The Riddle and Other Stories/Miss Duveen

by Walter de la Mare

 

MISS DUVEEN

I SELDOM had the company of children in my grandmother's house beside the river Wandle. The house was old and ugly. But its river was lovely and youthful though it had flowed for ever, it seemed, between its green banks of osier and alder. So it was no great misfortune perhaps that I heard more talking of its waters than of any human tongue. For my grandmother found no particular pleasure in my company. How should she? My father and mother had married (and died) against her will, and there was nothing in me of those charms which, in fiction at any rate, swiftly soften a superannuated heart.

Nor did I pine for her company either. I kept out of it as much as possible.

It so happened that she was accustomed to sit with her back to the window of the room which she usually occupied, her grey old indifferent face looking inwards. Whenever necessary, I would steal close up under it, and if I could see there her large faded amethyst velvet cap I knew I was safe from interruption. Sometimes I would take a slice or two of currant bread or (if I could get it) a jam tart or a cheese cake, and eat it under a twisted old damson tree or beside the running water. And if I conversed with anybody, it would be with myself or with my small victims of the chase.

Not that I was an exceptionally cruel boy; though if I had lived on for many years in this primitive and companionless fashion, I should surely have become an idiot. As a matter of fact, I was unaware even that I was ridiculously old-fashioned—manners, clothes, notions, everything. My grandmother never troubled to tell me so, nor did she care. And the servants were a race apart. So I was left pretty much to my own devices. What wonder, then, if I at first accepted with genuine avidity the acquaintanceship of our remarkable neighbour, Miss Duveen?

It had been, indeed, quite an advent in our uneventful routine when that somewhat dubious household moved into Willowlea, a brown brick edifice, even uglier than our own, which had been long vacant, and whose sloping garden confronted ours across he Wandle. My grandmother, on her part, at once discovered that any kind of intimacy with its inmates was not much to be desired. While I, on mine, was compelled to resign myself to the loss of the Willowlea garden as a kind of No Man's Land or Tom Tiddler's ground.

I got to know Miss Duveen by sight long before we actually became friends. I used frequently to watch her wandering in her long garden. And even then I noticed how odd were her methods of gardening. She would dig up a root or carry off a potted plant from one to another overgrown bed with an almost animal-like resolution; and a few minutes afterwards I would see her restoring it to the place from which it had come. Now and again she would stand perfectly still, like a scarecrow, as if she had completely forgotten what she was at.

Miss Coppin, too, I descried sometimes. But I never more than glanced at her, for fear that even at that distance the too fixed attention of my eyes might bring hers to bear upon me. She was a smallish woman, inclined to be fat, and with a peculiar waddling gait. She invariably appeared to be angry with Miss Duveen, and would talk to her as one might talk to a post. I did not know, indeed, until one day Miss Duveen waved her handkerchief in my direction that I had been observed from Willowlea at all. Once or twice after that, I fancied, she called me; at least her lips moved; but I could not distinguish what she said. And I was naturally a little backward in making new friends. Still I grew accustomed to looking out for her and remember distinctly how first we met.

It was raining, the raindrops falling softly into the unrippled water, making their great circles, and tapping on the motionless leaves above my head where I sat in shelter on the bank. But the sun was shining whitely from behind a thin fleece of cloud, when Miss Duveen suddenly peeped in at me out of the greenery, the thin silver light upon her face, and eyed me sitting there, for all the world as if she were a blackbird and I a snail. I scrambled up hastily with the intention of retreating into my own domain, but the peculiar grimace she made at me fixed me where I was.

“Ah,” she said, with a little masculine laugh, “So this is the young gentleman, the bold, gallant young gentleman. And what might be his name?”

I replied rather distantly that my name was Arthur.

“Arthur, to be sure!” she repeated with extraordinary geniality, and again, “Arthur,” as if in the strictest confidence.

“I know you, Arthur, very well indeed. I have looked, I have watched; and now, please God, we need never be estranged.” And she tapped her brow and breast, making the Sign of the Cross with her lean, bluish forefinger.

“What is a little brawling brook,” she went on, “to friends like you and me?” She gathered up her tiny countenance once more into an incredible grimace of friendliness; and I smiled as amicably as I could in return. There was a pause in this one-sided conversation. She seemed to be listening, and her lips moved, though I caught no sound. In my uneasiness I was just about to turn stealthily away, when she poked forward again.

