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CONTENTS

CHAPTER I
TUESDAY

Reclining in her steamer chair, her pretty eyes fixed pensively on the blue horizon line just visible over the Atlanta’s rail, Olivia was thinking of Harry. She was thinking that she had always known what Harry was like. She had known it for ten years. She had known it when she married him. It wasn’t fair to blame him for it now. It was, indeed, just because Harry was like what he was that Olivia had fallen in love with him. For she had fallen in love with him. Whatever else might be charged against Olivia, she had fallen sincerely in love with both her husbands.

Yes, Olivia faced the fact honestly, incredible as it now seemed, she had fallen sincerely in love with Harry. Not, of course, at first sight, as she had with Nick. At first sight Olivia could remember thinking that Harry was—well—more fascinated than fascinating. He had been fascinated, however. That was strongly in his favour. The moment that he had met her at that dull Park Avenue dinner-party to which she had dragged Nick—Nick had always protested against the dull dinner-parties of his wife’s Park Avenue friends—Harry’s admiring interest in her had been flatteringly apparent. She had felt so despondent that evening, for she had been quarrelling with Nick over household expenses all the way uptown in the conjugal taxi, and Harry’s admiring interest had succeeded in making her feel attractive, amusing, even well-dressed again, in spite of her three-year-old, made-over, black satin evening gown and her shabby silver slippers, a little run-down at the heel.

The orchids that he had sent her the next morning had surprised her tremendously—too many bright lavender orchids. Laughing a little, Olivia had pinned them on the coat lapel of her threadbare blue suit and had glanced at herself in the mirror, and had thought that their florid exuberance made her look a trifle common and had wished that the eight orchids had been five gardenias. Nick, in the old days, had always sent gardenias, but only one, because he had never been able to afford any more. The sweet, penetrating perfume of a gardenia always recalled to Olivia the delirious rapture of the weeks of her secret engagement. Dispassionately pinning on Harry’s orchids, Olivia had remembered just how her fingers had trembled and how her heart had faltered and fluttered—yes, her heart had actually physically faltered and fluttered—whenever she opened a tiny square florist’s box and drew Nick’s one gardenia from its protecting wrappings of pale green oiled paper. Ho-hum! She had been nineteen years old in the days of her secret engagement! And when she had met Harry, she had been twenty-nine and Nick had not sent her a gardenia for at least seven years.

Funny about life, reflected Olivia. Such trivial causes led to such important effects. If Nick had only continued to send her gardenias, Harry’s orchids would never have made the impression that they had. For they had made an impression. Even now, ten years later, reclining in her steamer chair, her pretty eyes fixed pensively on the blue horizon line just visible over the Atlanta’s rail, Olivia could recall that impression very distinctly. She could see the reflection that had laughed back at her from her mirror—pretty and shabby and only twenty-nine—and she could remember the little thrill of excitement with which she had reflected that, though the brilliant orchids on the threadbare suit made her look a little like an erring stenographer, they also made her look young and gay and popular again, and her reckless sensation of worldly sophistication when she had resolved to forget, for an hour or two, that she was Nicholas Allen’s indigent young wife and that she ought to stay at home and eat Hamburg steak with her eight-year-old daughter, and had opened the door of her Greenwich Village flat and had gone out to meet Harry for luncheon at Pierre’s.

That luncheon! When she thought of it, Olivia laughed again, her eyes on the blue horizon line, just as she had laughed, ten years before, at the sight of the eight lavender orchids in the mirror of the Greenwich Village flat! Harry had been waiting for her under Pierre’s awning, standing nervously beside the liveried doorman. He would not let the doorman open the door of her taxi. He had bounded to open it himself and he had ordered the kind of luncheon in advance that makes the head waiter precede you, bowing backward, to your corner table. It was all a little ridiculous, of course. Yet, before the luncheon was half over, Olivia was reflecting that she had not, at first sight, done justice to Harry. By the end of the luncheon, she had decided that he was really rather a dear. Not very exciting, certainly, but simple and timid and kindly, and only a little dull. By the end of the luncheon, Olivia had been inclined to be generous. For Harry’s admiring interest had continued to be flattering. It had made Olivia remember that life is not over at twenty-nine.

Olivia stirred restlessly in the luxurious folds of her new mink coat, recrossed her slender ankles under her Scotch plaid rug, and leaned her head wearily on the little brown taffeta cushion on the back of her steamer chair. There was nothing like a man and his flattery, she reflected with a little pensive sigh, to make a woman remember that life is not over at whatever age she happened to be. Not that she had ever really gone in for philandering. Why hadn’t she?—when her life with Nick had proved so unhappy and her life with Harry was proving so dull and she had come so increasingly to feel that she had never really lived and never really would live before she died. Olivia would be forty on her next birthday. She shivered when she thought of it. You couldn’t laugh off forty. Forty was middle-aged.

The Atlanta was steaming steadily, on an even keel, over a turquoise sea. It had left Cherbourg harbour an hour before. Olivia’s maid was unpacking Olivia’s steamer trunk in the cabin. Half an hour earlier, she had established Olivia in the steamer chair, with seven farewell telegrams and two new English biographies and three French novels—vient de paraître—on her lap and the five gardenias sent by that amusing boy in the Paris embassy pinned to the lapel of her new mink coat. Then Olivia had sent her down to fold her chiffon négligée on the pillows of her little brass bedstead and arrange her perfumes and bath salts in her white-tiled bathroom and converse with the steward on the distribution among the steerage of the votive offerings of hothouse fruit and Rumpelmayer candy that had been sent to Olivia on the steamer.

Olivia had not opened the books. She had glanced at the telegrams and had sniffed the gardenias and thought instantly of Nick and briefly of the boy in the embassy, who was obviously a darling but could not be a day over twenty-nine, and had wondered whom she might know among her fellow travellers on the Atlanta and had wished vaguely that she had a passenger list to look over, and then had settled down to think gloomy thoughts of the winter that lay before her with Harry in Chicago. Just like the ten winters that had preceded it, of course, except that this winter she would be forty and little Olivia was ‘coming out,’ and she would have to adjust herself to the fact that that trivial event placed her definitely in the older generation. No longer Olivia——but Olivia’s mother. That was how her world would come gradually to think of her. That was how the amusing boys, in and out of embassies, would come gradually to think of her. The amusing boys with whom she had never really philandered, but who had sent her gardenias and asked her to dance, and had sometimes grown a little desperate and difficult over a teacup or a cocktail when Olivia had pointed out that they really must be sensible.

Childless women, Olivia reflected, slipped gracefully into middle age. There was no one particular awkward moment when they climbed up on the shelf. Harry professed not to mind the shelf. Of course he was used to it. He had been on it, really, for years. From the day that he married Olivia, Harry had never looked at another woman. Harry was anticipating the début of little Olivia with step-paternal delight. The bond between Harry and his wife’s daughter was a very close one.

Olivia sighed, recrossed her slender ankles under her Scotch plaid rug, and hoped against hope that something might happen to make this crossing amusing. It was a lovely late October day. The mellow afternoon sunshine sparkled on waves that looked only as large as ripples from the height of the promenade-deck. Olivia’s fellow travellers had unpacked their luggage by this time and had read their telegrams. They were appearing on deck in groups of two and three, with new English biographies and French novels—vient de paraître—in hand. They were settling themselves on steamer chairs and looking over the rail and beginning to promenade. Olivia had seen three other new mink coats, and none of them as good as hers, and a man who looked as if he might prove to be rather delightful until he was joined by his cheerful wife and two inquisitive small sons; and another man who did not look as if he would prove to be delightful at all, but who had rather obviously and a trifle annoyingly thought Olivia would prove so. He had no wife and no small sons and he had all the earmarks of a nuisance. But Olivia had seen no one whom she knew as yet, and no one whose face was familiar from the rotogravure sections of the Sunday papers. Not Greta Garbo, nor Irving Berlin, nor Bobby Jones, nor Mary Garden, nor Otto Kahn, nor even a travelling congressman of sufficient distinction to make his features familiar. Six boring days at sea stretched barrenly ahead of Olivia, a curtain-raiser to the boring winter that would follow them at home.

Was life always going to be boring, Olivia wondered, her eyes on the blue horizon line? Why had both her marriages turned out as they had? Failures. Or was failure too strong a term? Had not both her marriages turned out to be merely—marriage? Romance died. Glamour faded. That was what every woman knew. Nevertheless, when Olivia thought of the girl she had been twenty years ago, that soft, silly, wistful, idealistic young creature who had breathlessly, confidingly embarked on that secret engagement with Nick, she really felt defrauded. Life had owed that soft, silly, wistful, idealistic young creature more than she had ever been able to get out of it. Nineteen-year-old Olivia had deserved a better fate than that of turning into the kind of woman that Olivia, who saw life steadily and saw it whole, clearly recognized herself, at thirty-nine, to be.

She was a hard woman. No, she wasn’t! She had fallen sincerely in love with both her husbands! Of course she had fallen sincerely out of love with them, too. But wasn’t that because instead of being hard she had been soft? Too soft to accept and dismiss as unimportant the inevitable disillusions and adjustments and compromises of marriage, too soft to accept life on any other basis than the romantic one which had betrayed that soft, silly, wistful, idealistic young creature into that secret engagement with Nick.

Her parents had been right about that engagement. It pained Olivia a little to admit that her parents had ever been right on any question on God’s green earth. But they really had been right about that engagement. Nicholas Allen at twenty-five, budding novelist and impoverished New-Englander, eager, uncompromising, and inexperienced, had proved an impossible husband for Olivia Van Tyne. And Olivia Van Tyne, budding beauty and impoverished New-Yorker, eager, uncompromising, and inexperienced, had proved an impossible wife for Nicholas Allen.

The rightness of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Van Tyne of Gramercy Park, to be sure, had been founded on no sounder basis than the shifting sands of worldly wisdom. Victims of their own love marriage that had been consecrated in Trinity Church in the late eighties, uniting in impecunious matrimony the scions of two of the oldest families on Manhattan Island, Mr. and Mrs. Peter Van Tyne had adopted an attitude toward life that was distinctly practical. It was as if their every impulse toward romance had been satisfied by their own improvident union. From the three pretty daughters who had blessed their marriage they demanded better things. They recognized in them their most valuable pieces of property. From the days of her babyhood, Olivia had been bleakly familiar with this point of view. Until she had met Nick, indeed, it had never occurred to her to question it. Three pretty daughters, if rightly handled, can bring in a more remunerative return than three corner lots of downtown real estate. So Mr. Peter Van Tyne had argued and his wife had earnestly agreed with him.

The meagre capital of the Peter Van Tynes had been boldly invested in Olivia, Ruth, and Diana. They had saved and skimped and lavished and expended in exactly the right directions to display their valuable pieces of property to the best possible advantage in the markets of the world. But Olivia had betrayed them. The prettiest of the three pretty Van Tynes had proved a very bad investment. At the end of her débutante winter, she had met Nicholas Allen at a studio tea on Tenth Street and had fallen sincerely in love with him before she had finished her second cup of chocolate.

Two months afterward, old Peter Van Tyne had sternly dismissed the eager, uncompromising, inexperienced young novelist from his library on Gramercy Park. But Olivia, heavily veiled, was waiting for him under Booth’s statue in the centre of the square and had tearfully plighted her troth there, to the rumble of the Lexington Avenue street-cars and Nick’s breathless vows of eternal fidelity. In six weeks’ time the thrills of her secret engagement had culminated in a midnight elopement and a two-column news item on the front page of the New York Times—‘Olivia Van Tyne Defies Parents to Wed.’

It had all been very romantic, but old Peter Van Tyne had not felt the lure of that romance. Old Peter Van Tyne had felt exactly as if a trusted bank had failed him. Next spring, however, when Ruth married Hendriks Bleecker in Saint George’s Church and moved out to Long Island to rule over an extensive estate at Oyster Bay, his confidence in daughters as objects of investment had been somewhat restored. Four years later, it was completely reëstablished when Diana became the Princess Arezzo at a magnificent wedding ceremony in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and sailed to Italy to adorn the first circles of Roman society as a lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Italy and the mother of three chocolate-eyed princelings.

By that time Olivia’s sad fate had almost ceased to trouble him. He encouraged no confidences on the stormy vicissitudes of her life with Nick. Her moments of rapture, her hours of disillusion, were all one to him. Quite simply, he hated her queer husband and he ignored her little daughter, and he never darkened the door of her Greenwich Village flat. He had written Olivia philosophically off the books of life. Some securities, unfortunately, must be so dealt with. Six years later, when her marriage with Nick had crashed in the divorce court and she had married Harry Ottendorf, the only son of a Milwaukee brewer, then respectably established selling bonds in Chicago, old Peter Van Tyne had had the incredulous feeling that an investment which had long ceased to pay dividends had suddenly sent him a check for his accrued losses.

Not that an alliance with the Ottendorfs of Milwaukee could be regarded in Gramercy Park as a brilliant alliance. But Olivia was damaged goods—spotted and torn by the folly of her first mad marriage—and prohibition had closed the disgraceful doors of the Ottendorf brewery, and Harry had made a sound place for himself in the financial world of Chicago and could do for Olivia, on the income from gilt-edged securities which had no connection with anything so shameful as beer, quite as much as Hendriks Bleecker had ever been able to do for Ruth and much more than old Guido Arezzo had ever felt called upon to do for Diana.

In brief, old Peter Van Tyne liked Harry Ottendorf. And Harry Ottendorf sincerely respected old Peter Van Tyne. Harry’s instinctive, humble respect for all of his wife’s exalted New York connections had been a pleasant change for Olivia from Nick’s contemptuous comment on a social scene that had merely struck him as annoying, uninteresting, and unimportant.

It was curious that Olivia, who had always disliked her father and disagreed with her mother and quarrelled with her two sisters, should have experienced that warm, clannish instinct to defend their peculiarities under the attack of Nick’s contemptuous comment. Nick had frequently reminded her, in the heat of argument, that without a pang of compunction she had deserted them all for his arms. ‘Out of the frying-pan into the fire!’ Olivia had retorted. For God knew, with all their faults they were no more peculiar than Nick’s mother! Nick’s mother—grim, restrained daughter of New England! How Olivia had hated her! And how she had hated Olivia! No—not hated. Hate was too warm, too impulsive a name for any emotion that could animate the breast of Mrs. Seth Allen. How she had disliked and distrusted Olivia! How she had immediately and dispassionately disapproved of the soft, silly, wistful, idealistic young creature whose bright eyes and curly hair and willowy figure had trapped her only son into the bondage of a premature and ill-advised marriage!

Ah, well! Mrs. Seth Allen had not been Olivia’s mother-in-law for ten years and she had been dead for three. Nevertheless, the evil that she had done lived after her. Olivia had always felt that if the ecstasy of her first absurd honeymoon—the rapture of that walking trip with Nick through the Green Mountains—had not ended in the drastic disillusion of a three weeks’ visit with Mrs. Seth Allen in her Vermont farmhouse, her marriage with Nick might have turned out quite differently. Mrs. Seth Allen’s slim, angular figure, her straight, snow-white hair, and level, ice-green eyes, the delicate, thin-lipped contour of her sensitive New England features, together with the immaculate neatness of her black alpaca gown, the spotless austerity of her Vermont farmhouse, and the cold, uncompromising dignity of the granite hills that surrounded it, became instantly for Olivia, and remained for her down the years, a caricature of the qualities she liked least in Nick. ‘Oh, Nick! That’s Vermont coming out in you!’ How often, in the throes of domestic discussion, she had said that! And Nick had invariably retorted . . .

Even now, after all the years, Olivia recrossed her slender ankles under the Scotch plaid rug and fluttered her small white chamois-gloved hands in a little involuntary gesture of irritation as she recalled the kind of thing that Nick had invariably retorted! Her slight, involuntary movement stirred the gardenias that were pinned to her coat lapel. Their sweet, penetrating perfume drifted momentarily across the salt sea breeze. Olivia instantly recalled the delirious rapture of the weeks of her secret engagement and felt her heart softening a trifle. In spite of the fiasco of their life together, she would never quite get over Nick. He had been an irascible, exasperating—but a very exciting—husband. And of course—extenuating fact—he had been a genius. Not that Olivia had suspected that extenuating fact ten years ago. Ten years ago no one had suspected it—except Mrs. Seth Allen. It was the first novel that he had written after his divorce from Olivia that had brought him instant recognition.

Olivia had not seen Nick since the day that they parted in her lawyer’s office, but she knew a great deal about his life. She was always reading about him in the newspapers. Every other month or so there was a headline or a picture. If he wasn’t being awarded the Pulitzer Prize, he was refusing an offer from Hollywood. If he wasn’t declining a lectureship at Columbia, he was accepting an honorary degree from Yale. He seemed to be continually sailing for Europe, to visit John Galsworthy in England, or join Eugene O’Neill in Italy, or meet Ernest Hemingway in France. In Vogue, in Vanity Fair, in Town and Country, Olivia was constantly catching glimpses of his long, lean figure, of his amused and amusing twinkle, of his candid smile. He might be rallying Yvonne Printemps at Longchamps, or chatting with Lady Astor at Ascot, or laughing with Alice Longworth on the steps of the Chevy Chase Country Club. He seemed always to be succeeding in diverting these ladies. Sometimes he was merely evading the advances of the inquiring reporter who had boarded an ocean liner to ask him how it felt to have written the Book of the Month and what he thought about Prohibition and the Surtax on earned incomes, and whether he considered Edith Wharton or Willa Cather the Dean of American Letters. Olivia had read everything about him in the newspapers except one thing. She was always expecting to have to read that.

Why hadn’t Nick married again? Olivia wondered, her eyes on the blue horizon line. He would, of course. Nick had a way with women, and he was only forty-five. Well—Olivia sighed profoundly—when he did, his wife would have a very amusing life. Whenever Olivia read about Nick in the newspapers, she always sighed profoundly. In spite of the fact that she had fallen sincerely in love with Harry.

For it was with Harry, and not with Harry’s millions, that Olivia had fallen sincerely in love. After ten years of coping with Nick’s complexity and Nick’s querulousness and Nick’s clever eccentricity which was not yet recognized as that of genius, Harry’s simplicity, Harry’s timidity, Harry’s very dullness and kindness had had for Olivia an artless fascination.

Harry’s millions had helped, of course. Harry’s millions had helped to make that second, much less absurd honeymoon, that pilgrimage of fantastic expenditure across the continent of Europe, ecstatic and rapturous. Strolling with Harry down the Rue de la Paix, buying now a ruby ring and now a sable wrap and now a forty-dollar bottle of French perfume, had been a very different experience from that of striding at Nick’s side, knapsack on back, up a country road, through the glorious June sunshine of the Vermont uplands. Still, it had had its points. There was one glory of the sun and another glory of the moon. Olivia would never forget the incredulous delight of the moment, when, standing hand in hand with Nick on a twist of woodland trail, she had seen her first Vermont hillside, veiled in the blushing, bridal bloom of mountain laurel. But neither would she ever forget the incredulous delight of the moment, when, standing by Harry’s side on the Rue Saint-Honoré, she had realized that she was now in a position to buy two dozen silk stockings at once and throw them away, at the first sign of wear, with never a thought for a darning-ball!

Yes. Harry’s millions had helped. They had helped to make Olivia’s Lake Shore Drive apartment infinitely more charming than her Greenwich Village flat. They had helped to make the birth, care, and education of Olivia’s two Ottendorf sons infinitely pleasanter for Olivia than the birth, care, and education of her Allen daughter. They had done wonders for that daughter. They had brought roses to her cheeks and French frocks to her back. They had given her toys and games, and governesses and tutors, and winters in Florida and summers in France. They had straightened her teeth and corrected her eyesight and taken out her appendix and tested her metabolism. They had recently presented her with a string of pearls and a Kentucky hunter and a racing Stutz runabout and an education at Foxcroft. This winter they would provide for the début in Chicago and a ball in New York. Next spring they might even arrange for a presentation at the Court of Saint James’s.

Yes. Harry’s millions had helped. They had helped, above all, in making the society of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Ottendorf of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, much more endurable than that of Mrs. Seth Allen of Greenfield, Vermont. In the Ottendorf mansion on Milwaukee’s North Shore you lived on the lap of luxury. Nevertheless, Olivia sighed again, as profoundly as she had sighed a moment before over her inner vision of the amusing life Nick’s second wife would have, when she reflected that, as soon as she arrived in Chicago, Harry would begin urging her to arrange for their annual autumn visit with his parents.

That annual autumn visit! As she thought of the month of exile in store for her, Olivia shrugged her mink-clad shoulders and set the sweet, penetrating perfume of the gardenias once more astir in the briny air. Curious that she should have married two men who were such victims of filial piety! Morbid, it seemed to Olivia. The Œdipus complex would probably explain it. With a thought for her lifelong aversion for the person and prejudices of old Peter Van Tyne, Olivia, not without humour, thanked God that she, at least, was normal! Whimsically she toyed with the fancy of having her stolid Harry psyched for his unnatural craving to spend one month out of twelve in the Ottendorf mansion on Milwaukee’s North Shore!

Olivia veritably believed that Harry, in spite of his ten years of residence in her intensively interior-decorated Lake Shore Drive apartment, still stubbornly thought that the Ottendorf mansion was beautiful! Still stubbornly admired its shiny white, terra-cotta-tiled walls, topped with its shiny green, terra-cotta-tiled roof, which rose in spotless Teutonic splendour from its acres of close-clipped turf, geometrically bisected with gravel paths and dotted with circular flower-beds of red and yellow tulips in the spring and red and pink geraniums in the summer and fall. Olivia veritably believed that Harry even stubbornly admired the largest flower-bed of all, which adorned the turn-around in front of the house, in which the name of the Ottendorf mansion, ‘Friedenheim,’ was spelled out in nameless herbs, magenta and sage-green in colour. Olivia veritably believed that Harry still stubbornly admired the gleaming silver glass gazing-ball which stood on a shiny white, terra-cotta-tiled pedestal in the centre of the lawn, reflecting the turf and the paths and the flower-beds and the mansion in distorted miniature. And the great iron fence, with its shiny white, terra-cotta-tiled posts, each topped with its little shiny green terra-cotta-tiled roof. And the glittering glass greenhouse. And the shiny white, terra-cotta-tiled garage. And the rococo German summer house on the bluff overlooking the lake, where Mrs. Ottendorf served coffee and Kranz-kuchen, every pleasant spring, summer, and autumn afternoon, to the most conservative German-American society in Milwaukee!

Yes—Harry admired it all. And Mrs. Otto Ottendorf sincerely admired her only son’s elegant young wife. She liked to see her passing the Kranz-kuchen and presiding over the coffee-tray. She liked to talk to her about the grandchildren and the housekeeping and the problems of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Kinder, Küche, and Kirche, the three dominant interests that Emperor William had allotted to Woman, sufficed to occupy and satisfy Mrs. Otto Ottendorf. They did not, however, suffice to occupy and satisfy Olivia, who was frequently driven, when residing at ‘Friedenheim,’ to forsake the society of Mrs. Otto Ottendorf for that of her husband.

Old Otto Ottendorf had been sadly in need of mental employment since the dark day when Prohibition had closed the doors of his brewery. His plump, paunchy, pink-and-silver person could usually be found, wandering disconsolately among the German atrocities that monstrously furnished his shiny white, terra-cotta-tiled mansion. And he was always delighted to converse with his daughter-in-law. He strolled with her down the gravel paths and talked about the flower-beds and the grandchildren and the Eighteenth Amendment, and sometimes he quoted a little Heine.

‘Du bist wie eine Blume,’ he would declaim, in the soft, booming gutturals of his native tongue, his simple old blue eyes beaming affectionately through gold-framed spectacles at Olivia’s pretty, petulant face; ‘So hold und schön und rein!’ For Mr. Otto Ottendorf was a very sweet and sentimental old German. And he, too, sincerely admired his only son’s elegant young wife.

At such moments Olivia had often reflected that, in spite of the alleviating influence of Harry’s millions, the sincere admiration of Mr. and Mrs. Otto Ottendorf was, on the whole, almost as trying to put up with as had been the dispassionate disapproval of Mrs. Seth Allen.

She was a hard woman. No, she wasn’t! She really wasn’t, although it would seem, on the face of it, that only a very hard woman could think such unkind thoughts about the touching and tender old German-American couple that Olivia, in her better moments, clearly recognized Mr. and Mrs. Ottendorf to be. But she was not a hard woman—she was just an unlucky one. What did Olivia—what did any woman—want in life but the golden opportunity to love and to be loved? Olivia sincerely wished that she had been blessed with a father and a mother and two sisters and a husband and a family of relatives-in-law who were capable of inspiring her ardent adoration. But they had not been vouchsafed her. Who could really adore the Ottendorfs—touching and tender though they were? Who could adore Mr. and Mrs. Peter Van Tyne—or Ruth—or Diana—or Mrs. Seth Allen? Who could have continued to adore Nick—quarrelsome, contentious husband that he had turned out to be? Or Harry, for that matter—mild and unimaginative—conscientious and kindly, of course, and, yes, rather touching and tender like his father and mother, but so unexciting and so inexplicably contented with their humdrum life in Chicago!

There were the children, of course. Yes, Olivia sighed, her eyes on the blue horizon line, of course there were the children. There were Otto and little Van Tyne in Fay School and there was handsome young Olivia, who was about to put her mother on the shelf.

Olivia dreaded the shelf, but she sincerely admired her handsome young daughter. She admired her qualities of mind—her balance and her judgment and her saving sense of comedy. It seemed very extraordinary to Olivia that an eighteen-year-old girl should possess those qualities—they had been so conspicuously lacking in the soft, silly, wistful, idealistic young creature who had embarked on that secret engagement with Nick. She admired her daughter’s cool, sane beauty, so different from the pink-and-white and golden-brown radiance of her own impetuous youth. She admired her slim, angular figure, her straight golden hair, her level ice-green eyes, and the delicate, thin-lipped contour of her sensitive New England features. She always tried to forget that Olivia looked exactly like the miniature of Mrs. Seth Allen, painted the year of her marriage, which had always hung over Nick’s writing-desk in the Greenwich Village flat. Yes, Olivia admired her daughter and loved her—and feared her. You couldn’t help fearing that calm, dispassionate glint of disapproval which flickered momentarily in those level ice-green eyes. She feared her balance and her judgment and her saving sense of comedy. Admirable qualities in themselves, but very disconcerting to live with, if you knew that you, yourself, were rather apt to do something foolish: that folly attracted you: that you were still somewhat soft and silly and wistful and idealistic in secret, even at thirty-nine.

Olivia didn’t fear Otto and little Van Tyne, of course, and sons never put you on the shelf and they never disapproved of you, as daughters did. Otto and little Van Tyne were exactly like Harry. Pure Ottendorf, both of them. Blond, bland little Teutons. Olivia loved their chunky little persons, their tow-coloured heads, their rosy, freckled faces. But you couldn’t make out a life for yourself in just loving children. Children gave nothing back to you. They accepted everything as a matter of course. Cold-blooded little monsters, really. They never applauded, never adored, never made you feel attractive, amusing, and young again. Only a man did that. And he didn’t do it for long. Just for those few gay months while he was falling in love with you. What really counted in life, thought Olivia solemnly, was having a person about who thought you were perfect. Children never thought you were perfect. But a man really did—while he was falling in love with you.

Olivia pulled herself up, sharply, out of revery. She really must stop thinking thoughts like that. She must face the facts of life, and remember that she was thirty-nine years old and that little Olivia was ‘coming out’ and that in two years’ time she would probably find herself a grandmother! No man was ever going to fall in love with her again. That chapter was closed. She could only seek consolation, now, in remembering that Harry had—so comfortingly—when she was twenty-nine, and Nick had—so glamorously—when she was nineteen—and—and now it was little Olivia’s turn to be fallen in love with! Olivia sincerely hoped that she was going to enjoy a certain vicarious romance in watching a great many irresistible men fall desperately in love with little Olivia. She had bought the child some enchanting clothes in Paris. She had bought herself some enchanting clothes, for that matter. But what use were enchanting clothes to a woman who was about to climb up on the shelf—who faced the fact that romance was over for her—who——

Olivia’s attention was suddenly arrested by a sharp, inarticulate exclamation. It was uttered by a man who had stopped rather abruptly in his walk down the deck at the foot of her steamer chair. Before she looked up at him, Olivia was only conscious that he was a tall, lean, somewhat cadaverous gentleman in a grey tweed overcoat and battered felt hat. After she looked up at him, she was conscious of nothing but a vast sense of shock and her own ridiculously throbbing heart and a feeling of complete social inadequacy.

‘Why—Olivia!’ the man was saying. His voice was sharp with amazement and a little rough with emotion.

Olivia stared up at him. She was thinking too fast to speak. She was thinking about his face. He hasn’t changed, she thought. He’s hardly changed at all! His mouth’s a little grimmer. It’s grown more—sardonic. But his eyes are just the same—bright blue New England eyes—shrewd eyes—eyes that saw things—more things than you wanted them to, sometimes. The amused and amusing twinkle was still there.

The man took off the battered felt hat. Again Olivia was conscious of that quick sense of shock. She had not been prepared for the dramatic effect of his snow-white hair. In the pictures Nick’s hair had looked grey—discreetly, decently grey. In life its effect was sensational. It carried no illusion of age. On the contrary, it curiously emphasized the youth of his smiling sunburned face. It was romantic hair—it was the kind of hair that made you feel it must have turned white in a single night. It was thick and well-kept and wavy. Olivia shrewdly suspected Nick of exploiting it a trifle.

‘Well, Olivia,’ the man was continuing, a little uncertainly, ‘this—this is a surprise!’ A note of levity was tempering the emotion of his voice. Olivia was thinking that she had forgotten Nick’s voice! How could she have forgotten it? She could remember now her quick sense of excitement—of exaltation—when its deep, husky tones had vibrated in her ear the very first time that he had ever telephoned to her—the morning after their meeting at that studio tea. She had known, then, that he cared.

‘Here we are,’ the man was saying tranquilly, ‘and here we’ll be for the next five days! It—it’s quite a situation.’ He was looking straight down into Olivia’s face with a smile that he had succeeded in making, by this time, distinctly ironic. His eyes were shining, however, with a quick, incredulous excitement. He’s glad to see me, Olivia reflected.

‘What are you going to do about it, Olivia?’ the man inquired, after a moment’s pause. ‘It’s—er—your lead.’

Olivia suddenly realized that she had been staring up at him in silence. She would have given her soul for some sprightly rejoinder. But none occurred to her. Absurd, abrupt thoughts were still stumbling over themselves in her startled brain. Nick’s hands, she was thinking, were like no other hands in the world. Long, lean, and sensitive, they were twisting the brim of the battered felt hat a trifle nervously.

‘What—what can I do?’ faltered Olivia stupidly.

Nick was twinkling down at her.

‘Say something—charming,’ he suggested.

Olivia rallied her failing forces in a twinkle of her own.

‘I don’t know quite what is said at a moment like this.’

Nick seemed tremendously cheered by her smile. His own light touch became distinctly more assured.

‘Now, Livvy,’ he said reproachfully—her ear caught the intimate nickname—truly a ‘nickname,’ Nick’s name for her—‘that’s really inadequate of you. There are lots of charming things to say! You can say you’re delighted to see me. You can say you’re astounded to see how well I’ve withstood the assaults of time. You can say that you admire my last book, that you like my white hair——’

‘I do,’ said Olivia honestly.

Nick looked pleased.

‘If you say so, I believe it,’ he declared promptly. ‘You were always truthful, Livvy—for a woman. But so was I—truthful, even for a man. Perhaps that was part of the trouble. We were both too truthful. Truthful to a fault. If we had veiled some of the more disagreeable facts of life in a becoming tissue of falsehood—— But there’s no use going into that now.’ He smiled engagingly down at her. ‘I can say, at least, with perfect veracity, that I’m delighted to see you. I can say I’m astounded to see how well you’ve withstood the assaults of time. I—well—I can’t say that I admire your last book, because you’re not a writer.’ He looked quizzically down at her in mock anxiety. ‘You haven’t become a writer, have you, Livvy, by any chance, since I last saw you? No? I’m relieved. Forgive me for asking, but you know everybody’s doing it—especially the ladies, God bless ’em!—and I do think it’s a mistake.’ Again he smiled engagingly down at her. ‘And I can’t say I like your white hair, for, if you have any, it doesn’t show beneath that little French hat. Have you white hair, Livvy? If you have, please break it to me gently. It would make me feel so awfully like John Anderson, your Jo——’

‘Nick—don’t!’ said Olivia faintly. It was ridiculous—it was preposterous to allow herself to be moved by Nick’s airy inconsequence! She knew her lips were trembling a little. She was a fool, of course. Still, it was disconcerting, meeting your divorced husband like this—after ten years—without a word of warning. It was his voice, she thought. It was his voice more than anything. Suddenly she observed that his twinkle had dissolved into tenderness. Nick could always make his twinkle do that—when he wanted to! No trace of irony, now, in his smile.

‘Livvy,’ he said very seriously, ‘I won’t. I—I’m just running on like the ass that I am, because I don’t know quite what to say myself. I’ll shut up. I’ll go away. I won’t do anything to annoy or disturb you. I’d leave the ship, if it were possible—and you asked me to. But——’

‘It isn’t possible,’ said Olivia softly.

‘No. It isn’t possible.’ He looked steadily down at her for a moment in silence, then turned away his eyes, to stare at the battered felt hat that he was still twisting uneasily in his long, lean hands. ‘I—I really hope you don’t find this meeting too—irritating, Olivia——’ He broke off rather suddenly.

Olivia was staring, in her turn, at her small white chamois-gloved fingers clasped tightly on her mink lap. She did not answer until she was very sure that her voice would be quite steady.

‘Why should it irritate me?’ she said at last. ‘It’s just a chance meeting, after all, between two people who——’

‘Who once were married,’ Nick completed her sentence gravely. There was another brief pause. It was broken by Nick. The levity had returned abruptly to his tone. ‘May I inquire, Mrs. Ottendorf, if your husband is on this boat?’

‘Oh—no!’ cried Olivia.

Nick’s cheerful twinkle was his only comment on the horror in her tone.

‘Well, I’m glad,’ he said calmly. ‘I’m very glad, because I should like to put in the next five days being very attentive to you. My intentions are honourable, Livvy, but I somehow feel that the presence of Harry—you do call him Harry, don’t you?—would rather cramp my style. I should like to hear all about everything that’s happened to you, Livvy. I should like to talk to you for hours about myself. I should like to indulge in a good deal of rather futile sentiment—for this is a gloriously sentimental occasion——’ Meeting the eye that Olivia was struggling to make extremely forbidding, he broke off ingenuously. ‘You’re prettier than ever. Prosperity becomes you. Do you know what I’m wondering?’

‘No,’ said Olivia.

‘Perhaps it’s just as well that you don’t,’ smiled Nick provocatively.

Olivia indulgently allowed herself to be provoked.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’

‘If you won’t think me impertinent.’

‘I’ll think you impertinent if you are.’

‘Oh, Livvy!’ said Nick reproachfully. ‘Don’t let’s have any secrets! The whole fun of this meeting depends on our being quite candid with each other!’ His voice sank confidentially. ‘I’m wondering whether, if I could have afforded to dress you in mink, your charms would ever have palled on me. For they did pall on me, Livvy.’ He contemplated her detachedly for a moment in silence. ‘That seems queer, now, doesn’t it? For really you are the prettiest woman I have ever known.’

‘You are impertinent,’ said Olivia coolly. She was very proud of the coolness.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Nick disarmingly. ‘I don’t mean to be.’ Again he broke off ingenuously. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me to sit down in one of those empty chairs?’

‘No. I’m not,’ said Olivia firmly. For it had been impertinence.

‘Perhaps you’d rather walk the deck?’

‘No,’ said Olivia.

‘Not even the top one?’ smiled Nick persuasively. ‘Alone with the lifeboats?’

‘No,’ said Olivia. She cast off her steamer rug as she spoke. She really felt she couldn’t cope with Nick a moment longer. ‘I’m going down to my cabin.’

‘Feeling the motion?’ inquired Nick sympathetically. And indeed the breeze had freshened a trifle. The waves looked larger than ripples. The long level deck of the Atlanta was rising and falling, ever so slightly, in the roll of the deep-sea swell. Olivia frowned indignantly.

‘Certainly not,’ she said. ‘I’m an excellent sailor.’

‘Well, don’t be irritated,’ said Nick mildly. ‘You couldn’t expect me to know that. I never took you to Europe.’

Olivia made an awkward movement to rise. It annoyed her to be awkward. But you couldn’t rise gracefully from a steamer chair! Nick’s hand clasped her elbow. He steadied her to her feet. His touch was firm and impersonal. Olivia moved instantly away from him, however, and let her eyes wander coolly, appraisingly, over his tall, lean figure. In spite of the white hair, it looked amazingly familiar. Even his clothes were the same! That battered felt hat was absurdly characteristic. That grey tweed overcoat might have been the one which had hung for ten years in the hall closet of the Greenwich Village flat. Nick never took any trouble about his appearance. It had always irritated her. He ought to, now. Or ought he? There was something rather chic about badly dressed distinction.

‘I’ll walk with you to your cabin,’ he was saying pleasantly. He fell into step beside her. For a moment they walked side by side in silence. Then——

‘Nick,’ said Olivia, very seriously. Her tone was preoccupied. It was the sort of tone that betrays the fact that the speaker is thinking hidden thoughts.

‘Livvy,’ said Nick, matching her seriousness with his own.

‘Nick,’ said Olivia—‘I—I’d rather that you didn’t come down with me.’

‘Why not?’ asked Nick.

‘Oh’—said Olivia evasively—‘there—there’ll be people on board—there are sure to be—who know us both. You mustn’t——’

‘Oh, I won’t!’ said Nick easily. ‘I never do.’

‘You never do what?’ inquired Olivia.

‘I never make the lady in the case conspicuous. I’m a perfect gentleman.’

‘You’re a perfect idiot!’ said Olivia.

‘That sounds familiar,’ smiled Nick. ‘That’s the first really familiar thing you’ve said.’ He was pausing at the door of the companionway to let her precede him over the raised threshold. ‘I’m going below myself, as it happens. I want to talk with the dining-room steward. I want to arrange with him for a little table for two this evening——’

‘Nick, don’t be ridiculous!’ said Olivia sharply. She stood quite still in the doorway, looking up into his face.

‘You’re the one that’s ridiculous,’ said Nick. ‘It’s perfectly proper.’

‘I’m not thinking of the propriety,’ said Olivia loftily. ‘I’m thinking that I have another engagement.’

Nick looked absurdly startled.

‘Now, Livvy,’ he began—and his tone was an accusation—‘don’t tell me you have a boy friend on this boat! Harry, I could have put up with! I feel I could have risen above Harry. But a boy friend——’

‘I’m sitting at the right hand of the captain,’ said Olivia, with dignity. ‘He’s a friend of Harry’s. We always cross on the Atlanta.’

‘That’s bad,’ smiled Nick. ‘Very few sea captains can boast my dinner conversation. However, if you’ve made up your mind, there’s only one thing for me to do. I’ll sit at the captain’s table myself.’

‘You can’t,’ said Olivia pettishly. ‘Unless I arrange it.’

‘Livvy,’ smiled Nick, ‘you overlook the fact that I’m no longer the man you left behind you. I’ve become a lion. I’m an ornament to any captain’s table. I’m positively in demand. I——’

‘Nick,’ said Olivia very seriously, ignoring his banter, ‘you mustn’t. You really mustn’t.’

‘Why not?’ asked Nick again.

Olivia felt a sudden need of privacy. She stepped quickly back over the threshold onto the deck. She moved behind the open door of the companionway. It afforded a partial shelter from the casual glances of the passers-by. Nick followed her curiously.

‘Why not?’ he repeated, a trifle impatiently.

‘Well’—said Olivia slowly—‘you see it isn’t just the captain.’ Her eyes on the blue horizon line, she paused a moment, while Nick stared down at her with interest, then looked solemnly up at him. ‘Nick—I’ve Olivia with me.’

‘Olivia?’ he questioned. He looked a little confused.

‘Yes. Little Olivia.’

Nick’s face suddenly softened. It was abruptly illuminated by a delighted smile.

‘Little—Olivia!’ he said. ‘Good Lord, I’d forgotten all about her! Of course you have her with you! Where is she?’

‘She’s off somewhere with some boys—playing shuffleboard, I think. You see, Nick——’

‘Little—Olivia,’ Nick was repeating softly. ‘How old—no, don’t tell me! I know. Of course I know! She’s eighteen. Good Lord! that doesn’t seem possible, does it? Eighteen. Just one year younger than you were when we——’ Nick abandoned that sentence. ‘Is she pretty?’ he asked.

‘Very pretty,’ said Olivia gravely.

‘And a—a nice kid?’

‘A very nice kid,’ said Olivia.

‘Gosh!’ said Nick. ‘Eight-teen.’ He looked absurdly staggered. ‘I—I just can’t think of myself as the venerable father of an eighteen-year-old daughter! But of course I am.’ He rallied a little to smile cheerfully down at Olivia. ‘Makes you feel the years, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Olivia soberly, ‘it does.’

‘Well,’ said Nick brightly, ‘that can’t be helped.’ He slipped his arm confidingly through the crook of Olivia’s elbow. ‘Let’s go look her up. I can’t wait to see her.’

‘N-no,’ said Olivia, moving away from him. She was conscious of a sudden sense of panic. She was thinking how astounding it was that she, too, had forgotten all about little Olivia. After Nick had broken into her revery in the steamer chair, she had never once thought of the child until he had suggested walking down with her to her cabin. She was thinking of her now, however. She was thinking of her level ice-green eyes. She was thinking of all the—the unfavourable things that she herself had said to little Olivia, at one time or another, about her father. She was thinking of how literal little Olivia was—and how logical—and of how difficult it really was, sometimes, to explain to little Olivia just why you had acted in the way that you had——

‘Come on,’ Nick was saying impatiently. ‘Let’s find her. I want to talk to her.’

‘No,’ said Olivia again. ‘I don’t want to find her. I don’t want you to talk to her until—until——’ She paused a little helplessly. Until what? She wondered.

‘Until you break the news?’ smiled Nick sympathetically.

Olivia grasped at the straw of that suggestion.

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly.

‘Well, run off and break it now,’ said Nick.

The sense of panic closed down again.

‘N-no,’ said Olivia. ‘I don’t want to.’

Nick looked extremely perplexed.

‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘surely we can all have dinner together.’

Olivia shook her head. This was going to be very awkward.

‘Why not?’ asked Nick.

‘Oh, Olivia’s probably made some date——’

‘Now, Livvy, come!’ laughed Nick. ‘I know the modern generation is sated with pleasure, but, after all, you don’t meet a long-lost father every day!’

‘It wouldn’t do,’ said Olivia firmly. ‘I don’t want you to talk to her until I think things over.’

‘Think what things over?’ asked Nick impatiently.

Olivia looked up at him with reproachful eyes.

‘Well—yes——’ he admitted. ‘I get you, Livvy. There are things, of course, that will bear thinking over——’

‘I should think there were,’ said Olivia indignantly. She turned to reënter the companionway. Nick followed her over the threshold.

‘We’ll think them over together,’ he smiled reassuringly. That was just like a man, reflected Olivia. Men never knew, men never had any conception of, the complicated multiplicity of thoughts that women had to think over alone. The subtler shades of personal relations just didn’t exist for them. They turned toward the stairs.

‘If little Olivia’s made other plans,’ said Nick persuasively, ‘I can’t see why you can’t dine with me. You don’t really care about that captain, do you?’

‘Oh, it’s impossible,’ said Olivia.

They descended the stairs together in silence.

‘Livvy,’ said Nick, as they turned into the cabin corridor.

‘Yes,’ said Olivia. She was walking very steadily ahead of him down the narrow hall. She was hoping, with really the force of prayer, that they were not going to meet little Olivia face to face on the threshold of the stateroom.

‘Livvy, what’s the matter?’

‘Nothing’s the matter,’ said Olivia falsely.

‘Livvy,’ said Nick, and his voice was roughened again by that little note of emotion. ‘Aren’t you—aren’t you at all glad to see me?’

Olivia turned to look up at him at her cabin door. For a moment he did not say anything more. Then he laid a tentative finger, a little hesitatingly, on her mink-clad arm.

‘Livvy,’ he went on, ‘kidding aside, I’m awfully glad to see you. You see, there’s—there’s something I want to say to you. I’ve always wanted to say it.’ Nick wasn’t smiling now. He was looking down, very seriously, into Olivia’s wide brown eyes. Suddenly Olivia forgot to remember her daughter. Shaken by that tremulous undertone in Nick’s husky voice, she was terribly afraid that she was going to cry.

‘Livvy,’ he was saying, ‘I—I’ve always been so ashamed of the sordid way we parted. I’ve always regretted those ugly things I said. If—if it had to end—it shouldn’t have ended just that way—considering how it began. I’ve always hoped that we could meet—sometime, somewhere, this side of the Jordan—and—well—sort of say we were sorry.’ Olivia, staring silently up at him, felt her lips begin again stupidly to tremble. ‘We—we were two cute kids—once. Those first years we had——’ He broke off suddenly.

‘Yes,’ said Olivia, tremulously, ‘I—I’m sorry too, Nick.’

His face lit up with his sudden candid smile.

‘I’ve always felt that if we had to part, we should have been more—more friendly about it.’

‘It’s hard to be friendly,’ said Olivia softly, ‘when——’

‘When you’re fed-up’? Nick completed her sentence. ‘Yes. But we’re not fed-up now.’

‘No,’ said Olivia.

‘Au contraire,’ smiled Nick. Levity had again reassuringly taken possession of his voice. ‘Well—I’m glad you feel that way. If you won’t dine with me, Livvy, will you meet me at the bar at seven-thirty for a cocktail?’

Olivia nodded, her hand on her doorknob. She felt suddenly very light-hearted. And somehow—just nineteen years old again. Then she remembered those boys who had asked little Olivia to play shuffleboard. All the young people would be in the bar-room at seven-thirty.

‘Oh, Nick!’ she cried regretfully, ‘I can’t. I really can’t.’

He looked very crestfallen.

‘But, Nick’—breathed Olivia—‘I—I tell you what I will do! I’ll meet you on the boat-deck at nine o’clock!’

‘Great work!’ cried Nick. His face was beaming.

‘But you mustn’t sit at the captain’s table! And you mustn’t try to meet little Olivia!’

‘I won’t,’ grinned Nick. ‘I’ll have a chop in the grill. But I don’t see why——’

‘Never mind why,’ smiled Olivia. ‘You just do as I say!’ She was nineteen years old again! She was nineteen years old and she was counselling Nick on how to avoid the watchful eyes of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Van Tyne!

‘I can’t wait to see you with your hat off,’ smiled Nick. ‘I can’t wait to find out about that hair!’

‘I dye it,’ said Olivia.

‘Peroxide?’ queried Nick.

‘Henna,’ smiled Olivia.

She slipped into her cabin. She closed the door on Nick. Maggie, her Scotch maid, was shaking out the folds of her black lace dinner gown in the bathroom door. Little Olivia, thank Heaven, was nowhere to be seen. Olivia stood very quietly, for a moment, by her little brass bedstead. She was smiling a trifle, at nothing in particular. Suddenly she tossed off her hat. She ran her fingers caressingly over the soft marcelled waves of her golden-brown hair. She walked over to her dressing-table and picked up her handglass and turned to examine the curls rolled up at her neck. They were exactly right. Paris hair-dressers were impeccable.

‘Maggie,’ she said suddenly.

‘Yes, madam,’ said Maggie.

‘Maggie, I want you to take my trunk keys and go down to the hold. I want you to open my big trunk and get out my new Vionnet dinner gown. The jade-green chiffon. You’d better get out all my new dinner gowns. And open my slipper trunk——’ Suddenly Olivia realized that Maggie was staring at her in astonishment.

‘You told me, madam,’ she began disapprovingly——Maggie had been seven years in Olivia’s service, and with Maggie disapproval was always articulate. It was her only fault. ‘You told me, madam, to pack the black lace for the steamer.’

‘Did I?’ Still smiling vaguely, Olivia had returned to the examination of the curls at the back of her neck. ‘Then I made a mistake, Maggie.’ In the handglass Olivia could catch the double reflection of Maggie’s astonishment and her disapproval. She still felt very light-hearted. ‘We all make mistakes, now and then, Maggie,’ she continued airily, ‘but sometimes we can correct them.’ Her vague smile had deepened and broadened. It turned abruptly into a little throaty laugh of happiness. ‘Go get the jade chiffon, Maggie,’ she said peremptorily as she patted her curls. ‘I want to wear it this evening.’

CHAPTER II
WEDNESDAY

The morning sunshine, reflected from gleaming water, was shining in the little chintz-hung window of Olivia’s cabin, when Olivia opened her wide brown eyes and stretched her slender body luxuriously beneath her silken coverlet. She felt a little dazed at first, and pleasantly drowsy, and very, very comfortable. Almost consciously postponing the return of consciousness, she lay quite still for a moment, watching the little shimmering flecks of light that danced in an uneven rectangle on the white panelled wall at the foot of her brass bedstead. Slowly the world returned to her. Nick, she was thinking, dear—old—Nick. Just that—nothing more definite. It was nice to wake up in this cool, gay little cabin. It was nice to stretch for a moment in her narrow bed and think of Nick and look at the yellow sunlight and finger the silken coverlet and smell the briny air.

She could smell, too, the faint, sweet, decomposing odour of the Hamburg grapes and the pungent, aromatic scent of the tangerines in the great gilded basket that stood on her dressing-table. Olivia laughed a little. She was wide awake now. She knew that an innate instinct for thrift, combined with a sure Scotch sense of the eternal fitness of things, had prevented the impeccable Maggie, in spite of orders, from presenting that magnificent gilded basket, with its pyramid of exotic fruits, to the steward to give to the steerage. Olivia, however, would present it to him, herself, that morning. Or, no—perhaps she and Nick would toss the tangerines, one by one, over the rail to the little dark-eyed children who would be playing on the triangular deck below. But the grapes, reflected Olivia, distastefully wrinkling her pretty nose, must go out immediately.

Why, Olivia wondered, when you were embarking on a six days’ voyage in a modern ocean liner equipped with a Ritz restaurant, did your loving friends and relatives persist in sending you food? Food, which, being mortal, was destined to decay. It was, of course, a tradition surviving from a romantic past. A romantic past when an ocean voyage might prove really an adventure. When you sailed for a new world, with high hopes of finding it—and were storm-tossed and ship-wrecked and—and got scurvy and really needed a tangerine or a Hamburg grape, to help you swallow the salt pork. But nothing happened, nowadays, on an ocean liner. There were no new worlds to discover. The tangerines and the grapes, on this occasion, were quite superfluous.

Diana had sent that basket. Diana had sent it rather thankfully, Olivia suspected, being perhaps just a little relieved to see the last of her sister and niece, after their visit at the Villa Arezzo in Rome and their weeks together in Paris. Diana was lonely in Europe and homesick for New York. But she always preferred Ruth’s visits to Olivia’s. The presence of a shamelessly divorced and remarried sister was sometimes an embarrassment to Diana in the Catholic drawing-rooms of foreign capitals. For Guido Arezzo was, after all, the nephew of three cardinals and a personal friend of the Pope’s, and his family had been in and out of the Vatican for eight generations. Olivia quite understood. It was difficult for Diana to explain her sister’s equivocal position to all the frumpy old marchesas and contessas who had rocked Guido’s cradle and who, had they known all, would have set Olivia down, quite simply, as a woman who was living in sin.

Diana, herself, set Olivia down as that, of course, for she had become a devout Catholic and displayed all the zeal of the convert in her adopted faith. But Olivia had never resented the criticism. The thought of anyone living in sin with Harry was just too awfully funny to be taken seriously, and Diana, poor girl, considering how Guido, at a gouty sixty, was carrying on with that little dancer from the Folies Bergères had need of all the consolation religion could bestow. If it helped the poor child to believe that divorce was a sin and adultery a peccadillo——

Nevertheless, Olivia wished that the Hamburg grapes had been gardenias. She would have liked very much to have been able to send Maggie down to the steward’s ice-box to get a great fresh fragrant bunch of gardenias to pin on the lapel of her new mink coat before she went up, as she would presently, when she had had her coffee, to meet Nick, as arranged, in the little sheltered crevice that they had discovered last evening behind the fourth lifeboat on the starboard side of the top deck. Had the grapes been gardenias, Nick would have inevitably wondered who had sent them—which would have been very gratifying—and perhaps their sweet, penetrating perfume would have reminded him of the days when, a little threadbare but very particular, he had braved the supercilious stare of fashionable florists to pick out the very best gardenia that the best shops could afford to send——

But you couldn’t pin a bunch of Hamburg grapes to the lapel of a new mink coat, so they were just another example of the conspicuous waste that the socialists were always talking about, and the steerage should have them, Olivia decided, and the tangerines, too. But she and Nick would throw the tangerines to the children. Nick would think that was fun. Nick had always loved children. Except, Olivia ironically reflected, his own!

For of all the surprises that this meeting with Nick had presented to Olivia, no surprise was more surprising than Nick’s unfeigned and unaffected interest in, and emotion over, the presence of little Olivia on board the Atlanta. He had talked of her really for hours, up on the boat-deck, the night before. He had asked innumerable questions. Some of them Olivia had found rather difficult to answer.

‘What’s she really like, Livvy? Is she practical or romantic? Does she talk? Is she shy? Does she like the boys? Is she humorous? What does she do with her spare time? That’s always the answer, isn’t it, what we do with our spare time? I mean—it shows us up. Does she read much?’ And then, a little shyly, ‘Has she—has she read my books?’

All this, especially the shyness, had really astounded Olivia. Nick’s feeling of passionate paternity was so obviously sincere. But it was very curious. For, even when she racked her memory, Olivia could hardly remember a single occasion in the Greenwich Village flat when Nick had felt any way at all about little Olivia, except that she was a nuisance!

