should like to hear you say the contrary."
She laughed a low laugh and caught his hand a little tighter.

"That displeases you?"

"No, no, of course not!" Presently she added with an effort:

"There is so much that we must say to each other and we have not the
courage."

"True, all summer we have never talked of what must come after."

"I want you to understand why I go back to it all, why I wish every year
to be separated from you--yes, exactly, from you," she added, as his
fingers contracted with an involuntary movement. "Ben, what has come to
me I never expected would come. I love, but neither that word nor any
other word can express how absolutely I have become yours. When I told
you my life, you did not wonder how difficult it was for me to believe
that such a thing could be possible. But you convinced me, and what has
come to me has come as a miracle. I adore you. All my life has been
lived just for this great love; ah yes, that's what I believe, what I
feel." She leaned swiftly to him and allowed him to catch her to him in
his strong arms. Then slowly disengaging herself, she continued, "You
are a little hurt because I do not cry out what you would not accept,
because I do not say that I would give up everything if you asked it."

"It is only to _hear_ it," he said impulsively.

"But I have often wished it myself," she said slowly. "There's not a day
that I have not wished it--to give up everything and stay by you. Do you
know why? From the longing that's in me now, the first unselfish
longing I have ever had--to sacrifice myself for you in some way,
somehow. It is more than a hunger, it is a need of the soul--of my love
itself. It comes over me sometimes as tears come to my eyes when you are
away, and I say to myself, 'I love him,' and yet, Ben, I shall not, I
shall never give up my career, not now, not for years to come."

"No," he said mechanically.

"We are two great idealists, for that is what you have made me, Ben.
Before I was always laughing, and I believed in nothing. I despised even
what my sacrifice had won. Now, when I am with you, I remain in a
revery, and I am happy--happy with the happiness of things I cannot
understand. To-night, by your side, it seems to me I have never felt the
night before or known the mystery of the silent, faint hours. You have
made me feel the loneliness of the human soul, and that impulse it must
have before these things that are beyond us, that surround us, dominate
us, to cling almost in terror to another soul. You have so completely
made me over that it is as though you had created me yourself. I am
thirty-five. I have known everything else but what you have awakened in
me, and because I have this knowledge and this hunger I can see clearer
what we must do. You and I are a little romanesque, but remember that
even a great love may tire and grow stale, and that is what I won't
have, what must not be." Her voice had risen with the intensity of her
mood. She said more solemnly: "You are afraid of other men, of other
moods of mine--you have no reason. This love which comes to some as the
awakening of life is to me the end of all things. If anything should
wound it or belittle it, I should not survive it."

She continued to speak, in a low unvarying voice. He felt his mind clear
and his doubts dissipate, and impatiently he waited for her to end, to
show her that his weakness of the moment was gone and that he was still
the man of big vision who had awakened her.

"There are people who can put in order their love as they put in order
their house. We are not of that kind, Ben. I am a woman who has lived on
sensations. You, too, are a dreamer and a poet at the bottom. If I
should give up the opera and become to you simply a housewife, if there
was no longer any difficulty in our having each other, you would still
love me--yes, because you are loyal--but the romanticism, the mystery,
the longing we both need would vanish. Oh, I know. Well, you and I, we
are the same. We can only live on a great passion, and to have fierce,
unutterable joys we must suffer also--the suffering of separation. Do
you understand?"

"Yes, I do."

"That is why I shall never give up my career. That is why I can bear
the sadness of leaving you. I want you to be proud of me, Ben. I want
you to think of me as some one whom thousands desire and only you can
have. I want our love to be so intense that every day spent apart is
heavy with the longing for each other; every day together precious
because it will be a day nearer the awful coming of another separation.
Believe me, I am right. I have thought much about it. You have your
diplomatic career and your ambitions. You are proud. I have never asked
you to give that up to follow me. I would not insult you. In January you
will have a leave of absence, and we will be together for a few
wonderful weeks, and in May I shall return here. Nothing will be
changed." She extended her arm to where a faint red point still showed
on the unseen water. "And each night we will wait, as we have waited,
side by side, the coming of our little boat,--_notre p'tit bateau_"

"You are right," he said, placing his lips to her forehead. "I was
jealous. I am sorry. It is over."