“Yes, yes, I know you quite intimately, Arthur. We have met here.” She tapped her rounded forehead. “You might not suppose it, too; but I have eyes like a lynx. It is no exaggeration, I assure you—I assure everybody. And now what friends we will be! At times,” she stepped out of her hiding-place and stood in curious dignity beside the water, her hands folded in front of her on her black pleated silk apron—“at times, dear child, I long for company—earthly company.” She glanced furtively about her. “But I must restrain my longings; and you will, of course, understand that I do not complain. He knows best. And my dear cousin, Miss Coppin—she too knows best. She does not consider too much companionship expedient for me.” She glanced in some perplexity into the smoothly swirling water.

“I, you know,” she said suddenly, raising her little piercing eyes to mine, “I am Miss Duveen, that's not, they say, quite the thing here.” She tapped her small forehead again beneath its two sleek curves of greying hair, and made a long narrow mouth at me. “Though, of course,” she added, “we do not tell her so. No!”

And I, too, nodded my head in instinctive and absorbed imitation. Miss Duveen laughed gaily. “He understands, he understands!” she cried, as if to many listeners. “Oh, what a joy it is in this world, Arthur, to be understood. Now tell me,” she continued with immense nicety, “tell me, how's your dear mamma?”

I shook my head.

“Ah,” she cried, “I see, I see; Arthur has no mamma. We will not refer to it. No father, either?”

I shook my head again and, standing perfectly still, stared at my new acquaintance with vacuous curiosity. She gazed at me with equal concentration, as if she were endeavouring to keep the very thought of my presence in her mind.

“It is sad to have no father,” she continued rapidly, half closing her eyes; “no head, no guide, no stay, no stronghold; but we have, O yes, we have another father, dear child, another father—eh? … Where … Where?”

She very softly raised her finger. “On high,” she whispered, with extraordinary intensity.

“But just now,” she added cheerfully, hugging her mittened hands together, “we are not talking of Him; we are talking of ourselves, just you and me. So cosy; so secret! And it's a grandmother? I thought so, I thought so, a grandmother! O yes, I can peep between the curtains, though they do lock the door. A grandmother—I thought so; that very droll old lady! Such fine clothes! Such a presence, oh yes! A grandmother.” She poked out her chin and laughed confidentially.

“And the long, bony creature, all rub and double”—she jogged briskly with her elbows, “who's that?”

“Mrs. Pridgett,” I said.

“There, there,” she whispered breathlessly, gazing widely about her. “Think of that! He knows; He understands. How firm, how manly, how undaunted! … One t?'

I shook my head dubiously.

“Why should he?” she cried scornfully. But between ourselves, Arthur, that is a thing we must learn, and never mind the headache. We cannot, of course, know everything. Even Miss Coppin does not know everything—” she leaned forward with intense earnestness—“though I don't tell her so. We must try to learn all we can; and at once. One thing, dear child, you may be astonished to hear, I learned only yesterday, and that is how exceedingly sad life is.”

She leaned her chin upon her narrow bosom pursing her lips. “And yet you know they say very little about it.They don't mention it. Every moment, every hour, every day, every year—one, two, three, four, five, seven, ten,” she paused, frowned, “and so on. Sadder and sadder. Why? why? It's strange, but oh, so true. You really can have no notion, child, how very sad I am myself at times. In the evening, when they all gather together, in their white raiment, up and up and up, I sit on the garden seat, on Miss Coppin's garden seat, and precisely in the middle (you'll be kind enough to remember that?) and my thoughts make me sad.” She narrowed her eyes and shoulders. “Yes and frightened, my child! Why must I be so guarded? One angel—the greatest fool could see the wisdom of that. But billions!—with their fixed eyes shining, so very boldly, on me. I never prayed for so many, dear friend. And we pray for a good many odd things, you and I, I'll be bound. But, there, you see, poor Miss Duveen's on her theology again—scamper, scamper, scamper. In the congregations of the wicked we must be cautious! … Mrs. Partridge and grandmamma, so nice, so nice; but even that, too, a little sad, eh?” She leaned her head questioningly, like a starving bird in the snow.

I smiled, not knowing what else she expected of me; and her face became instantly grave and set.

“He's right; perfectly right. We must speak evil of, no-one. No-one. We must shut our mouths. We——” She stopped suddenly and, taking a step leaned over the water towards me, with eyebrows raised high above her tiny face. “S—sh!” she whispered, laying a long forefinger on her lips. “Eavesdroppers!” she smoothed her skirts, straightened her cap, and left me; only a moment after to poke out her head at me again from between the leafy bushes. “An assignation, no!” she said firmly, then gathered her poor, cheerful, forlorn, crooked, lovable face into a most wonderful contraction at me, that assuredly meant—“But, yes!”