She had been a nuisance, of course. Olivia honestly admitted that. She had been a terrible nuisance. In the beginning there had been the initial shock of the discovery—so dreadful for both Nick and Olivia to sustain—that there was going to be any little Olivia at all. There had been prolonged, resentful discussion as to just how it could have happened, and brief, regretful abandonment of their rapturous plans for that trip abroad—that winter in Paris—that they had been saving for and counting on during the first two years of their marriage. There had been weeks of blank despair and months of frenzied discussion of ways and means—frenzied discussion of dollars and cents, and nurses and doctors, and cribs and perambulators, and shirts and bands, and little cambric frocks and little silken bonnets, and little knitted sweaters and little crocheted afghans. There had been pain and there had been panic and there had been Mrs. Seth Allen’s inconsiderate visit at the crucial moment. And when it was all over and the baby was born and Mrs. Seth Allen had actually been dislodged from the flat, as far as the Hotel Brevoort, to make way for Miss Simmons, the trained nurse—there had been the acute disappointment that little Olivia was a daughter.

For Nick was acutely disappointed, and Olivia was acutely disappointed, and Mrs. Seth Allen was most acutely disappointed of all. Moreover, Mrs. Seth Allen made no secret of her opinion that the unfortunate sex of the baby was a Van Tyne inheritance—for was not Olivia one of three brotherless sisters?—and no secret of her conviction that the consorts of Allens should be made of sterner stuff—that their undaunted mettle, in brief, like that of Lady Macbeth, should bring forth men-children only. She herself had buried two dear little boys before Nick was born. And his father had been one of six sons. For the first three days of little Olivia’s life, in fact, Olivia had felt very much ashamed of herself.

It was Nick, to be sure, who had expressed the first favourable verdict.

‘She’s cute,’ he had said, looking down at little three-day-old Olivia, who lay faintly wriggling and wrinkling in her cocoon of afghans in Olivia’s arms. ‘She mewls and pukes. Shakespeare was really infallible! Until I had a baby of my own I never knew what mewling and puking was!’

She was cute. And at the time when little Olivia was only three days old, Nick was still very much in love with his twenty-one-year-old wife. He tactfully persuaded his mother to return to Vermont before Olivia was out of her bedroom in the Greenwich Village flat. He slept cheerfully for four weeks on the living-room sofa, so that Miss Simmons could have his bed beside Olivia. The very first day that Olivia could walk out on the street, he had pinned a single gardenia to her shoulder and said she looked thinner and prettier than ever and had insisted on taking the baby out with them in the brand-new perambulator! Olivia could remember just how Miss Simmons had laughed at him, as she waved them off from the front steps—she had been, of course, quite captivated by Nick’s pyrotechnic conversation at meals—and how absurdly Nick had trundled the perambulator down Waverley Place, and how lovely and sunny Washington Square had seemed, and how warm the spring sun, and how blue the May sky, and how festive the tiny green buds on the elm trees, and how gay the high silvery clouds floating over the Arch, and how nice it was to have everything over, and how an old lady had stopped them at the entrance to the Square and had said that little Olivia was really a remarkable baby!

But next day Miss Simmons had gone and little Olivia had continued to be very cute, but had also continued to mewl and puke, only a trifle more vociferously with advancing age. And little Olivia, alas, unlike Shakespeare’s baby, had now no nurse’s arms to mewl and puke in. And frightfully soon she began to get teeth and to fret a little when Nick was trying to write, and soon after that Olivia had to stop nursing her and they couldn’t find just the right formula at first, so little Olivia had colic and took to crying at night, and then, after the formula was found, the only place where Olivia could mix her food was the bathroom—for the kitchen was awfully dark and always looked dirty and Olivia had once found a cockroach in it—and the cans of Dextri-Maltose and Mellin’s Food and the bottles of lime-water and Castoria had to stand on the bathroom window-sill beside Nick’s shaving-brush and cream, and the little nursery ice-box turned out to leak a trifle, and there wasn’t any place for it to leak in, innocuously, except the bathtub; and, worst of all, when the cold weather came in the fall and the steam heat gave out, as it always did, in the back of the flat, the didies had to dry around the living-room fire, in the very room where Nick was trying to find a moment of tranquillity—in the midst of tossing off a series of detective stories destined to keep the wolf from the door—in which he might outline The Great American Novel, that he always knew he could write if he could get a little repose——

It was then that Olivia remembered Nick’s first voicing the sentiment, that he was to repeat often enough in the eight years to come, ‘This flat is hell!’ and he had jammed on his battered felt hat and he had marched out without his grey tweed overcoat to walk the city streets in a snowstorm until three in the morning, while Olivia wept on her bed beside little Olivia’s crib and bravely refrained from calling Mrs. Van Tyne on the telephone to say that she was coming home with the baby to stay forever! Though Olivia had admitted to herself, at the time, that it was perhaps cowardice rather than courage that prevented her making that call. For the thought of the reception that old Peter Van Tyne could be counted on to give a prodigal daughter—the ‘I-told-you-sos’ and the ‘Don’t-blame-mes’ and the ‘Never-say-that-I-didn’t-warn-yous’—would have kept a much more disillusioned young wife than Olivia in the arms of a much less satisfactory young husband than Nick.

Well, Nick had come home, on that occasion, very cold and wet, in the wee small hours of the morning. And he had taken the weeping Olivia in his penitent arms and they had both been very contrite and very confidential and, for a few days after that, very, very happy. And the last formula was finally mixed, of course, and the last didy eventually dried.

But by that time little Olivia was walking and talking and taking naps. Walking and talking, inevitably, when Nick wanted to work. And taking naps, with equal inevitability, when Nick wanted to walk and talk. The typewriter, Olivia recalled, had had an unholy fascination for little Olivia from her earliest years. She was always breaking the little springs, or pulling out the ribbon, or completing the unfinished page of a manuscript with a paragraph of abortive dashes and stars and dollar marks and oddly assorted capitals.

That flat was hell for a writer, of course. Olivia admitted that now. But who could have realized at the time that Nick was ever going to turn out to be the kind of a writer who had the right to expect anything but a flat that was hell from the hands of a wife who was as tired and harassed and overworked as Olivia was during the first six years of little Olivia’s life? Even now, looking back on it all, even now, when Nick had become so very distinguished and had written so much awfully good stuff, Olivia couldn’t really blame herself, or any one else, for not realizing, at that far-away time, that it was terribly important for Nick to have the repose he was clamouring for—that, indeed, it was of any importance whatever that Nick should continue to be a writer at all!

‘Why don’t you go out and get a job?’ How often had Olivia said that to him? ‘You can’t afford to write! Great goodness, do you think I wouldn’t rather write myself than slave all day long in this miserable flat, cooking the meals and making the beds and trying to keep the damn place decently picked up and dusted? You haven’t put down a single word for the last hour! If you haven’t got anything better to do, you might at least take little Olivia out into the Square. It’s a lovely sunny day, and if I could just get rid of both of you for an hour, I’d ask the laundress to come in and wipe up this living-room. It hasn’t been cleaned for three weeks!’

And Nick would take little Olivia grimly by the hand and jam on the battered felt hat and go out and sit for hours on a green bench in the Square—sit for hours on a green bench beside the idle, shabby loafers who were sleeping in the summer sun—sit, staring unseeingly at the uniformed nurses guarding their perambulators on the benches across the path, forgetting all about watching little Olivia who was pushing her doll’s carriage around the Square or keeping her from playing hop-scotch and tag with the little dark-eyed Italian children, from whom Olivia was always afraid she was going to catch a disease. Sometimes Nick came home from those hours on a green bench very silent and cross and despondent. And sometimes he came home very cheerful and gay and determined. And then he would sit down at the typewriter, often even forgetting to take off his hat, and he would write and write and write and shout out to Olivia that he didn’t want any lunch, or, for God’s sake, to keep that child quiet! But nothing very much ever came of his writing, except barely enough money to keep the wolf from the door.

Just before little Olivia entered school, however, when the problem of paying for her tuition had become the main theme of family argument, Nick had begun to make quite a little more money.

‘I seem to have developed,’ Olivia could remember him sardonically remarking, ‘quite a steady market for the things I like least to write.’ And he had gone on sardonically writing them, until he could afford to hire a maid for Olivia and to rent a studio for himself.

After that Nick had really left home every morning, much to Olivia’s relief, like a perfectly good bread-winning husband and he never came back until dinner-time. Sometimes, indeed, he did not come back until long after dinner-time. When this happened, he always said that he had been writing in the studio, or dining with some editor or publisher or a group of other writers, and Olivia always believed him. For, really, the only thing that Nick ever wanted to do was to write, or to talk about writing. He never seemed to care about women. At least, he never seemed to care about the women that he met at the dinner-tables of Olivia’s old New York friends. They went to a great many dinner-parties. Olivia always loved to press and patch an old gown and call up the laundress to come in and sit with little Olivia and go out to a party. Nick never did, though he was often amusing enough when he reached one. He would drive in sullen, resentful silence all the way uptown at Olivia’s side in a bus or a taxi, and then hold a dinner-table spellbound by his airy, good-humoured, inconsequential talk. Olivia had found that trait of Nick’s extremely irritating.

‘You quarrel and complain,’ she’d said, ‘because I drag you out to a party, and then, when you get there, you’re the life of the wake!’

For the next two or three dinners, with his eyes ironically fixed on Olivia, Nick had remained diabolically dumb. It was a distinct effort, however, for him to discipline her in that manner. Nick loved to talk, and when he talked, no matter with whom, his spirits rose airily like iridescent soap-bubbles.

But Nick never talked about writing at dinner-parties, of course, and perhaps it was for that reason that he claimed never to enjoy them. Olivia heard plenty of his talk about writing at home, however, and she thought it was entertaining enough, when she had time to listen to it, but not very practical and really awfully egocentric. Sometimes he brought an editor or a publisher or another writer back with him to the flat for dinner. These gentlemen were invariably charmed with Olivia and sometimes Olivia was charmed with them. But she was always slightly preoccupied in keeping little Olivia quiet. For the Greenwich Village flat was very, very small, and little Olivia, in one way or another, was always interrupting the talk about writing. Nick said she was spoiled. But how could you expect an eight-year-old child to be very much interested in plots and titles and themes and moods and sequences of scenes and methods of attack? Little Olivia, at the age of six, however, had been very much pleased when Nick rented his studio.

‘Now you’ve got an office,’ she had said approvingly, ‘like other fathers.’

Of course, Olivia admitted, when you looked back at it now, it did all seem just like the sort of tragic misfortune that had assailed so many men of genius in their early unrecognized years. A clever biographer could throw a very romantic light on that dreary decade which Nick had spent trying to support a wife and daughter in the Greenwich Village flat. A clever biographer undoubtedly would before so very long. Olivia shuddered to think of just how she would figure in that clever biography! A shrew—a flibberty-gibbet—the woman who had not understood! A gross materialist—a creature of coarser clay—the girl who had missed the glorious opportunity of comforting and consoling and—yes—perhaps really inspiring a truly great artist!

When you thought of the clever biography, it was all very provoking. But when you remembered the actual years in the Greenwich Village flat, when you remembered the difficulties and the discouragements and the maddening way that Nick really used to behave, and especially when you remembered what it had been like to try to snatch for little Olivia, out of that welter of bills and manuscripts, that Babel of talk about writers and writing, any sort of a decent life for a normal child—well, you could not help thinking that a really clever biographer ought to realize that there were two sides to every question. And you could not help being completely astonished by the feeling of passionate paternity that had so obviously and so sincerely moved Nick on the boat-deck the night before. Why the man seemed positively obsessed by the thought of little Olivia!

Little Olivia—Olivia sighed as the vision of her daughter as she was that minute—no longer the importunate nuisance of the Greenwich Village flat, but a level-eyed, level-headed young woman, possessed of so much cool, sane beauty, so much balance and judgment and such a saving sense of comedy—rose before her. She sighed profoundly and audibly, all alone in her cool, gay little cabin. She had promised Nick, at parting, that she would ‘break the news’ to little Olivia before they met on deck the next morning. And, of course, it was obvious that the news would have to be broken. America’s foremost novelist couldn’t skulk, incognito, around an ocean liner for five days because his former wife experienced a certain inexplicable embarrassment in introducing him to his own daughter! Olivia’s embarrassment had been inexplicable to Nick. She couldn’t explain that it wasn’t just the fact that they had met—for the meeting, of course, was on the lap of the Gods, on the scroll of the Fates, and not even little Olivia could have expected her to prevent it; but it was the fact that they had so enjoyed that meeting that little Olivia was going to find so difficult to understand. That couldn’t be explained to Nick. Not by Olivia. Not in the face of his artless assumption—the artlessness of men always made Olivia feel dreadfully sorry for them—that this unfortunate meeting should be ingenuously accepted as a simply delightful and delightfully simple family reunion. Little Olivia, Olivia knew quite well, was never going to take it like that. Little Olivia never cared for unconventional situations, and she was devoted to Harry, and she had been brought up to believe that her father had ruined her mother’s life. Yet Olivia was terribly afraid that little Olivia was now going to see—for the level ice-green eyes of little Olivia almost invariably saw everything that her mother wished most to conceal from them—that the very look of Nick’s face, the very tone of his voice, the very touch of his hand, still had the power to—well, yes—to make rather a fool of Olivia, just as they had twenty years ago, when that soft, silly, wistful, idealistic young creature had run off with him.

Ah, well—Olivia decided to ring for her coffee. She sat up in bed and touched her bell and reached for her cherry-coloured velvet sack to cover the nakedness of her brand-new, diaphanous, aquamarine-tinted Patou pajamas. She needed her coffee to help her meet the complications that the day would present. It would be perfectly impossible, of course, to make an inexperienced girl understand how you could fall so sincerely in and out of love with two husbands. Or how you could once have been so angry and so unhappy and so disillusioned and yet how you could never quite get over the man who had made you so. Or how, when there was a man in the world whom you had never quite got over, you couldn’t be expected to resist the temptation, once it was offered, of discovering whether or no he had ever quite got over you. Especially when he didn’t seem to act as if he—he really ever had! Little Olivia, at eighteen, knew nothing about such complicated temptations. And Olivia shrewdly suspected that she would know nothing about them at eighty. Life was going to be a comparatively simple affair for little Olivia, emotionally speaking. The sharp steel blade of little Olivia’s literal and logical mind would always cut straight through the soft entanglements of an emotional situation like a hot knife through butter.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Coffee and rolls, please,’ said Olivia, smiling abstractedly up into the pleasant red English face of the stewardess. ‘And have you any Persian melon?’ Her voice was as abstracted as her smile. Her interest in Persian melon was purely superficial. She was thinking, as she spoke, that little Olivia would always dismiss three fourths of life, and the most important three fourths at that, with the simple epithet ‘Silly!’ She was a strange child to be the daughter of Nicholas Allen and Olivia Van Tyne. For if there was any one quality in life that those two foolish young people had shared, it was that of silliness—sheer, light-headed, light-hearted, divine silliness. Of course there had never been anything very silly about Mrs. Seth Allen. The forces of heredity were marvellous to observe.

There was a second knock at the door.

‘Come in,’ said Olivia, wriggling comfortably against her pillows and curling up her aquamarine-tinted silken legs to make way for the breakfast-tray. The stewardess entered.

‘Nice morning, ma’am,’ she said. ‘No motion whatever.’ She placed the tray on the bed.

‘The equinoctials are over,’ said Olivia pleasantly. The Persian melon looked very good.

The stewardess lingered. ‘Sometimes they seem to come back, ma’am,’ she said impassively. ‘I always say the weather’s like life—calm begets storm. But I hope you have a pleasant passage, ma’am. Good morning, ma’am.’ And the stewardess was gone.

What a philosophic stewardess, thought Olivia, as she poured out her coffee! The kind of a stewardess that Bernard Shaw might have invented. Nick had been awfully funny about Bernard Shaw last night. Olivia sighed as she tasted her Persian melon. Olivia would have liked to have heard Nick and Bernard Shaw involved in an argument!

Just what had she said about Nick to little Olivia, down the years, Olivia wondered as she sipped her coffee. Nothing, thank God, very definite. That lack of definiteness, curiously enough, had been thanks to Harry. ‘You might as well let the child think as well as she can of him,’ had been Harry’s comment. And Olivia, herself, had always considered that abuse was vulgar. No—nothing very definite. Just ‘an impossible person’—something like that. Or ‘intolerable to live with.’ Or, ‘You can’t judge a man by his books, Olivia.’ Nothing more damning.

But why, why, Olivia asked herself with vain regret, as she scooped the last moist jade-green mouthfuls of Persian melon from the écru melon rind, why even so damning? Olivia searched her heart and was disgusted with what she found there. Could it be possible, she asked herself aghast, could it be possible that when you had left a man whom you would never quite get over, and when that man had added insult to injury by turning out, so unexpectedly, to be such a really extremely distinguished person, could it be possible that you could be capable of succumbing to the shameful and shameless temptation to bolster up your own point of view, to defend your own indefensible decision, by—by lying about him—or at least by suppressing the truth—by making him out worse than he was—to his own daughter, too—— Yes, it was possible. Olivia sat overwhelmed at the depths of turpitude that she had discovered in the human heart. And she felt very grateful to Harry. Harry had always been splendid about Nick. He had said only to Olivia that Nick was a selfish beast—an unspeakable cad. And he had said that only at the time when Olivia had confided to him how unutterably unhappy she was in the Greenwich Village flat. Before he had asked her to leave Nick and marry him. After Harry had asked Olivia to leave Nick and marry him, he had always seemed to prefer never to mention Nick’s name, nor to hear Olivia mention it, in any way at all.

Her breakfast being finished, Olivia pushed aside her tray. She must get up. She glanced at her wrist watch. Good gracious! It was eleven o’clock! She must get up and get dressed and go out to find little Olivia and break the news to her.

Olivia sprang out of bed and picked up her underclothes and reflected that she wouldn’t summon Maggie to turn on her tub, because Maggie was always conversational, and Olivia wanted all the time that was left her before meeting her daughter to think in! So she turned on the tub herself, and brushed her teeth, and sprinkled her bath salts, and slipped out of her pajamas, and jumped into the sweetly scented, salt, invigorating, pale-green sea water that was, she always thought, the very nicest thing about an ocean voyage.

But it was dreadful, she was reflecting, that it was eleven o’clock. She really should have told little Olivia all about everything the night before. But she hadn’t come down from the boat-deck with Nick until two o’clock in the morning and the child was, of course, asleep—and—and it had seemed silly to go into her cabin and wake her up just to say—well, what was there to say? ‘I’ve been talking to your father in the moonlight for five hours’? That was no way to have to begin that extremely delicate explanation! Just the same it wasn’t safe not to tell little Olivia immediately. It was the sort of thing that she really must learn at a mother’s knee. And it had been only the grace of God, last night, that little Olivia had been too much occupied with those silly boys at the farther end of the captain’s table to overhear all those ridiculous things that everyone had been saying about Nick to the right and left of the captain.

It was just her luck, reflected Olivia helplessly, as she stepped out of her bath, that Henrietta Parsons should be on this boat. But she would be, of course. Henrietta Parsons was always everywhere where there was anything spicy to be seen or to be heard. Henrietta Parsons was Ruth’s husband, Hendrik’s, second cousin and she was Park Avenue’s arch-disseminator of malicious gossip! She was a forty-seven-year-old spinster with, as Olivia had often charitably remarked, a face like a hatchet and an eye like a gimlet and an ear like an open barn door! She was sailing home from her cure at Carlsbad, and the moment that Olivia had entered the dining-room the evening before and had seen Henrietta sitting chattering to the captain, she had known that in six days’ time all New York would be informed of the interesting fact that she and Nick had crossed together on the Atlanta and of all the other interesting corollary facts as to how they had conducted themselves on that eventful crossing. Olivia really wouldn’t put it beyond Henrietta to radio the glad tidings ahead of the boat! Henrietta knew a news value when she saw one. She would have had a distinguished career in the world of the press.

And as if Henrietta hadn’t been enough, the moment that Olivia had sat down at the table, she had been introduced by the benevolent captain to Lady Caverley, a nice, grey-haired English lady all jet and bugles, who was sitting on his left, and to her red-faced, white-headed husband, Sir Hugh, and was immediately included in their vivacious conversation by Lady Caverley’s animated question.

‘Isn’t it interesting, Mrs. Ottendorf, that Nicholas Allen is on this boat?’

Olivia never really knew just how she had received this broadside, but she was perfectly aware, at the time, that Henrietta, who was sitting beside her, had literally jumped. Yes, jumped. And turned her sharp, smart hatchet face directly in line with her sharp, smart collarbones, to see what Olivia was going to do about it. Olivia almost blinked. For Henrietta’s thin, colourless countenance, with its brightly carmined lips, its high arched nose and its delicate twitching nostrils, was positively gleaming—gleaming like an alabaster lamp, so brightly was it illumined from within by the pure translucent flame of curiosity. Her gimlet eyes were mercilessly raking Olivia’s pretty features.

‘Very,’ said Olivia. And thought she had shown commendable presence of mind.

‘Have you seen him, Olivia?’ Henrietta had pitilessly inquired, with an innocent air of social give-and-take that would have done credit to a Pinkerton detective.

‘I’ve seen him,’ interrupted Lady Caverley, and Olivia had blessed her for the interruption. The blessing was a trifle premature, however. Lady Caverley’s eager English voice, with its curious uneven cadence, was rattling animatedly on. ‘We saw a great deal of him in London, last season. Oh, in London, last season, Nicholas Allen was very much the person to see! I like him. He’s so simple and unpretentious, and he has that confiding way with him that flatters old ladies like me into thinking he’s almost a little bit in love with them! I think my niece-in-law rather more than liked him.’ Lady Caverley paused to smile humorously at Olivia. ‘She’s a very clever young woman—and a pretty one, too—and Roderick—that’s my sister’s boy, Mrs. Ottendorf—has never been what you might call intellectual. He goes in for hunting and shooting and fishing—and flying, a bit these last years—but he doesn’t take much interest in literary young men. Guinevere’s very different. She likes to give queer parties and she likes to flutter about the lamp of genius.’ Again Lady Caverley had paused to smile humorously at Olivia. ‘Of course, she’s an experienced moth, but, really, last spring, with this young Mr. Allen——’

And where, Olivia had wondered, was the proverbial reticence of the Briton? Henrietta’s gleaming face had now turned its hatchet profile. The gimlet eyes were fastened on Lady Caverley across the table. Lady Caverley, Olivia had hopelessly reflected, was just the kind of woman designed by God and Nature to tell Henrietta Parsons the things that Henrietta liked to find out! The talk had gone on about Nick’s conquests and Nick’s genius and Nick’s charming lack of pretension. And Olivia, with one eye on her daughter, who was being rather noisy with a former Yale full-back and a returning Rhodes scholar at the farther end of the table, had never seemed to find just the moment to explain to Lady Caverley that she had once been married to Nick. In any case, she had decided bitterly, it would be a shame to deprive Henrietta of the pleasure of that explanation. Olivia knew she would make it, the moment her back was turned. But Henrietta must not be allowed to explain to little Olivia. Olivia had carefully escorted Henrietta to the card-room and had left her bending over a backgammon board with Sir Hugh, before she had gone off to keep her appointed tryst with Nick on the boat-deck.

What should she wear, Olivia wondered, emerging from her bathroom in shell-pink chiffon. She thoughtfully approached her closet door. The dark red wool crêpe—that would be just the thing—and the little red velvet béret and no jewels except her ruby engagement ring and her small diamond circle at the collar of the wool crêpe. There was something very flattering about that béret. Olivia’s attention was arrested by a knock at her door.

‘Ma?’ It was little Olivia’s firm young voice. It was the ridiculous diminutive by which little Olivia always addressed her mother. The door was flung open before Olivia could reply, and the slim, angular figure of little Olivia stood outlined against the dark of the narrow corridor. She was dressed in a pale-blue sport suit. Her little tan hat was pushed comically back, high over the parting of her straight golden hair. Her level ice-green eyes were twinkling. She looked a little warm and a trifle mussy and adorably young.

‘Gosh, it’s a swell day!’ she said. ‘I’m hot as hell. I’ve been playing deck tennis.’ Tossing her hat to the top of the dressing-table, she flung herself down on Olivia’s unmade bed and smiled cheerfully up at her mother. ‘What are you up to, old lady?’

‘I was just getting dressed,’ said Olivia meekly.

Little Olivia was wrinkling her nose.

‘You ought to throw out that rotten fruit,’ she said dispassionately. It was always with just some such dispassionate comment that little Olivia took command of her mother’s life.

‘I was going to,’ said Olivia meekly.

‘Here—give it to me. I’ll pitch it out in the corridor.’

‘No,’ said Olivia. She was thinking of Nick and the tangerines.

‘Why not?’ said little Olivia argumentatively.

‘Because I don’t want you to!’ said Olivia, with a hint of irritation in her harassed voice.

‘It smells like a dago’s pushcart,’ said little Olivia dispassionately.

‘I’m going to give it to the steward,’ said Olivia.

‘He’ll get it if I put it in the corridor,’ said little Olivia.

Really, the literal and logical qualities of little Olivia’s mind were sometimes trying to live with. Olivia opened her closet door.

‘He’ll get it if I put it in the corridor,’ repeated little Olivia.

‘I don’t—want—you—to—put—it—in—the—corridor!’ said Olivia. The irritation in her harassed voice was, by this time, more than a hint.

‘Oh—very well,’ said little Olivia amiably. But the level ice-green eyes held their familiar calm, dispassionate glint of disapproval. ‘What are you going to do today?’

This was, of course, the opening. Clutching the red crêpe frock, Olivia took a long breath. She swallowed twice. She tried to imagine herself saying, ‘My dear, there is something we must both do. I haven’t told you before, Olivia, but your father is on this boat——’ The words died down, even in her imagination. Olivia turned her back on the opening and on her daughter. She was thankful to hide her face as she slipped into her gown.

‘Oh—nothing much,’ she said vaguely.

There was a little pause.

‘Don’t let Miss Parsons get you,’ smiled little Olivia.

Olivia turned sharply, béret in hand, to stare at her daughter. ‘Did she—did she get you?’ she faltered.

‘Me?’ laughed little Olivia. ‘Don’t worry. She tried, after breakfast, but I was too agile for her!’

Olivia turned to her mirror to adjust the béret. Having let the opening pass, she must begin, of course, without the opening. Little Olivia rose to her feet.

‘I like you better in a hat with a brim,’ she said.

There was another little pause.

‘You’re all right, then?’ asked little Olivia.

‘All right?’ questioned Olivia.

‘Yes,’ said little Olivia, a trifle impatiently. ‘I thought I’d just come down to see.’

‘Oh—I’m all right,’ said Olivia.

‘Got anything good to read?’ inquired little Olivia kindly.

‘Oh—yes,’ said Olivia.

‘Well, toss me my lid,’ said little Olivia. ‘I’m going up on the bridge. The captain said he’d let me steer the boat. Sure you don’t want me to throw out that fruit?’

Little Olivia ought to be good at steering the boat, reflected Olivia. Little Olivia always wanted to steer all the boats that she was ever in! She picked up the little tan hat very thoughtfully. She walked slowly over to her daughter.

‘Olivia——’ she said very bravely.

‘What?’ said little Olivia. There was a faint gleam of impatience, now, in the level ice-green eyes.

‘Nothing,’ said Olivia. ‘Here’s your hat.’

She was a coward, of course. She was an arrant coward. Olivia was still thinking that, ten minutes later, when she emerged from her cabin and walked down the narrow corridor and up the great white-and-gold staircase and through the little companionway to the promenade-deck. Nick would be expecting her to bring little Olivia with her to their tryst by the lifeboats. He would be expecting little Olivia to have fallen an eager victim to filial piety. He——

Olivia blinked a little as she emerged through the open door of the companionway into the dazzling world of light and colour commanded by the promenade-deck. It was a glorious, sunny day. The glassy sea, running in gentle swells, was gleaming in the glare of the high noon sun. The sky was cloudless and very blue at the zenith. It had just the glaze of a porcelain bowl. A blue porcelain bowl, delicately fading into a China-white rim, set upside down on the waste of glassy water. The sun was hot, but the breeze was cool, and the damp sea air still held its scent of brine for Olivia’s land-accustomed nostrils. She took a great breath of the salt, invigorating breeze.

If only, she was thinking, little Olivia weren’t on this boat! If only Henrietta Parsons weren’t on it! If only she could have those five brief days alone with Nick—to laugh and talk and—yes—be just a trifle divinely, but harmlessly, silly with him, with no alien eye to criticize or comment on her conduct! Those five brief days alone with Nick, Olivia was thinking, would quite set her up for the winter that would follow them. They would make her realize that, though she was almost forty and little Olivia was ‘coming out,’ there was still something attractive and amusing and young about her! They would delude her into thinking for a moment that life was not over at thirty-nine—though of course Olivia really knew that it was—the kind of life that she found amusing, at least.

But now she must go up to the boat-deck and meet Nick, who must have been waiting there for more than an hour, and try to invent some excuse for her cowardice and—— Just then Olivia turned the corner of the promenade-deck at the stern of the boat and the first person she saw was Nick—Nick charmingly and casually dressed in a grey tweed suit with a light blue tie that brought out the colour in his bright New England eyes, and his white hair ruffled from the salt sea breeze and his smiling sunburned face bent admiringly on a little semi-circle of ladies, who had quite backed him up against the rail of the boat and were obviously captivated by his amused and amusing twinkle.

Henrietta was one of them, of course. Henrietta, looking incredibly smart and slim in a black covert-cloth suit and a black skull cap, pushed fashionably back from her high, white forehead, outlining her delicate hatchet face with the felicity of line and contour of some early Florentine canvas. Henrietta, Olivia regretfully admitted, looked just as much like a cameo as she did like a hatchet, and even more like some long dead, high-born lady who had made the pulse of a Renaissance painter beat a little faster.

Lady Caverley was standing beside her, bunched up in heather-coloured British tweeds, a cane in her hand and a cigarette in her mouth, and a long mauve complexion veil, floating ridiculously off from the tan grouse that was flattened against the crown of her heather-coloured tweed hat. English women were amazing, reflected Olivia. Bunched up and ridiculous in those weather-beaten clothes, grey-haired and sixty, if a day, there was an air of pleasant, commanding authority about Lady Caverley, an atmosphere of genial, quite-taken-for-granted aristocracy, that made the finely etched distinction of Henrietta Parsons look brittle and spurious and shoddy—just a matter of dressmakers and complexion salons.

Nick was also attended by three unknown graces in assorted Paris costumes. One of them was wearing one of the three new mink coats that Olivia had observed yesterday on the promenade-deck and it wasn’t as good as hers, and the day was much too warm for a mink coat, and the woman looked rather common, Olivia thought, with her blue-black hair and her brutally rouged lips and her violent black eyes fastened so naïvely on Nick’s smiling sunburned countenance.

Olivia thought all this before she realized that, of course, she must turn in her tracks and go up to the boat-deck alone and wait there until Nick could extricate himself from this bevy of admiring femininity. She certainly didn’t feel equal to sustaining a conversation with Nick on the threshold of the open barn door that was the ear of Henrietta Parsons. Nick wouldn’t feel equal to it either. Just then he caught her eye.

‘Hello, Livvy!’ he called cheerfully, and the five ladies moved to stare at the stricken Olivia, just turning in her tracks to slip away unobserved. ‘I was wondering where you were.’

‘Good morning,’ said Olivia non-committally. And she didn’t take a single step nearer Nick. He brushed past the woman in the new mink coat, however, and strode confidently over to her.

‘You look as fresh as a daisy,’ he said as he took her hand. ‘I was shocked last night when I got down to my cabin and realized how long I’d kept you up.’

Over his ruffled white head Olivia could see Henrietta Parsons recording an interesting news value on the tablets of memory.

‘Oh, it wasn’t very late,’ she said calmly.

‘It was the moon,’ continued Nick. ‘I’m sure it must have been the moon. I’ve always been susceptible to moons,’ he went on lightly, as he turned back to the bevy. ‘Lady Caverley, do you know Mrs. Ottendorf?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Lady Caverley cordially. ‘I met Mrs. Ottendorf last night at dinner.’ Her tone was cordial and her eyes were kindly, but they were both just a shade curious. Olivia knew from that shade of curiosity that Henrietta had done more than justice to her situation in the card-room, the evening before. God knew what the woman might have said! She met the kindly old eyes of Lady Caverley a trifle apologetically. She experienced a curious desire to take Lady Caverley by the arm and lead her away from that gaping semi-circle and explain to her in detail just why she had found it necessary to divorce Nick—explain to her that she hadn’t been the fool that she looked, for he really had been maddening——

‘Mrs. Ottendorf,’ Nick was continuing conventionally, ‘Mrs. Spencer, Mrs. Levotti, and Miss Hathaway.’

Mrs. Spencer was just a lion-hunter, a lion-hearted, middle-aged lion-hunter, glowing with excitement, but perhaps a little gun-shy in the presence of big game. Mrs. Levotti, in the new mink coat, looked precisely like Olivia’s idea of a gunman’s lady or a bootlegger’s bride—her pearls were as big as robins’ eggs, and Olivia was sure she could smell whiskey on them. But Miss Hathaway was charming. Miss Hathaway couldn’t be a day over twenty-seven, and she was exquisitely dressed in a dove-grey suit and her wide grey eyes were gazing up at Nick as if she were mesmerized, as if she couldn’t quite believe he was true——

‘How do you do?’ said Olivia.

‘Henrietta, you know,’ Nick was saying, with possibly a hint of irony in his conventional voice. That hint of irony seemed suddenly to Olivia to bring her and Nick much nearer together. It built a little wall around them, over which they might muse and mock at a laughable world. Behind that wall with Nick, Olivia no longer experienced that curious desire to take Lady Caverley by the arm and confide in her. Behind that wall with Nick, Olivia knew that Nick thought that Lady Caverley was a dear old thing and Mrs. Spencer was ridiculous and Mrs. Levotti terrible and Henrietta outrageous. Behind that wall, even the mesmerized stare of Miss Hathaway’s wide grey eyes didn’t really matter. For Nick must realize that mesmerized girls were only absurd——

‘Yes, I know Henrietta,’ Olivia was smiling. And the hint of irony in her own voice built just a little higher the wall that shut Nick and Olivia away from a laughable world. Elated by her intangible sense of intimacy, she twinkled serenely at him.

Just then she heard a great gay shout of young masculine laughter. Above it rose little Olivia’s voice.

‘Absolutely!’ she was crying. ‘I’m not kidding you!’

And then around the corner of the promenade-deck, outlined against the vast gold-and-blue back-drop of sun and sea and sky, came three rollicking young figures, and Olivia turned to see little Olivia, capering arm in arm with the former Yale full-back and the returning Rhodes scholar—little Olivia bent double with laughter—amused by and amusing the two boisterous young men—little Olivia crashing into Nick’s life in an hilarious burst of girlish gaiety, looking her brightest, looking her best, looking her youngest and most charming and care-free, the level ice-green eyes holding only the glint of merriment and audacity.

‘Hello, Ma!’ she cried, stopping abruptly. Her voice was still ringing with laughter.

Olivia stared at her dumbly. Olivia felt her brain was paralyzed. This was too much. This was beyond everything. She would have to turn—she would have to turn that minute—and, in front of that gaping semi-circle, she would have to introduce Nick to his long-lost daughter. How did you introduce a divorced husband to a long-lost daughter in front of a gaping semi-circle? Did you say, ‘Olivia, this is your father’? Or did you say, ‘Nick, this is Olivia’? Or did you say, ‘Olivia, I want you to know Mr. Nicholas Allen whose books you have always admired’?

As she opened her mouth to say she knew not what, Olivia heard a determined step behind her. She heard also Henrietta’s quick, tremulous gasp. It was a breathless gasp—an excited gasp—the kind of gasp that an audience makes in a moment of sudden, dramatic suspense at the crisis of a good melodrama. Then Nick brushed by her. In an instant he had reached little Olivia’s side. He was holding both little Olivia’s hands in his own.

‘Well—let—me—look at you!’ he was saying delightedly. Then, ‘So you’re little Olivia! Oh, Livvy! She’s charming! She’s utterly charming!’ He had slipped his arm confidingly, by this time, through the crook of little Olivia’s elbow. He had turned and was leading her away from the startled Yale full-back and the astonished Rhodes scholar. ‘Come and talk to us, my dear. You don’t look at all like your mother. You look like my mother, however. She looks exactly like Mother, doesn’t she, Livvy?’

Little Olivia was staring at him exactly as if he were a maniac. For little Olivia, Olivia fleetingly reflected, would stare at even a maniac with nothing more emotional than a glint of calm, dispassionate disapproval. She threw a questioning glance at her mother. Not a gleam of suspicion illumined her astonishment.

‘Who is this lunatic?’ her level gaze said clearly.

Nick, beaming happily down at the two Olivias, seemed suddenly to become conscious of his startled audience. Meeting Lady Caverley’s eyes, he grinned like a delighted boy, and led his daughter confidingly up to her.

‘Lady Caverley,’ he said—and his voice was actually ringing with paternal pride—‘have you met Mrs. Ottendorf’s daughter, Olivia Allen?’

In spite of her cordiality and her kindness, not even Lady Caverley, for an instant, seemed able to rise to this occasion. She smiled, a trifle nervously. And suddenly confronting the bewildered eyes of the semi-circle—for even Henrietta, by this time, was looking a bit bewildered—Nick seemed, himself, to lose, for the first time, his feeling of happy confidence. There was something lacking, he obviously felt, in his proud, paternal introduction. A link that was missing. A knot that was untied. ‘Mrs. Ottendorf’s daughter,’ he repeated a trifle confusedly—‘and mine.’

In the sensation that followed this explicit statement, the words she had been seeking came suddenly to Olivia. They were simple words and very few in number. They had nothing to do with her own embarrassment and vexation. They arose in a frantic desire to help poor stupefied little Olivia. Why hadn’t they occurred to her before?

‘Olivia, darling—this is Nicholas Allen.’

The child pulled quickly away from Nick’s restraining hand. She took a sudden step backward, still staring at her father. Her face was blank with astonishment and just a little shaken with shock, Olivia thought. Then slowly, like a returning tide, her familiar expression, that expression that was born of her balance and her judgment and her saving sense of comedy, reanimated the delicate contour of her sensitive New England features.

‘Oh—’ said little Olivia. Then politely extending her right hand, like a well-bred little girl at her mother’s tea-table, ‘How do you do?’

Nick looked distinctly taken aback by this conventional utterance. He took the slim right hand, however, and held it in his own, as he answered solemnly,

‘I do very well, thank you.’ Then, with a cheerful grin, ‘How do you think I do—as a father, I mean?’ Again he seemed suddenly to become conscious of his appreciative audience. ‘But that’s a question, little Olivia, that you really should not be required to answer save in the sanctity of the family circle. Let’s take a walk, my child, let’s take a walk with your mother, and get to know each other a trifle better.’

And then somehow, all in a moment, Nick’s right hand was slipped through Olivia’s elbow and his left was slipped through his daughter’s, and he was leading them both off gaily down the deck away from the still startled, blank faces of Lady Caverley and Henrietta Parsons and Mrs. Spencer and Mrs. Levotti and Miss Hathaway and the former Yale full-back and the returning Rhodes scholar.

‘God! What a scene!’ he was remarking lightly. ‘My child, I apologize! But you told me you’d tell her, Livvy! You told me you’d tell her!’

‘I tried to tell her,’ protested Olivia lamely.

‘Well, she knows now,’ remarked Nick amiably. ‘But that was a bad moment. It was a bad moment,’ he chuckled reminiscently; ‘but I’ll never forget Henrietta Parsons’s face. I must put Henrietta in a book some day. Though no one would really believe she was true! Well, girls,’ he continued lightly, ‘where do we go from here? I want to find what’s known as a sheltered nook, where I can really get to know my daughter. How about the boat-deck, Livvy?’

And almost immediately they were scampering up a little iron staircase—up a little iron staircase to the world of space and light and sunshine that was roofed by the porcelain bowl. Nick dragged three steamer chairs into the shelter that the bridge afforded. Olivia sat down and her daughter sat down, and Nick pulled his steamer chair a little nearer the one that the child had appropriated and leaned over to pat little Olivia’s hand.

‘Now we’re all set,’ he smiled reassuringly. ‘I want to hear the story of my daughter’s life.’

Little Olivia was gazing rather thoughtfully at him.

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ she said.

‘Nothing to tell!’ cried Nick reproachfully. ‘Nothing to tell about how a little girl grew up from an urchin in pigtails to the princess in a fairy story! You are like the princess in a fairy story, little Olivia. You’re exactly like the princess with hair as yellow as gold and lips as red as blood and skin as white as milk. A little icy princess from an Icelandic saga——’ Nick broke off abruptly. ‘How did you change into that, little Olivia, in a Lake Shore Drive apartment in Chicago, Illinois?’ For last night in the moonlight Olivia had told Nick quite a little about what her life in Chicago was like.

‘Oh—I just grew up,’ said little Olivia.

‘She—just—grew up,’ smiled Nick at Olivia. ‘That’s the recurrent miracle, isn’t it, Livvy? Shelley said it.’ And Nick began softly to croon.

And Wordsworth said something else:

Do you know the Valedictory Sonnet to the River Duddon, little Olivia? It’s a great poem.

‘We had to read it in school,’ said little Olivia. ‘I had to learn it at Foxcroft.’

The amused and amusing twinkle had returned to Nick’s bright blue New England eyes. He was beaming at little Olivia with his sudden, candid smile.

‘Well, tell it your own way,’ he said brightly. ‘What have you been doing for the last ten years?’

‘Oh—’ said little Olivia vaguely. ‘I’ve just been living with Mother and Hunny.’

‘Honey?’ queried Nick, with a questioning glance at Olivia.

‘She—she means Harry,’ faltered Olivia lamely.

‘Oh—’ said Nick in his turn. He seemed absurdly taken back. ‘Does she—does she call Harry—er—Honey?’

‘Hunny,’ explained little Olivia sweetly. ‘H-u-double-n-y. It’s long for Hun, you know. For when Grandfather Van Tyne gets irritated——’ She paused with a sudden practical glance at her father. ‘Do you know what Grandfather Van Tyne’s like when he’s irritated?’

Nick’s face was a triumph of gravity.

‘Yes,’ he said solemnly. ‘I know what Grandfather Van Tyne’s like when he’s irritated.’

‘Well, when he’s irritated at the Ottendorfs,’ continued little Olivia cheerfully, ‘he always calls them Huns. And it’s really terribly funny, because I don’t know what Grandfather Van Tyne ever did to win the war—but Hunny was one of the first men to enlist in the first Officers’ Training Camp at Fort Sheridan, and he was eight months in the trenches, and he got a shred of shrapnel in his knee, and he spent a year in a Frog hospital after the armistice. And the very day war was declared, Grandfather Ottendorf took the Kaiser’s picture off his desk, and Grandmother Ottendorf stopped cross-stitching a motto she was making for a German bazaar for the war sufferers. It said “Deutschland über Alles,” and she stopped just where she was, right in the middle of the “über”! She’s got it still, and I’ve often seen it——’ She broke off suddenly and looked curiously at her father. ‘What did you do during the war?’

Olivia flinched. She looked quickly over at Nick. He was smiling very cheerfully, however.

‘Me?’ he said lightly. ‘If my memory doesn’t fail me, I wrote a serial called “Glad Rags” for the Smart Set. And then I did a series of “True Stories of Girls Who Had Gone Wrong” for one of Mr. Hearst’s magazines. And then I tossed off “The Confessions of a Gunman.” And after that, I recall, I wrote “The Autobiography of a Slacker.” ’ He broke off abruptly. ‘The pen is mightier than the sword, little Olivia. You must never be seduced by brass buttons! And “The Autobiography of a Slacker” was damn good!’

Little Olivia was looking at her father. He was still smiling cheerfully. Little Olivia, however, did not return his smile. Her level ice-green eyes held that familiar glint of calm, dispassionate disapproval. Little Olivia, Olivia was miserably thinking, could not be expected to remember that war had been declared the very week before her fifth birthday. And she could not be expected to remember the months that had followed that declaration in the Greenwich Village flat. She could not remember her moody, irresolute father, pacing up and down in the little crowded living-room. Nor the bills. Nor the manuscripts. Nor her Aunt Ruth’s ill-timed visits to tell how much her Uncle Hendriks liked the life at Plattsburg. Nor her Grandfather Van Tyne’s curious silence, considering his apoplectic fury against the Huns, in all family discussion as to just how Olivia and little Olivia were to be supported if Nick went to war.

‘You’re over age,’ old Peter Van Tyne had said briefly to his moody, irresolute son-in-law.

‘I’m over age one year,’ Nick had answered with equal brevity. And old Peter Van Tyne had preserved his curious silence.

So Nick had stopped pacing up and down in the little crowded living-room and had sat down at his typewriter and had gone on writing ‘Glad Rags’ for the Smart Set. And twelve months later, when the second call was made for the draft, and Nick was no longer one year over age, but two years under it, he had gone to the Draft Board and explained that he was the sole and essential support of his wife and daughter. And while he was finishing ‘True Stories of Girls Who Had Gone Wrong,’ the editors and publishers and other writers whom he knew had drifted off, one by one, to the training camps. And when he was beginning ‘The Confessions of a Gunman,’ a few of them had sailed for the front. And not very long after ‘The Autobiography of a Slacker’ was published in the Atlantic, they had all sailed home again. For peace was declared, and the world was made safe for democracy, and all of them had lived to continue to support their wives and daughters—if they had any—and the talk grew much less patriotic and a great deal more disillusioned when the casual editor or publisher or other writer came to dinner with Nick in the Greenwich Village flat.

And soon after that Nick read Masefield’s ‘Gallipoli’ and a lot of disenchanted stories that his friends were turning out, and the talk that Olivia heard about her dinner-table became just the same old talk about writers and writing—entertaining enough, but not very practical and really awfully egocentric—reaching its climax in Nick’s passionate exclamation, one evening, as he and Olivia sat alone before the fire in the little crowded living-room, reading aloud from the newly published War Journal of a contemporary, ‘God! What a war book I could have written!’ And Nick had tossed the half-finished War Journal into the crackling flames in an inexplicable burst of irritation and seemed entirely unconscious of the fact that he had just uttered quite the most egocentric statement that Olivia had ever heard him make!

Little Olivia couldn’t be expected to remember all that, of course, but why had Olivia never told her about it? Why had Olivia never explained to her daughter, as a really clever biographer should, that there were two sides to every question? If she had, perhaps little Olivia wouldn’t be looking at poor old Nick with quite that level gleam of dispassionate disapproval. And perhaps this really—really rather difficult interview would have turned out to be the simply delightful and delightfully simple family reunion that Nick was trying so hard to make it.

He was trying hard. He was trying so hard and so good-humouredly that Olivia really wondered whether he had any conception of the thoughts that were racing behind the level ice-green eyes of the little icy princess. Olivia was suddenly overcome, once more, with her sense of pity for the childlike artlessness of men. Just then she heard the notes of the trumpet announcing the second call for luncheon. Shrill, martial notes, piercing the golden air. She rose promptly to her feet. She was thankful to have this first awkward interview over. Nick, however, stood up rather reluctantly.

‘We’ve just begun,’ he said, and his candid smile was enveloping little Olivia. ‘We’ve ten long years to live through together and just four days left to cover the ground!’

Henrietta was lying in wait for them at the foot of the little iron staircase. She looked almost benevolent.

‘I’ve just been arranging a seat for you at the captain’s table,’ she said kindly to Nick. ‘He threw out the third officer.’

Incredibly, Nick looked grateful. He looked as if he really thought that Henrietta had done that out of the kindness of her heart. The thought of the artlessness of men struck Olivia again with that little pang of pity. Even eighteen-year-old little Olivia was regarding Henrietta with an expression of complete contempt. Fortified by the armour of intuition that was the strength of the weaker sex, even eighteen-year-old little Olivia knew quite as well as her mother that Henrietta had provided that seat for Nick at the captain’s table, in just the same spirit of revelry with which she would have arranged for music with her meals.

CHAPTER III
THURSDAY

Married—Olivia reflected. That was how she felt. Nothing more disturbing. Nothing more romantic. Still, it was disturbing and romantic enough, after all the years, to feel merely married—to Nick! It was the sight of his face across the captain’s dinner-table that did it to her. Nick’s smiling, sunburned face, with its eager eyes, its salient nose, its neat clean jaw-line, rising above the conventional austerity of black broadcloth dinner-jacket and white linen shirt-front. He tied his bow tie exactly as he always had—a little too tight and slightly twisted to the left. Nick never allowed himself quite enough time in which to dress for dinner. He was always in a hurry when he came to his tie.

Yes—it was Nick’s face that did it to her. Nick’s face, seen across a dinner-table, lit up with its candid smile, holding two ladies, as always, enthralled by its clever, concentrated charm. Across how many dinner-tables, Olivia wondered, had she seen Nick’s face looking just like that? Across how many dinner-tables had she seen the heads of two captivated women turned eagerly toward it, two women unconsciously preening and pluming themselves for Nick’s delectation, two women quite lifted out of themselves by the mere intoxicating presence of Nick? Dear old Nick—who was quite lifted out of himself, too, but not by the intoxicating presence of the ladies! Oh, dear, no! With a wife’s wisdom, Olivia knew that Nick was lifted out of himself by the pure pleasure that he had in his own conversational performance! But the ladies never realized that. They were spared disillusion by the depths of their own infatuation.

But she mustn’t sit staring at him—she really mustn’t. Not with Henrietta Parsons on his left hand! Olivia deliberately allowed her eyes to wander down the length of the captain’s table. On this third night out it had taken on a very festal air. The captain’s guests no longer eyed each other warily, appraisingly, as unknown and potentially unattractive travelling companions. They had become friends. Their conversation had grown jocular, intimate, even uproarious. In the interests of festivity, they had changed their appointed places at his long table. Family groups were broken up. Olivia still sat at the captain’s right, but on her other hand was Sir Hugh, and across the narrow damasked board was Nick, on the left of Lady Caverley and on the right of Henrietta. Yesterday at luncheon Nick had laughingly insisted that his daughter should be moved up above the salt, where he could talk to her more easily. So beyond Henrietta the returning Rhodes scholar—whose name, Olivia had learned by this time, was Binky—and the former Yale full-back—whose name, Olivia understood, was Spuds—were competing for the child’s favour. Between them little Olivia, looking delightfully young and slender and awkward in pale-green taffeta, was leaning back in her chair, graciously allowing the two young men to amuse her, raising her white eyelids, from time to time, to flash an ice-green glance of appreciation at the sallies of one or the other of them. The dapper second officer at the foot of the table was watching her in discreet admiration. Olivia’s smile of amusement faded into a sigh of resignation. She felt the shelf hanging heavy over her head.

The smile of amusement returned, however, as her eyes wandered back to the face of Henrietta Parsons. Henrietta was gazing very animatedly at Nick. ‘Over the watch-dog a watch has been set,’ thought Olivia, as she noted that Henrietta’s gimlet eye had softened and brightened and her high cheek-bones showed a faint tinge of colour, and the finely etched distinction of her hatchet profile had relaxed a trifle, blurred by an incongruous expression of excited coquetry. It was rather reassuring, Olivia reflected, to discover that Henrietta was human. Lady Caverley was looking rather flushed and flattered, too, as well as highly amused. Yet Nick was only telling them about his adventures that summer with the American expatriates in the literary colony in Paris. He was putting up a very good performance, however.

Sir Hugh and the captain were discussing the dole, across Olivia’s gracefully inclined and outwardly attentive figure. Sir Hugh seemed to have a great deal to say about it, and Olivia periodically rewarded him with a sympathetic smile. Her own views on the subject, however, were negligible, in fact practically non-existent, so she felt free to listen surreptitiously to Nick. That was like old times, too. At how many dinner-tables had Olivia periodically rewarded a gentleman with a sympathetic smile, while covertly straining her ears to discover what the women on both sides of Nick were laughing about? Nick was certainly the most unfailingly entertaining man that she had ever met, Olivia reflected. Throughout ten years of matrimony he had held his own wife’s involuntary, admiring, though often irritated, attention at every party they had ever attended. At least, until that eventful one on Park Avenue where they had met Harry.

‘They’ had met Harry! Olivia sighed rather wistfully, as she realized how easily she had fallen back into the old conjugal plural. The conjugal plural was a sure indication of a united married life. The outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace. As long as you thought of yourself as ‘we,’ things were going smoothly enough. That eventful Park Avenue dinner-party had really marked the line of demarcation in Olivia’s thoughts, between the safe first-person plural and the perilous first-person singular of the personal pronoun. After it, she had thought and acted as ‘I.’

Even at that Park Avenue dinner-party, of course, ‘they’ hadn’t met Harry. Olivia had met him. Olivia had met him and laughed at him and liked him. But he hadn’t even impinged ever so slightly on the airy outer fringe of Nick’s consciousness until several weeks later. It was over the teacups in the little crowded living-room of the Greenwich Village flat that Nick had really become conscious of Harry for the very first time. Olivia still recalled Nick’s rather astonished entrance, after a day in his studio, on the intimate little scene that was staged before her open coal fire. She had been telling Harry—rather archly, she feared now in retrospect—that she had truly made the sponge cake with her very own hands, when she heard Nick’s latchkey in the front door.

He had entered and had been astonished, and had promptly forgotten his astonishment in saying, standing between them on the hearthrug with his back to the glowing coals, ‘I’ve finished the third chapter, Livvy, and it’s a knock-out. I haven’t had any lunch.’

And then he had sat down and had drunk three cups of tea and eaten all the rest of the sponge cake and what was left of the bread and butter, while he told them, in that eager, egocentric way he sometimes had, just what he was going to do with the fourth chapter. He had not paid any attention at all to Harry. And Harry had hardly spoken, though Olivia had thought that he was paying a great deal of attention to Nick. Not listening, really, to what he was saying, but somehow observing him and observing Olivia, too, and observing that she was not listening either. Olivia could remember just how Harry’s gaze had wandered rather wistfully around the little crowded living-room, taking in the books and the manuscripts and the shabby, inadequate furniture, and little Olivia’s doll’s house in the corner by the window, and the plate of home-made sponge cake that Nick had perched on the arm of his easy-chair. Harry had really seemed shocked, as he watched Nick devouring that sponge cake! When Olivia had confided to him, a few minutes earlier, that she had truly made it herself, Harry had looked as if he thought that, under those circumstances, it was far too precious to be eaten. Rather as if he’d like to take a piece of it home with him and press it in the family Bible, Olivia had fantastically fancied!

