“She is certainly going to do something,” Harriet declared. “But whatever can she hope to do now? What weapon has she left? How is she, after she’s poured herself out so, ever to gather herself up again? What she’ll do is the horror. It’s sure to be ineffectual, and it’s equally sure to have distinctly dramatic aspects.”

  Harriet was not, however, quite prepared for the issue which confronted her one morning. She sat down shaken and aghast when Ethel, pale and wraith-like, glided somnambulantly into her garden and asked whether Mrs. Westfield would accompany her to Fortuney on the following day.

  “But, my dear girl, ought you to go there alone?”

  “Without Harold, you mean?” the other inaudibly suggested. “Yes, I think I ought. He has such a dread of going back there, and yet I feel that he’ll never be satisfied until he gets among his own things. He would be happier if he took the shock and had done with it. And my going there first might make it easier for him.”

  Harriet stared. “Don’t you think he should be left to decide that for himself?” she reasoned mildly. “He may wish to forget the place in so far as he can.”

  “He doesn’t forget,” Ethel replied simply. “He thinks about it all the time. He ought to live there; it’s his home. He ought not,” she brought out, with a fierce little burst, “to be kept away.”

  “I don’t know that he or any one else can do much in regard to that,” commented Harriet dryly.

  “He ought to live there,” Ethel repeated automatically; “and it might make it easier for him if I went first.”

  “How?” gasped Mrs. Westfield.

  “It might,” she insisted childishly, twisting her handkerchief around her fingers. “We can take an early train and get there in the afternoon. It’s but a short drive from the station. I am sure” — she looked pleadingly at Harriet— “I’m sure he’d like it better if you went with me.”

  Harriet made a clutch at herself and looked pointedly at the ground. “I really don’t see how I could, Ethel. It doesn’t seem to me a proper thing to do.”

  Ethel sat straight and still. Her liquid eyes brimmed over and the tears rolled mildly down her cheeks. “I’m sorry it seems wrong to you. Of course you can’t go if it does. I shall go alone, then, to-morrow.” She rose and stood poised in uncertainty, her hand on the back of the chair.

  Harriet moved quickly toward her. The girl’s infatuate obstinacy carried a power with it.

  “But why, dear child, do you wish me to go with you? What good could that possibly do?”

  There was a long silence, trembling and gentle tears. At last Ethel murmured: “I thought, because you were her friend, that would make it better. If you were with me, it couldn’t seem quite so — indelicate.” Her shoulders shook with a sudden wrench of feeling and she pressed her hands over her face. “You see,” she faltered, “I’m so at a loss. I haven’t — any one.”

  Harriet put an arm firmly about her drooping slenderness. “Well, for this venture, at least, you shall have me. I can’t see it, but I’m willing to go; more willing than I am that you should go alone. I must tell Robert and ask him to look up the trains for us.”

  The girl drew gently away from her and stood in an attitude of deep dejection. “It’s difficult for you, too, our being here. We ought never to have come. And I must not take advantage of you. Before letting you go with me, I must tell you the real reason why I am going to Fortuney.”

  “The real reason?” echoed Harriet.

  “Yes. I think he’s there now.”

  “Harold? At Fortuney?”

  “Yes. I haven’t heard from him for five days. Then it was only a telegram, dated from Pontoise. That’s very near Fortuney. Since then I haven’t had a word.”

  “You poor child, how dreadful! Come here and tell me about it.” Harriet drew her to a chair, into which she sank limply.

  “There’s nothing to tell, except what one fears. I’ve lost sleep until I imagine all sorts of horrible things. If he has been alone there for days, shut up with all those memories, who knows what may have happened to him? I shouldn’t, you know, feel like this if he were with any one. But this — oh, you are all against me! You none of you understand. You think I am trying to make him — inconstant” (for the first time her voice broke into passionate scorn). “But there’s no other way to save him. It’s simply killing him. He’s been frightfully ill twice, once in London and once before we left India. The London doctors told me that unless he was got out of this state he might do almost anything. They even wanted me to leave him. So, you see, I must do something.”

  Harriet sat down on the stool beside her and took her hand.