Indeed it was an assignation, the first of how many, and how few. Sometimes Miss Duveen would sit beside me, apparently so lost in thought that I was clean forgotten. And yet I half fancied it was often nothing but feigning. Once she stared me blankly out of countenance when I ventured to take the initiative and to call out Good-morning to her across the water. On this occasion she completed my consternation with a sudden, angry grimace—contempt, jealousy, outrage.

But often we met like old friends and talked. It was a novel but not always welcome diversion for me in the long shady garden that was my privy universe. Where our alders met, mingling their branches across the flowing water, and the kingfisher might be seen—there was our usual tryst. But, occasionally, at her invitation, I would venture across the stepping-stones into her demesne; and occasionally, but very seldom indeed, she would venture into mine. How plainly I see her, tip-toeing from stone to stone, in an extraordinary concentration of mind—her mulberry petticoats, her white stockings, her loose spring-side boots. And when at last she stood beside me, her mittened hand on her breast, she would laugh on in a kind of paroxysm until the tears stood in her eyes, and she grew faint with breathlessness.

“In all danger,” she told me once, “I hold my breath and shut my eyes. And if I could tell you of every danger, I think, perhaps, you would understand——dear Miss Coppin. …” I did not, and yet, perhaps, very vaguely I did see the connection in this rambling statement.

Like most children, I liked best to hear Miss Duveen talk about her own childhood. I contrived somehow to discover that if we sat near flowers or under boughs in blossom, her talk would generally steal round to that. Then she would chatter on and on: of the white sunny rambling house, somewhere, nowhere—it saddened and confused her if I asked where—in which she had spent her first happy years; where her father used to ride on a black horse; and her mother to walk with her in the garden in a crinolined gown and a locket with the painted miniature of a “divine” nobleman inside it. How very far away these pictures seemed!

It was as if she herself had shrunken back into this distant past, and was babbling on like a child again, already a little isolated by her tiny infirmity.

“That was before——” she would begin to explain precisely, and then a crisscross many-wrinkled frown would net her rounded forehead, and cloud her eyes. Time might baffle her, but then, time often baffled me too. Any talk about her mother usually reminded her of an elder sister, Caroline. “My sister, Caroline,” she would repeat as if by rote, “you may not be aware, Arthur, was afterwards Mrs. Bute. So charming, so exquisite, so accomplished. And Colonel Bute—an officer and a gentleman, I grant. And yet … But no! My dear sister was not happy. And so it was no doubt a blessing in disguise that by an unfortunate accident she was found drowned. In a lake, you will understand, not a mere shallow noisy brook. This is one of my private sorrows, which, of course, your grandmamma would be horrified to hear—horrified; and which, of course, Partridge has not the privilege of birth even to be informed of—our secret, dear child—with all her beautiful hair, and her elegant feet, and her eyes no more ajar than this; but blue, blue as the forget-me-not. When the time comes, Miss Coppin will close my own eyes, I hope and trust. Death, dear, dear child, I know they say is only sleeping. Yet I hope and trust that. To be sleeping wide awake; oh no!” She abruptly turned her small untidy head away.

“But didn't they shut hers?” I enquired.

Miss Duveen ignored the question. “I am not uttering one word of blame,” she went on rapidly; “I am perfectly aware that such things confuse me. Miss Coppin tells me not to think. She tells me that I can have no opinions worth the mention. She says, 'Shut up your mouth.' I must keep silence then. All that I am merely trying to express to you, Arthur, knowing you will regard it as sacred between us—all I am expressing is that my dear sister, Caroline, was a gifted and beautiful creature with not a shadow or vestige or tinge or taint of confusion in her mind. Nothing. And yet, when they dragged her out of the water and laid her there on the bank, looking—" She stooped herself double in a sudden dreadful fit of gasping, and I feared for an instant she was about to die.

“No, no, no,” she cried, rocking herself to and fro, “you shall not paint such a picture in his young, innocent mind. You shall not.”

I sat on my stone, watching her, feeling excessively uncomfortable. “But what did she look like, Miss Duveen?” I pressed forward to ask at last.

