. The people there all remember her. It’s a little bit of a place.”

  Harriet looked at him, holding her breath. The black kitten came up and brushed against him, tapping his arm with its paw and mewing to be fed.

  “Is that why you go away so much? Ethel has told me. She said there was some business, but I doubted that.”

  “I’m sorry it has to be so. Of course, I feel despicable — do all the time, for that matter.” He wiped his face and hands miserably with his napkin and pushed back his chair. “You see,” he went on, beginning to make geometrical figures in the sand with his walking-stick, “you see, I can’t settle down to anything, and I’m so driven. There are times when places pull me — places where things happened, you know. Not big things, but just our own things.” He stopped, and then added thoughtfully, “Going to miss her is almost what going to meet her used to be. I get in such a state of impatience.”

  Harriet couldn’t, she simply couldn’t, altogether despise him, and it was because, as he said, she did know. They sat in the quiet, sunny little garden, full of dahlias and sunflowers and the hum of bees, and she remembered what Eleanor had told her about this fishing-village where they had lived on figs and goat’s milk and watched the meager vintage being gathered; how, when they had to leave it, got into their compartment and flashed away along the panoramic Mediterranean shore, she had cried — she who never wept for pain or weariness, Harriet put in fondly. It was not the blue bay and the lavender and the pine hills they were leaving, but some peculiar shade of being together. Yet they were always leaving that. Every day brought colors in the sky, on the sea, in the heart, which could not possibly come just so again. That to-morrow’s would be just as beautiful never quite satisfied them. They wanted it all. Yes, whatever they were, those two, they were Olympian.

  As they were nearing home in the late afternoon, Forscythe turned suddenly to Harriet. “I shall have to count on you for something while I am away, you know.”

  “About the business? Oh, yes, I’ll understand.”

  “And you’ll do what you can for her, won’t you?” he asked shakily. “It’s such a hellish existence for her. I’d do anything if I could undo what I’ve done — anything.”

  Harriet paused a moment. “It simply can’t, you know, go on like this.”

  “Yes, yes, I know that,” he replied abstractedly. “But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is that sometimes I feel as if Eleanor wants me to give her up; that she can’t stand it any longer and is begging me to let her rest.”

  Harriet tried to look at him, but he had turned away his face.

  IV

  Forscythe’s absence stretched beyond a fortnight, and no one seemed very definitely informed as to when he might return. Meanwhile, Mrs. Westfield had his wife considerably upon her hands. She could not, indeed, account for the degree to which she seemed responsible. It was always there, groping for her and pulling at her, as she told Westfield. The garden wall was not high enough to shut out entirely the other side: the girl pacing the gravel paths with the meek, bent step which poor Harriet found so exasperating, her wistful eyes peering from under her garden-hat, her preposterous skirts trailing behind her like the brier-torn gown of some wandering Griselda.

  During the long, dull hours in which they had their tea together, Harriet realized more and more the justice of the girl’s position — of her claim, since she apparently had no position that one could well define. The reasonableness of it was all the more trying since Harriet felt so compelled to deny it. They read and walked and talked, and the subject to which they never alluded was always in the air. It was in the girl’s long, silent, entreating looks; in her thin hands, nervously clasping and unclasping; in her ceaseless pacing about. Harriet distinctly felt that she was working herself up to something, and she declared to Westfield every morning that, whatever it was, she wouldn’t be a party to it.

  “I can understand perfectly,” she insisted to her husband, “how he did it. He married her to talk to her about Eleanor. Eleanor had been the theme of their courtship. The rest of the world went on attending to its own business and shaking him off, and she stopped and sympathized and let him pour himself out. He didn’t see, I suppose, why he shouldn’t have just a wife like other men, for it didn’t occur to him that he couldn’t be just a husband. He thought she’d be content to console; he never dreamed she’d try to heal.”

  As for Ethel, Harriet had to admit that she, too, could be perfectly accounted for. She had gone into it, doubtless, in the spirit of self-sacrifice, a mood she was romantically fond of permitting herself and humanly unable to live up to. She had married him in one stage of feeling, and had inevitably arrived at another — had come, indeed, to the place where she must be just one thing to him. What she was, or was not, hung on the throw of the dice in a way that savored of trembling captives and barbarous manners, and Harriet had to acknowledge that almost anything might be expected of a woman who had let herself go to such lengths and had yet got nowhere worth mentioning.