Olivia still remembered, too, Nick’s indifferent comment, when Harry had finally taken his awkward, belated departure, ‘Where’d you pick up that fathead?’ And her own sense of astonishment that the man who had been occupying the foreground of her thoughts for three whole weeks hadn’t even impressed his personality on Nick sufficiently to be remembered. That very moment, staring up at him from her seat behind her ravished tea-table, Olivia had ceased to feel married to Nick—married, at least, in the secure, united sense that she, absurdly enough, felt married to him now! Nick’s indifferent comment had been a knife—a cruel, impersonal knife that had slashed down on the three of them and cut them definitely into one—and two. Nick was on one side of the knife and she and Harry were irrevocably on the other. She hadn’t replied, she remembered. She had only wanted to shield Harry by silence from Nick’s further contemptuous, casual comment.

Yet now, ten years later, strangely enough, she only wished that she could consider it decent to discuss poor Harry with Nick in complete detail. She couldn’t consider it decent, of course, for it simply wouldn’t be! You didn’t discuss your husband with any other living person. She had done that once before, and look what it had led to! Nevertheless, Olivia knew that Nick would prove very sympathetic and understanding in the course of that forbidden discussion, and that, curiously enough, his comment would no longer be either contemptuous or casual. Nick would take a very sweet and serious and helpful interest, now, in her perplexed state of mind over Harry. Just the same kind of interest, Olivia admitted in tardy justice, that Harry had taken, ten years ago, in her perplexed state of mind over Nick. She had certainly let Nick down to Harry! What cads women were, Olivia thought suddenly, in a little flush of shame. They always wanted to spill the beans. Men never did. They had the gift of silence.

Lady Caverley was chuckling comfortably over Nick’s latest pleasantry. Henrietta was bestowing upon him a smile that bore no resemblance whatever to the habitual frosty contraction of her carmined lips. But Olivia still had, funnily enough, that secure conjugal sense that Nick was her property.

It must be the familiar sight of his face across a dinner-table that had given her that sense of possession, because, at other moments during the last thirty-two hours on board the Atlanta, Olivia hadn’t felt that way about Nick at all. Sometimes, indeed, she had felt curiously detached and remote from him. Just one of the bevy of admiring femininity who found him delightful. She knew, of course, that Nick really wasn’t in the slightest degree interested in any of the silly women who had sprung up all over the boat to pay him extravagant compliments, but, nevertheless, whenever Olivia had joined their appreciative semi-circle, she had had a curious feeling that she, who had once been Mrs. Nicholas Allen, was now reduced to the rank and file. She had kept away from that semi-circle whenever she could, but Henrietta had continually beckoned her into it, and Nick had always seemed delighted to find her there. He had invariably welcomed her with a word or a glance—some flash of intensive intimacy. But a flash of intensive intimacy that had nothing secure or conjugal about it.

When she had eluded the semi-circle, Nick had usually managed to escape from it. And when they were alone together, Olivia no longer felt reduced to the rank and file. Her sensations, however, were not those of Mrs. Nicholas Allen. There was nothing about them either conjugal or secure. On the contrary, they had been quite deliciously exciting and uncertain, yet somehow subtly confident. They had been very much the sensations, indeed, of the soft, silly, wistful, idealistic young creature before she had run off with him—before she had even quite made up her mind to do so. Last night, for example, when, absorbed in the fun of tossing the tangerines to the children, they had not heard the bugle announcing the second call for dinner and had shared a club steak and a bottle of ale in the grill, Olivia, while wondering uneasily what little Olivia might be thinking, had felt ridiculously like the fluttered, flustered girl of twenty years ago, who had slipped out of old Peter Van Tyne’s front door, with a lie on her lips as to where she was dining, to meet Nicholas Allen at some inconspicuous restaurant—some Purple Parrot or Green Door in the depths of the Village—to tell him once more that there could never be anything between them because her father would never listen to him and he was a very determined person and——

But now, in the familiar, formal frame of a dinner-party, she certainly felt all the old marital sense of security. Perhaps, Olivia whimsically reflected, it was only because he was ignoring her so cheerfully! Whatever the reason, she felt tacitly near—and, yes, dear—to Nick. And when you stopped to think about it, that was, after all, a very natural feeling. For wasn’t a divorced husband merely a new and—and peculiarly intimate kind of relation? Wasn’t he bound to you by ties of shared experience that were quite as strong as many ties of blood?

But what if Harry were sitting across that dinner-table, too? The startling thought bounced abruptly into Olivia’s mind. She had had ten years of watching Harry’s face across dinner-tables—Harry’s round, amiably Teutonic face, with the blond hair growing just a little thin above the temples and the plump cheeks growing just a little heavy above the jaw. Ten years of watching Harry’s round face grow blank as an empty plate, as Harry deliberately considered what he could think of to say next, while the woman on one side of him turned, definitely, a naked, indifferent shoulder and the woman on the other toyed pensively with the stem of her wine-glass or nibbled a meditative olive in silence.

God knew Olivia had always felt married to Harry on those occasions! She had felt acutely that absurd sense of responsibility—that ridiculous extension of the ego to the person and peculiarities of another human being—that was the essential characteristic of the united married state. At her own parties, at such psychological moments, Olivia had always thrown out the life-line. She had turned the drift of conversation, stopping, if necessary, in the middle of a sentence or the middle of the soup, to turn her head, with the heads of all the dinner-party turning dutifully after her—like a field of ripe grain, Olivia often thought, bowing obediently to the whim of the prevailing breeze—so that the woman on one side of Harry could stop nibbling that meditative olive and the woman on the other would have to turn that naked, indifferent shoulder, brightly pretending it was no longer indifferent, and say something pleasant and provocative to dear, dull Harry—something sufficiently provocative, God send, for him to answer it at length!

Yes, Olivia reflected, if Harry were seated across the captain’s dinner-table, she would certainly feel married to two men at once! And that would be an extremely confusing, not to say immoral, feeling. Olivia wasn’t at all sure that she would have been able to cope with it, and she felt very grateful for the uncertain condition of the falling market, which had made Harry feel that his presence in the brokerage office in Chicago was absolutely essential and that a trip to Europe that season with his wife and stepdaughter was quite out of the question.

‘Oh—that will be delightful!’ said Lady Caverley suddenly. She was smiling across the table at Olivia as she spoke.

‘What will be delightful?’ inquired Sir Hugh, recalled from his masterly condemnation of the dole by his wife’s assertive statement. Lady Caverley was still smiling at Olivia.

‘Nick tells me that you and little Olivia are coming to London next season. That you are both to be presented.’

Little Olivia must have told Nick that, Olivia reflected. Little Olivia must have told Nick a great many things in the hours that they had spent together that morning, exploring the Atlanta. They had exhausted her resources from stokehole to wireless station.

‘We hope to come,’ said Olivia vaguely. Somehow she scented trouble in the air.

‘Olivia knows Dawes,’ said Henrietta sweetly. ‘It’s the era for presentations from the corn belt.’

‘We like him so much,’ said Lady Caverley conventionally. Then continued more animatedly, ‘Nick says he’s coming, too.’

‘Nick’s coming, too?’ echoed Olivia in surprise.

‘Of course,’ put in Nick decisively. ‘Do you think I’d miss a chance to see you two Olivias in tiara and feathers?’

‘So he’s going to take a holiday,’ pursued Lady Caverley, ‘and a little week-end cottage near London——’

‘Where I can entertain my daughter and the more eligible sons of the richer dukes,’ put in Nick delightfully.

‘Little Olivia will like that,’ said Henrietta sweetly.

But the child did not take up the challenge. She merely turned her level ice-green eyes from those of the former Yale full-back to her father’s smiling face. How much of the conversation had she heard, Olivia wondered.

‘You’ll need an old lady to chaperon her!’ cried Lady Caverley delightedly.

‘I’ll need an old lady to chaperon her mother,’ grinned Nick. ‘But I can’t say that I think you answer that description! You must come, though, Lady Caverley, with Sir Hugh, and give me advice on playing the heavy father——’

‘And you must come down to our place in the country,’ smiled Lady Caverley hospitably. ‘I hope you’ll bring your daughter down for a week-end, Mrs. Ottendorf. It’s an old place and a very quiet one. We don’t talk about much but dogs and horses, I’m afraid. Except when Nick’s there. Then we discuss the universe. But he will be there, of course. And we’ll fill the house with young people——’ She turned kindly toward little Olivia. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, my dear?’

‘Yes, I would,’ said little Olivia frankly. Her level eyes had turned from her father’s face and had softened in response to Lady Caverley’s smile. ‘I’d like it very much. And so would Hunny. We both like dogs and horses. And we neither of us go in much for discussing the universe——’

‘Does she call you “honey”?’ interrupted Lady Caverley, with a smile for Olivia. ‘How charming!’

‘Hunny,’ said little Olivia very steadfastly, ‘is my stepfather.’

The simple statement fell in a little pool of silence. Henrietta flashed a quick glance at Nick, then one at Olivia, then turned deliberately in her chair to stare at their daughter. Little Olivia paid no attention to her whatever. She merely began to speak again, and the high, bell-like timbre of her clear, cool little voice, Olivia thought, was all that indicated the depth of her indignation.

‘He’ll be with us, of course. But he likes quiet places and he likes the country. I think he only lives in a city apartment for Mother and me. We’re what we call “loop-hounds” in Chicago. We like the shops and the restaurants and the theatre and the opera. So Hunny puts up with them. My little brothers like the country, too. They’re really just like Hunny, and my mother and I always impose on them. Hunny lets Mother and me do exactly what we want to. I think you’d like Hunny, Lady Caverley, and I know he’d like you. He’s a very sweet person.’ Having given her testimony, little Olivia lapsed tranquilly into silence. A silence that seemed rather prolonged. It was broken by Lady Caverley.

‘I’m sure I’d love to meet him,’ she said, with her cordial smile. ‘And I hope he’ll come to England with you——’

‘Oh—he will,’ said little Olivia serenely.

‘And come to stay with us at Lockby,’ continued Lady Caverley. And having said that, she didn’t seem to find anything much else to say at the moment.

Olivia’s cheeks felt very hot and uncomfortable. Her eyes were fastened on her plate, but she knew that Nick was looking at her. Henrietta was looking at her, too, of course, but Olivia was past minding what Henrietta looked at. She ought to glance up, she knew, and meet Nick’s eyes with a tranquil smile—a smile full of amused affection for little Olivia. Then turn and say something charmingly casual to Lady Caverley about Harry. That was what she ought to do, but, somehow, she didn’t feel up to it. She didn’t feel up to it because of her sense of shame. Yes—her real sense of shame. For little Olivia had recalled her to her duty. There was no doubt about it. Little Olivia, in her explicit statement, had set forth lucidly everything that Olivia, herself, sometime, somehow, during the last two days on the Atlanta, should have said or implied to Nick—and, yes, to Lady Caverley as well—about Harry. Whereas, unpardonably, she hadn’t even mentioned Harry’s name. She hadn’t even referred to the existence of Otto and little Van Tyne!

But Lady Caverley really was a darling! She had broken the silence again, nipping into her husband’s conversation with the captain with her views on the dole, exactly as if nothing awkward had happened. Nick was following her lead. He was a darling, too. He was making everyone laugh. Olivia herself was laughing, but she still felt crushed under her sense of her sins of omission. It was one thing to refrain from discussing your husband, and another—oh, distinctly another!—never to mention his name! What had Nick deduced from her silence? To what unfortunate conclusions might not Lady Caverley have jumped? Did Nick think that poor old Harry was now merely—negligible? Did Lady Caverley imagine that he was just one more of those vaguely unattractive, perpetually deserted, American husbands—those legendary figures that stand behind letters of credit—who must seem to the European a national institution on a par with the high tariff and the Monroe Doctrine? Unpardonable, of course, to have left it to little Olivia to explain that Harry was a very sweet person! Though really, little Olivia was absurd! No one with any knowledge of the world could claim that Harry would be much of an addition to that week-end house-party at Lockby! Especially if Nick and little Olivia were to be there also——!

Oh, dear, thought Olivia! Had Nick reëntered her life again, never to leave it? In a way, of course, she hoped he never would. It was lovely to be with him. But he did mix things up! A future presenting the intricate pattern of an indefinite series of social occasions at which Harry and Nick and little Olivia were all to be present was far too complicated to be contemplated with equanimity! Still—you had to live with the consequences of what you’d done. You did live—and learn. By the time you were thirty-nine, you had learned that what you did today would have consequences tomorrow. Trying to reconcile your past with your present was really what made your future so often obscure. But there was no use in worrying. Difficulties sometimes straightened themselves out, if you don’t think too much about them. In the very worst messes, some power not yourself seemed often to take the helm and steer you through to some satisfactory solution. Things happened, if you gave them time, through no fault or virtue of your own.

‘You agree with that, don’t you, Mrs. Ottendorf?’ said Sir Hugh suddenly. ‘You don’t think me too conservative?’

Olivia came out of her revery with a jump. How long had it lasted? Henrietta was still looking at her.

‘Oh, yes!’ she said hastily. ‘I mean—oh, no!’ Sir Hugh’s round, red, weather-beaten old face was staring at her rather perplexedly. ‘I mean—I think you’re quite right, Sir Hugh—and very wise.’

Sir Hugh emitted a little grunt of satisfaction. Olivia realized that she must have given the dole its coup de grâce. The captain, she observed with gratitude, was rising from his chair.

‘How about a little contract?’ Henrietta was saying to Nick.

‘Let’s dance,’ Binky was urging persuasively on little Olivia.

‘The orchestra’s playing in the forward lounge,’ said the captain benevolently.

Olivia moved very soberly at Lady Caverley’s side as they walked down the length of the dining-room. Every face was turned toward them from the smaller, less consequential tables. But no—not toward them—toward someone behind them. Why, of course! Everyone was staring at Nick. The women were all smiling. Miss Hathaway was nodding shyly in her corner near the door. Mrs. Spencer was rising resolutely from a chair beside her. She was going to join them if possible. But Olivia could see, from her uncertain countenance, that Nick, bringing up the rear with the captain, was offering her no encouragement. How ridiculous women were! How ridiculous Nick was! Stalking through life in this sort of triumphal parade! He ought to do something about it! This hysterical adulation was enough to make any self-respecting woman resolve not to speak to him for the rest of the voyage——

Just then Olivia felt Nick’s hand, slipped intimately through her arm. She heard his confidential voice in her ear.

‘Let’s go and watch the kids dance.’

In the dining-room doorway the strains of the orchestra on the deck above could be faintly heard. It was playing a spirited fox-trot—‘Laughing at Life,’ Olivia thought it was. Little Olivia, with her two young men, was prancing lightly up the white-and-gold staircase.

‘Let’s dance ourselves,’ said Nick, even more confidentially. His hand was still thrust casually through her arm.

‘Henrietta wants to play contract,’ said Olivia.

‘Do you?’ said Nick. Then, with his candid smile, ‘Of course you don’t!’ Arm in arm they were climbing, now, the white-and-gold staircase. ‘I’m going to ask the orchestra to give us “The Merry Widow Waltz.” It always makes me think of those swell New York balls you used to drag me out to. I suppose you jazz about, Livvy, like the rest of our contemporaries, but I always picture you waltzing. Do you remember a black net evening gown you had the first year we were married? It had little puff sleeves and——’

‘I ought to remember it,’ interrupted Olivia coolly. ‘I wore it for four winters.’

But Nick was not chilled by the coolness.

‘And lots of tiny ruffles around the skirt. You carried the train over a little ribbon loop on your wrist and it swooped when you waltzed. You had black satin slippers with scarlet heels. Very fetching, I thought them, but, as I recall, in that benighted age they were considered rather daring.’

Olivia laughed, in spite of herself.

‘Ruth said they were fast,’ she twinkled. ‘But they were much prettier than hers. They were prettier than any she had in her trousseau. I think she didn’t think they were quite suitable for——’ Olivia stopped abruptly.

‘The impoverished wife of Mr. Nicholas Allen!’ finished Nick with bravado. ‘Yes. Ruth had views on how the other half should live. She took after your father in that. He was always willing to save our money for us! Gosh! Do you remember how big ten dollars used to look?’

‘Those slippers only cost six,’ said Olivia gravely. ‘I bought them at a sale at Wanamaker’s.’

‘Don’t say “Wanamaker’s” to me!’ laughed Nick. ‘The very name still gives me that first-of-the-month feeling in the pit of my stomach.’

‘And what do you think it gives me?’ inquired Olivia. ‘I never bought a thing we didn’t simply have to have, and yet you used to row and carry on——’

‘I was an unmannerly, miserly cub,’ said Nick engagingly. By this time they had reached the head of the staircase. ‘And I’d had no worldly experience. I understand now that ladies have to have red-heeled slippers——’

His voice died away as they stood beneath the portières in the doorway of the forward lounge. The floor of the forward lounge had been cleared. The rugs were rolled up and the little gilt tables and great green satin armchairs had been pushed against the wall. The orchestra was playing in a bower of palms in a corner near the door. Attracted by the music, a few elderly ladies had already settled themselves in the green satin armchairs. They were talking together in low voices, smiling indulgently at the dancers. Ten or twelve couples were revolving on the floor. Nick’s eyes found little Olivia at once. She was fox-trotting tranquilly in the arms of the dapper second officer. Spuds and Binky were chatting together beside the great brass saxophone in front of the palms. Nick watched his daughter for a moment in silence.

‘I wish she wouldn’t do that,’ he said suddenly.

‘Do what?’ said Olivia. She hadn’t noticed anything.

‘Hold her—her cheek that way,’ said Nick. And, to be sure, Olivia now observed, the pure, pale oval of little Olivia’s face was pressed closely against the second officer’s meticulously shaven, blue-black chin.

‘Oh—that!’ said Olivia. ‘They all do it.’

‘I don’t like her to,’ said Nick soberly.

Olivia surveyed him with a suppressed twinkle.

‘You date, Nick,’ she said warningly. For the last ten years of association with her daughter had taught Olivia that that was the one thing parents really must not do. Nick’s face brightened as he answered her smile.

‘I guess I don’t need any advice on playing the heavy father,’ he said, a trifle ruefully. ‘It seems to be a rôle that you take to naturally, without any coaching. Funny—how it changes your point of view—this being a parent. I’ve always been whole-heartedly in favour of cheeks on chins—when it was my chin and not my daughter’s cheek!’

‘Well, keep your point of view to yourself,’ admonished Olivia wisely. ‘Little Olivia won’t care at all what you are, or are not, whole-heartedly in favour of. She’s extremely independent.’

But Nick was not listening.

‘See here!’ he cried excitedly. ‘I don’t like that fellow. He’s positively mauling her!’

‘Nick! He’s not!’ protested Olivia. ‘He’s the second officer and the captain’s very conservative. The discipline on these English boats——’

But again Nick was not listening. He was looking very indignant.

‘I’m going to cut in on him!’ he was saying excitedly. And without another glance at Olivia, he dashed out on the floor, pushed past the revolving couples, and tapped the dapper second officer cavalierly on his blue broadcloth shoulder. Little Olivia stared up at him in astonishment. The second officer relinquished her with a disarmingly regretful smile. It did not seem to disarm Nick, however. He slipped his arm around his daughter’s green taffeta waist with an air of outraged dignity. He glided off with her to the strains of the fox-trot, and, when Olivia caught a glimpse of his face again, its expression of dignity and of outrage had already faded. He was fox-trotting expertly—Nick had always been a deft dancer—and he was gazing down on the straight part on his daughter’s smooth little golden head with a fond smile of paternal pride. That smile, Olivia decided, looked rather foolish. She had just realized that Nick, overcome by his sense of little Olivia’s peril, had left her standing quite alone in the doorway. It was absurd of Nick to carry on so about the child! That young second officer was really a most deferential young man. The captain had told her he had once been in the navy. During the war he had done distinguished service with the Channel fleet.

But Nick had already lost little Olivia. Halfway round the room, as they passed the brass saxophone, Spuds had stepped determinedly forward and had tapped Nick’s shoulder. Little Olivia, with a non-committal smile, had slipped instantly into his arms. Nick was left looking a trifle astonished, under the palms. He turned to speak to Binky, but Binky was not there. Binky was approaching Olivia in the doorway.

‘Do you dance, Mrs. Ottendorf?’ he was inquiring respectfully. A trifle too respectfully, Olivia decided. More as one would invite Olivia’s mother, than Olivia, to dance! How old was he? Olivia wondered. Surely not more than a year or two younger than that amusing boy in the Paris embassy who had seemed to find Olivia so much more entertaining than her eighteen-year-old daughter last month at Biarritz.

As she glided away with him, Olivia caught a glimpse of Nick, conversing, faute de mieux, with the leader of the orchestra. But he would soon find companionship. Henrietta and Sir Hugh and Lady Caverley had appeared in the doorway. Mrs. Spencer and Miss Hathaway were hovering behind them. Henrietta’s gimlet eye was raking the room. Under that eye, Olivia abandoned herself to the embrace of the returning Rhodes scholar with ardour. She tilted her head to smile, with perhaps unnecessary vivacity, up into his face. The returning Rhodes scholar returned the smile with interest. He was, after all—Olivia comforted herself with the reflection—only one more susceptible young man. If she weren’t a nice mother and if she could really put her heart into it, Olivia knew that she could cut out little Olivia before the evening was over. But she was a nice mother and she couldn’t put her heart into it—not even under Henrietta’s gimlet eye—because—yes—because of Nick. Or rather—Olivia grasped gratefully at the afterthought to save her self-respect—because of the problems that Nick’s presence on board the Atlanta perpetually propounded.

As a matter of fact, leaving Henrietta quite out of it, Olivia would have liked nothing better than to stage, for the benefit of her former husband, a practical demonstration of the fact that a twenty-six-year-old boy could still become her slave. But you had to have a tranquil spirit and a single-track mind to put your heart into a flirtation. Whereas Olivia’s spirit was in tumult, and her mind—her mind, Olivia humorously reflected, presented very much the aspect of the congested switchyard of a city railroad terminal! Trains of thoughts were backing complicatedly to and fro—trains of thoughts from the ends of the world, moving backward and forward, with bells ringing and engines puffing and whistles blowing! Safe, stolid, domestic thoughts, like dull freight cars full of sustaining canned goods, were parked on sidings; swift, dangerous, exciting thoughts like limited expresses with romantic names—The Pioneer Limited—The Golden Gate Special—were bearing down on them from the great open spaces, and other, still more disturbing thoughts —erratic, free-lance ones—were whizzing wildly about, like runaway engines with no hand on the throttle, no eye on the track, adding tremendously to the confusion. There was only Olivia to throw the switches and prevent the collisions. For three whole days, Olivia felt, she had been walking the railroad ties with a lantern in one hand and a red flag in the other, trying to keep order on that network of rails! Switchmen on duty had no heart for philandering! Just then the strains of the fox-trot throbbed and hesitated and faltered, then swelled into the dreamy, lilting cadence of ‘The Merry Widow Waltz.’

‘My dance, I think,’ said Nick, at Olivia’s elbow. Binky paused politely in the middle of a spirited glide. He was instantly recalled to respect by the presence of the distinguished author. He made Olivia a correct little bow and said ceremoniously ‘Thank you so much, Mrs. Ottendorf,’ like a good little boy at a children’s party, then turned immediately to snatch little Olivia, with no ceremony whatever, from the resisting arms of a violently protesting Spuds. In the scuffle that ensued, little Olivia really seemed to be dancing with both of them for a moment.

‘It is my dance, isn’t it?’ Nick was saying, smiling down at her. ‘It sounds like mine.’

Olivia nodded, then looked slowly up at him. Somehow she didn’t—she didn’t want much to dance with Nick. It was—it really was—playing with fire. There was no sense in poking up old embers. Suddenly she realized that Nick was looking disconcertingly self-possessed. That look of self-possession on Nick’s face made Olivia feel rather foolish. His arm encircled her waist with a purely mechanical gesture.

‘You are an ass!’ said Olivia to herself, actually stumbling out of time and losing the first step of the waltz in a little instinctive stamp of her foot in her humiliating sense of the preposterous and obviously unreciprocated emotion that she felt in being once more, though so conventionally, so formally, in Nick’s embrace. But Lord Byron was right—there was something indecently intimate about a waltz! And it was Nick’s dance. It was just that. In whose arms but Nick’s should Olivia be waltzing to ‘The Merry Widow Waltz’? With that music in her ears, Olivia could almost believe that she was back once more at one of those ‘swell New York balls’ that she had dragged Nick out to! Some dance at Delmonico’s or Sherry’s with cotillion favours waving and champagne flowing and Nick’s arms around her and Lehar’s sweet, sentimental melody surging out over the heads of the crowd—over the heads of all her friends and her family—the sharp-eyed, well-dressed girls and the eligible young men whom she might have married, the critical dowagers and the elderly beaux, Ruth and Diana, her father and her mother, her uncles and her aunts, her cousins and her second cousins, her godmothers and her godfathers—all the enormous Van Tyne connection, in brief—who were shaking their heads and pursing their lips and craning their necks for a glimpse of the rank young outsider, the reckless young Romeo from a Vermont farmhouse, whom Olivia Van Tyne had incontinently run off with! How proudly, how defiantly, she had waltzed with him to ‘The Merry Widow Waltz,’ under their appraising eyes! How valorously she had protected him from appraisal until she had discovered—the discovery had been a bit disconcerting for Olivia—that Nick only thought that appraisal was funny! That Nick believed the Allens of Vermont to be quite as important as the Van Tynes of New York! That Nick only had to be dragged out to balls because balls rather bored him, and because, as he had frequently and fervently protested at that glamorous period of their life together, he would rather spend an evening alone with Olivia in the Greenwich Village flat than go to a ball where he could win the hand of the princess and succeed to half the kingdom!

‘My dancing days are over,’ Olivia could remember him saying, in front of their little coal fire. ‘I’ve found my Cinderella and I’ve brought her back to the cinders which are her natural habitat. Cinderella was a home girl, Livvy, and the story explicitly tells us that she lived happily ever after. Once the biological urge was satisfied, I’m sure she never chucked Prince Charming into a long-tailed coat and went in for the night life and became a dangerous married woman!’ It had never occurred to her to listen to him! To take him seriously. Why hadn’t it? If she had, they would have had, as the years went on, at least one less difference to quarrel over.

‘You waltz like an angel, Livvy,’ said Nick suddenly. ‘You always did. And this is very refreshing. I’m beginning to feel distinctly less like a parent! It’s the music, of course. Why don’t they write music like this to dance to nowadays? Do you remember the silly words?’ And whirling, reversing, never losing a step of the old-fashioned measure, Nick began softly to sing.

Isn’t it swell, Livvy?’ Other dancers, now, were humming the air. A few middle-aged ones were remembering the words.

Nick’s voice abandoned the wordless allegro that followed the chorus.

‘Doesn’t it make you feel gay, Livvy?’ he asked.

Olivia did not quite trust herself to answer. As a matter of fact, it was making her feel just a little sad. For a moment or two they twirled together in silence.

‘Aren’t you dating a bit?’ inquired Nick, very casually.

Indignation promptly restored Olivia’s confidence in her voice.

‘Dating?’ she cried. ‘Certainly not! I waltz just as well as I ever did!’

‘Oh—I didn’t mean that!’ protested Nick warmly. ‘I only meant—what about your cheek, you know? My chin’s feeling rather lonely!’

Olivia laughed up at him. In emotional moments Nick was certainly a man to tie to! He always saved everything by the light touch!

‘I never had my cheek on your chin when we danced to this tune in nineteen hundred and ten,’ she said, very firmly.

‘Why revive outmoded blue laws?’ murmured Nick in her ear. ‘Don’t you believe in progress?’ He was only in fun, of course, but his lips were on her hair. Olivia glanced up at him. Nick promptly took advantage of the movement. ‘There, that’s better! Now don’t struggle, Livvy! Henrietta won’t see you! She’s waltzing with Sir Hugh like a spinning top. On the dancing-floor Sir Hugh is distinctly a gentleman of the old school. Don’t you think this is nice?’

Olivia begged the question. But she did not turn her head.

‘Little Olivia will see me,’ she said. ‘She’ll think me deplorably kittenish.’

‘Little Olivia,’ said Nick comfortably, ‘is very much occupied with Binky.’

‘Little Olivia,’ said Olivia, ‘is never too much occupied with any one to forget to observe with whom I am occupied!’

‘Very proper, I’m sure,’ said Nick. ‘But she can certainly observe me with impunity. As a parent you know I’m a prude, Livvy, but I still think the eyes of an innocent young girl can rest without outrage on the spectacle of her father and her mother waltzing together.’

Just then the music died away into silence. It rose again immediately in a blare from the saxophone. Nick’s arm was still around Olivia.

‘ “The old order changeth,” ’ he quoted lightly. ‘But let’s keep right up with it! It’s a one-step. Snap into it, Livvy! Let’s see you do your stuff!’

‘Nick—you’re revolting,’ said Olivia lightly. ‘Go and dance with Miss Hathaway.’

‘I will not,’ smiled Nick.

‘Mrs. Levotti has just come in,’ said Olivia. ‘I dare say she would snap into it. She looks like a red-hot mamma.’

‘Now you’re revolting,’ said Nick. ‘No, Livvy. If you won’t dance with me, you’re going to sit beside me on this green satin divan and watch little Olivia. I feel in a moment I’m going to relapse into parenthood. But before I do, sit down, Livvy, and look as if I were fascinating you! Let’s give Henrietta an eyeful.’

There was something contagious about Nick’s candid smile. There was something contagious about his utter indifference to the opinion of Henriettas! Why not enjoy yourself, thought Olivia? There was nothing indiscreet about sitting down with Nick on a green satin divan. Once they were settled on it, however, and Nick’s eyes had again found little Olivia—dancing with Sir Hugh, she was, now, teaching him the one-step, stepping on his toes, laughing up into his face, holding him at arm’s length to avoid the comfortable convex curve of his black waistcoat—the candid smile had faded from his face. Olivia thought he looked a little solemn.

‘What’s the matter, Nick?’ she asked.

The smile returned then. But it was rather wistful than candid.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I was just watching little Olivia.’

‘She shouldn’t make Sir Hugh hop about like that,’ said Olivia. ‘At his age——’

‘She’s lovely,’ said Nick.

‘She’s lovely,’ said Olivia, ‘but she’s very thoughtless.’

‘She’s everything,’ said Nick very soberly, ‘that I’d like a daughter of mine to be.’

Oh, dear, thought Olivia helplessly, that was just like a man! What did Nick know of little Olivia, except that her hair was as yellow as gold and her lips were as red as blood and her skin was as white as milk? But that, of course, was enough for any man to know of any woman. If a man knew that much, he always thought he could imagine the rest! The imaginings of men on the hidden qualities of women were the cause of a great many misunderstandings in the world. But Nick was going on in that same sober voice.

‘She’s beautiful and she’s sensible and she’s reticent. She’s dignified. I mean—under all that adorable youngness—and that slap-dash modernity of manner—she has essential dignity of soul. She knows what she likes—she knows what she approves of. She has standards. Those things’—Nick’s voice was faltering a trifle—‘those things she said—about Harry—at dinner—— Well, what I mean is—those things weren’t easy for her to say. She said them because she thought she ought to. She——’

‘She said them,’ said Olivia firmly, ‘to rebuke me. She loves to rebuke me.’

‘Oh, no!’ said Nick. And his eyes, as they met Olivia’s looked really quite shocked. ‘She said them because she thought they ought to be said. She would always say what she thought ought to be said. She’s just like Mother in that.’

Olivia found Nick’s eyes a little hard to meet. Her own glance wavered and fell and wandered across the dancing-floor to her daughter.

‘I’ve often thought,’ she said uncertainly, ‘that she was very like your mother.’

‘I love her to be like Mother!’ said Nick eagerly. ‘I shouldn’t have liked to find her just like you. Can you understand that, Livvy?’ The keen analytic gleam in Nick’s shrewd New England eyes was misted over with a breath of sentiment—a breath of sentiment, Olivia instantly detected, that had nothing to do with his emotion over little Olivia. Again his voice was faltering. ‘It—it’s a compliment, Livvy. It’s really a very great compliment. For me there could be only one Olivia.’

There was a moment’s pause. Olivia didn’t quite know how to break it. Nick shouldn’t—Nick really shouldn’t—say things like that. They were too—disturbing. When he spoke again, his voice was very cheerful and steady.

‘But a reincarnation of Mother—that seems very touching and very right. I wish that Mother could have lived to know little Olivia. To see that curious development of the New England temperament in a Western environment. It would have interested her. It would have rewarded her, I think, for the long life she put in fighting the good fight and preserving the faith. She so often felt I fell away from grace——’ Nick paused to smile humorously at Olivia, and Olivia felt her own lips stiffen as she tried to respond naturally to that smile. Curious—what it did to her, after all the years, to hear Nick speaking in just that old admiring way of Mrs. Seth Allen! He was reading her thoughts, of course.

‘You never understood Mother, Livvy,’ he was saying good-humouredly, ‘and you’ll never understand her grandchild.’

Well—this, thought Olivia, was really too much! Understand little Olivia! Why, she saw all around and through the child—right through her to her little back buttons! She knew, far better than Nick did, that little Olivia was exactly like Mrs. Seth Allen! When she thought of the chip of New England granite that little Olivia really was, Olivia felt very sorry for Nick. Nick would have an extremely disillusioning experience if he ever tried to mould little Olivia to conform to his ideas of living! Little Olivia would always be feeling, like her grandmother before her, that Nick was falling away from grace. She would always be trying to mould him. And she wouldn’t bring to that effort the indulgence, the patience that her grandmother had. For, to little Olivia, Nick would be nothing more than a scapegrace father, whereas to Mrs. Seth Allen he had been a scapegrace son. Sons always awoke in the hearts of women more indulgence, more patience, than fathers did. Or husbands for that matter. Or former husbands! Olivia really felt as if she were holding her tongue with both her hands to keep from answering Nick’s last gentle, dogmatic statement with an indignant retort. If she did, in a moment she and Nick might be quarrelling, just as they used to quarrel! Quarrelling over a ridiculous argument as to which of them best understood their own child! But it had always been over some ridiculous argument that their quarrels had started.

Olivia’s eyes had returned to her daughter. Binky had cut in on her again—that was something to be grateful for. He had saved Sir Hugh from an apoplectic stroke! Sir Hugh, mopping his red face and running his plump finger around the neck-line of his wilted wing collar, was returning to Lady Caverley’s side in the doorway. She was laughing good-humouredly at him. She was urging him to sit down in a green satin armchair. Sir Hugh was laughing good-humouredly at himself. His round, red, weather-beaten old face was all screwed up in comic little crow’s-feet and rueful wrinkles. Lady Caverley patted his arm. Their understanding was perfect. How long had they been married? Forty years, perhaps. A marriage that had lasted forty years and had ended in perfect understanding seemed suddenly to Olivia a very beautiful thing. Possibly the most beautiful thing in the world. But this was utter sentimentality! She must put away thoughts like that. And Nick was again speaking. His voice was still gentle and—somehow—remote. It came from some hidden chamber of thought.

‘You must lend her to me, Livvy. You must lend her to me very often.’

‘And what would you do with her, Nick?’ asked Olivia.

There was a moment’s pause before he answered her question.

‘I—really—don’t know,’ he said slowly. ‘You see—so much has been done. I realize that, Livvy, and, in a way, I’m grateful. You’ve made her what she is today. But just the same—I’d like to have had a hand in the making. I’d like to have shown my own child the world. Here on the Atlanta I’ve been thinking what fun it would have been to have picked up a bag full of Baedekers with one hand and a little wide-eyed daughter with the other and set sail for Europe on a maiden voyage. We were talking about Europe—she and I—this morning, when we were going over the boat. It’s an old story to her now. But I’d have liked to see little Olivia staring at Trafalgar Square, or the Isle Saint-Louis, or the Roman Campagna for the very first time. You know, Livvy—Nelson in the rain—Notre Dame at sunset—the aqueducts by moonlight. Nothing very original. Just the ordinary sort of thing that every parent does. But you’ve done it. You’ve skimmed the cream. Little Olivia tells me that she’s “sick of Europe.” ’

Nick’s lips were humorously twisted over the phrase with which his daughter had dismissed a continent. He did not look very much as if he wanted to laugh, however. Olivia, herself, did not know whether to laugh or to cry. Nick was so ridiculously, so sentimentally sincere! Still—Olivia could not help remembering the Greenwich Village flat. She could not help remembering those hot summer Sundays—when Waverley Place was an airless oven and Washington Square no more than an arid vacant lot—that she had spent urging Nick to take little Olivia up to Central Park to walk in the Zoo, or down to the Battery to look at the Aquarium, or out in a boat to climb up into the crown of the Statue of Liberty—a childish ambition of little Olivia’s, unsatisfied to this hour!—to see the prow of Manhattan Island from the harbour. But Nick had never consented to do any of those things. And he had never consented, on the cold winter Sundays—when the snow was piled high in the street and the slippery sidewalks of Waverley Place made impossible playgrounds, defiled as they were with frozen, uncollected garbage, eggshells and potato peelings and orange rinds, spilling over the edges of slatternly ashcans—to take little Olivia to look at the armour exhibit in the Metropolitan, or to marvel at the dinosaur’s skeleton, or the collection of butterflies, or the cross-section of a California redwood in the Museum of Natural History, or even to skate in the Park on her first little double-runner ice skates that she had outgrown before anyone had ever taught her how to use them! Still as bright and shiny as they had been under the Christmas tree, they had remained for years on the shelf of the hall closet of the Greenwich Village flat!

It was Harry, indeed, who had first taught little Olivia to skate. Olivia could see Harry now, as he’d looked the first year of their marriage, when she had motored up to the Lincoln Park duck pond to pick them up after a frosty afternoon on the ice. Waiting, he always was, skates in hand, in front of the red-brick locker house, rubbing his ears, stamping his feet, none too warmly clad in that fawn-coloured English overcoat she had always disliked—waiting for little Olivia—a small, staggering figure far out on the rink, made up of fluttering plaid skirt and flying blond pigtails and snow-smeared chinchilla-cloth reefer—to finish her last figure eight in triumph. It was Harry who had taken little Olivia to the Lincoln Park Zoo, where they had found a pet monkey who knew them, Harry always declared—and to the Field Museum, rechristened by little Olivia ‘The Dead Animal House’—and to the Art Institute to look at the paintings—and to the Historical Society to see the bed that Lincoln had died on—and even to the Water-Works to watch the wheels go round!

And it was Harry, curiously enough, rather than Olivia, who had shown Europe to little Olivia for the very first time. In Europe, Olivia herself never seemed to have time for sight-seeing. But give Harry a Baedeker and he immediately reverted to race! A double-starred view or a triple-starred national monument always awakened in Harry the naïve enthusiasm displayed by his absurd fellow countrymen in stout knickerbocker suits and green felt Alpine hats, whom you perpetually stumbled over in the corridors of Continental railway carriages. He didn’t actually cry out, gutturally, as they did, ‘Wunderschön! Wunderbar! Kolossal!’ but Olivia knew that he was simple-heartedly thinking it. When Harry and little Olivia were in Europe together, they were continually dashing off with a Baedeker to look at some dull arch or column or statue or tomb! Dead Europeans, Olivia had often reflected, were the only Europeans they took any interest in. Little Olivia thought her Aunt Diana’s life in Rome too dreary for words. And Harry infinitely preferred a round of golf on the Onwentsia Club links at home to a round of drinks, no matter how exalted his company, in the Basque Bar at Biarritz!

‘But there are other worlds, Livvy——’ Nick’s voice broke in upon her revery. Oh, dear, thought Olivia, what was he planning now? If he thought little Olivia would like to go traipsing off with him on some sight-seeing tour through Asia, Africa, or Australia, he was very much mistaken! Little Olivia enjoyed her conventional life at home. Little Olivia wanted to go back to the Lake Shore Drive apartment and wear her new French frocks and give a début ball at the Blackstone, and dance in the Junior League Show, and have a great many young men in the drawing-room every afternoon at half after five, waiting for a tray of Harry’s excellent cocktails! But Nick was still speaking, and, as she listened, Olivia realized that she had quite mistaken his meaning.

‘Worlds of thought and feeling, Livvy, that an eighteen-year-old girl must just be entering. I’d like to watch her—and talk things over—teach her what I’ve learned from my own experience——’

How touchingly little Nick understood, Olivia was thinking, about eighteen-year-old girls. And he understood nothing about the practical position of a modern parent.

‘Little Olivia,’ she said hesitatingly, ‘is—as you say—rather reticent. She isn’t much of a talker.’

‘Whom has she had to talk to?’ inquired Nick superbly. But this flash of the old egocentricity only made Olivia feel sorry for him.

‘She’s had me,’ she murmured mildly.

Nick’s face was all tender contrition.

‘Yes. Of course, she’s had you. But a woman alone——’

‘And she’s had Harry,’ said Olivia, with a little flicker of spirit. She felt better the moment that she had said it. Some inner urge toward justice had been satisfied.

Nick looked rather puzzled. ‘Yes,’ he said slowly, ‘she’s had Harry. But——’

The inner urge toward justice made further demands.

‘She—she likes Harry,’ said Olivia desperately.

‘I know she likes Harry,’ cried Nick, a trifle irritably. ‘I’m not a fool. I can see that.’

‘And she likes family life,’ said Olivia. She was turning a knife in Nick’s heart, she knew, but surely this was the moment to make everything clear. ‘She’s very fond of the little boys.’ Nick received these two statements in silence. Olivia’s troubled eyes were fixed unseeingly on the dancers. ‘Nick’—she said presently—‘you knew—I mean you knew before she—she mentioned them that—that I had the boys?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Nick, quite easily. ‘I knew that you had the boys.’ The ghost of a laugh was trembling in his voice. Olivia turned to glance questioningly at him. The ghost of a laugh had turned reassuringly into a reminiscent grin. ‘Henrietta told me. Henrietta told me—it must have been about eight years ago—at a dinner-party in Cornish. She came prancing up to me, cocktail in hand, with that gleam in her eye that warns you that she’s got a facer for you, and she said sweetly, “Oh Nick! Have you heard? Olivia’s just had a second son!” ’

Olivia’s shocked eyes were gazing at him very sympathetically. She was trying to imagine what her sensations would have been had Henrietta ever pranced up to her with that information about Nick.

‘Oh, Nick!’ she breathed. ‘How dreadful! What did you say?’

‘I said something pretty good,’ said Nick promptly. His eyes were unbelievably twinkling. ‘I said, “Really, Henrietta? I’ve just had a second novel. And we’re both doing as well, thank you, as could be expected.” Henrietta really didn’t know what to do with it. She had no snappy comeback.’

Olivia was conscious of a slight sense of anti-climax. But what did she expect? Nick couldn’t be required to burst into tears at a Cornish dinner-party on the receipt of the news that little Van Tyne had been born. Nevertheless, a faint cloud of disappointment hung over her. It was dissipated by Nick’s next words.

‘But I was surprised, Livvy, tonight at dinner, to hear little Olivia referring in just that casual way to her “little brothers.” ’

‘But they are her little brothers, Nick,’ said Olivia earnestly.

‘I suppose they are,’ said Nick slowly. ‘Yes. Of course they are. But——’

‘She was only nine when Otto was born, and Van Tyne came less than a year later.’

‘I know,’ said Nick, as slowly as before. ‘But don’t rub it in.’ The note of irritation was creeping back into his voice. ‘It’s funny—I’ve thought of you so often down the years, but I’ve always thought of you as just—Olivia. Olivia, who left me for Harry Ottendorf. I’ve never thought of you in a happy family circle——’

‘But, Nick,’ said Olivia, very seriously, ‘you wouldn’t—you wouldn’t have wanted me not to be happy.’

‘No,’ said Nick quickly. ‘No. Of course not. But just the same—— Oh, well!’ Nick sighed profoundly. ‘Do you know what I feel like?’ he inquired abruptly. ‘It’s not a very dashing rôle. But it’s the one a divorced husband in my position finds himself forced to play. You think of a divorced husband, of course, as a perfect Don Juan. As a matter of fact, I feel like Enoch Arden. A wan Tennysonian shadow, standing out in the dark and the cold under the dank yew tree in my former wife’s garden, pressing my nose to her window-pane to watch my successor dandle my offspring and his own on his paternal knee! It’s never been considered a very dignified position, Livvy, nor a very happy one——’

‘Nick,’ said Olivia softly. She laid a tremulous hand very gently on his arm. ‘Nick—you mustn’t feel like that. I—I’ll lend you little Olivia. I’ll explain to her why I left you. I mean—I—I’ll explain how it happened—how things like that do happen—with nobody really to blame——’ Olivia’s voice faltered into silence.

Nick’s hand was closing firmly over her own. He was looking very eagerly into her face.

‘How do things like that happen, Livvy?’ he was saying. ‘I wish you’d explain it to me. Why did you leave me? At the time, of course——’

‘Well, I really think you two are perfectly wonderful!’ It was Henrietta’s ironical voice. She had come up very softly behind them. Olivia snatched her hand from Nick’s firm clasp. Henrietta was smiling a pleasant social smile, but the gleam in her eye was lurking behind it like a clever fox in cover. ‘You’re so—casual with each other! It makes everything so easy for everyone else! I do hate awkward situations! I’ve come to get you to play a game of contract. Sir Hugh and Lady Caverley say they’ll take turns cutting in.’

By this time Nick had risen to his feet. He was not even looking at Henrietta and there was a glint of anger in his eye. The muscles in his cheek were sharply contracted. His neat clean jaw-line looked firmer than ever.

‘I don’t care to play contract, thanks,’ he said, rather rudely.

Henrietta was quite unruffled by the rudeness. Henrietta never cared if you were rude. She never cared what you were. She just went on watching you, deducing your state of mind from the symptoms you betrayed to her. Nick’s rudeness, Olivia felt, was rather a betrayal.

‘Oh, don’t you, Nick?’ she said. ‘I feel just like a rubber.’ But wasn’t her eager acquiescence rather a betrayal, too? That was the worst of it. No matter what you did, Henrietta always managed to discover just why you had done it!

‘Come and watch the game, Nick,’ said Henrietta.

‘No, thanks,’ said Nick.

Henrietta just stood smiling pleasantly at him for a moment. Her silence, Olivia thought, was ruder than Nick’s speech. Then she linked her arm very amiably through Olivia’s elbow. Still faintly, reminiscently smiling, she led Olivia away from the green satin divan.

‘We’ll be in the card-room if you change your mind!’ she called back to Nick, over her shoulder. Nick didn’t reply. Henrietta turned to look rather closely at Olivia’s face.

‘It must be very interesting for you to see Nick again,’ she said casually. ‘Don’t you think he’s improved?’ The question remained unanswered. They continued to stroll toward the door of the forward lounge for a moment in silence. Then, ‘He’s terribly taken with little Olivia, isn’t he?’ continued Henrietta.

Still Olivia did not reply. She was suddenly conscious of feeling very tired. Almost exhausted, really. Henrietta must deduce what she could from her silence. The deductions of Henrietta seemed suddenly unimportant, and Henrietta herself, with her impertinent questions, no more than an irritating gnat—an importunate mosquito—buzzing in her ear. Two other questions were occupying Olivia’s attention. They were filling her mind to the exclusion of all other earthly things. ‘How do things like that happen, Livvy? Why did you leave me?’ It must be because she was so suddenly tired, of course, that she could not think of the answer. It really seemed to her now that there had been no reason. But—that was absurd! You didn’t wreck two lives and steal a child from her father without a reason! Olivia tried to collect herself. This was mere melodrama! Her life wasn’t wrecked—and neither was Nick’s! Still—hadn’t they both lost something they could never find again? They had—of course they had.

‘Oh, this is charming of you, Mrs. Ottendorf!’ said Lady Caverley’s pleasant English voice. ‘Hugh is so fond of contract. He used to be a great whist-player. He likes all card-games——’

Olivia passed from the forward lounge with Henrietta’s arm still amiably linked in hers. She did not turn her head to glance back at Nick. She did not want to see him, standing alone by the green satin divan, watching little Olivia. And she did not want Henrietta to see the tears that were in her eyes.

CHAPTER IV
FRIDAY

‘The big one is Altair,’ said Nick. ‘The big one in the middle of the line of three.’

‘Is it?’ said Olivia dreamily. Nick had always known the names of the stars.

They were sitting side by side on the clean scrubbed planks of the boat-deck, tucked up in steamer rugs, their backs against the sheltering façade of the wireless room, gazing up at the glittering panorama of the October sky.

‘That’s Deneb,’ said Nick. ‘You can tell it because it makes a big diamond with Altair and Vega and the pole star. But Vega’s set now. She’s down behind the cloud-bank——’

Olivia leaned her head back comfortably against the upturned collar of her new mink coat. She was not really listening. In place of the masts and the smoke stacks and the funnels of the Atlanta, the crest of a Vermont hillside had risen before her eyes—the crest of a Vermont hillside, with its fringe of spiky pine trees outlined against a spangled sky. Twenty years ago she sat with Nick on that hillside—not really listening, as he talked about the stars. Twenty years and four months ago, to be exact—yet she could positively see that hillside that minute. A vaguely sensed stone wall criss-crossed the starlit slope. The Milky Way was tangled in an apple tree. She could feel it too—feel the rough edges of the boulder beneath her hand and the prickly needles of the juniper about her ankles. Smell it, really—ridiculous as that seemed! Smell the pungent odour of the sweet fern she had crushed between her fingers—wet with dew it had been—and catch, across the salt mid-ocean breeze, a whiff of balsam-laden air! Queer—the things you remembered and the things you forgot down twenty years of living. Just an ordinary New England pasture, of course, but—how happy she had been that evening! And why not? Nineteen years old and just married to Nick! She had flung herself flat on her back on the little outcrop of granite rock to look up at the stars. And Nick had taken off his coat and had tucked it under her head and—and presently, still holding her hand in his, he had said, ‘That’s Deneb and Altair and Vega——’ Like a little boy he had seemed, delighted to show off his knowledge! Olivia herself had never been able to tell the stars from the planets. She had always been content to call the biggest one Jupiter!

‘The moon will come up soon,’ said Nick. ‘She’s due to rise at nine.’

It was sweet of Nick, Olivia was thinking, to keep on talking so safely about the moon and the stars. He had been talking about them, in intervals of silence, for quite a long time. Ever since the steward, indeed, had taken away their supper-trays. And that must be almost an hour ago. Childish, they’d been, to eat their supper on the windy boat-deck! When they had come up there together, three hours before, the sea had been bright and the deck had been warm in the brilliant, slanting rays of the setting sun. They had stood in the shelter of a lifeboat and watched that sun turn amber—copper red—then fade to a dulled rose as it sank behind the cloud-bank on the western horizon. They had seen the rounded peaks of the cloud-bank gleam, incandescent flame, against the great rose flush of the empty sky. Three mares’ tails in the zenith had been wisps of pink. The sea had roughened under the steady breeze. The ground swell had increased. Nothing disturbed, however, the tranquillity of the mares’ tails. Moved by the silent beauty of the sunset, Olivia had stared up at them in search of inner tranquillity. They had dwindled to greyish mist and the first faint stars were showing, when Nick said suddenly:

‘That looks like a storm ahead. This may be our last fine evening. Let’s have supper up here. Or will you be too cold?’

Olivia had said that she would not be too cold. She had said it almost in spite of herself, for she was curiously afraid to linger with Nick on the boat-deck. She had been afraid to come up with him to watch the sunset. She had been afraid all day that Nick would attempt to continue the conversation that Henrietta had interrupted the evening before. Flying before that fear, she had played deck tennis, breathlessly, all morning with Spuds and Binky and little Olivia, and she had been very gay with Sir Hugh at luncheon, and she had resolutely invited Mrs. Spencer to watch the swimming tournament with her in the afternoon. Everyone had watched the swimming tournament, of course. But when Nick had turned up at her elbow, Olivia had plunged very animatedly into a serious discussion with Mrs. Spencer on the lecture program of the Columbus Woman’s Club and had heartily concurred in that lady’s tentative suggestion that it would be lovely if Mr. Allen felt he could address their December meeting. Nick had not troubled himself to feign any interest whatever in the lecture program of the Columbus Woman’s Club. He had stood silently by Olivia’s side at the tank rail, watching little Olivia, who, in her canary-coloured jersey suit and green rubber cap, was turning back summersaults with Spuds on the springboard and putting Binky to shame in the deep-water dive for the captain’s silver dollar. Little Olivia was really half-fish—a modern mermaid. A mermaid without a looking-glass, however. Slim and smiling, boyish and business-like in that scrap of jersey, little Olivia was intent on the sport. She had no eye for her audience.

‘She’s good, you know! She’s darn good!’ Nick kept murmuring delightedly in Olivia’s ear, breaking into irrelevant, paternal applause, regardless of the drift of the conversation on the lecture program. When the tournament was over, he had wheeled without a word, to join the congratulatory circle around his daughter.

Little Olivia, however, with the captain’s bronze medal pinned on her canary-coloured chest, had pulled off her green rubber cap and pulled on her terry-cloth bathrobe and slipped off to dress for dinner. When the show was over, the warm, watery atmosphere that hung over the pool had seemed suddenly stale and enervating. Olivia had longed for a breath of fresh air.

She had been standing for several minutes in the cool, golden radiance that flooded the promenade-deck, when Nick turned up again at her elbow.

‘Isn’t this lovely?’ she said. She meant the light of the late October afternoon. It looked mellow and yellow and curiously clear after the crude electric radiance of the white-tiled tank-room. The sea was bluer and the whitecaps whiter than they were when the sun was high.

‘Get your coat,’ Nick had said peremptorily. ‘There’s going to be a swell sunset. Shame to miss it.’

It had seemed a shame to miss it. Nevertheless, Olivia had hesitated.

Nick was smiling down into her doubtful eyes. ‘Your hair’s turned pure amber in this light,’ he said suddenly.

Olivia had turned her doubtful eyes away. No—she wouldn’t get her coat, she had thought prudently. Then——

‘You have a gift with that henna!’ grinned Nick reassuringly.

There it was again—the light touch, making everything safe and sane! She would get her coat, Olivia had reflected. How lucky that she had! They’d had a lovely evening, and the light touch, combined with Nick’s astronomical preoccupation, had almost banished her fear. Perhaps Nick sensed that fear. Perhaps he shared it. Perhaps he didn’t want to continue, any more than she did, that disturbing conversation that Henrietta had interrupted. Those questions had been—unwise. He was probably sorry that he’d asked them.

‘Here comes Aldebaran!’ cried Nick. ‘See, Livvy! In the end of that V—the red one—just rising! I thought she’d beat the moon to it!’

