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I saw him first in the Kursaal at Clareux.

He arrived at the moment when Herr Muller, the first violin and director of the orchestra, had paused to give his head a toss before attacking Wienawski’s sonata. The place was crowded. Very tall and very pale, and wearing a black plush hat that was rather too small for him, he searched shyly for a vacant chair. In one hand he clutched a pair of black kid gloves; the other held a white paper bag that might have contained half a dozen very fragile eggs. He was both deprecating and dignified. Obviously he did not desire to disturb either the orchestra or the audience, but he did wish to get seated and to submerge himself in the crowd.

The head waitress insinuated herself between the tables. She managed to attract his attention. She was a very capable young woman with a nose and a forehead and a chin that shone as though she polished them with one of those velvet pads that are used for adding gloss to a glacé shoe.

“You will find a chair here, monsieur.”

He appeared immensely relieved. He gave her a little stiff bow, and a gentle smile. She disposed of him in a chair by one of the pillars. He placed his gloves and the paper bag on a table, removed his black plush hat, and held it to his chest for a moment before tucking it away under the table. His pallor was remarkable; it was a kind of gentle, dim greyness as though he had lived for years in a sort of twilight world.

Herr Muller was tossing his head and acknowledging the applause when Major Jeremy caught my eye.

“See that fellow?”

“The gentleman with the paper bag?”

“That’s it. Anything strike you?”

Quite a number of things had struck me. At five-and-fifty one is either very dead or very alive. Being a woman—and quite undomesticated—I continued to find the world absurdly interesting. Moreover, I had just come from Rome, and my Rome is always the Rome of the ancients. I go back to the marble nymphs and fauns, the naked girls and gods and satyrs. They refresh one. They belong to the years when life was very much younger. And in the cloisters of the Baths of Diocletian I had been amused and intrigued by a particular piece of statuary.

“It’s quite absurd,” I said.

Major Jeremy cocked an eye at me from under a bushy white eyebrow.

“German, or Austrian?”

“Oh, that’s too modern and superfluous. A living satyr.”

He tapped a cigarette on the table.

“That’s it! I was groping. Pan in a plush hat.”

“But a very gentle Pan.”

Why the ancients should have assigned that particular type of face to Pan and his creatures I do not know. Its expression may be brutal and sensual, but it can also express gentleness and humour and a kind of naïve sympathy with birds and beasts. Yet it seemed to me that the man disturbed the very conventional people who were seated near him, just as the odour of a white man is unpleasing to a negro or an Arab. I saw a woman edge her chair away. And I think he must have been aware of the curious repugnance he inspired, that he was familiar with it, and pained by it, and unable to understand it. It explained both his dignity and his air of gentle and sad shyness. He was the cause of an unhappy physical flinching among his fellows, just because puckish Nature had endowed him with a particular cast of countenance.

Even old Jeremy was susceptible to it.

“Sinister looking beggar.”

I did not agree with him.

“It’s a mask,” I said. “Try and look a bit deeper.”

“I don’t know that I want to.”

Even the much polished head waitress appeared moved to treat the man with severity. He had ordered a cup of chocolate. The white paper bag reposed upon the table, and the woman objected to the bag and its probable contents. There happened to be a lull in the conversation, and I heard what passed.

“Monsieur will excuse me, but visitors are not permitted to bring food with them.”

His pale eyelashes flickered.

“It is not for myself, madame. Biscuits—biscuits for the birds.”

He went so far as to open the bag and show her the contents, and she gazed down at it and at him a little scornfully. She was a full-blooded young woman, and this pale creature with his bag of biscuits and his shy and wayward eyes must have seemed to her both uninteresting and futile.

I glanced at old Jeremy. He was a very quick person who resented unnecessary questions.

“A bag of biscuits for the little birds! A St. Francis disguised as Pan.”

“Why not? A bag of shot is your ideal.”

He smiled at me.

“Used to be. I’m not so fond of killing things—as I was.”

Life may be little more than a series of glimpses, and I had my glimpses of the man in the black plush hat. He came daily to the Kursaal, but he refrained from introducing his paper bag. No one ever spoke to him, save the waitress who brought him his tea or his chocolate. It was both obvious that he was a lover of music and that he understood it, but it seemed to me that music did not satisfy him. I would catch him looking wistfully at his fellow humans, as though he felt his isolation, and was hungry for human sympathy. So eager did he appear to exchange a few words with someone that I saw him pause and try to talk to the very dry and polite person in a blue coat who sat at the bureau just inside the door.