"But I, too, am jealous," she said, smiling.

"You?"

"Of course--no one can love without being jealous. Oh, I shall be afraid
of every woman who comes near you. It will be an agony," she said, and
the fire in her eyes brought him more healing happiness than all her
words.

"You are right," he repeated.

He left her with a little pressure of the hand, and walked to the edge
of the veranda. A nervous, sighing breeze had come with the full coming
of the moon, and underneath him he heard the troubled rustle of leaves
in the obscurity, the sifting and drifting of tired, loose things, the
stir of the night which awakened a restless mood in his soul. He had
listened to her as she had proclaimed her love, and yet this love,
without illusions, sharply recalled to him other passions. He remembered
his first love, a boy-and-girl affair, and sharply contrasting it with a
sudden ache to this absence of impulse and illusions, of phrases, vows,
without logic, thrown out in the sweet madness of the moment. Why had
she not cried out something impulsive, promised things that could not
be. Then he realized, standing there in the harvest moonlight, in the
breaking up of summer, that he was no longer a youth, that certain
things could not be lived over, and that, as she had said, he too felt
that this was the great love, the last that he would share; that if it
ended, his youth ended and with his youth all that in him clung to life.

He turned and saw her, chin in the flat of her palm, steadily following
his mood. He had taken but a dozen steps, and yet he had placed a
thousand miles between them. He had almost a feeling of treachery, and
to dispel these new unquiet thoughts he repeated to himself again:

"She is right."

But he did not immediately return. The memory of other loves, faint as
they had been in comparison with this all-absorbing impulse, had yet
given him a certain objective point of view. He saw himself clearly, and
he understood what of pain the future had in store for him.

"How I shall suffer!" he said to himself.

"You are going so far away from me," she said suddenly, warned by some
woman's instinct.

He was startled at the conjunction of her words and his moods. He
returned hastily, and sat down beside her. She took his head in her
hands and looked anxiously into his eyes.

"What is it?" she said. "You are afraid?"

"A little," he said reluctantly.

"Of what--of the months that will come?"

"Of the past."

"What do you mean?" she said, withdrawing a little as though disturbed
by the thought.

"When I am with you I know there is not a corner of your heart that I do
not possess," he began evasively.

"Well?"

"Only it's the past--the habits of the past," he murmured. "I know you
so well, Madeleine, you have need of strength, you don't go on alone.
That is the genius of women like you--to reach out and attach to
themselves men who will strengthen them, compel them on."

"Ah, I understand," she said slowly.

"Yes, that is what I'm afraid of," he said rapidly.

"You are thinking of the artist, not the woman."

"Ah, there is no difference--not to a man who loves," he said
impulsively. "I know how great your love is for me, and I believe in it.
I know nothing will come to efface it. Only you will be lonely, you'll
have your trials and annoyances, days of depression, of doubt, when you
will need some one to restore your faith in yourself, your courage in
your work, and then, I don't say you will love any one else, but you
will need some one near you who loves you, always at your service--"

"If you could only understand me," she said, interrupting him. "Men,
other men, are like actors to me. When I am on the stage, when I am
playing Manon, do you think I see who is playing Des Grieux? Not at all.
He is there, he gives me my _replique_, he excites my nerves, I say a
thousand things under my breath, when I am in his arms I adore him, but
when the curtain goes down, I go off the stage and don't even say good
night to him."

"But he, he doesn't know that."

"Of course not; tenors never do. Well, that is just the way I have
lived, that is just what men have meant to me. They give the _replique_
to my moods, to my needs, and when I have no longer need of them, I go
off tranquilly. That is all there is to it. I take from them what I
want. Of course they will be around me, but they will be nothing to me.
They will be like managers, press-agents, actors. Don't you understand
that?"