He was like a little boy! Olivia wondered if the breast of Mrs. Seth Allen herself had ever swelled to a more purely maternal emotion than she felt for Nick at that moment. She turned to look at his eager face, dear and dim in the starlight! The questions returned to her with sudden, unanswerable poignancy. Why had she left him? How had it happened? Was it, possibly, just—by chance? Was it by chance that things always happened? Even important things? Things that changed destinies?

Olivia’s eyes followed Nick’s back to the twinkling red pin-prick just visible over the eastern horizon. They either happened by chance, she decided, or they happened, like the rising of Aldebaran, because they were part of some obscure cosmic scheme, some gigantic kaleidoscope designed in the mind of God. If there was a God. Decision, at any rate, had nothing to do with it. Of that she was certain. She had never really decided to marry Harry. And poor, perplexed Harry had decided, if anything, not to marry her! He hadn’t decided to as much as hold her hand, until that kiss in the taxi had occurred. And certainly neither of them had ever decided anything about that! Yet, after it, effects had followed causes as quickly and as mechanically as ninepins falling. One thing knocking down another, until everything was decided without a decision. No time to think. No time to consider.

If it hadn’t been snowing that day that she lunched with Harry at the Crillon, Olivia reflected, she might still be married to Nick. But it had been snowing, so, as they emerged on Park Avenue, Harry had whistled for a taxi and had jumped into it with her to take her to the Greenwich Village flat. If it hadn’t been snowing, he would have said good-bye to her quite decorously on the Park Avenue sidewalk, and he would have gone back to Chicago on the Wolverine that afternoon as he’d planned, and she might never have seen him again, and, of course, if all that had happened, she would still be married to Nick. Harry hadn’t been at all desperate over his resolution to take the Wolverine that day at luncheon. He had just been—rather silent. She had been silent, too. As she looked back on it now, it had been, take it all in all, a very silent and quite a sad little meal. Still—nothing had been said. It was only in the intimacy of the taxi that Harry had suddenly abandoned his reticence.

‘Olivia——,’ he had said, and his voice had sounded just a little strained and unnatural. ‘Olivia—I’m glad I’m going. I—I don’t belong in the picture. I must snap out of this.’

And Olivia had turned to him—she had been staring unseeingly out across the snowflakes at the Fourth Avenue shop-fronts, trying to imagine what life was going to seem like when Harry was in Chicago—and she had said impulsively, ‘Why?’

And Harry had said very steadily, not looking at her at all, but staring straight in front of him at the broad, indifferent back of the taxi-driver, ‘Because—I must.’

The curious, choked undertone in his steady voice had suddenly unnerved Olivia. It had given her a fearful, fascinating sense of playing with fire.

‘Why?’ she had whispered again, very faintly.

And Harry had turned quickly and had looked into her eyes and, as he looked, his own eyes had filled slowly with tears. The sight of those tears had moved Olivia profoundly. Why—he cared—he cared like that, she was thinking amazedly, as Harry gave a sudden little gulping sob and took her in his arms and kissed her—kissed her ridiculously on the edge of her eyebrow. And then—and then, the ninepins began falling! And almost before she knew it, Olivia had kissed Harry—but not on his eyebrow—and she was trembling and crying and laughing in his arms—laughing at what dear, ridiculous Harry was saying! ‘Dearest—I know I shouldn’t! I mean—I know you don’t kiss nice women in taxis! But——’

At that moment Olivia had felt that nowhere—nowhere in all the world—was there such a darling as Harry! And presently Harry had leaned forward and had poked the broad, indifferent back of the taxi-driver and had told him to turn around and drive in circles through Central Park in the snowstorm until further orders, and Olivia had felt, excitingly, quite like not a nice woman, as she straightened her hat under the no longer indifferent taxi-driver’s sympathetic grin!

Her sense of niceness had reassuringly returned, however, as Harry shut the window between themselves and the taxi-driver and began to invent and unfold very rapidly, on the spur of the moment, incredible, intoxicating plans for a divorce and a marriage and to spin fantastic fairy tales about all he was going to do for Olivia and little Olivia to make them happy forever and ever and ever! And when Olivia had weakly declared that all this was perfectly impossible because she could never, never bring herself to tell Nick what had happened, Harry had suddenly paused in his spinning of fairy tales to look very stern and grim, and he had exclaimed, masterfully, that he would tell him himself, that very afternoon—he would drive to the studio and tell him just as soon as he had dropped Olivia at the Greenwich Village flat. He would tell him that Olivia must be happy and that she must be free, and that she must have little Olivia and that she must have him, Harry, because he intended to devote the rest of his life to giving her whatever she wanted, and she wanted, now, to leave Nick.

So everything had been decided without a decision. For Harry had done all that. Incredibly, inarticulate Harry had done it—though Olivia had never been able to imagine how, and neither Nick nor Harry had ever enlightened her!

‘Livvy—’ said Nick suddenly. ‘Do you remember one evening—near Bennington—when we sat out in a meadow and looked at the stars?’

Olivia’s thoughts were wrenched suddenly back from the taxi and the snowstorm. She could see the white bushes and the gleaming drifts of Central Park, however, just as plainly as the Vermont pasture. She could see the feathery snowflakes driving diagonally past the windows of the taxi.

‘Yes,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Yes—I remember.’

‘We were happy that evening,’ said Nick, quite composedly.

‘Yes. We were,’ said Olivia.

‘We were happy for quite a long time after that,’ said Nick, still in that composed, almost analytic, voice.

‘Yes,’ said Olivia.

For a moment Nick did not reply. Then, ‘I—I guess we were always happier than we realized,’ he said, with a sigh.

Olivia began to feel she must do something about this. ‘We—we were miserable, too,’ she said, very bravely.

‘We thought we were,’ said Nick. ‘But I’ve never understood how we got into the mess we did. I mean—I’ve never understood why you wanted to—to get out of it.’

Once you went in for being brave, Olivia decided, there was no drawing back.

‘I fell in love with Harry,’ she said, very steadily.

‘So you said at the time,’ said Nick briefly. ‘But——’

‘If you didn’t believe it,’ said Olivia with spirit, ‘you made a mistake.’

‘Then I made one,’ said Nick.

Olivia allowed this curt statement to fall into silence. She was thinking again of the snowstorm in Central Park. She was thinking of how she had left Harry in the taxi on Waverley Place and of how she had climbed her dingy stairs and taken out her latchkey and opened her front door and walked into the little crowded living-room of the Greenwich Village flat. She had stood for a long time, she remembered, in the centre of the living-room, looking round her at the objects that mutely testified to the stability of her life with Nick. The shabby, inadequate furniture. His manuscripts on the desk. Her darning on the table. A pile of little Olivia’s building-blocks on the hearth rug. In those familiar surroundings it had been impossible to believe that this was really happening. That before the afternoon was over that room would become a battle-ground. She had wondered, very fearfully, just what Nick would do when he came home from the studio and that interview with Harry. What could he do? Talk? Words would seem very inadequate. Would he strike her—knock her down—call her a faithless wife? Of course, he wouldn’t! Nevertheless, Olivia had shuddered as she realized that Nick might be knocking down Harry in the studio that minute! Or—which was much more likely, as Harry had been a Princeton wrestler while Nick was winning John Harvard scholarships!—Harry might be knocking down Nick!

Nick would be calm, of course. Still—with a prudent idea of clearing the decks for action, Olivia had moved slowly to the telephone in the hall and had called up her mother’s waitress and had told her that she was sending little Olivia to take dinner with her grandparents. She had walked into the kitchen and had dispatched her little Irish slavey to get the child at school and take her directly to Gramercy Park in a taxi. Then she had returned to the living-room and mechanically straightened Nick’s manuscripts and picked up little Olivia’s blocks, and after ten minutes or so of crying, rather hysterically, as she stood in the window looking down through the snowflakes on Waverley Place in the direction of Nick’s studio, she had dried her eyes and lit the lamps and dropped down in her rocking-chair by the little coal fire, and had employed her trembling fingers, ridiculously, with Nick’s socks and a needle and a darning-ball, while waiting for the sound of his latchkey in the front door.

The slavey had returned by the back entrance and was setting the dining-room table in the back of the flat with a good deal of clatter, before she had finally heard his step on the stair. As the latchkey clicked, she had dropped her darning and had risen guiltily to face him. She was standing on the hearth rug, her hands on her beating heart, as he opened the front door. He had walked straight into the living-room with his hat and his overcoat on, and the rim of the hat and the shoulders of the coat were silvered with melting snow, and he looked colder and leaner and more New England than ever. He looked tired and very, very angry, but not at all as if he were going to knock Olivia down.

‘Nick—’ she had said faintly, while he glared at her in silence. She had felt overwhelmingly sorry for him. That melting snow had added the last irrelevant touch to the pathos of his appearance. There was nothing pathetic, however, in his angry accents, as he said shortly:

‘Don’t let’s have a scene. I’ll move out tonight.’

‘Nick—’ she had said again. She remembered distinctly her feeling of utter futility. Words were inadequate! Nevertheless, she had experienced a sudden, inexplicable desire to speak—to talk everything over—to justify her decision—to explain——

‘Nick—’ she had said. ‘I—I’m dreadfully sorry——’

Olivia had wondered, down the years, just what might have happened if Nick had said, at that moment, that he was sorry, too. But he didn’t. He only said: ‘Please don’t be histrionic, Livvy. I’ve listened to Ottendorf.’

And then he had turned and walked out of the room with long quick strides and down the narrow hall and into their bedroom. And he had banged the door. Olivia, still standing quite still on the hearth rug, had heard him dragging his suitcase down off the closet shelf and opening and closing bureau drawers in a passion. Her sense of pity was drowned in a deeper sense of resentment. Nick was unfair—he was unkind! She had longed to walk into the bedroom and tell him not to be histrionic himself! But she was somehow too terrified. Too terrified at all that had been decided so suddenly without a decision. Ninepins falling—one thing knocking down another!

‘There’s still time,’ she had kept saying to herself, ‘there’s still time to prevent it! There’s still time to go down the hall and open that door and tell Nick that it’s all a mistake. That I was insane in that taxi. That——’ But she hadn’t been insane! She loved Harry. She had once loved Nick. Did she love him still? Could she, at least, not love him again? Just then Nick had opened the bedroom door. He had tramped down the hall, with his suitcase in his hand. He had glared at her from the living-room threshold.

‘But what gets me,’ he had said furiously, ‘is your falling for Ottendorf. If you have fallen for him! He’s a perfect oaf! Of course, he has millions—at least I infer he has from his rosy picture of what your life together will be.’

The knife had slashed down again! The knife that was Nick’s tongue! Nick’s cruel, cutting tongue!

‘He’s not an oaf!’ she had cried. And keep your voice down, she had thought, keep your voice down, or the maid will hear you! Absurd, ridiculous, to consider the opinion of an Irish slavey at such a moment! Her words, however, had sunk to a vicious undertone. ‘And it’s not his millions! He has them, I’m glad to say, but they don’t make any difference! He has loving kindness! And consideration! And common courtesy! He’s not like you—a selfish monomaniac, without a thought for anything except your wretched writing! He’s good—and he’s gentle—and he loves me! He loves me! Do you hear? You haven’t loved me for years, Nick! You haven’t! You haven’t!’

‘Do you want to bring Katie out of the kitchen for the last act of this melodrama?’ Nick had asked coldly. ‘Get yourself in hand, Livvy. You’re positively yelling. I’ll get in touch with a lawyer.’

In the midst of her anger, Olivia had been once more overwhelmed with a sense of irrevocable action.

‘Nick,’ she had said weakly, ‘where are you going—what are you doing?’

Her question had arrested him with his hand on the doorknob.

‘I’m deserting you,’ he had snapped savagely. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it?’

And so he had gone. He had gone—like that—as if he hadn’t cared at all. Yet now, ten years later, he had the audacity and he had the power to wring her heart with the question, ‘Why did you leave me, Livvy?’ Suddenly the answer to that question came to her. She had been seeking it miserably for twenty-four hours. It rose to her lips with the complete lucidity of a disinterested query. Just something she wanted to know.

‘Nick—’ she said suddenly. She was not conscious until she had phrased them of the irrelevance of her words. ‘Nick—why did you let me go?’

For a long moment he did not answer. He merely leaned back against the sheltering façade of the wireless room and stared up past the masts and the smokestacks of the Atlanta to the glittering sky above. Olivia knew from his silence—for it had rather a breathless quality—that she had surprised him tremendously by her question.

‘Why do you ask that, Livvy?’ he said finally. ‘Because the best defensive is an offensive?’ He was struggling, Olivia knew, for the light touch. But he had not attained it. His eyes were still on the stars. Olivia herself watched the mainmast of the Atlanta swing slowly across the Milky Way, then pause, recover, and rise deliberately toward the zenith.

‘I asked,’ she then said simply, ‘because I wanted to know.’

‘I couldn’t have kept you,’ said Nick slowly.

‘You—might have,’ said Olivia.

Nick turned from the stars, then, rather quickly, to look at her face.

‘I let you go,’ he said gently, ‘for several reasons. First of all, because I was young and inadequate and very, very angry. I was jealous—and humiliated—and astonished. When I listened to Ottendorf and realized it wouldn’t do a bit of good to punch his head—well—I saw red. A man like that—with millions—sneaking around my wife——’

‘He didn’t sneak!’ said Olivia hurriedly.

‘Well,’ said Nick reasonably, ‘perhaps he didn’t. I wouldn’t say that he did. I know more about life now than I knew ten years ago. I know how such things start. Still—you wouldn’t have expected me to shake Harry’s hand at the end of that interview and come home and kiss my wife and——’

‘Not at the end of that interview,’ said Olivia, reasonably in her turn. ‘But, Nick—it took months to get that divorce. Later—when you’d thought things over—when you weren’t seeing red—why didn’t you—why didn’t you——?’

‘Drop in on you and Harry with the welcome suggestion that we call everything off? Oh, come, Livvy! When a thing like that gets started, there’s no stopping it. Besides——’ Nick’s voice was faltering off into silence.

‘Besides what?’ said Olivia.

‘When I thought things over and I wasn’t seeing red, I—I came to the conclusion that you had a right to go.’

‘I—had a right to go?’ said Olivia. She didn’t quite understand.

‘Yes,’ said Nick slowly. ‘You see—oh, I know I’m a fool to tell you this, Livvy—but, in a way, I’ve always wanted to. Confession is good for the soul. And of course you really were ridiculous never to suspect——’

‘Suspect?’ cried Olivia. What was Nick talking about?

‘Yes. Suspect that I—that I was awfully taken with another woman.’

‘Another woman?’ gasped Olivia. ‘You mean—you mean——’

‘For nearly a year before you left me, Livvy, I—I’d been seeing a lot of a girl down in the Village. She was a poetess—trying to write—trying to sell her stuff—and I—I——’

‘You mean,’ said Olivia blankly, ‘you mean—you were in love with her?’

‘I thought I was,’ said Nick. Then added honestly, ‘And—yes—I was. I certainly was. But somehow that didn’t seem to make any difference in the way I felt when Ottendorf said you wanted to leave me. I mean—it didn’t seem to make any difference what I’d done——’

‘Nicholas Allen!’ said Olivia, sitting suddenly upright on the clean scrubbed planks of the Atlanta’s boat-deck. ‘Do you mean to tell me that I—I had grounds for divorce?’ Her voice was trembling with indignation.

‘I—I’m afraid you had,’ said Nick shamefacedly.

Olivia stared at him in stupefaction.

‘I—don’t—believe you,’ she said finally.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to,’ said Nick mildly.

Looking into his honest eyes, Olivia was suddenly consumed by a fury of resentment toward the unknown poetess.

‘Who was she?’ she asked angrily.

‘Oh—she was just—a girl. A Russian Jewess. Her people lived up in the Bronx. She’d broken home ties. I never met the family. She was holding down a job on The Masses when I knew her and writing poetry on the side. Damn good poetry, too. Some of it.’

‘How old was she?’ asked Olivia coldly.

‘Twenty-four.’

‘Pretty?’ asked Olivia.

Nick’s eyes were twinkling now.

‘As a picture! No, Livvy! Really she wasn’t! But she had something—wild dark hair and great burning eyes in a slab of a Slav face. She had a touch of genius. She really had. What’s the matter, Livvy?’

Olivia was looking at him with coldly cynical eyes.

‘And you let me go out to that filthy hotel in Reno and stay there for three months—in exile!’

‘But, Livvy,’ said Nick plaintively, ‘you wouldn’t—you really wouldn’t, you know, have named a co-respondent. It just isn’t done. It——’

‘Perhaps I wouldn’t!’ said Olivia hotly. ‘But you let me feel like a dog for falling in love with Harry! For letting you down! You let me feel like a—a positively fallen woman! You did, Nick——’

‘But why did you feel like a positively fallen woman?’ asked Nick perplexedly. ‘After all—married women do fall in love with other men. They do divorce their husbands. It’s done every day. It’s——’

‘Well—I did feel like one!’ said Olivia tremulously. ‘And I felt simply disgraced at that dreadful hotel. With those horrible other women—some getting their third and fourth divorces—and thinking it was just a joke—talking about their “cure”! And all the time you were back in New York with that—that——’ Olivia pulled herself up sharply. She felt rather disgraced at the moment. She had nearly sunk to the level of vituperation. And there was something that she still wanted to know. She waited a moment to get herself in hand. Then continued more calmly, ‘Why didn’t you marry her, Nick?’

‘Marry her?’ said Nick. ‘Oh—she didn’t believe in marriage. I thought I’d mentioned that. She was a free spirit. And after you left me—if you get me, Livvy—I had rather the feeling that I’d been married. I was a trifle fed-up with the holy estate. And—well—we began to quarrel when we saw more of each other. Two writers, you know, don’t make such a hell of a good combination. And so it ended—as such things do end.’

‘Where is she now?’ asked Olivia suspiciously.

‘In Beverly Hills. She drifted out to Hollywood and gave up her art. She got a good job writing picture scenarios. She was a bright girl. Two years ago she married a movie magnate. She must have abandoned her theories on marriage—or else he had half a million a year. Anyway, she sent me a wedding announcement.’

‘I don’t think,’ said Olivia severely, ‘that she ought to have done that.’

‘Why not?’ said Nick cheerfully.

Olivia gave a little shiver of repugnance.

‘I can’t imagine,’ she said, with dignity, ‘how a woman who had—who had once—lived with a man and—and had quarrelled with him—I mean—I can’t imagine how a woman like that, once she was married to another man, could—could bear to think of him—could possibly feel for him as just a—a friend——’

‘Don’t you?’ said Nick, with a twinkle.

‘No, I don’t,’ said Olivia. Then realized what she had said.

‘Livvy,’ said Nick very solemnly, in spite of the twinkle, ‘Livvy, I suspect you of having kept your ideals.’

‘Of course I’ve kept them,’ said Olivia quickly. ‘Haven’t you kept yours?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Nick slowly. ‘If I’ve kept them, Livvy, they’re in an old trunk in the attic. You know that trunk—full of things that once were precious. But you don’t know quite what’s there. You don’t go up to open it very often. If I wanted to lay my hand on an ideal, Livvy, I wouldn’t really know quite where to look for it——’

‘You’re talking nonsense,’ said Olivia promptly. ‘You’ve had a glorious life.’

‘Oh—I’ve had a glorious life, have I?’ said Nick.

‘Of course you have,’ said Olivia firmly. ‘You had everything you wanted when you were twenty-five.’

‘Not—everything,’ said Nick, very gently. There was a little pause. Then, quite deliberately, Nick added, ‘When I was twenty-five, I really only wanted the thing that I’ve lost.’

A sudden fearful thrill ran over Olivia. But she got the better of it. Oddly enough, she was thinking of Guinevere—Guinevere in London, who was a clever young woman and a pretty one too—Guinevere, who liked to give queer parties and flutter about the lamp of genius. The thought of Guinevere had a curiously tonic quality. It vanquished the last of the thrill. Strange, though, that she didn’t resent Guinevere half as much as the unknown poetess who had obviously been dead and buried for years, as far as Nick’s affections were concerned.

‘You needn’t try to tell me, Nick,’ she said presently, ‘that you haven’t had ten happy and exciting years. You must have had lots of experiences——’

‘Too many,’ said Nick gloomily.

Olivia’s eyes returned to the stars. They were paling in the silvery radiance that hung over the eastern horizon. The twinkling red pin-prick that was Aldebaran was already lost.

‘See, Nick!’ she cried suddenly. A thin sliver of silver showed over the waste of water. It thickened, rounded, rose with amazing rapidity and turned into the waning moon. The east was luminous now. The waves were tipped with light. A shining path stretched from the Atlanta to the horizon’s edge. Nevertheless, Olivia was reflecting, there was something very melancholy about a waning moon. Shelley’s image recurred to her—

But Nick was remembering his Shelley, too, and audibly.

‘And ever changing, like a joyless eye,’ repeated Nick gloomily. ‘Far be it from me, Livvy, to compare myself with Matthew Arnold’s “beautiful and ineffectual angel beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”—but Shelley had the right idea—though he didn’t live up to it. The only joy there is comes from constancy.’

‘And haven’t you been constant?’ said Olivia primly. The question was purely rhetorical. She was obscurely comforted to know that he hadn’t.

‘No,’ said Nick promptly.

‘You found no object worth your constancy, perhaps?’ suggested Olivia, with a twinkle. She had meant to be funny, rather than unkind, but she thought she saw in the moonlight that Nick really flushed.

‘I never found a woman who could make me forget the unfinished manuscript lying on my desk,’ he said.

‘Well—I never did that,’ said Olivia.

‘That was different,’ said Nick.

‘Why was it different?’ asked Olivia quickly. ‘Because you wouldn’t expect a wife to?’

‘You were different,’ said Nick impatiently. ‘With you it was the other way round—no unfinished manuscript ever made me forget you——’

‘Yes,’ said Olivia. ‘Me and the bills and the rent and the noise that little Olivia was making. I guess that was what was wrong with the manuscripts——’

‘Not at all,’ said Nick. ‘You—the girl that I loved and married and quarrelled with and——’

‘And were unfaithful to,’ said Olivia.

‘Livvy,’ said Nick. ‘That didn’t count. But you’ll never understand that. I was a fool to tell you about it. No woman ever counted in the sense that you did—though I tried hard to make them——’

‘Oh—you tried hard to make them, did you?’ smiled Olivia.

‘Of course I did!’ said Nick. ‘Though you’d be surprised to know how little’s ever happened to me. You see, Livvy—I’ve always been so damn busy. And there’s nothing that wastes your time like a woman. To get any kick out of a love affair, you have to go in for it in a big way. Of course, I can’t claim that I’ve never tripped up over a petticoat, but—well—I like to sit down at my typewriter every morning at ten o’clock and, when the mood’s on me, I like to write all day and all night. I can’t stop to remember that I’m teaing with some one, or dining with some one, or that I have to step out to the florist’s and get off a sentimental bouquet. Why, that sort of thing is a life in itself. No woman’s worth it.’

‘Oh—we’re a worthless sex!’ smiled Olivia. She was feeling more comforted all the time.

‘You’re an—exacting sex,’ Nick corrected her. ‘And you don’t seem to understand that writing is business. You think, just because a man’s an author and doesn’t have to punch a time-clock every morning at nine, that he’s got the leisure to hang around a drawing-room till hell freezes over——’

‘You speak feelingly,’ said Olivia.

‘I feel feelingly,’ said Nick.

‘A burnt child dreads the fire, perhaps?’ suggested Olivia.

‘I wish you’d stop kidding me,’ said Nick rather irritably. ‘I’m serious.’

‘I’m serious, too,’ said Olivia. But she was smiling provocatively. ‘I’m seriously telling you that if you’re trying to make me believe that I’m the only woman you ever loved——’

‘What do you mean by “loved”?’ said Nick quickly. ‘You’re the only woman I ever wanted to marry. At least——’ He broke off suddenly with his candid smile. ‘See here—my honesty will be my undoing.’

Olivia looked up at him with rather startled eyes. She was feeling distinctly less comforted than a moment before. For the first minute since he’d mentioned her, the figure of the unknown poetess paled in the light of new knowledge. Of course there’d been others. Serious others.

‘Don’t talk about them, Nick,’ she said suddenly.

‘Why not?’ smiled Nick. ‘Because I shouldn’t kiss and tell?’

‘N-no,’ said Olivia, doubtfully. ‘N-not that. I think you could kiss and tell me. I—I don’t count. That way, I mean.’

‘You count every way,’ said Nick promptly. ‘But why not, then?’

‘Oh,’ cried Olivia miserably, ‘because I can’t bear it! Because I don’t want to have to think about what you tell me—later, I mean. It would make me—unhappy. Truly, Nick, I—I’d rather just forget you——’

‘But, Livvy,’ said Nick—and he looked very much surprised— ‘you mustn’t feel like that! I don’t want to be forgotten. And it wasn’t anything, really——’

‘Nick,’ said Olivia desperately, ‘I don’t want to hear about the girls that you wanted to marry. I really don’t.’

‘But, Livvy,’ cried Nick again, almost desperately in his turn, ‘there was only one of her, and she wasn’t a girl. She was older than I was, as a matter of fact. But only a year. I met her at Palm Beach, the winter my third novel was published. Her husband had a big place down there—raised oranges in his hours of ease——’

‘Oh—’ said Olivia, with a sigh of relief. ‘She had a husband.’

‘Oh, she had a husband,’ said Nick. ‘But he wasn’t a husband who counted. And she was a heart-breaker! She certainly was! I guess I was just flattered, at first, because she stooped to notice me——’

‘And why shouldn’t she notice you?’ asked Olivia indignantly.

‘You don’t know,’ said Nick solemnly, ‘how many people noticed her. But she made me arch-fan-carrier. And—well—you can imagine how it was—you know the sort of thing. Too much to drink and too little to do. Swimming and dancing and motoring. Always motoring—motoring to some infernally romantic spot where the jazz was good and the cocktails were better and the moon shone down on the palm trees. I can hear those palm leaves rattle now, in that soft, silky breeze. And see those shadows—light as day, it was, all night, and the moon as big as a pumpkin. For six weeks I really was in a terrible way. I didn’t know whether I was in heaven or hell.’

‘Why not?’ asked Olivia practically.

‘Why, because we were head over heels in love, and she couldn’t make up her mind what to do about it. I couldn’t make up my mind what to do about it, either. Her husband was a sap, of course. Still, I never enjoyed much either shaking his hand or shaking his drinks. It didn’t worry her, but I felt like a worm because he was paying for our gas. I don’t set myself up to be any little tin god, Livvy, but I may say I prefer to enter a lady’s life by the front door. Oh—I was in a state! But then it got hot.’

‘What got hot?’ asked Olivia anxiously.

‘It,’ said Nick. ‘The weather. So she closed her house for the season and we all came North together.’

Nick’s voice had a note of finality, as if the story were over. There was a short pause. Then—

‘What happened next?’ asked Olivia rather breathlessly.

‘Oh—,’ said Nick. ‘Next.’ Her question seemed to rouse him from revery. ‘Well—next, I got a thought for the fourth novel. You know how you feel, Livvy, when you’ve been off on an orgy of the emotions—the consolations of the intellect are singularly refreshing. I was black and blue, mentally and morally, when I came back from Palm Beach, and the thought of that novel was like a clean cold compress on my bruises. I hung around her for a while, trying to write, and when I saw that I couldn’t—well, I just packed up my typewriter and a box of foolscap and beat it for the farm.’

‘The farm?’ said Olivia.

‘Yes. Greenfield. Mother was there, of course, but she always liked me to show up. I wrote that novel, Livvy, in three months——’

‘But what about the lady?’ asked Olivia perplexedly.

‘The lady,’ said Nick. ‘Oh—the lady got kind of off me. We smashed up.’

‘Why?’ said Olivia.

‘Well—’ Nick considered the question. ‘I guess because Baltimore is so far from Vermont.’

‘Baltimore?’ said Olivia.

‘She lived there,’ said Nick tersely. ‘She was a Southern belle, and she couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to live there, too. She couldn’t understand why I wanted to write that novel, nor why I didn’t want to write more letters. Oh—there were lots of things she couldn’t understand. She used to call me up, evenings, on the long-distance telephone to talk them all over. Livvy’—Nick’s eyes were twinkling—‘Livvy, do you remember where the telephone is in that farmhouse? Right under the stairs, where you can hear every word spoken into it all over the house? Well, about half-past nine, when I was writing and Mother was knitting by the parlour fire, it would ring—that deliberate party-line ring—three buzzes and then two—there’s nothing so Vermont as a party-line ring—and Mother would get up to answer it, and she’d listen to Central, for a minute, and when she came back into the parlour—well, I wish you could have seen her face! “Nicholas,” she’d say, “Baltimore calling.” Just that. But she didn’t need to say anything more. And while I was walking to the phone, she’d get that old brown ulster of hers that always hung behind the front door and she’d put it on and walk right out through the dining-room and the kitchen and sit down in the woodshed, where she couldn’t hear what I was saying. It was a cold spring that year in Vermont, but there she’d sit on the chopping-block, knitting, in the light of an old lantern, until I came to get her. Half an hour, sometimes. Three quarters. I thought she’d catch pneumonia, but I used to be glad she couldn’t hear me—I sounded like such an ass! Her face was always a study when I opened the shed door. I guess mine was, too. But she never passed any comment on the calls. She knew, though, that I never rang up Baltimore. I did, once, from the village store, when the novel was finished.’

‘And what happened?’ asked Olivia, still rather breathlessly.

‘I got the caretaker,’ said Nick. ‘She said the lady had sailed three weeks before for Europe. Her address, I recall, was Morgan and Company. But she didn’t answer my letter. I sent her a presentation copy of the book in the autumn, and she wrote me that she was rather disappointed, as she thought she rated a dedication. From which I inferred that I’d better skip Palm Beach next season. So I went to Egypt, instead——’

‘Nick,’ said Olivia cheerfully, ‘you are really shameless.’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Nick. ‘I’m really awfully ashamed. But that’s the way I feel about writing. And a woman who can’t understand that——’

Curiously enough, Olivia was feeling that she could understand everything. When she thought of the fool poor old Nick was capable of making of himself, she could understand Mrs. Seth Allen, for perhaps the very first time. If a siren in Baltimore ever had Otto or little Van Tyne by the coat-tails, Olivia hoped she would be equal to imitating her former mother-in-law’s iron restraint. There was something superb about New England reticence! Still—Olivia could understand the siren in Baltimore, too. A Southern belle, reduced to waiting for the postman’s knock—listening for the telephone to ring! ‘Greenfield calling’—assuaging words! Words that never came! Outrageous, really, of Nick to slip out from under like that! What a mess he made of things—always! Nick’s voice broke in on her revery. It sounded a trifle depressed.

‘Oh—it’s easy to kid about it,’ he said, ‘but I can’t kid myself. I know what I’ve missed in life. I knew long before I met you and little Olivia on this boat. You never appreciate what you have until you’ve lost it.’

‘ “Blessings brighten as they take their flight”?’ suggested Olivia cheerfully. ‘Nick, dear—that’s been said before.’

‘Everything’s been said before—everything that can be said about human relationships,’ said Nick morosely. ‘You don’t have to tell a writer that. But there are the eternal verities, Livvy, and they can’t be overstressed. I’d be a fool not to realize that when you left me, you took with you everything that makes life worth living. I might have married again, of course. Had a family of children. But I guess I’m a one-man dog——’

The sudden, fearful thrill ran once more over Olivia. There was something infinitely touching in the humility of his phrase. Not that Nick had the right to use it—when you considered the unknown poetess. Still——

‘Livvy,’ said Nick suddenly, and his voice was very solemn. ‘Livvy, this meeting with you has done something to me. I think—in spite of everything—I’ve the right to tell you what it is. It’s made me realize that some things last a lifetime. Two kids can’t love each other as we did—and marry—and have a child—and part—and ever quite get over it. They can’t, Livvy. There’s something fundamentally wrong about the whole idea of divorce. I mean—it’s impossible, really. You—you’ve legalized your life with Harry. But that’s all you’ve done. You’re still the kid that married me. You can’t get away from that. We share the life we had together just as much as if it had never been interrupted. We share little Olivia. The past, you know, Livvy, is the one thing you can’t do anything about. There it is. The present—the present’s the clay in the sculptor’s hands—the future’s his dream of a masterpiece. But the past—the past’s set firmly in stone, or bronze, or marble. It faces you down. It’s exactly what you made it. There’s nothing half so real in life as the things you’ve done—inexorably, unalterably done. You can’t change them.’

Olivia’s face was half-hidden in the collar of her new mink coat. She was terribly afraid that she was going to cry.

‘You—you can forget them,’ she said presently. Her words were a tremulous whisper.

‘Can you?’ said Nick, quickly. ‘Have you forgotten them? The things—the things I mean?’

Olivia did not answer. She was hoping, desperately, that Nick would not see her tears. If he did, he would think—he would know——

‘Of course you haven’t,’ said Nick very gently. ‘Of course you couldn’t. Some things are unforgettable.’

Olivia was furtively wiping her cheek with her gloved finger-tips. Nick was staring steadily past her at the low-swung moon. He seemed to have nothing more to say at the moment. Once—once you began to cry, Olivia was thinking, it was terribly difficult to stop. It was practically—impossible. If she sobbed—if she even caught her breath—Nick might—Nick might——and then the floodgates would open! The ninepins would begin falling!

‘Nick,’—she said, and she was happily surprised to discover that her voice sounded only a little breathless and subdued—‘Nick—I—I’m going down to my cabin now. It’s getting late——’

‘It’s not ten,’ said Nick. His eyes were still on the moon.

‘I’m tired,’ said Olivia, making a movement to rise.

Nick did not turn his head.

‘But that’s not why you’re going,’ he said, very quietly. ‘You’re going, Livvy, because you’re afraid that I’m going to make love to you.’ Olivia stared at him, appalled. He had uttered the overwhelming words in a curiously dispassionate tone. Like a man in a trance, Olivia thought swiftly. Suddenly he turned to her. His voice rang clear with decision. ‘And you’re right. I am.’

‘Nick!’ cried Olivia in consternation.

‘Don’t you want me to?’ said Nick. He was gazing, sternly, straight into her eyes.

‘You—you have no right to ask me that question!’ faltered Olivia. She had risen to her knees as she spoke.

‘Possibly not,’ said Nick. ‘But you’ve answered it.’ His voice dropped suddenly. It was vibrant with emotion. ‘And what do you think I am? I—I’ve had about as much of this as I can stand! I can’t sit here beside you while you—you cry like that—and keep up this farce a minute longer! Livvy, look at me! Speak to me!’ He caught her hands in his. ‘Livvy—you precious little fool! There’s no use pretending! Livvy——’

‘Nick! Let me go!’ gasped Olivia.

‘I—I can’t!’ he said huskily. ‘Livvy——’

‘Nick,’ said Olivia desperately, ‘please let me—behave myself! I want to—behave. There’s nothing we can do that won’t make everything worse. Please, Nick——’

For a long moment his eyes questioned hers. Then, very gravely, he surrendered her hands.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘We can go on talking. But it won’t do any good. We’ll go on feeling, too. It’s much, much wiser to face the situation——’

‘I’m going down to my cabin,’ said Olivia.

‘You’ll take the situation with you,’ said Nick.

‘I know, Nick,’ said Olivia soberly. She was rising to her feet. ‘But I’d rather deal with it there than here.’

‘You’ll be miserable,’ said Nick. ‘And it’s rotten to be miserable alone.’ He was standing beside her now. He smiled wanly down at her. ‘Let’s—let’s be miserable together.’

‘I’ve been miserable alone before this,’ said Olivia sadly. ‘And I’ve learned that you get over it.’

‘I never did,’ said Nick.

‘You think, now, that you didn’t,’ said Olivia steadily. ‘But you really did. You know you did, Nick.’ She turned to walk down the boat-deck. Nick fell into step beside her. As they rounded the corner of the wireless room, Olivia became suddenly conscious of the violence of the wind. The breeze had turned into a gale. The western stars were gone. The Atlanta was pitching, now, in the swell of the approaching storm. Olivia paused to steady her steps. Nick slipped his arm through hers. They walked on for a moment, leaning against the wind. Then—

‘We were both just a little crazy this evening, Nick,’ said Olivia. ‘By tomorrow——’

‘By tomorrow,’ said Nick gloomily, ‘I expect to be in a frenzy.’

By this time they had reached the little iron staircase.

‘Don’t come down with me, Nick,’ said Olivia suddenly. She drew her arm from his.

‘Livvy——,’ said Nick.

Olivia glanced up at him. His eyes were troubled, but his lips were twisted humorously.

‘Livvy,’ he said, ‘if it’s any comfort to you, you are certainly behaving yourself very, very well. You are even making me behave. Which is quite an accomplishment.’

This gallant effort to achieve the light touch did not deceive Olivia. She endeavoured to rise to it, however.

‘Oh—I’m quite a behaviourist,’ she said lightly. ‘But don’t be too miserable. Things look different in daylight.’ As she put out her hand, his own closed eagerly over it. ‘Good night, Nick.’

‘Good night, Livvy,’ he said gravely.

She turned steadily from him to descend the iron staircase. The promenade-deck was deserted. Skirting the steamer chairs, Olivia hurried along it. As she reached the companionway, she broke into a run. She stumbled down the white-and-gold staircase. She was conscious, at the moment, of only one desire—to reach her cabin and shut the door on her misery before she met some fool whom she would have to speak to. A piece of paper was pinned to her cabin door. A message was scrawled on it. Olivia read it and burst into hysterical laughter. ‘Madam, I am seasick, Maggie.’ Well—that was one comfort. She had forgotten Maggie! Maggie, who would have been waiting, if the breeze had not turned into a gale, to hang up the new mink coat and the red crêpe frock beneath it on a closet rail! Maggie, who was always conversational—Olivia entered the lamplit serenity of her little chintz-hung cabin. She ought to look up little Olivia—but, no—she couldn’t. She absolutely couldn’t. Olivia locked her door and slipped out of her mink coat and sat down on the edge of her brass bedstead. It was only then that she began to think really of Nick. Of Nick—and of herself—and of Harry.

‘There’s nothing half so real in life as the things you’ve done,’ she whispered. ‘Inexorably, unalterably done.’

Two hours later, Olivia lay breathlessly beneath her silken coverlet as she heard little Olivia’s light tap on her door.

‘Ma?’ said little Olivia softly. Then again, ‘Ma?’

Olivia did not answer. The doorknob clicked. The lock resisted. After a moment she heard the door of her daughter’s cabin open and close across the narrow corridor. Olivia went on silently crying into her dampened pillow. She went on rehearsing all she had said to Nick, all he had said to her, on the boat-deck, two hours before.

CHAPTER V
SATURDAY

Olivia sat in her chintz-covered armchair, listening to the boat creak and watching the chintz curtains sway slowly back and forth at her cabin window. A shaded reading-lamp stood at her elbow. It cast a concentrated circle of yellow light on the chair in which she sat. Beyond it, in spite of the cheerful chintz, the little room looked cold and colourless in the light reflected from the grey-green sea and the leaden sky. A French novel—vient de paraître—was lying on Olivia’s lap. She had cut the first twenty pages and had read three. But the book was dull, she thought, and the construction rather difficult. She did not want to read it. Her hands, still holding the wire hairpin that had served as a paper-cutter, were lying idly on its lemon-coloured cover. There was nothing that she wanted to do. Nothing, at least, that she could do in her cabin. Still—Olivia knew that it was wiser not to leave it.

It was a depressing day. A gust of rain, now and again, blew down the deck outside and spattered the window-pane with a whirl of crystal raindrops. Like tears, they looked, Olivia thought, as they trembled a moment in limpid globules, then slowly elongated and ran their wavering course down the grey misted glass. The Atlanta rose and fell, mechanically, in the grip of the sea—rose, twisted herself, and fell, with a curious corkscrew movement that seemed to provoke the protesting creaks from the panelled walls of Olivia’s cabin. Occasionally the rhythm of her motion was sensibly interrupted by a dull shock—an audible flat slap—that the waves administered somewhere below her water-line. It was certainly a depressing day.

Under ordinary circumstances, however, Olivia knew that she would not have thought that sort of day in mid-ocean at all depressing. Olivia was, as her daughter had often bitterly remarked, a disgustingly good sailor, and she loved to watch the sea when it was acting up. On any other voyage, she would have been up on the boat-deck in a mackintosh, braving the wind and the rain, breathing in great gulps of the damp sea gale, rejoicing in the lowering clouds and the tossing waves and the white spirals of spray, blown from the crests of the choppy swell. Even now, in her chintz-covered armchair, Olivia could picture, with a sense of exhilaration, the great prow of the Atlanta, rising and falling with its majestic rocking-horse motion, against the clear, grey horizon line. She could see the sea-gulls—there would be sea-gulls, of course, only twenty-four hours out from New York—great greedy sea-gulls, soaring white against the cloud-smeared, slate-coloured sky, or dropping like stones into the marble path of the wake, to flutter there an instant in a confusion of flapping wings, before they rose triumphantly, a scrap of toast, a bit of biscuit, in their curved beaks, to soar again, above the masts, around the smokestacks, back to the wake again——Oh, yes! On any other voyage, Olivia knew, she would have been up on the bridge with the captain, watching the plunging prow, or down on the steerage-deck with the young second officer, perhaps—the storm would have swept it clear of emigrants, poor darlings!—hanging over the stern, tossing hardtack to the gulls!

But on this voyage, after last night’s revelations, the rain-washed, deserted decks were forbidden ground. Waking in the middle of the morning from the heavy, drugged sleep which had followed her tearful night, Olivia had told herself firmly that there must be no more revelations. She really must not see Nick alone again until after they had landed. Later, if he turned up in Chicago some day, ringing the doorbell of the Lake Shore Drive apartment and asking for a cup of tea and a glimpse of little Olivia, surely—surely she would have herself more in hand. In her own drawing-room, swept and garnished as it was by the hand of the modern decorator, denuded of every homely object that had reference to their mutual past, she would feel mistress of herself and of the situation. Behind her own tea-tray, pouring her China tea out of the silver teapot that was part of the Georgian service which Harry had bought for her in London on their wedding trip, she would feel as serene and unruffled as the vast plane of pale-blue lake water that stretched before her fifteenth-story windows. She would feel like what she was. She would feel like Harry’s wife.

Nick, too, sitting on her jade-green sofa with his feet on her pale grey rug, noting the oyster-white walls and the silver hangings and the sparsely scattered, perfectly placed chairs and tables—collectors’ pieces, every one!—breathing the faint, clean perfume from the great bowl of white roses which always stood beside her tea-table, looking from his self-possessed hostess to her self-possessed reflection in the crystal mirror above the black marble mantelpiece—Nick, too, would have himself more in hand. The Greenwich Village flat would seem very far away. It would seem in another world—as indeed it was. In the modern setting of the Lake Shore Drive apartment, Nick would face the fact that bygones were bygones. That the woman before him was merely—his hostess. That she was Olivia Ottendorf—Mrs. Harry Ottendorf—irrevocably transmuted by the alchemy of time and experience from the soft, silly, wistful, idealistic young creature who had run off with him—from ‘the kid that had married him’—into—into——well, into something infinitely more hard-headed and hard-hearted—more capable, more competent—something quite different, at any rate, from the girl that she had been, or the woman she might have become, if she had remained Olivia Allen—Mrs. Nicholas Allen—in the Greenwich Village flat.

In her chintz-covered armchair, Olivia was even equal to hoping that Harry might break in on this imaginary interview—might enter the drawing-room, fresh from the brokers’ office, bringing the weight of his cheerful, conjugal presence to the scales already tipped beneath the influence of merely material surroundings—might pat her shoulder—shake Nick’s hand—say curtly, ‘How are you, Allen?’ Then, ‘The market looked up today, Olivia. Are we dining at home this evening? I’m glad. Where’s little Olivia?’

All that would be good for Nick. It would be good for her. It would make them both realize that the water which had run under the bridge could not be recalled—could not be piped back to the mountain rill from which it had sprung. Last night on the boat-deck it had seemed—it had really seemed as if that were possible. Last night on the boat-deck—with a little audible sigh, Olivia pulled herself up sharply. She must stop thinking thoughts like that. She must stop thinking about Nick. That way madness lay! She ought to be very grateful for the storm. She was very grateful for the storm. It had made the best of excuses for her absence from the luncheon-table.

For, on waking from her heavy, drugged sleep in the middle of the morning, Olivia had felt totally unequal to meeting Nick at noon. While drinking her black coffee and crunching her Melba toast, she had decided to order luncheon in her cabin. Fortified by that decision, she had risen, presently, and dressed and, seeing Maggie’s note of the evening before still lying on her dressing-table, she had set forth on a visit of mercy to the inside cabin on a lower deck which Maggie shared with a school-teacher from Moline, Illinois—a distressed little seasick school-teacher, returning from her first grand tour of Europe. On her way back to her cabin, Olivia had tapped at her daughter’s door. Little Olivia was not a good sailor. She was lying white and wan on her bed, and she had had no breakfast and she wanted only a bowl of soup for luncheon. When Olivia had tried to tell her of the comic condition in which she had found the prostrated Maggie, little Olivia had only turned her face to the wall and had said, ‘Don’t talk about it, Ma! Have a heart!’

Olivia had had a heart. She had patted her daughter’s thin white shoulder and had gone quietly out of the cabin, leaving little Olivia to her reflections. She had returned to her own room, feeling just a little conscience-stricken because she found the rough weather so very convenient. It took her thoughts off herself to feel vaguely responsible for the condition of Maggie and of little Olivia. And she could have luncheon in her cabin. Nevertheless, she felt a trifle conscience-stricken again, under the reproachful eye of the overworked stewardess who took her order. This was a day, that glance had implied, for those who could think of eating lamb chop and alligator pear salad and hot compote and tea, to eat them in the dining-room!

But Olivia, after all, had ignored the chop and only toyed with the salad and left the compote untasted. She was not hungry, she had told herself firmly as she sipped her hot tea, because she had had no fresh air. After the stewardess had removed the tray, she had stood for some time at her window, staring out at the sea, struggling with the temptation to slip into her mackintosh and run up the white-and-gold staircase for a turn or two around the promenade-deck. She wouldn’t see Nick. He’d be in the smoking-room, a wretched day like this.

‘Liar!’ Olivia had said presently, quite viciously, aloud to herself. ‘You just want to meet him!’ And she had picked up the French novel and the wire hairpin from her dressing-table and had sunk down in the chintz-covered armchair and had turned on the reading-lamp—only to discover that she did not at all care to read.

She glanced now at her wrist watch. Three o’clock. Four hours to dinner-time. She would go up to dinner. But she would return to her cabin as soon as the meal was over. She would talk to Nick only in the presence of the benevolent captain. In the mean time, she might put her mind on her customs declaration. Where, she wondered, half-heartedly, were those bills that the Paris dressmakers had made out? She ought to look them over. Perhaps they were too low, after all, to get by without question. Still—to a man’s undiscerning eye modern clothes never looked as if they’d cost anything. No lace. No embroidery. If you turned them inside out and hung two on a hanger—— Had Maggie really ripped the labels out of those hats? But they were in the hold. Too late to do anything about them now. She was glad that Harry was not with them. Men had such a conscience about the customs! Women never had. It wasn’t a question of morality, however. Olivia had long ago decided that people merely broke the laws that they found personally inconvenient. In the Ambrose Channel, Harry always carried on about her declaration as if he’d never shattered a speed limit or hired a bootlegger in his life! How many thousands of dollars’ worth of duty, she wondered idly, had she saved Harry, by a little harmless subterfuge at various ports of entry? Yet, if he were with them, he would be saying plaintively, ‘You’re a smuggler, Olivia. You’re just a common smuggler.’

If Harry were with them—again Olivia sighed her little audible sigh. If Harry were with them, this voyage on the Atlanta would not have presented the problems that it had. It would have been awkward—it would have been difficult—it would have provided Henrietta with plenty of interesting anecdotes to repeat all winter at New York dinner-tables—but it would not have been the same. For if Harry had been with them, she and Nick would never have achieved quite the same sort of companionship. And Nick would have seen—she would have found it so easy to show him—that she and Harry—— But what would Nick have seen? What could she have shown him? Nick’s keen eyes would have detected instantly that she—that he—— Oh, well, that her marriage with Harry had turned out just like every other marriage! That the bubble was off the wine.

Was there ever any use, Olivia wondered sadly, in leaving one man for another? In ten years’ time wasn’t your feeling for a husband—for any, every, husband—exactly the same? Was it merely love that women fell in love with? But Byron, the king of lovers, had had something to say about that—what was it?

‘In her first passion’—yes, in her first passion, she had really loved Nick. But someone else, some minor forgotten poet, had said something else. ‘The lover in the husband may be lost.’ She had lost Nick, long, long before she had ever thought of leaving him. The unknown poetess—the bickerings—the rows. Under any circumstances they could never recapture, now, the emotion that had brought them together. Twenty years later, all they loved was love.

Olivia wished suddenly that she had thought of all this on the boat-deck last evening. She wished that she had said it to Nick. Absurd she’d been, to break down like that! She ought to have pointed out to Nick that only propinquity and opportunity and the provocative novelty of their piquante situation had loosened their tongues. She ought to have told him that he should marry some nice girl, years younger than herself——Nick ought to marry. She hoped he would——

‘Liar!’ said Olivia aloud again, and again quite viciously. She had never quite got over him. She never would get over him.

But this was ridiculous! This was utterly impossible! She must occupy her thoughts! Olivia rose abruptly from her chintz-covered armchair. The novel and the hairpin slipped to the floor. She would go in again to see little Olivia. A moment later she tapped at her daughter’s door.

‘Come in!’ cried little Olivia. Then, ‘Oh—come in, Ma. Sit down and talk to me.’

Little Olivia was looking much more cheerful. She had had her soup and she was sitting up in bed now, her thin shoulders covered by a blue flannel bed-jacket, her little white face angelically framed by her straight golden hair. She needed only a blue veil, Olivia fancied, to look like some primitive Madonna, some childlike, round-cheeked Virgin, caught, unaware, in the last moment of her childhood. A Gabriel, lily in hand, would not have seemed out of place at her bedside! The detective story on her lap, however, was a trifle out of the picture. ‘Murder by Inches,’ was flaming in scarlet script on its yellow jacket. Little Olivia grinned up at her pleasantly.

‘Richard is himself again,’ she said brightly. ‘I’m holding hard to the thought that we’ll land in twenty-four hours.’

Olivia picked up the empty bouillon cup from its precarious position on the bed’s edge and placed it on the dressing-table. We’ll land in twenty-four hours, she was thinking. We’ll land in twenty-four hours, and I may not see Nick again for another ten years. I may never see him again, like this—unless—unless I do lend him little Olivia. I wonder what she’d say if I asked her——

‘Sit down,’ said little Olivia. ‘I’m feeling very sociable.’

Olivia sank down obediently in her daughter’s chintz-covered armchair.

‘You look much better,’ she said.

‘I feel much better,’ said little Olivia cheerfully. Then, with a critical glance, ‘You don’t look so very fit yourself.’

‘I’m feeling fit,’ said Olivia calmly.

Little Olivia regarded her for a moment in silence.

‘You’re a funny one, Ma,’ she said presently. ‘I never know what you’re thinking.’

‘Me?’ said Olivia in astonishment. For she always felt as transparent as plate glass under little Olivia’s level ice-green gaze.

‘Yes,’ said little Olivia, rather admiringly. ‘You always look so innocent. But do you know—I sometimes think you’re rather full of guile.’

‘Me?’ said Olivia again. She felt overwhelmingly flattered.

‘On this trip,’ said little Olivia unexpectedly, ‘I think you’ve been quite remarkable.’

‘On—this—trip?’ faltered Olivia questioningly.

‘Yes,’ said little Olivia. ‘You fooled me at first. At first I thought you were being rather silly. But then I realized you were being very wise.’

‘Wise?’ said Olivia wonderingly. If there was anything she hadn’t been, she was thinking amazedly, it was just that.

‘Yes,’ said little Olivia again, ‘Wise with—I never know what to call him.’

‘Your father?’ asked Olivia. She was meeting her daughter’s level ice-green gaze very steadily.

‘Yes. My father,’ said little Olivia.

Olivia was wondering just how to break the pause that followed, when her daughter spoke again.

‘I don’t know, Ma,’ she said hesitatingly, ‘just what you thought I was thinking about him for the last ten years. You see—you hardly ever spoke of him. I can’t remember now, just what I did think at first. I was so young, and it was all so exciting—living in Chicago, I mean, and knowing Hunny and having things—— Can you understand that?’

‘Yes,’ said Olivia soberly, ‘I can understand that.’

‘But later,’ said little Olivia confidentially, ‘later I began to be awfully curious about him. I can’t remember much about the way we lived in New York, you know. Just a little about how the flat looked—my tiny room and my iron bed with the screen around it—and the coal fire, Ma, in the living-room—I can remember you telling me not to play too near it! And the dining-room that was always dark—eating breakfast by electric light. And my school—that teacher, Miss Swayne—she was a darling! And I can remember the Square—and my doll’s carriage—and you telling me not to catch diseases! But I don’t remember Father—except just that he was there. I remember his typewriter—I remember you telling me not to touch it. But not Father himself, at all. So, of course, you see, I began to wonder about him. I wondered a good deal.’ Little Olivia’s voice trailed off into silence. She was looking rather questioningly at Olivia.

‘That—that was very natural,’ said Olivia steadily.

‘Well, it was, you know, Ma,’ the child began again. ‘Of course, I could see that you didn’t like him. I mean—well—you and Hunny never said much of anything, but I knew that your attitude was critical. I knew that always—long before I was old enough to understand why. To understand, I mean, that of course you wouldn’t have left him if he hadn’t made you awfully unhappy. Still—just the very fact that you were both so completely down on him made me wonder what he was really like. It seemed to me, you know, that no matter what he’d done, he’d come out at the small end of the horn. We were all happy. But he—— Well, I used to think about him. There’s something appealing about the underdog. And he seemed like the underdog to me. The one who got left. He did get left, Ma——’ Little Olivia’s voice was almost anxiously explanatory.

‘Yes,’ said Olivia encouragingly. ‘He did get left.’ This was very touching, she was thinking tremulously. And very cheering. It wasn’t going to be so hard to lend little Olivia, after all.