Obviously, he was a very lonely creature, though he looked no more than forty. His height—he was six feet or more—made him all the more noticeable, and he held himself very straight like a Prussian prisoner refusing to bend. He was very fair. His pale blue eyes looked at the world as though they asked for everything and nothing, and concealed their yearning behind a mute and deprecating mildness.

I christened him the Harmless Satyr.

Once or twice I found him standing by the edge of the lake, a solitary and very black figure surrounded by seagulls. He was feeding them with broken biscuits from a paper bag, throwing the pieces up in the air, and smiling as the birds swooped to catch them. I felt very much tempted to stop and speak to him, but he appeared so absorbed in feeding the creatures that I left him alone with them. Moreover, the gull is a bird I fail to appreciate. I mislike the coldness of its eye.

Major Jeremy had missed three afternoons at the Kursaal. I supposed that he had had one of his attacks of asthma, and was fuming and wheezing and re-reading the old magazines in the hotel lounge, but on the Saturday he turned up at the Kursaal wearing a new suit.

Does a man ever cease to be susceptible? I believe old Jeremy had three love affairs per year, and bought a new suit whenever the divine occasion had arrived. He looked at me with his brazen blue eyes, just like a guilty and self-pleased boy, and sat down, and beckoned to the waitress.

“You’ll tea with me to-day.”

I said that I would, provided he would allow me to eat nothing but brown bread and butter.

“You’re so Spartan, dear lady. Do you really like it?”

“Of course I do.”

He gave the waitress his order as though he were paying her a compliment.

“Oh, by the way, remember that German chap?”

“My Harmless Satyr?”

“I say, that’s a good name. The fellow is staying at my hotel.”

The coincidence would have lacked either significance or interest had not Jeremy gone on to comment upon the H.S.’s isolation.

“Not a soul will speak to him. If he goes and sits in a corner—he has that corner to himself.”

“But why?”

“Well, he’s a German—you see, and it isn’t so very long since the war.”

“But—in Switzerland——?”

“Clareux is a sort of little England. Ninety per cent. of the “Grand” is English, the rest French or Belgian. And then—you know—the fellow has a rather queer physiognomy. The English like things just so.”

“I know we do. But a poor lonely creature with the eyes of a lost dog, a man who feeds the birds, and wears a pathetic hat——!”

“Dear lady, it may be the hat——”

“Oh, I know, the heinousness of hats!”

The tea arrived, and when I had poured out Jeremy’s cup he gave me one of his droll, kind glances.

“Well—anyway—I spoke to the chap.”

“Good for you.”

“His name’s Halberg—Heinrich Halberg. My German is as formless as a haggis, but he has plenty of English. I thought he was going to kiss me.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“Granted. But—do you know—I rather took to the chap. He’s got a sort of natural niceness. He doesn’t splurge. He has dignity.”

A somewhat creamy cake occupied his attention for the moment, and I thought what a pet he was, with his brick-red face, and his air of fierceness, and his very generous heart. He had the old English phlegm.

His blue eyes stared under their white eyebrows.

“That fellow has had a very bad time—dear lady. That’s my feeling about him. He gives you the impression of having been bled white. I never thought that a German would offer me a cigar, and that I should take it.”

“And the cigar——?”

“Minx!” he said. “Oh—perfect. But—hallo——”

He glanced up and I saw the Harmless Satyr not two yards from our table. He bowed to Jeremy, and he bowed with a kind of grave shyness to me. I saw Jeremy’s moustache twitch, a sign that mischief was in the air. He got up and introduced us.

“Herr Halberg—Miss Fraser.”

I found myself suggesting that Herr Halberg should take the third chair.

His grey face lit up. The pallor of it was actually suffused with pink. He gave me a second little bow, holding his plush hat to his chest. His pale blue eyes had a kind of Northern innocence.

“You are very kind. I accept.”

His English was good, and later I was to learn that his French was almost as good as his English. He sat down, and he gave me a proof of his sensitive restraint, for the orchestra began to play “Madame Butterfly,” and with one courteous little explanatory smile, he sat silent and still, enjoying the music. His very stillness was a thing of breeding. He did not fidget or attempt to be self-consciously appreciative. He just sat there and listened.

With Muller distributing his acknowledging bows Jeremy thought it time to make a remark. For an Englishman he was very patient when an orchestra was attacking.

“That fellow’s an artist. Always looks rather ill—though——”

I saw Herr Halberg press his pale lips together, and I suddenly remembered that Muller had been a prisoner in Russia during the war, and that the conversation might verge upon the painful, so I asked Halberg whether he would take tea or chocolate.

