wants to marry me now, as a matter of fact; and I have really no idea if I would marry him in case he did. It is more than twenty years since I spoke to him—oh, I spoke to him out of a taxi-cab the other day, but he did not answer—and I have no idea what he is like. In twenty years one may become an entirely different person. However, that is all my business, and no one else's. Now, if you have finished, let us take a stroll in the garden before your carriage comes round." [Pg 53] "I ask then a favor of you," he said. "And what is that?" "That you be yourself just for this stroll: that you be as you used to be when we met that summer at Zermatt." Dodo was rather touched: she was also relieved that the favor was one so easy to grant. She took his arm as they left the dining-room and came out into the brilliant sunshine. "That is dear of you to remember Zermatt," she said. "Oh, Waldenech, think of those great mountains still standing there in their silly rows with their noses in the air. How frightfully fatiguing! And they all used to look as if they were cuts with each other, and there they'll be a thousand years hence, not having changed in the least. But I'm not sure we[Pg 54] don't have the better time scampering about for a few years, and running in and out like mice, though we get uglier and older every day. Look, there is poor John Sturgis coming towards us: let us quickly go in the opposite direction. Ah, he has seen us!—Dear John, Nadine was looking for you, I believe. I think she expected you to read something to her after breakfast about Goths or Gothic architecture. Or was it Bishop Algie you were talking to last night about cathedrals? One or the other, I am sure. He said he so much enjoyed his talk with you." [Pg 54] Waldenech felt that Dodo was behaving exactly as she used to behave at Zermatt. Somehow in his sluggish and alcoholic soul there rose vibrations like those he had felt then. "Talk to him or me, it does not matter," he said in German to her, "but talk like that. That is what I want." Dodo gave him one glance of extraordinary meaning. This little muttered speech strangely reminded her of the pæan in the thrush's song at dawn. It recalled a poignancy of emotion that belonged to days long past, but the same poignancy of feeling was hers still. She could easily feel and habitually felt, in spite of her
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