‘You understand, don’t you, Ma,’ asked little Olivia anxiously, ‘how I came to think all that? I don’t want to hurt your feelings——’

‘I understand,’ said Olivia tenderly. ‘And you don’t hurt my feelings. On the contrary, I only wish you’d told me—I wish you’d asked me—I would have explained——’

‘I don’t think you could have explained,’ said little Olivia doubtfully. ‘Some things you have to see for yourself.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Olivia, ‘you were too little to appreciate——’ She was thinking how fundamentally wrong divorce was. She was thinking how confusing, how bruising, the very thought of divorce—even a decent, discreet divorce like hers—was to the mind of a child. ‘You were too little, darling,’ she said suddenly, ‘to think those thoughts alone. You should have come to me——’

‘I knew how you felt,’ said little Olivia calmly, ‘without coming to you.’ Her voice had quickened and brightened. It had lost its confidential inflection. It had grown distinctly practical. ‘And now that I’ve seen him, I know why you felt it.’

‘You know—why I felt it?’ faltered Olivia.

‘Yes,’ said little Olivia competently. She was leaning eagerly forward among her piled-up pillows. She paused a moment to brush back a strand of her straight yellow hair. ‘Now that I’ve seen him, I don’t see how you could have lived with him ten days, let alone ten years——’

‘My child!’ cried Olivia in consternation.

‘What I wish you’d tell me now,’ said little Olivia, smiling, ‘is why you ever fell for him? He’s such a queer mixture—so cocksure one minute and so sentimental the next. I think he’s awfully conceited—in rather a subtle way. He’s very light and airy about himself, of course, and he’s funny—but he always knows he’s funny. He likes to be laughed at and applauded and admired. He likes to make a hit with the ladies. I suppose what he really likes is just to be loved—which is rather pathetic. For how could you love anything quite so bright and glittering and shiny——’

Olivia had risen from her chair. Her eyes were blazing down at her daughter.

‘You mustn’t talk like that!’ she said hotly.

‘Why not?’ asked little Olivia calmly.

‘Because he’s your father,’ said Olivia indignantly. She was thinking how completely at one with Nick she felt! A knife had slashed down again. A knife, this time, that was little Olivia’s tongue. The child was unfair! She was cruel!

‘But don’t you agree with me?’ asked little Olivia.

‘Of course I don’t!’ said Olivia. Her eyes dropped, however, before the level ice-green gaze.

Her daughter regarded her for a moment in silence. Then she drew a long breath.

‘I guess you’re not as remarkable as I thought you were, Ma,’ she said slowly.

Silence fell again on mother and daughter. Again it was broken by little Olivia.

‘Ma, dear,’ she said gently, ‘don’t look like that. It’s just foolishness. You’re worth ten of him. I suppose he’s been trying to upset you——’

‘He hasn’t been trying to upset me,’ protested Olivia tremulously.

‘Well, something’s upset you,’ said little Olivia reasonably. She was looking very keenly at Olivia. ‘See here, Ma!’ The child paused again to brush back the wayward strand of straight yellow hair. ‘I’d decided you were just being super-civilized, letting him loiter about and—and being nice to him. I thought it was awfully sophisticated of you to forgive and forget in such a—a natural way. But if he’s making you miserable’—here little Olivia’s clenched hand descended on her coverlet—‘if he’s making you miserable, I’ll go to him, myself! I’ll tell him to lay off you! I’ll——’

In spite of the absurdity of her daughter’s words, Olivia was suddenly overcome with tenderness for her earnest little champion.

‘There’s nothing you can do, darling,’ she said, ‘except——’

‘Except what?’ asked little Olivia belligerently.

‘Try to—like him,’ said Olivia simply.

The expression of little Olivia’s face was quite blank and startled.

‘Like him?’ she said.

‘You’re his child,’ said Olivia.

‘I keep forgetting that,’ said little Olivia slowly. Then, rather perplexedly, ‘It—it’s confusing, isn’t it?’

A faint smile of irony flickered for a moment on Olivia’s tremulous lips.

‘Yes,’ she conceded deliberately, ‘it is confusing.’ She turned toward her daughter’s door. She really felt she had nothing more to say.

‘Ma—give me a kiss!’ said little Olivia, most unexpectedly.

Greatly astonished, Olivia bent over her daughter’s yellow head. She kissed her soft white cheek. Little Olivia patted her shoulder encouragingly.

‘Ma,’ she said cheerfully, ‘if I were you, I’d just forget him. I’d put him out of my head——’

Olivia burst into rather hysterical laughter. In her turn she patted little Olivia’s shoulder.

‘That’s good advice,’ she said. Again she turned toward the door. Her hand on the doorknob, she paused to look back at her daughter. ‘Put him out of your head, anyway,’ she said, smiling. ‘Why don’t you try to take a little nap?’

Little Olivia glanced at her wrist watch.

‘Oh—twenty-three hours, now!’ she cried jubilantly. ‘I guess we’ll all live to land.’

Twenty-three hours now, thought Olivia, as she crossed the narrow corridor. With little Olivia feeling the way she did, when she parted with Nick next day, she would part with him really forever. Little Olivia was the only decent excuse there was for a bond between her father and mother. If little Olivia vetoed their further association, it became impossible, undignified, positively clandestine! Olivia opened the door of her cabin. With a heavy sigh she looked around the little chintz-hung room. She picked up the French novel from the floor. She might as well try to read it. Suddenly she perceived a small square florist’s box, standing on her dressing-table. A florist’s box, five days out at sea? It had not been there before. A small square florist’s box—what did it make her think of? Something very far away—something——It was tied with flamboyant green gauze ribbon, slightly creased at the ends. Olivia undid the knot. A note was tucked above the folds of pale-green oiled paper. ‘Livvy,’ the superscription read. Olivia unfolded it with trembling hands.

‘My dear,’ it ran, ‘you said you were an excellent sailor. The promenade-deck is delightful today—cold and wind-swept and wet and utterly deserted. I have complete confidence in your behaviour and can guarantee my own. Nick.’

But why the florist’s box? Olivia turned back the folds of pale-green oiled paper. A single gardenia met her eye—a single gardenia, ridiculously concocted from white-and-green blotting-paper, its thick white petals and green leaves held sketchily in place with paper clips! A bit of tinfoil was wound about its beribboned stem. Olivia was laughing aloud. Nick was really irresistible! She—she took things too seriously. Nick took them seriously, too, of course. Still—there was always the light touch! The light touch redeeming sentiment from sentimentality! Yet sentiment too—sentiment lurking so touchingly behind the light touch!

Olivia turned from her dressing-table and opened her closet door. She slipped into her mackintosh without a moment’s hesitation. She pulled her red velvet béret over her ears. She walked then, back to her mirror. Deliberately she powdered her nose and outlined her lips with her carmine lipstick. She smoothed her hair down becomingly beneath the sides of the béret. Smiling, she confronted her reflection in the mirror. The smile was completely involuntary. Her eyes were starry bright. Slowly she picked up the blotting-paper gardenia, looked at it for a moment, then pinned it on the lapel of her mackintosh. Her smile had turned into a little audible laugh of happiness.

‘I’m a fool,’ she thought. ‘I’m an utter fool.’ But she thought it without conviction. With a last glance in the mirror, she ran to her cabin door. She hurried down the corridor and up the white-and-gold staircase. The companionway was deserted and the door leading to the promenade-deck was closed. The boat was rolling so that it was hard to open it. As she did so, a great gust of cold, damp air assailed her. It carried with it the scent of the rain and the sea. She stepped over the threshold. The deck was wet and empty. The steamer chairs were folded and the canvas was up, hiding the view of the boisterous waves. The light that filtered through it was grey and the wind was whistling. A rope flapped somewhere, over her head. The floor of the deck was slippery. Staggering a little, with quick, uncertain steps, Olivia walked toward the stern of the boat, the wind at her back. This was fun, she was thinking. This was really adventurous! As she rounded the turn of the deck, she saw Nick at once. He was standing with his back to her at the edge of the canvas on the lee side of the boat, his elbows on the rail. The battered felt hat was pulled down over his ears. The collar of the grey tweed overcoat was turned up about his neck. The noise of the storm hid the sound of her footsteps. He was not aware of her approach until she touched his arm. He turned then, very quickly, to look down at her. His face was suddenly illuminated by his candid smile.

‘You came!’ he said, a little breathlessly.

‘Yes. I came,’ said Olivia, rather unnecessarily.

‘I wasn’t sure that you would,’ said Nick very gratefully. His eyes were on his flower.

‘I—I loved your gardenia,’ said Olivia almost formally.

‘I loved it myself,’ said Nick, with a grin. ‘And I hoped it would fetch you. I found the most imaginative steward who brought me the box and the tinfoil and the ribbon. Well—now you’re here, where shall we go?’

‘I don’t care,’ said Olivia.

‘Do you think, with some rugs, those chairs would be possible?’

‘I’m sure they would,’ smiled Olivia.

‘I’ll hail my imaginative steward,’ said Nick. ‘Wait here.’

He walked brusquely away from her. Olivia watched his lank figure as he hurried down the deck. Then turned to look at the sea. There were gulls. There were lowering clouds and tossing waves and white spirals of spray, just as she had imagined. The water was grey-green—the tint of pale jade. The sky was smoke-coloured. The rain had stopped for the moment, but the air was wet with the briny spray. Her lips tasted salt.

‘Meet my imaginative steward,’ said Nick. ‘His name is Bill.’

Olivia turned to smile at the pallid young Briton, who stood at Nick’s elbow, bowed down under cushions and steamer rugs. His white-lashed eyes were twinkling. His thin lips were curved in a Cockney grin.

‘Note the stupendous effect of our gardenia, Bill,’ said Nick cheerfully. ‘Now we must make Mrs. Ottendorf very comfortable.’ He was straightening out a steamer chair as he spoke. ‘One rug under her, I think, Bill, and two rugs on top. Sit down, Livvy. Lift your feet. Now, two cushions at her back. There! Is that luxurious? Is it, at least, dry? That’s fine, Bill. Now, throw me a rug, and dismiss us from your mind!’

The steward was grinning over Nick’s half-crown. He was twinkling appreciatively at Olivia. Nick opened another steamer chair, flung himself into it, and tossed his rug over his knees.

‘Would you like some ’ot tea, sir?’ suggested Bill sympathetically.

‘You’re a good man, Bill!’ cried Nick with enthusiasm. ‘I said you were imaginative! Yes! How about it, Livvy? Hot tea—and English muffins in a little covered plate. Plenty of muffins, with plenty of butter. And some Scotch seed-cake. That suit you, Livvy?’

Olivia nodded. Bill ducked and withdrew.

‘Now this is something like,’ said Nick, extending his long legs beneath his steamer rug with a comfortable sigh. ‘I’ve lots to talk about. I’ve been thinking all day of the things I didn’t say to you last night.’

‘You said plenty,’ observed Olivia brightly.

‘But not nearly all. You’ve no idea of the number of things I didn’t say. They began to occur to me as soon as you vanished down that iron staircase. I’m afraid that I gave you quite the wrong impression of my life. As I thought it over, it seemed to me that we had rather concentrated on my—er—hours of ease. I wouldn’t like you to get an erroneous slant, Livvy, on the career of the foremost American novelist——’

‘Idiot!’ said Olivia brightly.

‘There! You see?’ said Nick, with equal brightness. ‘You did get it. I’m not at all an idiot. On the contrary. I’m a serious-minded artist——’

‘I wonder what you really are,’ smiled Olivia. ‘I used to try to guess that from your books.’

‘Didn’t you know?’ asked Nick. ‘Did you have to guess?’

‘Yes,’ said Olivia, rather seriously. ‘I did. It’s funny, isn’t it? No matter how well you know a person, once he begins to write—write seriously, I mean—you can learn things about him from the printed page. You can’t write well, without giving yourself away, Nick. I used to read your books and think how I had misunderstood you——’

‘Did you?’ said Nick, rather wistfully. ‘Did you, really?’ But his eyes were beginning to twinkle. ‘If you did, Livvy, you were wrong. You really can’t learn about a writer from his writing. For writing’s the great refuge—it’s an escape from reality—it’s the world as we wish it was. No writer’s got the guts to live up to the sentiments that he expresses on the printed page.’

‘Water can’t rise above its source,’ said Olivia primly.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Nick.

‘I mean,’ said Olivia slowly, ‘I mean—that the—the quality of a work of art is—is determined by the quality of the mind of the artist. No novel could ever be better than the mind that produced it. Your books are fine and true and beautiful——’

‘So I must be fine and true and beautiful, too?’ smiled Nick ironically. ‘Livvy, dear—you haven’t known as many writers as I have! Good novelists are merely people who possess a sense of reality and a gift for telling a story. They’re people who are willing to work like dogs and think only of themselves—for your book is yourself, Livvy—it’s an extension of the ego. Artists are always egotistical and usually mean. They’re muckers, really——’

‘Nick!’ protested Olivia.

‘But they are, Livvy! Just that impulse to give yourself away—there’s something rather muckerish about that——’

‘It’s only the impulse to tell the truth!’ cried Olivia.

‘It’s the impulse to tell the world,’ muttered Nick moodily. ‘You don’t know, Livvy—that rotten urge of the writer in the most passionate personal situations to stand off and observe—to record and remember—to take notes on your emotional reactions—on your very words sometimes—for future reference. To sell yourself. Not for gold, perhaps—but for glory. To an artist nothing is sacred——’

‘Nothing is sacred, perhaps,’ said Olivia stoutly, ‘but the urge to create.’

‘Create what?’ said Nick contemptuously. ‘In my case, one more book. God knows there are too many books in the world already! Yet I want to write another one this minute. I’m going to write it, just as soon as we land. I’ve got a plot——’

Enthusiasm was creeping back into his disillusioned voice.

‘Where?’ asked Olivia.

‘Where?’ echoed Nick. ‘Where have I got the plot?’

‘Where are you going to write it?’ asked Olivia wistfully. She was hoping rather foolishly that he was going to say ‘Chicago.’ But—

‘Oh—’ said Nick. ‘I write up at the farm. I keep the farmhouse open, Livvy. I’ve lived there since Mother’s death. It’s a great place to work. I haven’t a motor, and I’ve cut off the incoming calls on the telephone——’

‘That was a wise precaution,’ said Olivia demurely, with a twinkle for the siren in Baltimore.

But Nick ignored the interruption. ‘And I’ve made my invaluable Jap rig up his radio in the barn. I can’t hear it, but I hate to think it’s there. I only tolerate it to keep Suki. You’d like Suki, Olivia. He’s been with me seven years. He’s my cook and my secretary and my valet, all in one. He stands between me and the world. He’s the only person I see, sometimes, weeks on end at the farm. Often I write sixteen hours at a stretch. Suki shoves my food in front of me and bicycles down to the village for the mail and the supplies. He’s a good typist——’

‘And a good companion?’ inquired Olivia. Nick’s life seemed rather lonely.

‘A swell companion!’ cried Nick enthusiastically. ‘Much the same sort of companion as a goldfish. Just as silent—but more amenable to suggestion. Oh, Suki makes me very comfortable——’

‘But—don’t you ever get—depressed?’ asked Olivia anxiously.

‘Depressed?’ Nick’s voice rang clear with astonishment.

‘Bored,’ said Olivia. ‘I’m always depressed when I’m bored.’

‘But I’m never bored at the farm,’ said Nick eagerly. ‘I write like a house afire when the going’s good. And when it isn’t, I walk the stony pastures and climb the granite hills. Suki’s a good cook——’

‘But, Nick,’ said Olivia, ‘don’t you ever want someone to talk to?’

‘To talk to—yes,’ said Nick judicially. ‘But never to listen to. And it’s been my sad experience, Livvy, that when you talk, you have also to listen. Of course, I can conceive of an alter ego—someone to air my views to—who would understand—— This writing game’s not so simple.’

‘Another—writer?’ suggested Olivia. She was thinking of the unknown poetess.

‘Perish the thought!’ cried Nick, with emphasis. ‘No—just a—oh, just a woman, I guess. Every man needs a woman, Livvy. But with a woman’—Nick sighed profoundly—‘with a woman you have to take so much else.’

This was the moment, of course, in which to tell Nick that he ought to marry some nice girl years younger than herself. But Olivia didn’t seem to want to. She didn’t want to, she tried to tell herself, because she couldn’t think of any nice girl who would fit into the picture that Nick had just drawn of life on the farm. A nice girl would begin by quarrelling with Suki, of course, and end——

‘There’s only one real reason, Livvy,’ went on Nick very practically, ‘for putting up with the inconvenience of living with a woman. And I told you last night that I’d never met one whom I could really love.’

Olivia allowed this statement to fall into silence. The conversation was growing dangerous, she thought nervously. Just then she saw Bill’s figure emerge from the door of the companionway, bent backward under an enormous tin tray. She was greatly relieved to see it. Hot muffins would provide a divertissement.

‘I’ve brought a drop of rum, sir,’ said Bill sympathetically. He was placing the tray on the foot of Nick’s steamer chair. ‘It’s ’eartening, sir, in your tea, a day like this.’

‘Thanks,’ said Nick briefly. ‘I need heartening.’ Then, with a grin for Olivia, ‘And so does Mrs. Ottendorf. Give me the wine check, Bill. Rum, Livvy? You’d better. That’s the girl! Everything’s fine, Bill.’

Again the steward ducked and withdrew. Nick poured Olivia’s tea. He passed her the muffins. They were hot and crisp and buttery. The rum was heartening. Olivia sipped the hot, sweet liquid very gratefully. She was suddenly conscious of feeling very hungry. Nick was filling his own cup as he continued gently:

‘But we’re still talking about me, Livvy. One of the things that occurred to me last night, as you vanished down that iron staircase, was that you’d been singularly inarticulate about your life.’

‘My life?’ said Olivia. She was stirring her tea a trifle intently. She was watching three tea-leaves that were circling in the tiny whirlpool which followed her silver spoon. Nick dropped his sugar into his cup with a little audible splash. There was a perceptible pause before she continued lightly, ‘Oh, my life’s not worth talking about.’

‘Why not?’ asked Nick promptly.

‘Oh’—said Olivia vaguely—‘I mean—it’s very uneventful—and conventional and——’ Her voice died away into silence.

‘And what?’ asked Nick.

Suddenly Olivia decided to tell him.

‘And over,’ she said abruptly.

‘Over?’ cried Nick. He looked completely astonished.

‘I’m thirty-nine. Nick,’ said Olivia sadly. ‘I’ll be forty in December.’ What a curious thing vanity was, she thought swiftly! It was all she could do to force her lips to phrase the fatal word—‘forty.’

‘What’s forty?’ said Nick stoutly. ‘I’m forty-five myself.’

‘You’re a man,’ said Olivia.

‘You’re a woman,’ smiled Nick. ‘At forty some women are just coming into their own.’

‘Not women like me,’ said Olivia sadly. ‘Not women with eighteen-year-old daughters.’

If possible Nick looked more completely astonished than he had a moment before.

‘I never heard such nonsense in my life!’ he declared eagerly. Incredibly, he was laughing at her! ‘Don’t tell me, Livvy, that you’re jealous of little Olivia!’

‘I’m not!’protested Olivia. ‘I’m not, indeed! But I face the fact that she—she pushes me into the background. And rightly so, Nick. The background is where I belong—for the next four decades!’

Nick’s laughter had subsided into a very tender smile.

‘ “O matre pulchra filia pulchrior!” ’ he murmured gently. ‘You’ve got it all wrong, Livvy. Little Olivia is your background. She’s the bud that sets off the rose. A beautiful woman has no more becoming frame than her beautiful children——’ At the sound of Olivia’s sigh, Nick paused to look rather keenly at her. ‘Besides,’ he said—and his voice had grown very practical—‘your children are only part of your life. An important part, Livvy—an interesting and amusing part—but never the whole. You’re still yourself, you know. And, as you say, you’ve got four decades to go. Where are you going?’

‘Going?’ echoed Olivia.

‘Emotionally speaking, I mean.’

‘I don’t expect,’ said Olivia severely, ‘to be going much of anywhere, emotionally speaking, by the time I’m seventy-nine.’

‘You’ll always be emotional,’ said Nick swiftly.

‘If you think,’ said Olivia, even more severely than before, ‘that I’m going to turn into one of those terrible, love-hungry, more than middle-aged women who are always emotional, you’re very much mistaken! I think they’re appalling! I think they’re ridiculous! I hope never to be ridiculous, Nick——’

‘You never will be,’ said Nick reassuringly. ‘You’ll always be a dear. But—an emotional dear. Your heart will rule your head, Livvy, to the day that you die. It always has. At least——’ Nick’s voice faltered into silence.

Olivia was thinking that every word he said was God’s truth! She’d always be a fool! But Nick was speaking again, and his voice had a curious accent of hesitation.

‘Livvy’—he said slowly—‘do you know that last night you really gave me only one autobiographical statement? Only one—all evening long. I’ve been thinking of it ever since you made it. It surprised me very much. May I—may I ask you about it? It’s none of my damn business, of course. Yet, in a way, it was—once——’ Again Nick’s voice faltered into silence. Olivia was looking very seriously up into his face.

‘What was it, Nick?’ she asked gently. ‘I don’t remember. But you can ask me about anything.’

Nick paused deliberately to place his empty teacup on the tea-tray. Then turned to look steadily into her eyes.

‘You said, Livvy’—and his voice still held that curious accent of hesitation—‘you said that you—you fell in love with Harry. Was that true?’

Olivia set her empty teacup down rather suddenly in its saucer.

‘Y-yes,’ she said simply.

Nick’s eyes questioned hers for a moment in silence, then dropped under her candid gaze.

‘Well’—he said slowly—‘I—I’ve done you a great injustice, all these years.’

‘How?’ asked Olivia.

And still he was not looking at her. He was staring out across the jade-green water and his lips were twisted in rather a bitter smile.

‘I—I always thought you married Harry for his money,’ he said presently.

‘Nick!’ cried Olivia, aghast. ‘How could you think it?’

‘I guess I had to think it—to save my pride,’ said Nick soberly. ‘It—it was just—egotism, on my part, I suppose. He had money. And I hadn’t. I couldn’t see—now I’m going to make a fool of myself, Livvy, but I’m also going to tell you the truth—I couldn’t see that his personal charms exceeded my own.’

‘They—they didn’t, Nick,’ said Olivia pitifully. She felt terribly sorry for him. ‘But they were different. The money didn’t matter.’

Nick sighed profoundly.

‘So you really loved him?’ He turned now, from the tumbled waves, to look at her.

Olivia nodded, miserably. She almost wished she hadn’t.

‘I’ve been trying to accept that fact ever since you stated it last night on the boat-deck. But—I don’t know, Livvy. I can’t make it fit with the rest of the picture-puzzle. All the other little pieces that I’ve picked up from you and little Olivia go together. But that——well, I’ll put the question! If you loved Harry, Livvy, why aren’t you happier now?’

‘I—I am happy now!’ protested Olivia sharply. The protest was quite involuntary. Obscurely, honour demanded that it be made.

‘Don’t prevaricate, Livvy,’ said Nick very soberly. ‘You’re not happy and you’re—how shall I put it?—you’re emotionally idle. You’re empty-hearted. If you really loved Harry, Livvy’—Nick paused a moment on that curious little accent of hesitation, then ended simply—‘If you really loved Harry, you wouldn’t have taken the interest that you did in me.’

Olivia’s brow was wrinkled with a little frown of perplexity. She felt no impulse toward coquetry. She only wanted to match Nick’s candour with her own.

‘I really loved you, Nick, yet I—I took an interest in Harry.’

‘Then you didn’t love me,’ said Nick. ‘You couldn’t have, you know. That’s one of the facts I’ve been trying to accept since last night on the boat-deck.’

‘But I did, Nick!’ cried Olivia eagerly. Again she felt terribly sorry for him. ‘It sounds impossible, I know, but it’s true! A woman can love two men at once——’

‘That’s nonsense!’ interrupted Nick. ‘She can’t. Not with the kind of love I’m talking about.’ He broke off abruptly to look very keenly at her. ‘See here, Livvy, what are you up to? I want to know where I stand. If I’m mistaken—if you’re happy with Harry—really happy with him, I mean—I’m not going to rock the boat. But if you’re not’—Nick drew a long breath—‘If you’re not, Livvy, that lets me in again.’

‘Let’s you—in again?’ faltered Olivia.

‘Exactly,’ said Nick. He flung off his steamer rug as he spoke. He rose to his feet and took a little turn or two up and down the deck, without saying anything more. He came to a standstill, presently, at the foot of Olivia’s steamer chair. ‘Now, listen, Livvy,’ he said very seriously. ‘I’ve given a lot of thought to this and I want you to hear me. We’re both impulsive people. And, like all impulsive people, we’ve made a good many mistakes. Perhaps we made our first one when we ran away together. I’m not sure. Life might have been easier for both of us if we’d never met. I only know that I, at least, got out of that runaway the moments of highest happiness I’ve ever known. But we went on making mistakes. And some of them were serious. Very serious. But no mistake’s so serious that you can’t recover from it.’

His words were brusque and business-like, but his voice was trembling a little.

Olivia looked up at him very thoughtfully.

‘I’m not so sure about that, Nick,’ she said gently. ‘You said last night that the past was the one thing we couldn’t do anything about.’

Nick only shrugged his shoulders impatiently.

‘I’m interested in the future today,’ he said briefly. ‘How about it, Livvy? It’s for you to say.’

‘It’s—for me—to say?’ faltered Olivia.

‘Yes,’ said Nick sharply. ‘You know——’ He caught his breath in a little excited gasp. The glint in his eyes was almost that of anger. ‘You know I love you.’

A sudden flood of emotion swept over Olivia.

‘Oh—Nick!’ she breathed softly. Her words were almost a sigh. ‘I—I didn’t know it.’

‘You must have,’ said Nick sternly.

‘No woman ever knows that, Nick,’ said Olivia, still in that faint, soft voice, ‘until she’s told. Sometimes—sometimes she doesn’t know it, even then.’

‘I’ve always loved you,’ said Nick, with conviction.

Somewhere—somewhere in the flood of emotion, Olivia clutched at a faint impulse toward humour, as a drowning man at a straw.

‘Now—now you’re—prevaricating,’ she said feebly.

He smiled at that. He dropped quickly down at the foot of her steamer chair.

‘Essentially,’ he said, ‘I’ve been a lot truer to you than you have to me. No woman ever took your place. Livvy——’ His hands were seeking hers.

‘Nick,’ said Olivia sadly, ‘you said you could guarantee your behaviour.’

At that he smiled again.

‘I didn’t make allowance,’ he said, ‘for human frailty. Besides, Livvy, it’s ridiculous to talk of behaviour, in that sense, between you and me. When I’m with you like this, I feel you’re just as much my wife as you ever were——’

‘Diana would agree with you in that, Nick,’ said Olivia cheerfully. ‘You can’t think what a Catholic Diana has become. She’s never really recognized my marriage with Harry——’

‘Why don’t you become a Catholic?’ grinned Nick persuasively. ‘I’ll become one with you! But, no’—his face grew suddenly serious—‘I can’t joke about it. I mean every word I’m saying. I’ve entered the lists. Unless you’re prepared to tell me, here and now, to clear out and go about my business, I’m going to give Harry a run for his m——’ He checked instantly his unconscious play on words. ‘I let him walk off with you once, Livvy, without a word of protest, but I’m damned if I’ll do it again! This time I’m going to fight for my wife——’

‘For his wife, you mean, don’t you?’ asked Olivia lucidly. Again that wayward straw of humour had floated within touch of her hand.

‘Livvy,’ said Nick, ‘that’s just casuistry. You were my wife before you were Harry’s, and I’m going to hold that marriage is an indissoluble state. You said yourself that the Church Fathers were behind me. Saint Paul and the lot of them——’

Was he serious? Was he joking? The light touch was sometimes terribly confusing. She had not long to wonder.

‘Livvy, darling, I’m in deadly earnest.’ He looked in deadly earnest. The muscles in his cheeks were twitching nervously. The hands that had ceased to seek Olivia’s were firmly clenched on his knee. The knuckles were white. His voice had a curious pleading quality that was very hard to withstand. ‘I know I made you miserable before. But I wouldn’t do it again. We’re ten years older, now—and wiser. We know the value of what we lost. We’d be terribly careful not to upset the apple cart——’

She—she must handle this situation, Olivia was telling herself, a little wildly. She must bring Nick to his senses.

‘Being terribly careful, Nick,’ she said slowly, ‘is part of what you call the inconvenience of living with a woman.’

Nick was twinkling at her very tenderly.

‘Livvy, dear—I said there was one real reason for putting up with it. And this—this isn’t an abstract argument. Can’t you understand?’ He paused a moment and the twinkle died in his eyes. They grew suddenly very eloquent. ‘Dearest—I love you. I’ve always loved you. I can’t live without you.’

‘But—you’ll have to, Nick.’ She was trying desperately to make her tone sound as firm as her words. She couldn’t meet his eloquent eyes a moment longer. She turned her head to stare, unseeingly, across the tumbled, jade-green water. But his voice, his terribly moving voice, went on inexorably.

‘Livvy, darling,’ he said, ‘have you thought what’s ours for the taking? You said your life was over. That—that’s a preposterous idea! Good Lord, Livvy, you have the right to happiness! What does life hold for you as you’re living it now?’

‘As I’m living it now,’ repeated Olivia slowly. The question recalled her to reality. But still she could not look at him. ‘It holds a great deal, Nick, that you have no conception of.’

‘Material things?’ questioned Nick. ‘I could make you very comfortable, Livvy. I——’

But Olivia was impatiently shaking her head.

‘Not that,’ she said. ‘Not that at all. You do think me mercenary, Nick, don’t you?’

‘No,’ said Nick promptly. ‘But you might well consider——’

‘I’m not considering anything,’ said Olivia, ‘but personal relationships.’ She threw him a sidelong glance.

‘You—you don’t seem to visualize Harry’s position——’

‘Harry’s position?’ interrupted Nick sharply. ‘I visualized my own, ten years ago. Harry’s only getting what’s coming to him. It’s poetic justice——’

‘No,’ said Olivia slowly, ‘it’s not poetic justice. I can’t explain, Nick, but Harry’s not at all like you. He—he deserves to be happy.’

‘Well, good God!’ cried Nick indignantly. ‘Didn’t I deserve to be happy?’

‘Not—not quite in the same sense that Harry does,’ said Olivia steadfastly. ‘You see, Nick, he—he’s quite an unusual person. You were unusual, too, of course. You’ve proved that. But Harry’s unusual in quite a different way. He’s proved it, too. In ten long years of marriage, Harry’s never had a thought for himself. He’s been kind and gentle and generous. He’s been—childlike. He——’

‘He hasn’t made you happy,’ said Nick quickly, ‘in spite of all his virtues.’

‘I sometimes think, Nick,’ said Olivia sadly, ‘that must have been my fault, in spite of all my own. I ought to be happy with Harry——’

‘But if you’re not,’ said Nick, ‘it doesn’t make much difference where the fault lies.’

‘Sometimes I’m happy,’ said Olivia honestly. ‘And I’m always happy with my children——’

‘You’d be happy with them still!’ cried Nick. ‘Just think what you and I and little Olivia could do together!’

Oh, dear, oh, dear! thought Olivia. For the moment little Olivia had slipped her mind. And little Olivia was not all! She was not nearly all!

‘You—you’re forgetting the little boys, Nick,’ said Olivia bravely.

From the startled expression of Nick’s face, Olivia knew that the accusation was not unfounded. He looked quite taken aback, for an instant, then drew a long breath and returned to the charge.

‘Well—I did forget them, for the moment,’ he said disarmingly. ‘It—it’s easy to forget two children whom you have never seen. But I’m sure I’d like them, Livvy. They’re yours.’

‘Yes. They’re mine,’ said Olivia. The chunky little persons, the tow-coloured heads, and the rosy, freckled faces of Otto and little Van Tyne had risen up before her. Two very solid and singularly disquieting small ghosts.

‘And they’re in boarding-school,’ said Nick, quite easily. ‘Didn’t little Olivia tell me? Yes—she certainly did. Fay School, she said. Such a good school, Livvy. And I suppose Saint Mark’s later? When you’ve sent a son to boarding-school, Livvy, you’ve really lost him. College, you know, and professional schools and——’

‘I haven’t lost them!’ cried Olivia indignantly. ‘And—and neither has Harry. He——’

‘Then they’d be a great comfort to him,’ said Nick approvingly. ‘And to you, too, of course. As for me—I’ve often thought that the relation between a man and his stepchildren could be very intriguing. Interesting, you know, and—and detached enough to be friendly. The irritating ties of blood would be absent. You’d feel you could let them alone. And they’d like that. What are you thinking of, Livvy?’

Olivia did not answer. She was thinking of Harry and of little Olivia. She was thinking of that monkey which had known them in the Lincoln Park Zoo. She was thinking that Harry had never seemed to make any distinction whatever between little Olivia and his own small sons. And suddenly Olivia began to cry.

‘Livvy!’ cried Nick, in consternation. He was staring in amazement at her tears.

‘Oh, Nick!’ sobbed Olivia. ‘You—you’ll think I’m always crying!’ She was fumbling in the pocket of her mackintosh for a handkerchief. ‘I hate to—really. But you—you don’t know what you’re putting up to me!’

‘Darling!’ said Nick. ‘I’m a brute! I’m a beast! I shouldn’t disturb you so!’

‘I—disturb myself,’ said Olivia. She had found the handkerchief by this time. She buried her face in it.

‘But you love me, Livvy. You love me, or you wouldn’t be disturbed!’

‘Of course I love you!’ sobbed Olivia, from the depths of the handkerchief. Nick’s hands were once more seeking her own. ‘If I didn’t love you, it would all be very simple.’

‘If you love me,’ said Nick eagerly, ‘it all is simple. Nothing else matters. If you love me, everything can be arranged.’

‘By me?’ said Olivia pitifully.

‘By both of us,’ said Nick very tenderly. ‘Don’t worry, Livvy. Don’t think of the difficulties. Just think of—us.’

‘Us,’ said Olivia wistfully. The tender little pronoun held a host of associations. Visions of the future—memories of the past. A past that was forsworn, however. A future that was forbidden. With the hand which Nick was not holding, Olivia wiped her eyes.

‘Nick,’ she said solemnly, ‘it’s perfectly impossible. I can’t let Harry down.’

Nick looked extremely astonished. The glint in his eyes was distinctly that of anger. He dropped Olivia’s hand.

‘Very well,’ he said coldly. ‘The choice was yours. And you’ve made it.’ He rose dramatically to his feet.

‘Nick,’ said Olivia pitifully, ‘please don’t misunderstand me. I love you—I’ve loved you always—I always will love you. But——’

‘You’re talking rubbish!’ said Nick savagely. The expression that was New England in its essence had dropped like a curtain over his face. ‘Well—this interlude is over!’ He was turning abruptly away from her.

‘Nick——’ said Olivia, again very pitifully.

He wheeled, then, to glare at her.

‘You always want to talk!’ he said. ‘You have no feeling for finality. No woman has.’

On that he left her. Miserably, Olivia watched his lean figure receding down the deck with long quick strides. Finality, she was thinking. This, of course, was final. This was their last quarrel. It was dreadful that their—their relationship should end on a note of anger. They had had their chance—their chance to patch everything up. And they had thrown it away. Nick would be sorry, later. She was sorry now—she was terribly sorry. Should she call him back? Say—— But that would be talk again. Talk—which Nick despised. Just then, at the door of the companionway, Olivia saw Nick’s furiously moving figure collide, unexpectedly, with the comfortable, tweed-clad presence of Lady Caverley. She was just emerging on deck. Olivia saw her laugh up in his face. Laugh—look—stare—and stand gazing after him, as, with a word, he brushed abruptly past her. It was too late now. She could never, never tell him—— Still gazing after Nick, Lady Caverley was straightening her hat. Cane in hand she was advancing up the empty deck. Olivia tried to compose herself. She was gazing very steadfastly out over the jade-green water when Lady Caverley’s pleasant, cordial accents fell on her unwilling ears.

‘So you’re enjoying the storm, Mrs. Ottendorf!’

‘I—I’ve been having tea out here,’ said Olivia lamely, with a glance at the disordered tea-tray, still lying at the foot of Nick’s steamer chair.

Lady Caverley was a lady. She had her expression very well in hand. Her kindly old eyes were determinedly declining to observe a situation which could not escape observation.

‘I’ve been having it in the lounge,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But this is much nicer.’

Olivia hoped that she was succeeding in looking as if it had all been very nice. Her thoughts were still with Nick, however. She smiled, uncertainly, up at Lady Caverley.

‘Won’t you sit—down?’ she said. She was much the more surprised of the two when her voice was shaken by that little breathless sob.

Lady Caverley was smiling now—smiling rather wistfully.

‘My dear,’ she said suddenly, ‘how old are you?’

‘Th-thirty-nine,’ stammered Olivia. She was very much astonished.

‘I’m sixty-seven,’ said Lady Caverley cheerfully. ‘At thirty-nine, I thought, myself, that life was very difficult. At sixty-seven, you’ll realize that we make our own difficulties. Why don’t you run after him?’

‘Run—after him?’ faltered Olivia.

‘A word in time saves nine,’ said Lady Caverley genially.

Olivia had risen to her feet. She was staring very blankly at her immoral mentor.

‘Misunderstandings,’ said Lady Caverley, ‘are merely stupid.’ She was twinkling, now, at the blotting-paper gardenia. Instinctively, Olivia covered it with her hand.

‘Run along, child,’ said Lady Caverley indulgently. ‘He’s not gone far.’

And Olivia ran. She ran breathlessly, along the slippery deck and through the door of the companionway. No Nick in the corridor. No Nick on the stairs. Olivia paused on the top step, her hand on the white-and-gold rail. Where was she going, she thought suddenly? What could she say? She couldn’t say anything that wasn’t just—talk. This might be stupid—but it was final. Finality—that no woman had a feeling for. Very slowly and soberly, Olivia descended the white-and-gold staircase. She would go back to her cabin. It was settled—it was over. She and Nick had parted—parted on a note of anger. She turned into her narrow hall.

‘Livvy!’ And there he was—waiting! Waiting by her cabin door!

‘Nick!’ she gasped. They stared at each other in silence. Then,

‘Livvy!’ he said again. He took her in his arms. ‘I—I had to say good-bye to you!’ He pressed his lips to hers.

‘Oh——’ sighed Olivia. ‘My dear!’ The flood of emotion was closing over her head. She clung to him desperately. He was kissing her mouth—her eyes—her hair. She buried her face in the shoulder of the grey tweed overcoat. The little red béret was pushed over her eye.

‘Oh—isn’t life hell?’ said Olivia presently.

‘It certainly is!’ said Nick.

Slowly she extricated herself from his arms. She looked wanly up at him.

‘I—I’m glad you did that, Nick,’ she said slowly. ‘I—I’ll always remember it.’ She was gazing up at his face as if she were never going to see it again. She never would see it again, of course, looking just like that. Oh, Nick—darling Nick! But they hadn’t parted on the note of anger. She was his—he was hers. She could keep him forever. In her thoughts. In her heart.

‘Good-bye, Nick,’ said Olivia softly. ‘I’ll see you again, of course, but this is our real good-bye.’

Nick was smiling down at her a trifle enigmatically. His eyes were shining. There was a glint in them that looked almost triumphant. But—

‘Good-bye, Livvy,’ he said very decorously.

Olivia opened the door of her cabin. With a last radiant smile for Nick, she slipped quickly through it. She closed it again on his radiant smile. She stood quite quietly, then, leaning against its panels. She could still feel Nick’s arms around her. She covered her face with her hands. She wanted to shut out the world. She wanted to be alone, while she could be, with her memory of Nick’s face. She could hear his footsteps, now, slowly retreating down the narrow corridor. They had not parted in anger, but—they had parted. They had parted—really forever. Olivia sank down in her chintz-covered armchair. She glanced at her wrist watch. Five o’clock. Two hours until dinner-time. Two hours in which to be alone—to be blessedly alone—with her memory of Nick’s face, with the feeling of his arms.

CHAPTER VI
SUNDAY

Olivia leaned back uncomfortably on the rosewood sofa which stood cater-cornered beside the white marble mantelpiece in her father’s library in Gramercy Park. You couldn’t be comfortable on that sofa, she was thinking. Its back sloped at just the wrong Victorian angle. Her mother was seated beside her, uncompromisingly upright, her hands busy with her knitting. Mrs. Peter Van Tyne did not hold with the modern habit of sprawling on furniture, and she would knit, but not sew, on Sunday evenings. She knitted ‘for charity,’ which made it all right, purling and plaining from navy blue or grey wool the small, serviceable sweaters perpetually in demand at Saint Anne’s Orphanage up the Hudson, which had been, for more than forty years, her only philanthropic interest.

Olivia was watching her hands, mechanically jerking the wool over the small ivory needles. Mrs. Peter Van Tyne was a very expert knitter. Sometimes she turned out two sweaters a week. The wool was grey, this evening. The hands were thin, with prominent shiny knuckles, and they glittered with old-fashioned rings. Three-stoned, not very large rings, rubies and sapphires and diamonds, set in Victorian gold. Mrs. Peter Van Tyne was very fond of her jewelry, but she had always declined her daughters’ offers to have it reset for her in modern platinum. ‘Any gunman’s girl can buy platinum,’ she had said tartly. ‘I like my things to look as if I’d had them longer than yesterday.’

Well, they certainly did, reflected Olivia whimsically. An amethyst, set in gold grape-leaves, gleamed at her mother’s throat. The little gold-and-green enamel watch which Tiffany had made for her in 1898 hung from a gold bowknot on her flat breast. That watch and the amethyst pin and the three-stoned rings, Olivia thought idly, seemed as much a part of her mother as the pale, tired-looking eyes, the brown hair, slightly streaked with grey, or the large dominant nose, which gave character to her otherwise rather characterless features.

Mr. Peter Van Tyne was seated across the hearth rug in his black leather armchair, smoking his after-dinner cigar and frowning absent-mindedly at little Olivia, perched on a tufted ottoman in front of the fire. Mr. Peter Van Tyne always sat in that armchair after dinner, and he usually put in the evening reading the Evening Post. He never read any thing, at any time, but the morning and evening papers. He read them very thoroughly, however. Sometimes he studied their financial pages for hours. The room was called his ‘library’ by courtesy. And in compliment, perhaps, to the neat tan-and-gold rows of Victorian classics which filled the shelves of the tall walnut bookcases on either side of the door. The only human hand that Olivia had ever seen touching those classics was the hand of the weekly cleaning-woman. When her father had finished with the papers, her mother always picked them up, refolded them neatly, and perused the social columns. She did not care for the editorials, and the only news item that ever arrested her attention was the filing for probate of an old New-Yorker’s will. Mrs. Peter Van Tyne was quite an authority on the trust funds and codicils of dead New-Yorkers. She always remembered who had received a comfortable bequest from his aunt. This evening Mr. Van Tyne had finished with the Post rather quickly. It was lying on the floor beside his chair. Silence had fallen on the little family circle. Her father and mother, Olivia knew, were thinking about Diana. They had been questioning her rather closely on the details of Diana and Guido’s life in Rome. Little Olivia was thinking of God alone knew what! She was regarding her grandparents with an air of tranquil and detached amusement. Her level ice-green eyes looked cool and remote and rather entertained. Her Van Tyne grandparents, she always said to Olivia, were as good as a play. They were, of course. But a play that was always the same. It no longer entertained Olivia.

However, Olivia reflected with a sigh, this evening she was not in the mood for any entertainment. She felt no interest whatever in her father or her mother or in little Olivia, or in the details of Diana and Guido’s life in Rome. It only depressed her to think that, in a few minutes, Ruth and Hendriks were going to drop in, after a Sunday evening dinner-party, to welcome her home, after her three months abroad. It would have been much easier to get through the evening if she and little Olivia could have ignored the family completely and gone quietly to a hotel together. Little Olivia would have dragged her out to a talkie, of course, but, even so, she would have been freer to think her own thoughts, to face her own tragedy, in the grateful dark of a cinema palace than on the rosewood sofa in her father’s library in Gramercy Park. Oh, Nick—Nick—Nick, thought Olivia passionately. Then stirred restlessly, under the torment of a pain so sharp that it seemed positively physical, and glanced furtively at her parents. She almost wondered if she had said the words aloud.

‘Of course,’ declared old Peter Van Tyne, coming out of his brown study to lean forward in his armchair and toss his inch-long cigar ash into the smouldering fire, ‘Diana is a fool.’

‘She’s been tried,’ sighed his wife non-committally. She did not raise her eyes from her knitting.

‘Uncle Guido’s the fool,’ said little Olivia pertly. ‘I think he wears corsets.’

‘A woman who marries a foreigner,’ said old Peter Van Tyne, settling comfortably back again on his black leather cushions, ‘must make up her mind to put up with some minor peculiarities.’

‘A woman who marries anyone,’ sighed his wife, again non-committally, ‘must do that.’

‘Nonsense!’ said old Peter Van Tyne, rather violently. ‘Diana’s unreasonable.’

His violence roused Olivia from revery.

‘She’s lonely, Papa,’ she said absently.

Old Peter Van Tyne stared at his eldest daughter. He always stared when he was crossed in argument.

‘That’s what’s unreasonable,’ he said petulantly. ‘Guido keeps up the Villa in Rome and the apartment in Paris. Diana goes to Cannes every season and to Biarritz, now and then. She gets up to Saint Moritz for the winter sports. She hunts in England. Guido has plenty of English friends——’

Olivia was no longer listening. This was just the same sort of talk about Diana that she had heard in Gramercy Park for the last fourteen years. She looked pensively at her parents. They never changed, she was thinking. They thought, spoke, acted, and looked exactly as they had for the last three decades. They never would change. Time stood still in Gramercy Park. For thirty years Olivia could remember her father’s sloping bald head, his popping brown eyes, his prominent upper teeth, and his drooping grey mustaches looking just as they did that evening. She was reading ‘Alice in the Looking-Glass’ for the very first time, so she couldn’t have been more than ten, when the thought had originally come to her that her father looked exactly like the Walrus. And he still did. An aristocratic, somewhat apoplectic walrus. Her mother, Olivia whimsically reflected, rather suggested the Carpenter. She was just as lean and thin-lipped and hollow-chested and her large dominant nose was much the same shape as his. She had, too, the gift of Lewis Carroll’s Carpenter of saying nothing much, while the Walrus made the plans.

Perhaps the three little Van Tyne girls, thought Olivia, pursuing her fantasy, had played the rôle of the oysters in the poem. The Walrus and the Carpenter had eaten every one. But that was unfair. They hadn’t, really. They had only tried to. Olivia herself had not had the soul of an oyster. She had messed up her own life. And Ruth, dull girl, was quite happy with her dull Hendriks. Diana, however, had been eaten. Poor little Diana—innocent oyster—kneeling fifteen years ago on those white satin cushions on the chancel steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, naïvely thrilled at the thought of becoming a princess! And Guido beside her, on his knees, too, of course, oh, very devout!—but quite forty-five and already corseted! Middle-aged Guido, who, though a prince, could afford the extravagant luxury of marrying a penniless, nineteen-year-old beauty! Could afford the luxury, barely two years later, of keeping up two households—of matching at Cartier’s, for his mistress, the Arezzo jewels which hung at Diana’s throat! It had been that open insult which had made poor little lost Diana seek emotional refuge in the Church of her adoption. Nick had seen it coming. He had said they should forbid the banns. He had whispered in Olivia’s ear, as they knelt side by side on the wooden bench in the second left-hand pew at that nuptial Mass, that Diana was being sold downriver!

Nick—would she never stop thinking about him? Would she have to live forever with this sharp pang of parting, this desolate sense of loss, gnawing constantly at her heart? Again Olivia stirred restlessly. I have never been as unhappy as this, she thought. A wave of self-pity crashed over her. But she must not be hysterical. She must trust to time, space, and incident to dull the edge of her pain. Sooner or later, the trivial, demanding duties of everyday life would take their accustomed place in the foreground of her consciousness. She would become involved in routine.

Curious that she hadn’t felt at all like this during her last lonely evening on the Atlanta. She had dined on bread and milk in her cabin and she had gone early to bed, terribly tired, exhausted really, but still sustained by that sense of exaltation which had swept over her at the moment of Nick’s embrace. She had fallen asleep quite happily with the feeling of his arms around her, still childishly, gratefully glad that they had not parted on the note of anger. Even that morning, as the Atlanta, after a stormy night, had steamed tranquilly up the channel in the bright October sunshine, she had kept that sense of exaltation. She had still felt childishly, gratefully glad. She had not faced the future. She had involved herself, quite happily, in routine. She had dismissed the pallid Maggie, packed her steamer trunk herself, found her and little Olivia’s passports, handed in her declaration, changed her French money at the purser’s office, tipped the stewards and stewardesses, dressed in her smart French suit, slipped on her new mink coat, and, absurdly fortified by this round of absolutely unimportant activity, she had met Nick at the captain’s luncheon-table with a smile so serene, so secure, that he had murmured, with a grin, ‘I get you, Livvy! Business as usual!’ Henrietta had heard him and had thrown a sharp glance at Olivia. A glance which Olivia had triumphantly baffled with another serene smile.

It was only later, when she was standing by Nick’s side at the crowded rail of the promenade-deck, watching the low brown shores, the scattered trees, and the old frame houses of Staten Island slip past the Atlanta, that her serenity had become suddenly less secure. All in a moment it had swept over her how startlingly the swiftly moving shore-line marked the speed of the liner, how quickly and irrevocably time, tide, and steam were carrying Nick and herself to their inevitable farewell. In an hour’s time we shall have landed and it will all be over, she had been thinking miserably, when Harry’s wireless was put into her hand.

In reading it, her serenity had been further shattered by her quick sense of relief in knowing that she would not have to meet Harry on the pier. For Olivia had been telling herself, very steadfastly, that she was counting tremendously on that meeting with Harry. That the mere sight of Harry, confident and conjugal, waving his hat, shouting his greeting, in the midst of that foolish crowd of waving, shouting people, would reëstablish her serenity for all time. She had been telling herself that in Harry’s familiar presence, the talk, the dreams, the kiss, even, that she and Nick had exchanged on the Atlanta, would take their inevitable and proper place in a visionary world. The foolish crowd itself—Olivia always loved it!—its excitement, its emotion, its homely endearments shrieked out over a rapidly narrowing strip of green sea water, would serve to remind her that this was a homecoming—that women were fortunate who had homes to come to—that—— But yet, when she read his message, Olivia had only been conscious of a vast sense of relief in knowing that she could postpone that meeting with Harry—that she would not have to wave to him, call to him, smile down into his honest eyes, find herself presently in his honest arms.

‘Who’s your wireless from?’ Nick had said.

Olivia had handed him the message. He had read it with uplifted eyebrow. He had made no comment. But——

‘You—you mustn’t let Papa see you,’ Olivia had said presently.

‘Why not?’ he had asked.

Olivia had lifted her eyebrow.

‘Well—you know how he feels about you.’

‘Still?’ Nick had asked in amazement.

‘More than ever. He’ll never forgive you for going famous on him. You see—it proved him wrong!’

Nick had chuckled delightedly.

‘I’ll dodge him,’ he had said. ‘I’ll go down the second-class gangplank. It will seem like old times—giving your father the slip.’ Then, ‘There they are!’ he had added suddenly.

The Atlanta had turned, slightly, in her course. The city skyline, still dim and grey and distant, had swept into view. Straight ahead, on the left, the Statue of Liberty rose from the breezy bay in the brilliant yellow sunlight of the autumn afternoon, New York sunlight, harder and brighter and clearer than that of Europe. A few black specks, a group of tourists, no doubt, were gathered around its base. They were about to realize little Olivia’s unsatisfied ambition, Olivia had thought swiftly, and ascend into its crown. She had wondered if Nick ever thought of little Olivia when he looked at the Statue of Liberty. As her eyes returned to the skyscrapers, the city seemed much nearer. Outlined against the stainless blue of the October sky, the grey towers rose dramatically from the waters of the harbour. Tugs, barges, and ferryboats were zigzagging cheerfully in the nearer view. The little rope-made monsters clung desperately to the noses of the tugs. The barges were heaped with coal and lumber and steel. The ferryboats were crowded with motors and horse-drawn trucks and sprinkled with isolated pedestrians. The pedestrians were all waving hats and hands and handkerchiefs at the Atlanta. Nick had waved back at them with his friendly grin. He had waved again at a smiling, shawled woman, with a wind-whipped skirt, who was standing on the deck of a little tramp freighter, flying the French flag, which had cut across the Atlanta’s impressive bow. He—he seemed in excellent spirits, Olivia had thought miserably.

As they rounded the Battery, the Aquarium had caught her eye, and she had thought again of little Olivia. Of little Olivia and herself, on those far-away, hot summer Sundays. Of little Olivia staring at the fish, tugging at her hand, begging to be allowed to throw a peanut to the turtles——

‘The Aquarium always makes me think of Jenny Lind,’ Nick had said suddenly. ‘She sang there, you know. I wish I could have heard her. They should have turned it into an aviary, out of compliment to the Swedish Nightingale.’

Olivia had not replied. She had gazed despondently over the flat, squat roof of the Aquarium, up the crack that was Broadway. Around the corner, on Wall Street, Harry’s market was engaged in being uncertain. The city looked very formidable, she had thought, and very full of its unseen millions. Tower on tower it rose before her, its western windows gleaming in the sun. It looked bright and new and self-confident. From its topmost pinnacles small wisps of steam, like white pennants, were floating jauntily eastward in the western breeze. Nick’s eyes had followed hers.

‘Aren’t they stupendous?’ he had said. It was obvious that he did not share her mood. The skyscrapers were no treat. She had seen them too often.

‘They look exactly like their pictures, Nick,’ she had protested lightly. ‘Some things do. Queen Mary—and the Leaning Tower of Pisa—and Manhattan Island—and——’

But Nick had interrupted her, very seriously.

‘They’re dramatic and fantastic and incredible. I never come home to them without a sense of exhilaration. They dazzle me always with a vision of a new life in a new world. They make me feel that life can begin over again—and be quite different from any life ever lived before——’

Just then little Olivia had turned up at her elbow. She was dressed in her smart French suit, and Spuds and Binky were with her. Henrietta and Sir Hugh and Lady Caverley were close at her heels.

‘We’ve been up on the boat-deck!’ little Olivia had cried. ‘We’ve been showing Sir Hugh all England lost—for a boatload of tea!’