He blushed.

“Oh, no—you must not give me tea. Though I have the honour of your kindness——”

He made a sign to the waitress, and ordered himself a cup of chocolate, and turning to me began to talk music until he realized that Jeremy knew nothing about music save that he liked it tuneful. His divergence was instant. Were we fond of flowers? And had we seen the crocus fields? Jeremy had the Englishman’s passion for flowers, so all was well.

Like many sensitive people I follow my intuitions, and my intuition told me that my Harmless Satyr was the gentlest of creatures. Being old enough to be his mother I could observe and study him without the prejudices of a mother or the merciless severity of a young girl. His Nature God was of the North. He had the Northerner’s blue-eyed and dreamy romanticism. Tear an illusion from him and he would instantly possess himself of another. Besides, you cannot deprive a man of music and birds and mountains unless you shut him up in a prison, and even in prison his Northern imagination will find the grey mists and the sea.

But that was what had happened to Halberg. He had been a prisoner, and a Russian prisoner, a white man in a land of red slime. I did not know it then, but he was to tell me about it later, though he did not tell me the whole of it. He told that to Jeremy, as man to man, for Russia was a red rag to Jeremy. “Better at butchery than soldiering.” He said that he did not understand the Russian and did not want to understand him.

But I was to be brought to see my Harmless Satyr in a different situation, and to get my glimpse of the man as God may have seen him. I love poking about in the picturesque back streets of the continental towns, and the old parts of Clareux had to be searched for up steep lanes and along grey passages, and I was exploring what was a mere donkey track on the hillside below Guyon when I chanced upon Halberg in a singular situation.

He was standing outside a little stone cottage, holding his plush hat in one hand and some money in the other. He was being harangued with emphasis by a very square and confident Swiss woman. On the front of the cottage hung a bird’s cage, the wire door of which was open.

I effaced myself in a deep doorway.

“It is not a question of money, monsieur,” the Swiss woman was saying. “You have interfered with our property——”

I listened. I gathered that there had been a goldfinch in that cage, and that Halberg—deliberately—had opened the door of the cage and let the bird out. Afterwards he had knocked up the woman, told her what he had done, and had offered her the price of the bird.

But she would have none of his money. She protested that the bird had been a great pet, and Halberg put his money away, but still stood with his hat in his hand.

“Madame—I—too—have been a prisoner. Until one has been shut up behind wire—one does not understand. You will forgive me—but I cannot bear now to see a bird in a cage.”

“But it was not your bird, monsieur.”

“Are the birds and the beasts our slaves, madame?” he asked.

I came out of my doorway. Halberg had produced a fountain pen and an envelope, and was writing down the woman’s name and her address.

“I hope you will permit me to make some little recompense, madame. I wish to.”

Then he saw me and blushed. He had put on his hat. He raised it to me, and including the Swiss woman in the salute, paused for a moment to hand her his card.

“If you wish to take proceedings, madame——”

Obviously she did not. You could not be angry with the man, and she shrugged her shoulders and smiled, and Halberg came down the path to join me, still carrying his hat, and looking shy.

“Is it not strange,” he said, “that good people who feed wild birds in winter will yet shut up a wild bird in a cage.”

I supposed that it was due to our childish egotism, and he adjusted his plush hat, and for a moment looked as fierce as it was possible for him to look.

“Yes, our egotism. I suppose it is egotism—even when I cannot bear to see a bird in a cage, and must let the creature out. Do I do it to please myself? No—I think not—not wholly. I do feel for the bird.”

“I’m sure you do. Have you opened many cages in Clareux?”

“Three: A blackbird, a linnet, and a goldfinch. They will not miss this spring.”

There was emotion in his voice. He walked beside me, erect, courteous, serious, yet his eyes seemed to be watching the happy flutterings of some liberated bird.

“I agree with you,” I said, “but what an inconvenient person you would be in a Zoo. Would you let out the lions and the tigers?”

He answered me with a kind of stark gravity.

“I never go to Zoos. The cages smell. They are unhappy places, very unhappy, and full of children. And children can be so cruel——”

So it appeared that he wandered about Clareux looking for bird-cages that could be opened, though he admitted that his liberating passion did not spend itself upon canaries. Mercifully he excluded the little yellow birds from his endeavours. His gentle, droll smile showed me that he was not one of your brass-bound reformers who cannot let life alone.

“A canary is a canary. Canaries and cages go together.”

“Yes—Herr Halberg—there are human canaries who appear to ask for cages, and a sunny window.”