“No, no, no,” she cried again. “Cast him out, cast him out. Retro Sathanas! We must not even ask to understand. My father and my dear mother, I do not doubt, have spoken for Caroline. Even I, if I must be called on, will strive to collect my thoughts. And that is precisely where a friend, you, Arthur, would be so precious; to know that you too, in your innocence, will be helping me to collect my thoughts on that day, to save our dear Caroline from Everlasting Anger. That, that! Oh dear: oh dear!” She turned on me a face I should scarcely have recognised, lifted herself trembling to her feet, and hurried away.

Sometimes it was not Miss Duveen that was a child again, but I that had grown up. “Had now you been your handsome father—and I see him, O, so plainly, dear child—had you been your father, then I must, of course, have kept to the house … I must have; it is a rule of conduct, and everything depends on them. Where would Society be else?” she cried, with an unanswerable blaze of intelligence. “I find, too, dear Arthur, that they increase—the rules increase. I try to remember them. My dear cousin, Miss Coppin, knows them all. But I—I think sometimes one's memory is a little treacherous. And then it must vex people.”

She gazed penetratinglv at me for an answer that did not come. Mute as a fish though I might be, I suppose it was something of a comfort to her to talk to me.

And to suppose that is my one small crumb of comfort when I reflect on the kind of friendship I managed to bestow.

I actually met Miss Coppin once; but we did not speak. I had, in fact, gone to tea with Miss Duveen. The project had been discussed as “quite, quite impossible, dear child” for weeks. “You must never mention it again.” As a matter of fact I had never mentioned it at all. But one day—possibly when their charge had been less difficult and exacting, one day Miss Coppin and her gaunt maid-servant and companion really did go out together, leaving Miss Duveen alone in Willowlea. It was the crowning opportunity of our friendship. The moment I espied her issuing from the house, I guessed her errand. She came hastening down to the waterside, attired in clothes of a colour and fashion I had never seen her wearing before, her dark eyes shining in her head, her hands trembling with excitement.

It was a still, warm afternoon, with Sweet Williams and linden and stocks scenting the air, when, with some little trepidation, I must confess, I followed her in formal dignity up the unfamiliar path towards the house. I know not which of our hearts beat the quicker, whose eyes cast the most furtive glances about us. My friend's cheeks were brightest mauve. She wore a large silver locket on a ribbon; and I followed her up the faded green stairs, beneath the dark pictures, to her small, stuffy bedroom under the roof. We humans, they say, are enveloped in a kind of aura; to which the vast majority of us are certainly entirely insensitive. Nevertheless, there was an air, an atmosphere as of the smell of pears in this small attic room—well, every bird, I suppose, haunts with its presence its customary cage.

“This,” she said, acknowledging the bed, the looking-glass, the deal washstand, “this, dear child, you will pardon; in fact, you will not see. How could we sit, friends as we are, in the congregation of strangers?”

I hardly know why, but that favourite word of Miss Duveen's, “congregation,” brought up before me with extreme aversion all the hostile hardness and suspicion concentrated in Miss Coppin and Ann. I stared at the queer tea things in a vain effort not to be aware of the rest of Miss Duveen's private belongings.

Somehow or other she had managed to procure for me a bun—a saffron bun. There was a dish of a gray pudding and a plate of raspberries that I could not help suspecting (and, I am ashamed to say, with aggrieved astonishment), she must have herself gathered that morning from my grandmother's canes. We did not talk very much. Her heart gave her pain. And her face showed how hot and absorbed and dismayed she was over her foolhardy entertainment. But I sipped my milk and water, sitting on a black bandbox, and she on an old cane chair. And we were almost formal and distant to one another, with little smiles and curtseys over our cups, and polished agreement about the weather.

“And you'll strive not to be sick, dear child,” she implored me suddenly, while I was nibbling my way slowly through the bun. But it was not until rumours of the tremendous fact of Miss Coppin's early and unforeseen return had been borne in on us that Miss Duveen lost all presence of mind. She burst into tears; seized and kissed repeatedly my sticky hands; implored me to be discreet; implored me to be gone; implored me to retain her in my affections, “as you love your poor dear mother, Arthur,” and I left her on her knees, her locket pressed to her bosom.

Miss Coppin was, I think, unusually astonished to see a small strange boy walk softly past her bedroom door, within which she sat, with purple face, her hat strings dangling, taking off her boots. Ann, I am thankful to say, I did not encounter. But when I was safely out in the garden in the afternoon sunshine, the boldness and the romance of this sally completely deserted me. I ran like a hare down the alien path, leapt from stone to stone across the river; nor paused in my flight until I was safe in my own bedroom, and had—how odd is childhood!—washed my face and entirely changed my clothes.