  “Why don’t you, then, my dear, do it — leave him?”

  The girl looked wildly toward the garden wall. “I can’t — not now. I might have once, perhaps. Oh!” with a burst of trembling, “don’t, please don’t talk about it. Just help me to save him if you can.”

  “Had you rather, Ethel, that I went to Fortuney alone?” Harriet suggested hopefully.

  The girl shook her head. “No; he’d know I sent you, and he’d think I was afraid. I am, of course, but not in the way he thinks. I’ve never crossed him in anything, but we can’t go on like this any longer. I’ll go, and he’ll just have to — choose.”

  Having seen Ethel safely to her own door, Harriet went to her husband, who was at work in the library, and told him to what she had committed herself. Westfield received the intelligence with marked discouragement. He disliked her being drawn more and more into the Forscythes’ affairs, which he found very depressing and disconcerting, and he flatly declared that he wanted nothing so much as to get away from all that hysteria next door and finish the summer in Switzerland.

  “It’s an obsession with her to get to Fortuney,” Harriet explained. “To her it somehow means getting into everything she’s out of. I really can’t have her thinking I’m against her in that definite, petty sort of way. So I’ve promised to go. Besides, if she is going down there, where all Eleanor’s things are—”

  “Ah, so it’s to keep her out, and not to help her in, that you’re going,” Westfield deduced.

  “I declare to you, I don’t know which it is. I’m going for both of them — for her and for Eleanor.”

  V

  Fortuney stood in its cluster of cool green, half-way up the hillside and overlooking the green loop of the river. Harriet remembered, as she approached it, how Eleanor used to say that, after the south, it was good to come back and rest her eyes there. Nowhere were skies so gray, streams so clear, or fields so pleasantly interspersed with woodland. The hill on which the house stood overlooked an island where the haymakers were busy cutting a second crop, swinging their bright scythes in the long grass and stopping to hail the heavy lumber-barges as they passed slowly up the glassy river.

  Ethel insisted upon leaving the carriage by the roadside, so the two women alighted and walked up the long driveway that wound under the linden-trees. An old man who was clipping the hedge looked curiously at them as they passed. Except for the snipping of his big shears and occasional halloos from the island, a pale, sunny quiet lay over the place, and their approach, Harriet reflected, certainly savored all too much of a reluctance to break it. She looked at Ethel with all the exasperation of fatigue, and felt that there was something positively stealthy about her soft, driven tread.

  The front door was open, but, as they approached, a bent old woman ran out from the garden behind the house, her apron full of gourds, calling to them as she ran. Ethel addressed her without embarrassment: “I am Madame Forscythe. Monsieur is awaiting me. Yes, I know that he is ill. You need not announce me.”

  The old woman tried to detain her by salutations and questions, tried to explain that she would immediately get rooms ready for Madame and her friend. Why had she not been told?

  But Ethel brushed past her, seeming to float over the threshold and up the staircase, while Harriet followed her, protesting. They went through the salon, the library, into Harold’s study, straight toward the room which had been Eleanor’s.

  “Let us wait for him here in his study, please, Ethel,” Harriet whispered. “We’ve no right to steal upon any one like this.”

  But Ethel seemed drawn like the victim of mesmerism. The door opening from the study into Eleanor’s room was hung with a heavy curtain. She lifted it, and there they paused, noiselessly. It was just as Harriet remembered it: the tapestries, the prie-dieu, the Louis-Seize furniture — absolutely unchanged, except that her own portrait, by Constant, hung where Harold’s used to be. Across the foot of the bed, in a tennis-shirt and trousers, lay Harold himself, asleep. He was lying on his side, his face turned toward the door and one arm thrown over his head. The habit of being on his guard must have sharpened his senses, for as they looked at him he awoke and sprang up, flushed and disordered.

  “Ethel, what on earth — ?” he cried hotly.

  She was frightened enough now. She trembled from head to foot and pressed her hands tightly over her breast. “You never told me not to come,” she panted. “You only said,” with a wild burst of reproach, “that you couldn’t.”