I saw that I hurt him. He winced. His pale lips matched his pale eyes. I could only wonder whether I had touched a sore memory—if I had hurt him, or whether he was the sort of man who was always hurting himself. Possibly he had been the possessor of a pet canary, and it had died.

But the explanation came to me through Jeremy some days later. Men make queer friendships, and yet there was nothing queer in the friendship that appeared to spring up between the red Englishman and the pale German. They were such contrasts, pepper and salt, red wine and white.

I ran into Jeremy in the English library where he was pulling books from the shelves and putting them back again with an air of bored impatience.

“What a lot of stuff! You only get a live book once in a blue moon.”

Jeremy’s “live books” dealt mostly with the shooting of elephants and tigers, or with descriptions of very greasy and very primitive peoples of a horrible degree of ugliness. He would never allow them their ugliness, and would accuse me of being suburban and prejudiced because I looked at a black man with the eyes of a white woman.

“Here’s just the thing for you,” I said. “How I explored the Amazon in a Wash Tub.”

He grinned and took the book.

“Canoe—to be correct—dear lady. Got ten minutes to spare?”

“Probably.”

“Let’s go and sit by the lake. I have something to tell you. I suppose I may tell you.”

He was strapping up his collection of books, and I smiled over him.

“I suppose you may, if it is not about a third person.”

He bushed his eyebrows at me.

“Of course it’s about a third person. It always is, isn’t it? I don’t go in for confessionals.”

It was about Halberg. We sat on an iron seat under the drooping gold of a weeping willow, and looked across the blue lake at the mountains of Savoy. Jeremy could sit for an hour and stare at these mountains as though he was considering how each one could be climbed. He had a very serious face this morning, for he was confronting the tragedy of a man’s life.

“Suppose I can tell you.”

“I suppose that depends——”

“You are the one woman in this place who doesn’t reduce life to gossip. Gossip is talking about other people’s frailties and troubles—without any decent human feeling for them. Like turning over odds and ends of meat in a butcher’s shop. Life’s a serious business.”

“In this case—would the third person mind?”

“I don’t think he would. Not you. Besides the poor beggar is very plucky and big about it.”

“A woman?”

“Oh—of course.”

“Not inevitable—you know. Well——?”

Jeremy rested his elbows on his knees.

“Oh—well—quite an unusual sort of tale. But is anything usual when you know one of the characters? Halberg had a young wife—a sort of pretty canary in a cage—I should imagine——”

I was inwardly startled.

“A canary?”

“That’s how I sense it. Well, he went to the war, and was taken prisoner by the Russians, and shut up for three years in a damned wire cage. And presently his wife’s letters ceased—and when he got back to Germany—after the war——”

“The canary’s cage was empty?”

Jeremy gave one of his characteristic grunts.

“That’s the long and short of it,” he said.

So that was how a woman and the war had treated my poor Harmless Satyr, leaving him no doubt with that peculiar and secret feeling of humiliation that such an affair produces in a man. I have Jeremy’s word for that. A man loves both his wife and himself, and his self-regard may be interwoven with his love for the woman. Strip out that love from the pattern and you leave the man’s pride all shreds and tatters.

“Poor Halberg! With his pale and gentle eyes.”

Jeremy grunted.

“Don’t be sentimental. The fellow’s better off as he is. He’s not shut up in a cage.”

“No, my dear, but he may be horribly lonely. All men are not predestined bachelors——”

“You’re wrong there, if you are being personal. If my confounded pension weren’t so paltry——”

I laughed, but Jeremy did not know what I was laughing at. Moreover it was not unkind laughter, though how many “little pretties” he would have collected during his earthly course had his income been adequate, is a question for the people who can calculate probabilities.

But I don’t think either of us foresaw the ultimate adventure.

Herr Halberg and I met fairly regularly at the Kursaal and I supposed that he was still wandering round Clareux and its neighbouring villages looking for birds to liberate. It struck me that his Northern eyes were even more dreamy, and that music was even more intimately his. We should not have found out—perhaps—what was happening had not Jeremy been dragged off to dance at the Clareux Palace Hotel by a young thing who had to dance with somebody.

I met him next day. He had an air of mystery. He asked me if I ever went to the Palace dances. They were held twice a week.

“Why should I?”

“It would be worth your while to see the young fools doing that new dance.”

“The Charleston?”

“Believe that’s it. I call it leg-waggling.”

“Why don’t you take me?”

“I will—if you like.”