My grandmother, when I appeared at her tea-table, glanced at me now and again rather profoundly and inquisitively, but the actual question hovering in her mind remained unuttered.

It was many days before we met again, my friend and I. She had, I gathered from many mysterious nods and shrugs, been more or less confined to her bedroom ever since our escapade, and looked dulled and anxious; her small face was even a little more vacant in repose than usual. Even this meeting, too, was full of alarms; for in the midst of our talk, by mere chance or caprice, my grandmother took a walk in the garden that afternoon, and discovered us under our damson tree. She bowed in her dignified, aged way. And Miss Duveen, with cheeks and forehead the colour of her petticoat, elaborately curtseyed.

“Beautiful, very beautiful weather,” said my grandmother.

“It is, indeed,” said my friend, fixedly.

“I trust you are keeping pretty well?”

“As far, Ma'am, as God and a little weakness of the heart permit,” said Miss Duveen. “He knows all,” she added, firmly

My grandmother stood silent a moment.

“Indeed he does,” she replied politely.

“And that's the difficulty,” ventured Miss Duveen, in her odd, furtive, friendly fashion.

My grandmother opened her eyes, smiled pleasantly, paused, glanced remotely at me, and, with another exchange of courtesies, Miss Duveen and I were left alone once more. But it was a grave and saddened friend I now sat beside.

“You see, Arthur, all bad things, we know, are best for us. Motives included. That comforts me. But my heart is sadly fluttered. Not that I fear or would shun society; but perhaps your grandmother … I never had the power to treat my fellow-creatures as if they were stocks and stones. And the effort not to notice it distresses me. A little hartshorn might relieve the palpitation, of course; but Miss Coppin keeps all keys. It is this shouting that makes civility such a task.”

“This shouting”—very faintly then I caught her meaning, but I was in no mood to sympathise. My grandmother's one round-eyed expressionless glance at me had been singularly disconcerting. And it was only apprehension of her questions that kept me from beating a retreat. So we sat on, Miss Duveen and I, in the shade, the day drawing towards evening, and presently we walked down to the water-side, and under the colours of sunset I flung in my crumbs to the minnows, as she talked ceaselessly on.

“And yet,” she concluded, after how involved a monologue, “and yet, Arthur, I feel it is for your forgiveness I should be pleading. So much to do; such an arch of beautiful things might have been my gift to you. It is here,” she said, touching her forehead. “I do not think, perhaps, that all I might say would be for your good. I must be silent and discreet about much. I must not provoke”—she lifted her mittened finger, and raised her eyes—“Them,” she said gravely. “I am tempted, terrified, persecuted. Whispering, wrangling, shouting: the flesh is a grievous burden, Arthur; I long for peace. Only to flee away and be at rest! But,” she nodded, and glanced over her shoulder, “about much—great trials, sad entanglements, about much the Others say, I must keep silence. It would only alarm your innocence. And that I will never, never do. Your father, a noble, gallant gentleman of the world, would have understood my difficulties. But he is dead. … Whatever that may mean. I have repeated it so often when Miss Coppin thought that I was not—dead, dead, dead, dead—but I don't think that even now I grasp the meaning of the word. Of you, dear child, I will never say it. You have been life itself to me.”

How generously, how tenderly she smiled on me from her perplexed, sorrowful eyes.

“You have all the world before you, all the world. How splendid it is to be a Man. For my part I have sometimes thought, though they do not of course intend to injure me, yet I fancy, sometimes, they have grudged me my part in it a little. Though God forbid but Heaven's best.”

She raised that peering, dark, remote gaze to my face, and her head was trembling again. “They are saying now to one another—'Where is she? where is she? It's nearly dark, m'm, where is she?' O, Arthur, but there shall be no night there. We must believe it, we must—in spite, dear friend, of a weak horror of glare. My cousin, Miss Coppin, does not approve of my wishes. Gas, gas, gas, all over the house, and when it is not singing, it roars. You would suppose I might be trusted with but just my own one bracket. But no—. Ann, I think—indeed I fear, sometimes, has no——” She started violently and shook her tiny head. “When I am gone,” she continued disjointedly, “you will be prudent, cautious, dear child? Consult only your heart about me. Older you must be … Yes, certainly, he must be older,” she repeated vaguely. “Everything goes on and on—and round!” She seemed astonished, as if at a sudden radiance cast on an old and protracted perplexity.