  Harold gripped the foot of the bed with both hands and his voice shook with anger. “Please go down-stairs and wait in the reception-room, while I ask Mrs. Westfield to enlighten me.”

  Something leaped into Ethel’s eyes as she took another step forward into the room and let the curtain fall behind her. “I won’t go, Harold, until you go with me,” she cried. Drawing up her frail shoulders, she glanced desperately about her — at the room, at her husband, at Harriet, and finally at her, the handsome, disdainful face which glowed out of the canvas. “You have no right to come here secretly,” she broke out. “It’s shameful to her as well as to me. I’m not afraid of her. She couldn’t but loathe you for what you do to me. She couldn’t have been so contemptible as you all make her — so jealous!”

  Forscythe swung round on his heel, his clenched hands hanging at his side, and, throwing back his head, faced the picture.

  “Jealous? Of whom — my God!”

  “Harold!” cried Mrs. Westfield entreatingly.

  But she was too late. The girl had slipped to the floor as if she had been cut down.

  VI

  One rainy night, four weeks after her visit to Fortuney, Forscythe stood at Mrs. Westfield’s door, his hat in his hand, bidding her good night. Harriet looked worn and troubled, but Forscythe himself was calm.

  “I’m so glad you gave me a chance at Fortuney, Harold. I couldn’t bear to see it go to strangers. I’ll keep it just as it is — as it was; you may be sure of that, and if ever you wish to come back—”

  Forscythe spoke up quickly: “I don’t think I shall be coming back again, Mrs. Westfield. And please don’t hesitate to make any changes. As I’ve tried to tell you, I don’t feel the need of it any longer. She has come back to me as much as she ever can.”

  “In another person?”

  Harold smiled a little and shook his head. “In another way. She lived and died, dear Harriet, and I’m all there is to show for it. That’s pitiful enough, but I must do what I can. I shall die very far short of the mark — but she was always generous.”

  He held out his hand to Mrs. Westfield and took hers resolutely, though she hesitated as if to detain him.

  “Tell Ethel I shall go over to see her in the morning before you leave, and thank her for her message,” Harriet murmured.

  “Please come. She has been seeing to the packing in spite of me, and is quite worn out. She’ll be herself again, once I get her back to Surrey, and she’s very keen about going to America. Good night, dear lady,” he called after him as he crossed the veranda.

  Harriet heard him splash down the gravel walk to the gate and then closed the door. She went slowly through the hall and into her husband’s study, where she sat quietly down by the wood fire.

  Westfield rose from his work and looked at her with concern.

  “Why didn’t you send that madman home long ago, Harriet? It’s past midnight, and you’re completely done out. You look like a ghost.” He opened a cabinet and poured her a glass of wine.

  “I feel like one, dear. I’m beginning to feel my age. I’ve no spirit to hold it off any longer. I’m going to buy Fortuney and give up to it. It will be pleasant to grow old there in that atmosphere of lovely things past and forgotten.”

  Westfield sat down on the arm of her chair and drew her head to him. “He is really going to sell it, then? He has come round sure enough, hasn’t he?”

  “Oh, he melts the heart in me, Robert. He makes me feel so old and lonely; that he and I are left over from another age — a lovely time that’s gone. He’s giving up everything. He’s going to take her home to America after her child is born.”

  “Her child?”

  “Yes. He didn’t know until after that dreadful day at Fortuney. She had never told any one. He says he’s so glad — that it will make up to her for everything. Oh, Robert! if only Eleanor had left him children all this wouldn’t have been.”

  “Do you think,” Westfield asked after a long silence, “that he is glad?”

  “I know it. He’s been so gentle and comprehending with her.” Harriet stopped to dry the tears on her cheek, and put her head down on her husband’s shoulder. “And oh, Robert, I never would have believed that he could be so splendid about it. It’s as if he had come up to his possibilities for the first time, through this silly, infatuated girl, while Eleanor, who gave him kingdoms—”

  She cried softly on his shoulder for a long while, and then he felt that she was thinking. When at last she looked up, she smiled gratefully into his eyes.

