Through much travail Marie-Louise had learned to perform this office with distinction; she was immensely proud of it. Ashcroft knew that; had himself praised her. It was a little thing, perhaps, but I heard Marie-Louise catch her breath, to see the girl there pouring tea as if she were the mistress. "Lorry was famished," Pat explained coolly, "so we went ahead. How do you take yours, Mrs. Ashcroft?"

Poor Marie-Louise crimsoned; stumbled over words. I don't believe she knew how she took her tea. It was always her delight to serve others; her own cup she filled mechanically if at all. "Mrs. Holling spoke to you!" said Ashcroft sharply. "Cream and two lumps, isn't it?”

She nodded quickly. If he had said four lumps and no cream she would have known no difference. Irritation showed in his eyes that his wife should appear so stupid before his guests; I rose and transferred the cup from Patricia to Marie-Louise, drawing a small console-table near enough to her elbow to set the thing. Her hands were beyond the power of holding it, I felt.

You know how a little thing like that can create a most fearful abyss of silence, and how one is apt to topple unwise words into it.

"I was admiring the pussy-willows in the hall," I began. "By Jove, they make you feel the winter's broken at last! I'd like to be going up with you to the old spot, Lorry!" Pat's eyes flashed up, to me and then to him. "Going where?"

"St. Lemaire," said Ashcroft shortly. "Marie-Louise's home. She hasn't been home, you know, since we were married!"

Patricia nibbled at her toast.
"When did you say?"

"April!" nodded Marie-Louise eagerly, childishly snatched from her depths by this turn of conversation, and the joy of anticipation. "It is just the grandest month at home!"

"April?" Pat turned to Ashcroft, brows puckered. "Oh, Lorry! How could you plan that when you know my recitals are to be then?"

"But I didn't know they were coming off that soon!"

"Well they are!" She bit decisively into her toast. I knew intuitively that she had decided on the dates definitely at that moment. Marie-Louise looked small and frightened, forgetting to eat or drink, not understanding the subtleties of polite composure. Ashcroft did not look up from his cup. "We'll have

see about it," he said noncommittally, but I heard the quick intake of Marie-Louise's breath.

The anger that blazed in me found vent when Marie-Louise accompanied the visitor to get her wraps. I suppose I spoke more harshly than I had business to, or than was wise. Ashcroft, as if fearing we might be overheard, drew me into the musicroom adjoining. He listened silently; somewhere a telephone was ringing, and I wondered if it was to that rather than to me he was giving attention. But when I stopped, he swung upon me. "If it was any one but you, old chap, I'd call you a damned meddler. You don't understand-about Pat. She's vital to my work!" He paced up and down twice. "I've got to have that sympathetic and yet critical understanding. You can't just under

way she said: "I do not understand -no, not as she! But I love-I love every word, every comma, because it is his!" She sprang up and came to me swiftly. "You must not tell him what she did! To him, you understand, she is-how is it you say that which I am not? -vital?"

The broken sound of that last word tore at me. I think I looked away from the tragedy of her young face. I know that when I turned again, she had gone. The thin volume of Ashcroft's poems, a new edition but containing much of his old work, lay in its place on the table. I went and picked it up. It opened, naturally, at the place where the page had been crushed by the fall. A curious wet blot had fallen upon the page, spreading to cover, in part, two lines. And these were the lines upon which the sorrow of MarieLouise had fallen:

"The crooked road that runs beside the barn

hurt, licks the hand of its owner but crawls away to suffer in solitude!" prevented me from amending his statement to do justice to a certain high pride that was also MarieLouise's. He did not notice that the black vase in the corner no longer held the slim, gray-tipped pussywillows in its mouth. But her bedroom window gave upon the back area fringed with poplars; and their pollarded branches, that she could not put away, must have mocked her daily with their cloudy green. He was lost in his creation. He would work away at it, and, three afternoons or more a week, Pat would come, and they would go over what he had done. Between times he often telephoned her. Sometimes they would vary it by meeting down town over the lunch-table.

Holling had been back from Europe, and raised some sort of a scene; I don't know the details, but they were useful to Patricia in dealing with a man like Lorry, who was not to be browbeaten by a wastrel, and

brown-"

23

Marie-Louise made no complaint at all. Her manner to him did not change, unless indeed it was in a refinement of her watchfulness for his comfort, and a quietness above the ordinary. Ashcroft himself was busy about a new creative idea that inspired him enormously; and he suspected nothing, for he has since confessed as much to me, as he has told me quite frankly the part of his story to which I now must come. The utter tragedy in his eyes as he said, "Old man, it makes me think of some poor little animal that, being

ling did something else before returning to his Parisian widow-for so we understood her to be. He made it clear to Pat that he wanted a divorce, and quickly. You may imagine the triumph of that for her, the zest it gave to her game with Lorry. And he, poor dupe, was too full of his creative fire, and too thrilled by her unstinted but careful and clever criticism, to understand what really she was after; if indeed he had any suspicions, he deliberately pushed them from him. Patricia was vital to him—to his art!