Officious tugs had begun to swarm, by this time, around the flanks of the Atlanta. They were ringing bells and whistling and churning the oily harbour water into pale-green marble. The Atlanta was ringing her own bells, with a last effort at importance, before surrendering herself to the ministrations of the tugs. The long lines of the piers stretched out into the water. The smokestacks of the liners showed over the roofs of their sheds—yellow smokestacks, red ones, black-and-white striped ones. At the end of the nearest pier the foolish crowd of people were already waving and shouting. An agile young man had climbed up on a post. He shook out an American flag. A woman’s shrill voice rang out over the clang of the bells, the whish of eddying water, ‘Bertie! It’s a boy!’ There were tears in that voice. Tears and laughter combined. There were tears in Olivia’s eyes. She could not have said, at the moment, whether those tears were for herself or for the unknown Bertie’s unknown male baby! The Atlanta was sliding into her slip. She was scraping softly against the green waterlogged pilings. As the gangplanks shot out of her side, Olivia had felt Nick’s fingers tightly clasping her own. She had shaken her head, however. She had pulled her hand from his grasp.

‘Don’t, Nick,’ she had whispered. ‘I really can’t bear it.’

He had smiled at her then. Smiled wistfully, tenderly. That smile had shattered forever, Olivia had thought wildly, all she possessed that was serene and secure. Trunks and mailsacks and crates and great wicker baskets were being pushed down the gangplanks. Little Olivia had plucked at her arm.

‘I’ll write,’ Nick had muttered hurriedly, as she turned abruptly away from him. Her heart had leaped up at his words. But she had not answered them. She had gone down with little Olivia to her cabin, to collect the last of their luggage. She had found Maggie waiting for them. She had joined the slow procession of passengers moving toward the gangplanks. She had seen her father, looking pushed about and provoked, on the outskirts of the waiting crowd.

The pier had been congested with passengers and her inspector a stickler for form. She had not seen Nick again until nearly two hours later, when she emerged from the customs shed with her father and daughter and Maggie. He was standing on the sidewalk by the cabstand, his suitcase at his feet, smoking a cigarette with rather the air of one who had been waiting for perhaps a long time. He saw her at once, but he made no move to approach her. Olivia had glanced nervously at her father. He had not noticed Nick, however. He was tipping the porters with his familiar air of fussy pomp and circumstance. Old Peter Van Tyne never tipped extravagantly, but he distinctly enjoyed tipping. It ministered to his sense of importance. He was distributing his quarters graciously, like a feudal baron, scattering largess to his vassals. Nick was smiling ironically, as he watched him. Little Olivia had hailed the nearest taxi. Her grandfather climbed into it. Olivia followed him and little Olivia, saying ‘Gramercy Park,’ pulled down one of the little seats and sat on it. Maggie, with the bulk of the luggage, was respectfully waiting for a second cab. The taxi chugged and started. Nick took off his hat, tossed his cigarette in the gutter, and stood smiling, bareheaded, in the October breeze. As the taxi slipped by him, he had boldly tossed a kiss to Olivia. Little Olivia was staring out of the other window of the taxi at the New York scene.

‘Gosh! It’s nice to be home again!’ she had said impulsively. Olivia did not know whether or not the child had seen her father.

‘Your hatbox is on my feet,’ old Peter Van Tyne had remarked inconsequently. Olivia had stooped to remove it. The taxi had turned a corner. Well—Nick was gone, Olivia had reflected.

He was gone—he was gone—he was gone. The dreary words throbbed dully in Olivia’s brain. Yet he was not far away. He was somewhere in New York—thinking of her, undoubtedly, as she was thinking of him. For Nick would think of her. He would think of her for a time. Still—people got over things. Life kept springing surprises. The past meant much more to women than it did to men. Nick would forget her again, as he had forgotten her before. He had forgotten her. He had not been really in love with her at the moment when they’d met on the Atlanta. He had been startled, curious, interested—and intrigued. Which was all quite different from being in love. But he was in love with her now. Oh, yes,—he was! He was hers for the taking. And he was close at hand. Oh—this was a terrible evening!

‘That must be Ruth,’ said Mrs. Van Tyne, with a smile of complacent pleasure. Ruth was her favourite daughter. They had always agreed about everything and Ruth had never made her a moment’s trouble.

‘Ruth?’ said Olivia vaguely.

‘Didn’t you hear the doorbell?’

Olivia was irrationally irritated by her mother’s harmless question. You didn’t hear doorbells when you were in torment, she thought resentfully. As a matter of fact, she hadn’t heard anything that had gone on around her for the last ten minutes. Then the front door opened and Ruth’s high, inquiring voice was instantly raised in the hall.

‘Mamma?’ Then, ‘Papa? Olivia?’ Her handsome, well-dressed figure appeared in the library door. Ruth was the chic Van Tyne. Less pretty than either her elder or her younger sister, she held her own beside them through the glamour of that indefinable quality known as style. Whatever the fashion was, it seemed especially designed by God and the Paris dressmakers to enhance the charms of Ruth’s slender, well-kept figure. Tonight the dull gold of her party coat set off the sheen of her sleek, copper-coloured hair. Her dangling paste earrings framed the smart oval of her egg-shaped face. Old Peter Van Tyne always deplored those earrings. He deplored the modern fashion of discarding diamonds for paste. ‘Faddy,’ he called it. Little Olivia had risen dutifully from her ottoman. Hendriks appeared in the door. His face was egg-shaped too, pale and shiny and bald above the temples. His ash-blond hair was very slickly combed. ‘Neat and clean,’ was little Olivia’s proverbial description of her Uncle Hendriks. He looked exceptionally neat and clean this evening, Olivia thought wearily, in his immaculate evening dress. Ruth crossed the room to kiss her sister. She glanced at her rather critically.

‘You look tired, old girl,’ she said.

‘Do I?’ said Olivia indifferently. She was thinking that the fresh faint odour of Ruth’s Chanel perfume was rather nice.

Ruth was kissing little Olivia. Hendriks shook hands with his sister-in-law. He, too, glanced at her rather critically. Ruth kissed her mother and sank down on the ottoman which little Olivia had abandoned. The fresh, faint odour of the Chanel perfume rose delicately from her moving, rustling figure. Ruth always had a curious air of dominating a room. You always looked at her. It was part of that indefinable quality known as style, of course. Everyone was looking at her now. She tossed off her party coat and gave her handsome shoulders a little comfortable wriggle in the heat from the fire. The shoulders were handsome, and Ruth was always generous with them. This evening you could see her white straight spine all the way to her waist-line. In her low-cut, sleeveless gown of pale pink satin she looked curiously, chicly, inappropriately naked against the sombre background of the dull-hued library. Her long paste earrings were her only jewels. Always the most securely married of the three Van Tynes, Ruth never wore her wedding ring. Hendriks had seated himself in a black leather armchair. White-tied, pearl-studded, and coat-tailed, he, too, looked somewhat out of place in that homely setting. Old Peter Van Tyne offered him a cigar. He shook his head and produced his shagreen cigarette-case.

‘Give me a Lucky,’ said Ruth. She smoked for a moment in silence, before she said vaguely, ‘How was Europe?’

‘Oh—fine,’ said Olivia, with equal vagueness.

‘How was Diana?’

‘Fair.’

Ruth blew out a long grey mouthful of smoke before she spoke again.

‘Get any pretty clothes?’

‘Oh, yes!’ cried little Olivia. She was perching on the arm of her grandfather’s chair.

‘Skirts any shorter?’

Olivia shook her head. Silence fell once more on the family circle. Ruth tossed her cigarette ash in the fire. Hendriks was looking at her rather meaningly, Olivia thought. He cleared his throat. Ruth’s eyes instantly met his. Her own held a glint of wifely warning. You leave this to me, that glint seemed to say. Then—

‘We’ve been dining at the Stuyvesants’,’ said Ruth casually.

Mrs. Van Tyne put down her knitting.

‘Who was there?’ she asked with interest.

‘Oh—lots of people,’ said Ruth indifferently. ‘And Schipa to sing. We left before the music.’

‘Music always seems suitable,’ said Mrs. Van Tyne approvingly, ‘for a Sunday evening.’

Ruth tossed her cigarette in the fire. The gesture vaguely suggested that she was clearing the decks for action. She looked at Olivia, then down at the pale pink, polished nails of her white, ringless hands.

‘We saw Henrietta there,’ she said.

‘Oh—’ said Olivia stupidly. So that was what Ruth had to say. Henrietta never let grass grow under her feet, of course. Still—Olivia hadn’t expected to hear from that county, this evening. She eyed her sister warily.

‘Is Henrietta back?’ Mrs. Van Tyne was saying pleasantly.

‘She came on the Atlanta with Olivia,’ said Ruth, very definitely.

‘Well! Why didn’t you tell us, Olivia?’ said Mrs. Van Tyne.

‘I didn’t think it would interest you,’ said Olivia falsely. For nothing ever interested Mrs. Van Tyne more than hearing who was everywhere.

‘How was she—after her cure?’ inquired Mrs. Van Tyne.

‘She was in fine form,’ said Ruth, with emphasis. Then, glancing at her sister, ‘I do think, Olivia, you might have kept in mind how Henrietta can talk.’

‘She can certainly talk,’ said Mrs. Van Tyne.

‘She doesn’t often have the opportunity to talk about us,’ said Ruth severely. ‘I wish you could have heard her this evening, Olivia. She had the whole table in hysterics.’

‘Over what?’ asked Mrs. Van Tyne hopefully.

For a moment Ruth was silent. Then she glanced once more at Olivia. She glanced at her as if she were generously offering her an opportunity to explain matters first. Olivia let the opportunity slip, however. As it was slipping, Ruth caught it by its coat-tails.

‘Mamma,’ she said solemnly, ‘Nicholas Allen was on that boat.’

‘Oh!’ said Mrs. Van Tyne. She looked really shocked. Then, ‘How—how unfortunate!’

‘I should call it that,’ said Ruth.

‘How awkward!’ said Mrs. Van Tyne.

Hendriks stirred uneasily in his chair. He looked positively embarrassed. Hendriks was always a defender of the decencies. The popping brown eyes of old Peter Van Tyne had almost popped out of his head.

‘What did you do?’ he asked briefly. ‘Cut him?’

Olivia saw Ruth’s ironical smile.

‘Certainly not!’ she cried sharply. ‘Why should I?’

‘Why should you——’ began Mr. Van Tyne rather truculently.

‘She didn’t have to cut him, Papa,’ said Ruth calmly. ‘But——’ She looked at little Olivia. The child’s green eyes were twinkling.

‘Speak freely, Aunt Ruth,’ she said. ‘I didn’t cut him either.’

‘Oh—what a situation!’ sighed Mrs. Van Tyne. Her sigh was almost a moan. It seemed to spur Ruth on.

‘You don’t know the half of it, Mamma! I hate to say this in front of little Olivia, Olivia—but she must have seen it. Henrietta said you were a perfect sketch! And Nick, too! She said you never looked out of each other’s eyes from shore to shore!’

‘Olivia!’ said Mrs. Van Tyne. Horror mingled with incredulity in her tone.

‘And she said, of course he was just kidding you, because there was a woman in London—with a title—niece to Sir Somebody who was on the boat—who was just about to divorce her husband to marry him! And——’

‘Olivia!’ said Mrs. Van Tyne again. Reproach was added, by this time, to the incredulity and the horror in her tone. But Ruth was sweeping on.

‘His wife told her, Mamma—Lady Whoever-she-was—told Henrietta, I mean—and told her in Olivia’s presence, that this English woman was just ready to throw her cap over the windmill. They’d been the talk of London, last spring——’

Even the unknown Guinevere, who was a clever young woman and a pretty one, too, thought Olivia swiftly, did not quite deserve this broadside from Henrietta’s guns!

‘But she said Olivia didn’t seem to care! She said she just lost her head! She said she was completely éprise—’

‘Olivia,’ said old Peter Van Tyne, still staring, ‘how much truth is there in this?’

Olivia had risen to her feet.

‘Papa,’ she said hotly, ‘I won’t be cross-questioned!’ Suddenly she met little Olivia’s gaze. The child was staring up at her, from the arm of her grandfather’s chair. She looked a little puzzled. Olivia turned abruptly to face the smouldering fire. She leaned her arm on the mantel-shelf and stared down at the rose-and-grey embers, trying to get herself in hand.

‘I don’t see how you could bring yourself to speak to that man, ever again,’ said old Peter Van Tyne solemnly.

‘Why not?’ flashed Olivia over her shoulder. ‘Good Lord, I was married to him, wasn’t I?’

‘That’s reason enough,’ said Mrs. Van Tyne. ‘He treated you despicably.’

‘He didn’t!’ flashed Olivia.

‘He dragged your name through the dirt of the divorce court,’ said her father triumphantly.

‘On the contrary,’ said Olivia, ‘I dragged his.’

Old Peter Van Tyne looked distinctly nettled. Hendriks stirred delicately in his chair.

‘Well, anyway,’ said Ruth, ‘when Henrietta’s around, I should think you’d have enough sense to consider appearances.’

Olivia turned then to face her embattled family.

‘If you think—that I care—how I appear—to Henrietta Parsons——’ Rage choked her utterance. She drew a quick breath and began again. ‘She’s a vulgar-minded, evil-tongued——’

‘Olivia,’ said Mrs. Van Tyne, ‘she is Hendriks’s cousin.’

‘My—er—second cousin,’ said Hendriks delicately. His tone implied that he definitely declined to accept responsibility for the conduct of any collateral relative more than one generation removed. Silence fell on the room. It was broken, again delicately, by Hendriks. ‘Ruth—perhaps we’d better go home. It’s after eleven. Olivia must be tired——’

Ruth stood up, party coat in hand. She was gazing meditatively at little Olivia.

‘Olivia, darling,’ she said, ‘just go into the drawing-room, if you don’t mind, and look out the front window and see if our car is there.’

Little Olivia rose deliberately to her feet. She was looking very scornfully at her Aunt Ruth.

‘And take my time about it?’ she suggested coolly. She walked serenely out into the hall.

Ruth turned once more to Olivia.

‘I just wanted to say,’ she said hurriedly, ‘that people all like to believe the worst. You know they do, Olivia. And Henrietta said——’ She paused, with a delicacy that almost equalled that of her husband.

‘Well—what did she say?’ asked Olivia coldly.

‘She didn’t exactly say it,’ said Ruth. She had lowered her voice discreetly. ‘But she certainly implied that perhaps—well, you know, Olivia, women do awful things nowadays—they used to be either respectable or—or not—but now things do happen that never would have happened ten years ago. And on an ocean liner—with a—a former husband——’

Olivia’s eyes were blazing.

‘Ruth,’ she cried passionately, ‘you—you simply disgust me!’

‘She didn’t say it!’ said Ruth very hastily. ‘She just said she thought you were seasick in the nick of time. She said the Lord sent a storm! She was really very funny——’

‘She must have been,’ said Olivia. Then she heard the doorbell ring. It sounded very clearly in the pause that followed her biting words.

‘Well—she was,’ said Ruth. ‘And everyone laughed. But just the same, you know, you could see that they were all thinking that there was probably something in it——’

‘People always think that,’ said Mrs. Van Tyne.

From her casual tone Olivia knew that her mother had not understood one word of Henrietta’s innuendo. She glanced at her father. He, too, was looking no more than normally vexed. In their day, of course, innuendo like that was not bandied about dinner-tables. It was reserved for the smoking-room. The smoking-room and the boudoir.

Just then little Olivia appeared in the door.

‘Have you finished, Aunt Ruth?’ she inquired, very practically. ‘May I come back now? Your car is waiting.’ She held a yellow envelope in her hand. ‘Here’s a wire that just came for you, Ma.’

Olivia stared at the telegram. She made no move to take it. It was Hendriks who crossed the room and put it in her hand.

‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ said Ruth.

‘I’m always afraid of telegrams,’ said Mrs. Van Tyne.

Olivia tore open the envelope. She drew out the message. It was not very long, but she read it slowly.

‘From Harry?’ said Mrs. Van Tyne.

Olivia did not raise her eyes from the slip of yellow paper.

‘From Harry?’ her mother repeated. A note of anxiety was creeping into her voice.

‘What?’ said Olivia stupidly. She looked up at her mother’s startled face. She met Ruth’s curious eyes. ‘Oh—yes,’ she said then, quite simply. ‘From Harry.’

‘What does he say?’ asked Ruth.

‘Oh—nothing much,’ said Olivia. She was smiling, very faintly.

‘How sweet of him!’ said Mrs. Van Tyne. She moved with Ruth toward the door. Hendriks was waiting courteously for them to precede him over the threshold.

‘Good night, Papa! Don’t get up!’ called Ruth. Then, ‘Good night, Olivia. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’ll drop in in the morning to look at your clothes.’

Olivia did not answer. Her mother and Ruth and Hendriks went into the hall. Her father, grunting a little, leaned over the arm of his chair to pick up the Evening Post. Little Olivia was looking at her mother very steadily from her stand near the door. Her face had that puzzled expression. Olivia had never stopped smiling. She returned to the mantelpiece. She stood gazing down at the embers of the dying fire. They were greyer now. The rose was almost gone. She still held her telegram, crumpled in her hand. She heard the front door open and close. Then her mother’s voice, on a high, approaching note, coming nearer down the hall.

‘Well, Olivia, I hope you’ll explain why you never once mentioned to your father and me that Nicholas Allen was on that boat! We asked you all about the voyage and——’ Her indignant figure had appeared, by this time, in the doorway.

Olivia turned from the fire. Her eyes were positively twinkling.

‘I didn’t appreciate,’ she said sweetly, ‘that you would think it so very important.’

‘I don’t think it’s important!’ said her father violently. He was rising to his feet, the Post in his hand.

Little Olivia took a sudden step nearer her mother.

‘Then Ma was right, wasn’t she,’ she asked simply, ‘not to bore you about it?’ Her clear cool little voice had the high, bell-like timbre that was always the storm-signal of her indignation. ‘I think this is a tempest in a teapot, and I think you’re all awfully rough on Ma. She couldn’t help his being on that boat. And he couldn’t help it either. Miss Parsons is just a jealous old maid with nothing on God’s green earth of any importance to think about. I should worry what she says or doesn’t say! And now, I’m going to bed. You’d better come, too, Ma.’ She smiled serenely at Olivia.

‘I will,’ said Olivia. She slipped her arm around the child’s shoulders. Once more she was overcome with tenderness for her earnest little champion. ‘Good night, Papa. Don’t worry about it, Mamma.’ She passed from the room with her daughter. Together they slowly ascended the stairs.

Little Olivia did not speak again until they had reached Olivia’s bedroom door. Then——

‘Goofy,’ she said. ‘Simply goofy, all of them. But you were a bit goofy, too, Ma, to let Aunt Ruth get your goat. She’s a terrible woman.’ She held up her little white face. Olivia kissed it.

‘Good night,’ she said. ‘I—I am a bit goofy.’ Then, after a little pause, ‘You can send Maggie to bed.’ She entered her room. She turned on her light. As she closed her door, she heard little Olivia scrambling, three steps at a time, toward her room on the third story. Goofy—that was what she was. That was what she must be. But oh! How heavenly to be really goofy once again! To be in love. She was in love. She opened her telegram, still crumpled in her hand. She read it twice over.

‘I will wait until morning if necessary,’ whispered Olivia softly. She glanced at her wrist watch. Twenty minutes past eleven. He was waiting now. He was waiting, a few hundred feet away, by the tall iron railing that surrounded the park. He was thinking of her. He was watching the house-front. He was waiting for the parlour windows to darken. He was waiting—just where he used to wait—how many years ago? Twenty and more? Oh, that wasn’t possible! It seemed only yesterday that she had stood, like this, in the very same room, listening breathlessly for the rustle of her mother’s gown in the corridor, the creak of her father’s footfall on the stair—listening breathlessly, beneath the rumble of the city, for her parents’ door to close, for the little house noises to cease. Waiting for silence—silence that was safety—to open her door with painful precaution, to listen again, to creep down the stairs in the black of the stair-well, to start, to stop, to listen once more, to take from its hook by the hatrack the great iron key that unlocked the park gate, to open the front door, put the lock on the latch, slip out of the vestibule, run down the steps, run down the street, keeping out of the arc light, turn at the corner of Twentieth and run, run, run, until Nick’s arms were around her and he had unlocked the gate and they were safe in the park with the gate locked behind them, safe to sit on a green bench under the rusty willow—the great rusty willow on the left hand of Booth—to sit there, sometimes, until the grey light of dawn came up from behind the Gramercy Hotel, to talk, to plan, to be happy—to be together!

Twenty years ago? What nonsense! What utter nonsense! Still holding her telegram, Olivia gazed slowly about the little lamplit room. Except for her innovation trunks and smart Cross handbags, splashed with foreign labels, it looked exactly as it always had. A young girl’s bedroom of the early days of the century still papered with its blue-striped, rose-garlanded wallpaper, still furnished with its bird’s-eye maple furniture, still hung with the gold-framed, brown photographs of sacred paintings which had replaced, in Olivia’s teens, the steel engravings of her earlier childhood. Olivia had once been very proud of those photographs. In the early days of the century they had represented a renaissance of culture in Gramercy Park. She smiled at them now rather tenderly. Raphael’s fluffy-headed cherubs gazed heavenward over the mantelpiece. Between the windows the infant Saint John drooped over his lamb and slender cross. Above the narrow bed Sir Galahad in shining armour—he had been her fourteen-year-old hero—led his snow-white charger. On that narrow bed Olivia had dreamed of Nick. She had locked up his love letters in the drawer of the bird’s-eye maple desk. The mirror over the dressing-table had reflected her round, young face under its waving pompadour—the face that Nick had loved. She would not look into that mirror now. She would not break the charm. For she felt exactly as she used to feel—gay, tremulous, and terrified, yet confident—oh, extra-ordinarily confident! Sure of herself—sure of Nick—sure of everything that made any difference! But, no—she wasn’t that. She wasn’t sure any longer. That happy, care-free certainty was a blessing of girlhood. It was part and parcel of youth. In girlhood you had only one aim—you had only one desire. To marry the man whom you loved. That was so simple. Twenty years after—well, you still wanted to marry the man whom you loved, of course. In the light of new knowledge you wanted that, perhaps, much more than you had ever wanted it before. But there were conflicts. There were considerations. There were obligations definitely assumed by yourself, not thrust on you by the casual accident of birth——

Suddenly Olivia caught her breath. She heard the rustle of her mother’s gown in the corridor. She heard the creak of her father’s footfall on the stair. She heard her mother’s slow step go down the passage to the front bedroom. She heard her father’s heavy tread pause for a moment, as he turned out the light in the hall, then go heavily on. She heard her parents’ door close definitely.

This is like a dream, she thought, this is like one of those weird, waking dreams, when you fancy that everything you are doing you have done once before. And Nick’s part of that dream. He’s doing it, too. He’s dreaming it, too. It’s his dream, as well as mine. He’s there. He’s watching the house-front. He has seen the parlour windows darken. He knows that in a few minutes the front door will open——

Will open? Will it open, thought Olivia breathlessly? Am I really going to go out to meet him? If I do, what will we say? What will we do? There is nothing to say. There is nothing to do. But, oh, if I go, she thought, I will be with him again! I will feel that sense of exaltation, of gaiety, of happy, intimate ease! I will feel his nearness. And we will face the facts together. Fearful, formidable facts. But out of them will arise a relationship that will have its place in the world of reality. We will establish a basis of understanding on which we can build a not impossible future—a future which will permit our meeting, our speaking—which will make each of us a part of the other’s actual life once more. A reasonable part—a small, sad part—a part that will not interfere——

Softly Olivia was opening her bird’s-eye maple wardrobe. She was getting out her new mink coat. She was slipping it on over the informal silk tea-gown that she had worn to dinner. She was opening her bedroom door. She paused then, with that curious sense of dreaming, to listen for a moment. Then shut her door behind her. The sudden blackness of the upper corridor assaulted her like a blow. She shut her eyes and groped her way carefully to the banister of the stair. Once her hand had closed on it, she was surer of her footsteps. As she turned the curve of the staircase, she opened her eyes again. The blackness was not quite so velvety black as before. But the stair-well was a hole of darkness. She descended a step or two. Then she saw, in the hall beneath, the ground-glass panels of the double street door, dimly lit by the arc light in the street beyond. She could see nothing more, but that one perceived object gave form, substance, and locality, instantly, to the other unseen objects on the stair and in the hall. She descended quickly, all sense of uncertainty gone. She groped for the key by the hatrack. It was there, on its accustomed hook. She opened the front door and drew a long breath of the cool evening air. The light fell clearly, now, on the red-and-white tiles of the Victorian vestibule, on the white painted doors. Olivia placed the lock carefully on the latch. She ran down the steps, her hand on the iron rail. She skirted the low privet hedge that enclosed the tiny front yard. She glanced back then, rather fearfully, at the red-brick façade of the house, at the green-shuttered windows, at the grilled iron portico over the front door. Time did stand still in Gramercy Park. She was nineteen years old again. And there was Twentieth Street, looking just as it always had looked, completely deserted at that nocturnal hour. There was The Players’ Club, with its white flag flying and its entrance lamps shining and its second-story windows, with the curtains not drawn, brilliantly lighted by its pendent chandeliers. You could see the chandeliers and the ceiling of that room from the corner of Twentieth Street, but not the room itself. Olivia had always wondered what it looked like. She ran across the street, her eyes dazzled a bit by the light from the arc light. When she had crossed the circle of its radiance, she saw Nick at once. He was hurrying toward her, past the railings of the park.

‘I knew you’d come!’ he was crying softly.

‘Of course!’ He had seized her hands. ‘I always came!’ She was smiling up into his eyes. Oh, Nick! Darling Nick! How heavenly, after the evening she had spent, to be with him again!

‘Have you the key?’ He looked absurdly anxious.

She was laughing now, a low excited laugh of happiness.

‘Of course I have the key!’

He took it from her hands. He grinned at it, sentimentally.

‘The key to Paradise!’ he said.

‘Paradise— Lost,’ smiled Olivia rather wistfully.

‘And Regained,’ said Nick promptly.

They had reached the gate of the park by this time. The square was as silent and as solitary as a country common. As Nick stooped to place the key in the lock, a lone taxi rattled down Twentieth Street. The noise of its approach sounded clearly above the distant hum of the city. It curiously emphasized the silence and the solitude of the square. It roared like a bombardment for an instant, then, with a grating of gears, the taxi turned south on Irving Place. The noise of its departure diminuendo-ed off and became merged in the warp and woof of distant city sounds.

‘This damn thing always stuck!’ said Nick. He was laughing as he struggled with the lock. ‘How did you get out, Livvy?’

‘I sneaked.’

‘Oh—you precious!’ The key turned, as he spoke. He threw open the gate. He smiled down at Olivia as she entered the park. She was gazing straight before her at Booth’s statue. In the faint, diffused light of the city night, his toga-ed figure rose dimly on his pedestal, standing courteously before his Roman chair.

‘He looks—he looks as if he’d got up to welcome us,’ said Olivia tremulously.

Nick was locking the gate behind them. He smiled at her, gaily, over his shoulder.

‘I shouldn’t wonder if he’d missed us.’

‘It’s funny to think he’s been here all the time, while we—we’ve gone so far.’

‘Yes—we’ve gone pretty far. But

He was pocketing the key. His voice was very casual and as gay as his smile, but, as he turned to walk over to her, Olivia could feel her heart tripping and stumbling under her new mink coat. Will he—will he kiss me again? she was thinking breathlessly. But no. He stood quietly beside her, his hands in the pockets of his grey tweed overcoat, staring up at Booth. ‘That’s what he’d say to you, I think, Livvy, if he could. He must have heard it said, very often. It’s from Twelfth Night, you know, Act II, Scene III. But it’s a false line. Most journeys don’t.’ He turned then to look down at her. ‘We’re very lucky,’ he ended tranquilly.

‘I can’t get over,’ said Olivia slowly—her heart was quieting down a bit—‘how exactly the same it all looks.’

‘Except for those.’ He indicated the tall, boxlike, skyscraping hotels at the Lexington Avenue corner. Their rows of windows, lighted in irregular clusters, stared down on the square. Great yellow rectangles, like observant eyes, invading the privacy of the park.

‘The Metropolitan Tower is the same,’ said Olivia. She was gazing up at the graceful pinnacle, tipped by its gleaming beacon, which dominated the houses to the west of the square. Obviously, she was thinking, he isn’t going to kiss me. And why should he? We both understood that last kiss was for good-bye.

‘Don’t look behind you or you’ll see the Consolidated Gas monstrosity,’ Nick was saying, very cheerfully. There was a little pause. Then——

‘Come over to our willow,’ said Nick. A slight, tense undertone had crept into his voice. It set Olivia’s heart tripping and stumbling as oddly as before. He slipped his hand through her arm. They strolled together into the shadow of the tree. It was all incredibly the same. The gravelled paths—the trampled grass plots—the bushes—privet hedges—the city trees in sparse October leaf—the iron urns of ivy. There was their bench, still sheltered by the drooping foliage of the willow. Olivia was gazing back at Booth again. He looked very lonely, she thought, and rather pitifully deprived of his rightful audience, in his little empty circle, lit by the faint, reflected radiance of a million city lights. Those lights had dimmed the stars. A few pale clouds were floating overhead, softly luminous against the black of the city sky.

‘Livvy—’ said Nick suddenly. The slight, tense undertone was still in his voice. His fingers tightened slightly on her arm.

‘Yes—’ she said slowly. She was acutely conscious of the pressure of his hand. But her eyes were on the clouds. City night clouds, she was thinking vaguely, were always luminous, lit from beneath by the splendour of the town. But country night clouds were dark—moving mysteriously across a spangled vault. A spangled vault—the Atlanta’s boat-deck—the slope of a Vermont hillside——

‘Livvy—look at me,’ said Nick. There was a smile in his voice now. Slowly, she obeyed. He was smiling, and that glint that might possibly be that of triumph was in his eyes.

Suddenly Olivia began to tremble a little. She was conscious of a fleeting sense of fear.

‘Nick’—she said, and her voice was almost a whisper—‘you—you mustn’t misunderstand. You mustn’t misunderstand, I mean, my—my motive in coming out to you.’

‘I don’t,’ said Nick with emphasis. ‘But I suppose you do. Women are funny creatures. It’s that fear of finality again.’

‘Finality?’ said Olivia.

‘My darling,’ said Nick very solemnly, ‘this is final.’

‘What—what do you mean?’ faltered Olivia.

His eyes began to twinkle.

‘Livvy,’ he said, ‘even though you’re a woman, you must have known it was all over but the shouting when you kissed me on that boat.’

The heart stopped then. It literally stopped, for an appreciable instant, then throbbed more wildly than ever. But——

‘Nick,’ said Olivia very bravely, ‘I thought you knew why I kissed you.’

‘You kissed me because you couldn’t help it,’ said Nick promptly. ‘And that’s the best reason there is. In a moment you’re going to kiss me again. And after that, you’re going to tell me when you’ll marry me.’

‘But, my dear,’ said Olivia tremulously, ‘I’m not.’

Nick sighed a little wearily.

‘Well, sit down on our bench,’ he said, after a moment’s pause, ‘and we’ll begin again at “do.” You never take up the scale, Livvy, at the point where we left it off.’

Olivia sat down a trifle uncertainly. This was facing the facts, of course. This was establishing that basis of understanding. Still—conversations with Nick never turned out just as you had planned them. He seated himself beside her. He leaned forward confidentially, one elbow on his knee, one arm extended along the back of the bench.

‘Livvy,’ he said, ‘I don’t know just what more to say to you. But I know what’s going to happen. It doesn’t make much difference what I do say, does it, as long as I keep up the conventional masculine rôle of persuasion and attack? It’s not what I say, but what you feel, that will make you come to me. You’re not an inexperienced girl. You’ve been my wife. And we’re terribly in love with each other. In a case like this, the result is a foregone conclusion. It’s just a—a chemical combination in which combustion is inevitable.’

Inevitable, thought Olivia. She only wished it were. She wished that there were no such thing as free will in the world! She wished that she could be enchanted—that thought could be arrested by a sorcerer’s wand—that scruples could be stilled——

‘Dearest,’ said Nick, ‘do you think for a moment that I’ll let you go on living as you have been living? Living half dead? When you need me so—want me so? Do you think I’ll go on living as I have myself? When I want and need you——’ His voice faltered into silence.

Olivia was gazing straight into his face—his eager, pleading face—that was so near her own. She yielded to temptation.

‘Do—do you need me?’ she whispered faintly.

He caught up her hand then. He pressed it to his lips. Olivia sat staring at his bowed head, almost in terror. I’m sunk, she thought, I’m absolutely sunk! There’s nothing I can do about this! It’s too much for me! Nick’s too much for me! I——

‘Darling,’ said Nick tenderly, ‘you’re cold. Your fingers are like ice.’ He was holding her hand still, crushed against his cheek.

‘No,’ said Olivia faintly, ‘I’m not. I—I’m just—excited.’

Nick smiled at that.

‘I’m excited, too. That—that’s putting it rather—mildly.’

Olivia did not answer. For a moment they sat in silence. Then——

‘Livvy——’ began Nick, tremulously.

Olivia met his shining eyes very bravely.

‘Nick,’ she said steadily, ‘I didn’t come out here to—to neck like a flapper. I take you much too seriously for that. You—you really mustn’t kiss me.’

‘I won’t,’ said Nick earnestly. ‘I won’t—until you want me to. But, kissed or unkissed, you must listen, darling.’

‘I—I am listening,’ said Olivia.

‘We must act quickly.’

‘Act?’ faltered Olivia.

‘Certainly,’ said Nick. ‘You must do just as I say.’

There was something deliciously exciting about his masterful tone. Whatever he said, Olivia knew, would seem very possible. What seemed impossible, with his hands so closely holding hers, was to renounce this ecstasy, this intimacy, this rapture of being ordered about by Nick again, just as she had been ordered about, twenty years ago, on that same green bench, beneath the sheltering willow.

‘And what do you say?’ she was smiling, very faintly.

‘I say we must go away together,’ said Nick promptly.

Olivia never stopped smiling. It did seem possible. It seemed almost simple. But of course it wasn’t. It wasn’t—it couldn’t be!

‘Oh, Nick,’ she breathed wistfully, ‘it would be heaven. But——’

‘But what?’ said Nick.

‘I—I’ll think it over. I——’

‘Indeed you won’t!’ cried Nick vehemently.

‘Yes, Nick. I promise you I will. I’ll go home and——’

‘Never!’ cried Nick. ‘That’s the last thing I’d let you do! You’d be in hell. And you’re such a little ass, Livvy, that you’d probably decide to stay there! No—I’ll not let you go back to Chicago. I’m almost afraid to let you leave me tonight. Livvy——’ His voice was suddenly breathless.

‘Yes,’ said Olivia.

‘Why do I let you leave me tonight?’

Olivia stared at him.

‘Why—do you—let me leave you?’ she echoed.

‘Yes.’ His voice was still breathless. ‘Livvy—you—you couldn’t come away with me—now?’

‘Now?’ cried Olivia, aghast. She was suddenly conscious of feeling very shy and virginal. Absurdly virginal. ‘Of course I couldn’t.’

‘Why not?’ he asked swiftly. The very rapidity of his utterance seemed to put the chimerical question on a very practical plane.

Olivia answered it practically.

‘Nick—it’s after midnight. I’m not packed. I—I’m in a tea-gown!’ She laughed nervously.

‘I’ll take you in a tea-gown—if you’ll come! Oh—Livvy!’ Suddenly his arm encircled her. He swept her into his embrace. ‘You—little—fool!’ He said. Olivia breathed a long shuddering sigh. His lips met hers. This was enchantment. This was the sorcerer’s wand. Thought was arrested. Scruples were stilled. Free will was no more. ‘Oh—my love!’ said Nick. His very voice was shattered. Low, strained, and vibrant, it fell on Olivia’s ears. This was dark, dark magic. She was dissolved in emotion. She trembled, uncontrollably.

‘Will you come?’ he whispered.

His words broke the spell.

‘I—I can’t,’ faltered Olivia. ‘Not—not tonight.’

‘Why not?’ asked Nick again.

‘Because,’ said Olivia simply, ‘I must think. There are things—things I must do——’ Her voice was shaking, terribly.

‘Darling,’ said Nick very tenderly, ‘you must stop thinking. It’s thinking that upsets you.’ For a long moment, saying nothing more, he held her closely in his arms. When he spoke again, his voice was very serious. ‘But there are things you must do. I recognize that. There are things that must be done. I only wish, sweetheart, that I could do them for you. But I can’t.’ His voice lapsed once more into silence. Presently——

‘Now you’re thinking,’ said Olivia pitifully.

‘Yes,’ said Nick slowly, ‘I am. I’m thinking that it—it’s impossible for us to go away together until you tell Harry. You must do that tonight.’

‘Tonight?’ said Olivia faintly. ‘How—how can I tell him?’

‘You must write him exactly what’s happened. It will be hard, I know, but if he’s all you say he is, he—he’ll make things easy for you. He’ll understand. It—it’s rough on him, of course, but he’s got to take his medicine. After all—I took mine.’

Harry—Olivia was thinking miserably. Harry’s medicine. Oh, what a mess life could be! Nick’s voice was going resolutely on.

‘You must try to get some sleep, Livvy, and in the morning you must explain matters to little Olivia.’

Little Olivia—thought Olivia! Oh, dear, she hadn’t once thought of the child. She hadn’t once thought of her since she kissed her good night!

‘Tell her we’ll fix everything up just as soon as we possibly can. Tell her we’re not leaving her for long. She’ll stand by us, Livvy. She’s our child. But I wouldn’t try to explain anything to anyone else, if I were you. Just pack your bags and leave the house unobtrusively about ten o’clock. I’ll be waiting in a taxi around the corner of Twentieth Street——’

‘You mean’—gasped Olivia—‘you mean we’re—to go—tomorrow?’

‘Of course,’ said Nick. Her surprise had surprised him extremely.

‘But where—where would we go?’ gasped Olivia.

‘Why—to the farm,’ said Nick.

‘The farm?’ said Olivia. Her voice was sharp with astonishment. She sat up abruptly in Nick’s embrace. ‘Oh, Nick! I—I couldn’t go there!’

‘Why not?’ asked Nick. Again he seemed extremely surprised.

‘Well—’ said Olivia slowly. She was trying to phrase her feeling of distaste in not too wounding words. ‘There—there’s Suki, for one thing. What would he think?’

‘He doesn’t think,’ smiled Nick. ‘It’s that invaluable goldfish quality.’

‘But what would you say?’

‘I’d say you were Mrs. Nicholas Allen. That’s all there is to say.’

‘But I wouldn’t be,’ said Olivia very seriously. ‘Nick—Suki isn’t all. That farm’s your mother’s house. I don’t think you ought to bring me into it until—until——’

Nick was laughing now, but very tenderly.

‘Until I’ve made you an honest woman? Livvy, don’t be absurd!’

‘Nick,’ said Olivia solemnly, ‘I’d be your mistress.’

In spite of her solemnity, a little trembling thrill ran over her, as she said the desperate word. For her it was invested with the romantic glamour it holds for all virtuous women. Nick wasn’t laughing now. But he was smiling—smiling as if at a child.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘you’d be just—Livvy. Livvy—at the farm. As you’ve been so often before.’

‘Nick’ said Olivia, ‘your mother wouldn’t have liked it. She wouldn’t have liked it at all. She would have thought it all very—irregular. I’d rather go somewhere else.’

‘But where?’ asked Nick. ‘I can’t just—take you to some hotel. There people might think things. They’d hear things, you know. The world’s so damn small. You wouldn’t like it, Livvy.’

Olivia sighed profoundly.

‘But we don’t have to decide it now. I’ll take you anywhere you want to go, of course. The main thing is—we’re going.’

Olivia considered his words in silence. We’re going, she thought. But it wasn’t possible.

‘Don’t look so solemn, dear,’ said Nick. Then, very confidently, ‘I’ll make you happy.’

‘I—wonder,’ said Olivia.

‘I’ll love you,’ said Nick gently. ‘That’s all the happiness there is.’

Olivia shook her head.

‘No. Not being loved. That’s very nice, of course. But you have to love back. It’s loving makes you happy. Oh, Nick!’ She looked wistfully up at him. ‘I—I want to love you!’

‘You will,’ smiled Nick.

‘I—wonder,’ said Olivia again.

‘Of course you will!’ said Nick. ‘We’ll love each other. For those next four decades! Aren’t you glad we’re so young?’

Olivia smiled at that.

‘I feel young,’ she said. ‘Tonight I feel nineteen.’

‘Tonight you look nineteen,’ said Nick proudly. ‘And that’s my doing. It’s curious what happiness does to a woman.’

Olivia’s smile had grown rather wistful.

‘And you’d keep me happy? Always?’

He took her in his arms.

‘Now,’ he said presently, ‘remember that. Remember how we felt, I mean, out here in the park. If you do that, you won’t have any misgivings.’

‘Oh—I’ll have misgivings.’

‘But you’ll meet me on Twentieth Street. Livvy—if I thought you wouldn’t——’ He gave her hands a little purposeful shake.

‘What?’

‘I’d take you now. But you will?’

Olivia stared at him for a long moment in silence. Then——

‘I don’t think so, Nick,’ she said slowly.

For a long moment Nick stared in silence at her. His eyes had grown stern. His lips were firmly compressed. That expression that was New England in its essence seemed hovering, like a threatening cloud, over his expressive features. Then he smiled. It was a very brief smile. It shone through the cloud like a flash of wintry sunshine.

‘Livvy,’ he said shortly, ‘for two cents I’d lose my temper!’

‘Nick,’ said Olivia pitifully, ‘you mustn’t do that.’

‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘I won’t because I mustn’t. There’s too much at stake. But you simply infuriate me. You infuriate me only because I adore you. Livvy——’

‘Yes,’ said Olivia meekly.

‘I don’t know why I don’t consider you the archphilandress of the world,’ he said. ‘But I don’t. I know you love me. I know that we’d be happy. I ought to knock you over the head, of course. I ought to drag you off by the hair——’

‘I wish you would,’ said Olivia faintly.

‘Well, I won’t,’ said Nick briefly. ‘It’s for you to decide. But I have no use for triangles. I’m not going to hang about, on the outskirts of your life, waiting for the crumbs that I can pick up from Harry’s table. I’m not a crumb-eater. And I’m not a sneak. I’m not a procrastinator. There’s work I want to do in the world and I’m going to do it. I’m not going to let you ruin my life. I’ll love you till I die. And I’ll be waiting, tomorrow morning, in that taxi on Twentieth Street. If you don’t come——’

‘What?’ said Olivia faintly.

‘I’ll go without you,’ said Nick very firmly. ‘And I won’t go to the devil. The devil, as a distraction, has no charms for me. He can’t compare with the typewriter. But I’ll go, Livvy. And I swear to God you’ll never see me again.’ His voice was trembling now. He paused a moment to get himself in hand. Then ended simply, ‘Will you meet me in that taxi?’

There was another pause. Olivia was staring at her hands. Her thin, white hands, clenched tightly in her lap. Nick was not touching her now, but his eyes were on her face. Acutely conscious of his gaze, Olivia would not meet it. She would not meet it until she had decided. She could decide. She must decide. She was still a free agent—free to move in whatever direction she liked. O God, thought Olivia desperately, what a curse freedom was!

‘Will you?’ said Nick, again. His voice was cool, and somehow—remote. Already he was slipping away from her! He had meant every word he had said! He would go. He would go and he would forget her. She would never see him again. He would not let her ruin his life. Of course, she did not really want to ruin it, but——

‘Will you?’ said Nick inexorably.

Olivia drew a long shuddering breath. She mustn’t. She couldn’t. She turned to look at him then, and received a quick sense of shock. She was completely unprepared, by his cool, remote voice, for his look of breathless suspense. Oh, Nick! Darling Nick! He had not slipped away! He wanted her—he needed her! And she—she—— She stared into his eyes. His anguished gaze had a curious clinging quality. The very air between them was imbued with a mysterious magnetism that was drawing her nearer to his motionless figure. She felt relaxed and fluid and unutterably weary. The very fibres of her body—the solid flesh and bone—were melting—melting and flowing—flowing toward Nick—— This is perfectly terrible, thought Olivia desperately. It was terrible and beautiful. It was not to be resisted.

‘Yes,’ she said slowly, ‘I will.’ Her words had the solemnity of a vow.

‘You mean that?’ said Nick sharply. ‘You won’t go back on it?’

‘I won’t go back on it,’ said Olivia gently.

In his turn Nick drew a long shuddering breath.

‘You—you had me frightened,’ he said simply. Then took her in his arms. Lost in the rapture of her surrender, Olivia clung to him in silence. Presently——

‘I—I do love you, Nick,’ she said gently.

‘I know,’ he whispered. For a time there was silence again on the bench beneath the willow. Then——

‘Nick,’ whispered Olivia, ‘it—it must be very late. I ought to go in. I——’

‘Don’t,’ he said softly. ‘I can’t bear to give you up.’

‘It’s after one,’ she said.

He kissed her very tenderly.

‘Poor little Livvy! You’ve had a dreadful day. And you must get some sleep. I must take care of you now.’

Olivia was smoothing her disordered hair.

‘Happy?’ Nick asked.

Olivia sighed and smiled.

‘Completely,’ she said. ‘It’s decision that’s dreadful.’

She rose to her feet. He stood up beside her. She was thinking how curious it was that her last statement was entirely true. She felt very peaceful. And somehow—dedicated. Dedicated to the destiny that she had chosen. His arm was around her as they strolled back to Booth’s pedestal. Nick looked up at the statue.

‘It’s just a circle, Livvy. Our lives. We were lost in a wood. We walked and walked and here we are again, just where we started from, twenty years ago. He looks very benign. As if he’d known all along how it was going to turn out. As if he were finishing the quotation.

The park was faintly brighter now. The waning moon, palely wrapped in Indian Summer mist, had swung round the corner of the Gramercy Hotel. They walked in silence to the gate.

‘I hate to leave it,’ said Olivia.

‘We’ll come back,’ said Nick.

‘We never came back before.’

‘We’ll be wiser this time.’ He was struggling again with the key in the lock.

‘It’s not always so difficult,’ said Olivia whimsically, ‘to get out of Paradise!’

‘We take our Paradise with us.’

He flung open the gate as he spoke. Olivia passed through it as if it were the door of her future. She still held that sense of peace and dedication. But on the other side was just Twentieth Street. Twentieth Street, looking as it always had looked. The lights in The Players’ were extinguished now. The city’s hum was fainter. Olivia paused at the corner.

‘You—you’d better not come any farther with me, darling,’ she said, glancing fearfully at the arc light.

‘You are nineteen,’ smiled Nick. ‘You’re an inexperienced girl.’

‘No,’ said Olivia, ‘I wish I were—but I’m not. However, even so, I don’t feel like explaining to Papa how we happened to be out in the park together at midnight. And he might look out his window.’

‘Then good night,’ said Nick. ‘May I kiss you here in the open?’

Olivia smiled up at him provocatively.

‘Hadn’t you better wait,’ she said, ‘until tomorrow morning in that taxi?’

‘No,’ said Nick promptly.

But Olivia scarcely heard him. Until she had said them, she had not considered her words. They shattered that sense of peace. A kiss in a taxi! Oh, Harry! Poor betrayed Harry! Nick was grinning delightedly. He was taking her possessively in his arms. She smiled then, up into his face. But she could not speak her thoughts. He’d hate to hear them. Unspoken thoughts. Would she have them always—a barrier between herself and Nick? When her one desire was to show herself to Nick as she really was? To open the doors of her mind——

For a long moment his kiss obscured her fears. She thrilled at his touch, but the sense of peace was destroyed. She clung to him desperately, trying to recapture it. In vain, however.

‘Livvy, darling,’ said Nick anxiously, ‘you look so sweet—but you look sad, too. You must never look sad again!’

That was true, of course. She must never look sad. She must make Nick happy—she must keep him contented. He must never regret. Smiling very cheerfully, Olivia slipped from his embrace.

‘I won’t,’ she said. ‘Good night—my dearest!’ She ran across the street. She hurried down the block, past the low privet hedge, and up the front steps of her father’s house. From the vestibule she turned to wave at the dim figure just visible, blotted against the railings of the park. Nick—darling Nick, she was thinking. Nick—come back to her after all the years! He waved in his turn. He called something, softly, that she could not hear. She opened the front door with infinite precaution. She slipped the lock off the latch. She hung up the key on its hook by the hatrack, then closed the door, and turned to steal up the stairs into the darkness above.

So it was decided,—she thought. Incredibly, it was decided. Two hours before, creeping down the same staircase, she had never dreamed, she had never imagined——But one thing had knocked down another. If the market had been certain—if Harry had met her—if Nick had not telegraphed——And now, the ninepins were falling. It was not her fault. It was not anyone’s fault. It was a gigantic kaleidoscope designed in the mind of God. But she would have to write to Harry. She would have to write to Harry that—it was decided. That was all there was to say. She couldn’t explain it. He wouldn’t understand it. He couldn’t understand it. He had had no warning. Harry had no inkling—he had no conception—of the thoughts she had been thinking for years. Unspoken thoughts again. Intangible barriers. Hedges of the mind. Unpruned hedges that grew and grew between husband and wife until—until the woman behind them was really a stranger. The man was a stranger, too, of course. Was Harry a stranger? He did not seem so. Nevertheless, he had not seen her face for years. Her real face. And now he must look at it. Now she must show it to him. It would be dreadful for Harry. More dreadful than to lose her would be to face the fact that he had been living with a stranger. Yet he must face it.

Oh, thought Olivia, at the turn of the staircase, how could she write to Harry! How could she break through that hedge of unspoken thoughts and show him her face! She opened her bedroom door. She closed it softly behind her. Dazzled a bit by the soft yellow lamplight, she stood, for a moment, near her wardrobe, staring blankly at the bird’s-eye maple desk. It loomed starkly before her as an engine of destruction. At that desk, she would presently have to write to Harry. Olivia was suddenly conscious of feeling completely deflated. Her hands were trembling. Her knees were tottering. It was nerves, of course. It was nerves and exhaustion. It was exhausting—an hour like this last. An hour like this last! The thought of Nick swept over her. Nick’s face, dimly seen in the faint diffused light of the city night. Nick’s eager, anguished eyes. Nick’s ardent voice. Nick’s hands. Nick’s arms. Nick’s confident, gay self. With a rush of wild happiness she realized that that gaiety, that confidence, was hers forever, now. That light-hearted companionship. She would be his wife. Their intimacy would be to him the dearest, the closest thing in all the world. And to her— Oh, she did love him! They would be in Paradise!

Nevertheless, three hours later, Olivia was still sitting at the bird’s-eye maple desk. She was dressed in her nightgown and her chiffon négligée and her bags were packed and piled in a neat pyramid by the door. Her trunks were locked. The room was in perfect order. Only the desk was untidy. It was littered with scraps of torn note-paper, and Olivia was staring at a clean white sheet before her on the blotter.

‘Dear Harry,’ she wrote and paused. She stared at the sheet once more. Then pushed it aside. She took another from the pigeon-hole.

‘My dearest Harry,’ she wrote. The words came quicker now. ‘You are my dearest Harry, though you won’t believe it when you read what I have to write. This is going to shock you fearfully, but I have to tell you the truth. I have to tell you that——’ Olivia paused again, drew a long breath, read over what she had written, dipped her pen in the ink, and continued quickly, ‘I’ve been thinking about our marriage. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. And on the boat coming home, Harry, I met Nicholas Allen. This isn’t a sudden thing, Harry. As sudden as it seems. And when I saw Nick——’ Again Olivia paused. Again she read over what she had written. Again she dipped her pen—‘I—knew——’ She wrote slowly. Then stopped. Stopped and stared at the paper. Presently she gave a little hopeless sigh. She ran her hand through the disordered waves of her golden-brown hair. She leaned her head on that hand. She fell to tracing little squares and circles and triangles on the blotter.

Then——

‘O God!’ said Olivia despairingly. For what did she know? What did you ever know? She crossed the last word out, with thick black strokes. She substituted ‘felt.’ She stared again. No—‘felt’ would never do. She must keep feeling out of it. She must not hurt Harry. At least—she must not hurt Harry unnecessarily. Though, of course, she must choose between hurting Harry and hurting Nick. Facing those monstrous alternatives, Olivia fell again to tracing little squares and circles and triangles on the blotter. Presently she dropped her pen. She glanced at her wrist watch. She clasped her hands then, put her elbows on the desk, and sat with closed eyes, for some minutes, her forehead resting on those clasped hands. She tried to collect her thoughts. She could not collect them. She could hear her wrist watch, ticking time away, a few inches from her ear. Presently she raised her head and picked up the sheet of note-paper with an air of decision. She laid it neatly on the sheet on which ‘Dear Harry’ was written, and tore them both definitely into minute fragments. It was after four in the morning and her brain was paralyzed. She still loved Nick. They would be in Paradise. But she could not write Harry. She could not write Harry that night.

CHAPTER VII
MONDAY

Twelve hours later, Olivia was seated at the wheel of a brand-new, canary-coloured Chrysler roadster, moving rapidly over a hilly Vermont road. Beside her, on the shiny, black leather cushions, Nick was reclining, relaxed and smiling, his hands in the pockets of the grey tweed overcoat, the battered felt hat pulled down over his eyes to cut off the brilliant, horizontal rays of the sinking sun. Olivia was smiling, too, faintly, introspectively smiling, her gaze mechanically fixed on the long line of clay highroad which stretched in front of the car. Up hill and down dale it stretched, a yellow undulating ribbon, commanding from its heights a glorious panorama of Vermont landscape—field and forest and tip-tilted stone-strewn pasture—and from its depths delightful little glimpses of brooks and glades—mountain brooks, rootbeer-coloured, breaking in yellow foam over granite boulders, and wooded glades, russet and scarlet and gold, brilliant and burning in the bright October sun.

It was heavenly, Olivia was thinking, it was utterly heavenly, to be moving at Nick’s side, so quickly, so easily, through the glory of the Vermont uplands. She had forgotten, really, how glorious they were. Or perhaps they had never looked as lovely as they did in the soft autumnal haze that hung over them at the close of this bright October day. The sky above them was a deep and stainless blue. The sugar maples and the quivering white birch trees stood out dramatically, in glowing patches of colour on the pine-clad hills. Orange and red, saffron and lemon, they flamed among the evergreens. As the Chrysler slipped easily over the crest of a rise, the course of the brook in the valley below could be traced by the brilliant frost-touched foliage that lined its rocky banks.