“About your soul, dear child,” she said to me once, touching my hand, “I have never spoken. Perhaps it was one of my first duties to keep on speaking to you about your soul. I mention it now in case they should rebuke me when I make my appearance there. It is a burden; and I have so many burdens, as well as pain. And at times I cannot think very far. I see the thought; but it won't alter. It comes back, just like a sheep—'Ba-aa-ah' like that!” She burst out laughing, twisting her head to look at me the while. “Miss Coppin, of course, has no difficulty; gentlemen have no difficulty. And this shall be the occasion of another of our little confidences. We are discreet?” She bent her head and scanned my face. “Here,” she tapped her bosom, “I bear his image. My only dear one's. And if you would kindly turn your head, dear child, perhaps I could pull him out.”

It was the miniature of a young, languid, fastidious-looking officer which she showed me—threaded on dingy tape, in its tarnished locket.

“Miss Coppin, in great generosity, has left me this,” she said, polishing the glass on her knee, “though I am forbidden to wear it. For you see, Arthur, it is a duty not to brood on the past, and even perhaps, indelicate. Some day, it may be, you, too, will love a gentle girl. I beseech you, keep your heart pure and true. This one could not. Not a single word of blame escapes me. I own to my Maker, never to anyone else, it has not eased my little difficulty. But it is not for us to judge. Whose office is that, eh?” And again, that lean small fore-finger, beneath an indescribable grimace, pointed gently, deliberately, from her lap upward. “Pray, pray,” she added, very violently, “pray, till the blood streams down your face! Pray, but rebuke not. They all whisper about it. Among themselves,” she added, peering out beneath and between the interlacing branches. “But I simulate inattention. I simulate …” The very phrase seemed to have hopelessly confused her. Again, as so often now, that glassy fear came into her eyes; her foot tapped on the gravel.

“Arthur,” she cried suddenly, taking my hand tightly in her lap, “you have been my refuge in a time of trouble. You will never know it, child. My refuge, and my peace. We shall seldom meet now. All are opposed. They repeat it in their looks. The Autumn will divide us; and then, Winter; but, I think, no Spring. It is so, Arthur, there is a stir; and then they will hunt me out.” Her eyes gleamed again, far and small and black in the dusky pallor of her face.

It was indeed already Autumn; the air golden and still. The leaves were beginning to fall. The late fruits were well-nigh over. Robins and tits seemed our only birds now. Rain came in floods. The Wandle took sound and volume, sweeping deep above our stepping stones. Very seldom after this I even so much as saw our neighbour. I chanced on her one still afternoon, standing fixedly by the brawling stream, in a rusty-looking old-fashioned cloak, her scanty hair pushed high up on her forehead.

She stared at me for a moment or two, and then, with a scared look over her shoulder, threw me a little letter, shaped like a cock-hat, and weighted with a pebble stone, across the stream. She whispered earnestly and rapidly at me over the water. But I could not catch a single word she said, and failed to decipher her close spidery handwriting. No doubt I was too shy, or too ashamed, or in a vague fashion too loyal, to show it to my grandmother. It is not now a flattering keepsake. I called out loudly I must go in; and still see her gazing after me, with a puzzled, mournful expression on the face peering out of the cloak.

Even after that we sometimes waved to one another across the water, but never if by hiding myself I could evade her in time. The distance seemed to confuse her, and quite silenced me. I began to see we were ridiculous friends, especially as she came now in ever dingier and absurder clothes. She even looked hungry, and not quite clean, as well as ill; and she talked more to her phantoms than to me when once we met.

The first ice was in the garden. The trees stood bare beneath a pale blue sunny sky, and I was standing at the window, looking out at the hoar-frost, when my grandmother told me that it was unlikely that I should ever see our neighbour again.

I stood where I was, without turning round, staring out of the window at the motionless ghostly trees, and the few birds in forlorn unease.

“Is she dead, then?” I enquired.

“I am told,” was the reply, “that her friends have been compelled to have her put away. No doubt, it was the proper course. It should have been done earlier. But it is not our affair, you are to understand. And, poor creature, perhaps death would have been a happier, a more merciful release. She was sadly afflicted.”

I said nothing, and continued to stare out of the window.

But I know now that the news, in spite of a vague sorrow, greatly relieved me. I should be at ease in the garden again, came the thought—no longer fear to look ridiculous, and grow hot when our neighbour was mentioned, or be saddled with her company beside the stream.