"Yes, yes, I understand," he said without sincerity. Then he blurted
out, "I wish you had not said it, all the same."

"Why?"

"I cannot see it as you see it, and besides, you put a doubt in my mind
that I never wish to feel."

"What doubt?"

"Do I really have you, or only a mood of yours?"

"Ben!"

"I know. I know. No, I am not going to think such things. That would be
unworthy of what we have felt." He paused a moment, and when he spoke
again his voice was under control. "Madeleine, remember well what I say
to you now. I shall probably never again speak to you with such absolute
truth, or even acknowledge it to myself. I accept the necessity of
separation. I know all the sufferings it will bring, all the doubts, the
unreasoning jealousies. I am big enough in experience to understand what
you have just suggested to me, but as a man who loves you, Madeleine, I
will never understand it. I know that a dozen men may come into your
life, interest you intensely, even absorb you for a while, and that they
would still mean nothing to you the moment I come. Well, I am
different. A man is different. While you are away, I shall not see a
woman without resentment; I shall not think of any one but you, and if I
did, I would cease to love you."

"But why?"

"Because I cannot share anything of what belongs to you. That is my
nature. There is no use in pretending the contrary. Yours is different,
and I understand why it is so. I have listened to many confidences,
understood many lives that others would not understand. I have always
maintained that it is the natural thing for a human being to love many
times--even that there might he in the same heart a great, overpowering
love and a little one. I still believe it--with my mind. I know it is
so. These are the things we like to analyze in human nature together. I
know it is true, but it is not true for me. No, I would never understand
it in you. I know myself too well, I am jealous of everything of the
past--oh, insanely jealous. I know that no sooner are you gone than I
will be tortured by the most ridiculous doubts. I will see you in the
moonlight all across that endless sea with other men near you. I will
dream of other men with millions, ready to give you everything your eyes
adore. I will imagine men of big minds that will fascinate you. I will
even say to myself that now that you have known what a great love can
mean you will all the more be likely to need it, to seek something to
counterfeit it--"

"Ben, my poor Ben--frightful," she murmured.

"That is how it is. Shall I tell you something else?"

"What?"

"I wish devoutly you had never told me a word of--of the past."

"But how can you say such things? We have been honest with each other.
You yourself--"

"I know, I know, I have no right myself, and yet there it is. It is
something fearful, this madness of possession that comes to me. No, I
have no fear that I will not always be first in your heart, only I
understand the needs, the habits, of your nature. I understand myself
now as I have not before, and that's why I say to you solemnly,
Madeleine, if ever for a moment another man should come into your
life--never, never, let me know."

"But--"

"No, don't say anything that I may remember to torture me. Lie to me."

"I have never lied."

"Madeleine, it is better to be merciful than to tell the truth, and,
after all, what does such a confession mean? It only means that you free
your conscience and that the wound--the ache--remains with the other.
Whatever happens, never tell me. Do you understand?"

This time she made no answer. She even ceased to look at him, her head
dropped back, her arms motionless, one finger only revolving slowly on
the undulating arm of her chair.

"I shall try by all the strength that is in me never to ask that
question," he rushed on. "I know I shall make a hundred vows not to do
so, and I know that the first time I look into your face I shall blurt
it out. Ah, if--if--if it must be so, never let me know, for there are
thoughts I cannot bear now that I've known you." He flung himself at her
side and took her roughly in his arms. "Madeleine, I know what I am
saying. I may tell you the contrary later. I may say it lightly,
pretending it is of no importance. I may beg the truth of you with tears
in my eyes--I may swear to you that nothing but honesty counts between
us, that I can understand, forgive, forget everything. Well, whatever I
say or do, never, never let me know--if you value my happiness, my peace
of mind, my life even!"

She laid her hand on his lips and then on his forehead to calm him,
drawing his head to her shoulder.