Yet all this loveliness, Olivia was thinking, was merely a back-drop—stage scenery, set to frame the happiness that she felt in being at Nick’s side. She was his—he was hers—and nothing should ever part them. The last ninepin had fallen. The monotonous strip of yellow clay was leading her onward to her regained Paradise.

It was monotonous, however. It was monotonous and peaceful. It had an irresistible fascination for her tired eyes. Her eyes were tired. She was tired all over. Her hands were lying laxly on the wheel. The road was smooth, the sun was warm, and she had been six hours in that Chrysler. In spite of her happy thoughts, her eyelids were drooping ominously. She nodded once—twice—then recovered herself with an unexpected jerk, as she sank against Nick’s shoulder. Absurd—ridiculous, thought Olivia, sitting suddenly upright, to be mainly conscious, as her romantic elopement drew toward its close, of feeling supremely sleepy! Still—she had had only four hours of sleep the night before. And eloping—well, eloping, under the best of circumstances, was a delightful, but a—a very exhausting, method of travel!

Nevertheless, she mustn’t fall asleep at the wheel and kill Nick and herself at a corner of the road by running into a pine tree. Olivia straightened her stiffened shoulders and stretched her tired ankles to throw out the brake and the clutch as the Chrysler dipped suddenly down over another little rise. She turned to glance at Nick. He looked a trifle tired, too, Olivia thought, but rather dreamy than sleepy. As his eyes met hers, his smile deepened.

‘God’s country, isn’t it, darling?’ he observed gently.

Olivia nodded. The scene before them, at the moment, was breath-takingly beautiful. Outlined against the golden glory of the sinking sun, the peak of Equinox Mountain rose tranquilly above the nearer, clearer hills. Small, tumbled hills, stretching on either side as far as the eye could reach, tossing their piny crests, running in mounting waves to the northern horizon, where the sky was cut by the jagged, lavender summits of the Green Mountain range.

Nevertheless, in spite of the beauty of the view, Olivia’s eyes wandered wistfully to the dial of the speedometer. It was just ticking off its one hundred and ninety-eighth mile. No use, of course, in asking Nick how much farther he thought it was to Greenfield. Absurd of Nick, really, all these years, never to have had a car! Greenfield wasn’t on the road map and didn’t seem to be on any of the sign-posts. Had she been foolish, that morning, to insist, as the initial step of their flight together, on buying that roadster? She was tired now and if they had gone by train, as Nick had planned, and had changed cars at Pittsfield and again at Jamaica Centre, they would have been already at the farm. Still—they wouldn’t have had the car. They would have been marooned in Greenfield. You simply couldn’t live in the country without a car, Olivia argued silently with her fatigue, as she had argued, more articulately, with Nick, six hours before.

It hadn’t been really an argument, of course. It had just been a—a difference of opinion. It had taken place, much to Olivia’s surprise, almost immediately after her rapturous meeting with Nick in the taxi that was waiting on Twentieth Street. They had barely embraced and packed in Olivia’s bags and told the taxi-driver, in a great flutter of excitement, to drive to the Grand Central Station, when the difference of opinion was upon them. They were rolling up Fourth Avenue, and Nick was explaining to Olivia that he really thought that they had better go first to the farm, because he could think of no other place, though he had been thinking all night, where they would be so completely unobserved, when Olivia had said easily—

‘Oh—that’s all right!’ And had gone on to explain, with an air of pretty confidence, that she had decided that they could really have lots of fun at the farm, because no country was prettier in October than the Vermont country and she was going to give Nick a Chrysler for his ‘running-away present.’ The thought of that Chrysler, which had come to her with her breakfast-tray, had been quite a relief from other, more perplexing thoughts. It had already made Olivia feel much better about Greenfield. Nick, however, had looked extremely startled.

‘A what?’ he’d asked incredulously.

‘A Chrysler!’ Olivia had beamed. ‘A roadster. A little sports roadster for you to run off with me in!’

‘Oh—’ Nick had said. Then rather lamely, ‘I see. A—a Chrysler.’

‘Yes,’ Olivia had said very happily. ‘We can motor up to the farm in it.’

Then had come that discussion of the trains. Nick had looked them all up. Olivia, however, was distinctly not in favour of elopement by public carrier.

‘We’ll buy a Chrysler,’ she had said confidently, ‘right out of a shop window. And start off in it——’ She had paused to smile very tenderly at Nick, only to find that he was looking rather embarrassed.

‘How—how much do the damn things cost?’ he had inquired, uncertainly. ‘I—I’ve only a thousand in my checking account.’

‘Oh—it’s a present from me,’ Olivia had explained, very eagerly.

Nick had looked at her rather coldly. Rather coldly, that is, considering that they hadn’t yet been ten minutes together in their runaway taxi.

‘From Harry, do you mean?’ he had asked curtly.

‘Oh, no!’ Olivia had been distinctly shocked. ‘From me. I’ve still got twenty-five hundred in my letter of credit.’

‘And where did that come from?’ Nick had asked. His tone had lost nothing of its curtness. But—

‘Nick!’ Olivia had cried. ‘You surely don’t expect me to mail back the change from that letter of credit to Harry! Why, it—it would hurt him fearfully! A Chrysler doesn’t cost anything! And I want to give you one——’

‘Livvy,’ Nick had said very firmly, ‘you must get this at the start. I’m not going to live on Harry’s money.’

‘You can’t live on it!’ Olivia had replied, rather tartly. And at this point, indeed, their conversation had begun to sound quite like an argument. ‘You can’t live on it, because I haven’t got any! Harry’s never settled a cent on me. He—he just gave me an allowance and—and paid the bills. He never discussed money. Harry always hated to. And I—I——’ Olivia’s voice had faltered into silence. She was thinking what a blessed relief it had been never to have to discuss it, after the acrimonious budgeting in the Greenwich Village flat.

‘We-ll,’ Nick had said uncertainly.

It was in reply to that non-committal comment that Olivia had observed that you couldn’t live in the country without a car. And Nick had remarked, with rather a rueful smile, that he had—for the last forty-five years. His smile was so very rueful that Olivia had kissed him. And then she had laughed at him. And then Nick had laughed at himself. And soon after that, with his arms close around her and his lips on her hair, Nick had said philosophically that he guessed that you had to run off with a lady on her own terms, and had added, less philosophically, that it was just like the darling Olivia to want to give him a ‘running-away present.’ And when they had reached that point on their elopement where Park Avenue divides to go under the viaduct to approach the Grand Central Station, Nick had rapped smartly on the glass between them and the driver and had told him to turn east on Forty-Second Street and drive to the Chrysler Building instead.

Half an hour later, Olivia was standing on the Lexington Avenue sidewalk, delightedly surveying the canary-coloured roadster which had so suddenly become Nick’s own. Nick was surveying it, too, with a slightly quizzical smile. The affable young salesman, who had outlined its points in the salesroom, was still lingering hatless at Olivia’s elbow, intent on describing its charms. The greasy young mechanic, who had run it out of its shop window to the Lexington Avenue pavement, was wiping his grease off the steering-wheel with a scrap of white waste.

‘She came over the road from Detroit,’ the affable young salesman was remarking smilingly, ‘so she’s done her first five hundred miles. You can step on the gas without fear of straining her, and you’ll find she’ll go sixty-five without turning a hair. You’ll be up in the seventies before you notice any vibration——’

‘What about the license?’ Nick had asked, somewhat gloomily.

The salesman was all efficiency.

‘Well—as you’re going right out of the State, I tied on this “license applied for” card. It’s not quite regular, of course, but I’m glad to oblige the lady. Just run so you don’t get into an argument with a cop and you’ll be O.K. You can send in your application for a Vermont license tomorrow——’

‘It will be all right, darling,’ Olivia had said rather hurriedly, for Nick still looked a trifle gloomy. ‘I’ve a way with the force! Get in first, dear.’ She had indicated the seat at the wheel.

‘You drive,’ Nick had said modestly.

‘Oh, no!’ smiled Olivia. ‘It’s your car.’

‘See here!’ Nick had said suddenly. ‘You—you can drive, can’t you?’

Olivia had laughed at that.

‘I’m a demon chauffeuse,’ she had said. Then, smiling tenderly up at him, ‘But I’d always rather be driven.’

Nick had seemed quite unmoved by the tenderness.

‘Well—so would I,’ he had remarked, rather sheepishly.

Olivia stared at him in astonishment. The affable young salesman looked distinctly surprised. The greasy young mechanic glanced up from his waste. ‘You see, Livvy,’ Nick continued apologetically, ‘I—I’ve hardly ever driven. And never in a city. I’d hate to steer those brand-new mud-guards through the New York traffic. Especially if we’re not to get into an argument with a cop——’

‘Oh, then—of course, darling!’ Olivia had seated herself at the wheel. She had hoped that her voice had not betrayed her astonishment, for she could not believe her ears. Of course, when she came to think of it, she could hardly remember ever having seen Nick in a motor. They’d never been able to afford one, and neither had the Peter Van Tynes, and Mrs. Seth Allen had kept only one grey mare and a high-wheeled farmer’s buggy in the barn at the farm. Still—a grown man—a man of Nick’s experience—forty-five years old—who had never driven a car in a city! It was really incredible. But of course he could learn. And fortunately she was a demon chauffeuse. She had always spelled Harry in the driver’s seat on their trans-continental touring. Harry was a very intrepid motorist. On a pleasure jaunt he never took a train. Olivia had motored East with him nearly every summer for the last ten years, and they had been three times to Florida and once to the Coast, and had run up last season in the Daimler to the Canadian Rockies with all three children for six weeks of horseback riding on a mountain ranch. Little Olivia loved motoring, too. She loved to drive a car. She would have felt just the way Olivia did, and Nick so obviously and so rather disappointingly didn’t, about that canary-coloured Chrysler.

While she was thinking these thoughts, Olivia had slipped the gears into low.

‘Good luck!’ cried the salesman.

Olivia slipped into high and slid expertly in front of a moving street-car.

‘She handles nicely!’ she called over her shoulder, across the muttered imprecations of the motorman. The salesman grinned in response. The greasy young mechanic waved his scrap of white waste. Olivia received a fleeting but cheering impression that they both thought Nick an exceedingly lucky fellow. And she did handle nicely. She handled very nicely, indeed. Olivia had passed five taxis, a truck, and a glittering Rolls-Royce limousine before she turned west at the Forty-Third Street corner.

‘Dear me,’ Nick was murmuring, ‘did you ever drive a fire engine?’

‘I always wanted to,’ smiled Olivia.

But her smile was a trifle abstracted. She was thinking that the purchase of the roadster had settled the responsibility for the management of the elopement very squarely and unexpectedly on her own slender shoulders. It was up to her, now, to take them both to the farm. As a first step, of course, it was up to her to get them out of New York City. Olivia was frowning, by this time, as abstractedly as she had been smiling a moment before. She suppressed a slight sigh. If she were eloping with Harry, she couldn’t help thinking, he would know exactly how to find the Bronx River Parkway. Whereas Nick—— But Nick knew other things. Other things that were, after all, much more essential to the success of an elopement. She had turned up Park Avenue. Harry always turned up Park Avenue, she reflected. But there was some trick about finding the One Hundred and Forty-Ninth Street Bridge. With a smile Olivia recalled that time when she and Harry had been motoring out to Greenwich together, very late for a dinner engagement, and he had said that the thing to remember about the One Hundred and Forty-Ninth Street Bridge was that it was not on One Hundred and Forty-Ninth Street. There was something peculiar about it. It was built on the bias. But after you crossed it, you were almost immediately on the Concourse. Which led to the Parkway. Which ended at White Plains. Where there were signs for the Bear Mountain Bridge.

Olivia had already decided to cross the Bear Mountain Bridge and run up the west bank of the Hudson and cross back at Rensselaer rather than risk trying to find a brand-new cross-country road through the Berkshires to the Vermont line. It would be longer, of course, but at least she would not get lost. She and Harry always motored home from New York by the Bear Mountain Bridge. Had motored—Olivia corrected herself. Of course they would never do it again. Still, it seemed very strange to slip into the past tense when thinking of Harry, as if he were not only deserted, but dead. It seemed very strange, for that matter, to think that she and Harry would never motor again across the Bear Mountain Bridge. Never lunch again at that inn they’d discovered in the Catskills, where they kept a real bear in a cage by the gas station—that real bear which Otto and little Van Tyne always found so entrancing and which even little Olivia invariably stooped to throw buns to——

‘See here, my own,’ Nick had said very mildly, ‘that light was red. If we’re not going to get into an argument with a cop——’

Olivia had whistled her wayward thoughts to heel. She had concentrated on the green and ruby sparks that controlled the river of traffic, flowing north at her side. She had found the One Hundred and Forty-Ninth Street Bridge. By the time that they had reached the asphalt wastes, the cream-coloured hotels, and the wide cement sidewalks of the Concourse, she had discovered that the sky was clear and the sun was bright and that she and Nick had drawn from the lottery of life a beautiful blue-and-golden day to be running away together!

The Bronx River Parkway had proved rather a disappointment. Its grass was dead and trampled, its leaves were withered and brown. But city parks were heralds of the seasons, Olivia had reflected. In the spring, they were green and blossoming when the country fields were bare. In the autumn, they looked bleak and wintry when the woods were a riot of colour. The tall trees at Scarsdale proved the truth of her reflections. They stood like golden sentinels against the blue of the sky. Nick had kissed her as they passed under them.

‘God! Greenfield will be lovely!’ he had said.

It had all been very lovely. It had grown more lovely with every turn of the Chrysler’s wheels. The fertile farmland beyond White Plains had smiled in the autumn sun. The hills of the Hudson had hung like glowing tapestries on either side of the river. They had stopped quite some time on the Bear Mountain Bridge—as she and Harry had always done, Olivia could not help remembering—to look at the view.

‘I wish this damn car would run itself,’ Nick had said as he relinquished her hands and they started once more into motion. ‘I want the chauffeuse to concentrate on me!’

‘She has concentrated on you,’ Olivia had smiled in answer. ‘She has contracted to concentrate on you for a lifetime.’

Then came the question that Olivia had been dreading. She had been dreading it for three hours.

‘Livvy—what did you write to Harry?’

Olivia had looked evasively at the view. She had felt her features harden defensively. Harden to hide the little spasm of pain that had passed over them at the thought of the letter she had yet to write.

‘Don’t—don’t tell me, if you’d rather not,’ Nick had added, after a moment. And Olivia had said nothing. She could feel his disappointment in the pause that followed his words. But she couldn’t talk of Harry. She really couldn’t, no matter what Nick wanted. She couldn’t explain why she hadn’t written that letter. Unseen thoughts, again! But they must remain unseen. It was as impossible to hurt Nick by telling him how she felt about Harry as it was to hurt Harry by telling him how she felt about Nick. And lies were impossible. Yet this silence was a lie. A furtive, cowardly lie. Nick’s thoughts were unseen, too. He thought them for a moment in silence. Then—

‘Livvy,’ said Nick.

‘Yes,’ said Olivia.

‘I’ve been wondering all morning,’ he said, with sombre irrelevance, ‘why you weren’t saying anything about little Olivia.’

‘Oh—little Olivia—’ Olivia had said vaguely.

‘Yes. How did she take it?’

There was a point, Olivia decided desperately, beyond which you could not seek shelter in silence. Not in silence that was a lie.

‘She didn’t take it,’ she said.

‘She didn’t take it?’

‘I didn’t tell her.’ Olivia was still looking evasively at the view.

‘You didn’t tell her?’ Nick’s voice was sharp with amazement. Sharp, too, with something sharper than amazement. Something that was very like reproof.

Olivia burst into a flood of explanation.

‘Nick—I couldn’t! I simply couldn’t! I didn’t get to sleep until five in the morning and I never woke up until a quarter past nine! I had to have some breakfast—and dress—and then Mamma came in to talk to me! Little Olivia was sleeping. She was sleeping up on the third floor. How could I explain to Mamma that I wanted to wake her up? I only had three quarters of an hour——’

‘So you left?’ Nick had said, rather dully. ‘You left—without telling her?’ His tone was completely incredulous.

‘I couldn’t tell her,’ said Olivia plaintively, ‘like that—in a minute. Why, it would have been a fearful shock. It will take weeks to make little Olivia understand—if she ever does understand——’ Olivia’s voice was shaking.

‘I don’t see how she ever can understand how you could leave her in ignorance,’ said Nick very soberly.

Olivia winked away something very like a tear.

‘Nick,’ she said desperately, ‘you mustn’t scold me! I don’t believe you have any conception of the frame of mind in which I left that house——’

‘But what will little Olivia think?’ Nick had asked, more gently. ‘What is she thinking now?’

‘Oh—’ said Olivia. ‘Mamma will tell her.’

Nick had stared at her blankly.

‘Did you tell your mother?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Your mother—and not little Olivia?’

‘I told Mamma,’ said Olivia desperately, ‘that I was going to Boston.’

‘To Boston?’ Nick had gasped. Olivia nodded. Then, ‘Why Boston?’ asked Nick.

‘To see Otto and little Van Tyne at Fay School, of course,’ said Olivia sharply. ‘What could be more natural?’

For several minutes Nick had said nothing more. Then—

‘Well, you certainly made a very thorough job of it,’ he observed coldly. ‘I don’t see why you had to tell your mother that——’

‘Good Heavens, Nick, I had to tell her something!’ cried Olivia angrily. ‘There I was—with my hat on and my trunks locked and my bags packed—and Mamma asking questions! I couldn’t say I was going out to a manicure with three suitcases and a hatbox! That’s why I rode around the Twentieth Street corner in a taxi. Mamma called it to take me to the station. I wondered at the time why you didn’t ask me why I was in that taxi——’

‘I thought you were just making a getaway,’ said Nick soberly.

‘Well—I was making a getaway!’ Olivia had retorted. ‘I was making the best one I could! I wish you wouldn’t be so self-righteous, Nick! You don’t know what it was like to get out of that house! After all—you didn’t have to explain to your hotel bellboys where you were going! If you had had to, you would have lied! I like to tell the truth as much as you do, but——’

Nick had sighed rather heavily.

‘I don’t mind the lies,’ he said. ‘Though I can’t say I care very much for the particular lie you chose. It was none of your mother’s business. But I do mind your leaving little Olivia in the dark.’

‘If I’d stopped to explain matters to little Olivia,’ cried Olivia desperately, ‘I’d be there yet! You don’t know little Olivia, Nick! You think you do, but you don’t! She—she’s——’ Olivia’s voice died nervously into silence.

‘She’s what?’ asked Nick. The self-possessed question threw Olivia into panic.

‘Oh, dear! Well—she’s precisely like your mother!’

‘I know that,’ said Nick calmly. ‘But what of it?’

‘What of it?’ cried Olivia. ‘Oh, Nick—can’t you understand? She—she’s terribly New England! She’s not a bit tolerant. She only approves of people who are exactly like herself! You can’t tell me, Nick, that you didn’t do things all your life that you felt you couldn’t explain to your mother! I mean—you know she—she wouldn’t have approved of the—the Greenwich Village poetess or the—the Southern belle! Why, you never even told her you were going to marry me, until after we’d done it! And you know how we both felt the night that little Olivia was born! I can see your face now, when you had to walk out of our bedroom and break the news to your mother that she was a daughter! Well—little Olivia’s like that. She puts you in the wrong. For little Olivia life’s black and white. Conduct’s black and white! She doesn’t admit that there are any complications. Emotional complications. She’d be the last person that I could ever tell that I was going to run off from my husband——’

‘Is that how you feel,’ Nick had inquired icily, ‘about our going away together? Am I just a—a Greenwich Village poetess or a—a Southern belle?’

In spite of her deep distress of mind, Olivia had found sudden comfort in his unconscious note of scorn. It seemed to put those too trusting ladies in their proper place.

‘Nick!’ she had cried penitently. ‘You know you’re not! You know that I adore you! You know I’m tearing up my life by the roots because I can’t live without you! But it isn’t easy, Nick! O God—it isn’t easy!’ Olivia was frankly crying by this time. ‘I can’t stand this, Nick,’ she sobbed. ‘I really can’t stand it! I can’t go on talking like this and—run the car! I——’

‘Well—stop the damn car!’ Nick had cried very violently.

And Olivia had stopped it. She had stopped it abruptly in a skitter of gravel on a curve of the Storm King Highway. She had flung herself in Nick’s arms.

‘Oh, Nick!’ she had sobbed. ‘You said you’d keep me happy! I knew you wouldn’t, but I didn’t expect to be miserable so soon! I’m miserable because I know I’m a cowardly, craven woman! I don’t deserve to be run off with—but you have run off with me! And—and you really must be kind to me——’

‘My precious! My darling!’ Nick was murmuring consolingly. ‘I’m going to keep you happy! It’s all right about little Olivia! It’s all right about everything! We’ll write to her, dearest—we’ll write to her together! And you’re not a bit cowardly! Stop crying, sweetheart! Livvy, dear—look at me!’

Olivia had looked at him. Olivia had looked at him, and the Paradise that had seemed so precarious a moment before had been instantly regained.

‘Oh, Nick!’ she had breathed against his lips. ‘This is worth everything! It’s worth everything to know that you love me! Weren’t we fools to quarrel?’

‘We didn’t quarrel!’ Nick had declared indignantly. ‘That wasn’t a quarrel!’

‘Oh—wasn’t it?’ said Olivia. She was smiling into his eyes.

Just then a sky-blue Duesenberg roadster came rapidly around the curve of the Storm King Highway. With a screech from its brakes and a scream from its horn, it stopped, not a foot from the radiator of the canary-coloured Chrysler. Its driver, a red-faced, hatless young man in a magenta sweater, looked distinctly annoyed. He leaned over the wheel.

‘Well, what the hell——’ he began truculently. As his eyes met Olivia’s, however, the truculence had faded from his face. It was instantly replaced by a sympathetic grin. ‘Don’t neck on the curves, sister!’ he admonished very cheerfully as he stepped philosophically on his starter. His stalled engine coughed and started. He slipped into reverse. Olivia stepped on her starter with a splendid assumption of offended dignity. The Chrysler moved slowly past the Duesenberg. The hatless young man continued to grin sympathetically, but Olivia avoided both his grin and his mud-guards with the scorn of an outraged queen. She could hear Nick chuckling at her side.

‘I’d rather die with you than live without you, darling,’ he observed cheerfully. ‘But that advice on necking was good. I shouldn’t wonder if that young man was an expert——’

Around the corner of Storm King the country had dropped off suddenly into rolling farmland. The great romantic river flowed peacefully between its pastoral banks. Forty miles away the rounded outlines of the Catskills rose dimly in a vaguely golden perspective. Save for the urban interlude of Newburgh, the broad cement highway had stretched straight and featureless through open fields, through wooded heights and hollows—sleepy hollows, Olivia had thought, for this was Washington Irving’s country—and dreamy heights—heights from which she had seemed to see her whole happy future extending before her, lost in a perspective as vaguely golden as that which glimmered over the rolling farmland in the soft October haze. All the way to Albany, Nick had held her hand in his. He had abandoned it reluctantly as they met the city traffic.

‘We’ll lunch at the De Witt Clinton,’ Olivia had said.

Again the thought of Harry had surged up, uninvited. When they motored through Albany, Harry always lunched at the De Witt Clinton. The food was very good.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’ asked Nick.

‘Famished,’ said Olivia. ‘It’s almost three o’clock.’

She had parked the Chrysler at the hotel entrance. She had looked down the familiar hilly street. It was funny to be there with Nick, she had reflected soberly. It really was. It was funny to park a motor before the De Witt Clinton Hotel and not to hear little Olivia and Otto and little Van Tyne laughing and quarrelling and clattering together in the back of the car. Not to see Harry collaring the boys, marching them off to scrub their grimy hands——

‘Tired?’ asked Nick, as she descended from the car.

‘Just a little,’ smiled Olivia.

‘I’ll run her myself after luncheon,’ Nick had said very bravely.

Olivia had rewarded his bravery with an encouraging twinkle. As they crossed the sidewalk, Nick slipped his hand through her arm. She passed through the revolving doors with a pleasing sense of adventure. Before that sense of adventure, Olivia realized thankfully, the ghost of Harry was fading. It was fading before Nick’s happy, confident smile. Only for a moment did the big round table near the entrance of the dining-room recall the family party which had so often sat around it. When she was settled with Nick in a distant corner of the room, smiling into his eyes across a narrow space of damask, a glow of pink candle-light and a glitter of hotel silver, Olivia was suddenly swept with a sense of romantic, of tremulous intimacy.

‘How about oysters?’ Nick was saying very practically. But his voice was a little strained. As his eyes met hers over a lowered menu, it was quite obvious that he was not thinking of his words. The obsequious waiter, hovering at his elbow, was intent on them, however.

‘Blue Points, madam?’ he inquired encouragingly.

‘Blue Points would be—lovely,’ said Olivia rather absurdly. Beneath the little table, as her voice faltered, she felt the reassuring pressure of Nick’s foot against her own. As soon as the obsequious waiter had turned his back, he caught her hand quite openly, above the hotel silver.

‘Darling,’ he said simply.

Olivia’s eyes were shining. She was running away with Nick. Curiously enough, she hadn’t quite realized the full import of that fact that morning in the roadster. Outdoors together, in the golden sunshine, surrounded by hills and fields, by woods and running rivers, their relationship had assumed the simplicity, the innocence, of the natural objects around them. But some spell hung over that candle-lit table in a corner of a public restaurant, which threw the glamour of the desperate and forbidden over her precipitate flight. Olivia felt tender and tremulous and excited, and just a little wicked. She glanced covertly about her. Except for the presence of three loitering waiters and the steward at the door, the dining-room was empty at that hour in the afternoon. The presence of those four indifferent servants, however, absurdly increased Olivia’s sense of wickedness. They did not know—of course, they could not guess—but unconsciously they represented the pale. The pale beyond which Olivia had irrevocably stepped in pursuit of illicit happiness. She—she was a guilty woman, she thought with a thrill. She was a heroine of romance. She held Nick’s hand tightly in her own.

‘I—I feel so unregenerate,’ she had whispered softly.

Nick’s eyes were shining, too.

‘You’re adorable and I adore you,’ he had said, a little huskily.

For a long moment, their hands interlocked, they had looked at each other in silence. Memory and anticipation were rapturously blended in the thoughts that were flashing through Olivia’s mind. Words, kisses, little jokes, soft glances and caresses. The tender intimacy of love. The understanding. The tranquillity. All discontent of spirit ended forever. Happiness—in a word. Just happiness. Was it childish—was it foolish—to be so confident of happiness?

Just then the obsequious waiter turned up with the oysters. Nick gently relinquished her hand. They fell to on their luncheon in a burst of light-hearted hilarity. Nick had never been so funny, Olivia thought. And his fun was supremely contagious. She had never been so funny herself. They had both laughed immoderately.

The hands of the clock in the De Witt Clinton lobby had stood at twenty minutes to four when Nick and Olivia had pushed through the revolving entrance door to regain their waiting roadster.

‘I’m going to drive,’ Nick had said, very bravely.

With an air of sunny efficiency he had tucked Olivia into the car and had walked round the canary-coloured radiator to take his seat at the wheel. Olivia was just sinking back gratefully on the shiny black leather cushions when Nick stamped on the starter and roared into gear and stalled the engine for the first time. He laughed a little shamefacedly.

‘I’ll soon get the hang of it,’ he had declared confidently.

The engine started again, but the car moved off reluctantly.

‘Take off the brake,’ Olivia suggested.

Nick promptly did so and the Chrysler responded as an arrow loosed from the bow. With a curious jerky motion it charged unevenly down the wide, hilly street toward the denser traffic below.

‘Retard the spark,’ said Olivia mildly.

‘What?’ said Nick hastily. A truck thundered out from a side street not fifty feet away. Olivia’s hand flashed out to the wheel. The engine stalled again. A motor behind them tooted a warning horn.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Olivia penitently. ‘That was my fault.’

Nick’s lips were set rather grimly. Very carefully, sitting stiffly upright, he set the Chrysler once more in motion. The traffic was growing thicker. A car track loomed ahead. A bus stopped abruptly in front of them.

‘Watch the lights!’ said Olivia sharply.

Nick threw on the brake.

‘How can I watch the lights and the road at the same time?’ he inquired reasonably. All hint of irritation was carefully eliminated from his voice.

‘But you have to, darling,’ said Olivia, with equal reasonableness. Three horns honked sharply behind them. ‘See—it’s green, now.’

The Chrysler moved on and grazed the fender of a delivery wagon and the bumper of a touring-car and the curb of a traffic island in the course of the next two blocks.

‘Which way?’ cried Nick sharply, as they approached the bottom of the hill. The street ended abruptly in the false Gothic façade of the Albany railroad station.

‘Right! Right for the bridge!’ cried Olivia hysterically. She had met the traffic policeman’s inimical eye.

Nick painfully negotiated the turn.

‘See here, darling,’ said Olivia, in the comparative tranquillity of the street along the tracks, ‘you’d better let me drive.’

‘But you’re tired,’ said Nick tenderly. The Chrysler had swerved disconcertingly as he turned to meet her eyes.

‘No, I’m not!’ cried Olivia falsely. ‘I’m not at all! I—I’d love to——’

‘Well—if you’d love to——’ said Nick uncertainly.

Olivia’s hand shot out in warning to the cars behind them as he abruptly threw on the brake. The engine stalled again. As Nick climbed out of the roadster, Olivia slid thankfully behind the wheel. In silence Nick took his seat beside her. In silence Olivia started the car. Nick did not speak again until they had crossed the river and were chugging peacefully in second up the steep hill on the other side of Rensselaer.

‘Darling,’ he said then, ‘I’m lost in admiration. You’re a modern mythological monster—a mechanical centauress with the head of a woman and the body of a Chrysler car! But me, myself, well—enough said!’ He broke off abruptly as the Chrysler gained the crest of the hill. ‘There’s the first stone wall!’ he had cried delightedly.

It was the first stone wall, festooned with wine-red woodbine, surrounding a scrubby clearing overgrown with yellow sweet fern and dotted with silver-grey rock. The country was changing insensibly from New York to New England. Very soon, Olivia had reflected, they would be crossing the state line. The change was a subtler matter, however, than the definite position of a geographic boundary. They had left the wide horizons of the rolling farmland behind them. They had passed the last Dutch manor house on the river’s ridge. The fields were smaller here, and very much more barren. Wild orchards crowned the hills. The views were less extended, but curiously more lonely. Houses were littler, elm trees were bigger, and pine trees much more numerous. The ubiquitous white paint of New England was everywhere. The very men and women, walking the village streets, were racially different from the flat-faced, stolid descendants of the Dutch farmers and patroons who had settled the Hudson Valley. Lank and lean, gaunt and a little grim, with the wistful shadow of unfulfilment on their shrewd faces, they were strangely evocative of their Puritan forbears. New England was a nation in itself, thought Olivia with a shiver.

‘Cold, darling?’ asked Nick.

‘No,’ said Olivia.

‘Happy?’

‘Of course.’

‘Me, too,’ smiled Nick. His hand was clasping hers as it lay on the wheel. The highroad had turned abruptly into a little valley. Presently it climbed a hill. It rounded a miniature cliff, penetrated a tiny pass, and offered, on the verge of its steep descent, the first distant view of the Green Mountain range. Olivia had cried aloud in delight. The nearer view was as wild as a wilderness. No white paint here. Not a house in sight. Only the green, undulating stretches of the pine woods, broken by scarlet maple groves and the pale lemon copses of quivering birches. This was Nick’s New England, Olivia had thought suddenly. The New England of far-flung violet hills and intimate green valleys. The New England of virgin forest and deserted farm. The New England of golden sun and cobalt skies and high clear mountain air. New England untouched by New-Englanders, in brief! And it was very lovely. It had nothing to do with its Puritan inhabitants. She would love Greenfield. Of course, she would love Greenfield. She had patted Nick’s hand very tenderly.

But that—that was more than an hour ago, Olivia was now thinking wearily, as she struggled with her drowsiness. It was tiring work, changing gears on the hills. She glanced at Nick, sitting so comfortably, relaxed and smiling, on the shiny black leather cushions at her side. As her eyes returned to the road, she sighed a trifle enviously. She hoped she wouldn’t miss the turn for Greenfield. They must come to it soon. Nick’s thoughts were following hers.

‘It’s beginning to look like home,’ he said gently. ‘We’ll reach the farm for supper. Suki has a gift for suppers——’

Drowsiness fell suddenly away from Olivia at his words.

‘Nick,’ she said uneasily, ‘what—what did you tell Suki?’

Nick’s eyes twinkled.

‘I wired him,’ he said. ‘I wired him this morning.’

‘But—what did you wire him?’ Olivia inquired.

‘Ten lucid words,’ said Nick very cheerfully. ‘ “Married yesterday. Arriving with Mrs. Allen at Greenfield this afternoon.” ’

Olivia’s eyes were twinkling in their turn.

‘And you reproached me for being a liar.’

‘Your own lies always seem necessary,’ said Nick philosophically. ‘Have you ever noticed that?’

Yes, Olivia had noticed it. She suppressed a small, unexpected sigh. The unwritten letter to Harry surged again into her consciousness. She put it away from her with a quick, involuntary gesture of her hands upon the wheel. She would not think of Harry.

‘We ought to strike a short cut this side of Bennington,’ said Nick presently. ‘There’s a mountain road that goes over the hills.’

‘Have you ever been on it?’ asked Olivia anxiously.

Nick shook his head.

‘But I know it’s passable,’ he said consolingly. ‘It’s an old stage route and the farmers still use it.’

Once more Olivia’s eyes returned to the road. It ran for some moments by a lonely little pond. The water stretched steel grey in the breezeless air. Its polished surface reflected the cone-shaped pine trees that thickly fringed its banks. The sun was sinking into a golden glow. Some long thin clouds had materialized from nowhere and stretched, a luminous purple, above its shining disk. The surface of the pond, however, held no gleam of reflected radiance. The spiky tops of the pine trees stood out in sombre silhouette against the gold of the sky. It would soon be twilight, Olivia was thinking nervously, when——

‘Whoa!’ cried Nick sharply. ‘There’s a sign for Greenfield!’

Olivia threw on the brakes. She slowly backed the car. A rough mountain road, hardly more than a cart track, turned off to the right. It was so insignificant that Olivia had not noticed it, but it was dignified by a sign-post. The paint on the sign-post was grey and sun-blistered and the rudely sketched hand and the black block letters were almost obliterated. Olivia could read them, however, ‘Greenfield 13 miles.’ She turned the Chrysler into the cart track.

‘Do you know where we are?’ she inquired.

Again Nick shook his head.

‘Never been here before in my life,’ he grinned cheerfully. ‘Mother’s old grey mare would have dropped dead if we’d driven her twenty-six miles.’

‘Well—it must be right,’ said Olivia competently. ‘And it’s certainly very pretty.’

The Chrysler was chugging easily up the rocky road. Thirteen miles was nothing, Olivia was reflecting. Though the sunset glow was ebbing. The light was almost orange on the little hills. The air felt cool and damp and smelled distinctly of balsam. The cone-shaped pine trees thickly bordered the road. It was fun, Olivia reflected, a homecoming like this, with Nick, in the gathering dusk. It was romantic and adventurous. The road dipped down suddenly into a miniature valley. The little hills were folding it to their heart. An exquisite silence reigned over the landscape. The hushed resignation of autumn. How many evenings, Olivia thought rapturously, would she and Nick experience a romantic and adventurous homecoming like this, in the gathering dusk, after a pilgrimage of exploration! She would show him Vermont. His own Vermont! How silly of him—how short-sighted, really—all these years, never to have had a car! With all this lovely country at his very doorstep, waiting to be seen and loved and made his very own!

People, too. Nick ought to see more people. And this lovely country was, Olivia knew, dotted all over with just the sort of people that Nick would like to see. Not grim New-Englanders. Not stupid summer tourists. But intellectuals—real intellectuals, Nick’s very kind—living in interesting isolation or gathered in stimulating groups, hidden here and there, in the folds of these little hills. Why, Cornish couldn’t be more than sixty miles away. And Dublin and Peterboro not over a hundred. There were artists at Cornish, Olivia had always heard, and the MacDowell literary colony was somewhere on the slopes of Monadnock. With a little effort—and the Chrysler—she and Nick—not this winter, of course, but when everything was—was finally arranged—could see all they wanted to of perfectly delightful people. Life at Greenfield wouldn’t be at all the same old life, now motors had so pleasantly shrunk the world. And it was a lovely place. A sweet green little valley. She and Nick could keep open house. With luck, they might found a literary colony of their own. Where did Robert Frost live, Olivia wondered? Somewhere in Vermont. Nick greatly admired his work. Robert Frost and Nick, together, would make a splendid nucleus for a literary colony. Not that Nick would not be a nucleus in himself, thought Olivia loyally. With a wife to help him, to take on all the social burden, he would be sure to draw to Greenfield a delightful group of really congenial people—important people—people who did things—the sort of people whom Olivia had always wistfully admired and had never had an opportunity to meet either in Gramercy Park or in the Greenwich Village flat, and certainly never in the Lake Shore Drive apartment. What fun it would be, Olivia thought eagerly, to make at last for Nick the sort of home he always should have had! To establish a suitable background. And in the winters they would travel——

‘There’s Blue Mound!’ cried Nick suddenly. He was pointing excitedly at one of the nearer hills. ‘See the fire lookout on top! That’s right back of the water-tower! We’re almost there, Livvy!’ He turned to smile at her ecstatically.

‘Nick,’ said Olivia tenderly, ‘you’re like a child.’

‘I am like a child about Greenfield,’ he admitted cheerfully. ‘I never come back to it without thinking that I’ll never leave it again. The day will come when I won’t leave it. Perhaps it’s come now. Perhaps I only left it before on the eternal quest. Perhaps I was just looking—for you. Looking for you through Europe, Asia, and Africa! Now I’ve found you——’ He drew a long breath.

‘What?’ smiled Olivia.

‘I want to stay here. I want to keep you forever, shut off from the world by these little granite hills. Shut in by our love—by our complete self-sufficiency. Darling—we’re going to be unbelievably happy. We’re going to be Romeo and Juliet and Paolo and Francesca and Darby and Joan, all rolled into one! We’re going to be young lovers still, when little Olivia makes us both grandparents. We’re old married folk now, at the same moment that we’re a romantic runaway couple——’ He broke off abruptly. ‘Livvy, darling, I must kiss you! Will it wreck the car?’

‘I don’t think so,’ smiled Olivia indulgently. ‘Though I’m getting a bit wobbly.’

His cheek on hers, he murmured very tenderly, ‘Are you all in, dearest? You’ve been simply wonderful. I’m ashamed of myself. But I’ve never motored——’

‘We must motor a lot now,’ said Olivia happily. ‘We must get to know this country. Since you love it so——’

‘I love it so,’ said Nick simply, ‘that I never want to go farther than a stone’s throw from the farm. You can’t beat the view from Bailey’s Knob anywhere in the State. And that’s just back of the woodlot. I’ve been thinking we ought to cut more trails. There’s land down behind Jericho Hill that’s never been opened up. Just scrub pine and juniper. From the top of that ridge on a clear day you can see Mount Washington. There’s a string of lakes beyond—Dumbbell Ponds, they’re called—that are ten miles as the crow flies from any road. I’ve only been there once myself. But I thought then that it would be a perfect place for a shack. A little log cabin and a canoe. No fishing-rods. God, how I hate to fish! Just books and you and’—he smiled shamefacedly—‘a typewriter, maybe.’

Olivia was laughing at his nonsense. Behind his smile, however, Nick looked rather serious.

‘You know, Livvy,’ he said earnestly, ‘I’m going to write as I never wrote before. Happiness like ours is bound to be productive. I’ve been thinking, on and off all day, about my new novel. I’m going to begin it tomorrow.’

‘Really?’ cried Olivia. She was sincerely thrilled. ‘Oh, Nick! How exciting! When will it be finished?’

‘Oh—a year from now, maybe, if it comes easily. My publishers want it for the Christmas sales. They have their eye on the gate receipts. But I don’t know—I never write for the market——’

‘Oh, Nick!’ cried Olivia again. ‘Don’t you think you ought to?’

‘Ought to?’ said Nick. His tone was faintly puzzled.

‘Yes, ought to,’ said Olivia firmly. For this, of course, was a very important part of establishing that suitable background for Nick. ‘I think you ought to get every cent that’s coming to you out of your writing.’

‘Oh—I get all I need,’ said Nick easily.

‘But you could do with more,’ said Olivia earnestly. ‘No matter what you have, you could do with more. I remember your saying in the old days that the first thing a writer needed to do good work on was a touch of genius, and the second was a margin of financial security——’

‘But I have a margin of financial security, darling,’ said Nick, smiling. ‘And modesty forbids that I stress the touch of genius. When I write, I go for the ride. I write what I want to write and I write it when I want to. I never listen to publishers——’ He broke off suddenly. ‘Why, good Lord! This is the road that comes in back of the sawmill. I never knew where it ended. You remember that field, Livvy? Best blueberries in the State, up behind those boulders! There’s Pulpit Rock—where they have the Sunday School picnics! It’s kind of egg-shelly now, but I loved it when I was a kid!’

‘We had a picnic there,’ said Olivia softly. ‘We had it on our honeymoon.’

‘You bet we did,’ said Nick. ‘I spilled the lemonade on your pink taffeta frock. And you kissed me, Livvy, which marked the depth of your infatuation!’

The cart track had turned, by this time, into a narrow gravelled road. It curved abruptly around an outcrop of granite rock and came upon the mill pond. Beside the weathered sawmill a pile of yellow sawdust shone like a heap of gold dust in the mellow evening air. A solitary maple burned scarlet behind it. A fish jumped suddenly, twenty feet from shore, in a tiny splash of crystal. Little circular ripples rose instantly from that splash and pursued their tranquil, rhythmic course to the margins of the pond. The accurate reflection of the weathered sawmill broke and wavered as they reached it and the gold and scarlet duplication of the sawdust pile and the maple quivered instantly into squares and diamonds and triangles of undulating colour.

‘There’s the blacksmith’s shop!’ cried Nick.

Beyond the blacksmith’s shop the little white frame village stretched serenely along its elm-shaded street. Two wooden steeples rose above the elms. One was a mere elongated pyramid, starkly surmounted by a gilded cock. The Church of the Holy Rooster, Nick had always called it. The other, distinguished by a more intricate, delicate carpentry of balconied bell and clocktower, vaguely suggested the art of Sir Christopher Wren. It marked Mrs. Seth Allen’s chosen place of worship. The first Greenfield function that Olivia had ever attended had been the Strawberry Festival, staged in the whitewashed basement of that little frame church. The village blacksmith, she recollected quite clearly, had regaled her, over a plate of vanilla ice-cream, with spirited anecdotes of Nick’s boyhood pranks. Nick and the village blacksmith, under the influence of Huck Finn, had planned to run away together in their twelfth year!

There was a lot to be said, after all, Olivia reflected, for the ubiquitous white paint of New England. There was something delightfully dignified about that elm-shaded street. The charming plainness, the simple symmetry, the restrained, reticent uniformity of the little white frame houses impressed themselves suddenly upon Olivia’s eye—that eye inured for the last ten years to the rococo banality of the bungalows of the corn belt. These little houses were shabby, they were weather-beaten, they needed paint, putty, and shingles, but they had the high aristocracy of New England domestic architecture. Secure in the eternal felicity of their balance and proportion, they made no attempt to conceal, they rather proudly ignored, the temporal handicap of poverty. They had style, absurdly enough—these rural cottages, belonging to the blacksmiths and farmers and pastors and grocers of Greenfield! They were as elegant as their sheltering elms.

‘Hasn’t changed much, has it?’ said Nick. They were rolling past S. Baxter’s General Store. ‘Sam’s put in that Socony gas pump and joined the International Grocers’ Association, but I think that’s the only step in the march of progress that Greenfield’s taken in the last ten years.’

They were leaving the village now and they had not seen a villager. Six o’clock was supper hour in the little town. The sun had set and the dusk was closing in, in earnest. The street was quite dark under the Gothic arch of its elms. Here and there, the yellow light of a kerosene lamp shone out through a square-paned window. An occasional flickering lantern marked the presence of a man or a boy, busy with evening chores around woodpile or shed. Beyond the square white schoolhouse the fields began again abruptly. Once out from under the elms, Olivia had a vivid sensation of recapturing daylight. The sky above her head was still a greyish blue, and the glowing coals of the sunset, the charred embers of the luminous purple clouds, were smouldering in the west. Above them the evening star shone tranquilly like a candle.

The road was familiar to Olivia now. It was too familiar. Her past was stalking on it. On this road, on her honeymoon, she had first lost patience with Nick. Lost patience with his determined, slightly irritated effort to explain to her the eccentricities of Mrs. Seth Allen. They were driving the old grey mare at the time, sitting in the high-wheeled farmer’s buggy, and Olivia had wondered—she had really momentarily wondered—how Olivia Van Tyne had ever consented to put herself in the fix that she was in! Had ever agreed to marry a man without knowing anything of his background. Later, of course, she had come to understand that background better. She had realized that the traditions of Greenfield, though not those of Gramercy Park, were still traditions. And that traditions must be respected—even by alien daughters-in-law——

‘There’s the farm!’ cried Nick.

Good gracious, so it was! The four miles to the village that the old grey mare had taken half an hour to negotiate had been covered by the Chrysler in a matter of seven minutes! There was the farm, indeed! There was the little white farmhouse, looking curiously smaller than she remembered it, rising beside its orchard, beyond an open field, under the solitary shelter of a single wine-glass elm. There was the green door, beneath its delicate fan-light, flanked on either side by two green-shuttered windows. There was the shingle roof, with its single ample chimney, sloping down in the rear over wing and shed and outhouse to meet the great unpainted barn rising behind the well. Absurd of Nick, Olivia thought swiftly, with all his success, never to have painted that barn! Never to have moved it, in fact. It stood squarely in the view that the back windows commanded of the hills. She turned into the driveway.

A light was shining hospitably from the right-hand parlour windows. Her mother-in-law’s lace curtains still hung behind the criss-crossed panes. Country curtains of coarse Nottingham lace that had lent a formal elegance to the parlour, in keeping, Olivia smilingly remembered, with the pink-lipped conch shells that adorned the wooden mantel-shelf and the china jar of peacock feathers, mixed with cat-tails, that stood on the table near the dining-room door. She stopped the Chrysler before the granite doorstep.

‘Darling!’ said Nick, very tenderly.

Olivia turned to smile into his eyes.

‘Are you exhausted?’ he continued eagerly.

‘No,’ said Olivia cheerfully. ‘Just a little stiff. I’ll be all right after a hot tub!’

‘You’ll be glad to know that I put in a bathroom between Mother’s room and mine, on the proceeds of my first successful novel,’ said Nick very proudly. ‘And a wood-burning hot-water heater, behind the kitchen tubs. Suki runs it beautifully. He’s quite an engineer. By the way—you must kiss me before he comes!’

As she sank into his arms, Olivia wished that she could stay in them forever. She felt suddenly unequal to getting out of that Chrysler and meeting Suki and facing the difficult problems of all that must be done to the farm. She had forgotten—at least it hadn’t occurred to her to remember—that there hadn’t been a bathroom. Still—Nick had put one in. But the kitchen tubs—— Who did Nick’s washing? she wondered fleetingly, with a thought for her new French underwear. In the old days a woman in the village, the postmaster’s widow, had done up her white nainsook chemises and nightgowns and starched her linen shirt-waists. But modern pink silk that had to keep its colour, and hand-run Alençon lace and those expensive jersey girdles—— Her lips met Nick’s.

‘Sweetheart,’ he said, ‘you are simply exhausted.’

Silently Olivia admitted to herself that she was. Very tenderly Nick helped her to descend from the car. As he did so, the front door opened. A diminutive, beady-eyed Jap stood framed incongruously beneath its delicate fan-light. He was dressed in a semi-American, semi-Oriental suit of black alpaca, and he held in his right hand a little formal bouquet of rusty goldenrod and purple Michaelmas daisies. He bowed ceremoniously.

‘For the illustrious bride,’ he remarked in perfect English. And descended the granite doorstep to present his floral tribute.

As she took it from his hand, Olivia blushed. She blushed and beamed on Suki and turned to twinkle at Nick.

‘How are you, Suki?’ he was remarking affably. ‘I see you got my wire. But where did you get the flowers? After all, it’s the end of October——’

Suki again bowed ceremoniously. He was smiling very pleasantly. His big yellow teeth looked too large and too numerous for his diminutive jaw.

‘They are nothing,’ he said. ‘But they are all that there were. The frost has not reached all points of the high pasture. I took the liberty——’ He paused deprecatingly.

‘Yes?’ said Nick encouragingly.

‘To purchase a few firecrackers at Baxter’s. Five packages were all they had left over from the Fourth. In Japan we have always fireworks at weddings.’

Nick was laughing now.

‘I told you, Livvy, that Suki was invaluable. We’ll set them off after supper. Livvy, I must lift you over the threshold. In America, Suki, we always lift brides over thresholds. It brings them good luck.’ He took Olivia in his arms. He carried her easily over the granite doorstep and set her down in the hall.

Olivia was laughing, too, laughing rather confusedly. She was experiencing once more that nineteen-year-old feeling. Nick had lifted her over that same threshold on her return from her wedding trip, twenty years before. And the hall looked exactly as it had looked then. Smelled as it had, too—a faint New England smell of damp and mould and old wood and matting. It was dimly lit by a small glass kerosene lamp that stood in a gilded wall bracket at the foot of the stairs, the steep straight stairs, with uncarpeted yellow treads, which stretched precipitately up to the attic under the eaves. The glass case of the stuffed ‘Birds of New England’ still hung on the faded wallpaper near the parlour door. The wooden pegs on the other side of the passage were crowded with the nondescript collection of faded ulsters and mackintoshes which had always crowded them. The door to Mrs. Seth Allen’s front bedroom was closed, but the parlour door stood open. Nick took her hand and led her gaily through it.

The small, square, low-ceilinged room was rather unbecomingly illuminated by the uncompromising light that filtered through the ground-glass shade of a prism-dangling lamp placed on a pie-crust table near the door. The furniture was neatly ranged around the walls. Olivia’s eyes instinctively sought Mrs. Seth Allen’s chair. It was a swan-armed, crooked-backed rocker, standing by a glass-knobbed sewing-table near a front window. It looked curiously empty. It seemed to rock a little, as Olivia looked at it, as if the slim, angular presence of her former mother-in-law had just deserted it. She squeezed Nick’s hand very tenderly.

‘Nick, dear,’ she said, ‘it makes me think of your mother. It’s so exactly the same.’

It was exactly the same, yet not quite as she remembered it. The careless eye of youth had missed that note of simple elegance, of restrained, reticent uniformity that distinguished Mrs. Seth Allen’s parlour as it had distinguished the little white frame houses on the village street. That room had once seemed to her, Olivia reflected incredulously, just small and shut-up and stuffy. Now her glance wandered appreciatively over the detail of its furnishing—the old mahogany sofa, with its horsehair seat, the two lyre-backed side chairs on either side of the hearth, the cross-stitched fire-screen, the bead-worked footstool, the clock between the conch shells, with its flowered face, its painted glass Mount Vernon panel. The swan-armed rocker was a museum piece! There was one just like it in the Metropolitan! And the prints on the walls were Currier and Ives—‘Reading the Scriptures,’ ‘The Fruits of Temperance,’ ‘The Courtship,’ ‘The Sailor’s Return,’ ‘Little Nicholas.’ Why, they were utterly charming! Even the conch shells themselves and the peacock feathers and the cat-tails, even the faded wallpaper and the brilliant flowered rug, and the little Franklin stove which stood on its zinc tray before the walled-up fireplace, were, each and every one, authentically ‘early American!’ They were the kind of thing that filled the furniture store windows on Madison Avenue—the kind of thing that dealers passionately and patiently searched for in the remoter rural districts of New England to sell to the residents of Park Avenue apartments! Of course, Greenfield was a remoter rural district of New England. Undoubtedly every one of those little white frame houses on the village street was full of treasure-trove! The farms, too—the outlying farms! She and Nick must explore them all, thought Olivia swiftly. They must cruise out in the Chrysler and pick up everything they needed while they were enlarging the house. She would keep it completely in the period——

‘I left it so,’ Nick was saying gently, ‘because it makes me think of her. And partly from laziness. I really live in the dining-room.’

‘Let me look at it, darling,’ said Olivia tenderly.

She slipped her arm through his. She felt as if she were embarking on a voyage of discovery. What a stupid child she’d been! An ignorant, unlettered chit, with no appreciation of the things Nick loved! But she was wiser now. They stood in the dining-room door.

Yes, there was the rope-edged table, set for two, the light from the candles in the Sheffield candlesticks reflected in the polished sheen of its mahogany surface. There was the Sheraton sideboard, absurdly large for the room, and five—Olivia counted them quickly—five perfect fiddle-backed chairs. There was Mrs. Seth Allen’s mother’s sampler, ‘wrought in her eighth year,’ hanging over the sideboard and the blue china soup tureen beneath it and——

‘I do all my work here,’ said Nick suddenly.

He was indicating a desk by the window. Olivia laughed as she looked at it. It was, unbelievably, in this perfect colonial setting, Nick’s old roll-topped, black walnut desk! The desk that he had had at Harvard—the desk that had cluttered up one entire corner of the little crowded living-room in the Greenwich Village flat! It was cluttering up one entire corner of the dining-room now. And beside it stood a typewriter on a metal office table, painted to look like cherry, and two steel filing cabinets, olive-green in colour, and a revolving office desk chair, and, yes, before the typewriter the sixth fiddle-backed one—making the set complete after all, Olivia thought quickly. The desk was piled with manuscripts and foolscap and neatly opened mail. Its green baize top was moth-eaten and ink-stained. It had been moth-eaten and ink-stained in the Greenwich Village flat. Little Olivia was responsible for that largest blot!

‘Oh, Nick!’ cried Olivia as she laughed. ‘You’re so precious!’

There was only one answer to that, of course. He took her in his arms. Nick did need her, thought Olivia happily, as she returned his kiss. He needed a wife. His arms were still around her when she heard Suki’s voice. It came from the kitchen door.

‘Pardon me, sir,’ he was remarking respectfully, ‘but there’s a day letter from the publishers I think you ought to look at. It came this afternoon.’