I believe he was too engrossed to notice the harassed look that began

to grow upon Patricia Holling. Partly, of course, it was the consummating of plans for her recitals, the first of which, now that March had blown itself out, was due in less than a week. "Pat," he would say, realizing at least this much, "I can never forget what you're doing for me, when you're so confoundedly busy yourself!"

"You can do one thing!" she told him. "Bring me back here after the first of the beastly things is over. I'm all keyed up and fagged out after them, and I simply must have some one like you to talk to!"

He did better. He arranged to escort her there, to send flowers up to her on the platform, and to rescue her from a host of admirers afterward. At the last moment he had one of his rare flashes of sense, or of conscience, or call it what you will. He told Marie-Louise that, if she cared, he'd come and take her over to the recital. It was, I recall, a most perfect spring evening: clear, perfumed, fragrant with growing things. Up at St. Lemaire there would be frost still at night, but the sap would be running well with the warmth of the days, when the ragged brown patches would grow in the fields, and the silly fowls would cackle in the uncovered mud and straw, and the stream would have grown big with spring, flooding the roots of the thin growth of trees, whose bare branches would have already caught that queer, breathtaking, pervasive green. Perhaps Perhaps she was abandoning herself to these thoughts, believing he had gone, when he returned, running up to find her in the bedroom at the window. "No," she shook her head, "I do not

think-I care-to go!" It ran in his mind afterward that she was angry with him over the disappointment at their change of plans. The truth of it was she dared not trust herself to speak just then.

The recital was a tremendous success. "By Jove," Ashcroft said in my ear, chancing upon me in the aisle as he jostled his way to the platform afterward, "there's an artist for you!"

She was tremendously fatigued by it. In the taxi she lay back, her shoulder companionably against his; he was filled now with compunctions, and expressed himself. "You've been overdoing it! You shouldn't have bothered with my stuff, Pat!"

She smiled, shaking her head. When they reached home Ashcroft had Marie-Louise brew some strong coffee, the maid already having retired. Patricia put a hand on his wrist while the girl was making preparations. "Just ourselves, Lorry dear! Just you and me. I can't stand—any one-to-night!"

That was easy enough, of course. Marie-Louise quite understood that they were vital to each other's art, and had learned self-effacement. I gather that the creative artist in Patricia did a quite tremendous thing then, with the stage cleared that way. It almost got Ashcroft; he has told me so since. Holling was out of the way now for good, apparently; not that it mattered, of course, but there it was. And they were made for each other. The touchstone of their art was too great to overthrow. I am putting it very baldly; she did it with consummate finesse. She made it all so extremely logical, and modern, and sensible;

and through her logic she shot the golden darts of her femininity. They were both in a sensitive exalted mood after the recital-in a world almost of unreality. The room was soft with lights, heavy with the fragrance of narcissus and hyacinth. His latest manuscript lay on the table; she held it as she spoke, fondling it possessively.

He was pacing the room. Rising from the Chesterfield where she had been half reclining, she went quickly to him. "Lorry, I need you! I've no one but you! And, oh, I'm so And, oh, I'm so tired, so tired!"

She staggered slightly; believing her faint he put a hand out to steady her; she clung to him fiercely. Her voice, perhaps, had been raised a little too high; Marie-Louise, thinking something was amiss, appeared in the entrance. She was gone again in a minute, so that Ashcroft, whose face was toward her, was not sure if his imagination or his eyes had played him false. But it was sufficient to restore to him his underlying wholesome good sense. that it was which saved him. almost lifted her to the sofa.

And

He

"You're overwrought, Pat!" His voice was very gentle. "We're neither of us quite normal to-night." He tried to laugh. "My manuscript and your old recital, you know. We've been too close to it. Tomorrow we'll recover our perspective and see things normally again. It's our work that draws us together, our common interest in creative art. Nothing else!"

She knew, of course, she was beaten for this time. She managed a smile as she asked him, like an old dear, to call a taxi.

Marie-Louise had fled to her room upstairs. She remembered after a while that she had left a light under the coffee. She went down again. Ashcroft was standing in the hall, hands deep in his pockets. He had just telephoned for the taxi. He did not turn to look at her. It was that, I think, that broke her finally; as if she were but a servant in the house of her beloved. She groped her way, blinded with tears, to the kitchen, and shut off the gas under the coffee. She piled up the few dishes and pots ready for washing; winning composure through this, and thinking Patricia Holling had gone, she returned to the living-room for the rest, knowing only that she must keep going or some terrible thing would happen inside her. She went by way of the music-room, to escape Lorry's attention now. She would do the dishes and go to bed. Like a servant in the house. She had failed him otherwise! Her simple mind did not find fault with him. It had just all been a mistake, supposing that a girl such as she, from the country, could mate with a man like this. She could love, but she could

not mate.

Stepping inside the living-room, she came to a sudden halt. Patricia Holling was there still! She did not hear or see Marie-Louise. She was standing before the fire, and the light of it fell on her evening-gown, on her white wonderful shoulders, on her red-gold hair with its coronet of pearls and diamonds. A little choking sob welled up in Marie-Louise. Never, never could she be wonderful like this! Patricia was smoking a cigarette; that Marie-Louise did not like, but refrained from criticism, as