"Listen, Ben," she said, gently. "I, the Madeleine Conti who loves you,
am another being. I adore you so that I shall hate all other men, as you
will hate all other women. There will never be the slightest deceit or
infidelity between us. Ask any questions of me at any time. I know there
can be from now on but one answer. Have no fear. Do not tire yourself
in a senseless fever. There is so little time left. I love you."

Never had he heard her voice so deep with sincerity and tenderness, and
yet, as he surrendered to the touch of her soft hands, yielding up all
his doubts, he was conscious of a new alarm creeping into his heart;
and, dissatisfied with what he himself had a moment before implored, in
the breath with which he whispered, "I believe you," he said to himself:

"Does she say that because she believes it or has she begun to lie?"




II


For seven years they lived the same existence, separated sometimes for
three months, occasionally for six, and once because of a trip taken to
South America for nearly a year.

The first time that he joined her, after five months of longing, he
remained a week without crying out the words that were heavy on his
heart. One day she said to him:

"What is there--back of your eyes, hidden away, that you are stifling?"

"You know," he blurted out.

"What?"

"Ah, I have tried not to say it, to live it down. I can't--it's beyond
me. I shall have no peace until it is said."

"Then say it."

He took her face in his two hands and looked into her eyes.

"Since I have been away," he said brutally, "there has been no one else
in your heart? You have been true to me, to our love?"

"I have been true," she answered with a little smile.

He held his eyes on hers a long while, hesitating whether to be silent
or to continue, and then, all at once, convinced, burst into tears and
begged her pardon.

"Oh, I shouldn't have asked it--forgive me."

"Do whatever is easiest for you, my love," she answered. "There is
nothing to forgive. I understand all. I love you for it."

Only she never asked him any questions, and that alarmed him.

The second time report had coupled her name with a Gabriel Lombardi, a
great baritone with whom she was appearing. When he arrived, as soon as
they were alone, he swung her about in his arms and cried in a strangled
voice:

"Swear to me that you have been faithful."

"I swear."

"Gabriel Lombardi"?

"I can't abide him".

"Ah, if I had never told you to lie to me--fool that I was."

Then she said calmly, with that deep conviction which always moved him:
"Ben, when you asked me that, I told you I would never lie. I have told
you the truth. No man has ever had the pressure of my fingers, and no
man ever will."

So intense had been his emotion that he had almost a paroxysm. When he
opened his eyes he found her face wet with tears.

"Ah, Madeleine," he said, "I am brutal with you. I cannot help it."

"I would not have you love me differently," she said gently, and through
her tears he seemed to see a faint, elusive smile, that was gone quickly
if it was ever there at all.

Another time, he said to himself: "No, I will say nothing. She will come
to me herself, put her arms around me, and tell me with a smile that no
other thought has been in her heart all this while. That's it. If I wait
she will make the move, she will make the move each time--and that will
be much better."

He waited three days, but she made no allusion. He waited another, and
then he said lightly:

"You see, I am reforming."

"How so?"

"Why, I don't ask foolish questions any more."

"That's so."

"Still--"

"Well?" she said, looking up.

"Still, you might have guessed what I wanted," he answered, a little
hurt.

She rose quickly and came lightly to him, putting her hand on his
shoulder.

"Is that what you wish?" she said.

"Yes."

She repeated slowly her protestations and when she had ended, said,
"Take me in your arms--hurt me."

"Now she will understand," he thought; "the next time she will not
wait."

But each time, though he martyrized his soul in patience, he was forced
to bring up the question that would not let him rest.

He could not understand why she did not save him this useless agony.
Sometimes when he wanted to find an excuse he said to himself it was
because she felt humiliated that he should still doubt. At other times,
he stumbled on explanations that terrified him. Then he remembered with
bitterness the promise that he had exacted from her, a promise that,
instead of bringing him peace, had left only an endless torment, and
forgetting all his protestations he would cry to himself, in a cold
perspiration:

"Ah, if she is really lying, how can I ever be sure?"