Half Europe and a part of America must know the “Palace” at Clareux. It is huge and obvious and expensive and comfortable, as efficient an establishment as that most efficient little country can show. That it lacked “atmosphere” was a matter of no importance. The cuisine, the tennis-courts, the dance floor, and the orchestra were the fundamentals. I don’t know why, but the “Palace” at Clareux always made me think of a French cemetery, with its pompous little graves decorated with horrible bead wreaths and crosses, and framed photographs of the departed. Even the garden on the edge of the lake was as artificial as one of the shops where they sell you cheap china and picture-postcards, and little wooden chalets and boxes covered with shells.

Jeremy and I wandered in about nine o’clock. I went to the cloak-room, and he waited for me in the broad gallery between the lounge and the ballroom. The orchestra was playing dance music, and half a dozen couples were walking busily up and down the polished vastness of the floor. When I rejoined Jeremy I found that he had taken possession of a settee and a table in the lounge.

“I’ve ordered coffee. Will you have a liqueur?”

“No, just coffee, thank you.”

But I was wondering why he had chosen the lounge when there were a dozen vacant chairs in the ballroom, and we had come to watch the young things “leg-waggling.” True, I had a view through one of the big doorways, and I could look along one half of the ballroom, but I did not understand why the show should be split in half for me.

He appeared to divine my inward protest.

“You’ll understand in a minute or two. I have brought you here to see something else. We don’t want to be too obvious.”

“Why so secretive?”

“Oh, well; you wait and see.”

“Nothing to observe at present?”

“Yes, part of the show. Just look straight ahead and tell me if anything catches your eye.”

At the far end of the ballroom, and close to a group of palms and the orchestra’s grand piano I saw two people seated in gilded and red velvet chairs. They sat side by side, within a foot of each other, staring straight down the room like a couple of royal supers posed on a stage.

The man was very old. He had a bush of white hair standing up fiercely on his square head; the corners of his hard mouth curved down to form a circle with his prominent chin. His eyes had a peculiar, set, glassy stare; they were both dead and very alive. A couple of sticks were tucked in beside him. He had the biggest hands that I have ever seen, and they rested on his thighs like the paws of some grim old animal.

He looked French, and yet not quite French, whereas the girl who sat beside him was neither white nor brown, but an exquisite, soft blending of the two. She should have worn a wreath of exotic flowers. Her eyes were like the eyes of a gentle animal, large, brown, and a little frightened. She was dressed in some saffron-coloured stuff, with a necklace of magnificent diamonds round her slim throat. She sat beside that rather terrible old man as though chained to his chair.

I glanced at Jeremy.

“Those two figures?”

He nodded.

“At twenty-five one would have said father and daughter. But—at fifty-five——”

“That’s so.”

“Abominable! Who are they?”

Jeremy was lighting a cigar.

“Old chap’s French, colonial, Guadeloupe or Martinique or somewhere. Name of Legros. Beastly rich. Yes; that’s his wife.”

“Mixed blood somewhere?”

“Obviously. Pretty thing. Much too pretty for that old ogre. They tell me he never lets her out of his sight.”

“Jeremy,” I said, “how do you get hold of all this gossip?”

“It isn’t gossip,” he retorted. “I picked up the human facts from a fellow at the club who is staying here at the ‘Palace.’ I was watching ’em the other night when I was dancin’ here. They just sit like that. They never seem to speak to each other or to anybody, and nobody speaks to them.”

“Your ogre doesn’t look very approachable. But the girl——”

“They tell me that nobody is allowed to speak to her. If anyone tries to—that old curmudgeon growls like a dog with a bone. Well, here we are.”

He pointed with his cigar, and I saw Halberg pass along the broad space between the lounge and the ballroom like a man passing across a stage. He was wearing a black overcoat over evening dress. In his left hand he carried his black plush hat, in the other a bouquet of white carnations. It struck me that he had a rapt, visionary look. He disappeared in the direction of the cloak-room, and when he reappeared he was still carrying the carnations. He did not see us. In fact he had the air of seeing nobody. He went and sat down at a little table just inside the ballroom, and I could see the back of his head and three-quarters of his thin, flat back. He placed his bouquet carefully on the table.

I glanced inquiringly at Jeremy.

“Is he part of the play?”

And Jeremy nodded.

“He was here the other night. He has that table reserved for him. They tell me that he has been here every night.”

“And the carnations?”

“Yes, every night he has a bunch of carnations.”

“And presents them to somebody?”

“No, takes them away with him. Can’t bring himself to the sticking point, I suppose.”

“How quaint! I wonder—— Who is it?”