  “Well, we’ll have Fortuney, dearest. We’ll have all that’s left of them. He’ll never turn back; I feel such a strength in him now. He’ll go on doing it and being finer and finer. And do you know, Robert,” her lips trembled again, but she still smiled from her misty eyes, “if Eleanor knows, I believe she’ll be glad; for — oh, my Eleanor! — she loved him beyond anything, beyond even his love.”

  On the Gulls’ Road

  THE AMBASSADOR’S STORY

  IT OFTEN HAPPENS that one or another of my friends stops before a red chalk drawing in my study and asks me where I ever found so lovely a creature. I have never told the story of that picture to any one, and the beautiful woman on the wall, until yesterday, in all these twenty years has spoken to no one but me. Yesterday a young painter, a countryman of mine, came to consult me on a matter of business, and upon seeing my drawing of Alexandra Ebbling, straightway forgot his errand. He examined the date upon the sketch and asked me, very earnestly, if I could tell him whether the lady were still living. When I answered him, he stepped back from the picture and said slowly:

  “So long ago? She must have been very young. She was happy?”

  “As to that, who can say — about any one of us?” I replied. “Out of all that is supposed to make for happiness, she had very little.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and turned away to the window, saying as he did so: “Well, there is very little use in troubling about anything, when we can stand here and look at her, and you can tell me that she has been dead all these years, and that she had very little.”

  We returned to the object of his visit, but when he bade me goodbye at the door his troubled gaze again went back to the drawing, and it was only by turning sharply about that he took his eyes away from her.

  I went back to my study fire, and as the rain kept away less impetuous visitors, I had a long time in which to think of Mrs. Ebbling. I even got out the little box she gave me, which I had not opened for years, and when Mrs. Hemway brought my tea I had barely time to close the lid and defeat her disapproving gaze.

  My young countryman’s perplexity, as he looked at Mrs. Ebbling, had recalled to me the delight and pain she gave me when I was of his years. I sat looking at her face and trying to see it through his eyes — freshly, as I saw it first upon the deck of the Germania, twenty years ago. Was it her loveliness, I often ask myself, or her loneliness, or her simplicity, or was it merely my own youth? Was her mystery only that of the mysterious North out of which she came? I still feel that she was very different from all the beautiful and brilliant women I have known; as the night is different from the day, or as the sea is different from the land. But this is our story, as it comes back to me.

  For two years I had been studying Italian and working in the capacity of clerk to the American legation at Rome, and I was going home to secure my first consular appointment. Upon boarding my steamer at Genoa, I saw my luggage into my cabin and then started for a rapid circuit of the deck. Everything promised well. The boat was thinly peopled, even for a July crossing; the decks were roomy; the day was fine; the sea was blue; I was sure of my appointment, and, best of all, I was coming back to Italy. All these things were in my mind when I stopped sharply before a chaise longue placed sidewise near the stern. Its occupant was a woman, apparently ill, who lay with her eyes closed, and in her open arm was a chubby little red-haired girl, asleep. I can still remember that first glance at Mrs. Ebbling, and how I stopped as a wheel does when the band slips. Her splendid, vigorous body lay still and relaxed under the loose folds of her clothing, her white throat and arms and red-gold hair were drenched with sunlight. Such hair as it was: wayward as some kind of gleaming seaweed that curls and undulates with the tide. A moment gave me her face; the high cheekbones, the thin cheeks, the gentle chin, arching back to a girlish throat, and singular loveliness of the mouth. Even then it flashed through me that the mouth gave the whole face its peculiar beauty and distinction. It was proud and sad and tender, and strangely calm. The curve of the lips could not have been cut more cleanly with the most delicate instrument, and whatever shade of feeling passed over them seemed to partake of their exquisiteness.

  But I am anticipating. While I stood stupidly staring (as if, at twenty-five, I had never before beheld a beautiful woman) the whistles broke into a hoarse scream, and the deck under us began to vibrate. The woman opened her eyes, and the little girl struggled into a sitting position, rolled out of her mother’s arm, and ran to the deck rail. After putting my chair near the stern, I went forward to see the gang-plank up and did not return until we were dragging out to sea at the end of a long tow-line.