‘I should worry about the publishers!’ said Nick easily. He was holding both Olivia’s hands in his own.

Suki’s beady little eyes were tactfully not looking at him. But his voice was rather obstinate.

‘They say it’s urgent, sir. They say they expected you to look them up in New York.’

‘Well—what do they want?’ Nick threw over his shoulder.

‘They say they don’t like the last chapter you sent them from London. They say they don’t like it at all. They think, sir, you ought to write them another ending for your mutual benefit——’

‘The hell they do!’ cried Nick very abruptly. And abruptly he dropped Olivia’s hands. He turned on Suki. ‘Where’s the wire?’

‘In front of the ink-well, sir.’

Nick seized the yellow envelope. He tore out its enclosure. He read it rapidly.

‘Well—of—all—the—damn—fools!’ He was not speaking to Olivia. He was looking very eagerly, straight over her head at Suki in the kitchen door. ‘That was a great last chapter! It had the best last sentence that I ever wrote, Suki!’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Suki.

‘We’ll have to send a wire, telling them where they get off. They’re nuts. They’re simply nuts. They don’t know a book from a banana! All they think about is high-pressure salesmanship! Suki!’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Suki.

‘We won’t telegraph. I’ll get ’em on the phone. What time is it?’

‘Half-past six, sir.’

‘Well, get me Ed Andrews at his house. New Canaan, Connecticut.’ Suki instantly vanished. Olivia was staring at Nick. She was trying to smile sympathetically, but she was distinctly astonished. She was astonished at the expression of Nick’s face. He was positively glaring. ‘Ed Andrews,’ he said savagely, ‘hasn’t the brains he was born with.’ Then, with vibrant scorn, ‘That fathead telling me how to write!’

‘I suppose,’ said Olivia timidly, ‘I suppose that he knows what will sell.’

But Nick wasn’t listening.

‘Now there’ll be the hell of a row,’ he was saying gloomily. ‘Just when I want to be tranquil and start that new book. Letters and telegrams and curses and prayers. I ought to have seen Andrews when I was in New York,’ he added accusingly. ‘I ought to have seen him this morning.’

Olivia raised her eyebrows.

‘Well, Nick,’ she said with spirit, ‘I didn’t keep you from seeing him! I didn’t even know that you had mailed a chapter from London. I——’

‘No; of course, you didn’t,’ said Nick hastily. He took her hand again. Holding it loosely in his own, he stood for a moment in silence. His face had a listening expression. Then, ‘Can’t you get him, Suki?’ he called.

‘The line just buzzes,’ Suki’s voice came from the hall.

‘Here—I’ll try it myself! Livvy’—Nick glanced hurriedly down at her—‘Livvy, just—just make yourself at home. Take off your hat. Go into my—our room and wash up for dinner.’ A faint note of contrition was creeping into his voice. ‘Will you be all right, darling?’ he added.

‘Oh—I’ll be quite all right,’ said Olivia calmly. And calmly she preceded Nick into the hall. He vanished under the stairs in pursuit of the telephone. As she opened the back bedroom door, she could hear him jiggling the receiver up and down and calling:

‘Here, operator! Get this. It’s important. I want a New York line.’

Olivia closed the bedroom door softly behind her. She looked around the room which had once been her own. Two candles were burning tranquilly on the old maple bureau. A bathrobe of Nick’s was laid out on the patchwork quilt that covered the four-poster bed. His combs and brushes were neatly arranged beneath the candles. Suki did take good care of him. Her own luggage was nowhere to be seen. Was Suki already making invidious distinctions? Then Olivia remembered. She remembered that her bags were locked up in the Chrysler’s rumble and that the key to that rumble was still in her purse. Well—she would use Nick’s brushes, thought Olivia with a smile. It wouldn’t be for the first time. In that familiar bedroom the old intimacies of marriage seemed singularly vivid and near. It was difficult to believe that there had been any break in their matrimonial adventure. But there had been, of course. There had been a break of ten years. She was ten years older, now, and ten years wiser, and it was perfectly ridiculous of her to feel the way she did because Nick had abandoned her so abruptly to call up a publisher. But she was tired and when you were tired——

Olivia took off her hat and slipped out of her coat, and tossed them both, absently, with her purse, on the bed. She walked slowly over to the maple bureau, her eyes on the gold-framed mirror that hung over it. Her face, reflected in that mirror, looked white and gaunt and weary in the naked candle-light. It stood out, a pallid oval, against the Rembrandtesque shadows in the corners of the room. Erratically there flashed into Olivia’s mind the thought of the rose quartz shades which veiled the electric brilliance that surrounded her dressing-table in the Lake Shore Drive apartment. Those shades had been imported from Munich. They were a triumph of the decorator’s art. When you were thirty-nine years old, Olivia thought wistfully, you needed shades that were imported from Munich. You couldn’t be expected to be at your best in naked candle-light——

Ten minutes later, however, the face that smiled back at Olivia from the gold-framed mirror looked quite ten years younger than it had ten minutes before. Freshly washed and brushed and lipsticked, Nick’s comb in hand, she was coaxing the soft water-waved ripples back into her golden-brown hair. She was smiling because she could hear Nick’s voice again, raised now in angry remonstrance.

‘Well, Heinemann thought it was swell, Ed. I say Heinemann in London thought it was swell. It was good enough for them. That’s my last word, Ed. It stands as it was written. That’s a beautiful climax. I don’t care if you don’t sell five thousand copies——’

He was the same old Nick, thought Olivia, still smiling. Success had not changed him. It had only given him the liberty to be exactly what he was. That was just the way that Nick had always longed to talk in the Greenwich Village flat to the editors and publishers who were cutting and changing his stuff. He couldn’t then, of course. He couldn’t, because of her and little Olivia. But he could now. Or could he? Should he, rather?

‘I don’t believe,’ thought Olivia soberly, ‘that Nick has any idea what it’s going to cost to live here. With me and three children and maybe——’ Softly Olivia smiled again. She had been wondering all day in the car if perhaps there might be sometime, in spite of her great age, a little Nick—another Nicholas Allen, to carry on the name that his father had distinguished. Nick’s voice was rising again. It didn’t sound so awfully distinguished at the moment, Olivia thought with a twinkle.

‘That’s bunk, Ed! Well, you know what you can do. You can return the manuscript. I don’t give a damn if you’ve begun to print it. I don’t give a damn if your salesmen are out on the road. You can just charge that dummy to profit and loss and I’ll mail the script to Harper’s. They’ve been after me for years. You know they have, Ed. And Scribner’s, too. That’s final, Ed——’

Olivia turned from the mirror still trying steadfastly to smile. This wasn’t just the way she had expected her homecoming to the farmhouse to turn out. Though, of course, it hadn’t really turned yet. The evening was still young. It was natural for Nick to be upset by a difference of opinion with his publishers. He always had been upset, very easily, when his writing was at stake. Olivia opened the bedroom door.

‘Hello, vision of loveliness!’ cried Nick very charmingly. He had just left the telephone. His face, unexpectedly, was wreathed in smiles. He looked pleasantly exhilarated by his encounter with his publisher. ‘Sorry to leave you, Livvy, but Ed Andrews always gets my goat. Come with me while I wash.’

‘No,’ said Olivia thoughtfully. ‘No, I think I won’t. I’ll go and wait in the parlour.’

‘All right, sweetheart,’ said Nick lightly. ‘Be with you in a minute.’ He disappeared into the bedroom.

Olivia crossed the passage and passed through the parlour door. She sat down on the horsehair sofa with a little audible sigh. She sat there for some moments, quite motionless, frowning slightly at the brilliant flowered pattern of the parlour rug.

‘Oh, well!’ she said suddenly. For there was no use worrying about the things Nick did or didn’t do. She had come to that conclusion almost twenty years before. He was as God made him and you had to take him as he was. Almost cheerfully, by this time, Olivia’s gaze was wandering once more around the little parlour. She wished that her former mother-in-law could know that she was going to keep the room exactly as it was. But the dining-room must be enlarged, of course, and they must throw out a wing from it into the orchard that would provide a studio for Nick. A long, light studio with a platform at one end with a grand piano on it—a room that would hold enough people for an occasional informal musicale or a dance for little Olivia. The present kitchen, Olivia thought happily, would do for a butler’s pantry and they could throw out another wing for service quarters on the other side of the house. A clever architect, Olivia was sure, could raise the roof of the original farmhouse without spoiling its lines and the attic could be turned into three bedrooms and two bathrooms for the children. New England houses always lent themselves gracefully to additions. Lots of people at Manchester and Prides Crossing had transformed little cottages no more inadequate than this into charming country houses. The views were divine, of course, from every window. When the barn was removed and the sheds and outhouses demolished, she would have a rose garden around the old well—an informal rose garden that would look like the stage set for Pelléas and Mélisande. She and Nick would have tea there every summer afternoon and people would motor over from the surrounding country——

‘A penny for your thoughts!’ cried Nick very gaily. He was standing in the doorway, neatly washed and brushed, his blue eyes twinkling down at her.

‘I was thinking how happy we were going to be,’ said Olivia simply.

Nick sat down beside her on the sofa and picked up her hands and kissed them very gently, one after the other. As he did so, Suki appeared silently in the dining-room door. He was holding a little tin tray on which were placed two glasses and a frosted cocktail shaker. Nick poured out the amber liquid with a smile.

‘I give you the bonny bride!’ he said, raising his glass.

Suki placed the tray on the pie-crust table and disappeared noiselessly into the dining-room.

‘It’s delicious,’ said Olivia.

Nick sipped and nodded.

‘Yes. Suki’s infallible. I couldn’t live without him. When I think of what he does for sixty dollars a week——’

‘Nick!’ cried Olivia, honestly startled. ‘Do you pay him that?’

‘You bet,’ said Nick cheerfully. ‘And cheap at the price. He’s the rock on which my life is built. There’s nothing that Jap can’t do. And doesn’t. He’d write my novels for me, I think, if I gave him the chance. Here, have another, Livvy.’

Olivia silently extended her glass. Men had queer extravagances, she was thinking. They were always exploited. Nick rose to his feet.

‘Oh, I have things running here on a very even keel,’ he said. ‘You won’t have to bother about anything, Livvy. Come in to supper, dearest.’

His arm was around her waist as they passed into the dining-room. Suki was standing very formally, with lowered eyes, behind her fiddle-backed chair. She wouldn’t, at any rate, Olivia thankfully reflected as she sipped his clam broth, have to bother about suppers. At least—not now. He was a perfect cook. But Suki could not be expected to remain Nick’s secretary and man-of-all-work when they were a family of five. The Greenfield servant problem would probably prove difficult. Still—there must be movies and a Catholic church in Bennington. They could keep a service Ford—— Suddenly Olivia realized that Nick was looking at her very ardently across the candle-light. Suki had withdrawn from the room.

‘Livvy,’ he said solemnly, ‘I’m just beginning to believe it’s true.’

A thrill passed deliciously over Olivia at his words. Domestic preoccupation faded instantly from her mind. A spell did hang over all candle-lit tables, she reflected with a smile. She was experiencing once more that slight sense of wickedness which had come to her in the De Witt Clinton dining-room at luncheon that afternoon. She was suddenly and blissfully realizing, with the force of a completely new thought, that she was alone with Nick in the little white farmhouse—with Nick and his manservant—she, Olivia Ottendorf—no, Olivia Allen again, after all the years. She smiled serenely into Nick’s ardent eyes. His next question, however, shattered the serenity of that smile.

‘Have you thought, Livvy,’ he asked gently, ‘how soon we can get things fixed up?’

‘Fixed—up?’ faltered Olivia. Her face had grown suddenly troubled.

‘Yes. What did you put up to Harry?’

There was an appreciable pause before she answered quietly, ‘Nothing very definite.’

‘I suppose Mexico’s the best bet. Though they have some new get-split-quick law in Nevada.’

‘Oh, Nick!’ cried Olivia hastily, with a little shiver of disgust. ‘I don’t think I—I could go to Reno again!’

‘There’s been trouble,’ said Nick seriously, ‘about some of those Mexican divorces.’

‘I know,’ said Olivia miserably.

‘There’s Paris, of course,’ said Nick, ‘and Switzerland and Prague, but——’

Olivia shook her head. Somehow she couldn’t bear to think of smirching her reunion with Nick by a sordid pilgrimage to Europe, a furtive hole-and-corner romance in some inconspicuous flat, some not too particular hotel. Just then Suki came in with the broiler. With the broiler and the riced potatoes and the grilled tomatoes with a delicious French sauce and a tall golden bottle of Château Yquem. When he left the room again, Nick instantly resumed.

‘We mustn’t waste time,’ he said. ‘I hope it can all be over by Christmas, so little Olivia can be with us.’

Christmas, thought Olivia. Christmas, of course, she told herself bravely, would be lovely at the farm. She would hang holly wreaths in all the square-paned windows, and she and Nick would hang up their stockings by the Franklin stove in the parlour and—— Nevertheless, Olivia’s face again looked rather troubled. There had flashed into her unwilling mind a sudden overwhelming thought of Otto and of little Van Tyne. Of Harry, too, and of Weihnachtsabend in Milwaukee. The very word ‘Christmas’ was inseparable from her memory of the elder Ottendorfs’ great golden-oak dining-room on Christmas Eve. She could positively hear the cuckoo clock striking six in the hall and feel the boys tugging at her hands and see the sliding dining-room doors rolling back to reveal the tall tinsel-hung Christmas tree, twinkling with wax candles, rising from snowy piles of white-papered, red-ribboned Christmas gifts, above the little models of die heilige Familie, of manger, ox and ass, of shepherds and of wise men, spread piously out on one of Mrs. Otto Ottendorf’s immaculate linen sheets. She could see, too, the holly-decked table in the centre of the room, loaded down with elaborately decorated bowls of Heringsalat and platters of kalter Aufschnitt, and plates of raisin-filled Stollen and little star-shaped Weihnachtskuchen, and the great grey pottery steins set out in readiness for the moment when Harry would open the dark beaded bottles of his father’s Munich beer. Little Olivia loved that Munich beer, and old Otto Ottendorf had taught the boys to love it, too—had always insisted that they sip a little from their grandfather’s stein to mellow their childish trebles before they all joined hands around the Christmas tree and sang ‘Heilige Nacht’ and ‘O Tannenbaum’ and ‘Kristkindchen kommt,’ after opening the white-papered, red-ribboned packages.

‘Stil-le Nacht, hei-lige Nacht——’ Olivia could hear the childish trebles of Otto and little Van Tyne and the birdlike soprano of little Olivia and the surprisingly clear, true tone of Harry’s Teutonic tenor rising above the rumbling bass of old Otto Ottendorf’s voice and the quavering notes which his wife accompanied with a beaming smile and a nod of her snowy head. It was silly, it was sentimental, it was terribly—terribly German of her, but Olivia could not keep the tears from coming. She and Harry had spent every Christmas Eve with his parents for the last ten years. The kindly simplicity, the childlike innocence, the unashamed emotion of that little family scene rose up before her with an appalling vividness that would not be denied. Old Mrs. Ottendorf, secure in the citadel of fifty years of domesticity—Harry and his boys—little Olivia so utterly Harry’s daughter—herself so utterly Harry’s wife—the solar radiance of old Otto Ottendorf’s face! And she—she was ruthlessly shattering it all! How could she ever hang holly wreaths in the square-paned windows of the little white farmhouse when she was thinking, as of course she would be thinking, of the Weihnachtsabend in Milwaukee that she had ruined by her treachery? Yes—treachery. That was the word, when she remembered Weihnachtsabend, that Olivia was forced to accept to describe her recent conduct. But when she remembered Nick—oh, when she remembered Nick—! Olivia winked away the tears that were pricking behind her eyelids. It was a very strange time for her to be going German, she reflected half miserably, half whimsically, but, born of the complications of the moment, Goethe’s love lyric, ‘Neue Liebe, Neues Leben,’ that old Otto Ottendorf loved to repeat, was echoing in her brain.

But Nick was speaking again.

‘Of course, she’ll want to be with us, Livvy.’

Want to be with them, thought Olivia desperately! The hedge of unspoken thoughts was growing by leaps and bounds. How could she tell Nick how little Olivia felt about Weihnachtsabend in Milwaukee? How could she explain that this flight of theirs would kindle in their daughter’s breast only a fierce defensive fire of protest in behalf of her beloved Hunny? That it would make her Harry’s daughter in a poignant sense that she had never been before?

‘Darling—what’s the matter?’ Nick was looking at her rather anxiously.

‘I—I was thinking of little Olivia.’

Nick’s face was rather puzzled.

‘But you mustn’t think of her, sweetheart, if it makes you unhappy. Though I don’t see why it should. We’re only giving back to her what we robbed her of before.’

Olivia sat in silence. She should not be sitting in silence, she reflected miserably. It was not fair to Nick. But a dark cloud of depression was sinking slowly over her. She struggled against it in vain. The thought of the unwritten letter to Harry rose menacingly in the foreground of her consciousness. The thought of Harry’s ignorance. How curious that all day long in the sunshine she had been able to push those thoughts away! Had been able to ignore the fact that, in postponing the awful moment of revelation, she was betraying Harry in a sense that she had never meant to betray him. She had meant to explain—she had meant to extenuate—— It was shameful—it was base of her not to have written that letter. She was behaving inexcusably. Why hadn’t she seen, last night in Gramercy Park, that the course of conduct that Nick had so easily outlined led only to this impasse?

Just then Suki entered the room with a tray of cherry tarts. Suddenly, those cherry tarts seemed to Olivia the last, the unbearable straw! But this—this was hysteria, she told herself firmly. She watched his diminutive figure passing noiselessly around the table. She helped herself to a tart. She sat in silence while Suki placed the little Sheffield coffee-tray at her elbow.

Nick was still watching her anxiously.

‘Cigarette?’ he said.

Olivia shook her head. She could not trust herself to speak. If she spoke, she thought wildly, she would certainly burst into tears. Over what? Olivia hardly knew. But panic was closing down on her. She—she could not sit here quietly eating cherry tarts with Nick, while Harry—while Harry remained in ignorance. She must end this deception. She must end this agony—yes, agony of spirit. She must send a telegram—get Harry on the telephone.

Olivia rose abruptly from her chair.

‘Livvy—?’ Nick’s voice was sharp with alarm. He rose in his turn.

‘Don’t—don’t get up!’ cried Olivia quickly.

‘But, Livvy—what’s the matter?’ With one stride he was at her side.

‘I—I’m going into the other room,’ said Olivia falteringly. ‘Don’t—don’t come with me.’

‘Don’t come with you?’ cried Nick.

‘No. I want to be alone.’ Olivia’s voice was trembling.

‘But, Livvy—what’s upset you?’ His arms were around her now.

‘Nothing!’ cried Olivia pitifully. ‘Oh—truly, Nick, nothing!’

‘Nothing?’ said Nick reproachfully.

‘Well—only thoughts. I’ve got to think them out. Don’t worry, darling. Just—just let me go, please, and eat your tart and drink your coffee and——’

‘Livvy! Don’t be absurd!’

‘No, I mean it, Nick. I want to be alone. I—I’ll be all right, dear.’

Slowly his arms relinquished her. His eyes were searching her face.

‘Poor little Livvy!’ he said tenderly. ‘I suppose I have no notion of what you’re going through. You’ve been so wonderful——’

Olivia shook her head.

‘Don’t, Nick—please. I—I don’t want to cry.’

With that she left him, standing uncertainly in the candle-light. She passed through the parlour and out into the hall. She sat down, feeling suddenly weak and tottery, on the uncarpeted yellow stairs. The mere proximity of the telephone seemed to comfort her a little. It reminded her, consolingly, that she could talk to Harry. She could and she would, but not—not immediately, thought Olivia falteringly. She must face the facts of the situation. She must get herself in hand. Nick hadn’t kidnapped her, she told herself firmly. She had wanted to come. She still wanted to stay, for that matter. There was only one way out and that was the way of complete courage. She would just sit quietly on the stairs for a few tranquil moments and phrase the things that she had to say to Harry, and then she would call him up. But before she did that, of course, she would have to tell Nick that that letter was unwritten. Nick would despise her cowardice and the telling would be dreadful, but she would feel much better the moment it was told. The relief of knowing that Nick, at least, knew the whole truth about her would brace her for the terrific ordeal of telling it to Harry. And Nick would help her. Of course, he would help her. She would explain, rather hysterically, she was afraid, how base she had been, and, after that one dreadful moment of despising her, Nick would understand. It was Nick’s business to understand such things. His books were full of them. Nick’s books were full of women who acted unaccountably, foolishly, basely even, under the influence of emotion.

Suddenly Olivia heard his footsteps leaving the dining-room. She looked pitifully up at him as he appeared in the parlour door. She—she would tell him immediately, she thought bravely. But she instantly realized that he was not thinking of her and that his face was strangely troubled.

‘Nick!’ she cried apprehensively. ‘What’s happened?’

Leaning against the door-jamb he gazed down at her for a moment in sombre silence. Her sense of apprehension flamed suddenly into alarm.

‘Nick!’ she said breathlessly. ‘What is it?’ Then—

‘Suki’s going to leave,’ he remarked gloomily.

A sudden sense of anti-climax left Olivia weak and trembling.

‘Leave?’ she echoed. ‘Why?’

‘He said,’ said Nick, still very gloomily, ‘that he had lived in households with ladies before.’

Olivia’s face was quite blank with amazement.

‘But, Nick,’ she protested, ‘I haven’t said two words to him.’

‘So I pointed out. But he said ladies were all alike. He said they made changes.’

‘But, Nick,’ said Olivia again, and this time very eagerly, ‘I don’t understand.’ She was forgetting her own distracting problems now in meeting this new catastrophe. ‘He seemed so pleasant—the flowers, you know, and the firecrackers.’

‘Suki would always do what he thought was fitting while he was in a situation,’ Nick said morosely. ‘But he says when he got my wire he made up his mind. He called me out into the kitchen and told me just as soon as you had left the room. He says he’ll stay until I’m suited, of course, but he hopes that I’ll be suited soon. He’s been telephoning the agencies in New York. He has a list of secretaries who want a job——’

Nick looked so completely woe-begone that Olivia could not help smiling.

‘Well, dear,’ she said brightly, ‘you know there are other secretaries.’

This cheerful comment was received by Nick in utter silence. There was quite a little pause before he remarked irrelevantly, ‘He’s been with me seven years.’

‘Let me talk to him,’ suggested Olivia.

‘No. He’s gone off to his room in the barn. He considers it quite settled.’

‘Well, I may say,’ said Olivia with spirit, ‘that I think he’s acting very badly.’

‘Only characteristically,’ said Nick judicially. ‘It’s that goldfish quality that I told you about.’

‘I have never,’ said Olivia firmly, ‘liked goldfish. I think this may be a blessing in disguise.’

‘Don’t be absurd!’ said Nick rather crossly.

‘I’m not absurd!’ cried Olivia indignantly. ‘If he feels like that about ladies, he would never have been happy with me. I’d been thinking already, Nick, that he mightn’t get along with the other servants. They often don’t like Japs, you know, and he has had the run of the house——’

‘What other servants?’ asked Nick. He was staring at her in astonishment.

‘What other servants?’ echoed Olivia. ‘Why, the servants we’ll need to keep the place up!’

‘This place?’ said Nick. If possible, he looked even more astonished than he had a moment before.

‘Of course,’ said Olivia. ‘You didn’t think for a moment that we could go on living here with just Suki, did you?’

‘Why, I certainly did,’ said Nick.

‘Nick!’ cried Olivia, rather crossly in her turn. ‘Don’t be ridiculous! Who did you think would do the work?’

‘What work?’ asked Nick stupidly.

And Olivia smiled at him tenderly. His very stupidity had disarmed her. There was an innocent masculine quality about it that would disarm any woman. She moved her feet to one corner of the uncarpeted yellow stairs.

‘Sit down, Nick,’ she said, ‘and let me tell you all I’ve been thinking.’ After an instant’s hesitation, he sank on the step beneath her. He took her hands in his, but he looked up rather doubtfully at her smiling face. ‘We’ll need servants, of course, but we won’t need many, if we can get good ones. Four in the house, at the most, and two men on the farm. I want a little garden that one gardener can take care of, and we’ll have to find a chore man who can run the cars. A cook and a laundress and a waitress and a chambermaid can do everything nicely. There must be women in the village who could come in when we need extra help. We won’t need it, except for large parties, and I thought we could build a little guest-house next summer, out under the apple trees, that we could shut up entirely when we didn’t have guests. That would save the chambermaid, because I suppose we won’t have many people here except in summer and——’

‘See here,’ said Nick suddenly, ‘what are you planning to run? A roadhouse?’

Olivia laughed at the incredulity in his tone.

‘You’ll love it, Nick, when I have it all fixed.’

‘Have what all fixed?’ demanded Nick rather irritably.

Then, with a nervous smile, ‘See here, Livvy, are you kidding me?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Olivia. Then, smiling reassuringly, ‘You won’t know the farm when I get through with it, Nick. I’m going to make it over into a really lovely place.’

‘What’s wrong with it now?’ asked Nick.

By this time Olivia was staring in astonishment in her turn.

‘Nick—you didn’t think we could live in it just as it is, did you?’

‘Why not? I always have.’

‘But you’ve always been dreadfully uncomfortable, darling,’ said Olivia reasonably. ‘The first thing I want to do is to build a big studio for you.’

‘I don’t want a studio!’ said Nick, very hastily.

‘Oh, yes, you do,’ said Olivia firmly. ‘Or at least you will, when we get settled down. You couldn’t work in the dining-room, Nick, with four servants in the house. And it’s so near the parlour—every caller would disturb you. And the boys would be running in and out—you know how children are—asking for cookies and apples and—drinks of water and——’

‘What boys?’ asked Nick. His voice was distinctly alarmed.

‘Why—my boys!’ cried Olivia indignantly. ‘Otto and little Van Tyne, of course!’ Then, rather sarcastically, ‘Had you forgotten them?’

Nick only ignored the sarcasm.

‘And what callers?’ he continued. ‘Good Lord, Livvy, I don’t have a caller more than twice a year!’

For a moment Olivia eyed him in silence. She was feeling distinctly provoked. Nick wasn’t even trying to understand, she thought resentfully. She drew a long breath. Then—

‘Nick,’ she said pleasantly, ‘you really must be reasonable. You must remember that you’ve always lived here as a single man. You have a great gift with people, Nick, and just that in itself takes a single man far. When you were bored with Greenfield, you could always pack a bag and run down to New York or Boston or—or Palm Beach,’ she added meaningly, ‘and pick up with a crowd of amusing people who could give you a good time. But with a wife and children—don’t you see, Nick—you have to make a place for them. Take little Olivia—I don’t know how much she’ll like the farm in any case, but she certainly won’t like it at all unless she can have house-parties. The boys will love it, of course—they’re just the age for it—but they’ll want their school friends to visit them. It’s only natural, Nick——’ Olivia’s voice trailed off into silence.

For a moment, staring solemnly straight before him, Nick considered her words. Then—

‘How old did you say they were, Livvy?’ he asked.

‘Eight and nine,’ said Olivia cheerfully.

Nick breathed a heavy sigh.

‘Of course,’ he said slowly, ‘I’d been counting on little Olivia. I thought we’d give her Mother’s old room. I’d been counting on the boys, too, in a way, though I can’t say I’d ever stopped to consider exactly where we’d put them. After all—they won’t be here much of the time. They’ll visit Harry, too. And to build a studio and a guest-house and hire six servants to take care of two eight- and nine-year-old boys who are in school nine months of the year——’ He broke off abruptly. ‘Where’d you put the servants for that matter?’

Olivia was beginning to feel just a tiny bit conscience-stricken. In spite of the fact that she was, of course, supremely right.

‘I—I couldn’t put the boys in the guest-house,’ she said, a little uncertainly. ‘You—you can’t exactly classify my children as guests. No,’—her voice was gathering confidence as she spoke—‘we’ll have to enlarge the house, Nick. We’ll have to build a servant’s wing and some rooms upstairs for the children. It won’t be much trouble to raise the roof and——’

‘Oh!’ cried Nick violently. ‘I can’t do that!’ He dropped her hands as he spoke. His violence recalled very vividly to Olivia the old days of argument in the Greenwich Village flat.

‘Why not?’ she asked coldly.

‘It’s out of the question. Just the expense alone——’

‘It wouldn’t cost much,’ said Olivia.

‘That depends on what you call much,’ said Nick very definitely. ‘It would cost twenty-five thousand dollars.’

‘At least,’ said Olivia briefly. Then, after a moment’s pause, ‘But you’ve got twenty-five thousand dollars, haven’t you?’

‘Why, yes,’ said Nick. ‘I’ve got it, but——’

‘And if you write a book a year, you must have a steady income of——’

‘But I don’t write a book a year,’ interrupted Nick quickly. ‘And I’m not interested in steady incomes. No, Livvy, we can’t live on that scale.’

‘But, Nick,’ said Olivia earnestly, ‘we have to live on it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because people do—because everyone does.’

‘No one in Greenfield does. My mother——’

‘Oh, Nick!’ cried Olivia in exasperation. ‘Your mother liked it! She’d lived here all her life. But—well—I mean, after all, you and I, we—we’re a different generation, aren’t we? We’ve met a lot of people and done a lot of things. We know how people live who live in other places. It isn’t as if you didn’t have the money, Nick. You’ve been extremely successful and you’ve never spent a cent. If you didn’t have it, I’d be the first to say that we ought to economize. But as it is, I think it’s time you took your place in the community. You ought to make your home attractive and ask attractive people to come to it. It’s just lazy of you to settle down and go native——’

Nick rose very abruptly from his seat on the stair. He walked across the hall and stood with his back to Olivia, staring unseeingly at the stuffed ‘Birds of New England,’ which hung on the faded wall.

‘Livvy,’ he said presently, ‘you must get this. It isn’t just the money—though you know perfectly well that it would cost the hell of a lot to live the way you’ve outlined and it would keep my nose to the grindstone to pay the monthly bills. But even if I had millions, I couldn’t stand the racket. Attractive people don’t attract me when I’m trying to write. Writing’s my life, Livvy—you must remember that. All I want in the world is a little peace and a desk in a good light and three square meals a day and——’

‘And me,’ said Olivia in a very small, low voice. ‘You said you wanted me.’

Nick turned on her angrily.

‘Of course, I want you. You know I do. But——’

For a moment Olivia’s eyes met his in silence. Then—

‘Nick,’ she said solemnly, ‘you told me on the boat that you had faced the inconvenience of living with a woman.’

‘I thought I had!’ flashed Nick.

Olivia rose to her feet.

‘Just what do you mean by that?’ she demanded.

Nick stared at her moodily. Then—

‘Don’t hit me, Livvy,’ he remarked humorously. ‘I only meant that I guess I’d forgotten how very inconvenient it was! I’d forgotten how women like to run things. There’s a practical, pushing side to a woman, Livvy, that’s enough to appal any man. It appals me—I tell you frankly. Here you haven’t been two hours in this farmhouse and you’re already talking about pulling it down and building it up again——’

‘Don’t forget,’ said Olivia tartly, ‘that I’ve been here before.’

‘That’s why I thought that you knew what you were getting in for.’

‘I did know!’ protested Olivia. ‘But I thought it would be different now you have——’ Olivia stopped suddenly. She was striving for perfect honesty, but, expressed in words, perfect honesty seemed a trifle crude. She had not stopped in time, however.

‘More money?’ said Nick. ‘Livvy, that’s all you think of.’

‘I don’t!’ cried Olivia. ‘It’s you that think of money! I think of comfort and convenience.’

‘It’s neither comfortable nor convenient,’ remarked Nick acidly, ‘to live in a manner that you can’t afford. You must remember, Livvy, that you’ve had ten years with a multi-millionaire. I suppose Harry gratified your every whim——’

‘You leave Harry out of it!’ cried Olivia angrily.

‘I can’t leave him out of it!’ said Nick, with equal anger. ‘For the last decade, Livvy, you’ve been living with a worm—a silkworm, sitting day after day in that broker’s office spinning silk for his own fetters! But I’m not like that——’

‘You’re certainly not!’ said Olivia viperishly.

Nick’s eyes met hers. Then—

‘I wonder, Livvy,’ he asked quietly, ‘if you’ve ever faced the inconvenience of living with a writer?’

‘Faced it!’ cried Olivia scornfully. ‘Didn’t I live with you for ten years in the Greenwich Village flat?’

Nick opened his mouth to reply and shut it again without speaking. For a moment he stood staring at Olivia.

Then, without another word, he turned abruptly away from her and opened the front door. A draft of cool mountain evening air swept instantly into the hall. It brought with it a scent of damp and dew and wet earth and rotting leaves and a faint aroma of balsam. Olivia shivered, then suddenly realized that she was trembling—trembling very violently. She stretched out her hand to grasp the banister rail. She clung to it for a moment as if it could offer her tangible spiritual support in the emotional whirlpool that had engulfed her. This—this is simply unbelievable, she was thinking. This is the end of everything. What had come over her? What had come over Nick? How was it possible that they could have said to each other the words that were still echoing in her ears? Nick stepped out on the granite doorstep. Beyond the black outline of his figure, Olivia could see the canary-coloured Chrysler, dimly discernible in the light from the parlour windows. Suddenly Nick’s figure moved.

‘Livvy,’ he said, and his voice was low and husky. ‘Come out and look at the stars. They’ll make you realize what utter fools we’ve been.’

Mute with her misery, Olivia walked slowly across the passage. She felt curiously unmoved by the note of apology in his tone. Nick was obviously sorry. Well—she was sorry, too. Still—being sorry wasn’t everything. They had smashed something—something priceless and precious—something they could never repair. She joined Nick on the doorstep. He smiled uncertainly at her, and then, a trifle hesitatingly, slipped his arm through hers. For a moment they stood in silence. Then—

‘That’s Deneb,’ said Nick slowly, and the tone of his voice told Olivia that his smile was deepening. The pressure of his fingers tightened slightly on her arm. ‘You can tell it because——’

‘Don’t, Nick—’ said Olivia faintly. Her eyes were on the stars. There they all were, she thought sadly. There were Altair and Vega and the pole star. There was the Milky Way, trailing its powdered star-dust over the leafless tops of the apple trees. They did not look at all as they had looked four nights ago from the boat-deck of the Atlanta. Cold and remote and incurious, they glittered in the sky. Olivia felt strangely oppressed by the indifference of the heavens. By the loneliness of the hills. By the sense of space about her. By the desolation of the decision she had arrived at in her heart. For yes—it was decision. She was trembling again.

‘Cold, darling?’ asked Nick.

Olivia shook her head.

‘No,’ she said slowly. ‘No. Just—shattered.’

‘Shattered?’ His voice was quick with alarm.

‘Yes,’ said Olivia solemnly. ‘Nick—we were fools.’

‘We’ll never be again.’ His lips were on her hair.

‘We’d always be. That’s the way we are, Nick. Foolish. I’m glad we quarrelled tonight.’

‘You’re glad——?’

‘I’m glad we quarrelled in time. And that was just—chance. If Suki had waited until tomorrow to say that he was going——’

‘Well—what?’ There was a moment’s pause.

‘Well—I guess we’d both have had to stand by the mistake we’d made. I don’t think, Nick, that I’d have the courage to leave you if it were tomorrow——’

‘Leave me?’ cried Nick. ‘Livvy—are you crazy?’

‘No,’ said Olivia calmly. ‘I’m just supremely sane.’

‘Sane—to talk of leaving me?’ His face was blank with astonishment. For a moment Olivia met his eyes in silence. Then—

‘I’m not talking of it, Nick,’ she said gently. ‘I’m doing it.’ She drew her arm from his. ‘I’m going in, now, to get my hat and coat——’

Nick stared at her, aghast.

‘Livvy—I won’t let you!’

‘You’ll have to, Nick.’ She turned into the hall.

‘But, Livvy—’ He was following closely after her down the narrow passage. ‘Livvy, what’s the matter?’

‘What’s the matter?’ cried Olivia reproachfully. She turned to look up at him at the bedroom door.

‘I mean—of course we quarrelled. But that quarrel was nothing. It was utterly nothing. Of course you can change the house——’

‘Oh—the house,’ said Olivia disparagingly. ‘I’d forgotten the house.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘It’s—just that I made you angry,’ said Olivia steadfastly. ‘And I’d do it again. You made me angry, Nick. I wanted to kill you.’

She opened the bedroom door. The candles were still burning on the maple bureau. Her hat and coat and purse were lying where she had tossed them, two hours before, on the four-poster bed. She looked at them listlessly.

Nick seized her arm. He twisted her around so that he could see her face.

‘Livvy,’ he said, and his voice was shaking, ‘is it nothing to you that I love you?’

Olivia looked solemnly up into his eyes.

‘You don’t really love me, Nick. You only want to. That’s very different. When you love someone——’

‘Yes?’ said Nick breathlessly.

‘You don’t fight.’

‘I do,’ said Nick candidly. ‘And you do, too, Livvy.’

Olivia accepted this charge in silence. But—I never fought with Harry, she was thinking soberly—at least—in a surge of self-abasement—Harry never fought with me. Poor patient Harry! But it wasn’t just patience. It was serenity—it was stability. Whatever it was, it was something that Nick did not have—that he did not care about having—that—— She could see it all—she could see it all so clearly. Kisses and quarrels—humiliating rows and more humiliating reconciliations—herself in Nick’s arms when they were really separated by miles of spiritual distance. Impossible to explain, of course, to one who did not feel it, how absolutely unendurable was the prospect of a life that was lacking in emotional dignity.

She gently loosened his hand.

‘I’d be in hell, Nick. I was in hell this evening. And so——’ She picked up her coat and slipped into it mechanically. She pulled her hat gravely over the soft water-waved ripples of her golden-brown hair.

‘Livvy—you’re hysterical.’

Olivia picked up her purse. He did not understand, she was thinking solemnly. He did not understand at all. There was a childlike quality about his lack of understanding that made Olivia feel, at the same moment, very near and infinitely far from him.

‘I’m thinking of you, too, Nick,’ she said quietly. ‘I’d spoil everything. Everything you like best.’ As she turned to face him, she managed to curve her lips into a shaky little smile. ‘I’m just the sort of person you can’t bear to have around.’ She moved toward the door.

‘But—Livvy—you can’t go—like this—alone—at night——’

‘I can’t stay like this—alone—at night,’ said Olivia bravely. ‘You know what would happen, Nick. You’d make love to me and I—I’d listen and we—we’d forget what a grim fiasco was ahead of us. And so I have to go.’

‘But, Livvy’—Nick was still at her elbow—‘where—where are you going?’

‘I haven’t really thought. To Bennington, I guess.’ She was greatly astonished at the practical tone she had managed to achieve. Beneath the hall lamp she glanced at her wrist watch. ‘After all,’ she smiled ironically, ‘it’s only half-past eight. I’ve plenty of money and plenty of gas——’

By this time they were standing on the doorstep.

‘Livvy—you little fool!’

‘I am a fool, Nick.’ She stepped down on the driveway. Without glancing back at him, she opened the Chrysler’s door.

‘Livvy—how can I stop you?’

‘You can’t.’ There it was in a nutshell. She was still a free agent. Free to move in whatever direction she liked. In a spirit of thankfulness, Olivia climbed into the car. She bent over the instrument board and turned on the headlights. The sudden stream of radiance illuminated the gnarled and twisted trunks of the apple trees. It picked out a rake and a rusty scythe and a pile of ruddy apples lying at the foot of one of the nearer trees. The façade of the farmhouse stood stark in the starlight. It looked unreal and unnatural, like stage scenery, Olivia thought, a stretch of painted canvas, pierced by its yellow windows.

Suddenly Nick’s dim figure plunged across the drive.

‘Good God!’ he cried. ‘Do you realize what you’re doing?’

Olivia nodded silently.

‘I’m waking up, Nick,’ she said slowly. ‘I’m waking up from a dream. For ten long years I’ve been cherishing the delusion that we wouldn’t have quarrelled if we hadn’t been young and foolish—that—that I still loved you, really— But now——’

‘Now what?’ he demanded.

‘Well—now we’re middle-aged,’ said Olivia solemnly. ‘We really are, Nick, though we don’t feel so. And yet we did it again. We’d always do it. We haven’t changed a bit, Nick.’ The solemnity had ended unexpectedly in a breathless little gasp. A gasp that was very like a sob. She’d have to get out of this, thought Olivia quickly. Nick was staring up at her over the side of the car. ‘Write a grand novel, Nick! I know you will! And Suki will type it! Return—return the firecrackers!’ Her voice was breaking now. Her feet were fumbling hysterically for the clutch.

‘Oh, Livvy! Shut up!’ The absurd words in their anguished accents plucked suddenly at her heartstrings.

‘I will. Oh, Nick, dear! Don’t look like that! Don’t—don’t feel like that!’ As she spoke, Olivia leaned out over the wheel. She kissed his upturned face. His hands stretched out to her.

‘Livvy—you’re crying!’

‘Of course I’m crying!’ sobbed Olivia hysterically. ‘Why wouldn’t I cry?’

Before he could answer, she set the gears in motion. She pulled herself from his arms. The Chrysler moved slowly around the little turn-around. The headlights swept the orchard, the open field, then shone down the driveway. Olivia slipped into high, and moved to look back over her shoulder for a last glimpse of Nick. He was standing in the light from the doorway of his little white farmhouse, under the wine-glass elm. There was something stunned and incredulous about the pose of his figure. Olivia turned into the road for Greenfield. She fumbled awkwardly, with one hand in her pocket for her handkerchief. She wiped her tearful eyes. The Chrysler swerved uncertainly, as she did so, in the narrow road. With a deft turn of her wrist she turned it mechanically back into the cart ruts. I must rely on my spinal cord, she thought numbly, to get me to Bennington. Her higher brain centres were paralyzed. She could not think—she could not feel. But she was trembling a little—trembling like one who has escaped, by a foot’s breadth, the fall of an avalanche.

Ten minutes later, as Olivia’s spinal cord was carefully negotiating the turn by the sawmill, Olivia came out of her trance. She stopped the Chrysler suddenly. She would not have to take the mountain road, she remembered. The short route to Bennington stretched straight beyond the village. The town itself could not be more than fifteen miles away across the starlit hills. She backed and turned in front of the blacksmith’s shop. She had not seen Greenfield, she reflected incredulously. She had been completely oblivious of the elm-shaded street. Not one of the little white frame houses had impinged upon her consciousness. She was conscious now of only a deep sense of relaxation, of expansion, of profound physical fatigue and a vast mental blank. Of relief, really. Yet what was there to be relieved about? She had plunged herself gratuitously into despair and disillusion. Her rapture and her romance had ended, with ridiculous rapidity, in a tragic farce.

She did not love Nick. That was what it all came back to, Olivia slowly realized, as she turned the car into the highroad. She did not love Nick. It was curious what a sense of emptiness that realization carried with it to her heart. For days the thought of him had filled her mind—for years it had lingered just around the corner of her consciousness. And now—it was gone. It had vanished like a breath on a mirror, like a spark in the dark. Absolutely nothing but the Nickishness of Nick—Olivia faced the fact solemnly—had driven her from his arms. But yet—there was the sense of emptiness. Olivia felt rather as if someone had turned out the light very suddenly in a familiar room and had left her staring, still dazzled, at darkness made visible. It was the same old room, of course, filled with the same old objects, but she would have to grope about a bit to get her bearings. She would get them, in time. Her eyes would grow accustomed to the darkness. But who, thought Olivia pitifully, wanted to live in the dark? She and Nick could have had such fun together. But no—they couldn’t really. Of course they couldn’t. They couldn’t because of the Nickishness. It had been a dream. And now she was awake. She saw things as they were. She saw herself as she was. A fool—an utter fool. A fool who was facing her folly. But at least she was facing it alone.

Olivia’s eyes were opened wide in the darkness. They were fixed on the ruts and little boulders which stood up uncompromisingly in the radiance of the headlights on the yellow clay road. She did not see them, however. She did not see anything. She was looking blindly forward with passionate anticipation to the moment when she could get out of the Chrysler in the main street of Bennington and sign a hotel register and achieve a hotel bedroom with a door that she could lock and a bed that she could lie on alone! Beyond that hotel bedroom, Olivia abandoned her future. What Harry would say to her she could not imagine—what she would say to Harry——

But suddenly Olivia sat bolt upright in her seat in the Chrysler. Her fingers tightened tensely on the slender wheel. There had burst like a bomb in her mind the thought of that unwritten letter to Harry—the thought that it was unwritten. She had completely forgotten that Harry did not know. Why—Harry did not know anything! She had been in a trance. Still, it did seem impossible that she could live through what she had lived through in the course of the last twenty-four hours and that Harry could still be in ignorance. He was thinking of her, undoubtedly, that very minute, as safe and sound in Gramercy Park. He did not even know that Nick had been on the Atlanta. He would have to know that, of course, but he need never know anything else. She need never tell him, never phrase those devastating words, that dreadful confession. But——

Olivia’s spinal cord was still guiding the Chrysler when the first lights of Bennington appeared in the valley ahead as she slid down from the starlit hills. She roused herself wearily from revery to cope with the ten o’clock traffic of the little town. The moving trolley-cars, the diagonally parked motors, the casually wandering pedestrians annoyed her with their insistent demands on her exhausted attention. She passed a movie house, a lighted Rexall drugstore, and drew up before the door of the hotel. She—she was all in, she thought vaguely. After a moment she rose dizzily from her seat at the wheel.

‘Take—take the luggage,’ she said to the bellboy who had mercifully sprung up from somewhere. She handed him the key to the rumble. ‘Put the car in a garage.’

Staggering a little, with quick, uncertain footsteps, she crossed the narrow sidewalk. She pushed her way blindly through the swinging doors. She was only half conscious of her spinal cord signing the register, but the name that it had signed arrested her attention. ‘Mrs. Harry Ottendorf,’ in purple ink, on the blue-lined page of the ledger. Mrs. Harry Ottendorf—of course—why not? Yet there was something shameful and shameless in her seeking refuge, at the end of this outrageous adventure, in the shelter of Harry’s name. She did not deserve it, really. By rights it was forfeited. As she entered the dingy elevator, Olivia’s tired eyes filled slowly with tears. The bellboy, bowed down under the load of her smart Cross handbags, looked curiously at her, but she was unaware of his curiosity. Still staggering a little, she followed him down the dim-lit, worn-carpeted hall. He flung open a flimsy door and pressing a button, flooded a dreary bedroom with the electric radiance of a central chandelier.

‘Thank you,’ said Olivia numbly. She was fumbling in her purse. When the bellboy had gone with his tip, she sat down suddenly on the edge of the wooden bed.

‘I’m tired,’ she said aloud, as if there were someone there to hear her. Her voice broke on the words. The tears in her eyes trickled slowly down her cheeks. I ought to be ashamed to be sorry for myself, she thought miserably. But yet she was. She was sorry for herself because she was so utterly alone. If Harry were here, she thought suddenly—and paused, amazed at the thought. Olivia was crying now in earnest. It was curious that having so nearly run off with Nick should make her feel so very near to Harry. It was curious and it was humiliating. Women were queer creatures. Ignoble—unstable. Oh, why, thought Olivia desperately, now that she did not have to tell Harry did she want to tell him so terribly? And why did it seem so impossible to take up life with a Harry who had not been told? Olivia would have liked to think that the answer lay in her innate craving for honesty. But she was too honest for that. No—she was merely succumbing to the irresistible temptation to confide her misery—to lay her troubles, as always, on Harry’s shoulders. She was a coward. She was a craven coward. She was a light woman without the courage of her levity. Tormented by a torrent of self-accusation, Olivia rose abruptly from the edge of the wooden bed. As she did so, her glance fell on the telephone, standing on the bed table. Again the proximity of that little black instrument instantly annihilated for her the barriers of time and space. For a long moment she stood motionless, staring at it. She felt exactly as if Harry were at her elbow. Then—

‘Oh—’ sighed Olivia softly. Trembling a little, but without hesitation, she picked up the telephone and lifted the receiver. ‘Give me long distance,’ she said, quite calmly. She sat down again, weakly, shakily, on the edge of the wooden bed. The voice of the operator trickled into her ear.

‘I want—I want Chicago,’ she said falteringly. ‘I want Superior three six six nine.’

‘I’ll call you,’ said the operator; but Olivia closed her eyes and sat motionless, the receiver at her ear. Harry’ll be home, she thought numbly, it’s after ten o’clock. Her heart was throbbing violently. Across a thousand miles of space the clipped impersonal accents of the trunk-line operators fell unheeded on her ear. Presently—

‘Ready with Chicago. Chicago, Bennington.’ It sounded absurdly, she thought, like a social introduction. Then—

‘Hello,’ said Harry’s voice, very humorously. ‘Who on earth wants me in Bennington?’ At the sound of that voice, Olivia had suddenly begun to cry. ‘Hello?’ said Harry again.

‘Are you there, Bennington?’ cut in a distant central.

‘Oh—I’m here, all right!’ cried Olivia hysterically. ‘Harry, can you hear me? It’s me!’

‘Olivia?’ cried Harry in amazement.

‘Yes,’ gasped Olivia. ‘I’m here, in Bennington. Oh, Harry, I hope you can hear me!’

‘Of course I can hear you! What’s happened?’

‘Everything!’ sobbed Olivia. ‘Oh, Harry—you—you must understand! I’m here—in Bennington——’

‘In Bennington? What for?’ said Harry.

‘Because—because—oh, Harry, can you hear me?—because I ran off with Nicholas Allen!’

‘Ran off with Nicholas Allen?’ Harry’s voice was completely stupefied.

‘Yes. He was on the boat. He was on the Atlanta, Harry, and I—I was dreadfully sorry for him——’

‘Sorry for him?’ Harry’s voice had lost nothing of its stupefaction.

‘Yes, I was!’ cried Olivia wildly. ‘Oh, Harry—don’t you see? I—I fell in love with him and he—he fell in love with me. I know it doesn’t sound reasonable, Harry, but that’s exactly what happened. And he asked me to go away with him. And I said I would——’

‘You said you would?’ Harry’s voice was louder.

‘Yes. I did,’ sobbed Olivia. ‘We started this morning. We bought a Chrysler and we motored all day—up here—to the farm, you know. Can you hear me, Harry?’

‘Yes. I hear you,’ said Harry.

‘But—when we got there, Harry, I didn’t like it. I—I didn’t like it at all. And we fought—we fought, just as we used to do. We simply smashed everything. It was terrible, Harry. It was perfectly terrible! So I left.’

‘You left?’

‘Yes. I left in the Chrysler. I came here to Bennington. I’m in the hotel. Oh, Harry—I’m so miserable!’

‘Where’s little Olivia?’ said Harry very seriously.

‘She’s in New York. She doesn’t know. No one knows, Harry, but——’ Olivia’s voice faltered dismally into sobs. Then, ‘Harry—are you there?’ she said faintly.

‘Yes—I’m here,’ said Harry, rather blankly.

‘Well—’ she paused very nervously. ‘Well, what are you going to do with me?’ For a long moment there was silence on the Chicago line. It was broken by Harry.

‘I’m coming East to get you,’ he said tersely. ‘I’ll take the ten-thirty tomorrow.’

‘Oh—Harry!’ breathed Olivia. But his voice was going firmly on.

‘Have you still got that Chrysler?’

‘Yes,’ said Olivia.

‘Well, run down to Boston in her tomorrow. I’ll meet you there at the Ritz the day after, ten minutes after the train gets in at Back Bay.’

‘But, Harry—’ said Olivia.

‘You can make it, Olivia,’ said Harry encouragingly. ‘It’s not a long run. You can do it in six hours easy. We—we’——for the first time his voice was shaking a little—‘we can go out to Southborough in the afternoon and see the boys. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I’ll wire little Olivia to meet us at the Ritz.’

‘But, Harry—’ said Olivia again. Her voice was choked with tears.

‘Yes?’ said Harry.

‘Harry—have you—have you forgiven me?’ asked Olivia pitifully. ‘How—how could you, Harry?’

‘I—don’t—know.’ His tone was rather puzzled. ‘But I seem to have, somehow.’

‘But, Harry—aren’t you angry?’

For a long moment he considered the question. Then—

‘No,’ he said slowly. ‘I just want to see you.’ For a minute there was silence again on the Chicago line. Again it was broken by Harry. ‘I—I love you like hell, you know,’ he said rather diffidently. Then, with rising confidence, ‘You love me, too, Olivia. Maybe you don’t think so now, but you must. You must, or you’d never have called me up.’

‘Of course I—love you,’ sobbed Olivia brokenly. ‘I never loved you—like this——’

‘Well—that’s all right, then,’ said Harry awkwardly. ‘Now you turn in and get some sleep.’

‘I will,’ said Olivia meekly.

‘Don’t worry.’

‘I won’t. Good night, Harry.’

‘Good night,’ said Harry. Then, rather sharply, ‘Olivia—’ A note of anxiety had crept into his tone.

‘Yes,’ said Olivia eagerly.

‘I don’t want you to see Nicholas Allen again before you leave Bennington.’

‘See him again!’ Olivia gasped. ‘Oh, Harry—I hope I never have to see him!’

Across a thousand miles of space a little involuntary sigh of relief fluttered into Olivia’s ear.

‘Well—that’s all right, then, too.’

‘Harry,’ said Olivia solemnly, ‘you’re simply wonderful. And I—I——’ She paused inarticulately.

‘You’re my Olivia,’ said Harry. Olivia was not sure whether or no she caught the whisper of another involuntary sigh. ‘That’s good enough for me.’ On that he hung up the receiver.

Olivia replaced the telephone on the table. She flung herself, sobbing, across the cotton counterpane of the wooden bed. She buried her face in her arms. Oh, Harry—Harry—she was thinking vaguely. Nothing more articulate. She had not even taken off her hat and coat, but she was too tired to care. She was too tired to care about anything, now. Her weary eyelids closed. A lovely languor was creeping over her body. A delicious stupor was stealing through her brain. She was still sobbing faintly—convulsively—at long intervals—like an exhausted child. The light from the central chandelier shone crudely down upon her. Her hat was pushed absurdly aslant over her golden-brown hair. Her lashes were wet, her cheeks were flushed and tear-stained. Her little slippered feet stuck out ridiculously over the edge of the wooden bed. Softly, insensibly, her slender figure relaxed into lines of utter fatigue. Slowly the sobs were hushed. Harry—she thought. It was less thought than feeling. Olivia was asleep.

THE END

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