“That’s what everybody is wondering. Personally—I have a sort of idea—that it is that Creole girl.”

“Oh, come now! Poor Halberg!”

“Well, she looks rather like a bird in a cage, doesn’t she?”

I was startled. I had not believed Jeremy’s blue eyes to be capable of such vision, but no sooner had he made the suggestion than I realized its significance. It was possible that my Harmless Satyr with his passion for opening prison doors had discovered a human thing in a cage, a gentle, wide-eyed creature, mute and chained.

“Jeremy,” I said, “do you really think——?”

He nodded his white head.

“A fellow who can sit for five hours and listen to Wagner! A chap who lets birds out of cages. An idealist! The most dangerous people on earth. Explosive. Besides—they imagine things. I daresay he imagines that girl—a victim——”

“Isn’t she?”

“Nonsense. She has plenty to eat and plenty to wear; and look at her diamonds.”

“You can’t talk materialism to me, my dear. I know you too well. But these Legros people, are they living here?”

“Not in the hotel. The old chap has a huge villa up on the high ground between Chambard and the lake. He just brings the girl out on a chain. Big closed car. Suppose he likes showing her off. Old Sultan.”

All this time I was watching the back of Halberg’s head and the faces of Monsieur Legros and his wife. Halberg sat as still as a stone faun, with the bouquet of white carnations lying on the table in front of him, but I had a feeling that his eyes were fixed steadily upon the old man and the girl. People were dancing. Their figures kept moving across my field of vision, and the flow of their movements seemed to emphasize the stillness of the two figures in the red velvet chairs.

The old man sat and glared like a wax figure with fatal eyes. The girl never moved an eyelash. She sat as though under a spell, a frozen princess with the warm life in her glowing but congealed. The music was persuasive. Even my old feet felt rhythmical, but there was not a flicker of those little saffron-coloured shoes.

“Jeremy,” I said suddenly, “go and get Halberg.”

He gave me a queer look.

“Nothing doing, dear lady——”

“I’m horribly afraid he’ll make a fool of himself.”

“Men will. Look out!”

For old Legros had made a movement. He had put his two huge hands on the gilded arms of the chair. His square, creased face expressed will force, effort. I saw the girl give a startled glance at him, rise quickly, and put herself behind his chair. Her hands slipped under his arms. She helped him up, and he stood on his feet, slouching rather like a huge old ape. She put his two sticks into his hands, and slowly—very slowly—they came down the long room together, he—with a kind of terrible and defiant grin on his face, she—like a sleep-walker.

I watched Halberg. He sat there with stiff shoulders. His right arm hung at his side, and I saw the fingers of his right hand make a slight, twitching movement as though to grasp the frame of the chair. My impression was that he was looking at the girl. Anyhow they went past him, and he did not stir, the old man with that defiant grin still on his face, the girl—wide-eyed and frightened. I saw Halberg’s chin jerk round, and that queer profile of his very white and set.

The girl had her cloak with her, a black velvet thing. She put it on as she and old Legros went slowly over the pile carpet towards the glass doors of the vestibule. They disappeared from my view, and turning to glance again at Halberg, I saw him snatch up his bunch of carnations, rise, and go stalking with a kind of fierce stiffness in the direction of the vestibule.

Without moving, and without looking at him I spoke in a whisper to Jeremy. I knew that half the hotel had been watching Halberg.

“Go after him—stop him.”

And this time he went, getting up with an air of English casualness, and pausing for a moment to simulate interest in an Argentino boy who was tangoing with the dancing instructress. He disappeared, and I sat praying that Halberg would not make a scene, or that Jeremy would waylay him before he could begin fumbling with bird-cages. Jeremy had left his cigarette case on the table, and I purloined a cigarette, and sat smoking.

I had half finished the cigarette before Jeremy returned. He strolled across to the table with his hands in his pockets, his red face studiously blank. He beckoned to a waiter and ordered a whisky and soda. He sat down.

“Halberg’s gone.”

“What, minus overcoat and hat?”

“Yes, and it’s raining. By George—what a chap!”

His blue eyes were very serious.

“What do you think he did?”

“Be quick,” I said.

“Dashed out just when their car was moving off, and threw those white carnations in at the window. I was watching him through the glass doors.”

I crushed out the lighted stump of the cigarette.

“You ought to have stopped him.”

“Thank you! But how was I to know that the mad idiot——? Besides——”

“That old fellow may burst a blood vessel.”