III


In the eighth year, Madeleine Conti retired from the stage and announced
her marriage. After five years of complete happiness she was taken
suddenly ill, as the result of exposure to a drenching storm. One
afternoon, as he waited by her bedside, talking in broken tones of all
that they had been to each other, he said to her in a voice that he
tried nervously to school to quietness:

"Madeleine, you know that our life together has been without the
slightest shadow from the first. You know we have proved to each other
how immense our love has been. In all these years I have grown in
maturity and understanding. I regret only one thing, and I have
regretted it bitterly, every day--that I once asked you, if--if ever for
a moment another man came into your life to hide it from me, to tell me
a lie. It was a great mistake. I have never ceased to regret it. Our
love has been so above all worldly things that there ought not to be the
slightest concealment between us. I release you from that promise. Tell
me now the truth. It will mean nothing to me. During the eight years
when we were separated there were--there must have been times, times of
loneliness, of weakness, when other men came into your life. Weren't
there?"

She turned and looked at him steadily, her large eyes seeming larger and
more brilliant from the heightened fever of her cheeks. Then she made a
little negative sign of her head, still looking at him.

"No, never."

"You don't understand, Madeleine," he said, dissatisfied, "or you are
still thinking of what I said to you there in Etretat. That was thirteen
years ago. Then I had just begun to love you, I feared for the future,
for everything. Now I have tested you, and I have never had a doubt. I
know the difference between the flesh and the spirit. I know your two
selves; I know how impossible it would have been otherwise. Now you can
tell me."

"There is nothing--to tell," she said slowly.

"I expected that you would have other men who loved you about you," he
said, feverishly. "I knew it would be so. I swear to you I expected it.
I know why you continue to deny it. It's for my sake, isn't it? I love
you for it. But, believe me, in such a moment there ought nothing to
stand between us. Madeleine, Madeleine, I beg you, tell me the truth."

She continued to gaze at him fixedly, without turning away her great
eyes, as forgetting himself, he rushed on:

"Yes, let me know the truth--that will be nothing now. Besides, I have
guessed it. Only I must know one way or the other. All these years I
have lived in doubt. You see what it means to me. You must understand
what is due me after all our life together. Madeleine, did you lie to
me?"

"No."

"Listen," he said, desperately. "You never asked me the same
question--why, I never understood--but if you had questioned me I could
not have answered truthfully what you did. There, you see, there is no
longer the slightest reason why you should not speak the truth."

She half closed her eyes--wearily.

"I have told--the truth."

"Ah, I can't believe it," he cried, carried away. "Oh, cursed day when I
told you what I did. It's that which tortures me. You adore me--you
don't wish to hurt me, to leave a wound behind, but I swear to you if
you told me the truth I should feel a great weight taken from my heart,
a weight that has been here all these years. I should know that every
corner of your soul had been shown to me, nothing withheld. I should
know absolutely, Madeleine, believe me, when I tell you this, when I
tell you I must know. Every day of my life I have paid the penalty, I
have suffered the doubts of the damned, I have never known an hour's
peace! I beg you, I implore you, only let me know the truth; the
truth--I must know the truth!"

He stopped suddenly, trembling all over, and held out his hands to her,
his face lashed with suffering.

"I have not lied," she said slowly, after a long study. She raised her
eyes, feebly made the sign of the cross, and whispered, "I swear it."

Then he no longer held in his tears. He dropped his head, and his body
shook with sobs, while from time to time he repeated, "Thank God, thank
God."




IV


The next day Madeleine Conti had a sudden turn for the worse, which
surprised the attendants. Doctor Kimball, the American, doctor, and Père
François, who had administered the last rites, were walking together in
the little formal garden, where the sun flung short, brilliant shadows
of scattered foliage about them.

"She was an extraordinary artist and her life was more extraordinary,"
said Dr. Kimball. "I heard her début at the Opéra Comique. For ten years
her name was the gossip of all Europe. Then all at once she meets a man
whom no one knows, falls in love, and is transformed. These women are
really extraordinary examples of hysteria. Each time I know one it makes
me understand the scientific phenomenon of Mary Magdalene. It is really
a case of nerve reaction. The moral fever that is the fiercest burns
itself out the quickest and seems to leave no trace behind. In this case
love came also as a religious conversion. I should say the phenomena
were identical."

"She was happy," said the curé, turning to go.

"Yes, it was a great romance."

"A rare one. She adored him. Love is a tide that cleanses all."

"Yet she was of the stage up to the last. You know she would not have
her husband in the room at the end."

"She had a great heart," said the curé quietly. "She wished to spare
him that suffering."

"She had an extraordinary will," said the doctor, glancing at him
quickly. He added, tentatively: "She asked two questions that were
curious enough."

"Indeed," said the curé, lingering a moment with his hand on the gate.

"She wanted to know whether persons in a delirium talked of the past and
if after death the face returned to its calm."

"What did you say to her about the effects of delirium?" said the curé
with his blank face.

"That it was a point difficult to decide," said the doctor slowly.
"Undoubtedly, in a delirium, everything is mixed, the real and the
imagined, the memory and the fantasy, actual experience and the inner
dream-life of the mind which is so difficult to classify. It was after
that, that she made her husband promise to see her only when she was
conscious and to remain away at the last."

"It is easily understood," said the curé quietly, without change of
expression on his face that held the secrets of a thousand
confessionals. "As you say, for ten years she had lived a different
life. She was afraid that in her delirium some reference to that time
might wound unnecessarily the man who had made over her life. She had a
great courage. Peace be with her soul."

"Still,"--Doctor Kimball hesitated, as though considering the phrasing
of a delicate question; but Father François, making a little amical sign
of adieu, passed out of the garden, and for a moment his blank face was
illumined by one of those rare smiles, such as one sees on the faces of
holy men; smiles that seem in perfect faith to look upon the mysteries
of the world to come.




EVEN THREES




I

Ever since the historic day when a visiting clergyman accomplished the
feat of pulling a ball from the tenth tee at an angle of two hundred and
twenty-five degrees into the river that is the rightful receptacle for
the eighth tee, the Stockbridge golf-course has had seventeen out of the
eighteen holes that are punctuated with possible water hazards. The
charming course itself lies in the flat of the sunken meadows which the
Housatonic, in the few thousand years which are necessary for the proper
preparation of a golf-course, has obligingly eaten out of the high,
accompanying bluffs. The river, which goes wriggling on its way as
though convulsed with merriment, is garnished with luxurious elms and
willows, which occasionally deflect to the difficult putting-greens the
random slices of certain notorious amateurs.

From the spectacular bluffs of the educated village of Stockbridge
nothing can be imagined more charming than the panorama that the course
presents on a busy day. Across the soft, green stretches, diminutive
caddies may be seen scampering with long buckling-nets, while from the
river-banks numerous recklessly exposed legs wave in the air as the more
socially presentable portions hang frantically over the swirling
current. Occasionally an enthusiastic golfer, driving from the eighth or
ninth tees, may be seen to start immediately in headlong pursuit of a
diverted ball, the swing of the club and the intuitive leap of the legs
forward forming so continuous a movement that the main purpose of the
game often becomes obscured to the mere spectator. Nearer, in the
numerous languid swales that nature has generously provided to protect
the interests of the manufacturers, or in the rippling patches of unmown
grass, that in the later hours will be populated by enthusiastic
caddies, desperate groups linger in botanizing attitudes.

Every morning lawyers who are neglecting their clients, doctors who have
forgotten their patients, business men who have sacrificed their
affairs, even ministers of the gospel who have forsaken their churches,
gather in the noisy dressing-room and listen with servile attention