“By Jove,” said Jeremy with an air of sudden and extraordinary brightness, “why—that would do the trick, wouldn’t it? Supposing Halberg’s not so mad? There’s a kind of madness——”

I sat and stared at the dancers. It occurred to me that there may be other ways of getting rid of an old watch-dog besides the throwing of poisoned meat.

Of course Halberg had no right to assume that because a pretty girl is married to an old curmudgeon like Legros, she is a bird in a cage and predestined to be rescued, though I do believe that Halberg’s inspiration was absurdly disinterested. A caged bird or a chained soul roused him to action. It was as though three years of heartbreak in a wire cage had accumulated in him such a head of passionate rage against all cruelty and oppression that his reaction against them had become instinctive. Idealism has one blind eye, and Halberg’s blind eye was turned upon Legros.

The old man was a monster, a jailor, a wrinkled old vampire sucking the blood of youth. Halberg—the Northern hero—had no more pity for him than had Siegfried for the dragon. But here was my poor Harmless Satyr innocently proving himself to the world’s eyes just what he was not, a Pan in pursuit of the nymph, of a nymph mated to a very grim old Silenus.

The lord of the villa above Chambard might dodder on two sticks, but he too was something of an original. I suppose that when Halberg’s white bouquet came tumbling into the car there was very little said. I could imagine old Legros picking up the bouquet, and with a grin—presenting it to his wife.

“Accept these tributes, my dear. Let us amuse ourselves with this idiot.”

Anyway, that was what his subsequent behaviour suggested. Shut his wife up behind the gates of the villa? Not he! For when a man remains masterful and potent to the end and has had some woman trailing dutifully at his heels, he does not surrender to the Halbergs.

Old Legros brought his Yvonne down to the “Palace,” and sat with her in the same velvet chairs, and stared with his glassy and fatal eyes at Halberg who persisted in placing himself at that table by the door. They confronted each other across the polished floor. As for the girl—she looked just as she had looked on the first night, a dusky victim, but how much a victim who can say?

And as though to dip irony in sentiment the girl wore each night in her dress a few of Halberg’s white carnations. For each night he arrived with his bouquet, and sat there stiff and white and solitary. Whether it was shyness, or self-restraint, or inherent delicacy of feeling I do not know, but he never made a public offering of his flowers, though he might easily have contrived some sort of introduction. He and old Legros sat and stared at each other. And every night—I believe—a white bouquet came tumbling into the Frenchman’s car.

Such a situation could not continue. No doubt my poor Harmless Satyr became more humanly involved than was satisfying to a disinterested inspiration. I suppose he fell in love with Legros’ wife. He seemed to grow thinner and paler. I would meet him walking at a great rate round the lake, skirting the edge of a new tragedy.

Always he would seem glad to see me. He would stop and stand holding his hat in his old courteous and gentle way, and sometimes I saw him at the Kursaal. Of Jeremy I think he saw very little, for Jeremy was shy of people who—as he expressed it—“Were baying the moon.” For, apparently, Halberg would go wandering in the hotel garden at eleven o’clock at night, and talk to himself and the stars when Jeremy—who had a room on the first floor above the garden—was trying to get to sleep. It annoyed Jeremy that a man should be such an ass, and so disturbing an ass.

“My dear lady, one doesn’t expect to have a Hamlet under your window; no, not in these days, with trams scrooping on the other side of the house. It is no comfort to me to hear a chap saying to the Swiss night—‘She has taken my flowers.’ Damn it! it’s too much like Italian opera. I have begun to feel a sort of sympathy for old Legros.”

I think I sympathized with all of them.

And then—suddenly—Halberg changed the colour of his carnations. I happened to be at the “Palace” on the night when he appeared with red flowers instead of white. He and the Legros went through the same dumb, staring, triangular contest. He followed them out as usual to their car.

How and why it happened I do not know. Possibly the colour of the red carnations had a more apoplectic effect upon the old gentleman. He may have been feeling irritable and stormy. I confess that I did decide to go home on the heels of the three, and when I got to the door I found myself the spectator of pitiful and human happenings.

A powerful electric lamp glared under the glass shell of the hotel porch. Halberg’s bouquet of red carnations lay like a red stain on one of the steps, and I was aware of him as a mute and rigid figure posed half in the light and half in the shadow. The car itself was the centre of a little knot of figures, the chauffeur, the “Palace” concierge, and an under-porter. They were trying to get old Legros out of the car, and I had a glimpse of the face of the girl, a very white still face as she bent forward to try and help them.

I slipped out into the drive and watched. Halberg remained where he was, a fatal figure observing the tragic outcome of its interference. One of the men climbed into the car, and I saw a limp, bunch of a figure lifted out and carried towards the glass doors. Legros’ wife followed.

I saw her almost put a foot on Halberg’s carnations, and bridle and step aside as though avoiding a pool of blood. She paused. She seemed to hesitate. Then she bent and picked up the bouquet, took three deliberate steps towards Halberg, and threw the red flowers in his face.

After that I smothered myself in between the flowering shrubs that edged the drive. I did not want Halberg to see me, or to realize that the climax had been pried upon by other eyes. I saw the girl disappear through the glass doors. Not a word had been uttered. She left Halberg standing there like a man who was so shocked and astonished that he was incapable of movement. I think he must have stood there for quite three minutes, and with so dreadful a stillness that I too was shocked.

Presently he bent down and picked up the bunch of carnations, holding them flinchingly as though they were white flowers that had been splashed with blood. He had opened the door of a cage, and the bird had flown in his face. Poor, Harmless Satyr! What he did with those fatal flowers I do not know, but he walked off into the night still carrying them. I have a feeling that he went down and threw them into the lake.

Yet the affair was not to end as it appeared to have ended. Old Legros died on a sofa in the office of the manager of the Palace Hotel, and the body was taken up to the huge, red villa above Chambard. Moreover there must have been someone on the watch in Clareux, some little assiduous relative, for the very next day half a dozen alert French people—four men and two women—all solemnly blacked—invaded the villa above Chambard. They had a lawyer with them. I heard all this afterwards from Halberg himself.

And the curmudgeonly of old Legros was exposed to the world. That grin of his had not been without significance. He had left his wife ten thousand francs in 3 per cent rentes. Just that! Villa and diamonds, and motor-car and an estate somewhere in the West Indies reverted to a stuffy and sallow-faced French family who owned a velour factory at Amiens.

The inwardness of women is peculiar. I have often wondered whether the girl knew of the cynicism of old Legros’ will when she threw those red carnations in Halberg’s face. My impression is that she did not. It was the emotional act of an excitable child, a gesture of protest against man’s eternal and sentimental interference.

She had been far happier in her cage than a man like Halberg could credit, for even a man’s idealism is apt to be so coloured by his consciousness of a woman’s sex that he assumes her to be the victim of fate unless she is busy with husband and babies.

But to revert to facts. It was the Amiens family who bundled the girl out of the red villa, shood her out of her cage. She had no legal redress. They straight-way handed her over her ten thousand francs—French—and were quit of their responsibilities. No doubt they were immensely relieved. Uncle Legros had had his senile romance, and had behaved in the end like a good Frenchman.

As usual, it was Jeremy who supplied me with the latest information. It appeared that Legros’ widow had taken refuge in a shabby little hotel—the “Étoile” in one of the streets behind the station. She had perched there like a rather bewildered bird let out of a cage, helplessly free, and with her supply of bird-seed cut off. Poor Halberg had made a bad mess of the liberation.

But had he?

Jeremy’s eyes had a human twinkle.

“He has been patrolling round her hotel like a policeman. Sort of figure of pale and passionate determination—wearing a plush hat. Having let her out he wants to shut her up again.”

“All men do,” I said.

And I was permitted to witness the beginnings of the last phase. I had wandered up above Chambard, between tea and dinner, to look at the orchards in bloom and the fields full of flowers, and to watch the sun flush the Savoyard peaks, and on a little path under the cherry trees I saw two figures. They were walking shyly and demurely, like a couple of very proper but unconfessed lovers, tremulous but coy, and no doubt discussing music or the mountains, or perhaps even the rate of exchange. Halberg’s tall figure seemed to overshadow hers. He was carrying his black plush hat in his hand.

I walked on to meet them.

He was very correct, very courteous. His pale blue eyes seemed to glimpse something humorous in my appearance, but without realizing what it was. He introduced the girl to me.

“Yvonne—this is Miss Fraser. Miss Fraser—Madame Legros.”

We shook hands. She had a wise, shy, gentle look. She did not remind me of the girl who had thrown those flowers in the face of the Harmless Satyr.

“Mademoiselle is enjoying the sunset?”

Yes—I admitted that I was enjoying the sunset, and added that I hoped to enjoy my dinner; and after a few more amiable nothings I smiled upon them and passed on.

My last glimpse of them—as I turned to get a view of the lake—showed them to me standing side by side under a cherry tree. They, too, were enjoying the sunset—and something more than the sunset. It seemed to me that Halberg, devoted, adoring, hat in hand, was tempting her to re-enter the eternal cage.